Rising oil prices could strain global economies, increase inflation, and impact energy policies, highlighting geopolitical vulnerabilities.

The post Sanctions and strikes could push oil prices toward $100 per barrel: CNBC appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising oil prices could strain global economies, influence inflation rates, and impact geopolitical stability, necessitating strategic responses.

The post US oil prices surge 41% since July, nearing $95 per barrel appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Heightened tensions in the Taiwan Strait could destabilize global markets, urging diplomatic efforts to prevent severe economic repercussions.

The post US diplomat warns Taiwan Strait conflict could surpass WWII economic impact appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The U.S. accusations against Chinese AI firms could heighten geopolitical tensions, affecting diplomatic relations and market dynamics.

The post US accuses Chinese AI firms of malicious copying ahead of Trump-Xi meeting appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Trump's push for the CLARITY Act could accelerate regulatory clarity in crypto, impacting market dynamics and raising ethical concerns.

The post Trump pushes Congress for CLARITY Act as $1B crypto stake draws scrutiny appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Lummis Blasts Democrats Ahead of Clarity Act Vote — But Adds Bill Can Get Passed

Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis has again slammed Democrats over the long-awaited crypto Clarity Act. 

Writing on X on Tuesday, the pro-crypto lawmaker responded to an article from Semafor that reported Republican senators saying the bill was likely to fail when the senate returns next week. 

Lawmakers were hoping a crucial vote on the long-awaited crypto market structure bill would go ahead in August before their five-week recess. But it was delayed and the Senate will now vote on it next week. 

“If this bill fails it won’t be because of ethics, it will be because Democrats didn’t join Republicans in embracing a bipartisan bill that protected consumers, cements America’s leadership in digital assets, and empowered law enforcement to clamp down on illicit finance,” wrote Lummis. 

She said that Democrats were continuing to “demand changes” that could allow future regulators to “kill the crypto industry.”

“If we can bridge those gaps I’m confident we can pass Clarity, but they require further compromise from Democrats, not the White House,” added Lummis. 

Lummis previously said that if the Clarity Act dies, it will be because of the Democrats. Lummis and other pro-crypto lawmakers have blasted politicians who they think are deliberately holding back the bill. 

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

Though passed by the House of Representatives last July, it has been stalled this year, mostly because the banking lobby clashed with crypto companies over paying customers stablecoin yield. 

A new draft tackling the issue of ethics started circulating in July, banning government officials from promoting or making money from crypto — something Democrats have criticized the Trump family for doing. 

Despite the changes, a group of Democrats said the bill fell short and wanted amendments. 

President Donald Trump has urged lawmakers to get the legislation over the line. In August, he said that in order for the U.S. to remain the “undisputed leader in Bitcoin and crypto,” they had to pass the “very, very powerful legislation.”

This post Lummis Blasts Democrats Ahead of Clarity Act Vote — But Adds Bill Can Get Passed first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

CoinCorner Launches Lloyd’s-Insured Multisig Bitcoin Vault with AnchorWatch

British bitcoin exchange CoinCorner has debuted a multisig BTC custody service that splits control of customer keys between the Isle of Man exchange and its US partner AnchorWatch — with holdings insured by Lloyd’s of London. 

The service charges 1.5% a year and is pitched at owners who want cold-storage security without managing hardware themselves, the Isle of Man-based company announced Tuesday.

Its new service comes following the Coldcard wallet hack — where bitcoin holders using a single signature wallet lost funds after hackers were able to exploit the popular products due to a firmware bug in the devices that lead to a weak seed generation. About $115 million was lost in the theft. 

“Vault offers a simple non-technical setup for customers, and partnering with AnchorWatch means we can offer fully insured, multi-signature custody with the simplicity our customers expect from CoinCorner,” CoinCorner CEO Danny Scott said in a statement. 

Customers can open a Vault and deposit whatever amount they choose, but the bitcoin doesn’t move into the insured wallet immediately, CoinCorner said. 

Rather, transfers typically happen on the first working day of the following month, and holdings are verifiable on-chain via a wallet address CoinCorner provides. 

Top-ups are allowed anytime, the companies said, Customers define their own identity verification rules before funds can move. 

CoinCorner added that it is the first service of its kind globally. 

Multisig has long been the security-conscious Bitcoin holder’s answer to single-key risk but has also been dismissed as too fiddly for anyone but the technically committed: setting one up traditionally means assembling several hardware devices, generating and backing up multiple private keys and keeping track of which key sits where.  

CoinCorner and AnchorWatch are aiming to simplify things. Vault handles key distribution on the customer’s behalf, leaving them with the security properties of multisig without the setup that has kept most people away from it.

This post CoinCorner Launches Lloyd’s-Insured Multisig Bitcoin Vault with AnchorWatch first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Capital B Buys 376 Bitcoins in Its Biggest Purchase of 2026

European bitcoin treasury Capital B has announced a BTC buy, snapping up 376 coins — one week after it said Blockstream boss Adam Back was investing in the company. 

The Euronext Growth-listed company said Tuesday that it now owns 3,521 bitcoins — worth over $277 million at today’s prices — making it the 25th biggest publicly traded bitcoin treasury in the world, according to Bitcoin Treasuries data. 

Capital B’s buy was for €25.3 million (over $29 million), according to its announcement. 

Just last week, the company said that top bitcoiner Adam Back, who heads up bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream, had invested €7.6 million ($8.8 million) in Capital B to help with its buys. 

The firm in August said it had raised €21 million ($24 million) in a private placement backed by Back and asset manager TOBAM. 

The bitcoin treasury’s stock was trading 2% lower on Tuesday. 

Capital B built most of its bitcoin position through fundraising rounds during the first half of 2026. 

In May, it snapped up 192 coins for €13 million after completing three capital raises.

The company, which calls itself “Europe’s first Bitcoin treasury company,” is trying to build a bigger bitcoin position as other treasuries look to raise funds and accelerate their buys. 

Capital B says on its website that it wants to eventually hold 210,000 bitcoins. “Our objective is simple: accumulate 1% of Bitcoin’s total supply by 2033,” it reads. 

Digital asset treasuries became big in 2025 as more publicly traded companies tried to follow in the footsteps of Nasdaq-listed Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), which started buying bitcoin in 2025. 

Hundreds of publicly traded companies started buying bitcoin — with many buying other cryptocurrencies — to boost their stock prices. But since the price of bitcoin started dropping, a number of them are now under water or have had to sell their holdings. 

Strategy, the largest corporate holder of the asset, has this year slowed down its bitcoin buys and instead pivoted to building a stronger cash balance and buying back its stock as the price of its shares has tumbled. 

This post Capital B Buys 376 Bitcoins in Its Biggest Purchase of 2026 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Castle Opens Its Bitcoin Savings Stack to Individuals

Castle, the company behind an automated bitcoin financial stack for businesses, has said it is opening its platform to individuals, bringing its high-yield product to personal accounts along with a first for the category: the option to take dividend income in bitcoin at whatever ratio the customer picks.

The yield comes from STRC, Strategy‘s perpetual preferred stock, which Castle added earlier this year and which currently pays a 12% annual dividend on a semi-monthly schedule. 

Holders can take 100% of that payout in cash, 100% in bitcoin, or anything in between, according to a Tuesday statement. Most Castle customers land in the middle, the company said, covering operating expenses with cash while the remainder compounds into bitcoin automatically at every payout.

“Investors have long faced a choice between earning steady yield and holding bitcoin. Castle eliminates that trade-off,” co-founder and CTO João Almeida said. “By enabling a portion of dividend income to be automatically converted into bitcoin, so customers get both cash flow and long-term upside.”

The broader pitch is consolidation: Castle puts operating cash, fixed income, and bitcoin accumulation on one platform, cutting out the shuffle between a bank, an onramp, and a brokerage. The system is built automation-first: users define a strategy once and the platform executes it.

Until now, Castle served business entities exclusively — restaurants, gyms, churches, accounting firms, e-commerce shops, auto dealers, SaaS companies, real estate, and non-profits among them. The push into personal accounts came from those same customers.

“Feedback we heard over and over from business owners was: ‘I love this stack — when can I use it personally?'” co-founder and CEO Stephen Cole said. “Today we’re answering that. The same automated bitcoin-powered financial stack that runs their company’s balance sheet can now run their personal finances.”

Castle was founded by Cole and Almeida and is backed by Boost VC and Winklevoss Capital. More information about the company’s product can be found here.

This post Castle Opens Its Bitcoin Savings Stack to Individuals first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Halted Its Bitcoin Buys Again Last Week 

Bitcoin treasury Strategy has halted stacking sats — again. 

Just one week after resuming its bitcoin buying following a 10-week hiatus, the Nasdaq-listed company has put its BTC purchases on hold again. 

Instead, the firm continued buying back its stock, repurchasing $176 million of STRC and increasing the size of its digital credit securities repurchase program from $1 billion to $2 billion, according to a Tuesday regulatory filing and announcement from founder and chairman Michael Saylor.  

The company still holds 845,050 bitcoins worth over $66 billion at today’s prices and $6.5 billion in dollar reserves. The bitcoins were bought at an average price of $63.73 billion, according to Tuesday’s filing. 

Strategy shares (NASDAQ: MSTR) were trading more than 3% lower Tuesday morning in New York. 

The company paused its bitcoin buys in June, instead focusing on building a cash buffer, buying back its stock and even sometimes selling some of its holdings. 

Strategy has defended its bitcoin sales, with CEO Phong Le saying that the company now has a “bullet-proof balance sheet” because of the move, and that it was the “right trade at the time” to sell when it did. 

In the company’s quarterly earnings in July, Strategy posted a $8.22 billion loss. But Le reassured investors that the firm’s current paper loss was nothing to worry about.

“We’re the J.P. Morgan of the crypto economy, so whether we sell 1,000 Bitcoin out of 840,000 to me is irrelevant to the conversation,” Le said. 

Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — is an enterprise software company that pivoted to buying and holding bitcoin in 2020. 

It first bought the cryptocurrency to protect its shareholders from inflation. Since then, it has aggressively bought the asset and pivoted to being a bitcoin treasury. 

Investors can now buy its shares to get heightened exposure to the cryptocurrency, or get paid a yield via its digital credit products. 

This post Strategy Halted Its Bitcoin Buys Again Last Week  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Metaplanet’s Bitcoin expansion has exposed an executive compensation windfall that shareholders want the company to unwind.

The dispute centers on an executive options pool that expanded as the Tokyo-listed company repeatedly issued equity to finance its Bitcoin purchases.

Shareholders are now demanding the cancellation of roughly 273 million potential shares added to management’s compensation package during that expansion.

Bitcoin fundraising swelled the executive pay pool

The controversy centers on Metaplanet’s Series 10 stock acquisition rights. Shareholders approved the plan in early 2023, before the company’s pivot to digital assets, and it initially covered 46 million shares.

The plan also contained an adjustment mechanism designed to maintain the shares underlying the options at a benchmark equal to roughly 20% of a defined fully diluted share count.

The company’s capital needs changed dramatically when Chief Executive Simon Gerovich pivoted Metaplanet to a Bitcoin treasury model in April 2024. Metaplanet repeatedly tapped equity markets to fund purchases that eventually built its treasury to 43,000 BTC.

Issued shares climbed from approximately 153.9 million around the start of the Bitcoin strategy to 1.28 billion by the end of June 2026. Because the Series 10 formula adjusted alongside the company’s capital structure, the executive options pool expanded with it, rising from the original 46 million to 319.464 million potential shares.

Metaplanet eliminated the adjustment mechanism on Aug. 18, capping future expansion.

The company acknowledged in its notice that the clause “amplifies the dilution borne by existing shareholders” and could create concerns about the relationship between capital-raising decisions and the interests of the stock acquisition rights holders.

Yet, Metaplanet froze the compensation pool at its expanded size rather than rolling it back to its original level.

That left management with roughly 273 million additional potential shares generated before the mechanism was abolished.

Gerovich turns part of the award into 64 million shares

The shareholder pushback intensified after Gerovich exercised part of his compensation award just days after the August amendment.

On Aug. 28, the CEO exercised 92,000 Series 10 rights and received 64.032 million newly issued shares. The transaction lifted his direct holdings from 15.56 million shares to nearly 79.6 million.

Gerovich paid the legacy exercise price of ¥10 per share, bringing the total cost to approximately ¥640.3 million.

At a Metaplanet share price of ¥244, those newly issued shares carry a market value of roughly ¥15.6 billion, leaving a paper spread of nearly ¥15 billion between their market value and the amount paid to exercise the rights.

Those gains remain unrealized. The August amendment subjected shares obtained through the plan to a five-year lockup that generally prevents their sale or transfer until August 2031.

However, the dilution occurred when the new shares were issued.

Gerovich held 276,000 of the 459,000 outstanding Series 10 rights as of June 30. After exercising 92,000, he would retain about 184,000 rights, assuming no other changes. Other executives and employees hold additional rights, with further portions of the awards scheduled to vest through 2028.

The compensation overhang hits Bitcoin per share

Investors are particularly focused on the compensation pool because it directly affects one of Metaplanet’s central treasury metrics: Bitcoin per fully diluted share.

As of June 30, the company held 43,000 BTC against roughly 1.63 billion fully diluted shares, translating to about 2,635 satoshis per share. That denominator includes the potential dilution from the Series 10 awards.

Shareholder Ragnar is among those demanding the outright cancellation of the roughly 273 million potential shares created above the original size of the compensation plan. He wrote on X:

“The only way out is to roll back the 273 million extra shares, and to replace them with a new, retroactively applied incentive program.”

Removing those potential shares from the denominator would raise Metaplanet’s Bitcoin exposure to about 3,166 satoshis per share, roughly 20% higher, assuming no other changes.

Ragnar has questioned why executives should keep the additional compensation after Metaplanet concluded that the mechanism amplified shareholder dilution and raised concerns about the incentives around capital raising.

He also pointed to Metaplanet’s international offering last year, which he said generated another 96.25 million potential shares through the adjustment clause. According to him, shareholders publicly questioned the arrangement in September and October 2025, months before the company removed the mechanism.

The additional shares also carry no new performance conditions tied to Bitcoin-per-share growth or other shareholder-return metrics, although Metaplanet’s August changes introduced the five-year restriction on sales.

