Anthropic's massive AI compute deals could significantly enhance its market position, potentially reshaping competitive dynamics in AI development.

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The refinancing challenge may lead to tighter monetary policy, impacting economic growth and financial stability amid rising interest costs.

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Trump's call for halting strikes may influence diplomatic efforts, potentially altering conflict dynamics and impacting energy markets.

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Trump's request highlights tensions in U.S.-Ukraine relations, potentially impacting diplomatic strategies and global energy markets.

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Potential U.S.-Iran conflict resolution could stabilize regional relations and influence global markets, impacting geopolitical dynamics.

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Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

Blockstream Tells Hackers To Return Remaining Bitcoin Stolen in Liquid Theft

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

Government Defeated as Lords Back UK Digital Assets Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Spikes, Shrugs off Hot US Inflation Data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Jupiter, tell it you want to swap SOL for USDC, check the price, and press the button. From the user's point of view, there is not much more to it.

So it's only natural to assume that Jupiter is where the trade happens. In reality, Jupiter is closer to a search engine for liquidity. Its software looks across different places willing to take the other side of the trade, compares what they are offering, and sends the order toward the best route it can find. Its current system can choose among ordinary decentralized exchanges, proprietary automated market makers, or propAMMs, and a request-for-quote network where professional market makers compete to quote a price.

The user sees one interface and one price, while underneath it several very different kinds of markets can be competing for the same order.

So the person selling you USDC might not be another user or a public pool funded by thousands of strangers. It could be a professional trading operation using its own money and pricing software, with no consumer-facing exchange and no pool into which you can deposit your own tokens. You never see most of that machinery; you just see the price that comes out of it.

A new analysis from DWF Ventures estimates that propAMMs account for roughly 15% to 27% of daily on-chain DEX volume. For one much smaller corner of the market, SOL-to-stablecoin trades routed through Jupiter, DWF puts their share above 90%.

Those numbers come with an obvious caveat: DWF Ventures is part of DWF Labs, which is itself a crypto market maker and investor. Nonetheless, the exact percentage presented here is much less interesting than what the numbers describe. A form of trading that barely exists in most people's mental model of DeFi has become large enough to shape how some of its busiest markets work.

That leaves crypto in a pretty strange place right now. The first generation of decentralized exchanges was built around the idea that markets could become more open by replacing professional dealers with public software. Anyone could see the pool, put money into it, and trade against it according to rules written into code. Now the professional dealer is coming back, and in some of the most liquid markets it seems to be very, very good at the job.

That would already be an interesting turn for DeFi. It becomes much more consequential when it's happening at the same moment that Nasdaq, the London Stock Exchange, Robinhood, and Kraken are working on putting traditional stocks onto blockchain rails.

For years, finance has argued about whether Wall Street would move onto crypto's infrastructure. But now, a harder question is starting to form behind it: what kind of market will be waiting there when it does?

The dealers are back in business

The original automated market maker was one of DeFi's stranger inventions.

Imagine a currency booth with two piles of money, except there's no dealer behind the glass. One pile contains SOL and the other contains USDC. Software connects the two using a formula. You put SOL in and receive USDC. As SOL accumulates on one side and USDC disappears from the other, the formula adjusts the price. Anyone can also contribute money to the booth and collect a portion of the trading fees.

That solved an enormous problem for early DeFi. A new market did not need to persuade a professional firm to keep buying and selling all day. It needed tokens, a smart contract, and people willing to deposit capital, and the market could run itself.

Running itself, though, isn't the same thing as being good at trading.

Suppose SOL is worth $100 inside the pool. News hits, centralized exchanges move immediately, and professional traders now value SOL at $101. The pool doesn't notice by itself, but an arbitrageur does. They buy the temporarily cheap SOL and keep buying until the pool's price catches up. The pool has learned that SOL is worth $101 by selling SOL too cheaply.

Academic work calls the problem loss-versus-rebalancing. The terminology is less important than what it means: a passive pool can repeatedly trade at yesterday's price against people who already know today's price. That's a tolerable flaw when markets are calm, and trading fees compensate the people providing liquidity. It becomes an expensive problem when prices are moving quickly, and every stale quote is an invitation for serious and sizable arbitrage.

A propAMM reverses the arrangement. Instead of relying on thousands of outsiders to deposit tokens, a professional trading firm supplies its own inventory. Instead of waiting for trades to drag a formula toward the right price, its private software watches outside markets and continually changes what it is willing to buy or sell for. The transaction still settles on-chain, but the thinking that produced the price happens within the company.

It's actually much closer to an electronic currency dealer installed inside a blockchain than to the vending-machine model that defined early DeFi.

It also explains why the word “proprietary” belongs in the name. Solana's own explainer says today's propAMMs are generally closed-source, their liquidity is not open for ordinary public deposits, and getting included by an aggregator is a permissioned process. Users can verify that a transaction happened on-chain without being able to inspect the system that decided what price to offer or why one market maker got the order.

From the old DeFi worldview, that can sound like regression. But, from the perspective of somebody trying to swap SOL quickly and cheaply, the verdict is much less ideological.

Jump Crypto examined roughly 20 million propAMM fills from March and compared them with prices available across Binance, Coinbase, OKX, and Bybit. Its research found that the median SOL-USDC fill executed 0.72 basis points from its benchmark centralized-exchange midpoint, while 91.9% of fills were cheaper than Jump's estimate for the lowest institutional centralized-exchange fee tier.

Jump is also a trading firm with commercial exposure to this market structure, so its study has its own incentives. Even so, the result helps explain why these venues are winning orders. Routers send them volume because, for certain trades, they can offer very good execution.

While this is a clear separation of both the mechanics and economics of decentralized trading, it's also a cultural break with early DeFi. The first version of DeFi treated openness as part of the product itself. The pool was public, the code could be inspected, liquidity came from users, and the route from capital to transaction was visible enough that a technically competent person could follow most of it.

The newer version asks a more consumer-like question: if another system gives you a better price, how much of that machinery do you actually need to see? Once the answer becomes “not very much,” the exchange begins to disappear behind the interface.

DeFi is turning exchanges into routers

Solana was particularly hospitable to this model because professional market makers care obsessively about old prices. A firm offering SOL at $100 doesn't want that quote hanging around while the rest of the world trades at $101. Every extra moment gives somebody an opportunity to trade against the old price before the firm can replace it.

Ethereum still operates with 12-second slots. Solana, by comparison, reached its 300-millisecond target on Aug. 28, which CryptoSlate examined through the economics of stale-price arbitrage. The networks build and process transactions differently, so the comparison is not one-for-one, but the attraction is easy to understand. Professional market makers want to update prices as often and as cheaply as possible, and Solana's own work on shorter slots explicitly points to lower stale-price exposure for liquidity providers and market makers.

You can reach the same destination another way, though. Instead of continually publishing every price on-chain, a system can ask professional firms for prices elsewhere and put only the winning trade on-chain.

That's essentially what request-for-quote systems do. On 0x's RFQ network, an application asks professional market makers for private off-chain prices, compares those offers with ordinary public AMM liquidity, and returns whichever route offers the better result. For highly traded pairs such as USDC-WETH and WBTC-WETH, 0x says its RFQ liquidity beats AMM pricing about 52% of the time.

Jupiter is combining several versions of that on Solana. Public DEX liquidity, propAMMs, and professional quote systems all live behind the same interface, which means the trader no longer has to choose what kind of market to use before making the trade.

That may be the deeper and more important transition here. Old DeFi effectively told the user: here is a pool, now trade against it. But new DeFi is starting to say: tell me what you want, and I'll figure out who should fill it.

Traditional finance already does this. When somebody submits an order to buy a stock, the customer usually doesn't choose the exact market center or dealer that executes it: it's the broker that routes the order. The SEC's basic explanation of US equity execution describes brokers choosing among exchanges, electronic networks, market makers, and internalization depending on where they can obtain the best available execution.

PropAMMs aren't just Wall Street dark pools transplanted onto Solana, and treating them that way would miss what makes the crypto version interesting. Blockchain settlement is observable, so the assets move across public infrastructure, and anyone can inspect the resulting transaction. What can remain private is the machinery around that transaction: the pricing model, the inventory decision, parts of the route, and sometimes the identity of the firm competing for the trade until execution occurs.

That creates a different definition of transparency. A financial market can expose ownership and settlement to public verification without exposing every part of price formation, and this distinction is becoming much more consequential as the assets moving through these systems stop being purely crypto assets.

Wall Street is coming just as DeFi changes course

Nasdaq said Thursday that its venture arm agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, Kraken's parent company, while the two firms continue work on Nasdaq Equity Tokens. Nasdaq expects the framework to launch in the second quarter of 2027 and plans to connect it with Payward's xStocks network.

The London Stock Exchange is moving in the same direction. On Sept. 1, LSEG announced a partnership with Payward around tokenized public equities and said it intends, subject to regulatory approval, to list xStocks for trading on its planned LSE 24 venue in 2027.

This is no longer a hypothetical market measured in a handful of pilots. CryptoSlate has already tracked tokenized stock trading at crypto-scale volumes, while the harder ownership question has become its own market-structure issue because products that resemble shares can come with very different rights. Tokenized stocks can look like familiar equities without giving buyers the same legal position, and the infrastructure beneath them can be just as unfamiliar.

Robinhood is a good example of what that infrastructure may look like in practice. Robinhood Chain has already turned tokenized stocks into assets that can circulate through permissionless crypto markets, but the professional liquidity layer looks much less like an open AMM experiment. 0x says its Stock Token implementation connects applications to professional market makers through RFQ, with USDG as the primary base pair and Tokka Labs as the primary maker participating through that system.

That's the point where the DWF report's speculation about real-world assets becomes much more important than the report itself. Mature tokenized assets don't have to inherit the market design of early DeFi simply because they settle on a blockchain. Tokenized Apple shares have a deep reference market elsewhere, professional firms capable of managing inventory around them, and traders who care about execution quality. Putting that share on-chain won't suddenly make a passive public pool the natural place to trade it.

For years, the tokenization debate asked whether Wall Street's assets would move onto crypto's rails. But a much more important question is appearing behind it: when they get there, whose market structure will they use?

CryptoSlate has already seen the same tension elsewhere in tokenized equities. Markets sold as a way to remove financial middlemen can still depend heavily on old financial infrastructure, including the brokers and custodians holding the underlying shares. One broker now handles the backing for a large share of tokenized equities. The propAMM transition points in the same broader direction from the trading side: blockchains can alter which parts of finance are public without making every intermediary disappear.

The trade is public, but the trading desk isn’t

The easiest conclusion would be that DeFi spent years trying to escape Wall Street and then rebuilt it anyway, but that's too simple. What crypto may actually be doing is separating two things that were once treated as if they had to travel together: transparency of settlement and transparency of execution.

Blockchains can publicly establish that a trade occurred, transfer the assets, and let those assets move through programmable infrastructure without requiring the market maker's pricing algorithm to be public. The settlement layer can be open while the execution layer contains private firms competing with one another.

There's an economic reason for doing this. Professional market makers that can protect themselves from stale prices and traders exploiting old quotes don't have to build those losses into every price they give ordinary users. Better information and faster repricing can make a private dealer cheaper to trade against than a fully public pool.

