The prolonged inspection halt risks escalating nuclear tensions, complicating diplomatic efforts and increasing global security uncertainties.

The post Iran halts IAEA nuclear inspections as standoff surpasses one year appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The Clarity Act's potential passage could significantly reshape crypto regulations, boosting market confidence and influencing future legislative efforts.

The post White House crypto advisor Witt confident Clarity Act skeptics will be proven wrong appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The integration of Chinese AI research into U.S. labs could enhance global AI competitiveness and foster innovative technological advancements.

The post US labs benefit from Chinese AI advancements in reinforcement learning appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Japan's $60B data center investment could position it as a key AI hub, but energy constraints may challenge sustainable growth and infrastructure.

The post Japan plans $60B investment in data centers as it races to become global AI infrastructure leader appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

OpenAI's Managed Agents could redefine AI deployment, intensifying competition and innovation in the AI platform landscape.

The post OpenAI plans to unveil Managed Agents at DevDay 2026 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Alleged White-Hat Hackers Withdraw 4,000 bitcoin from Blockstream’s Liquid Network Federation Reserves

The Liquid Network said Sunday that purported white-hat hackers withdrew about 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million, from the federation wallet that backs L-BTC. Bridge nodes were disabled, and the sidechain was paused. Other issued assets, including USDT, DePix and RWAs, were unaffected, the official account said on X.

The Liquid Network is a federated sidechain of Bitcoin, founded by Adam Back’s Blockstream. The Liquid chain issues a variety of assets such as LBTC, which it backs with BTC on the Bitcoin main chain, held in a large multisig of 15 corporate and known members. 11 of the 15 members need to sign a valid multi-signature transaction to move coins from the treasury. Before the hack, the treasury held over 4200 BTC; after the hack, Blockstream’s proof of reserves page reports a little over 207 BTC left. 

The hackers withdrew 4,019.4 BTC from the reserve address in a peg-out transaction using the SideSwap Peg-out Authorization Key. SideWap is a bridge exchange and a member of the Liquid Federation. While details on the mechanism of the hack are not confirmed yet, it appears an inflation bug on the LBTC side chain was exploited by the hackers to create over 4,000 LBTC that did not exist before, and cash them out for on-chain bitcoin from the federation. Because the transaction appeared as valid, given the consensus bug, the federation members’ HSM security servers signed the BTC withdrawal transaction, worth roughly 320 million at the time. 

The hacker moved the funds to an address ending in 6gyqjlte, from which they quickly signed a new transaction with a message on the OP_RETURN arbitrary data field saying “we are whitehats. contact us on chain.” Those coins were still at that address at the time of writing.

A small mainnet transaction to the hacker address followed by an OP_RETURN saying “Please contact security@blockstream.com”, presumably from a Blockstream public address, though that remains unconfirmed. A later OP_RETURN spend from the hacker address carried “Please contact us on Signal @m671aw.70”, however, this may be spam and does not share a link to the address with the stolen funds.

In response to the breach, exchanges were told to pause L-BTC deposits and withdrawals. Bridge nodes on the Liquid Network have been paused, limiting access to the side chain, which continues to produce blocks. 

JAN3 CEO Samson Mow said Aqua’s Liquid features were affected and that on-chain bitcoin still worked. Other wallets in the industry that use the Liquid Network are expected to be affected. Users holding LBTC now effectively have their savings at risk, since the underlying BTC is currently not redeemable. Given the private nature of the Liquid chain, user onchain analytics are scarce and not much public information is known about how much LBTC is held by retail users versus corporations of Blockstream itself. Nevertheless, should the funds not be returned, it would be a heavy blow to the Liquid Network’s user base.

Users of LBTC don’t have many options but to wait for conversations with the hackers to resolve. Given the size of the hack, it would be difficult for the hackers to get away with stealing all that bitcoin, though perhaps not impossible. What may happen is that the hackers ask for a finder’s fee and return the majority of the funds. 

This post Alleged White-Hat Hackers Withdraw 4,000 bitcoin from Blockstream’s Liquid Network Federation Reserves first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading 

British financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown is letting retail investors buy bitcoin — nearly one year after it said the cryptocurrency was “not an asset class.” 

The Bristol, UK-based investment firm’s website said it was offering bitcoin and other crypto exchange-traded notes to investors. ETNs are investment funds which trade on stock exchanges and track the prices of digital assets. 

It comes after the firm, which manages nearly £173 billion (over $233 billion) in assets, last year warned customers about buying bitcoin. 

“While longer-term returns of Bitcoin have been positive, Bitcoin has experienced several periods of extreme losses and is a highly volatile investment — much riskier than stocks or bonds,” the firm said at the time. 

“The HL Investment view is that Bitcoin is not an asset class, and we do not think cryptocurrency has characteristics that mean it should be included in portfolios for growth or income and shouldn’t be relied upon to help clients meet their financial goals.” 

Now, a number of ETNs tracking the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are available. The firm warns users that “crypto ETNs are considered high-risk and may be volatile.”

U.S. regulator the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 approved bitcoin exchange-traded funds for investors after a decade of saying no to the products. 

The funds had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs as investors previously unable to buy exposure to the asset class rushed in to buy the products. 

Run by top asset managers and banks like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley, the investment vehicles now collectively manage over $100 billion in assets. 

This post Hargreaves Lansdown Reverses Course, Rolls Out Bitcoin Trading  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Trezor Breach Worse Than Reported: Another 67,000 US Customers Exposed

Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor has said that a data breach first announced last month is worse than originally reported. 

The Prague, Czech Republic-based company said Friday that an additional 67,000 U.S. customers had their names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses and order numbers leaked. The leaked data came from orders made between November 2019 and August 2021, according to Trezor. 

Trezor first announced in August that data from 11,742 customers from the U.S., UK, Sweden, Colombia, Brazil, Italy, and Portugal had been exposed — with names, emails, phone numbers and shipping addresses leaked. 

Another 1,947 customers just had their names, cities and emails exposed in the breach. 

In Friday’s announcement, Trezor said that its third-party fulfillment partner, ShipMonk, had falsely reassured the company about deleting customer data. 

“Throughout our entire relationship with ShipMonk, we repeatedly requested and received written assurance confirming the deletion of the data, in line with our contract, data policy, and past communications,” Trezor wrote. 

“We are very disappointed that, despite receiving this confirmation, the data was not deleted in their systems.”

Neither Trezor nor ShipMonk immediately responded to Bitcoin Magazine’s questions. 

Trezor first announced in August that the data had been leaked because ShipMonk experienced “unauthorized access to their systems containing customer data.” 

The company added that it had directly emailed all customers involved in the breach. Trezor’s parent company, SatoshiLabs, told Bitcoin Magazine last month that it was investigating the incident. 

Trezor is one of the most popular Bitcoin hardware wallet solutions, and also has support for storing other cryptocurrencies. 

Bitcoiners’ personal data has been targeted by cybercriminals in the past: back in 2020, an unauthorized party accessed popular hardware manufacturer Ledger’s e-commerce and marketing database, leaking over 1 million email addresses and the personal contact data of nearly 10,000 customers. 

At the start of this year, customers reported receiving emails from Global-e, Ledger’s payment partner, that a data breach at its cloud systems leaked sensitive customer data. 

This post Trezor Breach Worse Than Reported: Another 67,000 US Customers Exposed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

El Salvador Isn’t Buying Bitcoin With Public Money, Says IMF 

El Salvador has not used public funds to accumulate bitcoin since the International Monetary Fund’s last review of its loan program, the fund said Thursday. 

In a report Thursday, the body said that the Central American country had instead received bitcoin from private donations, citing documentation from the government. It added that “no further Bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.”

El Salvador made headlines in 2021 when it became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in 2022 said the country would buy one bitcoin per day but it was never clear where the money was coming from — or if he was actually buying at all. 

“Documentation has been provided verifying that Bitcoin accumulation since the first review reflects private donations and that no public resources were used,” the IMF release said. 

“Understandings were also reached on steps to modernize the legal, regulatory, and supervisory framework for digital assets and to further strengthen the governance and risk-management arrangements for public-sector crypto-asset holdings. Going forward, no further bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected.”

The report added that public participation in the government-sponsored bitcoin wallet has been largely wound down, with majority ownership and operational control handed to a private operator. 

El Salvador in 2021 debuted a state-sponsored wallet called Chivo for its citizens as part of its plan to increase bitcoin adoption in the country. 

“IMF staff thank the Salvadoran authorities for the constructive discussions and excellent collaboration,” the report added. 

The IMF El Salvador entered a $1.4 billion loan agreement at the end of December but the fund asked for the country to scale back certain aspects of its bitcoin strategy. 

Institutions like the World Bank and the IMF have long criticized President Bukele’s Bitcoin law, which also asked businesses to accept the cryptocurrency if they had the technological means to do so. 

President Bukele in 2024 admitted that Salvadorans weren’t using the cryptocurrency to buy things as expected, but always boasted that the government was still stacking sats. 

Since launching a crime crackdown to tackle the country’s notorious crime gangs, murder rates in El Salvador have plunged. The country was once the most dangerous place in the Americas but President Bukele is now trying to turn it into a tech hub. 

Crypto companies like Tether have since relocated to its capital, San Salvador. 

This post El Salvador Isn’t Buying Bitcoin With Public Money, Says IMF  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Dips Below $80,000 on Strong US Jobs Report

Bitcoin slid Friday after a better-than-expected labor report showed that the U.S. job market accelerated in August. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently trading for close to $79,764 after dropping as low as $78,706 earlier in the morning in New York. It’s currently down over 1% over a 24-hour period. On Thursday, the coin soared above $82,000. 

The Federal Reserve is typically more likely to raise interest rates when the labor market is strong, because more people employed means more spending, and more spending can push inflation up. 

Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh last week gave his first major speech as head of the U.S. central bank and said he had “more work to do” to fight inflation. Bitcoin has typically done well in a low-interest rate environment. 

Traders currently view a U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate hike at the upcoming September 15–16 policy meeting as roughly a 50% to 60% probability. 

But U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday demanded the Federal Reserve slash interest rates. 

Writing on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said: “Lower the interest rates because the U.S.A. is a much stronger credit than it was just a short time ago!”

He added: “We should have the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World, like ‘the old days.'”

Bitcoin has decoupled from stocks recently as investors have renewed concerns around dollar debasement. 

The cryptocurrency started surging last month, after the U.S. Treasury Department said it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. The coin had its best run in three years and third best August ever.  

The much-talked about debasement trade is back in the spotlight, and bitcoin has been trading in lockstep with gold, according to analysts. The so-called debasement trade is when investors buy an asset as a way to hedge against a currency losing value. 

News dropped last month that U.S. public debt exceeded $40 trillion for the first time too. Excessive debt also undermines confidence in the dollar, making assets like bitcoin and gold attractive. 

This post Bitcoin Dips Below $80,000 on Strong US Jobs Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

An Ethereum prototype that divides blob-recovery duties among nodes reported an 11–18× reduction in estimated reconstruction computing work across 1,000-node simulations. The results suggest operators could reduce duplicated work through a smaller change than the full RowDAS networking proposal.

Researcher Csaba Kiraly's Sept. 3 report describes the reduced design as a possible first step toward RowDAS. It assigns recovery duties without introducing the new row-networking channels in the full proposal.

Blobs carry data used by layer-2 rollups. PeerDAS, Ethereum's system for checking that blob data is available, lets nodes download only part of it. High-custody nodes hold at least 64 of the 128 data columns, enough to rebuild missing blob data; supernodes hold all 128.

Many high-custody nodes can repeat the same reconstruction. The reduced design assigns particular blobs to them first, allowing others to receive the recovered data instead of immediately rebuilding it themselves.

What the Ethereum blob-recovery simulations show

In one configuration with four blobs, 10% supernodes and no columns withheld, the estimated network-wide reconstruction cost fell from 48.6 CPU-seconds under the PeerDAS model to 2.75 CPU-seconds under the reduced design. At a 20% supernode share, the corresponding figures were 91 and 6.6 CPU-seconds.

Those totals describe accumulated computing work across the simulated network, rather than elapsed recovery time. The accounting applies a measured 162-millisecond cost per blob recovery on a Ryzen 9 8945HS processor. Transaction speeds and fee savings were outside the reported measurements.

The PeerDAS baseline already includes randomized waiting and checks that suppress duplicate reconstruction. The comparison therefore gives existing client behavior credit for the work those delays save.

Under the reduced variant, assigned nodes share recovered cells through existing column-distribution channels. High-custody nodes retain a delayed recovery role for anything still missing, preserving a PeerDAS-style backstop.