Ragnar argued that the company should replace the enlarged award with compensation tied directly to future performance rather than preserve benefits accumulated under the abandoned formula.

Governance scrutiny expands to MMXX

Compounding the compensation dispute is a separate governance debate surrounding MMXX Ventures, a recurring Metaplanet shareholder and former lender.

Gerovich recently said he is a “significant but non-majority shareholder” of MMXX’s parent company and does not participate in the entity’s investment or trading decisions.

Investors have continued to seek greater detail about MMXX’s ownership and voting structure, as well as Gerovich’s economic exposure to transactions involving Metaplanet.

Metaplanet has also proposed shifting up to 90,000 remaining Series 10 rights, representing 62.64 million potential shares, into a new long-term incentive vehicle for executives and employees. The structure could include performance and service conditions without creating shares beyond the existing ceiling.

Gerovich has acknowledged shortcomings in the company’s communication and said Metaplanet continues to review its governance and compensation

That response has yet to resolve the central shareholder demand. Metaplanet has stopped expanding its executive options pool with future equity raises, but management has not said it will surrender the roughly 273 million potential shares generated before it abolished the mechanism.

The post Metaplanet’s Bitcoin boom quietly turned a 46 million-share executive pay plan into a 319 million-share windfall appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A Sept. 2, 2026 analysis by New York Fed researchers shows how a few large reserve portfolios can lower the global dollar share without a broad retreat from dollars. For investors assessing future sovereign demand for Bitcoin, the distinction is between a changing average and an investment decision.

Linda S. Goldberg, Oliver Hannaoui and Sneha Parthasarathy report that the dollar share of global official foreign-exchange reserves fell from 64% at year-end 2015 to 56% at year-end 2025, using IMF COFER data.

Their country-level evidence points to concentrated decisions and changes in reserve sizes.

Countries can change the currency mix of their portfolios, the “preferences” channel. Alternatively, their total reserves can grow or shrink, changing their weight in the global average.

When a country with a below-average dollar allocation accumulates reserves, it can pull down the worldwide dollar share without cutting its own allocation. Switzerland did that between 2015 and 2019: its reserve growth pushed the aggregate share down even as its own dollar allocation rose.

For that period, 76 countries had complete endpoint data within a 79-country exercise. Their preferences and reserve-size contributions declined by 1.2 and 1.5 percentage points, respectively.

For 2019-2023, the 62 countries with complete data contributed a positive 0.3 percentage point through preferences and a negative 0.5 percentage point through reserve-size changes.

China, Russia, Mexico and Morocco lacked 2023 dollar-allocation data. Under assumptions matching the observed 2.3-percentage-point global decline, the researchers inferred a combined negative 2.0-percentage-point preferences contribution for that group.

A Bitcoin allocation needs its own evidence

The underlying Staff Report 1087, issued in March 2024 and revised in February 2026, separates reserves needed for liquidity from an investment portion above those needs. Trade payments, foreign-currency debt, and currency stabilization sustain the need for liquid reserves.

The paper models that investment portion using short-term external debt or three months of imports as alternative measures of liquidity needs.

Diversification is more prevalent when reserves can satisfy those needs. Its earlier decomposition covers 2015-2020, while its broader country panel spans 1999–2023.

The distinction also applies when a central bank actually buys Bitcoin. On Nov. 13, 2025, the Czech National Bank announced a $1 million digital-asset test portfolio including Bitcoin, with a dollar stablecoin and tokenized deposit also part of the project.

The amount covered the whole portfolio, and the purchase was explicitly outside international reserves.

Applied to Bitcoin, the reserve research supports a limited inference: diversification beyond liquidity needs does not identify the money's destination. Neither New York Fed source measures sovereign Bitcoin purchases or estimates a Bitcoin price effect.

A sovereign Bitcoin demand case needs separate evidence: a disclosed allocation, its funding source, and executed purchases, with official reserves distinguished from holdings outside them. A shrinking dollar share supplies none of those details.

The post Why Bitcoin bulls shouldn’t mistake a shrinking dollar reserve share for central bank buying appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Strategy’s $250 Bitcoin-themed Air Jordans have sold out, extending Michael Saylor’s treasury brand from Wall Street into consumer culture.

The shoes, launched Sept. 4 through Strategy's online store, were sold out by Sept. 8, with all nine advertised sizes listed as unavailable. The company did not disclose how many pairs it offered or when inventory ran out.

The release pushes Strategy’s Bitcoin identity beyond its balance sheet and securities business into merchandise aimed directly at consumers.

The Saylor-led company holds 845,050 BTC, equivalent to about 4.02% of Bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply, making its association with the asset central to both its financial strategy and corporate identity.

Since dropping the MicroStrategy name in February 2025, Strategy has increasingly built its public image around Bitcoin, turning what began as a treasury allocation into the company's defining feature.

Strategy turns Bitcoin into something customers can wear

The Air Jordans are the most prominent example yet of that branding effort.

Strategy describes the mid-top sneakers as inspired by the original Air Jordan 1, combining custom company branding with leather overlays, Nike Air cushioning, and the Air Jordan Wings logo. The store listed sizes ranging from 6.5 to 14 at $250 a pair.

They sit alongside a broader catalog built around the company and Saylor’s Bitcoin persona, including a $50 Bitcoin Strategy Game, a $125 Strategy hoodie, and a $35 organic cotton Saylor shirt.

The merchandise gives Strategy another way to capitalize on the audience built around its Bitcoin strategy without depending directly on MSTR shares, Bitcoin purchases, or the company’s expanding suite of preferred securities.

The Jordans’ sold-out status points to demand for premium products carrying that identity, though the undisclosed inventory makes the scale impossible to measure.

There is also an irony in how customers are being asked to buy into the Bitcoin brand.

Strategy’s storefront lists American Express, Apple Pay, Diners Club, Discover, Google Pay, Mastercard and Visa among its payment methods. Bitcoin does not appear among the displayed options.

That does not establish that Bitcoin cannot be used at checkout, since the published menu may not capture every possible payment method.

Still, the visible retail experience remains decidedly conventional: customers buying merchandise from the company holding more than 845,000 BTC are presented with cards and mainstream digital wallets rather than Bitcoin itself.

For would-be buyers, inventory is the more immediate constraint. Strategy has not posted a restock date, leaving it unclear whether the Jordans were a limited promotional drop or the start of a broader effort to turn its Bitcoin identity into a recurring consumer business.

The post Strategy’s $250 Bitcoin Jordans sold out as Saylor turns 4% of BTC supply into a consumer brand appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin’s derivatives market is turning more bullish even as spot traders remain reluctant to chase another move above $80,000.

Glassnode’s latest Market Pulse showed demand shifting toward call options while US spot Bitcoin ETF inflows accelerated.

Yet aggressive selling still outweighed buying on centralized exchanges, leaving the market without the broad participation that would make another breakout more convincing.

Data from CryptoSlate showed Bitcoin traded around $78,800 on Tuesday after failing to sustain its latest move above $80,000. This puts the divergence between speculative positioning and actual spot demand back in focus.

Options traders start paying for upside

The clearest change came in Bitcoin’s options market, where 25-delta skew swung to -2.05% from +0.79%.

Under Glassnode’s methodology, the move means calls have become relatively more expensive than puts, signaling greater demand for upside exposure.

This marks a reversal from the more defensive positioning seen previously and suggests traders are increasingly willing to pay for the possibility of another advance.

Meanwhile, institutional flows are moving in the same direction.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $681.2 million in net inflows over the latest weekly observation, up from $247.8 million previously.

The increase provides real capital behind the more constructive derivatives positioning and indicates that regulated investment vehicles are still drawing demand despite Bitcoin’s difficulty holding above $80,000.

The combination gives bulls more support than options pricing alone would provide. But it has not yet translated into clear buying pressure on crypto exchanges.

Spot buyers still haven’t taken control

Glassnode’s spot cumulative volume delta improved sharply, but remained negative at $29.6 million.

That matters because CVD tracks the balance between aggressive market buying and selling. A negative reading means sellers are still dominating executed spot flow, even though the imbalance has narrowed substantially from the previous week's -$84.9 million.

In other words, selling pressure is easing, but buyers have not yet taken over.

The perpetual futures market shows similar hesitation. Glassnode said perpetual CVD remained negative at -$176, while long-side funding payments declined, suggesting leveraged traders are becoming less willing to pay a premium for bullish exposure.

That restraint stands out because futures open interest remains elevated at $37 billion. This essentially means that traders have not abandoned leverage, but they are also not showing the kind of aggressive long positioning that would normally accompany strong confidence in an imminent breakout.

The result is a market where different groups are expressing different levels of conviction.

ETF investors are allocating more capital, options traders are paying relatively more for upside, and exchange sellers are becoming less aggressive.

Still, none of those developments alone establishes that Bitcoin has the demand needed to hold above $80,000.

The next meaningful change would come from spot flow.

If CVD turns positive while ETF inflows remain strong, Bitcoin would have evidence that the optimism visible in options is spreading into direct buying. If spot selling persists instead, derivatives traders may find themselves positioned for a breakout that the underlying market still refuses to support.

The post Bitcoin bulls are loading up on calls while spot traders keep selling appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin’s next macro catalyst may weaken the dollar without delivering the easier money bulls need.

The European Central Bank’s Sept. 10 policy decision could strengthen the euro and push the dollar index lower, potentially offering relief to Bitcoin after its latest slide below $80,000. But a currency-driven drop in DXY would provide limited evidence that the financing conditions restraining risk assets have actually improved.

Data from CryptoSlate showed that Bitcoin was trading around $78,800, down roughly 1% over 24 hours, after stronger US labor data revived expectations that interest rates could remain elevated.

That leaves Thursday’s ECB decision as the next major macro event that could shift the currency backdrop before US inflation data return the focus to the Federal Reserve.

The distinction will hinge on what moves alongside the euro. A sustained Bitcoin recovery would carry more weight if it coincides with lower real yields, easier credit conditions and gains in both BTC/USD and BTC/EUR. A falling DXY on its own could simply reflect Europe becoming relatively more attractive.

A stronger euro can flatter Bitcoin’s dollar signal

The complication comes from how the dollar index is constructed.

The euro carries a 57.6% weight in the dollar index maintained by Intercontinental Exchange, far larger than the Japanese yen at 13.6% or the British pound at 11.9%. A sufficiently strong move in EUR/USD can therefore drag the index lower even if US borrowing costs remain high and the amount of capital available to investors barely changes.

That creates a potential false positive for Bitcoin traders who use the dollar index as a shorthand for liquidity conditions.

If the euro appreciates while Bitcoin’s dollar price remains unchanged, the cryptocurrency becomes cheaper for a euro-based buyer. If Bitcoin subsequently rises in dollars but makes little progress in euros, part of the apparent strength can be explained by currency translation rather than broader demand.

Recent trading shows why the distinction can be useful.

Between the Sept. 1 and Sept. 3 UTC closes, Bitcoin gained 4.99% against the dollar and 4.63% against the euro. That advance occurred alongside a modest decline in US real yields, giving the move support beyond foreign exchange.

The pattern reversed later. From Sept. 6 to Sept. 7, Bitcoin fell 1.55% against the dollar and 1.65% against the euro, showing that the weakness was visible to holders on both sides of the Atlantic rather than being driven primarily by a change in the dollar-euro exchange rate.

Thursday could produce a less straightforward configuration if the ECB sends the euro higher while bond yields and credit conditions remain restrictive.

ECB data offer competing reasons for a euro move

That risk has increased because the economic backdrop facing ECB officials gives markets reasons to pull the euro in either direction without a clear shift in monetary conditions.

Eurostat this week revised second-quarter euro-area growth to 0.6% from the previous quarter, strengthening the headline picture entering the meeting. Yet the composition was heavily skewed toward trade.

Net exports contributed 0.9 percentage points to quarterly growth, while inventory changes subtracted 0.5 points. Household consumption contributed 0.2 points and fixed investment made essentially no contribution. The figures suggest a stronger aggregate economy without the same acceleration in domestic demand that would typically point to a broad improvement in financing conditions.

Inflation is sending a similarly divided signal.

Headline euro-area inflation accelerated to 3.3% in August from 2.9% in July, largely as energy inflation jumped to 14.3%. Meanwhile, inflation excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco eased to 2.4% from 2.5%, while services inflation slowed to 3% from 3.3%.

That combination leaves policymakers balancing a renewed headline inflation problem against signs that some underlying pressures are cooling.

The ECB’s July meeting account also showed that financing conditions were already moving in the opposite direction from the relief Bitcoin bulls would prefer. Credit standards for business loans tightened somewhat in the second quarter, while mortgage standards also became stricter as banks grew more concerned about economic risks.

The ECB said financial conditions had tightened slightly since June, with higher longer-term yields beginning to feed into borrowing costs. Business lending rates stood at 3.6% in May and market-based debt financing costs at 4%.

A stronger euro after Thursday’s decision could therefore coexist with expensive credit.

The next test moves quickly back to US inflation

For Bitcoin, the trade becomes clearer only if the ECB reaction spreads beyond currencies into the markets that determine the cost and availability of capital.

A euro rally that pushes DXY lower while real yields stay elevated would leave leveraged investors facing much the same funding environment as before the decision. Bitcoin could still rise, but the move would carry less evidence that a broader liquidity shift was underway.

The sequencing also gives traders little time to settle on the ECB interpretation.

US producer-price data are due Thursday, the same day as the ECB decision, followed by August consumer-price inflation on Sept. 11. The CPI release will return attention directly to the Federal Reserve after July consumer inflation ran at 3.4% from a year earlier.

That leaves any ECB-driven Bitcoin rally vulnerable to being repriced within 24 hours. If the euro rises, DXY falls, and Bitcoin climbs in both dollar and euro terms while real yields retreat, investors would have a broader set of signals supporting renewed exposure.

If US inflation instead drives yields higher on Friday, traders could find that Thursday’s apparent dollar relief lasted only until Washington reopened the argument over how expensive money will remain.