The trade-off moves somewhere else. If users stop choosing exchanges and start choosing routers, the router gains much more influence over the market. It decides which firms are allowed to compete, which liquidity sources receive an order, what information accompanies it, how quotes are compared, and how transactions reach the blockchain.

Solana's own propAMM explainer identified several versions of this problem. The code can be closed, inclusion by aggregators is permissioned, and users can't always independently verify why one market maker won when several offer equivalent prices. The blockchain can show the trade that happened without showing the full competition that happened before it.

That becomes more important as market making, routing, transaction delivery, and block building begin to touch one another. Blockworks Research has examined the relationship among HumidiFi, transaction-landing system Nozomi, and block builder Harmonic, all associated with Temporal, and found periods when HumidiFi price updates reached Harmonic validators first much more often than other setups. The advantage later disappeared.

The episode is more interesting as a preview of the next DeFi market-structure debate than as an allegation: when several layers can influence execution, what exactly counts as best execution on a blockchain?

Traditional finance has spent decades writing rules around versions of that problem. Best execution, order routing, market access, quote priority, and conflicts between brokers and dealers all exist because the place where an investor presses “Buy” is only the beginning of the transaction. DeFi is rediscovering some of that complexity while rebuilding the system from different pieces.

The difference is that some pieces that historically lived inside the same financial institution can now be separated and placed on public networks. That makes the market more inspectable in some places and less inspectable in others, which is a much more interesting outcome than simply declaring it more or less transparent.

None of this means the original AMM is disappearing. Its weakness is also the reason it will probably survive.

Professional market makers work best when they have some idea what an asset is worth. SOL has deep markets elsewhere; Apple has a stock exchange; Treasuries have a reference price. Trading firms can look at those markets, calculate a value, hold inventory, and quote around it.

Now imagine somebody creates Token X at 3 a.m. There may be no deep outside market, no dependable reference price, and no professional firm willing to warehouse it. Before anybody can make a sophisticated market, the asset needs a market at all. Public AMMs don't need to know what Token X is worth: someone just supplies Token X and USDC, and trading can begin.

That's why the DWF data is more interesting as evidence of a sorting process than as proof that one design is replacing another. Professional liquidity works especially well for established assets with deep reference markets. Traditional AMMs retain their advantage in the long tail, where permissionless market creation is more valuable than shaving fractions of a percentage point from execution.

Tokenized finance could divide along the same line. Apple shares, Treasuries, SOL, ETH, and other heavily traded assets are natural territory for sophisticated dealers competing behind routers. Assets without mature outside markets may still depend on public pools willing to trade whatever anyone deposits.

Crypto began with a much grander cultural promise: software would remove the financial middleman. But its trading markets are now producing a more complicated answer. Some intermediaries were products of old infrastructure, while others existed because somebody still has to price risk, hold inventory, and stand ready to trade.

Blockchain technology doesn't have to eliminate that role to remake the market around it. The rails can be public, settlement can be inspectable, assets can move between applications instead of being trapped inside one institution, and professional dealers can compete over the same order without owning the infrastructure underneath it. The person pressing “Swap” may never know which one won.

The future exchange may be a blockchain everyone can inspect, wrapped around a trading desk almost nobody can see.

The post Why 90% of your DeFi trades are quietly being routed back to Wall Street market makers appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Satsuma Technology said the High Court of Justice approved the cancellation of 11,235,874,700 B shares, authorizing the share-capital reduction behind a £30,718,881 return to shareholders. The return is fixed at £0.002734 per B share after the UK-listed company sold all 669 BTC it disclosed.

The B shares are the mechanism for moving cash back to investors. Under the transaction structure, eligible investors received one B share for each ordinary share held at the record time. Canceling those B shares allows Satsuma to make the corresponding capital repayment while the ordinary shares proceed toward delisting.

Shareholders had approved the capital return and delisting on July 20. That vote launched the sequence, but it did not itself complete the Bitcoin sale or satisfy the court condition attached to the reduction.

From Bitcoin sale to fixed return

Satsuma sold the 669.4867 BTC between July 24 and July 31 at a net volume-weighted average realized price of £47,667 per BTC, generating £31,912,395. The company reported £35,324,953 in cash at the record time, including cash held by its subsidiary.

It calculated the B-share value after allowing for £2.6 million of estimated transaction and termination costs and retaining £2 million as working capital. In the Aug. 4 announcement, both the £30,718,881 aggregate return and the £0.002734 per-share amount were still explicitly conditional on High Court approval.

The Sept. 8 decision removed that judicial condition. Satsuma's earlier circular said the reduction would become effective when the court order was registered. The Sept. 8 court-approval notice announced that the company would return the fixed amount, but did not say the cash had already reached shareholders.

The Sept. 8 settlement update said eligible shareholders were expected to be sent checks or receive bank-account or CREST credits on or before Sept. 28. That future deadline separates approval of the payout from actual receipt.

Satsuma's last disclosed timetable listed Sept. 11 as the expected final day of dealings and 8 a.m. on Sept. 14 as the expected cancellation of its London listing. The Aug. 4 update retained the Sept. 14 date. These dates describe the announced timetable; the cited updates do not confirm completion of either milestone.

The court ruling therefore finalized the amount due to eligible B-share holders and removed the main remaining approval condition. Distribution of the cash and cancellation of the London listing are the next stated milestones.

The post UK company sells entire Bitcoin reserve to return 669 BTC to shareholders – here is who actually gets paid appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Commercial manufacturers whose connected hardware wallets or wallet software meet the European Union's product test must now warn cyber authorities within 24 hours of discovering an actively exploited vulnerability or severe security incident.

The requirement took effect Sept. 11, 2026, under the EU's Cyber Resilience Act, or CRA. The European Commission's reporting guidance says the clock applies to manufacturers of products with digital elements.

The CRA is a horizontal product law. The Commission's implementation FAQ says it applies to hardware and software made available on the EU market. The legal test also requires the product's intended or reasonably foreseeable use to include a direct or indirect data connection to a device or network.

A commercially supplied connected hardware wallet or downloadable wallet app can meet that test. However, EU guidance does not name wallet brands or declare every wallet service or project covered. Coverage depends on the specific product, how it is supplied and any applicable exclusion.

What manufacturers must report

The first filing is an early warning due without undue delay and no later than 24 hours after a manufacturer becomes aware of the vulnerability or incident. It must indicate, where applicable, the member states where the product is known to have been made available. For a severe incident, the warning must also say whether unlawful or malicious acts are suspected.

A fuller notification is due within 72 hours unless the relevant information was already provided. For an actively exploited vulnerability, that filing adds general information about the product, exploit and vulnerability, plus corrective or mitigating measures. For a severe incident, it adds the nature of the incident, an initial assessment and available mitigation information.

The final deadline differs by event. A vulnerability report is due no later than 14 days after a corrective or mitigating measure becomes available. The CRA sets the severe-incident final report deadline at one month after the 72-hour notification, as detailed in the regulation.

Manufacturers file once through the Single Reporting Platform launched by ENISA, the EU cybersecurity agency. The portal sends the notification to the designated coordinating Computer Security Incident Response Team and makes the information available to ENISA, then supports distribution to other relevant national teams. Manufacturers must also inform impacted users and, where appropriate, all users when action is needed, including measures they can take.

The reporting rule reaches in-scope products placed on the market before Dec. 11, 2027. That makes the new clock relevant to existing product lines, not only wallets first sold after the broader law takes effect.

Open-source licensing does not create a blanket exemption. The Commission's open-source guidance says commercially supplied free and open-source products can face manufacturer obligations. Non-monetized software supplied by its manufacturer should not count as commercial activity, while individual contributors are not treated as manufacturers for software outside their responsibility.

Open-source software stewards are a separate legal category, and their reporting duties begin Dec. 11, 2027. That is also when the CRA's main product-security requirements take effect. The Sept. 11 change starts the rapid reporting regime, not the law's broader secure-design and product-lifecycle framework.

The post Crypto wallet creators now have just 24 hours to alert regulators when flaws are exploited appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Thailand’s Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed a same-owner requirement for stablecoin transfers that would sharply narrow how customers can move tokens such as USDT through licensed crypto firms. The measure remains at the consultation stage and is not yet an operative rule.

Under the SEC Board-approved Sept. 3 consultation principles, stablecoins entering a customer account at a digital asset operator would have to come from an account or wallet verified as belonging to that customer. Withdrawals would likewise have to go to an account or wallet verified as the customer’s own.

The consequence is explicit: a stablecoin deposit from another person’s account, or a withdrawal to another person’s account, would be prohibited.

How the proposed ownership gate would work

As drafted, the restriction would stop a customer from using a Thai SEC-supervised platform to receive a transfer from someone else’s wallet or to send stablecoins to another person’s wallet. Its reach is limited to transfers conducted through supervised digital asset operators, rather than peer-to-peer transfers that take place entirely outside those firms.

The proposal would also require stablecoin transfer values to be consistent with a customer’s income source and financial position. Inbound and outbound transfers would each be capped at 5 million baht per day, per person, per operator.

The cap would not apply to transfers between customer accounts through SEC-supervised operators when both firms comply with the Travel Rule. The Sept. 11 consultation also lists cap exemptions for specified operator business transfers, certain Bank of Thailand-authorized operators and stablecoin/baht market makers. It remains unclear whether that cap waiver would affect the separately stated same-owner test, and consultation could add implementation detail.

The SEC said it developed the measures after observing significant growth in stablecoin transaction volume and value, particularly involving USDT. It also cited patterns that it associated with risks tied to money laundering, cybercrime and the circumvention of rules governing international money transfers.

The ownership test would be separate from Thailand’s finalized Travel Rule. That rule requires digital asset operators to collect information about transfer parties, check counterparties and verify ownership or control of certain self-hosted wallets. It takes effect on Feb. 27, 2027.

As described, the stablecoin proposal would add a stricter condition when a transfer crosses the boundary of a licensed operator: the outside sending or receiving account would have to belong to the platform’s customer, not another person.

On Sept. 11, the SEC opened the public consultation, with comments due by Sept. 25, 2026. It did not announce an effective date for the proposed stablecoin restrictions. Until final rules are issued, the same-owner restriction remains a proposal.

The post Thailand’s stablecoin proposal would block transfers to other people’s wallets appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin failed to break $80,000 on Sept. 11 as US stocks climbed about 1% and long-dated Treasury yields stayed near levels not seen in years.

Bitcoin registered an intraday high of $79,890, still short of the $80,000-$82,000 resistance zone identified by digital asset trading firm QCP. The S&P 500 closed up nearly 1%, while the Dow and Nasdaq followed closely.

That split is not proof that Bitcoin has decoupled from macro conditions yet or that sellers around $80,000 have become the dominant market force. Nevertheless, Bitcoin still has to show it can reclaim the level that has capped its recent advance.

Bonds eased from their peaks, but conditions stayed tight

August core CPI rose 0.3% on the month, keeping the Fed decision central to Bitcoin’s weekend setup.

The 10-year yield briefly touched 4.9915%, its highest level in almost three years, while the 30-year reached 5.424%, a 19-year high. The yields later pulled back to roughly 4.95% and 5.341%, respectively.

The move left the 10-year yield near 5%, maintaining a demanding backdrop for risk assets. Markets priced about an 85% probability of a quarter-point Fed rate increase the following week.