Full RowDAS, specified in draft EIP-8371, would add another recovery route: row channels let smaller nodes pool their data and reconstruct collectively when their combined holdings clear the recovery threshold. The reduced design retains today's dependence on high-custody nodes and cannot provide that additional resilience.

The measurements remain limited to simulated, in-process networks using real cryptography. Kiraly reported no devnet results, and the full design's 128-row-subnet configuration remains an extrapolation from smaller subnet counts. Larger simulations and real-network tests are still ahead.

EIP-8371 leaves blob limits unchanged, and the proposed split between duty assignment and row networking has yet to be incorporated into its draft text. The immediate opportunity is narrower: reducing the processor work needed for recovery, with the broader resilience benefits dependent on a later row layer.

The post Ethereum may have a simpler way to ease the computing burden of its growing rollup ecosystem appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Researchers examining the roughly $320 million Liquid Network incident have identified an alleged failure in the software’s transaction-validation cache, offering a more specific explanation for how unbacked tokens could be redeemed for real Bitcoin.

Accounts also raise a deployment question. Mononaut said the exploited bug had entered Elements’ master development branch the previous week but had never appeared in a tagged release. Liquid’s federation functionaries apparently ran that code, he said, while other nodes rejected the invalid transactions.

That deployment account remains unconfirmed by Blockstream in the available statements. If established, it would put the software rollout at the center of an incident in which valid signing credentials authorized the release of Bitcoin against allegedly bug-created L-BTC.

Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain whose L-BTC tokens are intended to be backed one-for-one by BTC held by its federation. As CryptoSlate previously reported, SideSwap said a customer submitted 4,000 L-BTC through its peg-out service on Sept. 6, prompting the release of approximately 3,996 BTC.

Liquid said neither SideSwap’s peg-out authorization key nor other federation keys had been compromised.

The emerging technical accounts focus on how the tokens reached that withdrawal process.

Calle described a flaw involving range proofs, which let nodes check that hidden transaction amounts fall within an allowed range without revealing those amounts.

Liquid’s confidential transactions require more than a check that inputs and outputs balance. A hidden negative output could otherwise offset a larger positive output, making newly created tokens appear to balance mathematically.

Range proofs are intended to prevent that outcome. Because checking them is computationally expensive, nodes cache successful verification results for reuse.

According to Calle’s account, the attacker could construct an invalid output and proof that matched the cache key associated with a previously valid check. A node finding that cached result would skip the verification that should have rejected the inflationary output.

Charles Guillemet endorsed the explanation, describing a crafted cache-key collision that allowed an invalid confidential transaction to bypass a range check. Calle cautioned that his account simplified the mechanism and could contain errors.

A separate transaction reconstruction by Stu identified setup transactions followed by an allegedly invalid transaction at Liquid block 4,050,336. Stu said the transaction created approximately 3,996.0183 L-BTC before the subsequent withdrawal through SideSwap.

Mononaut’s account adds a distinction between the nodes that accepted the transaction and those that did not.

He said federation functionaries accepted the exploit transactions, approved withdrawals, and continued building blocks. Other nodes, including those powering mempool’s Liquid explorer, rejected the affected block. That would explain why an explorer following the rejecting nodes could omit transactions visible elsewhere.

The reported divergence makes the affected software versions material to understanding the failure. A postmortem would need to establish which code functions ran, why it was deployed, and how its validation behavior differed from the nodes that rejected the block.

Meanwhile, the actors controlling the withdrawn Bitcoin have described themselves as whitehats and conditioned the return of most funds on the bug being fixed across affected nodes. The available reporting does not establish a completed return or patch rollout.

Recovering the Bitcoin would address the reserve shortfall. Explaining why federation nodes accepted the transactions and demonstrating that the corrected software rejects them would address the failure that allowed those reserves to leave.

The post Tokens created out of thin air may explain how $320 million in Bitcoin left the Liquid sidechain appeared first on CryptoSlate.

In a Sept. 3 developer update, Hyperliquid API Announcements said the onchain derivatives exchange was adding optional wallet allowlists to builder-run perpetual markets. The testnet-only extension, called HIP-3*, would let a market deployer decide which wallets may trade on its venue without imposing the same access policy across Hyperliquid.

HIP-3 is Hyperliquid's framework for perpetual markets deployed by independent builders. The current API reference says a new venue can be designated HIP-3* when it is created, enabling an onchain allowlist and proxied user actions. Hyperliquid described the feature as optional and strictly additive, with existing markets unchanged. The specification is preliminary, available only on testnet and has no announced mainnet date.

How HIP-3* wallet allowlists work

A HIP-3* deployer can act for a user in five defined ways: add or remove allowlist approval, cancel specified resting orders, cancel all of the user's resting orders and time-weighted average price orders on the venue, place reduce-only orders, and move collateral to another account on the same venue.

Each power is limited by the venue boundary. The documented bulk-cancellation tool leaves orders on other DEXs untouched, the collateral-transfer function is venue-scoped, and every proxied order must be reduce-only. That last restriction allows an operator to reduce a position but not increase one through the proxy function.

A deployer may use all five tools itself or delegate them one by one to approved sub-deployers. One address could administer the allowlist while another handles cancellations, without receiving every available permission.

The reference does not enumerate every action a wallet outside the allowlist may still perform on its own. HIP-3* should therefore be understood as access control and operator powers for one newly created venue, not as a wallet freeze across Hyperliquid.

The design could give firms with customer or jurisdiction restrictions a technical way to build gated perpetual markets while other deployers continue using ordinary HIP-3. It does not amount to regulatory approval, protocol-wide know-your-customer checks or evidence that an institution has adopted HIP-3*. Hyperliquid said the tools are intended to help independent deployers operate under requirements applicable to them, leaving legal and operational choices with each deployer.

That separation also leaves the economic responsibility with the market operator. Under the existing HIP-3 specification, deployers define contracts, maintain oracles, set leverage limits and settle markets. Each deployer DEX has independent margining, order books and settings.

A mainnet HIP-3 deployer must currently maintain 500,000 HYPE in stake. Validators can slash that stake for irregular inputs that jeopardize protocol correctness, uptime or performance. HIP-3* adds access controls to that operator model; it does not shift responsibility for a restricted venue to Hyperliquid or alter permissionless markets elsewhere on the network.

The post Hyperliquid tests allowlists that let operators restrict access to their own markets appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Vitalik Buterin sees a 60% chance that advanced cryptography becomes cheap enough to reshape Ethereum privacy.

On Sept. 6, the Ethereum co-founder said there is a 60% probability that SNARKs, fully homomorphic encryption and indistinguishability obfuscation will eventually operate at less than 10 times the cost of ordinary computation. He put the odds at 33% that all three could approach near-zero additional overhead at sufficient scale.

The forecast reaches well beyond hiding transactions.

Cheap SNARKs could make private proofs easier to generate. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) could let applications compute directly on encrypted data. Indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) aims to let software run without exposing its internal logic.

Together, the technologies could move privacy from a specialized feature toward a default layer for financial and computational systems.

Buterin’s timeline is more cautious than the probability headline suggests. He said there is a good chance that at least one of the three, probably SNARKs, reaches single-digit overhead by the end of the decade. He did not assign a probability to that specific deadline.

Ethereum can improve privacy before the big breakthrough

Ethereum does not need all three technologies to become cheap before meaningful privacy improvements arrive.

Its roadmap separates privacy into private reads, private writes, and private proving, allowing progress in one area without waiting for a universal cryptographic cost collapse.

Anonymous RPC systems, private information retrieval, oblivious RAM, and light clients can improve how users access blockchain data without exposing as much information about who they are or what they are querying.

Private transactions have their own constraints. A transfer can still be censored before inclusion, linked through its fee payer or correlated through sequential account nonces.

Ethereum researchers have proposed frame transactions that separate fee payment from the account performing an action, inclusion lists that force builders to include eligible transactions seen by validator committees, and keyed nonces that make activity harder to correlate. Those mechanisms remain proposals rather than guaranteed upgrades.

Application-specific zero-knowledge systems are further ahead.

SNARKs already allow users to prove that a private computation or statement is valid without revealing the underlying information.

Ethereum’s existing design patterns can support uses such as anonymous voting, private claims, and shielded withdrawals, though privacy can still leak through wallet reuse, RPC providers, public inputs, or weak anonymity sets.

That makes SNARKs the most mature part of Buterin’s three-way bet.

FHE and iO could take privacy beyond transactions

The more consequential leap for decentralized finance would come from making FHE substantially cheaper.

Unlike application-specific proofs, FHE allows multiple users to interact with shared data while keeping that state encrypted.

That capability is essential for applications such as private automated market makers, confidential lending pools, and sealed-bid auctions, where the system must process several users’ inputs without revealing them.

However, the obstacle is cost.

One 2026 benchmark required multi-gigabyte cryptographic artifacts and more than six hours of encrypted computation for a small BERT workload. The result reflects a single application rather than a universal performance measure, but it illustrates how far some FHE workloads remain from ordinary computation.

Developers can work around those constraints with specialized coprocessors, narrower workloads, or threshold-decryption systems. Those approaches can make encrypted applications practical today, but they add infrastructure and, in some cases, new trust assumptions.

Bringing FHE into single-digit overhead would change that tradeoff. Shared encrypted state could become a routine application primitive rather than something reserved for specialized systems, making confidential financial applications cheaper and easier to deploy.

The third technology, indistinguishability obfuscation, pushes that idea further.

FHE seeks to keep data private while it is being processed. iO aims to conceal the program itself, allowing users to execute software and verify its behavior without exposing the underlying logic.

That capability remains much further away. Buterin has previously described this rigorous approach as carrying “galactic” runtimes, while newer methods remain promising but unproven.

If practical iO eventually emerges, software could begin performing roles now assigned to trusted intermediaries without revealing how it makes decisions internally. Potential applications include more coercion-resistant voting, tightly controlled encrypted protocols and systems that disclose only authorized outputs.

Those possibilities extend beyond the private-read, private-write and private-proving tools currently emphasized in Ethereum’s privacy roadmap. They also broaden the implications beyond Ethereum itself.

Christopher Inks, founder of Texas West Capital, said cheaper cryptography could allow proprietary financial models to run on outside infrastructure without exposing private data, model mechanics or intellectual property.

He argued that such systems could eventually weaken the role of intermediaries including auditors, custodians, clearinghouses and exchanges, whose businesses partly depend on serving as trusted observers or validators.

The progression is therefore from hiding user data to hiding shared financial state and, eventually, the logic of the programs operating on it. If the cost of those protections falls far enough, the result could be a new class of financial infrastructure rather than simply more private blockchain transactions.

The privacy roadmap does not depend on one outcome

Ethereum’s privacy path is therefore better understood as a progression rather than a single breakthrough.

Anonymous access, censorship resistance, shielded transfers and specialized proofs can advance with technologies that already exist. Cheaper SNARKs would expand those capabilities. FHE would determine whether confidential shared-state applications can become practical at scale. iO would open a much more distant class of encrypted software.

Buterin’s 60% scenario would accelerate all three layers, potentially making privacy far cheaper and more composable.

The remaining 40% does not imply Ethereum privacy fails. It means progress would likely stay uneven, with useful protections arriving through specialized systems while general encrypted computation remains expensive.

The post Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin puts 60% odds on a cryptography breakthrough that could weaken Wall Street middlemen appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Changpeng Zhao’s September 5 visit to Kyrgyzstan’s crypto council came as President Sadyr Japarov set a three-month deadline for new regulations and officials discussed the risks posed by international sanctions. The decisions put the limits of domestic crypto policy in focus: approval at home does not ensure access abroad.

Zhao, known as CZ, said in a post that he attended in person and praised progress including a circulating KGST stablecoin. His post did not name USDKG, the separate gold-backed, dollar-pegged project whose issuer is on the UK sanctions list.

USDKG provides a concrete example of the limits of government backing. Its published framework combines a state-owned issuer, reserve management and administrative token controls. Yet its own FAQ reserves direct redemption for institutional clients, while UK-facing services have separate legal obligations. For a retail holder, the practical exit route is a trade with an available counterparty.

Kyrgyzstan sets regulatory deadlines

According to the National Agency for Virtual Assets’ account, Japarov chaired the third council meeting in Cholpon-Ata on September 5. Participants discussed regulation, security and risks from international sanctions and restrictions affecting the country’s virtual-asset market.

The agency, known as NAVA, received two three-month assignments: secure adoption of a package of secondary regulations and work through possible amendments to the virtual-assets law and related legislation.

The timetable extends beyond legislation. The State Tax Service was given two months to review tax regulation. NAVA has one month to determine the cost and funding sources for a digital licensing and supervision platform, with pilot testing planned from Jan. 1, 2027. Kabar, citing the presidential press service, also reported those directions.