The post Bitcoin could get the dollar drop bulls want this week without getting the liquidity rally they need appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Anyone holding one of the 25 tokens that KuCoin removed from trading on September 7, 2026 has until October 7, 2026 at 8:00 UTC to withdraw them from the exchange. After that the withdrawal window closes. Selling is already off the table, because trading has been halted since September 7. That leaves exactly one action: move the tokens to an address of your own.

The second point is the more uncomfortable one, and it comes from our own count: on the evening of September 8, KuCoin's official deadline overview listed only ten of these 25 tokens. Anyone who looks there and fails to find their token might conclude that they are not affected. That would be an expensive mistake.

KuCoin delisting: these 25 tokens are affected

In its announcement of September 3, 2026, KuCoin names these tokens: ACX, HYDRA, KARRAT, PORTALS, GAFI, SCOR, AUDIO, BLUM, HONEY, SN3, NOBODY, TSTBSC, HPOS10I, LVVA, MTRG, EMYC, DUCK, J, MOVA, BFC, WEN, FWOG, GAIN, WAXP and REEF. Trading was discontinued on September 7, 2026 at 8:00 UTC.

These are mostly small projects, but not exclusively. AUDIO is the token of the music platform Audius, for which we maintain a price prediction of its own; WAXP belongs to the WAX blockchain, MTRG to Meter Governance, ACX to the cross-chain protocol Across. Anyone who has had these holdings sitting in a secondary account for years may not have looked at it for months.

The three key dates: trading halt, deposit halt, withdrawal deadline

A delisting does not happen in a single day; it runs in three stages. In this case they fall as follows:

• September 4, 2026, 8:00 UTC: deposits of the affected tokens were switched off. Anyone who still sent tokens to their KuCoin address after that point has to reckon with them not being credited.
• September 7, 2026, 8:00 UTC: trading was discontinued. From this point a sale through the exchange is no longer possible.
• October 7, 2026, 8:00 UTC: withdrawals close. That is the deadline that counts.

Thirty days lie between the trading halt and the withdrawal deadline. That is the usual shape, which other exchanges also choose, and it is more generous than what Bitfinex offered in August with 13 tokens. Generous does not mean harmless, though: the deadline runs whether you notice it or not, and an email reminder is no substitute for checking yourself. If you want to understand how exchanges behave in cases like this and what marks out a dependable platform, our comparison of the best crypto exchanges is the place to look.

Deadline list checked: only 10 of 25 tokens were listed there

Alongside the individual announcements, KuCoin maintains a continuously updated overview page carrying the trading, deposit and withdrawal deadlines of all delisted tokens. We retrieved that page on September 8, 2026 at around 21:50 UTC and compared it with the announcement of September 3.

The result: ten of the 25 announced tokens were entered there with complete deadlines — KARRAT, SCOR, REEF, GAFI, AUDIO, ACX, PORTALS, BLUM, WAXP and HYDRA. All ten carry the same three points in time: trading until September 7 at 8:00 UTC, deposits until September 4 at 8:00 UTC, withdrawals until October 7 at 8:00 UTC.

Fifteen tokens from the same announcement were not on that overview at the time of our retrieval: HONEY, SN3, NOBODY, TSTBSC, HPOS10I, LVVA, MTRG, EMYC, DUCK, J, MOVA, BFC, WEN, FWOG and GAIN. That is a snapshot and not an accusation — overview pages are updated after the fact, and it is quite possible that the missing entries have since been added. For you as a holder, a practical rule follows all the same: the announcement is the binding source, the overview page is the convenience. Check your holdings against the announcement, not against the list.

Special treatment: what lies behind the procedure

For this delisting KuCoin invokes its so-called Special Treatment Rules. That is an internal set of rules which places projects under observation when certain metrics break down — persistently low trading volume, absent development activity or a project team that stops responding. A definition in one sentence: special treatment is the warning status an exchange gives a token before it removes it for good.

For you as a holder, one thing above all matters here: a delisting under this procedure says something about tradability on this one exchange, not necessarily about the token itself. The token continues to exist on its blockchain. What disappears is the convenient access through the exchange interface.

ACX and J: two tokens already removed elsewhere

Two names on the list have crossed our path in the past four weeks. We reported on August 14 on the Binance delisting of August 17, 2026, in which ACX among others fell out of trading; and on August 22 on the OKX delisting of MAJOR and J with a withdrawal deadline of August 26. Both pieces of information come from our own reporting and are marked as such here.

No verdict on prices can be derived from this, but a practical consequence can: when a token is removed by several large exchanges one after another, the circle of places where you can still sell it at all shrinks. Anyone who only reacts after the third delisting may find no trading venue left with usable depth. That is the real reason the deadline matters more than the day's price.

Preparing the withdrawal: network, address and minimum amount

A withdrawal rarely fails because of the deadline and often because of a detail. There are three points you should settle before you start the process.

The network. Many of the affected tokens exist on several chains. If you pick a different network for the withdrawal than your destination address supports, in the worst case the tokens are lost. Check in the withdrawal dialogue which networks are offered and match that against your wallet.

The destination address. You need an address whose keys you hold yourself, or an account at another exchange that still lists the token. For the first option a hardware wallet is the most robust route; which devices support which chains is set out in our hardware wallet comparison. The second route sounds simpler but merely shifts the problem: the next exchange can delist too.

The minimum amount. Exchanges set a lower limit and a fixed fee for every withdrawal. With residual holdings worth a few euros, the fee can exceed the amount — the withdrawal is then technically possible but economically pointless. That is annoying, but it is a deliberate decision and not an omission.

When the withdrawal fails: the liability disclaimer in the small print

The deadline overview carries a sentence that is easy to skim past. KuCoin points out there that withdrawals can fail if a project team restricts activity on its own chain — by halting block production or transfers, for instance. In such a case the platform may suspend withdrawals and is not liable for any losses arising from that.

This is more than a formality. It means that the deadline of October 7 is an upper limit and not a promise. If the chain of a delisted project stops running before then, the chance to withdraw ends earlier — with the exchange taking no responsibility for it. For projects whose development is already stalling, that is not a theoretical risk. The conclusion is uncomfortable and simple: do not wait until early October.

KuCoin EU and kucoin.com: first check where your account sits

For users in Germany there is a particular point to settle before any further step: two operations exist. The announcement discussed here comes from the global platform. Alongside it stands KuCoin EU Exchange GmbH, which according to the public ESMA register holds a MiCA authorisation as a crypto service provider from the Austrian financial market authority, granted at the end of November 2025.

Whether a delisting announcement from the global platform applies one to one to customers of the European entity does not emerge from the announcement itself. So log in to the account where your tokens actually sit and check in the withdrawal dialogue there whether the token can still be withdrawn and until when. While you are at it, sort out which providers hold your remaining assets and which of them is authorised in the EU.

Tax: what the withdrawal means for your holding period

A pure transfer from the exchange to an address of your own is not a sale. In Germany it does not in principle trigger a taxable event, and it does not interrupt the one-year holding period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act either. The only thing that matters is that you can still evidence the date and the cost of acquisition.

That is precisely where things often fail in practice. When a token is delisted, the trading data sooner or later disappears from the exchange interface as well. So download the complete transaction history for that token before you withdraw and file it with your tax records. Nobody will retrieve that file for you later.

Worthless residual holdings: withdraw or leave them?

Not every position is worth the effort. If your holding lands in the cents range after the withdrawal fee, the sober answer is: the economic damage has already occurred, and the deadline changes nothing about that.

Two reasons still speak for withdrawing. First, a token whose development continues can become tradable again later — on an address of your own you keep that option, on an exchange without a trading pair you do not. Second, for a tax loss to be recognised you need an event you can evidence; a holding that quietly expires in an account is harder to present than one you demonstrably still own. Whether that adds up for you depends on the size of the fee, and you see that in the withdrawal dialogue before you confirm.

How we counted: method and limits

This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on September 8, 2026. Method: we retrieved the delisting announcement of September 3, 2026 and KuCoin's continuously updated deadline overview on September 8, 2026 at around 21:50 UTC, read out the visible text without the HTML scaffolding, and checked each of the 25 tokens named in the announcement individually against the entries on the overview page. Checked: 25 tokens, two pages, one retrieval time. Result: 10 tokens with a complete set of deadlines on the overview, 15 without an entry there at the time of retrieval.

What we could not check: any view behind a login, because we do not maintain customer accounts — that is, the actual withdrawal dialogue, the networks offered for your token and the specific fees. It also remains open whether and when the missing 15 entries will be added, and whether the announcement from the global platform applies unchanged to the European entity. Anyone relying on this article should therefore check their own holdings in their own account in any case.

Checking the KuCoin deadline: what to take away

1. Look into your account today. Match your holdings against the list of 25 tokens from the announcement, not against the overview page — 15 of them were missing there on September 8. If you find a position, start the withdrawal immediately rather than shortly before October 7. If you are thinking about switching anyway while you are at it: our overview of regulated crypto exchanges sets out who is authorised in the EU.
2. Set up the destination before you withdraw. You need an address on the matching network whose keys you hold yourself. For smaller amounts a vetted software solution from our software wallet comparison is enough; for anything that would hurt if it were gone, keeping it off the network still applies.
3. Secure the records before the withdrawal. Download the transaction history for every affected token while it is still in the interface. A tool that carries acquisition dates and holding periods forward permanently takes that off your hands later — the common providers are in our comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Germany's Federal Ministry of Finance has sent its draft bill on the taxation of crypto assets into interdepartmental consultation. For the first time the paper states what the plan is meant to raise: 160 million euros from 2028, rising to around 350 million euros a year by 2031. On the morning of the same day, Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil presented a budget to the Bundestag with 555.4 billion euros in spending and 118.7 billion euros in new borrowing. Put the two figures side by side and you have the real news in this draft.

We covered the substance of the draft when the cutoff date became known: as the draft stands, crypto assets acquired up to December 31, 2026 stay under today's rules with a one-year holding period. The details are in our article on the cutoff date and grandfathering. This piece takes on the number that has been added since, and places it in the budget it is meant to serve.

What the crypto tax draft bill says

The explanatory memorandum says crypto assets “increasingly represent a possible form of private capital investment and are acquired and disposed of on a growing market”. Ministry sources describe the intention like this: it is unfair for earned income and capital income to be taxed while gains on crypto assets remain largely untaxed.

On five points this draft is markedly friendlier to investors than the bill the Bundestag voted on in May. The cutoff date lies in the future, not in the past. The rate is 25 percent instead of up to 45 percent. Losses can be offset against securities instead of silting up in a pot of their own. There is a favourability check. And an allowance takes the place of the former exemption limit. That belongs in a sober assessment before anyone looks at the number.

The crypto tax revenue set against the federal budget

The 2027 federal budget provides for spending of 555.4 billion euros. Net borrowing in the core budget is 118.7 billion euros, of which 33.4 billion comes from the regular debt rule and 85.4 billion from the carve-out for defence and security. Add the special funds and new borrowing reaches 203.7 billion euros.

From this the comparison of scale can be recalculated, and the arithmetic belongs with it so that the figure stays verifiable:

• New borrowing per day: 118.7 billion euros divided by 365 days is around 325 million euros a day.
• Share taken by the crypto tax: 160 million euros therefore amount to 0.49 days, or roughly twelve hours of new borrowing.
• Share of total spending: 160 million euros out of 555.4 billion euros is 0.029 percent. Even the 350 million euros that are not due to be reached before 2031 come to 0.063 percent.

Anyone who takes total borrowing of 203.7 billion euros as the basis instead of the core budget arrives at around seven hours. We deliberately calculate with the lower figure, because it presents the plan more favourably and the statement still holds.

The crypto tax is part of an action plan against tax fraud and undeclared money that is meant to raise around one billion euros in total. At 160 million euros, the crypto share is the smaller part of it.

How 11.4 billion euros became 160 million

The debate about abolishing the holding period has been conducted since the spring of 2026 with figures many times higher. The trail can be traced without a gap:

Between the highest figure and the official one lies a factor of 71. That is no nuance within an estimate; it is the difference between a budget item and a rounding error.

All of this was open to verification early on. Austria abolished the holding period back in 2022 and is the only real-world test in Europe. There, service providers remitted 33.8 million euros of capital gains tax on cryptocurrencies in 2024. Scale that value up to Germany by population and you land at around 300 million euros. We published that extrapolation on August 12, 2026, four weeks before the draft appeared; it can be read in the statement on the reply from the Finance Committee. The Federal Ministry of Finance is today in the same order of magnitude, while the figures used politically were off by a factor of six to seventy.

The Bitcoin Bundesverband put fifteen questions on methodology to the estimate of 11.4 billion euros, among them the origin of the data, the representativeness of the sample and the missing margins of error. They remain unanswered to this day.

What Klingbeil said in his budget speech

In his introductory speech Klingbeil defended the new borrowing as investment, named infrastructure, hospitals and schools, and announced a relief package of ten billion euros that is to be financed by higher taxation of very high incomes. The balanced budget, he said, had become “a fetish” in a period of low interest rates.

Crypto assets, bitcoin, the holding period and Section 23 of the Income Tax Act did not appear in the speech. Nor does the crypto tax appear as a separate item in the 2027 budget. Both are explicable and are no contradiction: under the draft the revenue is not due to flow before 2028, which puts it outside the budget year the Bundestag is currently debating. Reading concealment into that overstates the case. The timing remains striking. The draft went into consultation on the day the minister spoke about the budget it is supposed to contribute to.

The conflict of aims inside the crypto tax model

The stated intention is to tax speculation. For short-term investors the chosen model achieves the opposite. Anyone who sells crypto assets within a year today pays their personal income tax rate of up to 45 percent plus the solidarity surcharge. Under the draft, the same investor will in future pay a flat 25 percent. Olav Gutting, a member of parliament for the CDU/CSU, had already worked that effect out on July 31, 2026.

The reform therefore relieves short-term trading and burdens long-term holding, which is tax-free after one year today. On a gain of 100,000 euros after more than a year of holding, the effect can be quantified: 0 euros of tax today, 26,375 euros including the solidarity surcharge under the draft.

What investors can take from the crypto tax plan

For holdings acquired up to December 31, 2026, nothing changes as the draft stands. They remain within today's system: hold for a year, then sell tax-free. That also applies to a purchase in December 2026 whose one-year period does not run out until December 2027. What counts is the day of acquisition, not the date of the sale and not the calendar year.