Bitcoin’s weaker showing narrowed the weekend question: was the cryptocurrency only lagging an equity rebound, or was resistance near $80,000 becoming an obstacle in its own right?

The options market sets a two-level test

QCP reported that the Sept. 12 Bitcoin options expiry carried at-the-money implied volatility near 46%, compared with roughly 38%-40% across the rest of the curve.

Turnover was concentrated in Sept. 12 calls at $78,500 and $80,000, and QCP also saw steady demand for $75,000 puts expiring Sept. 11 and Sept. 18.

Call activity kept upside exposure active near spot, while the puts showed that investors were still paying for downside protection.

QCP’s levels reduce the weekend setup to support at the $76,300-$76,500 zone and resistance at the $80,000-$82,000 range.

A weekend break can establish direction, but cannot by itself distinguish macro pressure from Bitcoin-specific selling.

Wednesday’s Fed decision is the verification event

The Federal Reserve’s Sept. 15-16 meeting includes a new Summary of Economic Projections.

The test is whether Bitcoin can sustain a move beyond QCP’s range after the announcement. A break above $80,000–$82,000 would strengthen the recovery case; a loss of $76,300–$76,500 would weaken the consolidation case. Neither outcome alone would establish the cause.

The post Bitcoin’s $80,000 ceiling looks fragile after stocks shrugged off near-5% Treasury yields appeared first on CryptoSlate.

When your Sparkasse starts offering Bitcoin in October, you will not be buying coins that you then move to a wallet of your own. You receive a position in your securities account, and the cryptographic keys behind it stay with the bank. That is the central difference between what a high-street bank offers and an account at a crypto exchange, and it decides what you can actually do with your holdings later on.

This article takes on exactly that point. It explains what custody in a bank account means in practice and in law, which obligations an authorised custodian has to meet under the EU regulation MiCAR, which three public registers let you look up who really holds your crypto-assets, and which questions you should settle before your first purchase. The launch timetable and the cost question we have covered elsewhere.

Crypto powered by Deka: what custody in a bank account actually means

The Sparkassen offering is called Krypto powered by Deka. It was developed by DekaBank, the securities house of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, and it runs inside the Sparkasse app rather than in a separate application. For trading and the technical infrastructure, DekaBank works with Börse Stuttgart Digital. According to the reports available so far, a launch from mid-October 2026 is planned, with an internal test phase in September and a rollout in waves. Each of the roughly 370 regional Sparkassen decides for itself whether and when it switches the feature on. There is therefore no nationwide launch date, and the question of whether your own institution is taking part is answered only by your own institution.

What this construction lacks is the part many investors take for granted: the withdrawal of the coins you bought to an address that belongs to you. The holdings stay in central custody. You see them in your account, you can sell them, and you can hold them. A transfer to the outside is so far not part of what the high-street banks offer.

The difference from an ETN and a fund unit

A crypto ETN tracks a price and is legally a debt security issued by its issuer. The bank offering works differently: what is bought is the crypto-asset itself, it is simply held in custody for you. Economically the coin is yours, but the party able to dispose of it is the custodian. This split between economic ownership and actual control is the core of every custody model, and it applies in exactly the same way at a centralised crypto exchange.

Private key, wallet and custody position: the three terms kept apart

A private key is a secret sequence of numbers that allows transactions on a blockchain to be signed. Whoever holds it can move the associated holdings. Whoever does not hold it cannot, regardless of what an account overview says.

A wallet is not a purse with coins inside it but the management of those keys. The coins themselves exist only as entries on the blockchain. A hardware wallet is a device that generates the key and never lets it leave, so that it cannot be skimmed off an infected computer. If you want to see how the common devices differ, our hardware wallet comparison is a place to start.

A custody position, finally, is an entry in your bank's books. It states that a certain holding is due to you. It says nothing about which blockchain address that holding sits on and who can move it. This is exactly where the bank offering differs from self-custody, and anyone who confuses the three terms underestimates either the risk or the convenience.

Why the Sparkasse makes no provision for a transfer to an external wallet

From the provider's point of view several reasons speak for the bank model, and none of them is arbitrary. A payout to any address of the customer's choosing turns the provider into a transfer service and brings obligations from anti-money-laundering supervision with it, among them checks on the origin and the recipient of crypto-asset transfers. It also creates sources of error that a bank serving a mass-market clientele is reluctant to carry: a mistyped address, the wrong network, a loss with no way back.

For you as an investor that has two consequences. The first is convenient: you need no seed phrase, there is nothing you can misplace, and if something goes wrong you have a counterparty with an address in Germany. The second is inconvenient: you are tied to the institution. Moving to another provider means selling and buying again, not transferring. Anyone planning such a move triggers a sale that matters for tax, and that is something entirely different from shifting coins between two addresses.

What a sale instead of a transfer triggers

On a transfer between your own addresses, the acquisition date does not change. On a sale followed by a fresh purchase, the period under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act starts again, and any gain is assessed in the year of the sale. That is no argument against the bank account, but it belongs in the calculation before you settle on a provider.

MiCAR Article 75: the obligations of the custodian holding your crypto-assets

Since Regulation (EU) 2023/1114 on markets in crypto-assets, MiCAR for short, the custody of crypto-assets is no longer a legal vacuum. In its guidance note on crypto-asset services, BaFin lists ten services that require authorisation. First among them is the custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients, defined as the safekeeping or control of crypto-assets or of the means of access to them. Anyone offering this commercially needs an authorisation.

Article 75 of the regulation describes what such a custodian has to deliver. Four points are relevant to you as a customer:

• There has to be an agreement with you that sets out at least the identity of the parties, the nature of the service, the security procedures applied, the fee structure and the applicable law.
• The custodian keeps a register of positions and of every movement of crypto-assets it holds on your behalf.
• Client holdings are segregated from own assets. That segregation applies on the blockchain as well: own holdings sit on different network addresses from client holdings.
• Under the national law applicable in each case, the crypto-assets held in custody should also stand legally separate from the service provider's own estate, so that its creditors cannot reach them in an insolvency.

That is considerably more protection than an unregulated provider offers, and it is the real reason banks are taking on this business at all. A guarantee against every loss it is not. The regulation sets obligations, it does not replace a deposit guarantee scheme, and crypto-assets are not covered by the statutory deposit protection that applies to balances in current accounts.

Insolvency of the custodian: why segregating client holdings counts

The question of what happens to your holdings in a worst case is decided at a single point: are they assigned to the custodian's estate or to yours. Where segregation is clean, they do not fall into the insolvency estate but are due to the clients. That is exactly what the segregation duty in Article 75 MiCAR aims at, and exactly why it is not red tape but the core of consumer protection in this model.

In practice that means the institution's credit standing matters less in a custody model than its organisation. What counts is whether client holdings are kept separate technically and legally, and whether the record-keeping stands up to scrutiny in case of doubt. A provider who does not answer these questions when asked has already given you an answer.

Three questions you can put to your institution

1. Who is the custodian of the crypto-assets, and under which authorisation does it operate?
2. Are client holdings kept separate from own holdings, and does that apply on the blockchain too?
3. Which documents do I receive on acquisition date and acquisition cost, and in what format?

Checking CASP authorisation: Bundesanzeiger, the BaFin database and the ESMA register

In the language of the regulation, an authorised provider of crypto-asset services is a CASP, in full a crypto-asset service provider. On its page on crypto-asset services, BaFin names three registers in which you can look up an authorisation: the Bundesanzeiger, the BaFin company database and the MiCAR register of the European securities regulator ESMA. All three are public and free of charge.

This check is worth doing not only at your own bank, where the outcome will hardly be a surprise, but above all at every other provider you are looking at alongside it. If you are weighing a regulated trading platform as an alternative to the bank account, our overview of regulated crypto exchanges lists the providers that operate in the EU with an authorisation. Querying the register does not replace that overview, it adds to it.

How to spot a sloppy claim

It becomes conspicuous when a provider advertises a registration that is not an authorisation at all, when it names a permission for a service other than the one actually offered, or when the name in the register differs from the one on the website. Group structures are a frequent stumbling block here: what is authorised is often a particular company, not the brand.

What stays closed to you without a key of your own

The practical limits of the bank account are concrete and can be assessed in advance:

• No self-custody. The phrase "not your keys, not your coins" describes exactly this position. You carry the custodian risk, not the risk of losing your own backup.
• No staking and no lending. Anyone holding Ethereum in a bank account does not take part in validation and receives no staking rewards, as long as the provider does not explicitly offer it.
• No on-chain use. Paying, applications in decentralised finance, signing a message with your own address: all of that presupposes control over the key.
• Trading only in the provider's hours. Blockchains run around the clock, bank offerings do not necessarily. Which trading hours apply is set out in the terms.

Against that stand advantages that should not be talked down. Settlement runs through an account you already have. There is no separate onboarding, no additional identity check and no payout address you can enter wrongly while setting things up. For beginners with small amounts that is a genuine gain in safety compared with a first attempt at running a wallet.

Holding period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: securing acquisition data in a bank account too

For private disposals of crypto-assets, Germany currently applies the one-year holding period of Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Hold for longer than a year and you dispose of your holdings tax-free. Sell before that and you pay tax on the gain at your personal rate, provided the exemption threshold is exceeded. So that the tax office can follow this, you need two pieces of information per position: the acquisition date and the acquisition cost.

In a bank account you get both from your institution, and that is a convenience advantage over records you keep yourself. Even so, you should not rely on it alone. Save the statements as you go and in a format you will still be able to read after changing provider. A tax and portfolio tool helps above all where you hold assets in several places, because otherwise the allocation quickly becomes hard to follow.

On top of that comes an open building site in 2026: a draft bill from the Federal Ministry of Finance would treat gains on crypto-assets as investment income in future, with a cut-off date for new acquisitions. Nothing has been decided, and today's rules continue to apply unchanged. We have written up the state of play on grandfathering and the cut-off date separately. For the custody question that means one thing above all: complete acquisition data is becoming more important rather than less.

Inheritance, power of attorney and account freezes: where the bank account has the edge

Self-custody has a weak spot that is rarely discussed: it works only as long as the holder is able to act. If the backup is lost, the holding is gone, and gone for good. If the holder dies without anyone being able to reach the backup, the same applies. In a bank account, by contrast, the familiar mechanisms take effect: heirs prove their entitlement, a lasting power of attorney has effect, and a court-appointed guardianship is recognised.

Conversely, the bank model has one case that self-custody does not know: the freeze. If an account is temporarily blocked as part of an anti-money-laundering check or on suspicion, you cannot reach your holding even though it is due to you. Both models therefore carry a risk of failure, it simply sits in different places. Those holding larger amounts often split them deliberately across both routes.

Bitcoin and Ether at launch: why the coin list differs from source to source

On the question of what is to be tradable at launch the statements diverge, and that should be said openly. In early September 2026 the Sparkassen- und Giroverband Hessen-Thüringen set out the launch for the 46 Sparkassen in Hesse and Thuringia, naming Bitcoin and Ether. Industry reports on the same project speak of a broader initial selection that, alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum, also covers XRP, Solana and Polygon.

Both can be true, because a rollout in waves means exactly that: what a single regional association announces for its own institutions need not be the full scope of the overall offering. For your decision the list is secondary in any case. What matters is what actually appears in your own institution's app on launch day, and that is settled only then. For the timetable as a whole we have gathered the detail in our assessment of the planned October launch, and the cost side in our analysis of commission and spread.