The central bank has a separate assignment to develop and pilot a basic digital-som platform by Dec. 31, 2026, followed by real-world testing from 2027 and phased national deployment.

The projects should remain distinct. In a Nov. 6, 2025 statement, the Finance Ministry said USDKG was separate from KGST and the digital som, with different goals, mechanisms and backing.

State ownership does not determine foreign access

For USDKG, the state connection is through its issuer. The ministry’s November 2025 statement said it owned 100% of OJSC Virtual Asset Issuer. USDKG’s May 22, 2026 announcement continued to describe the issuer as a state-owned entity under the Finance Ministry.

Four days later, the UK designated the issuer under reference RUS3618. Its May 26 sanctions notice identifies the entity through names including USDKG. The current designation record lists an asset freeze, trust-services sanctions, director disqualification and internet-services sanctions.

The UK’s stated rationale is that it has reasonable grounds to suspect the issuer obtained a benefit from or supported Russia’s government through business of economic significance to that government.

For financial sanctions, the relevant boundary includes both location and legal identity. OFSI guidance says the rules apply to persons within UK territory and territorial sea, as well as UK persons worldwide, including entities established under UK law and their branches.

The internet-services measure addresses another part of access. Specified services must take reasonable steps to prevent users in the UK from accessing content, websites or applications provided by the designated issuer.

These restrictions do not amount to proof of a worldwide shutdown of USDKG transfers. They show why domestic authorization cannot settle every access question: a foreign service may have legal duties that Kyrgyz state ownership does not remove.

USDKG redemption depends on holder eligibility

USDKG’s current redemption FAQ makes the holder distinction explicit. Retail users are directed to supported exchanges for liquidity. Direct minting and redemption are available only to institutional clients, subject to identity and anti-money-laundering checks and issuer-defined procedures. Gold redemption is handled case by case.

For retail holders, the reserve asset and the immediate source of liquidity are therefore different things. Gold may support the issuer’s backing model, but the published retail route relies on somebody else being willing and able to buy the token.

The issuer’s December 2025 tokenomics explanation describes tokens being issued after gold enters custody and is verified. It also describes a fiat liquidity buffer intended to support redemptions without requiring immediate gold sales.

That arrangement depends on reserve management and the execution of issuer procedures. USDKG’s transparency page says its gold valuation uses prices at the audit date and displays a 2025 fourth-quarter report.

The available market observations are limited. A CoinGecko market page on September 6 displayed Ethereum Uniswap V3 and Curve USDKG market rows flagged inactive, indicating no trades in the preceding three hours on those displayed rows.

Likewise, the May 22 issuer announcement said USDKG/USDT was available to professional investors through OSL HK’s over-the-counter platform.

Token ownership still sits inside an administrative system

Access also depends on the token’s design. USDKG’s current project documentation assigns the owner the ability to pause transfers and issue tokens. It assigns compliance administrators the ability to blacklist addresses and burn balances held by blacklisted accounts. The documented redemption function burns tokens from the owner’s own balance.

Those are distinct powers with different consequences. A transfer pause concerns token movement, while a blacklist targets addresses. Direct redemption remains an issuer process subject to the eligibility conditions described in its FAQ. Possession of tokens alone does not remove those dependencies.

The Ethereum contract page labels its source an exact verified match and exposes administrative functions including pausing, blacklisting, issuance and redemption in its published interface. That corroborates the existence of the interfaces.

The January 2025 Consensys Diligence audit reviewed a specific code revision and described substantial trust in administrators. Its historical findings should not be treated as a complete account of every current deployed permission, or as evidence of present reserve solvency.

The documented controls add a separate dependency to the exit process. Eligibility determines who can redeem directly; counterparties provide retail liquidity; administrators retain specified powers over token movement.

Japarov’s September deadlines now create concrete milestones for Kyrgyzstan’s domestic framework: secondary regulations, possible legislative amendments and the licensing-platform pilot. Those measures can shape how the country supervises virtual assets.

For USDKG holders, the practical test is whether those services connect to an exit they can use. A retail sale still needs a counterparty, institutional redemption still requires issuer approval, and UK-facing services still have sanctions obligations. The next regulations will shape domestic supervision; access depends on how those separate conditions are met.

The post CZ’s Kyrgyzstan visit highlights why state backing cannot guarantee a stablecoin exit appeared first on CryptoSlate.

On the Liquid Network, the best-known Bitcoin sidechain, around 4,000 Bitcoin drained out of the shared reserve on September 6, 2026. The network has been halted since then, L-BTC currently cannot be swapped back into real Bitcoin, and several trading venues have stopped deposits and withdrawals of the token. If you hold L-BTC or use a wallet that supports Liquid, your most important task today is taking stock rather than trading.

The incident is unusual because no key was stolen. The payout was cryptographically valid. That is precisely what makes the case interesting for anyone who holds Bitcoin through a second layer.

What happened on the Liquid Network on September 6

According to several specialist outlets, between 3,998.5 and 4,019.4 Bitcoin were withdrawn from what is known as the federation wallet of the Liquid Network. At the time of the outflow the value stood at roughly $319 million to $320 million. The range arises because individual newsrooms draw the boundaries of the movement differently: tftc.io counts 3,998.5 BTC based on the on-chain data, while Bitcoin Magazine cites 4,019.4 BTC. The Liquid team itself officially speaks of around 4,000 Bitcoin.

Cryptopolitan dates the decisive transaction to Bitcoin block 965,783, confirmed on September 6, 2026 at 14:28:56 UTC. According to the analysis by tftc.io, 207.275 BTC remained in the federation wallet afterwards. Before that there were around 4,200 BTC. So roughly five percent of the reserve was left standing.

Shortly afterwards the network pulled the emergency brake. The bridge nodes were shut down, and new deposits and withdrawals between Bitcoin and Liquid are blocked. The sidechain itself continues to produce blocks, but the route back into the Bitcoin network is closed. No date for a restart has been given so far.

Peg-out, federation and PAK: how the Liquid Bitcoin bridge normally works

To understand why this case is different from an ordinary exchange hack, you need three terms.

A sidechain is an independent blockchain that is docked onto a main chain and represents its coins in wrapped form. L-BTC is the Bitcoin proxy on Liquid: a token that is meant to be backed one to one by real Bitcoin held jointly by a group of companies. That group is called the federation, and it is the actual custodian.

The way in is called a peg-in, the way out a peg-out: you lock real Bitcoin, are credited with the same amount of L-BTC, and can reverse the process later. In a peg-out the L-BTC on the sidechain are destroyed and the federation releases the real Bitcoin in return. So that no single party can do this alone, Liquid requires, as tftc.io describes it, a multisignature from eleven of the fifteen federation members plus authorisation via an allow list, the Peg-out Authorization Key, or PAK for short. A PAK is therefore the registered key that determines which Bitcoin address may be paid out to at all.

On September 6 the payout ran through the PAK of the SideSwap service. The network stresses that this key was not compromised, and that no key otherwise fell into the wrong hands. The signatures were genuine, the authorisation formally correct, and the federation did what it was built to do. The gap sat one layer earlier.

The flaw was in the software, not in the keyring

Several reports trace the process back to a bug in Elements, the open-source software Liquid is built on. The accounts differ in detail, and that difference is worth knowing rather than skimming past.

Bitcoin Magazine describes an inflation bug: more than 4,000 L-BTC are said to have been created without real Bitcoin behind them, and these were then paid out via the SideSwap PAK. A second reading, quoted in several reports, describes the sequence as an apparently regular process in which L-BTC were properly burned and just under 4,000 real Bitcoin were released as a result. Both variants lead to the same outcome: the sidechain's accounting and the federation's actual Bitcoin holdings no longer matched.

A conclusive technical post-mortem by the operators was not available at the time of writing. As long as it is missing, any statement about the exact place in the code is conjecture, and we treat it as such here.

"We are whitehats": what this on-chain message actually proves

In a follow-up transaction the other side left the message "we are whitehats. contact us on chain". In IT security a white hat is someone who finds a vulnerability and discloses it instead of exploiting it. Here the label is a self-description, no more than that.

What can be established: according to consistent reports, the Bitcoin are sitting untouched at the receiving address. Blockstream and the Liquid team are trying to make contact through signed on-chain messages. One of the reports states that the other side has held out the prospect of returning most of the sum once the Elements vulnerability is closed network-wide. That undertaking is not confirmed, and no repayment has been made to date.

For you as a holder, the choice of words changes nothing. Whether someone calls themselves a white hat does not decide whether your money comes back. Only the actual return decides that.

L-BTC is frozen: what holders should check right now

The unpleasant news first: anyone holding L-BTC can do little at the moment. The peg-out is blocked, so a swap into real Bitcoin is not possible for the time being. There is no button that solves the problem for you.

An orderly stocktake still makes sense. Open your wallets and look at whether there is any Liquid balance among them at all. The wallets mainly affected are those that support Liquid, such as SideSwap, Blockstream Green or Aqua, along with balances at trading venues that list L-BTC. If you are unsure whether a holding sits on Liquid or on the Bitcoin base layer, a look at the address format and the block explorer used will help. Note down the position with date and time so that you have a solid starting figure later, should any settlement arrangement come about.

Refrain from attempting new peg-ins now. As long as the bridge nodes are switched off, the best case is that you are sending Bitcoin into a queue whose resolution nobody can schedule. And treat offers that promise you a quick payout of your L-BTC for a fee with caution. Situations like this tend to attract fraud attempts posing as support.

USDt, DePix and RWAs on Liquid: why these assets are affected differently

Liquid carries more than wrapped Bitcoin. The official network account has stated that other issued assets are unaffected, among them the stablecoin USDt, the Brazilian DePix and tokenised real-world assets.

That is technically plausible: these tokens do not hang on the federation's Bitcoin reserve, and their backing sits with the respective issuers. The outflow from the federation wallet therefore does not touch them. In practice a problem remains, because as long as the network is halted you can move these assets only to a limited extent as well. Being unaffected and being freely available are two different things at the moment.

Exchanges halt L-BTC deposits and withdrawals: where to check the status

Several trading venues have suspended deposits and withdrawals of L-BTC or announced that they will. What counts here is solely the status page of your own provider together with its announcements, and not the summary in a news feed. That is where you will find whether only transfers are affected or trading too, and whether withdrawals in real Bitcoin remain possible by another route.

In a situation like this, pay particular attention to which networks a provider supports for deposits and withdrawals at all, and how quickly and openly it communicates about disruptions. Anyone with balances spread across several venues should go through this check today for every one of them, and not only for the one they use daily.

Sidechain, bridge, wrapped token: the counterparty risk behind every wrapped Bitcoin

The sentence that sticks from this case comes from the analysis by tftc.io: L-BTC holders had no direct claim on the underlying Bitcoin, and their risk was against a consortium of companies rather than against the Bitcoin protocol.

This is not a peculiarity of Liquid. It applies to every wrapped Bitcoin on every foreign chain. A wrapped token is a placeholder that represents on one blockchain the quantity of a coin held somewhere else. Its value hangs on two conditions: the backing has to exist, and redemption has to work. If either falls away, you hold a claim whose enforceability you may well not know.

Sidechains and bridges buy you something with real advantages in return: faster and cheaper transfers, confidential amounts, applications that do not run on the Bitcoin base layer. Anyone using them should make that trade deliberately rather than in passing. A useful rule of thumb: what sits on a second layer is working capital. What is meant to stay put for the long run belongs on the base layer in your own custody, as we described after the Coldcard incident in our assessment of the hardware wallet choice.

What the case means for your own custody

The key difference between this incident and a classic theft is the point of attack. Storing good keys well was of no help here, because the keys were fine. What broke is the rule that decides when those keys are allowed to sign.

From that follows an uncomfortable insight: the security of your holdings does not end at your own wallet. What matters is the whole chain of systems standing between you and the base layer. For a Bitcoin in your hardware wallet that chain is short. For an L-BTC in a software wallet, backed by a federation, secured through an allow list, paid out via a service with its own registered key, it is long.

In practice that means three things. Keep the amount on second layers small enough that a total loss does not knock you off course. For every wrapped token, check who the custodian is and whether one is even named. And document your holdings regularly, so that in an incident you have figures rather than memories.

What remains open

Three points were unresolved at the time of writing. There is no date for the network to restart. There is no commitment from the operators on how L-BTC balances will be handled if the Bitcoin do not come back. And there is no independent confirmation that the other side will actually repay. Anyone telling you today that the case is settled knows more than can be evidenced.