From this follows an incentive to bring planned purchases forward into the fourth quarter of 2026. Three things belong with that consideration:

1. The cutoff date sits in a draft, not in the statute book. The paper is in early coordination between the departments. The cabinet, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat have not yet dealt with it.
2. A cutoff date in the future can be brought forward. Where a legislature observes an announcement effect, moving the cutoff date to the day of the cabinet decision or of introduction is a common device in tax law. The bill of May 2026 expressly placed its cutoff date in the past. There is no assurance that the current date will hold to the end.
3. With mixed holdings, the consumption sequence decides. Under the finance ministry circular of March 6, 2025, the holding period is assessed per wallet, with the crypto assets acquired first deemed to be the first ones sold. Anyone selling after 2027 therefore uses up the protected older holdings first. Whether the draft bill contains a rule of its own on this is not apparent from what is known so far.

On the market effect, about which a great deal is being written just now, a sober assessment: a pull-forward effect is plausible, and its size is limited. On the Frankfurt School's estimate, around seven million German investors hold crypto assets worth some 400 billion euros. Even if a high single-digit billion sum were additionally invested in the closing months of the year, it would spread across a global trading volume that runs into tens of billions of US dollars a day in bitcoin alone. Deriving a price forecast from that sells a supposition as a calculation.

What happens next with the crypto tax bill

The draft bill is the working version produced by a specialist unit. Ahead of it lie the interdepartmental consultation, the hearing of the associations, the cabinet decision, the three readings in the Bundestag and the consideration by the Bundesrat. At each of these stages the tax rate, the cutoff date and the transitional rules can still be changed.

In parallel, Bundestag petition 201716 is running. It reached the quorum of 30,000 signatures within 48 hours in August and is therefore entitled to a public hearing in the Petitions Committee. The signing period runs until September 15, 2026. We have set out where the procedure stands in a separate article.

Frequently asked questions about the German crypto tax

Do I have to pay tax on my crypto gains now?

No. Today's legal position is unchanged: gains from a sale of privately held assets are taxable where less than a year lies between acquisition and sale. Once a year has passed they remain tax-free.

I am buying in December 2026. Am I protected?

As the draft stands, yes, because the acquisition falls before the cutoff date. That is not legally binding as long as no law has been passed.

What happens to my savings plan over the turn of the year?

Every single execution is an acquisition in its own right with a date of its own. Instalments up to December 31, 2026 would fall under the old rule, instalments from January 2027 under the new one.

Does the tax apply from 2027 onwards?

The law is intended to enter into force on January 1, 2027, but it covers only assets acquired from that date. The automatic deduction of tax by the service providers is not due to begin before January 1, 2028.

How much does the tax bring the state?

On the estimate in the draft bill, 160 million euros from 2028 and around 350 million euros a year by 2031.

Sources

• German Bundestag, text archive on the introduction of the 2027 budget, Bundestag printed papers 21/7300, 21/7301 and 21/7650: bundestag.de
• Bundestag printed paper 21/5752, bill amending Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: dserver.bundestag.de
• German Bundestag, short report on the rejection of the bill on May 20, 2026: bundestag.de
• Circular of the Federal Ministry of Finance of March 6, 2025 on the income tax treatment of certain crypto assets, file reference IV C 1 - S 2256/00042/064/043
• Bitcoin Bundesverband, catalogue of questions on the estimate of 11.4 billion euros: bitcoin-bundesverband.de
• Details of the content of the draft bill according to the reporting of September 8, 2026. The full text of the draft has not been officially published so far.

(As of September 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you bought your crypto assets before December 31, 2026, or buy them by that date, then on the current state of the draft nothing changes for them: hold for a year, then sell tax-free. Only crypto assets acquired or received after December 31, 2026 would fall under the new treatment as investment income. That is what a draft bill from Germany's Federal Ministry of Finance dated mid-August says, first reported by WELT on September 8, 2026 and reproduced with an explicit source citation by the specialist outlet Blocktrainer. None of it has been passed into law, and those two halves together describe your position: a dated cut-off in a paper that still has the whole legislative route ahead of it.

This article sets out what the draft means for an ongoing savings plan, for staggered purchases and for coins from staking and lending, which records you should secure now, and why our own report from yesterday appears at first glance to say the opposite.

Crypto Holding Period, Grandfathering and Cut-Off Date: German Tax Law in 2026

As long as no law is in force, today's rules continue to apply unchanged. Gains from the sale of cryptocurrencies held privately are taxable under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG) if less than a year lies between acquisition and sale. Hold for more than a year and you sell tax-free. This one-year holding period applies to Bitcoin just as it does to any other coin held privately.

For crypto investors that means, quite practically: the draft bill changes nothing about your 2026 tax return. Crypto gains you realise this year within the one-year window are still taxed at your personal income tax rate, and sales after the period has run remain tax-free. The tax change under discussion here would affect acquisitions from 2027 at the earliest.

The difference between short-term speculation and long-term holding matters, because today it decides the tax bill and the draft would level it out. That is exactly what turns the cut-off into an arithmetic problem for Bitcoin holders with large crypto positions: the value of the old rule rises with every year a position sits untouched anyway.

What the German Draft Bill Actually Lays Down on the Crypto Holding Period

A Referentenentwurf, or ministerial draft bill, is the working version of a law written by a specialist unit inside the responsible ministry before the cabinet, the Bundestag and the Bundesrat are involved at all. It is not law in force, but the first place where a political intention acquires sections and dates.

According to the WELT report, this draft contains three provisions that were not public before. First, gains from the sale of crypto assets are to be taxable in future regardless of the holding period and to fall in principle under the flat-rate withholding tax as investment income. Second, the law is to enter into force on January 1, 2027. Third, the new provisions are to cover only crypto assets acquired or received after December 31, 2026.

The reasoning the draft supplies, per the report, is remarkably sober: because of their speculative use, their high liquidity and their lack of wear, crypto assets resemble classic capital investments more than ordinary economic goods. That removes the doctrinal basis of today's treatment. Until now, Bitcoin and other coins held privately count as "other economic goods", the sale of which is a private disposal transaction under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act.

Why December 31, 2026 Is the Decisive Cut-Off Date

The one-year holding period, often called the one-year rule or speculation period, is the span between acquisition and sale after which a gain on privately held assets remains tax-free. That period hangs on the acquisition date of the individual coins, not on your sale date and not on the calendar year.

That is precisely why the cut-off in the draft acts like a dividing line straight through your portfolio. A Bitcoin you bought in March 2025 would be a legacy holding. A Bitcoin you buy on December 15, 2026 would also be a legacy holding, even though its one-year period does not run out until December 2027. A purchase on January 3, 2027 would be a new holding and therefore taxable under the draft, however long you leave it sitting.

For you that means: what counts is the day you buy, not the day the period expires. Anyone who was planning to add to their position in the first quarter of 2027 anyway now has an argument, on the current draft, for bringing that purchase forward. Anyone deciding a wealth question of that size should nonetheless keep two things apart: the cut-off sits in a draft, whereas your purchase decision is real and costs money.

A second point is often overlooked in the debate. The exemption limit of 1,000 euros for private disposal transactions under Section 23 EStG is a threshold, not an allowance: exceed it by one euro and you tax the entire gain, not just the excess. That threshold hangs on today's system. If crypto assets move into investment income, the saver's lump-sum allowance applies there instead, which covers all investment income together and which many investors already use up on interest and dividends.

Is There Grandfathering for Your Existing Holdings in Germany?

Grandfathering means, in tax law, that a new rule applies only to future circumstances and that positions already acquired are treated under the old law. On the reporting so far, the ministerial draft provides for exactly that: the federal government would forgo applying the change retroactively to existing holdings.

That is the most important substantive news in this draft, and it is the all-clear for everyone who has been holding for years. Until September 8, 2026 it was open whether legacy holdings would be protected at all. The specialist portal extraETF had explicitly called the question unresolved in July and named grandfathering "the most important question for many investors". The draft answers it for the first time with a date.

Legally the route is an obvious one. Protection of legitimate expectations is a constitutional principle that permits burdensome retroactivity only within narrow limits, and the legislator has already applied it in comparable reforms. When the flat-rate withholding tax was introduced in 2009, legacy holdings of shares and funds stayed under the old speculation period. The parallel is no guarantee, but it explains why a draft with a cut-off is more likely than a reform that reaches back over everything.

When Would the Crypto Holding Period End, and When Would Withholding Start?

The draft separates two dates that regularly get conflated in public debate. The law itself is to enter into force on January 1, 2027. The actual withholding at source, where crypto service providers deduct the tax directly and pass it to the tax office, is not to begin until January 2028 according to the report.

That transition period is not generosity but a technical concession. An exchange can only withhold correctly if it knows when and at what price you acquired your coins. For holdings deposited from your own wallet or from another platform, it does not know. The draft therefore provides that service providers may partly rely on your own statements of acquisition date and acquisition cost.

And if those details cannot be established? Then a flat assessment base is to apply: withholding on 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale. What is meant is not a tax rate of 50 percent, but the assumption that half your sale proceeds were gain. Sell a position with a small price gain and produce no records, and you would pay considerably too much tax and have to claim the money back through your tax return. That is the real reason your acquisition records are worth money from now on.

What the Cut-Off Means for Your Running Bitcoin Savings Plan

A savings plan does not buy once but every month, and each of those executions is a separate acquisition with its own date. If your savings plan runs across the 2026/2027 turn of the year, on the current draft it splits into two groups: every instalment up to and including December 2026 would be a legacy holding with a holding period, every instalment from January 2027 a new holding under the flat-rate withholding tax.

In practice that mainly means bookkeeping. On a sale, crypto assets in the same wallet are usually treated on the FIFO principle, under which the coins bought first count as sold first. When two tax regimes sit side by side, the allocation decides whether a sale is tax-free or subject to the withholding tax. We worked through how holding period, FIFO and the exemption limit interact with monthly purchases in detail in our guide to the Bitcoin savings plan and tax.

A clean record of your purchases is therefore no longer just diligence for the tax return, but the proof of which pot a position belongs in. Anyone who would rather not keep that in a spreadsheet will find programs in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers that pull acquisition data from the exchanges automatically and allocate FIFO sales correctly.

Staking, Lending and Airdrops: What Arrives Counts From the Cut-Off

On the reporting, the draft covers more than purchases. Income from classic lending, that is, lending coins out at interest, and from passive staking, where you pledge coins to secure a network and receive new units in return, is to be taxed as investment income in future. A transitional rule tied to the same cut-off is evidently envisaged for that as well: it covers crypto assets received after December 31, 2026.

The difference from a purchase lies in the word "received". A staking reward has no purchase date that you choose yourself; what counts is the day the units land within your power of disposal. Anyone who leaves their rewards sitting in the contract for months and only claims them later may thereby push the receipt beyond the cut-off. Whether that reading holds depends on the final version of the law and on the question of when power of disposal arises for tax purposes. For a decision on larger amounts, that is a case for a tax adviser, not for a rule of thumb.

Which Crypto Assets the Draft Expressly Excludes

The new category the draft is built around is called "exchange crypto assets" in the report. Not every digital asset falls under it. Excluded are to be, among others, non-fungible tokens, that is, non-interchangeable tokens representing a single digital object, plus security tokens, which digitally represent a securitised right such as a bond or a share, as well as other crypto assets intended to convey a real-world value. Certain stablecoins are also not to fall into the new category.

This delimitation is more than a footnote, because it helps decide which part of your portfolio would be affected at all. At the same time it is the point at which a draft, in experience, changes most in the further procedure: definitions that include or exclude an entire asset class attract the most comments during consultation.

Why Our Report From Yesterday Says Something Different, and Both Are True

On September 7, 2026 we reported that the Income Tax Reform Act 2027, which the federal cabinet waved through on September 2, leaves Section 23 EStG untouched and that the crypto holding period therefore stays for now. That was correct and remains so. A cabinet decision concerns precisely the law that is on the table, and that law said nothing about the holding period.

The ministerial draft at issue here is a different paper from a different procedural stage. According to the report it is in what is known as early coordination, that is, in the early alignment between the Federal Chancellery and the ministries involved, and it was not the subject of the cabinet decision on September 2. Two statements that appear to contradict each other therefore describe two different processes.

This double track is typical of crypto taxation in Germany and the reason why headlines on the subject so often stand against one another. The political intention has been documented since the government draft of the 2027 federal budget, which Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil explained himself at the federal press conference in July 2026. The route there runs through several legislative projects in parallel, and only one of them carries the crypto rules at any given moment.

A simple sequence helps in placing it. At the start stood the budget draft with the announced crypto tax reform. Out of that comes a ministerial draft inside the ministry, as now documented for mid-August 2026. Out of that, after inter-ministerial coordination, comes a government bill adopted by the cabinet, and only that goes to the Bundestag and Bundesrat as a bill. Each of those stages can still shift deadlines, definitions and the grandfathering.

Anyone wanting to gauge the consequences for their own crypto gains should therefore not read every headline as a decision, but pay attention to which stage a report is describing. We are following this procedure further in our crypto taxation cluster and recording the dates there.

Will There Be a Crypto Tax in Germany From 2027?

A crypto tax as a levy of its own does not exist and is not to exist under the draft either. What would change is the classification: away from private disposal transactions under Section 23 EStG, towards investment income with flat-rate withholding tax. Gains from crypto are already taxable today if you sell within a year and exceed the exemption limit.

For the question of whether the new rules from 2027 affect you at all, only one thing counts: the acquisition date of your coins. If they do affect you, the effect would cut both ways. The flat-rate withholding tax with its uniform rate can be cheaper than the personal income tax rate that a sale within the one-year window triggers today. The tax exemption after one year, which legacy holdings would keep, beats both.

What You Should Document by December 31, 2026

Whether or not the draft becomes law, one thing gains value in every scenario: a complete record of when you acquired what and at what price. If the cut-off becomes law, that date decides the pot. If it does not, you need the same records for the holding period.