What the statements on custody still leave open

What is publicly documented so far is the division of roles between DekaBank and Börse Stuttgart Digital, along with the fact that customers receive a custody position and not a key of their own. What is not publicly documented is how the record-keeping is organised in detail, whether there is a register of holdings at individual customer level, and which evidence customers receive in a dispute. Those questions are answered only by the contract documentation, which has to be available to you before your first purchase. Read it before you agree, not afterwards.

Checking Sparkasse custody: what to take away

1. Establish before buying who holds the assets and under which authorisation. The contract documents name the custodian, the three public registers confirm it. If you are considering a trading platform alongside, apply the same yardstick and take a look at our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Decide deliberately between a bank account and self-custody. For small amounts and for inheritance cases much speaks for the bank account; for amounts you want to hold long term and control yourself, much speaks for a device of your own. The differences between the common models are set out in our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Secure the acquisition date and the acquisition cost from your first purchase onwards. File the statements in a readable format and bring them together if you hold assets in several places. Which tools deliver that is set out in our overview of tax tools and portfolio trackers.

For further reading at the source: BaFin describes the crypto-asset services that require authorisation in its guidance note on crypto-asset services under MiCAR, and the authorisation of an individual institution can be looked up in the BaFin company database.

(As of September 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

At 13:15:45 UTC on September 23, 2026, the largest token lock-up in Humanity Protocol's history to date comes to an end. According to the emissions model, 292,857,143 H are released from six separate buckets in that single minute. Two days later, at 14:00 UTC on September 25, the exchange Kraken closes withdrawals for H and HUMANITY for good. Anyone holding H in a Kraken account therefore has to act in exactly the window in which, on paper, the largest additional supply in the project's history reaches the market.

The two dates have nothing to do with each other. One is a vesting date set by the project, the other a business decision by an exchange. For you as a holder they still fall in the same weekend, and that turns two footnotes into a task with a deadline.

The practical core of this is a custody question, not a price question. Tokens sitting in an exchange account follow that exchange's deadlines: when a trading pair is discontinued, the operator decides how long you have to move your holdings out and what happens to them afterwards. Anyone holding in self-custody does not have that problem, but has another one instead: they need to know the correct contract address. At Humanity there have been two of them since June.

This article recalculates the unlock from the emissions dataset itself rather than passing on the figure in circulation, shows which part of it can actually reach the market, and then walks through checking your own holdings. All figures were gathered first-hand on September 13, 2026.

What happens at Humanity Protocol on September 23, 2026

Humanity Protocol is an identity network: users prove by biometric means that there is a human being behind an account, and are paid in H for doing so. The token runs as an ERC-20 contract on Ethereum. Like almost every project of this kind, Humanity issued only a fraction of its total supply at launch; the rest is spread over years and released step by step.

In that schedule, September 23 is not an ordinary monthly date but a cliff: a cut-off date on which an amount that was fully locked until then becomes available all at once. Our own analysis of the DefiLlama emissions dataset (retrieved September 13, 2026, HTTP 200) shows six buckets carrying the same timestamp, 13:15:45 UTC on September 23, 2026. Those six tranches add up to 292,857,143 H.

At the price of $0.0833 that the same provider's price interface reported for the current contract at 06:21 UTC on September 13, that works out to roughly $24.4 million. For now that number is an arithmetic figure and nothing more. Whether any of the released tokens will actually be offered on the market is a different matter, and further down we resolve which part of the tranche is realistically in question.

Token unlock, cliff and vesting: the three terms behind the date

Vesting is the contractually fixed release of tokens over time. A project splits its total supply into buckets, such as team, investors and ecosystem, and sets for each bucket when tokens become available from it and at what pace.

A cliff is the lock-up period before a bucket's first release. Until the cliff date nothing is available; on the cliff date the accrued share is released in a single step. That is precisely what makes cliffs significant for the market: where a linear release produces a trickle, this produces a step.

A token unlock is the event itself, the moment locked tokens become transferable. One distinction matters here that headlines almost always drop: released only means transferable. Whether a team holds its released tokens, moves them into the project treasury or offers them on the market is not written into any contract.

At Humanity the release runs through Sablier streams, meaning on-chain contracts that handle the payout themselves. That has a practical advantage for you: the schedule is publicly visible and therefore verifiable. We have shown in detail how to reconcile such calendars against project documentation and resolve contradictions, using another token as the example: recalculating a token unlock.

The six tranches of the H unlock, broken down one by one

Quoting only the total gives away the real information. The six buckets behave completely differently, because different recipients sit behind them. Our own analysis of the emissions dataset produces this breakdown for September 23, 2026:

The largest single item is the team bucket at a good 105 million H, followed by the investors. Together the two make up more than half the tranche. That is the part market watchers usually call insider supply, because the recipients received their tokens on terms not available to a buyer on the open market.

The Identity Verification Rewards are the bucket from which users are paid for completed verifications. Those tokens therefore go out broadly to a great many small recipients, which suggests different behaviour from a concentrated allocation to a handful of addresses. The Ecosystem Fund finances development and incentive programmes.

Why the investor tranche in particular is uncertain

This is where it gets interesting, and where the widely quoted figures depart from what can actually be evidenced. The emissions dataset lists the investor tranche at 55,555,556 H under the same timestamp as the other five buckets. The Humanity Foundation, however, restructured the investor part of its vesting in April 2026.

As the trade publication crypto.news reported on April 24, 2026, the foundation gave its investors a choice until 09:00 UTC on April 26: either an extended schedule with a cliff on September 25, 2026 followed by twelve quarterly tranches, or immediate release at a 3:10 discount, under which 16,666,666 H were replaced by 5,000,000 H and paid out as early as June 25, 2026. Early backer Trix Ventures publicly opted for the discount, according to the same report.

Two things follow that a careful article has to keep apart. First, the foundation names September 25 for the extended investor schedule, while the emissions dataset carries September 23. Second, part of the investor allocation was already settled in June, which makes the 55.56 million H held in the model for that bucket an upper bound rather than an expectation.

How many investors chose which option has not been published so far. No reliable breakdown could be found in this research step; the question could only be settled conclusively against the vesting contracts on chain. This uncertainty belongs on the record rather than written away: if you come across the round figure of 292 million H somewhere as confirmed additional supply, at least a sixth of it carries a question mark.

Circulating supply: how large the inflow actually is

Of the six buckets, the data provider explicitly lists two as non-circulating: Strategic Reserve at 26,388,889 H and Foundation Operational Treasury at 12,500,000 H, together 38,888,889 H or an arithmetic $3.24 million. Those amounts move into the foundation's treasury and are not counted as freely tradable supply in the circulation model.

That leaves 253,968,254 H, roughly $21.2 million on paper, that can actually affect circulating supply. Set against the amount released in total to date, our own analysis puts the previously released supply at 3,698,214,286 H. The tranche therefore amounts to 7.92 percent of that supply, the circulating portion to 6.87 percent. Measured against the maximum supply of ten billion H held in the model, it is 2.93 percent.

This framing is the difference between a headline and a calculation. A number like $24 million sounds enormous as long as nobody writes down what it refers to next to it. An inflow of just under seven percent on the supply already released is substantial, but it is a different order of magnitude from what the absolute number suggests.

The Kraken withdrawal deadline at 14:00 UTC on September 25

Independently of the vesting calendar, a clock of its own is running at Kraken. In its notice on Humanity, last updated June 26, 2026, the exchange states: for H and HUMANITY, trading and deposits are switched off, only withdrawals are supported, and those close at 14:00 UTC on September 25, 2026. Both tickers are slated for delisting.

That is the sharper of the two deadlines, because it demands an action from you. An unlock happens without you doing anything; a closed withdrawal, by contrast, separates you from your tokens. We described the constellation in detail on September 5, at the time looking at the four affected tickers at Kraken: the Kraken withdrawal deadline on September 25.

Forced liquidation from September 28: what happens to holdings left behind

For holdings still sitting in the account after the deadline, Kraken announces a liquidation period from September 28 to October 2, 2026. The exchange is unusually clear about what that can mean: liquidation prices could be substantially below recent reference prices and in some cases, because of insufficient market liquidity, yield minimal proceeds or none at all. Kraken explicitly recommends acting before the deadline rather than relying on the liquidation.

For you that means the liquidation is an emergency exit with an open outcome. Which currency the proceeds are credited in is likewise made dependent on market conditions by the exchange, and is not committed to in advance. Anyone who lets the date pass trades a known position for an unknown result.

Legacy H and HUMANITY: why many holders have two positions in the account

The second pitfall has nothing to do with the unlock and is still the more common source of mistakes. Following the events of June 2026, the Humanity team rolled out a new contract and issued a new token. Kraken continues to list the old holding under the ticker H and the new one under the ticker HUMANITY, to keep the two distinguishable.

According to the Kraken notice, the contract addresses are 0xcf5104D094e3864CfCBDa43B82e1cEFD26A016eB for the old token and 0xE76c5b78f93909d34404E9eb4C1f19e7582a5dE1 for the new one. The emissions dataset the unlock figures above come from refers to the second of those addresses, that is, to the new token.

On top of that comes a risk of confusion that Kraken points out itself: the new token can still be displayed as H on chain and on other platforms. The two tokens can therefore only be told apart reliably via the contract address.

Anyone holding a position on the cut-off date received the new token automatically. Kraken gives the snapshot time as 17:25 UTC on June 8, 2026 and the airdrop date as 14:00 UTC on July 1, 2026, at a one-to-one ratio. Anyone who acquired H only after the snapshot is not eligible for this airdrop and is referred by Kraken to the Humanity team's claims portal, in which the exchange says it is not involved.

The practical consequence: the same account can hold two positions that both expire in the same minute. Withdraw only one of them and the other runs into the liquidation.

Self-custody or another exchange: where the tokens can go

When a withdrawal deadline is running, there are two destinations. One is your own wallet, where you control the private key. The other is an account at a different trading platform that still lists the token.

The two routes carry different risks. Self-custody removes counterparty risk and in exchange puts the responsibility for securing the recovery words on your shoulders; an overview of the devices and how they differ is in our hardware wallet comparison. Moving to another platform keeps the convenience and merely defers the problem, should a delisting be pending there too.

Two technical points decide between success and loss: the destination address has to support the network the token sits on, and it has to carry the correct contract address. An Ethereum address can in principle receive any ERC-20 token, but for it to show up in your wallet you may have to add the contract there manually. A token missing from the overview is not lost because of that; usually it is only the entry that is missing.

Check the withdrawal fee and the minimum amount in advance as well. On small residual holdings the fee can exceed the value of the position, and then the honest answer is that moving it is not worth it. That is a decision you should take deliberately rather than let a deadline take for you.

How to check your H holdings in five steps

The following sequence takes a few minutes and covers both dates.

1. Open the account balance. Check in the exchange account whether H, HUMANITY or both are sitting there. Both positions fall under the same deadline.
2. Reconcile the contract address. Note the contract address for each position and compare it with the two given above. That tells you whether you hold the old or the new token.
3. Prepare the destination address. Set up the receiving address and check with a small test amount that it works before you send the full holding.
4. Trigger the withdrawal. Build in a buffer. Withdrawals can go into review, and the deadline at 14:00 UTC on September 25 ends with no grace period.
5. Confirm arrival. Check in the block explorer that the transaction is confirmed, and add the contract in your wallet if the holding is not displayed.