Liquid peg-out and checking your L-BTC: what to take away

1. Establish and document your holdings. Open every wallet and every account today and record whether and how much L-BTC or other Liquid balance is sitting there, with date and time. Our crypto exchange comparison helps when you reconcile the networks and withdrawal routes of your trading venues.
2. Send nothing new into the blocked bridge. Avoid peg-ins as long as the bridge nodes are switched off, and read the status exclusively at your provider and at the network operator. Which wallet supports Liquid at all, and how transparently it discloses that, is shown in our software wallet comparison.
3. Bring long-term holdings onto the base layer. Separate working capital from reserves and self-custody the part that is meant to stay put. Which devices come into question and how to tell them apart is in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of September 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Filecoin's vesting of Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation ends on October 15, 2026. It is the largest inflow channel for new FIL since mainnet launched, and it dries up completely on that day. Gross emission, meaning the volume of FIL that enters circulation each year, falls by roughly 75 percent as a result: from about 88 million to about 22 million tokens a year. As a holder you need to do nothing on that date. No deadline expires, no swap is required. What changes is the mechanism behind it, and that is worth understanding before the day arrives.

The Filecoin price stood at $0.8173, or €0.7034, on September 7, 2026 at 06:36 UTC, up 1.69 percent over 24 hours, with a market capitalisation of around $676 million (source: CoinGecko API, own query at that time). Circulating supply was 826,950,326 FIL. That figure is the denominator for everything that follows, because emission numbers say little without a reference to circulating supply. If you hold FIL or want to build a position, what matters most is where you buy and how cheaply you get in: our comparison of the best crypto exchanges shows which venues list FIL and what they charge in fees.

What happens to Filecoin vesting on October 15, 2026

Vesting describes a lock-up period over which allocated tokens are released step by step instead of becoming available all at once. At Filecoin it covers the allocations to the development team Protocol Labs and to the Filecoin Foundation. The official documentation states the period in plain terms: a defined share of the FIL minted at genesis is released to Protocol Labs teams and the Filecoin Foundation over six years, and to SAFT investors over three years (docs.filecoin.io).

Six years from the mainnet launch land in precisely this October. Mainnet started at epoch 148,888, which corresponds to October 15, 2020 at 14:44 UTC. The announced end date therefore follows straight from a schedule that has sat in the protocol since 2020. Nothing about it is new except the fact that it now comes due.

Where new FIL has come from so far: vesting and block rewards

New FIL arises from two sources at Filecoin. One is block rewards, the payments storage providers receive for supplying and proving storage capacity. The other is that vesting. According to figures from the project source FilecoinTLDR, vesting from Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation contributes around 66.7 million FIL a year, block rewards around 21.7 million. Together that is just under 10 percent of circulating supply per year, as the source puts it.

Measured against current circulating supply, the figure holds up: 66.7 million equals 8.07 percent of 826,950,326 FIL, and the 22 million from block rewards equal 2.66 percent. Together, 10.73 percent. For anyone who prefers a daily number: at 88.4 million FIL a year that works out at roughly 242,000 new FIL per day, after which about 60,000 remain. The difference of some 182,000 FIL a day was worth about €128,000 on September 7.

Why gross FIL emission falls by roughly 75 percent

The arithmetic behind it is unspectacular. Of the two inflows, the larger one disappears and the smaller one stays. 66.7 out of 88.4 million is a good 75 percent, and that is exactly how the primary source states it: on October 15 this source dries up and cuts gross emission by about 75 percent. What remains is block rewards alone, around 22 million FIL a year, or a little over 2 percent of circulating supply.

Gross emission here refers exclusively to the inflow: everything that newly enters circulation, without netting off what leaves it. This distinction is the heart of the whole topic, and it gets lost in most headlines.

Vesting, emission and circulating supply: the terms kept apart

Three terms are regularly thrown together around this date. It helps to pin each of them down.

Circulating supply is the volume of FIL that is freely tradable. On September 7 that value stood at 826,950,326 tokens. Total supply of all FIL ever minted is 1,957,088,873 tokens, so roughly 42 percent of it is in circulation. Emission describes the speed at which new tokens are added. And net supply is emission less whatever disappears from circulation.

Only emission changes on October 15. Circulating supply does not fall that day; it simply grows more slowly afterwards. Anyone waiting for a jump in the statistics in October will wait in vain. The effect shows up as a flatter curve over months rather than as an edge on a single day.

Why lower emission does not automatically mean less FIL supply

This is where the real stumbling block lies, and the project source spells it out itself: the end of vesting changes what comes into circulation, but not what circulating supply does afterwards. Burns and the locking of collateral decide the rest.

That is not a footnote but the condition attached to every statement about future supply. A network can halve its emission and still have more liquid tokens in the market if locked holdings are freed at the same time. The reverse also holds: available supply can shrink at unchanged emission when more tokens are locked or destroyed than are added.

Collateral locking and burns: the other side of the FIL supply calculation

Two mechanisms continuously withdraw tokens from Filecoin circulation. The first is collateral locking: storage providers have to post FIL as collateral before they may offer storage capacity, and that pledge stays locked for the term of the storage commitment. As long as the volume of offered storage rises, the locked balance grows with it. The second mechanism is burns: part of the network fees is destroyed permanently, and collateral is forfeited when storage commitments are breached.

Both quantities depend on actual use of the network, and they move independently of the vesting calendar. That is why the October 15 date supports no statement about how the freely tradable volume of FIL develops afterwards. What can be said is this: the one large factor that has so far pulled reliably in a single direction falls away, and the remaining calculation is settled by demand.

What the FIL supply simulation says and what it expressly is not

On future net supply, FilecoinTLDR cites a range from its own tokenomics simulator: depending on the state of the network, daily net growth in supply could sit some 86 to 119 percent below the August 2026 level by the end of 2027. At the upper end of that range the daily balance turns negative, meaning more FIL would leave circulation than enters it.

The source flags these figures in the same breath as modelled scenarios and expressly not as forecasts. The outcome hangs on factors such as demand within the network, block rewards, collateral and burns. Anyone passing this range on as a price target has suppressed the source's own framing. We therefore reproduce it exactly as it stands there: an arithmetic exercise under assumptions, and no statement about the market.

That caution is the exception in the German-language space. On the emission date itself there is so far practically nothing in German, while search results on Filecoin are dominated by chart technicals and price targets. Precisely for that reason, the distinction between mechanism and forecast matters more here than any single number.

FIP-0118 Solstice: the second change to Filecoin economics in Q4

The vesting date is not the only change to the economics of the network this quarter. The improvement proposal FIP-0118, named Solstice, was accepted in September and is waiting to be scheduled into a network upgrade. The state of the specification we refer to here is that of September 1, 2026, and details may still change before delivery.

Substantively it concerns the question of what block rewards are paid out for. Today storage providers receive rewards based on their storage performance, regardless of whether anyone pays for that storage. Under Solstice a share of block rewards would flow to services that bring paying usage into the network, and that share would only be paid out if the payment volume settled through Filecoin Pay reaches targets set in advance. If the targets are missed, the corresponding share is burned instead of paid. In addition, the human review in the Fil+ process would fall away: every new sector would start automatically with the tenfold quality-adjusted power multiplier.

For the supply side this means a further part of emission would be tied to actual demand, with burning as the fallback. Whether and when this arrives is still open.

How demand for Filecoin storage is developing right now

Because future net supply hangs on usage, the figures the project publishes on it are worth a look. The annualised run rate of Filecoin Pay, through which payments in the network are settled, rose from $663 in January to $59,327 at the end of August 2026, according to FilecoinTLDR. The number of actively paying addresses grew from 73 to 119 over the same period, and the number of active settlement channels stood at 865 in August.

That is growth from a very small base, and it should be read that way: a run rate in the low five-figure dollar range sits against a market capitalisation of around $676 million. Alongside it, Fil One has offered an S3-compatible object store since June, priced at $4.99 per terabyte per month with no charges for outbound data transfer. Whether that turns into paying demand on a scale that noticeably drives burns is open, and it can be tracked through exactly these figures.

How to check the date and the FIL emission yourself

You do not have to take any report on trust to verify the date. Filecoin writes a block every 30 seconds, and these blocks are numbered consecutively. Epoch 0 falls on August 24, 2020 at 22:00 UTC. From the current block height, any date can be calculated in either direction.

On September 7, 2026 at 06:36 UTC the chain stood at height 6,348,552, retrieved via the public Glif node. Counting up from epoch 0 at 30 seconds per block lands exactly on that time, so the calculation holds to the second. October 15, 2026 at 00:00 UTC corresponds to epoch 6,457,200. Between the two points lie 108,648 epochs, or 37.7 days. If you want to follow the number yourself, pull the block height and divide the difference to the target moment by 30 seconds.

The second verifiable quantity is circulating supply. Note it down today and compare it in November: at an emission of around 88 million FIL a year, circulation grows by about 7.4 million a month, and at 22 million a year by only some 1.8 million. You will see that difference in the data set of any major market data source within a few weeks. We have described at length how to recalculate such release volumes yourself instead of trusting an aggregator, using one concrete unlock as the example: recalculating a token unlock. The method is the same here, only the direction is reversed.

Do FIL holders need to act before October 15?

No. There is no deadline that expires for you, no swap, no registration and no freeze on deposits or withdrawals. The date concerns the release of tokens to the team and the foundation behind the project, and not the holdings of investors. Anyone with FIL sitting on an exchange or in their own wallet can do exactly the same on October 15 as on the 14th.

This is the point where the date differs from those events that do create pressure to act. With an announced trading halt or a withdrawal deadline at an exchange you have to react, otherwise your balance is blocked. Here it works the other way round: doing nothing costs you nothing. It is still worth knowing the difference between the two cases, because headlines tend to treat them alike.

What the date means for custody and tax

Indirectly there are two points of contact. The first concerns custody. If you want to hold FIL for years because the supply mechanism convinces you, the question becomes where those tokens sit. Holdings on a trading platform belong to you economically but carry the platform's risk. Anyone who wants to separate the two holds their own coins and needs a wallet that supports FIL at all. Not every device does, and the differences lie less in the price than in which networks the manufacturer maintains.

The second point is tax. In Germany, selling crypto assets after a holding period of more than one year is tax-free for private individuals, and within that period the exemption limit for private disposal transactions applies. Anyone reallocating because of an expected supply squeeze may trigger a taxable event by doing so, regardless of whether the expectation is borne out. Clean records of acquisition dates are therefore the precondition for knowing what a sale actually costs.

How this date fits the run of FIL supply events

At many projects, releases and lock-ups shape supply more strongly than any partnership announcement. Usually the subject is additional tokens coming to market, as with the monthly releases we last worked through using LayerZero and its ZRO token. Filecoin now stands at the other end of that pattern: here an inflow ends that ran reliably for six years.

For context that means two things. First, the effect is structural and works over months, whereas a single unlock is measurable on one day. Second, the end of an inflow is the weaker of the two statements, because it touches only one half of the equation. What counts in the end is the balance of inflow, locking and burning, and at Filecoin that balance depends more heavily on network usage from mid-October than ever before.

Filecoin vesting: what to take away

1. Check the date yourself instead of taking it over. The block height and the 30-second epochs give you the date to the second, and circulating supply will show you from November whether emission has actually flattened. If you need a venue that lists FIL for this, you will find the terms in our crypto exchange comparison.
2. Keep emission and supply apart. The 75 percent refers to the inflow, and not to the tradable volume. Anyone holding for the long run should set up custody accordingly; the differences between devices are in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Factor in tax before you reallocate. If you sell on a supply expectation, you should know the holding period of each individual purchase. Tools that track this automatically are in our comparison of tax tools and portfolio trackers.

(As of September 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Bitcoin's oldest sidechain just lost almost everything it was holding, and the person who took it is asking politely how to give it back.

On Saturday, 6 September 2026, roughly 4,000 $BTC worth about $320 million left the federation wallet that backs Liquid Network, the Blockstream-built Bitcoin sidechain that has been running since 2018. The wallet held around 4,200 BTC before the incident. It now holds a little over 200. That is about 95% of every Bitcoin ever pegged into Liquid, gone in the space of 23 minutes.

Then things got strange. The attacker attached a message to a Bitcoin transaction announcing himself as a white hat and inviting Blockstream to get in touch. Blockstream did. The two sides have spent the weekend negotiating a $320 million return in public, one small Bitcoin transaction at a time.

What Actually Happened In The Liquid Network Hack?

The timeline is unusually clean, because most of it is on the Bitcoin blockchain.

At 14:05 UTC on 6 September, a customer sent 4,000 L-BTC to SideSwap's peg-out service. SideSwap is a Liquid Federation member and a normal, approved route for converting L-BTC back into real Bitcoin. It processed the order like any other: the L-BTC was burned on Liquid, a valid peg-out authorisation was attached, and 23 minutes later the federation paid out roughly 3,996 BTC on the Bitcoin mainchain.