So secure the complete transaction histories of every exchange you use as a file on your own computer, still this year. Platforms do not reliably provide old data after a change of provider or an account closure, and for holdings in your own wallet there is no body keeping it for you in any case. Record the acquisition date, quantity, acquisition cost in euros and the origin for each position, and document every transfer between your own addresses so that a move does not later look like a sale.

How seriously the legislator takes this subject is shown by a second front: through the European reporting obligations, the tax authorities are receiving increasing amounts of data from the platforms anyway. Anyone who knows their own figures can explain discrepancies. Anyone who does not is dependent on whatever the exchange has reported.

Crypto Holding Period and the December 31, 2026 Cut-Off: What to Take Away

1. Check which of your positions fall before the cut-off. Pull the acquisition dates together from every exchange and wallet and mark everything bought before December 31, 2026. A tool from our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers takes the collecting off your hands and allocates FIFO sales automatically.
2. Decide deliberately about planned purchases for next year. If you wanted to add to your position in 2027 anyway, then on the current draft the question of bringing the purchase forward is a tax question, not a speculative one. How staggered purchases can be implemented is set out in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plans.
3. Secure your records where you keep them. Download the complete transaction histories of your trading venues before accounts or providers change. Which platforms supply usable exports is shown by our crypto exchange comparison.

The draft is a working version, not a law. Until it is passed, a good deal can still change both on the abolition of the holding period and on grandfathering. What does not change is the value of clean acquisition data.

Sources for further reading: the report by the specialist outlet Blocktrainer on the ministerial draft of September 8, 2026, which reproduces the WELT report, and the assessment of the government draft of the 2027 federal budget at extraETF.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

A crypto loan is liquidated as soon as the loan-to-value ratio crosses a limit set by the lender. The maths behind it fits on a single line: the loan amount divided by the current value of the coins you have pledged. That ratio is called the loan-to-value ratio, or LTV for short. When the price falls, the LTV rises, and once a published threshold is reached the lender sells your collateral without asking for your consent first.

Bitcoin traded at $78,741, or 67,719 euros, on September 8, 2026. We pulled that price the same day from CoinGecko's public price interface, together with daily prices for the past twelve months. The one-year high was $124,740 on October 7, 2025, the one-year low $58,566 on July 1, 2026. There are 113 percent between those two marks, and that spread is what decides who can sleep soundly today and who has to post more collateral.

This analysis was compiled by cryptoticker.io on September 8, 2026.

Loan-to-Value Ratio: The One Number That Decides a Crypto Loan Liquidation

The loan-to-value ratio is the relationship between your outstanding debt and the market value of your collateral. Borrow $5,000 and pledge Bitcoin worth $10,000 and you start at 50 percent. The loan amount stays fixed, the value of the collateral moves minute by minute. That makes the LTV a moving measure: you set it when you take the loan out, and the market updates it from then on.

The key shift in perspective is simple, and it is still rarely made. You do not want to know what your LTV is today. You want to know at which Bitcoin price it reaches the liquidation threshold. For that you need two figures: the ratio on the day you borrowed, and your provider's liquidation threshold.

The Formula That Gives You Your Own Liquidation Price

Liquidation price equals opening price times starting LTV divided by liquidation threshold. An example with the numbers collected today: borrow at a Bitcoin price of $100,000 with a 50 percent ratio, with a provider that liquidates at 80 percent, and the liquidation sits at 100,000 times 50 divided by 80, or $62,500. Put differently, the price can fall by 37.5 percent before things get tight.

The same formula produces a table that holds for every loan, whatever the amount. Start at 50 percent and the 80 percent threshold sits 37.5 percent below the opening price, the 90 percent threshold 44.4 percent below it. Start at 60 percent and you have only 25 percent of headroom left before the 80 percent mark. Start at 70 percent and you lose your collateral after a decline of just 12.5 percent. The starting ratio therefore decides a good deal more than the size of your payout.

Bitcoin at $78,741: Who Is Close to the Threshold Today

Because we have the daily prices for the past twelve months in hand, this can be worked through for specific borrowing dates. Each case assumes a loan taken out on the day named at a 50 percent loan-to-value ratio, neither repaid nor increased since. Interest is not included in this calculation; it pushes the LTV up further.

• Borrowed on October 7, 2025 at the one-year high of $124,740: LTV today 79.2 percent.
• Borrowed on January 15, 2026 at $96,899: LTV today 61.5 percent.
• Borrowed on December 1, 2025 at $90,360: LTV today 57.4 percent.
• Borrowed on June 1, 2026 at $73,599: LTV today 46.7 percent.
• Borrowed on August 1, 2026 at $62,820: LTV today 39.9 percent.

The first case is the remarkable one. A loan taken out at the October high stands at 79.2 percent today, eight tenths of a percentage point below the 80 percent mark at which one of the two providers with a published threshold liquidates automatically. Translated back into a price: that limit would be reached at $77,962. That is 0.99 percent below the level of the afternoon of September 8. A single weak trading day is enough.

At a liquidation threshold of 90 percent, the same position looks far more relaxed. There the limit would sit at $69,300, twelve percent below the current price. Same loan, same collateral, a difference of eleven percentage points in the terms and conditions, and out of that comes the difference between a quiet day and a total loss of the position.

Why the Price Is Under Pressure Right Now

The occasion for this calculation is the ongoing decline. Bitcoin fell below the $79,000 mark on September 8. finanzen.net attributed the pressure the same day to rising bets on a rate hike by the US Federal Reserve at its September 16 meeting, and put the probability read off the CME FedWatch tool at around 60 percent. On top of that comes an oil price close to $100. Whether that reading holds is an open question; for your loan it makes no difference either way. All that matters is that the buffer between today's price and your personal threshold has become thin.

The Ledn Thresholds: Warning at 70, Liquidation at 80 Percent

The provider Ledn publishes the full ladder on its product page, readable without an account. Loans typically start at a 50 percent loan-to-value ratio, so roughly two dollars in Bitcoin have to be pledged for every dollar borrowed. From 70 and from 75 percent the firm sends out warnings. An automatic top-up kicks in at 70 percent and pushes the ratio back to 68 percent using Bitcoin from the settlement account, provided there is a balance there.

From 80 percent Ledn liquidates automatically and irreversibly, by its own account, selling as much collateral as is needed to cover the outstanding debt, charging a trading spread of 0.50 percent and refunding the surplus. The standard term is twelve months, the minimum loan $500, and there is no early repayment penalty. Automatic renewal is only considered if the LTV is at 65 percent or below.

One point belongs alongside this for context: on the same page Ledn names Canada and the United States as its coverage area. For you in Germany the firm is therefore not an option, but its published thresholds are the most clearly documented benchmark against which other terms can be measured. What you can do with these numbers is turn them into a question for your own provider.

Debifi: Three Margin Call Levels and a 5 Percent Liquidation Fee

The ladder is graded far more finely at Debifi, a marketplace where lenders and borrowers find each other directly and the Bitcoin sits in a multisig escrow. The terms are set out in the public FAQ and name four levels: at 75 percent the first margin call goes out, at 80 percent the second, at 85 percent the third. Only at 90 percent does liquidation begin.

Two qualifications sit right next to that and matter more than the headline figure. First, the individual lender may set a stricter limit, with 85, 80 and 75 percent named explicitly; which one applies is stated in the respective offer. Second, liquidation carries a fee of 5 percent. So anyone relying on the standard threshold of 90 percent without having looked at their own offer can be off by up to fifteen percentage points.

The 2 Percent Buffer on Margin Top-Ups

One detail from the same source is useful in practice: anyone posting additional collateral has to pledge slightly more than the arithmetic requires, because Debifi says the system demands a 2 percent buffer above the target value. The reason is obvious, because without that gap a small price move immediately after the top-up would trigger the next call. Calculate too tightly and you pay in a second time the same day.

Collateral is valued through an in-house price service. That is standard practice in the industry and still a point worth knowing: what counts is the price your lender applies, and it can differ from the one your trading app displays. In calm markets that goes unnoticed. In a fast decline it does not.

Nexo and Firefish: What the Providers Do Not Publish About Their Liquidation Threshold

At Nexo the loan landing page is open and lists the loan-to-value ratios by collateral: Bitcoin and Ethereum at 50 percent each, the in-house token at 15 percent, the dollar stablecoins Tether and USD Coin at 90 percent each. More than 100 assets are accepted as collateral. On liquidation the page says the firm automatically repays part of the credit line out of the collateral once a certain threshold is reached. Which threshold that is does not appear on the page we retrieved; the link leads to a help section that we could not load on the day of collection.

Firefish, a European platform based in the Czech Republic, makes a statement elsewhere that may be more relevant to you than a percentage. In the footer the company discloses an authorisation under EU Regulation 2023/1114, that is, under MiCA, and states explicitly what it covers: the operation of the Bitcoin escrow environment, the liquidation swap of the collateral and the associated on-chain transfers. It states just as explicitly that other services on the platform are not covered by that authorisation. The specific thresholds are in an FAQ that is loaded only after the page itself, which is why it came back empty in our collection.

That leaves the most important finding of this survey: of eleven providers checked, two publish a complete ladder up to liquidation that is readable without an account. A third at least names its starting ratios. For the remaining eight, the number that matters could not be established through the public pages on the day of collection. If you have a loan running, the route to your number therefore runs through your own contract document. Our comparison of crypto lending providers gives an overview of the field.

Post Collateral or Repay in Part: What Actually Lowers Your LTV

Once the margin call is in your inbox there are exactly two levers, and they work differently. The first is additional collateral: you transfer more Bitcoin, the denominator of the ratio grows, the LTV falls. The second is partial repayment: you pay back part of the debt, the numerator shrinks, and the LTV falls as well. Both providers with published thresholds name both routes.

The difference lies in the risk afterwards. Post more collateral and you have more Bitcoin at stake, so a further decline costs you correspondingly more. Repay and you shrink the position and with it the potential gain, but you stand on firmer ground. Which route fits better depends on whether you set the loan up as short-term bridging or as a permanent structure.

An Automatic Top-Up Is No Safety Net

The automatic top-up described by Ledn only works as long as there is Bitcoin sitting in the linked settlement account. If it is empty, the mechanism reaches into nothing and the ladder runs on to liquidation. Anyone relying on such a feature should therefore check regularly whether the reserve it draws on is actually still funded.

Liquidation and Tax: Why a Sale by Your Lender Concerns You

Taking out a collateralised loan is not in itself a sale. Ledn words this carefully on its own page and points out that a liquidation or a repayment out of the collateral may well constitute a disposal. For you in Germany that is the point at which a price question turns into a tax question: the sale of your Bitcoin by the lender is a disposal, even though you did not trigger it.

That is particularly awkward because liquidation typically arrives when the price has fallen sharply, that is, at the worst possible moment. Under the one-year holding period of Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, gains from the sale of privately held crypto assets are tax-free after more than a year of holding; below that they count as private disposal transactions. Whether a gain or a loss arises in an individual case depends on your acquisition costs and on how the sold holdings are allocated. We looked at the tax view of a sale triggered by someone else in a separate article on forced sales at crypto exchanges in August 2026. For documenting the affected holdings you should keep a clean record of the acquisition date and acquisition cost of each position. This text is no substitute for tax advice.

Custody of the Collateral: Escrow, Rehypothecation and Counterparty Risk

Alongside the threshold, the form of custody decides what happens to your coins if the worst comes to the worst. Debifi describes a multisig escrow in which several keys are needed to move the collateral, and names an authorised key holder alongside lender and borrower who takes part in the liquidation. Firefish describes an escrow environment whose operation is expressly part of its MiCA authorisation. Ledn advertises verifiable proof of reserves and distinguishes loan types by custody model.

The question to look for in the terms is this: may the provider lend out my pledged Bitcoin while the loan is running? Where that is permitted, an additional counterparty risk hangs on your collateral that has nothing to do with the price. Anyone wanting to avoid that construction altogether keeps their holdings in self-custody; which devices are suitable is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

Maturity Without a Grace Period: The Second Reason for Liquidation Besides Price

The price threshold makes it easy to overlook that a loan can also end without any price move at all. For the maturity date Ledn states explicitly that there is no grace period: if the loan is not repaid, not refinanced and does not qualify for renewal, the collateral is liquidated on the due date. And for renewal the ceiling of 65 percent loan-to-value mentioned above applies.

That produces an uncomfortable coupling. A fallen price drives the LTV up and can therefore rule out automatic renewal at the same time, even though the liquidation threshold has not been reached. Someone sitting at 79 percent is one percentage point away from liquidation and fourteen away from being eligible for renewal. If your term ends in the coming weeks, that is the date to note down first.

Getting Collateral Released Again

The way back is regulated too, and tied to conditions. Ledn allows a release of excess collateral when the LTV falls below 30 percent, and then releases down to a target of 40 percent. The loan has to be more than 60 days old, must not be within 30 days of maturity and must not have had another release in the past 60 days; the ceiling is $100,000 per 60 days. So anyone waiting for a recovery gets their coins back under rules written into the contract, not automatically.

How We Calculated: Method, Providers Checked and the Limits of the Survey

The collection date is September 8, 2026. We retrieved the publicly reachable product, terms and FAQ pages of eleven providers of collateralised crypto loans using a browser identifier and a session store, 23 addresses in total, noted the HTTP code and searched the visible text without the HTML scaffolding for the terms LTV, loan-to-value, margin call, liquidation, top-up and collateralisation. The prices come from CoinGecko's public price interface, daily values over twelve months, likewise retrieved on September 8.

The providers checked were Nexo, Ledn, Debifi, Firefish, CoinRabbit, YouHodler, Bitpanda, Coinbase, Wirex, BlockFi and Relai. Two could be evaluated with a specific threshold figure, one more with published starting ratios. The rest could not be evaluated: partly because pages were missing, partly because automated requests were refused, partly because the answers are only loaded once the page is in a browser.

What this survey does not deliver belongs here too. We hold no customer accounts and could therefore not check any view that appears only after logging in. The threshold actually agreed is in your contract and may differ from the published one, expressly so in marketplace models. We left interest, fees and accrued costs out of the worked examples; they increase the debt and thereby the LTV as well. And the price examples are point-in-time calculations, not a forecast.