A note on sequencing: do not do these steps on September 25. When the unlock goes through on September 23, things can get busier at the network level and in support queues. Moving in the days before that is the calmer option.

Tax: why even a forced sale is a disposal

One point regularly overlooked in delistings: a forced liquidation is, for tax purposes, a sale. The fact that you did not trigger it changes nothing about that. When the exchange realises your holding and credits you with proceeds, that creates an event you have to carry in your records.

A plain move from the exchange into your own wallet, by contrast, is not a sale but a transfer between two addresses of the same owner. What matters is that your records carry the acquisition date through that transfer, so that it remains traceable later when and at what price you acquired the holding. Tools that do exactly that are in the comparison of tax and portfolio tools.

Whether and how a gain is taxable depends, in Germany, among other things on the holding period and on your personal situation. The airdrop of the new token in July is a separate event with a valuation question of its own. That is precisely why these cases belong with a tax adviser and not in a classification by gut feeling.

What a token unlock does to the price, and what cannot seriously be said

The honest answer to the most common question is: nobody knows. What can be said is what mechanism sits behind the question.

A cliff raises the available supply abruptly. Whether that turns into selling pressure depends on what the recipients do, and that is not predictable. On top of that, a publicly known date can be priced in by professional market participants long before it arrives. In its April report, crypto.news describes exactly this pattern for Humanity: vesting contracts visible on chain, hedging trades in advance, and market participants positioning themselves ahead of the date.

The same outlet cites Starknet and ApeCoin as comparison cases, whose prices fell markedly after extended release schedules. That is that outlet's framing and not a statement about Humanity, and two examples do not make a rule. You will therefore not find price forecasts in this article; what you will find is the number at issue and a note on which part of it is uncertain.

More useful in practice than any forecast is the question of what you would do anyway. If you want to keep your holding, moving it into self-custody is the task. If you do not want to keep it, the question is where you can hand it over at a price you know, rather than in a liquidation at a price nobody promises you. For the trade itself you need a platform that still lists the token; which venues offer which terms is shown in the exchange comparison.

Four mistakes that make this date expensive

Withdrawing only one of the two positions. Anyone holding in June has held two tickers since July. Both expire in the same minute, and the balance shows them as separate lines.

Relying on the liquidation. Kraken itself warns that it can produce minimal proceeds or none at all. Anyone mistaking that for an orderly sale is planning with a price nobody has promised.

Taking the aggregator figure at face value. The 292 million H from the unlock calendars include just under 39 million H listed as non-circulating, and an investor tranche that is probably smaller because of the April restructuring. Anyone calculating with the gross figure overstates the inflow.

Waiting until the last day. Withdrawals can go into review, and support does not answer in minutes. A buffer of several days costs nothing.

H unlock and the Kraken deadline: what to take away

1. Check today whether H or HUMANITY are sitting in an exchange account, and withdraw both before 14:00 UTC on September 25. Where to is a decision you take afterwards; the safe option is your own wallet, and the models are set side by side in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Record the process cleanly. Transfer, airdrop and a possible liquidation are three different things for tax purposes; a tool from the tax and portfolio comparison takes the allocation off your hands before the records go missing.
3. Recalculate unlock figures before you believe them. Separate circulating from non-circulating tranches, and check whether a trading platform still lists the token at all; the exchange comparison shows where it is traded.

Sources for further reading: Kraken's notice on Humanity with all dates and contract addresses, and the crypto.news report on the vesting restructuring from April 2026. The unlock figures come from DefiLlama's emissions dataset and were aggregated first-hand for this article on September 13, 2026.

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

Anyone holding a tokenized real-world asset does not own a piece of metal in a vault. They own an entry in a mint account on a blockchain. That account is controlled by the issuer, and in many cases it allows far more than most buyers assume: freezing balances, halting transfers and pulling individual tokens out of other people's wallets. On September 11, 2026 exactly that happened, and it was publicly documented.

For this article we checked every tokenized asset that has its own mint account on Solana and is listed in the relevant market categories. The result is unambiguous: of 32 assets checked, every single one carries a freeze authority. In 21 cases a second permission is attached, one that allows tokens to be removed from an account without any action by the holder.

What happened to the silver token SILV on September 11

Dominion Market issues the token SILV, which is meant to represent one troy ounce of physical silver per unit. According to the provider, a multisig wallet belonging to the project was compromised in the early hours of Friday, September 11, 2026, at around 01:00 UTC. Roughly three hours later the team noticed unusual activity. Market reports put the token's price fall at about 74 percent, and the Sunrise trading front end removed the market from its listing.

The issuer's response is the instructive part. Dominion pulled the liquidity, secured the affected wallets and moved to new hardware devices. The project then announced that any SILV balance bought between 01:00 and 14:00 UTC on that Friday would be removed from the wallets. Balances that existed before the window opened were left untouched. Trading has been suspended since; refund claims in USDC are to be filed from Monday, September 14, 2026, at 12:00 UTC through an on-chain check.

An issuer that can unwind purchases without asking the buyers is no glitch in a process. It is a property that has to be built into the token for it to be executable at all. And that property can be looked up before you buy.

Freeze authority and permanent delegate: the two permissions in one sentence each

Both terms come from Solana's token standards and sit openly in the mint account. Once you have understood them, you can tell within minutes how much control the issuer holds over any given token.

Freeze authority

The freeze authority is the address allowed to freeze individual token accounts. A frozen balance stays visible but can neither be sent nor sold until the same address releases it again. It exists in the classic token program just as it does in the newer Token-2022 program.

Permanent delegate

The permanent delegate is an extension of the Token-2022 program and goes considerably further: the address stored there counts as permanently authorized for every account holding that token and can transfer or burn balances without the holder's consent. That is the technical basis for a clawback of the kind Dominion has announced. The full list of these extensions is in Solana's developer documentation.

In practice the difference matters a great deal. A freeze authority holds your balance where it sits. A permanent delegate takes it away. The current price of the underlying asset is irrelevant here; how Solana develops as a network changes nothing about these permissions, because they are anchored in the individual token rather than in the network.

Our measurement: 32 tokenized assets on Solana, 32 with a freeze authority

On September 13, 2026 we queried the mint accounts of every token that is listed in the market categories for real-world assets and for tokenized gold and that has a Solana address. That came to 35 addresses. We excluded three of them because they do not represent a backed asset but infrastructure or collectibles. That left 32 tokenized stocks, fund units, money market instruments and precious metals.

Each mint account was queried directly through a public Solana node, and the fields for the freeze authority and for the active Token-2022 extensions were evaluated. cryptoticker.io collected this data itself on September 13, 2026.

• 32 of 32 assets checked carry a freeze authority that is set. Not a single asset in the basket goes without one.
• 26 run under the Token-2022 program, 6 under the classic token program.
• 21 additionally carry a permanent delegate.
• 19 can be halted as a whole through the pausable extension.
• 19 start new accounts in a locked state, releasing them only after an approval, which amounts to a whitelist.
• 20 route every transfer through a transfer hook, meaning through external program code that can reject a transfer.

The completeness is remarkable. On many questions of this kind the answer sits somewhere between the camps. Here it sits at 32 to 0.

Clawback via permanent delegate: 21 of 32 tokens can be pulled back

The 21 assets with a permanent delegate are spread across every category: tokenized stocks of large technology companies, tokenized index funds, short-dated government bond funds, one securitized credit fund and several precious metal tokens, SILV among them. With SILV the query shows a particularity that explains what happened on Friday: freeze authority and permanent delegate sit on the same address. Whoever controls that key can lock balances and withdraw them in the same move.

Supply stood at roughly 93,516 SILV at the time of our query, which at one troy ounce per token should be matched by a corresponding silver holding. The address that holds both permissions belongs on-chain to the system program. That means it is an ordinary key address or a derived address, and not the account of an on-chain multisig program. Whether several signatures stand behind that key cannot be read from the mint account alone. Dominion itself speaks of a compromised multisig wallet.

How to check a mint account yourself, in two minutes

The good news about this situation: everything that matters here is public. You need no account, no sign-up and no paid service. All you need is the token's mint address, which every trading front end and every block explorer displays.

The block explorer route

Open a Solana explorer and enter the mint address in the search field. The token's overview page shows two entries. Under Freeze Authority you will find either an address or a note that none is set. Below that the explorer lists the active extensions, provided the token runs under Token-2022. If Permanent Delegate appears there, the issuer can move your holdings. If Default Account State appears, your account starts locked and has to be approved first.

The RPC call route

If you want more precision, ask the node directly. A single call is enough, and the answer contains every field in plain text:

curl -s https://api.mainnet-beta.solana.com -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"getAccountInfo",
       "params":["MINT_ADDRESS",{"encoding":"jsonParsed"}]}'

Three places in the response matter: freezeAuthority, mintAuthority and the list under extensions. A mint authority that is set means new units can be created at any time. If it is empty, the supply is fixed. For a backed real-world asset a set mint authority is normal, because new deposits require new tokens. That does shift the question over to the proof of backing.

Why issuers build these permissions in at all

It would be too easy to read the findings as sloppiness. Anyone bringing regulated assets onto a public blockchain is subject to obligations that are hard to meet without such interventions. An issuer has to observe sanctions lists, respond to court orders, adjust holdings in a corporate action and settle claims in an insolvency. A freeze authority is the standard tool for that, and with tokenized securities it is effectively a precondition for approval.

The price for it is clarity instead of illusion. A tokenized real-world asset behaves technically like a cryptocurrency, and legally like a claim against an issuer. Anyone keeping it in their own wallet holds the keys without holding the final say over the balance. With Bitcoin on a hardware wallet it works differently: there is nobody who could halt a transfer. That difference does not disappear because both sit side by side in the same wallet interface.

What the permission means for your hardware wallet

The common assumption is that owning your keys equals controlling your holdings. For Bitcoin and for most network tokens that holds true. For tokenized real-world assets it holds only in part, and the limitation sits in the token, not in your wallet. A hardware wallet protects you from someone else reaching your keys. It does not protect you from a permission the issuer has stored in the mint account.

In practice that leads to a simple distinction worth keeping in mind. Holdings nobody can interfere with behave differently in an incident from holdings where a third party has a say. Anyone who holds both should know which part falls into which category. On the question of who is entitled to what in case of doubt, we have already written up the ownership position on tokenized stocks and issuer risk in detail.

Tokenized stocks on Solana carry the same permission

For investors in Germany this is the most relevant part of the measurement. Tokenized stocks and index funds have been accessible through several trading venues since last year, and they make up the largest group in the basket we checked. In our query every one of these assets carried a freeze authority, and the large majority additionally carried a permanent delegate, a pause function and a transfer hook. Put differently: with a tokenized equity asset on Solana, the full chain of intervention is the normal case.

That does not speak against the product. It only shifts what you pay attention to when choosing. The interesting question is then less the fee and more who holds the permission, which supervisor that entity answers to, and what the terms say about freezing and unwinding. A supervised counterparty is no luxury here; it is the difference between an orderly procedure and an announcement on a social media account.