Nothing about that transaction looked wrong. It was confirmed in Bitcoin block 965,783 at 14:28:56 UTC, and the coins landed in a single address holding just under 4,000 BTC.

Shortly afterwards, that same address broadcast a tiny second transaction carrying an OP_RETURN message: the sender identified himself as a white hat and asked to be contacted on-chain. Blockstream replied the same way, sending 1,000 satoshis to the address in block 965,822 with a message pointing to its security contact. The conversation has since moved into PGP-signed notes passed back and forth.

Liquid disabled its bridge nodes and paused the network. Exchanges were notified, and several have suspended L-BTC deposits and withdrawals.

How Did The Elements Bug Let 4,000 BTC Out?

This is the part that should worry people more than the missing money.

Liquid's security model looks solid on paper. The Bitcoin backing L-BTC sits in an 11-of-15 multisig controlled by vetted federation members, and peg-outs back to Bitcoin are gated by a second layer called Peg-out Authorisation Keys. Neither of those layers broke. No key was stolen, no signer was phished, no hardware security module was tricked.

Instead, Blockstream has attributed the incident to a software bug in Elements, the open-source codebase Liquid runs on. Independent analysis points to a consensus-level inflation bug in how confidential transaction rangeproofs were cached. A cache key that left out asset and script context meant a previously verified proof could be reused, which let unbacked L-BTC be created out of nothing and accepted by a subset of nodes.

From there the attacker did not need to hack anything else. He simply redeemed his counterfeit L-BTC through the front door. SideSwap has said it had no way to tell the exploit-created coins apart from real ones, so it treated them the same, and the federation's HSMs signed a withdrawal that was perfectly valid under Liquid's consensus rules at the time.

The uncomfortable footnote: a fix had reportedly already been merged into the Elements repository days earlier, but had not yet shipped in a tagged release.

Is The Liquid Network Hacker Really A White Hat?

He says he will return most of the funds once the bug is patched and every node has updated. He has not said how much "most" means, has not given a deadline, and has not revealed who he is. As of Monday, the Bitcoin has not moved.

Plenty of people in the industry are not buying the framing. Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet pointed out that genuine white hats disclose a flaw before moving hundreds of millions in collateral, not after, and compared the situation to the Ronin bridge hack and the Euler Finance attacker's post-exploit change of heart. Draining a bridge and then asking for a chat looks less like responsible disclosure and more like leverage.

Former Blockstream CSO Samson Mow added another wrinkle, saying a Signal contact request that surfaced during the negotiation did not come from the address actually holding the coins. Which is a good reminder that in a public negotiation with an anonymous counterparty, anyone can pretend to be either side.

What Does This Mean For Bitcoin And L-BTC Holders?

Bitcoin itself is fine. The exploit never touched the base layer, and BTC has been sitting comfortably near $80,000 through the whole episode. This was a bug in a system built on top of Bitcoin, not in Bitcoin.

The damage is concentrated where you would expect: L-BTC liquidity, and any business or token that depends on Liquid as a settlement layer. Liquid exists to give exchanges fast settlement by issuing L-BTC against locked Bitcoin, and a reserve that is 95% empty is not a functioning peg. Until the coins come back, or the federation explains how it will cover the hole, L-BTC redemptions are stuck.

There is also a broader point about federated bridges. Liquid's federation did nothing wrong in the sense that everyone followed the rules. The rules themselves were wrong for a few blocks, and that was enough. For anyone holding assets through a bridge, custodian, or wrapper, a protocol-level bug in a shared reserve is a risk no amount of personal opsec can audit away.

What Happens Next?

Three things to watch:

• A confirmed return transaction. Nothing else counts. Until Bitcoin moves from that address back to the federation, the promise is just text in an OP_RETURN field.
• Blockstream's post-mortem. The company has not yet published a full technical account, including exactly how the peg-out cleared normal controls and why the Elements fix had not shipped.
• Reconciliation. Even in the best case, someone has to explain the gap between 4,000 BTC and "most" of 4,000 BTC, whether any of it is being kept as a self-awarded bounty, and how the remaining reserves are accounted for.

This story is not over when the hacker says nice things. It is over when the Bitcoin is back and the numbers add up.

Gifting bitcoin to children: the tax rules that apply in Austria

Transferring bitcoin to your own children is generally possible in Austria without the gift alone triggering income tax on any price gain accrued up to that point. There is no general gift tax either.

Even so, a larger transfer is not automatically without tax consequences. For one thing, a gift reporting obligation can arise. For another, in the case of a genuine gift the child generally takes over the tax history of the bitcoin, including the parent's acquisition costs.

The 50,000 euro threshold applies to parents and children

Children belong to the circle of relatives covered by the Austrian gift notification rules.

Gifts between relatives are generally exempt from the reporting obligation as long as the fair market value of the transfers between the same persons within one year does not exceed 50,000 euros in total. If that threshold is exceeded, the gift generally has to be reported.

Example:

• A parent gifts bitcoin worth 30,000 euros: generally no report on the basis of this gift alone.
• Later in the same relevant period, further bitcoin worth 25,000 euros follow.
• Total value: 55,000 euros.

The reporting threshold may thus have been exceeded.

Which bitcoin value counts?

For the gift reporting obligation, what generally counts is the fair market value at the time of the transfer. With bitcoin this can regularly be determined from a traceable market price.

• The following should therefore be documented:
• date and time of the gift,
• the amount of BTC transferred,
• the euro price used,
• the price source,
• wallet addresses,
• transaction ID.

This data can also help later on to demonstrate the origin of the bitcoin to the tax office.

The child does not get a new tax cost base

The later taxation is particularly important.

A genuine gift does not mean that the bitcoin market value on the day of the gift automatically becomes the new acquisition cost. Under the Austrian income tax guidelines, the recipient instead continues the acquisition costs of the donor.

Example:

• The parent bought bitcoin for 10,000 euros.
• At the time of the gift they are worth 30,000 euros.
• The child later sells them for 40,000 euros.
• The tax base value generally remains 10,000 euros, not 30,000 euros.

With taxable new holdings this can produce a gain of 30,000 euros on the later sale.

Legacy holdings also remain relevant for tax

The same principle makes the date of acquisition particularly relevant. If the transferred bitcoin were already acquired before March 1, 2021, their status as legacy holdings for tax purposes can likewise remain significant. A gratuitous transfer generally does not simply reset that history. Parents should therefore hand the child not only the bitcoin but also the historical purchase records.

Three months to file the report

If the reporting threshold is exceeded, the gift generally has to be reported within three months. If the threshold is only exceeded through several transfers, the deadline starts with the gift that pushes it over the line. The report is generally filed with the Austrian tax office, regularly via FinanzOnline. Wilfully failing to report can carry consequences under fiscal criminal law.

Conclusion

Bitcoin can generally be gifted to children in Austria without the gift alone realising a bitcoin price gain. With larger amounts, however, the gift reporting obligation has to be observed. For relatives the relevant threshold is generally 50,000 euros within one year. More important still for a later sale: in the case of a genuine gift the child generally takes over the parent's acquisition costs for tax purposes. Purchase date, cost basis and transaction history should therefore be documented together with the bitcoin.

Harmony is giving up its own blockchain. On September 6, 2026 the team behind the network announced that it will shut down the mainnet it launched in 2019 and reissue the ONE token as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. For you as a holder, one point matters above all: if your ONE sit inside a smart contract, meaning a liquidity pool, a multisig wallet or a DeFi position, you have to pull them out beforehand. Those positions do not travel with the migration. Balances in an ordinary wallet and on an exchange, by contrast, are captured by a snapshot and credited again on Ethereum without you having to apply for anything.

The window is tight. Reports name both September 9 and September 10, 2026, and they do not name them consistently. Anyone affected should therefore not wait until the last day.

Harmony mainnet shutdown: what happens on September 9 and 10, 2026

A mainnet is the productive main network of a blockchain, where real balances and real transactions live, as opposed to a testnet. Harmony runs such a mainnet as an independent layer 1 chain. Layer 1 describes a blockchain that settles and secures its transactions itself instead of attaching itself to another chain.

That independence is now ending. According to the announcement, the final blocks are to be processed on September 9, 2026; validators may shut down their nodes afterwards. On the exact cut-off date the available reports diverge, and you should know that rather than have it smoothed over: The Block writes that users should exit all smart contracts before September 10, 2026, and names September 10 as the day validators are allowed to cease operations. ETHNews describes September 9 as the day of the final blocks and September 10 as a hard boundary after which funds in certain positions are lost. The Chinese-language industry outlet WuBlockchain names September 9 in its summary as the deadline for exiting smart contracts.

In practice the spread means this: anyone holding a position on Harmony has until September 8 to unwind it safely. After that it depends on whether the chain is still producing blocks, and that is not something to rely on when money is at stake.

Why Harmony is abandoning its own chain: the cross-shard exploit of August 12

The trigger lies four weeks back. On August 12, 2026 Harmony was attacked through a flaw in what is called cross-shard verification. Harmony splits its network into shards, several parallel sub-chains that settle transactions among themselves via receipts. The attacker was able to have valid receipts redeemed more than once. The result was new ONE with no offsetting entry: the attack touched not a single smart contract. It struck one level deeper, at the consensus layer, the place where the network's nodes agree on the valid state.

The scale is the reason an in-flight repair was ruled out. The first confirmed wave covered around 4 billion ONE, which against a total supply of roughly 15.01 billion works out at about 26 percent. Reconstructing the full attack, the security firm Verichains arrived at roughly 3.01 trillion forged ONE. The two figures do not contradict each other; they describe different stages of the post-mortem.

Harmony then opted for a rollback, winding the chain back to a state before the attack. Shard 0 was reset to block 92,730,034 and shard 1 to block 94,978,278; both checkpoints carry the same timestamp, 23:25:37 UTC on August 11, 2026, shortly before the first confirmed forgery. More than 141,000 consecutive blocks and over 109,000 regular transactions were discarded, 109,441 exactly according to ETHNews, along with several hundred staking operations. What such a reversal means for your own holdings and for your holding period is set out in our explainer on the blockchain rollback after an exploit.

The reasoning behind the current shutdown reaches beyond this single case. In the project's words: “The threats posed by state actors and AI agents are too great.” That is the team's assessment, not a verified fact, and it stands that way in the announcement.

Snapshot and airdrop: how ONE becomes an ERC-20 token on Ethereum

A snapshot is a point-in-time record of all balances at a defined block. Harmony intends to take that record at the chain's final block and then distribute new ONE as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum to the same addresses. ERC-20 is the standard on which the vast majority of tokens on Ethereum are built; it defines how a token is transferred and queried, so that wallets and exchanges can support it without special handling.

For the majority of holders that is the good news: there is no claim process, no form, no redemption deadline. Anyone holding ONE in a self-custodied wallet whose address also works on Ethereum will be credited the new tokens there automatically. Total supply and issuance rate are to remain unchanged. Newly issued tokens are to be allocated to Harmony's own new venture, an initiative around AI-assisted video production that the team describes as a “remix economy”. Whether that pivot carries is an open question, and not a decisive one for the deadline at issue here.

Not every address is alike: the difference between the ONE and Ethereum formats

Harmony uses two notations for addresses: the familiar Ethereum format beginning with 0x, and its own format with the prefix one1. Both denote the same key, merely encoded differently. If you hold your ONE in a wallet where you own the private key or the seed phrase yourself, that is uncritical for the migration, because the same key also controls the matching 0x address on Ethereum.

It becomes critical somewhere else: with addresses that belong to a program and not to a key. That is exactly what the next section is about.

Balances on an exchange: why you usually have nothing to do here

If your ONE sit on a centralised trading platform, the address belongs to the exchange, not to you. According to the announcement the snapshot also captures holdings on centralised exchanges, and Harmony intends to switch the listings over to the new token. In that case the exchange credits you the ERC-20 token once it has worked through the changeover.

Even so, you should not rely on that blindly. A chain shutdown is a separate operation for every platform: it has to halt deposits and withdrawals on the old network, add the new contract and trigger the credit. Experience shows that exchanges announce this in their announcements section, often only a few days in advance, and that the suspension of deposits usually comes first. So check your platform's notices, and move no ONE to or from it in the days around the cut-off. If in doing so you find that your exchange does not list the token at all, or that its communication stays thin, a sober look at the alternatives helps: our comparison of the best crypto exchanges shows which providers handle changes of this kind cleanly on a regular basis.