Checking Your Crypto Loan: What to Take Away

1. Get hold of your three numbers. Opening price, starting LTV and the liquidation threshold in your contract. If the threshold is not in the contract, ask the provider for it in writing; without it you cannot put a figure on your risk. Which firms are worth considering at all and what their terms look like is shown in our provider comparison for crypto lending.
2. Work out your liquidation price and write it down. Opening price times starting LTV divided by liquidation threshold. If the result is less than ten percent below today's price, decide now whether you post more collateral or repay in part, rather than waiting for the second warning. Note the maturity date in the same breath.
3. Prepare for the tax case before it arrives. A liquidation is a disposal, even though you did not trigger it. Keep the acquisition dates and acquisition costs of the pledged holdings to hand; the tax and portfolio tools in comparison help with the allocation.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Primary sources: Ledn, terms for Bitcoin-backed loans and Debifi, FAQ on margin calls and liquidation, both retrieved on September 8, 2026.

If you are holding Steelcoin (STEEL) on Bitpanda, a single date matters: September 30, 2026, 23:59 CET. Until then you can sell your tokens yourself, and without any selling fee. After that, the trading platform switches the sell button off for good. On October 1, 2026, all remaining holdings are converted into euros automatically and credited to your fiat wallet.

Your money is not gone. What you lose after September 30 is something else, and for the value of your holding it can matter a great deal more: the choice of moment. Sell for yourself and you pick your price. Wait, and you get whatever the market pays on the day of the forced liquidation.

That is the complete set of instructions, and it fits into a single paragraph. The rest of this article answers the questions that come afterwards, the ones that have had no answer in the German-speaking market so far. Why is a regulated product being withdrawn when nobody is insolvent? Is there a swap into the successor? What about the Steelcoin ETP in your securities account, which carries the same name and is still a different thing? And why can a payout of one euro be unreachable in practice?

The process is also a lesson in a mechanism that affects every holder who keeps coins with a broker instead of in their own wallet. A listing is not a permanent state. When a platform drops an asset from its programme, what follows is almost always the same pattern: buying stops, a selling window opens, and then automatic disposal. We have written that sequence up in general terms in Delisting explained: what happens when your token can no longer be traded. If you want to spread your custody risk on principle, you will find the licensed providers in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

The three Steelcoin delisting dates at a glance

Bitpanda keeps a timeline in its helpdesk article that carries the whole process, last updated on August 31, 2026. This is how it stands:

Two of these four dates have already passed at the time of writing. The only one that calls for action is the line in the middle, and it leaves you a good three weeks.

What happens if you do nothing at all?

Then the forced liquidation applies. Forced liquidation means the platform sells your position without your consent and credits you the euro equivalent. Bitpanda words it in its helpdesk as the holding being converted on October 1, 2026 at the, literally, “live market price”.

That half-sentence carries the only economic difference between the two routes. For an asset whose buy side has been switched off for a year and whose trading is running out, the prevailing market price is not a particularly robust figure. It may be above today's price on October 1. It may also be below it. Nobody who is honest can predict that for you, and this article does not try.

What can be said is something else, and it needs no forecast: when you sell for yourself, you control a variable that you hand over in an automatic disposal. That is not a statement about the price. It is a statement about who pulls the trigger. The same constellation came up in August at another trading platform, and we described it in Kraken delisting with forced liquidation.

One common misunderstanding belongs out of the way at this point: a delisting is no expropriation. Your tokens are not taken away without compensation, you receive their equivalent value. The loss investors are afraid of is created by the price at which the process happens, not by the process itself.

Security token, utility token and ETP: three wrappers for the same steel promise

To understand why this product is disappearing, you have to keep three terms apart that all appear in the Steelcoin case and are regularly confused.

A security token is a security mapped onto a blockchain. Legally it falls under capital markets law rather than crypto law, which is why it usually needs a prospectus approved by a regulator. A utility token, by contrast, certifies no investor right but a claim to use something, a good or a service. Since the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets took effect, it falls under MiCAR and needs a whitepaper in place of a prospectus. An ETP, finally, is an exchange-traded bearer instrument that you hold in an ordinary securities account and buy through your bank or your broker, with no crypto account at all.

Tokenising a commodity can therefore come in very different legal forms, and the name on the packaging says nothing about which one it is. Steelcoin carries that name in at least three versions, and only one of them is affected by the Bitpanda deadline. Anyone tidying up their assets by the name instead of by the wrapper is tidying up in the wrong place.

Why Bitpanda is delisting Steelcoin: the capital markets prospectus has expired

The reason is stated word for word in the trading platform's FAQ, and it is remarkably unspectacular: “The validity of the prospectus for STEELCOIN has run out, and the asset can no longer be listed on Bitpanda as a result.”

A capital markets prospectus is the document approved by the competent supervisor that allows a security to be offered publicly. Under European law it is valid for twelve months. After that it has to be updated and approved again, otherwise the basis for the public offer falls away. If that does not happen, the product disappears from the shelf without anyone having to have made a mistake.

That makes this case more interesting than an ordinary delisting. The usual reasons an asset is dropped by a platform are thin volume, regulatory pressure or a problem at the project itself. Here it is an expired deadline inside an administrative procedure. The product is not failing, it is losing its authorisation. For you as a holder the outcome is the same; for how the case should be read it is not, and for the question of whether a successor product deserves your trust it certainly is not.

The one-euro flat payment meets the ten-euro minimum withdrawal

On September 3, 2026, Bitpanda automatically wound up all STEEL holdings worth less than one euro and credited the accounts affected with a flat one euro. That sounds like a generous rounding up, and taken on its own it is exactly that.

It becomes interesting in combination with a second rule on the same platform. Its helpdesk states that the minimum amount for deposits and withdrawals in fiat currencies is ten euros. So anyone who holds one euro in their account because of this flat payment and nothing else cannot have it transferred to their bank account. The balance exists, it is simply trapped below the threshold at which a withdrawal can be triggered at all.

In practice that means the one euro works as a balance you can go on using inside the platform, on your next purchase for instance, rather than as a payout. If you were planning to close your account anyway, factor that in. And anyone still holding a larger STEEL position has one more reason not to push the sale to the last minute, because the proceeds land in that same fiat wallet first and not in your current account.

Is there a swap into Steelcoin X (SCX)?

Everyone who has read the delisting notice asks this question, because the name lives on. The issuer, SC Steelcoin GmbH, based in Vienna, today runs Steelcoin X (SCX). By its own account the company is an independent subsidiary of the Frankstahl group, a European steel trader in business for some 140 years, and is run by its founder Marcel Javor.

What matters is the legal form of the successor, because it is a different one. The company page describes Steelcoin X as a “MiCAR-regulated utility token” that gives its holder the right to obtain hot-rolled strip steel. One token stands for one metric tonne of steel; a full coil takes roughly twenty to thirty tokens depending on weight, and physical delivery is provided for across the entire European Economic Area. Access is limited to investors from the EU and the EEA.

An investment product under capital markets law has thereby become a right to obtain goods under MiCAR. That goes beyond a change of label: the rulebook under which you hold your claims is a different one.

No swap offer for legacy holdings can be found on the issuer's publicly reachable pages. On September 8, 2026 we called up the provider's addresses for its legal information, for the ETP and for the ETP's FAQ. All three now redirect to a single landing page for Steelcoin X. Anyone looking there for the old prospectus or for a redemption rule for STEEL will no longer find them. For you as a holder, the practical answer to the opening question follows from that: do not count on being able to grow into the new product. You have the selling window, and if the commodity still interests you, entering SCX is a separate, fresh purchase with due diligence of its own.

If you want to switch platforms for such a fresh start anyway, our comparison of the best crypto brokers is worth a look before you tie yourself to the first provider you come across. Fees for buying, custody and withdrawals differ far more between houses than the advertising suggests.

How long does a payout at Bitpanda take?

A clean distinction pays off here, because in the context of the delisting the question can mean two completely different things.

The first step is the conversion of STEEL into euros, and that happens either the moment you sell for yourself or automatically on October 1. After that the amount sits as a fiat balance in your account on the platform. The second step is the transfer of that balance to your bank account, and only there do the rules for withdrawals apply: the minimum of ten euros mentioned above, plus the daily limits that depend on your verification status and your chosen payment method. How long the transfer itself takes depends on the method and on the banking route, not on the delisting.

The practical advice is therefore this: think of the process in two stages. If you really need the proceeds in your current account, do not leave the sale to the last day, but plan both steps one after the other.

Steelcoin ETP (ISIN DE000A3G9Q60): why your securities account is a separate question

Alongside the token on the trading platform there is a second product of the same name, and many German investors hold that one rather than the token: the Steelcoin ETP with the ISIN DE000A3G9Q60 and the WKN A3G9Q6. It is an exchange-traded bearer instrument with no maturity and no interest that tracks the performance of certain steel products, listed on the Stuttgart stock exchange since November 29, 2023 and likewise issued by SC Steelcoin GmbH. The price sheets name a future on Northern European hot-rolled strip steel as its underlying.

That is a different instrument in a different wrapper, bought through a bank or a broker and held in a securities account. The Bitpanda deadline of September 30 does not affect it. The trading platform's notice speaks explicitly of STEEL holdings on Bitpanda and mentions the ETP nowhere.

What follows from that for the instrument itself cannot be answered credibly from the outside, and here honesty matters more than a tidy answer. Whether the expiry of the prospectus also touches the ETP's listing we were unable to establish: the issuer's legal information page is, as described above, no longer reachable, and the trading venue's own pages answered our requests on September 8, 2026 with an access block. So we claim neither that the ETP is affected nor that it is not.

What we did measure is the state of the freely accessible price sheets, and you should know it if the instrument is sitting in your account. On September 8, 2026, at around 12:40, a common financial portal showed no ask price for the ETP, meaning no price at which anyone is selling. The most recent bid shown there, at 11.84 euros, carried a timestamp of August 14, 2025. Daily turnover stood at zero.

For you that means: a security with no quoted ask price and no turnover is, in case of doubt, not sellable within seconds, whatever your account statement says it is worth. If you hold this ETP, the right next step is a question to your custodian bank about tradability and current pricing, rather than a hunt for a deadline. That is a question for your broker, not one for Bitpanda.

The date trap: deadlines from 2025 no longer apply

Search for this topic and you quickly run into a second pair of dates, and it leads you astray. The delisting is running in two waves. Back in the autumn of 2025 there was already a selling deadline and a withdrawal deadline, in September and October of that year respectively. Those dates have passed and carry no meaning for you.

What counts is the current timeline alone, which Bitpanda itself describes as the conclusion of the process begun in October 2025. If a search engine summary or an older forum post sells you a date from 2025 as current, ignore it. Check the provider's notice in the original instead, and look there for the field with the update date. Where deadlines are concerned, that care is no luxury. This is why we keep the running key dates in a list of their own, see Crypto deadlines and key dates at a glance.

What this case shows about tokenised securities

The launch of Steelcoin in October 2024 was a media event, accompanied by an opening ceremony and by coverage in major business newsrooms. The ending is taking place without an audience. At the time of writing, no German-language media house has reported on the wind-down, not even those that covered the launch in detail. Comparison pages at large business titles are still promoting the product.

From that follows a lesson that reaches beyond this one case and that you can apply to any tokenised product you come across. Attention is at its greatest at the launch and at its smallest at the end. If you hold a product tied to an authorisation, you are responsible for the expiry of that authorisation yourself, because nobody has an economic interest in reminding you of it.

There are three questions you should be able to answer up front for any tokenised security. Which rulebook governs it, capital markets law or MiCAR? How long does the authorisation run, and who renews it? And what happens to your position if the platform drops the product from its programme? The answers are in the prospectus or in the whitepaper, not in the product advertising. If you cannot find them, you already have an answer.

One last point that is easily overlooked: for tax purposes a forced liquidation is a sale like any other. Whether it produces a taxable gain depends on your holding period, your acquisition history and your personal situation. Secure the settlement as soon as it is available, and clarify the assessment with a tax adviser.

Checking the Steelcoin deadline: what to take away

1. Put September 30, 2026 in your calendar, not October 1. Until 23:59 CET you can sell STEEL yourself free of charge and set the moment. After that, the automatic disposal decides. If you are rethinking where you keep your assets anyway, compare the licensed providers in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Check which Steelcoin wrapper you actually hold. The token on the trading platform, the ETP in your securities account and the new utility token SCX are three different things, and only the first of them has a deadline now. If yours is the ETP, address your question about tradability and pricing to your custodian bank; which houses offer which terms is shown by the crypto broker comparison.
3. Document the process before the position disappears. Secure your purchase receipts, your holdings statement and the settlement of the sale or the liquidation while they are still retrievable. For keeping track of such events across several platforms, the tools in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers will help.

The primary sources to read up on: the delisting notice in the Bitpanda helpdesk with the full timeline, and the company page of the issuer SC Steelcoin on the successor product.

(As of September 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

NYU's Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck of racing to claim credit for a Navier-Stokes proof after learning about his unpublished work with Anthropic's Levent Alpöge.

The hackers have returned 3,400 of the roughly 4,000 BTC drained from the sidechain, but about 600 BTC remains outstanding—and some doubt the actors' "white hat" claims.

Bitcoin is defending its golden zone support while the S&P 500 grinds inside its tightest range yet, both waiting on Friday's inflation report before the Fed's September 16 rate call.

The payment processor giant is pairing payment settlement data with blockchain lending tools to help fintechs and stablecoin-linked card programs access working capital.

The Vivek Ramaswamy-founded asset manager added 1,375 BTC last week, its third straight week of 5%-plus growth.

Major altcoins remain broadly bullish, but cooling momentum and nearby resistance levels are raising the risk of short-term corrections.

Major crypto asset manager 21Shares is pushing back against one of XRP’s oldest controversies, arguing that Ripple does not control the XRP Ledger despite its deep ties to the cryptocurrency.

The CLARITY Act is facing a serious risk of failure as Republican senators warn that a lack of compromise over ethics rules could sink the landmark crypto bill.

Shiba Inu logs explosive surge in burn activity over the last 24 hours as nearly 47 million tokens were permanently destroyed from circulation within the period.

Mexican authorities have dismantled a massive clandestine crypto mining farm in Puebla equipped with around 300 computers and allegedly powered through stolen electricity linked to a federal hydroelectric complex.