The SILV case: what affected holders can do from September 14

Anyone who bought SILV between 01:00 and 14:00 UTC on September 11 has to assume that the balance was removed. According to the provider, a procedure opens on September 14, 2026 at 12:00 UTC through which claims can be filed in USDC; the check is to happen on-chain. Three things matter here.

1. Secure your evidence before you do anything else. That includes the signatures of the transactions concerned, the time in UTC and the wallet address used. A screenshot of the trading interface is no substitute for a transaction signature.
2. Expect opportunists. Every larger incident produces pages within hours that promise a refund and ask for a signature or an approval in return. A refund never requires you to approve a transfer of your holdings.
3. Use only the route the issuer names itself. The official information is on the provider's site, and only what appears there governs your case.

What our survey does not show

A measurement is worth as much as the statement of its limits. Our query reads the technical state of the mint accounts and nothing else. It says nothing about whether the stated backing actually exists, because that is not on the chain. It says nothing about who owns the authority addresses and how many signatures are needed to use them. For tokens on other chains it does not apply at all; Ethereum and the standards there have their own mechanisms, which carry different names and work in similar ways.

Nor does it check whether a permission has ever been used. For the vast majority of the 32 assets there is no public occasion for that. The measurement answers one question only: whether the possibility exists. For tokenized real-world assets on Solana the answer is yes throughout.

RWA tokens and freeze authority: what to take away

1. Check the mint account before you buy. Freeze authority, mint authority and the list of extensions are looked up in two minutes. For anything meant to work without an external permission, self-custody remains the benchmark; which devices are suitable for it is covered in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Pay attention to who holds the permission and who supervises them. With a tokenized security an option to intervene is unavoidable; an unsupervised counterparty is avoidable. Which trading venues are licensed in the EU is shown in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Document purchase and inflow without gaps. In an unwinding, in a refund and later before the tax office, the documented moment counts, and not your recollection. Suitable tools for that are collected in the overview of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

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

If your Volksbank or Raiffeisenbank has recently started offering crypto, it holds a BaFin authorisation for it. In most cases that authorisation covers exactly one service: the execution of your buy and sell orders. It does not cover the custody of your coins. Who holds the key to your holdings is not stated in your bank's authorisation, and that is precisely the question you should settle before your first purchase.

The occasion is a shift in the European register that has become clear over recent weeks. Between August 12 and September 10, 2026, according to an analysis by the trade service The Industry Spread published on September 10, 16 new entries were added to the CASP register of the European securities regulator ESMA. Fourteen of them were German cooperative banks. The specialist service MiCA Watch arrives at the same picture for the same period and now counts 31 local banks with a MiCA authorisation, each with a single service and each for Germany only.

What a CASP authorisation under MiCAR actually permits

CASP stands for crypto-asset service provider: a company that commercially offers one of the crypto services listed in the EU's MiCAR regulation and needs an authorisation from the national supervisor to do so. MiCAR is the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets, in force since the end of 2024; the competent authority in Germany is BaFin.

One property of this authorisation is decisive and tends to get lost in everyday use: an authorisation of this kind never applies across the board. MiCAR lists ten individual services, from custody through the operation of a trading platform to investment advice on crypto-assets. An institution applies for each of them separately, and the register then states exactly which ones it received. A bank can therefore be authorised and still not be entitled to hold your coins.

The second point concerns reach. The authorisation applies EU-wide in principle, but only for the countries into which the institution has notified it. With the cooperative banks this field is set throughout to a single country, namely Germany. For you as a customer in Germany that changes nothing, but it explains why these institutions look different in the European register from an international exchange.

Cooperative banks are filling the ESMA register: 14 of 16 new entries

The figures from the two analyses are unambiguous. For the window from August 12 to September 10, 2026, The Industry Spread gives a share of 14 of the 16 new register entries, so 87.5 percent. MiCA Watch gives 15 of 17 new entries for August, and therefore 88.2 percent. Both services name ESMA's machine-readable register file as their source. The names appearing there belong to local banks throughout: Raiffeisenbank Schwaben Mitte, Volksbank Euskirchen, VR-Bank Mittelfranken Mitte, Volksbank Raiffeisenbank Dachau, Frankfurter Volksbank Rhein/Main and others.

Differing values exist for the overall size of the register, and we are not smoothing them over: the MiCA Crypto Alliance arrives at 294 entries after the 14 new additions, while the service CASP Tracker gives 338 authorised crypto-asset service providers for September 7, 2026. The spread is likely down to the services counting differently, for instance entries against institutions, or with and without notified branches. Only the direction is reliable at this point, and that is unambiguous.

What this movement means can be described soberly. German crypto access is migrating out of the specialist-provider space and into bank distribution. Anyone who previously had to open an account at an exchange now finds the offering in the app of their own high-street bank. How the costs of that route compare with the fees of an exchange is something we calculated in a separate analysis of the commission at Sparkasse and Volksbank.

Execution only: why order execution does not include custody

The service that all the local banks concerned have registered is called "execution of orders for crypto-assets on behalf of clients" in the register. Exactly one process is meant: your bank accepts your order and passes it on for execution, buying in your name and selling in your name.

Custody is a separate service of its own under MiCAR, with the register name "custody and administration of crypto-assets on behalf of clients". What that means is the holding of the means of access, namely the private keys with which a crypto holding is disposed of. A private key is the secret sequence of numbers that can move a crypto holding; whoever holds it actually controls the coins.

For you as a customer, a concrete checking task follows from that. If your bank covers only the execution, then your holdings sit with a third party, and that third party matters just as much to your risk as the bank with which you place the order. Which custody models exist and where the differences lie is set out in our hardware wallet comparison, which describes self-custody as the counter-model.

Our own count: 66 crypto-asset service providers in the BaFin database

So as not to depend on other people's counts alone, we collected the German side ourselves. The basis is BaFin's public company database, queried through the category "crypto-asset service provider". This assessment was carried out by cryptoticker.io on September 13, 2026.

The method in one sentence: on September 13, 2026, we retrieved the "crypto-asset service provider" category of the BaFin company database in full, alphabetically, because the result list breaks off at 50 entries, and evaluated each institution's category designation.

The result across 66 institutions checked:

• BaFin lists 66 institutions in the crypto-asset service provider category.
• 21 of them belong to the cooperative sector, meaning Volksbanken, Raiffeisenbanken, VR-Banken, the Westerwald Bank and DZ BANK as the central institution.
• 33 of the 66 are also credit institutions; 23 are investment firms.
• Ten of the 66 additionally carry the crypto custodian designation.
• Not a single one of the 21 cooperative institutions carries the crypto custodian designation.
• Three institutions are additionally registered as crypto securities registrars.

The last line is the core of it. The cooperative sector accounts for a third of Germany's crypto-asset service providers and not one custodian.

Crypto custodians under section 32 of the KWG: which ten institutions hold the permission

The crypto custodian designation in the BaFin database refers to crypto custody business under the German Banking Act, a national permission that existed before MiCAR and has since been continued alongside the European authorisation. This designation is not identical to the MiCAR custody service, but it covers the same business: holding crypto-assets for others.

According to our count of September 13, 2026, these ten institutions carry the designation: BitGo Europe, Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody, Bullish Europe, Commerzbank, Crypto Finance Deutschland, DekaBank, Hauck Aufhäuser Digital Custody, Tangany, Tradevest Digital Assets and V-Bank. That is a short list for a market with 66 authorised service providers, and it shows how heavily custody is concentrated on a few addresses.

Why this concentration counts for you

A custodian pools the holdings of many customers of many banks. Should it fail, that hits the customers of every institution attached to it, and not only the customers of a single house. This is no accusation against any individual institution but a property of the model, and it belongs in your risk assessment before you place a larger amount there. Anyone wanting to compare this route with a regulated exchange that has its own custody arrangement should therefore first establish how many stages lie between them and the coins.

meinKrypto at Atruvia and DZ BANK: who holds the keys in the background

The offering through which the local banks serve their customers is called meinKrypto. It was built by the cooperative sector's IT service provider Atruvia together with DZ BANK and, as IT-Finanzmagazin reports, has been available in the VR Banking app since January 2026. At launch, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Cardano were available to choose from. Of the roughly 700 affiliated cooperative banks, more than a third intended to go live in the months that followed, according to that report.

Two accounts of the division of labour in the background exist and do not fully agree, so we reproduce both. IT-Finanzmagazin writes that custody is handled by Boerse Stuttgart Digital and order execution by EUWAX AG. MiCA Watch describes the model as hub and spoke and assigns custody to DZ BANK, while the local banks take the order.

Our own count supports the first account, though only for the national permission: Boerse Stuttgart Digital Custody carries the crypto custodian designation, DZ BANK does not. EUWAX AG appears in BaFin's crypto-asset service provider category as an investment firm. What cannot be read off the BaFin database, however, is which of the ten MiCAR services DZ BANK has registered in the ESMA register. Both statements can therefore be correct at once, if DZ BANK holds the European custody service and outsources the technical custody to Boerse Stuttgart Digital. This can only be cleared up through DZ BANK's own register entry.

The question you can put to your bank

You do not have to unravel this chain yourself. A single question to your bank is enough, and it should be answered in writing: which company holds custody of my crypto-assets, and on what permission is that based? A bank that distributes crypto has to have a clear answer to that. If you do not get one, that in itself is a piece of information.

Hub and spoke: what the model means for your counterparty risk

In the hub-and-spoke model your holdings pass through three stations: the local bank with which you place the order, the entity that executes the order in the market, and the custodian where the coins sit. Every station is regulated, and every one is a separate point at which something can go wrong. The model is therefore no worse than the route through an exchange, it is simply cut differently, and you should know where the cuts lie.

One point that often gets confused with deposit protection deserves explicit mention: crypto-assets are not deposits. The statutory deposit guarantee and the protection scheme of the cooperative sector apply to balances in your account, not to coins in your portfolio. That holds at your own bank exactly as it does at an exchange, and the MiCA authorisation does not change it.

What MiCAR prescribes instead is a separation: a custodian must keep customer holdings apart from its own assets and is liable if it loses them. That is genuine progress compared with the unregulated state of affairs, but it is not a state guarantee on the value.

Transfer to your own wallet: what to settle before your first purchase

The practically most important consequence of the execution-only model concerns transfers. If your bank does not provide custody itself and the holdings sit in a pooled structure at the custodian, then paying out to a wallet address of your own is a function the provider either makes available or does not. Whether your institution offers it is not stated in the register but in the terms of the offering.

Four points are worth checking in the paperwork before you buy. First, the transfer: is a payout to an external address possible, for which coins, and what does it cost? Second, the tax records: do you receive a statement with the acquisition date and acquisition cost for each addition, one that is fit for the holding period? Third, the price at which settlement happens and the mark-up on it, because with bank offerings the cost frequently sits in the spread rather than in a stated fee. And fourth, because it counts when selling: how quickly is the order executed, and does a limit apply or only the next determinable price?

Which banks have already rolled the offering out at all is something our editorial team has gathered in the overview of crypto trading at Volksbanken.

What the registers do not show and where our count ends

Honesty requires stating the limits of one's own figures. BaFin's company database names one designation per institution, such as crypto-asset service provider or crypto custodian. What remains unnamed is which of the ten MiCAR services an institution has registered in the European register. Our count of 66 institutions therefore says with certainty who is listed in Germany as a crypto-asset service provider and who is additionally listed as a crypto custodian, and it says nothing about the precise scope of the MiCAR permission in an individual case.