Liquidity pools, multisig and DeFi: what the migration leaves behind

This is where the actual work lies. According to the announcement, multisig safes, liquidity pools and on-chain applications cannot be migrated. Users are told to exit all smart contracts before the cut-off date.

A liquidity pool is a contract into which several users deposit two tokens so that others can swap between them for a fee; your share of it is represented by a dedicated pool token. A multisig safe is a wallet that requires several signatures for a payout, technically also a contract rather than an ordinary address. What both have in common is that program code sits behind the address instead of a private key. That is precisely why a snapshot can allocate nothing to you there: on Ethereum that contract does not exist, and no one can rebuild it for you.

The task is therefore clearly defined. Go through the applications in which you have ever deposited anything on Harmony, and pull the holdings back to an address whose key you hold yourself. That applies to pool shares as much as to collateral posted in lending contracts, to wrapped tokens and to anything you brought onto the chain via a bridge. If you no longer remember where everything sits, the chain's block explorer helps: it lists all token balances for your address and the contracts you have interacted with.

For the wallet you pull everything back into, one plain rule applies: it has to be an address whose seed phrase you own. An address inside an application that has never shown you the private key is not a safe choice for this purpose.

Staking delegations and validators: where the rewards end up

Anyone who has staked ONE has as a rule delegated them. Delegation means assigning your tokens to a validator who takes part in consensus on your behalf, without you giving up control over them. The validator in turn is the operator of a node that proposes and confirms blocks and is rewarded for doing so.

A special rule applies to these holdings, and it is the point at which many holders are likely to be unpleasantly surprised: delegated stakes and rewards not yet claimed are not to flow directly to wallets, but into governance treasuries, referred to in the announcement as governor vaults. A treasury in this context is a jointly managed pot whose use the community decides on. Your delegated ONE will therefore not land automatically in your wallet as a freely available ERC-20 token.

If you want to keep control, undelegate before the cut-off date and claim your outstanding rewards, so that both sit as ordinary balance on your own address. Bear in mind that unwinding a delegation carries a waiting period on many networks. Check in your wallet menu how long yours runs before you count on the final day. Harmony has pledged to support validators in moving into roles within the new venture; for you as a delegator that is no substitute for exiting yourself.

ONE in trading: what our count of trading venues on September 7 shows

This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 7, 2026. At 03:50 UTC we retrieved CoinGecko's public dataset on Harmony (HTTP 200) and counted every trading pair listed there, each with its trading venue, currency pair and reported daily volume.

The result is sobering, and directly relevant to the question of how you act now. Thirty trading pairs across 23 trading venues were recorded. The price stood at $0.00073244, or €0.0006309, the market capitalisation at around €9.38 million, rank 1168. For comparison: before the attack ONE was still traded as a project with a billion-dollar valuation. The dilution from the forged tokens and the rollback have all but wiped out the market value.

Two things stand out when you look at the venues. First, volume is heavily concentrated: Binance accounted for around $481,000 in daily volume with ONE/USDT and around $212,000 with ONE/TRY, followed by Pionex, OKX, Gate, KuCoin and MEXC in the mid five-figure to low six-figure range. Second, there is almost no euro access: among the 30 pairs we found exactly one euro pair, ONE/EUR on OKX, with a reported daily volume of around $533. Providers through which German investors usually trade did not appear in the list at all.

What we could not check belongs here too: we did not evaluate the announcement pages of the individual trading venues one by one, so we cannot say which exchange has already committed to the switch to the ERC-20 token. Three entries were flagged as anomalies in the dataset and one more as stale; we left them in the count but did not use them as a reliable volume figure. And the volume figures come from the trading venues themselves, they are not independently audited.

What follows for you is above all an expectation: selling larger holdings in euros will founder on these volumes. Anyone wanting to sell has to go via a stablecoin, and anyone unwilling to do that holds the position and waits for the migration.

Tax and holding period: what the swap can trigger for German investors

Caution is warranted here, and in both directions. The framework is settled: in Germany, gains from selling crypto assets held as private assets count as a private disposal transaction under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, with a holding period of one year, after which a disposal gain remains tax-free. The Federal Ministry of Finance last set out the cooperation and record-keeping obligations for crypto assets in more detail in its circular of March 6, 2025.

What is not settled is how this particular event is classified. Whether crediting a new ERC-20 token after the original chain is shut down is to be treated for tax purposes as a swap that starts a fresh holding period, or as a mere continuation of the same asset, has not been decided for this case. We are not asserting a legal position that does not exist in this form. What you can do in practice is document: record which holdings you had at which point in time on which address, when the credit occurred and at what price. Without those records, any later classification, whichever way it falls, is barely traceable. Only a tax adviser can give you binding advice on your own case.

Layer 1 shutdown as a risk: how to spot an endangered chain early

The Harmony case stands at the end of a development that is visible across several smaller chains. From the sequence of events you can derive markers that you can check on any chain where you hold meaningful balances.

How many validators actually carry the network?

A rollback across 141,000 blocks presupposes that a manageable number of operators can agree on a new version within days. That is practical when an attack has to be repelled, and at the same time it shows how narrow the circle is that decides on the valid state. Check how many independent validators there are and how much stake falls to the largest among them.

How much of your holdings sits in contracts rather than in a wallet?

The expensive part of this migration hits positions in smart contracts and nothing else. Anyone simply holding a balance in a self-custodied wallet gets through by doing nothing. This asymmetry applies to almost every chain wind-down. On a small chain the extra yield from a liquidity pool is rarely worth the risk of no longer being able to pull it out when it matters.

How quickly do the trading venues react?

For most holders the exchange is the real lifeline, because it goes through the snapshot and handles the changeover. The fewer venues list a token, the greater the chance that nobody takes on the work. Our count above shows how thin that cover has become for ONE.

Is there a bridge, and where does it end?

A bridge connects two blockchains and gives you on the destination chain a claim on a holding that is locked on the origin chain. If the origin chain is switched off, the value of that claim depends on whether anyone can still release the lock. Wrapped tokens are therefore among the positions you unwind first.

Checking the Harmony shutdown: what to take away

1. Open your wallet today and look for contract positions. Pool shares, collateral in lending contracts, wrapped tokens and multisig holdings all go back to an address whose seed phrase you hold yourself. If you notice in the process that your current wallet setup does not even show you what you have deposited where, that is the real finding: our software wallet comparison ranks the common applications by exactly that question.
2. Undelegate your staking positions and claim outstanding rewards. Delegated holdings and unclaimed rewards are to go into governance treasuries, not into your wallet. Factor in the waiting period when unwinding. For amounts you then want to hold longer term, separate custody is the soberer choice; which devices are suited to it is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Check your exchange's notices and move nothing in the days around the cut-off date. Deposits and withdrawals on the old network are, in experience, halted first, and a transfer that falls into that window is the most common way to lose holdings. If your platform is regularly late or silent on changes like this, the exchange comparison lists the providers that handle it more reliably.

You can read the announcement itself in the project's own channel: Harmony on X, September 6, 2026. A detailed write-up of the figures on the rollback and the compensation has been published by ETHNews; it also puts a number on the compensation of $1.372 million, which is to be paid out over four quarters.

(As of September 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Keys are going into rented boxes alongside cash, watches and passports, Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau says.

The attacker built 293 separate vaults for the stolen Bitcoin and is emptying them in order of size, largest first.

Blockstream and the hackers are engaging with each other through PGP-signed messages in Bitcoin transactions.

Early testers spent OpenAI's launch weekend pushing Astra through 3D cities, playable games, Bach chorales and research papers.

The multi-year deal will place the XRP logo on the field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium starting this season, extending Ripple's push into college athletics.

Key crypto updates for Sep. 7: Lummis warns on 2030 freeze, XRP holds $1.40 against Fed hikes, GPT-6 Astra sparks AI rally, and ETFs cross $101 billion.

Ripple appears to be deflating the supply of RLUSD on the XRP Ledger while pumping the supply on Ethereum, as a massive cross-chain movement involving the stablecoin was noticed.

Shiba Inu gets head start with Japan’s crypto ETF door finally opening.

The privacy-orientated asset pushes away ChainLink from the top-10.

Whales front-run the Sep. 15 vote on Binance as XRP futures hit a 6-month high and institutional ETF inflows build a solid floor at $1.40.

Key Highlights

• PLTR shares rocketed 51% throughout August, climbing from $123.06 to reach $186.38, outperforming all tech sector peers.
• Second-quarter revenue reached $1.94 billion, representing a 93% year-over-year increase and exceeding analyst projections by $130 million.
• The company elevated its 2026 full-year revenue forecast to $8.15 billion, suggesting approximately 82% revenue expansion.
• New strategic initiatives include an enhanced PwC collaboration and a $192 million U.S. Army TITAN agreement secured in early September.
• Analyst consensus stands at Moderate Buy with a mean price objective of $192.19.

Throughout August, Palantir Technologies (PLTR) emerged as the technology sector’s dominant performer, posting an impressive 51% advance from $123.06 to $186.38. This exceptional gain dwarfed the 6.36% increase recorded by the Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLK) during the identical timeframe, outpacing it by more than eightfold.

Palantir Technologies Inc., PLTR

Following a peak of $182.53 reached on September 3, shares retreated to settle at $174.33 on September 4. Due to the Labor Day holiday closure of U.S. financial markets on Monday, this $174.33 level represents the latest available closing price.

The powerful August momentum stemmed from exceptional second-quarter financial results. The company delivered $1.94 billion in revenue, marking a 93% year-over-year surge and surpassing Wall Street’s $1.81 billion projection. Earnings per share registered at $0.41, exceeding the analyst consensus of $0.34 by $0.07.

The U.S. commercial segment delivered particularly impressive performance, soaring 149% year-over-year to generate $764 million. During the quarter, Palantir successfully completed 220 transactions valued at a minimum of $1 million each, with 73 of those deals exceeding $10 million in value.

Total contract value bookings within the U.S. commercial division hit $2.132 billion, representing a 153% year-over-year spike. Management also projects adjusted free cash flow between $4.5 billion and $4.7 billion for the complete fiscal year.

Strategic Partnerships Boost Momentum

Palantir elevated its 2026 full-year revenue projection to $8.15 billion, indicating roughly 82% anticipated growth. This upgraded forecast provided additional momentum for investor optimism throughout August.

Early September brought two significant developments. The company announced an expanded collaboration with PwC US, creating an artificial intelligence platform engineered to accelerate deal execution and merger activities utilizing Palantir’s Foundry and AIP technologies. This innovative platform targets transaction timeline reductions of up to 50% while potentially decreasing one-time deal expenses by as much as 45%.

Simultaneously, Palantir secured a production agreement with the U.S. Army to provide eight TITAN tactical intelligence systems, representing approximately $192 million in contract value. The combined impact of the PwC partnership and Army contract drove PLTR approximately 8% higher on September 4 before experiencing minor profit-taking.

Pricing Metrics and Street Sentiment

Shares currently command a price-to-earnings multiple of 149, while the company’s market capitalization exceeds $418 billion. This elevated valuation has prompted measured skepticism from certain analysts and market participants monitoring for potential deceleration in expansion rates.

Michael Burry has recently voiced pessimistic perspectives on the equity, and Google’s aggressive expansion into government artificial intelligence solutions could introduce competitive dynamics affecting Palantir’s public-sector operations. Company insiders have divested $117 million in shares over the preceding 90 days, including a transaction executed by CEO Alexander Karp on August 20.

Nevertheless, Wall Street maintains a Moderate Buy consensus derived from 21 Buy recommendations, 10 Hold ratings, and three Sell opinions. The consensus price objective currently stands at $192.19, with both Mizuho and Needham establishing $215 targets.

Amundi increased its PLTR position by 7.4% throughout Q2, elevating its aggregate holdings to 17.6 million shares valued at approximately $2.06 billion. Institutional ownership represents 45.65% of outstanding shares.

The 50-day moving average for PLTR registers at $150.22, and shares recently generated a golden cross formation, which numerous technical analysts interpret as a constructive indicator.

PLTR’s 52-week trading corridor spans from $106.37 to $207.52.

The post Palantir (PLTR) Stock Skyrockets 51% in August: Can the Rally Continue? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• In the STEP Young study, 40.4% of children between ages 6 and 12 successfully dropped below obesity thresholds following 68 weeks of semaglutide treatment
• Zero participants receiving placebo achieved comparable BMI improvements throughout the study period
• The company discontinued two supplementary cardiovascular studies testing ziltivekimab following a monitoring board’s determination of minimal success probability
• The heart drug candidate had previously disappointed in a pivotal late-stage cardiovascular study during July
• Shares of NVO declined 1.92% during trading

Investors in Novo Nordisk faced contrasting developments on Monday, as encouraging findings from a childhood obesity study emerged simultaneously with announcements that the company was terminating two additional cardiovascular drug investigations.