TLDR:

• Liquid Network exploit minted 4,000 unbacked LBTC via a range proof caching flaw.
• Attackers used SideSwap’s peg-out authorization to convert fake LBTC into real bitcoin. 
• Blockstream patched the bug and recovered 3,400 BTC; 598.5 BTC remains outstanding. 
• Elements v23.3.4 emergency release expected within 48 hours to restore full network function.

The Liquid Network suffered a major security breach on September 6, 2026, after attackers exploited a flaw in its Elements software.

The exploit allowed roughly 4,000 unbacked LBTC tokens to be minted and converted into real bitcoin through the network’s peg-out system.

Blockstream confirmed the Liquid Federation has since recovered most of the stolen funds, though the network remains offline while a patch is finalized.

How the Liquid Network Exploit Unfolded

The incident occurred at Liquid block 4,050,336, when a vulnerability in range proof verification caching went unnoticed by the system.

This flaw let attackers create LBTC that had no bitcoin reserves backing it. The unbacked tokens were then routed through SideSwap, a Liquid Federation member holding peg-out authorization.

Because the validation failure happened before the peg-out request was submitted, SideSwap’s node and the network’s functionaries treated the transaction as legitimate.

The peg-out mechanism itself worked exactly as intended, releasing bitcoin to a whitelisted address tied to SideSwap. From there, the funds were forwarded to an address controlled by the exploiters.

Blockstream clarified that no private keys were compromised during the attack. The Liquid Federation’s functionary nodes operated normally throughout the incident.

Before the breach, the Liquid reserve held close to 4,205 BTC in total. After the unauthorized peg-outs were processed, that balance dropped sharply to just 197 BTC.

Other assets issued on the Liquid Network, including USDT, were not directly affected by the vulnerability. However, those tokens remain temporarily unavailable since the entire network has been paused.

In its statement, Liquid Network said the failure came from several factors that “interacted in ways that ultimately defeated the system’s built-in redundancies.”

Recovery Efforts and Network Restoration Plans

Shortly after the exploit, the responsible party left a message on the bitcoin mainchain. They identified themselves as white-hat security researchers and asked to coordinate with Blockstream on fixing the vulnerability. This message came before any funds had been returned to the network.

Blockstream moved quickly to contain the damage once the exploit was discovered. A patch for the Liquid Network’s bridge nodes was deployed by September 7 at 01:09 UTC. This update closed the vulnerability, preventing any further exploitation of the same flaw.

On September 7 at block 965,950, the exploiters returned 3,400 BTC to the Liquid Federation’s peg wallet. That leaves approximately 598.5 BTC, or 15% of the total taken, still outstanding.

Blockstream said discussions with the individuals involved are continuing in an effort to recover the remaining bitcoin.

Blockstream announced that an emergency release of Elements, version 23.3.4, is currently undergoing review. The update is expected within roughly 48 hours of the announcement.

Once deployed, functionary operators will apply further adjustments to restore full network operations. Liquid Network users have been told no proactive action is required to protect their existing funds at this time.

The post Liquid Network Exploit: Blockstream Recovers 3,400 BTC After $400M Bug appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Visa now runs 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs, up nearly 200% year over year. 
• Cuy Sheffield calls stablecoin-linked cards a “hypergrowth” trend across Visa’s global network. 
• Visa’s Credit Coop pilot has processed $2.7 billion with zero borrower defaults recorded. 
• Nearly $700 billion in stablecoin loans have moved through onchain lending protocols since 2020. 

Visa stablecoin-linked cards are expanding at a rapid pace, with the payments giant now supporting more than 160 card programs worldwide. Volume on these programs has climbed nearly 200% compared to last year.

Visa is also rolling out new data-sharing tools for blockchain lenders, aiming to support issuers as demand for stablecoin products accelerates across the fintech sector.

Visa Stablecoin-Linked Cards See Rapid Adoption

Visa now operates over 160 stablecoin-linked card programs for issuers and program managers globally. This marks close to a 200% increase in volume from the previous year.

Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, said “stablecoin-linked cards are in hypergrowth mode” during an interview with CNBC. He noted that new issuers are joining the network at a steady rate.

Sheffield explained that stablecoin neobanks and fintech firms are “launching cards every week” on Visa’s platform. He pointed to last year’s GENIUS Act as a major driver behind this shift.

The legislation established federal rules for stablecoin issuance in the United States. Sheffield called the law a “huge” turning point for the industry.

Several large financial institutions have since approached Visa about building stablecoin offerings. Sheffield said banks and major payment companies “want to be able to engage and work with Visa” on these products.

Alongside this growth, Visa has been piloting a lending partnership with Credit Coop, which supports card issuers with financing needs.

The pilot offers a credit facility for companies issuing stablecoin-linked cards. Sheffield described it as “a positive step forward for how onchain credit can start to come into our network.”

Credit Coop reports it has processed $2.7 billion in total volume through smart contracts, with no borrower defaulting to date.

Visa Expands Onchain Lending Data For Card Issuers

Visa announced it will share more settlement data with companies that lend on blockchain networks. This data will be paired with onchain lending infrastructure already used by digital asset lenders. The goal is to give lenders clearer insight into how card issuers and fintech firms are performing financially.

According to Visa, nearly $700 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans have moved through onchain lending protocols over six years.

Much of that lending activity has stayed concentrated within crypto-native markets. The new data offering is intended to help lenders evaluate financing requests from digital asset businesses more efficiently.

Card issuers such as Rain and FlexSuperApp are building tools for global payouts and business transactions using stablecoins.

These features are designed to simplify cross-border payments for companies operating in multiple regions. Analysts have noted that stablecoin adoption could reduce transaction costs for merchants in markets like South Korea.

Visa joins other payment companies investing in stablecoin infrastructure this year. Mastercard has built its own stablecoin platform, while PayPal and Circle operate separate systems for digital dollar transactions.

Visa shares have risen roughly 7% so far this year, reflecting investor interest in the company’s blockchain-related expansion plans.

The post Visa Stablecoin-Linked Cards Hit Hypergrowth With 160+ Programs Live Worldwide appeared first on Blockonomi.

The crypto market just received another major political warning, as Senator Cynthia Lummis says failure to pass the CLARITY Act in the current Congress could push the next serious attempt at U.S. crypto market-structure legislation all the way to 2030. The Senate is facing a crucial 60-vote cloture test on September 15, while the bill has already passed the House by 294 to 134. With the regulatory clock tightening, even established names such as Shiba Inu (SHIB) are part of a market where policy developments could shape the next wave of crypto attention.

While regulation takes center stage, the countdown is over, and Apeing is officially live. Its official presale has opened doors, with Stage 1 now at $0.0001. If you are watching the meme coin presale space for fresh projects entering the market, Apeing has now moved into its first active stage, with Banana Drop featuring a limited allocation.

Apeing’s Meme Coin Presale Is Now in the Banana Drop Stage

Apeing’s first official presale stage is live, bringing its meme culture, community energy, and utility into focus. With the project now in its active presale phase, attention is turning to the limited opening allocation. The Apeing meme coin presale is currently in Banana Drop Stage 1 at $0.0001, with a planned listing price of $0.01. With limited availability, the opening stage is already underway, giving you a reason to act while it lasts.

Bring One Ape. Build Your Place in the League.

Apeing’s referral system turns community growth into an active part of the presale, giving buyers and referrers rewards when purchases are completed through referral codes. The Ape Referral League takes that idea further with a live leaderboard that tracks referral activity throughout each monthly cycle. That creates a constantly changing contest where new referrals can shift positions and give active apes another reason to stay engaged. With Stage 1 underway, the league is ready to become part of the action from day one.

For someone choosing $300, the stated 10,000% ROI would represent $30,000 in potential profit if achieved, putting the total value at $30,300. The attraction of entering during a live opening phase is having the opportunity to participate while the presale is actually underway, rather than simply watching its progress from the outside.

How to Buy Apeing: Join Stage 1 in a Few Steps

Getting started with Apeing is simple. Visit the official website, connect your compatible wallet, choose your Stage 1 allocation, and complete the purchase using the supported payment option. Once you are in, you can also explore Apeing’s referral system and Ape Referral League, where sharing your referral code can add another layer of community participation.

SHIB Gains 0.33% as Exchange Flows Put the Recovery Under Pressure

Shiba Inu is pushing higher as fresh market activity gives its recovery another twist. SHIB is trading at $0.055451, up 0.33% in 24 hours, with a $3.21 billion market cap and $68.64 million in daily volume, which has jumped 24.74%. The volume-to-market-cap ratio stands at 2.13%, while recent on-chain data shows roughly 75 billion SHIB moved onto exchanges in a single day, raising questions about the amount of supply becoming available for trading.

The latest exchange-flow shift arrives as SHIB continues trying to build on its recent recovery. CoinMarketCap’s latest analysis says buyers are defending the $0.0000052 area while short-selling activity has declined, creating a tighter setup around nearby resistance. At the same time, the large inflow of tokens to exchanges introduces a counterpoint, as increased available supply could make it harder for the recovery to accelerate.

SHIB Buyers Are Back: Can This Recovery Build Real Momentum?

Technical signals are offering a more constructive backdrop. Investing.com currently rates SHIB’s technical setup as Strong Buy, with 10 technical indicators showing buy signals and RSI around 58.5. CoinLore also describes the broader setup as neutral but notes that SHIB has moved back above its 50-period EMA and recently formed a bullish engulfing pattern.

Volume Is Rising, Support Is Holding: Is SHIB Ready for More?

That leaves SHIB at an interesting crossroads. Rising volume and improving technical readings are supporting the recovery narrative, while elevated exchange flows add another variable to the setup. If buyers continue defending the current support structure, the latest move could develop into a stronger recovery attempt rather than simply another short-term bounce.

Meme Coin Presale Enters a New Chapter as Apeing Stage 1 Goes Live

Apeing brings a live meme coin presale built around meme culture, community engagement, and utility, while Shiba Inu continues to maintain its established role in the meme coin news sector. Shiba Inu’s community and ecosystem keep it relevant across ongoing meme coin news, while Apeing is now creating its own story through its active presale and Stage 1 Banana Drop.

The Apeing presale has officially started; Stage 1 is now live at $0.0001, with a limited allocation. If you are following the current meme coin presale activity, this is the active stage to watch rather than a future opening. Keep connected with official Apeing channels for the latest announcements and follow the live Stage 1 presale while the current allocation remains available.

For More Information:

Website: Visit the Official Apeing Website

Telegram: Join the Apeing Telegram Channel

Twitter: Follow Apeing ON X (Formerly Twitter)

FAQs About the Meme Coin Presale

What is a meme coin presale?

A meme coin presale is an early token sale where a crypto project makes its tokens available before a planned public listing or later market phase.

Is the Apeing meme coin presale live?

Yes. Apeing’s official presale started on September 8, and Stage 1, Banana Drop, is currently live at $0.0001.

What is a meme coin presale?

A meme coin presale is an early token offering where a project makes its tokens available before a planned exchange listing. Presales can use multiple stages with different prices and allocations.

How do you buy into a presale?

You typically visit the project’s official platform, connect a compatible crypto wallet such as MetaMask or Phantom, and use supported cryptocurrencies like ETH, BNB, or SOL to purchase the presale tokens.

The post The Apeing Meme Coin Presale Is Getting Attention: Can Its 10,000% ROI Target Stand Out as Lummis Warns of CLARITY Act Delays? appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• CHYM surged 10.38% after hours as Chime agreed to acquire Stride Bank for $590M.
• Chime will pay $590 million in cash to acquire longtime banking partner Stride Bank.
• The Stride deal could deliver more than $100 million in net synergies for Chime.
• Chime lifted its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to as much as $2.77 billion.
• The Stride Bank acquisition is expected to close during the first half of 2027.

Chime Financial shares surged after hours after the company agreed to acquire Stride Bank for $590 million in cash. CHYM closed at $32.31, down 4.30%, before jumping 10.38% after hours to $35.67. The deal gives Chime direct control of a national bank charter and strengthens its banking infrastructure.

Chime Financial, Inc. Class A Common Stock, CHYM

Chime Moves Toward Full-Stack Banking

Chime will acquire Stride Bank, its banking partner for seven years, through a cash agreement. After closing, Stride will become Chime Bank, N.A. and operate as Chime’s wholly owned subsidiary. The structure gives Chime a faster route to bank ownership than seeking a new charter.

Stride was founded in 1913 and operates from Enid, Oklahoma, with established banking and compliance capabilities. The bank already supports many Chime accounts, which contribute significantly to Stride’s deposit base. That relationship should help Chime integrate banking functions without rebuilding its operating model.

Chime expects bank ownership to remove partner fees, reduce funding costs, and improve unit economics. The company also plans to connect its ChimeCore technology stack with Stride’s banking infrastructure. As a result, Chime expects faster product development, simpler regulatory processes, and more direct account management.

$100M Synergies Support CHYM Stock Rally

Chime expects the acquisition to increase earnings per share immediately after the transaction closes. The company forecasts over $100 million in net synergies from fee savings, lending growth, and cheaper funding. Chime values Stride at about 1.5 times tangible book value and will use existing cash.

The company plans to keep its payments-led, asset-light model while gaining more control over banking operations. Direct ownership should also support lending growth through lower funding costs and integrated underwriting. Meanwhile, Chime expects to keep bank assets below $10 billion for the foreseeable future.

Chime serves more than 10 million active members through its digital banking and payments platform. Its business has relied on partner banks to hold deposits and provide regulated banking services. Buying Stride shifts key infrastructure inside Chime while preserving its consumer-focused operating strategy.

Chime Raises 2026 Revenue Guidance

Chime also raised third-quarter guidance, adding further support to the after-hours CHYM stock rally. The company now expects $705 million in revenue, representing about 30% year-over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA should reach $117 million to $120 million, implying a margin near 17%.

For 2026, Chime projects revenue between $2.76 billion and $2.77 billion. That range represents annual growth of about 26% to 27% under the updated outlook. Adjusted EBITDA should reach $481 million to $489 million, with margins between 17% and 18%.

The transaction should close during the first half of 2027 after receiving required federal approvals. The OCC and Federal Reserve must approve the ownership change before Chime completes the deal. Both boards approved the transaction, while Stride will mainly support Chime’s consumer business after closing.