The ESMA register does carry that scope, and that is where the statement comes from that the local banks hold order execution exclusively. That statement comes from the two specialist analyses named above and not from a measurement of our own: the ESMA register's search form could not be evaluated through an automated retrieval on September 13, 2026, as it serves the results page only to a browser. It is normally usable for readers, and we link to it for that reason.

DZ BANK's register entry likewise remains open, and it is the entry on which the contradictory assignment of custody would be decided. We have no measurement of our own on this and therefore reproduce both published accounts without declaring either one a fact.

Checking your Volksbank's crypto licence: your takeaways

1. Separate the two questions. The fact that your bank holds a crypto authorisation says nothing about who holds custody of your coins. Ask about the custodian and about its permission, and compare the answer with the providers in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges before you commit.
2. Settle the transfer question before buying. Holdings you cannot move to an address of your own are tied to the provider. Whether and how you can withdraw coins is stated in the terms; which counter-models exist is shown by our hardware wallet comparison.
3. Check the tax records while you can still choose. For the holding period you need the acquisition date and acquisition cost for each addition. Ask for a sample of the annual statement before your first purchase, and place the provider in the market with our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

The sources for this article in the original: BaFin's public company database, in which you can query the crypto-asset service provider category yourself, and ESMA's CASP register, which lists the individual approved services for each institution.

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

When you want your staked coins back, the date is set by the protocol and not by your click. On Ethereum, a full exit takes around eight days this weekend, on Solana about a day and a half, on the Cosmos Hub exactly 21 days and on Polkadot 28 days. On Cardano there is no lock-up at all. These figures rarely appear in your wallet interface, and they shift with how busy the network is. We queried them on September 13, 2026, at the chains themselves and at the public queue statistics.

The lock-up period is the most frequently overlooked item in a staking yield. A reward of two and a half percent a year sounds calm as long as you leave your holdings alone. It turns uncomfortable the moment you need the money while the network still makes you wait three weeks and the price does whatever it likes in the meantime. Anyone who has pledged collateral for a loan or scheduled a tax payment plans around the deadline, not around their preferred date.

How long does unstaking take? The short answer for five networks

The overview below gives the waiting time between your withdrawal request and the moment your holdings are freely available again. All values date from September 13, 2026, shortly after midnight UTC.

The gap between zero and 28 days is neither an accident nor a mark of quality. It follows from one question: how long does a network need in order to punish a validator's misconduct after the fact? Where that possibility is absent, no lock-up is required.

What a staking lock-up period is and why the protocol enforces it

Staking means depositing coins in the network so that a validator may use them to propose and verify blocks, and receiving a reward for doing so. A validator is the machine that performs this work. The lock-up period, known in English as the unbonding period, is the span between your withdrawal request and the moment the coins can be moved again. During that time you generally earn nothing further and still cannot reach them.

The reason is called slashing: the penalty with which a network seizes part of the deposited balance when a validator misbehaves, for instance by signing two contradictory blocks. Behaviour of that kind often only comes to light days later. If an operator could withdraw their stake immediately, the penalty would be worthless, because the money would long since be gone. The lock-up period holds the pledge for as long as the network needs to detect a breach and act on it. What is protected is the chain, and you as a customer carry the waiting time.

From that follows a rule of thumb that helps with every new network: the further back a protocol can punish, the longer the lock-up. Chains without slashing for delegators manage without any waiting time.

Ethereum: why the exit takes around eight days even with an empty exit queue

With Ethereum, many people assume the waiting time on exit depends only on how many others want out at the same moment. That is half the truth. On September 13, 2026, at 00:41 UTC, the exit queue held precisely nothing: zero ETH, waiting time zero minutes. You still wait after leaving, however, because the second part of the route begins at that point.

That second part is called the sweep. The network works through all validators in turn and checks each one for withdrawable balance. The pointer travels in a circle, as on a clock face. At most 16 withdrawals fit into each block, which corresponds to roughly 115,200 validators a day. With 911,414 active validators, the figure the statistics showed on the day of measurement, a full circuit takes a corresponding amount of time. The measured value came to 7.9 days.

In practice that means a good seven and more likely eight days pass between your request and the credit, even in the most favourable case. The official documentation sets the sweep out in a table, where 3.5 days appear for 400,000 withdrawals and 7.0 days for 800,000. If you want to look the figure up yourself, you will find it in the documentation on staking withdrawals.

Sweep, churn and exit queue: the three clocks in Ethereum staking

To estimate the waiting time yourself when it counts, it pays to keep the three quantities cleanly apart.

The exit queue is the amount of ETH waiting to leave. On the day of measurement it was empty. The churn is the ceiling on how many validators may enter or leave per epoch; 256 per epoch were measured. An epoch on Ethereum is a fixed section of 32 slots, so a good six minutes. The sweep delay, finally, is the circuit time of the withdrawal pointer across all validators.

The first clock fluctuates heavily, because it depends on the mood in the market. The second is a rule value of the protocol. The third grows with the number of validators and therefore with the success of the network. So if you read somewhere that the exit currently takes only a few hours, that refers to the first clock and leaves out the third.

Ethereum entry queue: 31 days of waiting and what has changed since August

The opposite direction is currently the real bottleneck. On September 13, the entry queue held 1,843,131 ETH awaiting activation. The waiting time calculated from that comes to 31 days. Deposit today and you earn your first reward only in a good month's time, at whatever rate applies then. On the same day the statistics reported 43.1 million ETH staked, which is 35.3 percent of the circulating supply, at an annual yield of 2.46 percent.

That becomes interesting in comparison with our own earlier reading: cryptoticker measured the entry queue once before, on August 17, 2026, and arrived at 2,229,411 ETH and around 39 days of waiting. The details of that measurement are in the piece on the Ethereum staking queue. The queue has since grown shorter by a good 386,000 ETH, the waiting time by eight days. The trend points downwards, but the bottleneck remains.

For your planning that means two things. First, staking on Ethereum is currently a decision with a month's lead time. Second, the ratio can flip at any moment: should sentiment turn, the exit queue fills up, and its waiting time is then added on top of the eight days of sweep. You can look up the current values at any time on the Validator Queue page, which draws its data from beaconcha.in.

Solana: how the epoch determines the payout date for your staked SOL

With Solana there is no fixed number of days. What governs is the epoch, and on Solana that is defined as a block of 432,000 slots. A slot is the time window in which a validator may produce a block. Your withdrawal request only takes effect at the end of the current epoch, after which a cooldown phase follows.

How long an epoch actually lasts depends on how fast the chain is running at the time. We measured this directly at a network node on September 13, 2026: between slot 446,547,780 and slot 446,567,780 lay 6,307 seconds. That is 20,000 slots in a good 105 minutes, so 0.32 seconds per slot. A full epoch of 432,000 slots therefore takes around 38 hours.

At the time of measurement, epoch 1033 was running at slot 311,780 of 432,000. A good 120,000 slots, or roughly ten and a half hours, were still missing until the end of the epoch. That is exactly the range your payout date has on Solana: request withdrawal shortly after an epoch begins and you wait almost a day and a half; request it shortly before the end and it is a matter of hours. The documentation additionally points out that the cooldown phase can stretch across several epochs, because it depends on the behaviour of the other participants and therefore cannot be predicted to the minute.

Anyone who has delegated Solana through a wallet can see the current epoch in every common block explorer. That is the only figure you need in order to estimate your earliest possible payout date.

Cosmos Hub: 21 days of unbonding, queried at the chain itself

The Cosmos Hub makes your research easy, because it serves its staking parameters openly through a programming interface. The query of September 13, 2026, returns an unbonding_time of 1,814,400 seconds. That is exactly 21 days, and the value applies regardless of how many other delegators happen to be exiting. There is no queue here that could fill up, but rather a fixed deadline.

The same response contains two values that hardly anyone knows and that matter when it counts. max_entries stands at 7. That means you can have at most seven withdrawal requests running simultaneously per validator. Anyone withdrawing their holdings in small slices to stay flexible runs into a wall after the seventh slice and has to wait until one of them has run through. The second value, min_commission_rate, sits at five percent and sets how much a validator retains from your reward as a minimum.

The 21 days are the usual reference figure in the Cosmos world, but no law of nature: every chain in the ecosystem sets its own parameter, and many smaller networks deviate from it. Check the value for each chain separately, therefore, instead of carrying the number over from the Hub.

Polkadot and Cardano: a 28-day lock-up against no lock-up at all

Polkadot sits at the upper end of the scale. The lock-up period there amounts to 28 eras of 24 hours each, so 28 days. An era on Polkadot is the section after which the network settles rewards and reassembles the validator list. For comparison, the same documentation gives 28 eras for the sister network Kusama as well, but there an era lasts only six hours, so that seven days come out. The example shows nicely that the number of days is a consequence of the era length.

At the other end stands Cardano. Delegation locks nothing there: the balance stays in your wallet and remains transferable at all times, and you can switch pools whenever you like. That is possible because no slashing is provided for delegators. Without a penalty no pledge is needed, and without a pledge no deadline.

That is the real yardstick when you are torn between two networks: a higher reward on a chain with a 28-day lock-up is a different proposition from the same reward on a chain without one. The difference is the price you pay for availability.

Staking through an exchange: when the deadline sits in the terms of service rather than the protocol

If you stake through an exchange or an app, the protocol deadline continues to apply in the background, but you no longer see it directly. The provider pools the holdings of many customers, runs its own validators and decides for itself when it pays out. Two possible deviations arise from that, upwards and downwards.

Downwards: some providers pay out faster than the protocol, because they advance funds from their own holdings and settle the withdrawal internally. Upwards: others allow themselves additional processing times or reserve the right to stretch payouts when demand is heavy. What is binding in both cases is what stands in the terms of service, and not the figure from this article. If you want to know which platform applies which deadlines and fees, our comparison of the best staking platforms puts the terms side by side.

One point that often gets lost with provider staking: on top of the protocol risk you carry the company's default risk. Should the provider run into difficulty while your coins are locked, you can neither sell them nor withdraw them. The losses of the 2022 wave of insolvencies lay in precisely that combination.

Liquid staking: the exit through the market and its price

Liquid staking is the attempt to get around the lock-up period. You deposit coins with a provider and receive a tradable token in return that represents your share of the deposited holdings. Anyone who wants out sells that token instead of waiting the deadline out.

The catch lies in the price. The token is worth only as much as somebody is currently paying for it. In calm phases it sits close to the value of the deposited coin. When things turn choppy and many want out at once, it slips below, because the buyer on the other side takes on the lock-up period and has that risk compensated. So you are trading the waiting time for a discount whose size is largest at exactly the moment you can least afford it.

There is a second layer on top: the token lives in a smart contract, meaning a program on the chain. A flaw in it hits you on top of the price risk of the coin itself. Liquid staking therefore does not solve the availability problem, it moves it into a market and into a piece of software.

How to check the lock-up period yourself in three steps

You need no special tools for this and have to rely on no table on the web, this one included. The values stand openly at the chains.

Step 1: fetch the protocol value

Chains from the Cosmos family serve their staking parameters through an open interface, in which the value unbonding_time stands in seconds. Divide it by 86,400 and you have the days. With Polkadot the number appears as a constant of the staking component in every explorer that displays chain values.