Trading activity saw NVO shares decline 1.92% to $46.60, as investors processed both pieces of news.

Novo Nordisk A/S, NVO

The phase 3 STEP Young investigation evaluated weekly semaglutide administration in 165 pediatric patients between 6 and 12 years old diagnosed with obesity. Following a 68-week treatment period, 40.4% of children receiving the medication successfully reduced their BMI below obesity classification levels. In contrast, no participants assigned to the placebo arm achieved this outcome.

Every participant received comprehensive lifestyle intervention throughout the investigation, incorporating calorie-restricted nutrition plans and enhanced physical exercise regimens.

The study successfully achieved its principal objective, demonstrating significantly greater BMI reductions among semaglutide recipients versus those receiving placebo. Over 85% of enrolled children presented with severe class II or III obesity at baseline.

Pediatric participants were administered either 1.7 mg or 2.4 mg weekly semaglutide doses, determined by their initial body weight measurements.

Ania M. Jastreboff, who serves as Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Yale, characterized the findings as promising, particularly considering the substantial obesity severity observed among most study participants initially.

The drug’s safety profile and tolerability aligned with observations from prior investigations involving adults and teenagers. Researchers identified no novel safety issues, and no concerns emerged regarding growth patterns or pubertal progression.

The pharmaceutical company intends to unveil comprehensive findings at ObesityWeek 2026 in Washington DC, scheduled for November 14 through 17.

Cardiovascular Program Faces Additional Challenges

The encouraging pediatric findings were counterbalanced by Novo’s announcement that it was terminating two more clinical investigations of its investigational cardiovascular compound ziltivekimab.

Both studies were evaluating the medication in heart failure populations and received early termination after an independent data monitoring panel determined minimal probability that either investigation would yield outcomes differing from a previously unsuccessful trial.

During July, ziltivekimab had already demonstrated inability to decrease major adverse cardiovascular event risk, encompassing mortality, non-fatal myocardial infarction, and non-fatal cerebrovascular accidents, when compared against placebo in a late-stage investigation.

The consecutive disappointments represent a significant obstacle to Novo’s strategy of expanding beyond its established obesity and diabetes portfolio.

This setback emerges following a similarly unsuccessful cardiovascular investigation from Novartis, whose experimental compound was also developed based on the identical inflammatory-disease theory that guided development of both therapeutics.

Future Outlook

A single ongoing ziltivekimab investigation remains active, evaluating the drug in individuals recovering from myocardial infarction. Findings are anticipated during the first half of 2027.

According to research published Friday, GLP-1 medication prescriptions for American children under age 12 have increased more than 300-fold since 2019, despite semaglutide lacking regulatory approval for this pediatric population.

The post Novo Nordisk (NVO) Stock Dips Despite Promising Childhood Obesity Trial Results appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Highlights

• ASML emerged as a top performer in Sands Capital’s Global Growth Fund during Q2 2026, which delivered a 22.2% quarterly return.
• Shares ended trading at $1,714.88 on September 4, marking a 115% climb over the trailing 52-week period and pushing market capitalization near $651 billion.
• Trans Canada Capital initiated a fresh stake valued at $28.64 million, positioning ASML as the firm’s fifth-largest equity holding.
• Bernstein analysts elevated their price objective to $2,623 from $1,971, significantly above the consensus estimate of $1,970.33 among “Moderate Buy” ratings.
• Hedge fund ownership expanded to 140 positions by the close of Q2 2026, compared to 133 in the preceding quarter.

Shares of ASML finished at $1,714.88 on September 4, 2026, representing a remarkable 115% appreciation over the past year. Throughout this period, the stock has fluctuated within a range of $786.75 to $1,999.96.

ASML Holding N.V., ASML

In its Q2 2026 shareholder letter, Sands Capital Global Growth Fund highlighted ASML as a significant portfolio contributor. The fund achieved a 22.2% quarterly gain, substantially exceeding the 14.9% advance posted by the MSCI All Country World Index.

According to the fund’s analysis, artificial intelligence applications serve as the primary catalyst. Advanced semiconductor production demands increasingly complex lithography processes, and ASML manufactures the specialized equipment essential for these operations.

Sands Capital expressed the view that lithography capacity may emerge as one of the most significant bottlenecks limiting AI infrastructure expansion. This dynamic could sustain tight supply conditions for an extended timeframe.

The investment firm also identified agentic AI as an emerging demand driver. Industry projections suggest that data center architectures may evolve toward a one-to-one CPU-to-GPU ratio, necessitating increased production of sophisticated logic semiconductors and corresponding lithography tools.

Based on Sands Capital’s research, both Chinese chipmakers and their international counterparts will likely need to expand lithography capabilities to satisfy AI semiconductor requirements. This positions ASML favorably across multiple geographic markets.

Institutional Ownership Expands

During the second quarter of 2026, Trans Canada Capital Inc. established a new stake in ASML, acquiring 14,396 shares valued at roughly $28.64 million. The position represents 1.6% of Trans Canada’s total assets under management and ranks as the fund’s fifth-largest equity allocation.

Additional institutional activity included Boston Common Asset Management initiating a $4.35 million position in Q1. Cambridge Investment Research Advisors expanded its holdings by 3.5% during Q4, while Griffin Asset Management matched that increase with its own 3.5% addition.

Collectively, institutional stakeholders now control 26.07% of outstanding ASML shares. The count of hedge funds maintaining positions in the stock increased from 133 to 140 between the first and second quarters of 2026.

Wall Street Raises Price Forecasts

Bernstein delivered the most aggressive projection, lifting its price objective from $1,971 to $2,623 while maintaining an “outperform” recommendation. Argus established a $2,100 target, and Morgan Stanley reaffirmed its “overweight” stance.

The consensus price target among all covering analysts sits at $1,970.33. Among 32 analysts tracking the stock, 25 assign Buy or Strong Buy ratings. Four recommend Hold, while three advise Sell.

Technical indicators show ASML’s 50-day moving average at $1,751, with the 200-day moving average positioned at $1,602.20. The stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 53.36 and maintains a price-to-earnings-growth ratio of 0.85.

In its latest quarterly results, ASML posted earnings per share of $8.65 on revenue totaling $10.62 billion. The company achieved a net profit margin of 30.11% alongside a return on equity of 52.71%.

Wall Street projects full-year earnings per share of $44.99. ASML distributed a quarterly dividend of $2.1507 on August 5, translating to an annualized dividend yield of 0.5%.

The post ASML (ASML) Stock: Bernstein Sets Ambitious $2,623 Price Target on AI Chip Demand appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Fair Isaac shares plunged approximately 15-18% following the FHFA’s approval of VantageScore 4.0 as an alternative scoring model for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lenders
• The regulatory decision terminates FICO’s decades-long exclusive position in mortgage credit scoring
• Since a pilot program launched on May 1, 2026, VantageScore 4.0 has already secured more than 9% of GSE mortgage securitizations
• Wall Street maintains a “Moderate Buy” rating with a mean price target of $1,553.69, despite recent target reductions from several firms
• Shares have declined 43.2% in 2026, currently trading in the $927-$934 range

On September 4, 2026, Fair Isaac Corporation experienced a devastating selloff, with FICO stock collapsing between 15% and 18% after federal regulators ended its exclusive hold on the mortgage credit scoring industry.

Fair Isaac Corporation, FICO

The Federal Housing Finance Agency granted approval for VantageScore 4.0 to be utilized by mortgage lenders working with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. FHFA Director Bill Pulte instructed both government-sponsored enterprises to permit all mortgage originators to select between Classic FICO and VantageScore 4.0 effective immediately.

Shares commenced trading at $934.39, a significant drop from the previous session’s close of $1,118.93, and reached an intraday low of $927.36.

The opening price gap reflected the market’s swift reassessment. Wall Street had valued FICO based on its near-exclusive market position in mortgage scoring. That valuation premise evaporated in a single trading session.

This regulatory action broadens a pilot initiative that commenced on May 1, 2026. According to VantageScore data, by the end of August, VantageScore 4.0 represented more than 9% of GSE mortgage securitizations.

Decades of Market Dominance Now Threatened

For years, Classic FICO maintained virtually unchallenged control over mortgage credit scoring. Financial institutions had no viable option when underwriting GSE-eligible loans. That exclusive position has now been eliminated.

Market participants are primarily worried about potential loss of market share and compression of profit margins. Should mortgage originators migrate significant volumes to VantageScore, FICO’s ability to maintain premium pricing in its flagship mortgage business could deteriorate substantially.

Before this latest decline, FICO had already fallen 43.2% since the beginning of 2026. Trading at $933.70, the stock now sits 50.3% beneath its 52-week peak of $1,880, which was achieved in October 2025.

Despite the market reaction, the company’s operating performance remains solid. FICO’s latest quarterly results, released on July 29, revealed earnings per share of $12.18, surpassing the Wall Street consensus of $11.76. Revenue totaled $674.19 million, representing a 25.7% year-over-year increase, though marginally below analyst expectations of $679.17 million.

Wall Street Maintains Cautious Optimism Despite Price Target Cuts

The analyst community hasn’t abandoned FICO entirely. With eleven Buy ratings and five Hold ratings, the stock maintains a “Moderate Buy” consensus, supported by an average price target of $1,553.69.

However, multiple analysts have adjusted their expectations downward. UBS decreased its price objective to $1,130 from $1,200 while maintaining a “neutral” stance. Royal Bank of Canada lowered its target to $1,525 from $2,400 but retained an “outperform” rating. Wells Fargo modestly increased its target to $1,450 from $1,400 with an “overweight” designation.

Institutional ownership stands at 85.75% of outstanding shares. Recent insider transactions included Director Eva Manolis disposing of 967 shares on July 29 at $1,400 per share, reducing her holdings by 66%.

FICO’s 50-day moving average stands at $1,174.33, with the 200-day moving average at $1,167.44. Current trading levels remain significantly below both technical indicators.

Management has established full-year FY2026 EPS guidance at $42.43, while the analyst consensus projects average earnings of $37.37 per share for the current fiscal year.

The post Fair Isaac (FICO) Stock Plummets 18% Following End of Credit Scoring Dominance appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• Bernstein SocGen reduced BABA’s price target from $180 to $165, maintaining an Outperform rating
• Shares have declined approximately 5% following the August 23 announcement of a $10.2 billion equity offering
• Market participants are questioning the rationale behind raising capital with $30.7 billion in net cash available
• Investment analysis indicates AI chip ventures may achieve payback within 2.5 to 3 years
• Analysts maintain a Strong Buy consensus with a mean price target of $189.46

Shares of Alibaba (BABA) are currently trading at $113.24, reflecting approximately a 5% decline since the Chinese tech giant revealed its $10.2 billion capital raise on August 23, earmarked for artificial intelligence expansion initiatives.

Alibaba Group Holding Limited, BABA

Bernstein SocGen analyst Robin Zhu recognized shareholder concerns and reduced his BABA price objective to $165 from the previous $180, representing an approximately 8% decrease. His Outperform recommendation remains unchanged.

According to Zhu, it’s “not hard to sympathise” with shareholders expressing dissatisfaction over the transaction. The primary concern centers on a fundamental question: what justifies additional capital when the corporation maintains $30.7 billion in net cash reserves?

The capital raise encompasses a primary placement of 710 million shares offered at a discount. Following the announcement, Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai acquired 720,000 Hong Kong-listed shares, demonstrating executive-level confidence in the company’s strategic trajectory.

Alibaba’s capital expenditure surged 75% year-over-year to roughly $10.07 billion in recent financial results, illustrating the magnitude of its artificial intelligence investment strategy.

Bernstein Projects Accelerated Return on Investment

Notwithstanding investor apprehensions, Zhu’s evaluation indicates the AI expenditures may generate returns more rapidly than market consensus anticipates.

Bernstein constructed a data-center financial model based on Alibaba’s current Zhenwu 810E chip technology. The analysis projects a three-year capital expenditure payback timeline for this processor.

The advanced M890 chip demonstrates even more favorable economics. Commercial rollout commenced in August, with industry feedback indicating a 2.5-year payback horizon.

Market pricing for server rental services has experienced consistent increases over recent months, reflecting robust demand for AI computational infrastructure.

Conversations with major clients additionally indicate the marketplace remains supply-constrained, bolstering the rationale for sustained capital deployment.

Bernstein’s investigation incorporated insights from Alibaba, artificial intelligence research facilities, and industry connections throughout the AI and semiconductor ecosystems.

InvestingPro analytics reveal Alibaba maintains cash reserves exceeding debt obligations on its balance sheet, substantiating its financial strength notwithstanding the recent capital raise.