The post Chime Financial, Inc. (CHYM) Stock: Surge as $590M Stride Bank Acquisition Fuels Rally  appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Rocket Lab launches IMM Apex with 31.5% efficiency for space power systems.
• IMM Apex cuts solar cell mass by 40% while reducing reliance on germanium use.
• Rocket Lab targets higher satellite demand with scaled solar cell production.
• More than 1,100 satellites already use Rocket Lab solar power technologies.
• RKLB closed 2.51% higher as Rocket Lab expanded its space systems portfolio.

Rocket Lab expanded its space power business by releasing the new IMM Apex solar cell for production. The product combines higher efficiency, lower weight, and less dependence on germanium for spacecraft systems. RKLB closed at $65.87, up 2.51%, before falling 0.18% after hours to $65.75.

Rocket Lab USA, Inc., RKLB

IMM Apex Raises Space Power Efficiency

Rocket Lab designed IMM Apex with 31.5% beginning-of-life solar conversion efficiency for space missions. The company also cut cell mass by 40%, increasing specific power for satellites and exploration spacecraft. Higher specific power lets spacecraft builders generate more electricity without adding similar system weight.

The new design removes germanium substrates used in conventional multi-junction solar cells across the industry. Rocket Lab reduces exposure to rising material costs and supply constraints affecting germanium. The change also gives production teams more flexibility when planning larger manufacturing volumes.

Rocket Lab made IMM Apex compatible with mechanical and electrical systems built for germanium-based cells. As a result, customers can integrate the product without major redesigns or costly manufacturing changes. This approach simplifies adoption across established spacecraft platforms while preserving existing engineering processes.

Rocket Lab Expands Solar Cell Production

Rocket Lab improved manufacturing methods and invested in equipment to support demand for space power hardware. The company can produce IMM technology at volumes reaching several hundred kilowatts for customer programs. That capacity supports larger satellite fleets and exploration missions requiring reliable solar power systems.

Rocket Lab has developed and tested its IMM technology through more than a decade of space operations. Earlier IMM cells powered NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter during its historic mission on Mars. The technology has also supported satellites operating in orbit for more than ten years.

The company continues advancing IMM products for civil, commercial, security, and scientific space applications. Rocket Lab has completed extensive testing and qualification work across demanding mission environments. IMM Apex now enters production as the company expands solar manufacturing and customer reach.

RKLB Stock Reflects Broader Space Systems Push

Rocket Lab’s solar operations extend its business beyond launch services and strengthen its space systems portfolio. Its products have supported the James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program. The company has also supplied power technology for national security and interplanetary science missions.

More than 1,100 satellites currently use Rocket Lab solar products across commercial and government programs. IMM Apex adds a lighter option while addressing supply risks facing traditional solar cell production. Its germanium-free structure also supports more predictable sourcing, manufacturing schedules, and production costs.

RKLB stock finished higher as Rocket Lab added another product to its expanding space systems lineup. IMM Apex gives the company a new offering tied directly to satellite and exploration power demand. Future sales will depend on customer adoption, production scale, and growth across global spacecraft programs.

The post Rocket Lab (RKLB) Stock:Surge as New IMM Apex Solar Cell Targets Space Power Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin dipped below $80,000 as strong US jobs data raises the chances of another interest rate hike. Markets now put the odds of a Federal Reserve rate hike on September 16 at about 60%.

According to the recent Bitfinex Alpha report, the US added 162,000 jobs in August, while unemployment stayed at 4.1%. The data suggests the labor market remains strong, giving the Fed less reason to rush into cutting rates.

Strong Jobs Data Puts Bitcoin to the Test

The strong jobs report pushed two-year US Treasury yields above 4.34% as markets adjusted their expectations for the Fed. Higher rates can put pressure on Bitcoin because safer assets such as government bonds become more attractive.

Even so, Bitcoin held up for a while despite pressure. So far, it reached $82,400 on September 3 before pulling back and has since traded between roughly $77,200 and $82,100.

Meanwhile, the cryptocurrency remains about 42% above its July low. US spot Bitcoin ETFs have also continued to attract demand, recording nearly $1 billion in net inflows last week.

ETF Demand and Inflation Could Set the Next Move

Analysts at Bitfinex said this week’s inflation report will be an important test for Bitcoin. They are watching whether ETF demand can remain strong even while short-term interest rates stay high.

If ETF buying continues under those conditions, Bitfinex believes high rates may no longer be the main factor limiting Bitcoin’s recovery. A sustained flow of money into the ETFs could support Bitcoin if other market conditions remain favorable.

Bitcoin also faces a potential selling hurdle as more than 71% of its supply is currently in profit. That figure is approaching the historical average of 74.7%, a level Bitcoin has previously moved above during shifts from weaker markets to stronger ones.

For now, Bitcoin remains between $77,200 and $82,100 as markets wait for fresh inflation data. A weekly close above $82,100 could strengthen the recovery, while hotter inflation could increase pressure on the Fed to raise rates.

The post Bitcoin Calms Below $80K as Fed Hike Odds Climb: Bitfinex Alpha appeared first on CryptoPotato.

DBS and Citi settled a US dollar cross-border payment between Singapore and New York on September 5 using tokenized deposits on SWIFT’s shared ledger, clearing the transfer in minutes over a weekend when a conventional payment can take up to two business days.

The banks used tokenized deposits, commercial-bank money issued on a blockchain, with SWIFT’s ledger acting as an orchestration layer that matched and netted the obligations between the two institutions before final settlement ran through existing payment rails.

“In a global digital economy that never sleeps, businesses need to move money more quickly and efficiently across borders to stay competitive,” said Rachel Chew, Group Chief Operating Officer and Co-Head of Digital Assets, Global Transaction Services at DBS.

DBS Builds Out Tokenized Rails

DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, launched DBS Token Services in 2024 and is the only Asian-headquartered bank in the 12-member core design group behind SWIFT’s ledger.

It also runs DBS Treasury Tokens, a permissioned blockchain for corporate treasury and liquidity management, and has teamed with Ripple and Franklin Templeton to launch tokenized repo markets on the XRP Ledger, listing Franklin’s sgBENJI money market token and Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin on DBS Digital Exchange.

Asia’s outbound cross-border payments are projected to reach $24 trillion by 2033, up from $13.5 trillion in 2025, according to figures cited in the announcement, which also said half of finance leaders are exploring blockchain-based tools for liquidity and foreign exchange management.

“This milestone with DBS on Swift’s ledger reflects Citi’s commitment to building financial infrastructure for our clients and partners that is always-on, interoperable and fit for the future,” noted Mridula Iyer, Head of Services for Asia South at Citi.

Banks Line Up on Swift’s Ledger

The DBS-Citi payment follows the first live tokenized deposit transfer on the network, which HSBC and Standard Chartered ran on August 19.

“With our new ledger capability, we’re extending the trust and stability of established finance into the frontiers of digital money,” said Thierry Chilosi, Chief Business Officer at Swift. Seventeen banks from six continents, among them ANZ, BNP Paribas, MUFG, UBS and Wells Fargo, are piloting live transactions on the ledger, which Swift announced in September 2025 and had Consensys prototype.

Bank of America’s Mark Monaco has said clients are not “beating down the door” for tokenized deposits, though interest is growing. A competing US network, The Bridge, is being built by The Clearing House with JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo for the first half of 2027 and is open to all US banks.

The post DBS and Citi Settle 24/7 Cross-Border Dollar Payment on SWIFT’s Ledger appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Chainlink has staged a strong rally after the mid-August breakout. But its momentum may be cooling down.

A new analysis suggests that LINK’s latest price move is facing several signs of caution after it surged 95% from around $7 to a recent high of $13.77 in just two months.

Three Red Flags

Ali Martinez has flagged a sell signal from the TD Sequential on LINK’s weekly chart, which comes after the crypto asset’s sharp climb and raises the possibility of profit-taking. At the same time, activity from large holders has cooled noticeably. In fact, transactions worth more than $1 million have dropped from roughly 59 over the past two weeks to about 10 on September 7th.

Meanwhile, exchange deposits are adding to the concern, as Martinez found that 1.75 million LINK moved onto exchanges and the total exchange balance rose from 269.25 million to approximately 271 million units. The analyst explained that the combination of these developments could signal a cooldown after LINK’s strong advance.

So while short-term momentum is showing some strain, the broader setup remains constructive. The important development for LINK is that it has now closed above the $10.87 higher-timeframe level, which, according to Crypto Patel, keeps the bullish outlook intact as long as that level holds. With the asset trading above this mark, the current targets remain $50 and $100.

Michaël van de Poppe does not think that “LINK will stall much” and expects to see a strong continuation here towards the next area at $14.50-15 as a potential target zone.

Industry Developments

LINK is among the latest cryptocurrencies being added to Charles Schwab’s crypto trading service, alongside Solana and Avalanche. The expansion means eligible Schwab clients will soon have direct access to the token. The financial giant initially launched the service with Bitcoin and Ethereum in May.

Additionally, Wyoming is expanding its use of Chainlink to give near-real-time, on-chain visibility into the reserves backing its official Frontier Stable Token (FRNT). The state has adopted Chainlink Proof of Reserve after moving FRNT to CCIP in August, in a bid to make reserve verification more continuous by combining independent checks with automated on-chain monitoring.

The post 3 Red Flags Are Emerging for Chainlink After LINK’s Powerful 95% Rally appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Polymarket’s monthly trading volume fell to $8.41 billion in August, down about 35% from July’s $12.89 billion, as the post-World Cup rush that drove prediction markets earlier this summer faded.

Rival Kalshi barely flinched, closing the month at $38.67 billion, a gap that shows how unevenly the slowdown hit the two biggest platforms in the space.

Polymarket’s Volume Cools While Kalshi Holds Steady

According to data compiled by The Block, Polymarket’s combined volume, its core platform plus the separate Polymarket US product, ran $13.95 billion in June, dipped modestly to $12.89 billion in July, then dropped to $8.41 billion in August.

The core Polymarket platform did most of the falling, sliding from $7.89 billion in July to $4.59 billion in August, while Polymarket US held up better, going from $5 billion to $3.82 billion.

Kalshi’s numbers moved in almost the opposite direction. It closed June at $33 billion, climbed to $40.1 billion in July, and only eased back to $38.67 billion in August, a drop of roughly 4%. The gap between the two platforms has widened: Kalshi now processes close to five times Polymarket’s monthly volume, based on the same figures.

DeFiLlama’s tracking shows the pullback has continued into September too, with weekly volume across the industry running around $4 billion, well below the pace platforms saw during the tournament.

A Trading Slowdown That Hasn’t Scared Off Investors

As CryptoPotato reported in July, the World Cup pushed prediction market volume from about $65 million at the beginning of that month to a peak of $5.6 billion by the 22nd, with football pulling in a wave of first-time users across multiple platforms.

That run is the high point the industry has been coming down from. But the volume drop hasn’t dented interest from investors, though, with Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, leading a $1 billion funding round that values Polymarket at $21 billion, a 40% jump from the roughly $15 billion valuation it carried earlier this year.

Data from Predictefy puts Polymarket’s 30-day volume at $3.8 billion against Kalshi’s $11.28 billion, though Polymarket still counts more than 3 million users on its platform.

Legal pressure hasn’t gone away either. Recall that Baltimore sued both Kalshi and Polymarket last month, arguing the companies are running unlicensed sports betting operations, one of several lawsuits the two platforms are juggling.

Kalshi is also fighting a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James, prompting the CFTC to invoke emergency powers to keep it running in the state, all as trading volume settles into a quieter rhythm.

The post Polymarket Trading Slumps 35% as Post-World Cup Lull Hits Prediction Markets appeared first on CryptoPotato.

BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) reported an Ethereum (ETH) treasury of 5,929,198 tokens and combined crypto, cash, and moonshot holdings of $15.7 billion as of September 7, in an 8-K filed September 8 that also disclosed the end of the outside agreement running its staking operations.

BitMine marked its ETH at $2,495 per token, per Coinbase, leaving the total little changed from the $15.6 billion it reported a week earlier, when the stash crossed 5.9 million tokens on a 53,501 ETH purchase. The company added 28,086 ETH over the past week and has bought Ether every week since the strategy began on June 30, 2025.

Those holdings equal 4.9% of the 122.0 million ETH in supply, which BitMine puts at 97% of the way to its goal of owning 5% of all ETH, a target it calls the Alchemy of 5%.

Staking Fee Switches to Flat Rate

BMNR Subsidiary One and Ethereum Tower LLC signed a mutual termination agreement on September 4, ending a management services agreement from March 24 under which Ethereum Tower collected a revenue participation fee, a share of net staking revenue on company-owned ETH.

The original contract carried an initial ten-year term and let BitMine exit for convenience on 180 days’ notice, a period both sides waived. BitMine said it paid no material early termination penalties and that amounts accrued through September 3 remain payable.

A BitMine subsidiary then signed a new advisory agreement with American Validator LLC, an affiliate of Ethereum Tower, effective September 4, for a flat fee of 1.50% of staking rewards on staked ether.

BitMine stakes 5,067,309 ETH, worth $12.6 billion at its mark and about 85% of the treasury, through MAVAN, the in-house Made in America Validator Network it built this year. Chairman Tom Lee put projected annualized staking revenue at $330 million, rising to $386 million once the ether is fully staked, at a 2.61% seven-day yield.

Cash Rebuilds to $593 Million

Total cash and marketable securities reached $593 million on September 7, up from $541 million a week earlier and $78 million on August 16. Alongside the ether, BitMine held 211 Bitcoin (BTC), a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $91 million stake in Eightco Holdings (ORBS), which the release described as one of the only listed equities offering indirect exposure to OpenAI.

BitMine is among the most heavily traded US stocks, at $1.10 billion in average daily dollar volume in the five days to September 4, according to Fundstrat. Its holdings rank first among corporate ether treasuries and second among all crypto treasuries, behind Strategy (MSTR), which the release said owns 840,447 Bitcoin worth about $66 billion

The post BitMine Now Holds $15.7 Billion in Various Assets as Massive ETH Buying Spree Continues appeared first on CryptoPotato.