Analyst Community Perspectives

Baird has similarly reduced its Alibaba price objective, adjusting it to $160 from $164. The firm referenced margin compression stemming from intensive AI capital allocation and challenging e-commerce market conditions.

Mizuho adopted an alternative perspective, reaffirming an Outperform rating alongside a $195 price objective. The firm highlighted robust cloud segment growth and margin improvement fueled by AI-related demand.

BofA Securities has preserved its Buy rating on shares following the capital raising announcement.

Alibaba additionally unveiled the Qwen3.8-Flash recently, an artificial intelligence model featuring 125 billion parameters engineered to rival products from Anthropic and DeepSeek.

The broader analyst community perspective on BABA remains favorable. The equity holds a Strong Buy consensus rating supported by 12 Buy recommendations issued during the past three months. The mean price objective stands at $189.46, suggesting approximately 67% potential appreciation from present trading levels.

The post Alibaba (BABA) Stock Slides 5% Following $10.2B Capital Raise Announcement appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin has spent the past several days struggling to decisively break past $80,000, and options traders don’t appear too concerned about an imminent volatility explosion despite the major economic events in the next ten days.

QCP Capital’s latest market analysis suggests that BTC’s 18-day at-the-money implied volatility currently sits at just 37%-38%, despite the upcoming US inflation report and the subsequent FOMC meeting.

Waiting for Clarity

The analysts believe the volatility compression reflects a market waiting for additional information rather than traders expressing strong directional conviction. This narrative received some confirmation last week after the release of the August jobs report, which significantly exceeded expectations, with the US economy adding 162,000 jobs compared to forecasts of around 55,000. Unemployment remained at 4.1% while average hourly earnings increased 0.3% MoM.

The reading strengthened the argument that the US remains resilient and shifted attention back toward inflation and the Fed’s next move. Markets now assign a 58% probability of a 25-basis-point rate hike at the September 15-16 meeting.

Major institutions have also turned hawkish, especially after Kevin Warsh’s speech at the end of August. UBS expects the central bank to raise rates in September and also in December after previously forecasting no changes this year.

Aside from a brief retracement by a few grand, Bitcoin has remained resilient, surging past $82,000 last week before it calmed at just under $80,000.

CPI Can Tilt the Market

The next big test comes with the August inflation data, to be announced during the current big economic week. Producer inflation will provide the first signal on Thursday, followed by the considerably more important Consumer Price Index on Friday.

The latter could materially alter expectations surrounding the upcoming Fed decision. As usual, a hotter-than-expected reading would provide the central bank more leeway for a rate hike, potentially pushing Treasury yields higher and creating additional pressure on risk assets like bitcoin.

The inflation threat has become particularly relevant as oil prices continue climbing amid renewed US-Iran strikes. Brent crude neared $100 per barrel on Monday, while markets are already assigning increasing probabilities to rate hikes from several major central banks.

A softer reading could reduce the pressure on policymakers to act and potentially provide BTC with the catalyst to finally break through $82,000. Nevertheless, QCP’s analysts do not expect a dramatic breakout in either direction.

The post Bitcoin Traders Are Surprisingly Calm Ahead of CPI and the Fed: Is a Big Move Coming? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Popular analyst Ali Martinez outlined that more than 116,000 ETH were withdrawn from crypto exchanges in just two days. The stash was worth roughly $300 million at current prices.

This has reduced the amount of ETH immediately available for trading, potentially easing sell-side pressure. Although exchange withdrawals alone do not necessarily indicate accumulation, as assets can also be moved for staking, custody, or other purposes, the timing is peculiar, as ETH is making another attempt to break above the $2,500 threshold.

What’s the Next Target?

In a separate analysis also dedicated to ETH’s performance, Martinez noted that the asset has traded between $2,370 and $2,530 since its breakout during the last week of August. Recall that Ethereum, alongside the rest of the market, exploded after August 19, surging from $1,900 to the aforementioned upper boundary.

However, it was unable to break through despite trying on several occasions, and each subsequent rejection drove it south toward $2,400 or slightly below. The analyst believes ETH is now gradually rebuilding momentum for its next move, and the direction should be confirmed by an hourly close outside that range. The current structure, he added, appears to favor buyers.

If the largest altcoin is indeed able to break through $2,530, Martinez noted that the next immediate target would be $2,700. The one after that would be at $2,822, where more than 10 million tokens were last transacted, making it a major supply zone that could trigger “a rejection or, at the very least, slow advance.”

Ethereum is sitting on a major support zone around $2,475, where roughly 2.86 million ETH have previously changed hands.

As long as this level holds, the path toward $2,722 remains relatively clear.

The real test comes between $2,723 and $2,822, where more than 10 million $ETH… https://t.co/kwLrVWl186 pic.twitter.com/ffwai9aOpn

— Ali Charts (@alicharts) September 7, 2026

ETF Still Green

The other piece of good news for ETH investors comes from the ETF net inflows. As reported yesterday, the past week was also quite beneficial for the funds tracking the altcoin, as they gained $218.41 million. In the past two weeks alone, the net inflows have skyrocketed to well over $1 billion.

Moreover, the Ethereum ETFs have been in the red only once weekly since the beginning of July, and even that streak-breaker was quite modest, with net outflows of just $2.26 million.

The post Ethereum Breakout Incoming? $300M in ETH Leaves Exchanges as Analyst Eyes Next Big Target appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP futures trading had a much busier August as volume climbed to its highest level in six months. This marked the strongest activity since February, according to data shared by CryptoQuant.

The jump was not limited to one exchange.

August Volume Surges

Activity increased across some of the biggest names in crypto, which brought more liquidity and interest back into the XRP derivatives market. CryptoQuant found that Binance dominated the market. The exchange recorded roughly $37 billion in XRP futures volume during August. Bybit was a distant second at around $14.54 billion, followed by OKX at approximately $12.88 billion.

These three exchanges alone handled more than $64.6 billion worth of XRP futures trades during the month.

The change is especially noticeable as XRP futures activity had been running at lower levels, but August brought traders back in a much bigger way. The stronger price action around the crypto asset likely played a role here. It climbed nearly 30%, rising from $1.06 at the start of the month to a high of $1.50 on August 24 before ending at $1.35.

Alongside futures, spot trading volume also reached its highest level since February. Binance, as usual, accounted for the biggest share, posting around $7.28 billion in XRP trades. Next up was Upbit with $4.68 billion, while Bithumb Korea posted nearly $2.59 billion. Bybit, Gate.io, and KuCoin trailed with roughly $1.4 billion, $1.33 billion, and $1.23 billion, respectively. Bitget and Coinbase each came in just below the $1 billion mark.

However, the technical picture is less convincing. Crypto analyst ChartNerd noted that XRP has stayed below its 50-week WEMA for three straight weeks, while the weekly Stoch RSI remains overbought. The 20-week WEMA at $1.29 is now the support level. A continued break below the 50 could lead to a deeper correction.

Weekly Slowdown

On the institutional front, the XRP ETF market remained positive for another week, but the pace of inflows clearly slowed. The funds attracted nearly $19 million over the latest period, and extended their winning streak to eight consecutive weeks.

That result was a sharp step down from the previous week, when inflows topped $110 million and were the strongest weekly performance of 2026.

After $5.64 million entered the funds on August 31, inflows jumped to $14.38 million on September 1. The momentum then broke on Wednesday, when investors pulled $7.2 million from the products. It was the first day of net outflows since August 5. Thursday brought some relief as another $6.14 million flowed into the funds. Friday, however, produced no movement at all.

The post XRP Futures Just Posted Their Biggest Month in 6 Months: Here’s What Changed appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin tried to take down the coveted $80,000 level once again on Monday morning but was denied once again, dipping below $79,000 before it found some support.

Ethereum remains inches away from $2,500, while XRP fights for the $1.40 support. LINK, TAO, MNT, ICP, and WLD have marked major gains from the larger caps.

BTC Fails at $80K

The primary cryptocurrency’s attempts to surge past $80,000 and $81,000 have been halted every time, starting from the middle of the last full week of August. At the time, it tried twice, only to be pushed south to under $77,000 on Friday after the hawkish speech by Kevin Warsh.

Nevertheless, it rebounded over the previous weekend and tapped $79,000 last Sunday before the resumed strikes in the Middle East resulted in another leg down to $77,000. The selling pressure built on in the following days, and BTC slipped to $76,400 on September 2/3.

This is where the bulls stepped up and didn’t allow another leg down. Instead, bitcoin went on the offensive on Thursday and skyrocketed by several grand to $82,400, the highest level reached since mid-May. Another rejection followed, though, after the strong US jobs report on Friday, and BTC dived to $78,800.

The weekend was less eventful, with BTC spending it trading sideways between $79,000 and $80,000. It tried to overcome the upper boundary on Monday morning, but it was stopped at $80,500 and pushed south to just under $79,000. It has rebounded to just over that level now, with its market cap remaining at $1.6 trillion on CMC.

PI Above $0.09, ARB Falls

Most large-cap alts have marked minor losses over the past 24 hours, with ETH struggling below $2,500, BNB dipping beneath $750, and XRP fighting to stay above $1.40.

In contrast, LINK has soared by 9% to well over $13, TAO is up by 14% to $267, MNT sits at $0.635 after a 7.5% daily jump, ICP has gained 12.6%, and WLD has rocketed by over 14.5%. ARB, on the other hand, was rejected at $0.20 and now sits 13% lower than its peak yesterday.

Pi Network’s native token remains well above the $0.09 support and even challenged the key $0.095 resistance, but it remains inches below it as of press time.

The total crypto market cap has remained at essentially the same spot as yesterday at $2.710 trillion on CMC.

The post Pi Network’s PI Remains Above Key Resistance, Bitcoin (BTC) Fails at $80K: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The altcoin market may be approaching a turning point after several major gauges broke out of year-long downtrends, according to analyst Matthew Hyland.

His charts suggest smaller cryptocurrencies are gaining ground against Bitcoin and traditional risk assets, although rising leverage also increases the odds of a painful correction.

Altcoin Gauges Break Long Downtrends

In a post published on September 7, Hyland said ETH, Total 2, Total 3, and OTHERS had all confirmed the end of their year-plus declines by forming higher highs. Let’s break that down a bit.

Total 2 tracks altcoins excluding Bitcoin, while Total 3 removes both BTC and Ethereum. OTHERS excludes the top 10 cryptocurrencies and therefore focuses more heavily on smaller tokens.

Hyland questioned whether the moves were simply a “bear market rally,” then followed up with a more bullish assessment.

In another post, the market watcher wrote, “The largest #Altcoin Bull Run of all time is loading,” and argued it could be “much larger than 2020-2021.” The accompanying OTHERS.D/SPX chart provided the basis for that view. It compares the dominance of cryptocurrencies outside the top 10 to that of the S&P 500.

The ratio has been falling for years after reaching a major peak during the 2017-2018 ICO period, and the chart places the current reading near the lower end of that long decline. A lower oscillator on the chart has also moved into an oversold area around 20-30, and the setup is being compared with the overbought reading near 80 seen in 2017.

But that does not prove that a new altcoin cycle has started. It does show why Hyland believes the market may be approaching a period of relative strength for smaller tokens.

There are already signs of increased trading activity, with data from Coinalyze showing altcoin perpetual futures open interest had overtaken Bitcoin’s for the first time since December 2024.

Leverage Adds Another Side to the Trade

The shift comes as altcoins outside the top 10 have pushed their combined market capitalization to $213 billion, up nearly 12% since the start of September.

Zcash has been one of the dramatic examples. Yesterday, as CryptoPotato reported, it surpassed $1,200, up 370% from its early-June low. Its market cap also moved above $20 billion, putting it ahead of Hyperliquid (HYPE) and Dogecoin (DOGE), both of which were still at the time of writing, having gained over 11% in 24 hours.

DOGE itself and BNB also posted strong moves in that period, with the former climbing 12% from its Friday low to $0.094, while BNB went close to $780, its highest level since early February.

But there’s a warning. ZEC perpetual futures open interest reached $2.7 billion per CoinGlass, while its move above $1,200 triggered $24 million in liquidations in the last 24 hours, more than $17 million of that being shorts, and historically, similar shifts in derivatives positioning have come right before corrections in mid-cap tokens.

That leaves two competing signals: the breadth of the altcoin move is improving, and several long-term charts have broken higher, but at the same time, leverage is building quickly. However, as things stand, Hyland sees the first as evidence that the market could be entering a much larger altcoin phase.

The post “Largest Altcoin Bull Run of All Time Is Loading,” Analyst Says as Key Charts Break Out appeared first on CryptoPotato.