Step 2: check the queue where there is one

Ethereum is the special case, because there a variable queue is added to the fixed mechanics. Before every decision, look at how full the entry and exit queues currently are, and add the sweep delay on top. Without that second item your estimate falls short by more than a week.

Step 3: read your provider's terms

If your staking runs through a platform, its rulebook beats the protocol. Search the terms for the keywords payout, notice period and processing time, and note the deadline down together with the date on which you read it. Providers change these passages, and in a dispute the version that applied on your reference date is what counts.

Anyone who goes through these three steps once per network has the figures together for all future decisions. They change rarely, and when they do, with advance notice.

Lock-up period and tax: two clocks with nothing to do with each other

A widespread misunderstanding holds that the lock-up period has tax significance. The protocol knows no tax deadlines; it knows blocks, epochs and timestamps. Conversely, tax law does not take its cue from whether a chain happens to be making you wait.

The lock-up period is still practically useful, namely as evidence. The start of your withdrawal request and the later credit stand immutably in the chain as transactions with timestamps. Secure the transaction ID, the date and the amount for every event, ideally as you go rather than retroactively in the spring. A portfolio tracker takes this work off your hands and assigns rewards and withdrawals automatically.

How staking income is treated in Germany is a topic of its own with pitfalls of its own, and the answer depends on your overall situation. Settle it with your tax adviser before you move larger holdings.

Three mistakes that make lock-up periods expensive

The scheduling mistake. Anyone pledging coins as security for a loan or planning a payment out of their holdings has to pull the lock-up period into the plan. A margin call does not wait 21 days. Always keep enough freely available to bridge a deadline.

The slicing mistake. Breaking your holdings into many small withdrawal requests looks flexible, but on some chains it runs into a ceiling on simultaneous operations. Check that limit before you split.

The yield mistake. Two percentage figures are comparable only when the availability behind them is the same. Count the lock-up period as a cost item, and compare afterwards.

Staking lock-up period: your takeaways

1. Look the deadline up before you stake. The figure belongs in front of the decision, not behind the withdrawal request. Which platform applies which deadlines and fees stands in our comparison of the best staking platforms.
2. Plan your liquidity around the longest deadline. Anyone staking on several chains takes their bearings from the network with the longest lock-up. A look at the platform comparison helps there too, because it says where holdings can be withdrawn at any time.
3. Document every withdrawal request the same day. Transaction ID, date, amount. A tool from our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers handles that in the background.

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

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

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

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

Ben Delo and Christopher Harborne each gave £36 million, and between them beat what every UK party raised last year.

The surveillance mod on GTA V brings the privacy fight to Los Santos, where players can demolish the cameras tracking them.

Whale monopolization locks 94.68% of Shiba Inu (SHIB) supply as triangle pattern forces price squeeze.

Dogecoin core seeks Japanese speakers and Mac developers for new tests.

XRP Ledger just validated its biggest-ever ledger.

Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee says crypto could be entering an exceptionally bullish 12-month stretch.

Ethereum is heading toward one of its strongest third quarters ever after recovering more than 55% from its June low.

TLDR:

• XRP price trades near $1.34 while analyst Ali Martinez identifies $1.31-$1.35 support, $1.38 confirmation, and a $1.60 breakout target.
• RippleX Head of Product Jazzi Cooper calls XRP collateral for institutional credit a killer use case linked to the proposed XRPL lending stack.
• XLS-65 and XLS-66 still await validator approval, while the current design records uncollateralized loans and keeps underwriting off-chain.
• Evernorth plans to use XLS-66, but historical Clearpool and Cicada figures do not represent $1.8 billion in loans already originated on XRPL.

XRP price trades near $1.34 as an institutional-credit narrative meets an unresolved technical setup. RippleX Head of Product Jazzi Cooper calls XRP collateral for institutional credit a “killer use case.” Her comment links the asset to lending and collateral workflows beyond cross-border payments. 

However, XLS-65 and XLS-66 have not been activated on the XRP Ledger mainnet. Both amendments still require validator approval before institutions can use their native functions. 

Market attention now splits between that pending infrastructure and a short-term price test. XRP sits inside $1.31-$1.35 support, while $1.38 marks the analyst’s breakout confirmation. A successful break would place $1.60 in focus.

XRP Price Gains a Broader Institutional Credit Narrative

Cooper made the statement while responding to discussion about institutions accessing credit without selling XRP. Her view presents XRP collateral as potential working capital rather than dormant treasury inventory.

Ripple’s lending design supports that broader goal, although its present mechanics require careful distinction. XLS-65 defines Single Asset Vaults that pool one asset and issue ownership shares. XLS-66 defines fixed-term loans, interest, repayment schedules, fees, and defaults at the protocol layer.

The current XRPL lending design does not automate collateral or liquidations onchain. Official documentation describes its loans as uncollateralized, with underwriting and risk management handled off-chain. Institutions can structure separate collateral agreements, but XLS-66 does not itself lock XRP against a loan.

Both base amendments are available in XRPL software but are not active on mainnet. They must secure a validator supermajority for at least two consecutive weeks. LendingProtocolV1_1 is also in development, adding closed-ended vaults and cash-basis accounting.

This means XRP price has no verified mainnet lending-volume catalyst from these features today.

Evernorth has publicly stated its intent to use XLS-66 as a core treasury tool. Its SEC-filed communication describes the plan as conditional and warns that approval, operation, and projected yields are not guaranteed.

Clearpool also labels its XRPL product “coming soon.” Its website reports about $965 million in loans originated across seven existing networks. Those records demonstrate experience, not $1.8 billion of live XRPL loans.

RLUSD supplies another possible lending asset, with market capitalization near $2.42 billion. Clearpool’s planned XRPL product specifically advertises real-world yield using RLUSD and native credit primitives. That plan does not establish current XRP collateral demand.

Social posts also compare the opportunity with trillions of dollars in securities lending. S&P Global reports August average balances of $4.2 trillion, above the older $3.1 trillion figure. Neither measure represents capital committed to XRP or XRPL lending.

Mainnet lending data cannot link these unactivated features to XRP price performance. XRP collateral adoption would require published eligibility rules, haircuts, custody terms, and default procedures from participating institutions. Mainnet also has no funded lending vaults or completed loans under XLS-66 today.

Technical Setup Keeps $1.38 and $1.60 Levels in Focus

XRP price now tests the $1.31-$1.35 support zone identified by Ali Martinez. Trading near $1.34 places XRP inside that band, leaving the short-term structure without breakout confirmation.

Martinez identifies $1.38 as the decisive resistance level. A clean move above it could complete the triangle breakout and open a path toward $1.60. Until then, the setup reflects a conditional target rather than a confirmed advance.

A separate weekly analysis places $1.55 as the larger resistance test. Crypto Patel says a weekly close above that level could expose $2, followed by the prior $3.66 high. Failure to reclaim $1.55 could instead return attention to the $0.70-$0.95 demand area.

The institutional-credit narrative does not alter those confirmation levels. XRP price still depends on holding support, breaking resistance, and attracting sustained spot demand. XRPL lending also requires validator approval before usage data can show whether institutions adopt the proposed rails.

The post XRP Price Nears Breakout as XRPL Lending Plans Gain Traction appeared first on Blockonomi.

For years, crypto tried to make games more financial.

The next opportunity may be the opposite: make the creator economy around great games more efficient.

Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled for November 19, 2026, and the release is already one of the largest attention events in gaming. But the economic story will not stop at software sales. A blockbuster game now creates a second market around itself: livestreams, reaction videos, guides, edits, memes, roleplay, commentary, Discord communities, sponsorships and thousands of independent creators competing for attention.

That matters to crypto because the creator economy has started to look less like a social-media side hustle and more like a financial market.

Creators are becoming small media companies. Brands are buying distribution from them. Platforms are underwriting future earnings. Payment providers are competing to move creator revenue across borders.

The interesting question is no longer whether creators can make money online. It is who builds the infrastructure that connects attention to money.

GTA 6 arrives into an influencer economy that already thinks like a market

Influencer marketing used to be simple enough to describe: a brand paid a creator for a post.

That model still exists, but the machinery around it is becoming more sophisticated. Campaigns now involve creator discovery, briefs, approval workflows, disclosure rules, audience quality, performance tracking, usage rights, payment terms and repeat relationships.

The creator is no longer just a distribution endpoint. The creator is an operating business.

That shift is visible in finance. In early September 2026, CreatorFi said it had secured up to $45 million in financing commitments for creator-led businesses. Its model advances capital against projected earnings from platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Spotify and Roblox. The larger implication is that creator cash flow is increasingly being treated as something measurable and financeable.

Now add a launch like GTA 6.

The game can create enormous demand for sponsored content without Rockstar having anything to do with those sponsorships. Hardware brands, gaming accessories, streaming tools, communities, crypto projects and consumer products can all want access to the audiences forming around the release.

The challenge is turning that demand into an organized market.

The real bottleneck is coordination and payment

There will be no shortage of GTA 6 content.

The shortage will be reliable systems that answer basic commercial questions. Which creators fit a campaign? What should they make? How is the work reviewed? How does a sponsor know the content is authentic? Who gets paid, how quickly and in what currency?

Those questions are less exciting than game trailers or token launches. They are also where real businesses get built.

Traditional influencer marketing platforms solve some of the coordination problem, but payments remain fragmented. Creators may earn from platforms, sponsors, affiliates, subscriptions and communities while dealing with different payout schedules, currencies and intermediaries.

Crypto payments become more interesting when they disappear into that background.

In April 2026, Meta began offering USDC payouts to select creators in Colombia and the Philippines through Stripe, with supported wallets on Solana and Polygon. Meta did not need to launch a new social token. The underlying content business stayed the same. Only the payment rail changed.

That is a more mature crypto proposition.

Stablecoins solve the boring part—and that is the point

Stablecoin payments have become one of crypto’s strongest real-world narratives because the value proposition is easy to understand.

A dollar-denominated asset can move across blockchain networks without waiting for conventional international settlement. A creator or business can receive value to a compatible wallet, hold it, transfer it or convert it depending on available services and local rules.

The user does not have to care about “Web3.” They care that the money arrived.

That is why stablecoin payment infrastructure continues attracting investment. Diameter Pay raised $10 million in September after saying it had processed more than $10 billion in payment volume during 2026, serving financial institutions with dollar accounts, payments and stablecoin on- and off-ramps.

The lesson for the creator economy is straightforward: crypto becomes more useful when it is infrastructure instead of the pitch.

A gaming creator should not need to become a token analyst to complete a campaign. A sponsor should not need to design a blockchain economy to pay creators. The technology earns its place when it reduces friction in a workflow people already understand.

Sponsored content needs more than a wallet

Payments alone do not create a functioning creator marketplace.

A wallet cannot tell a brand which creator is trustworthy. A stablecoin cannot determine whether a submission followed a brief. Fast settlement does not solve fake engagement, campaign eligibility or quality control.

The market needs a coordination layer: structured campaign briefs, creator reputation, submission review, eligibility rules, reward pools and a persistent record of participation.

That combination is more powerful than any single payment method because it creates a repeatable path from advertiser intent to creator output.

The game supplies attention. Creators turn attention into media. Brands buy access to that media. A network coordinates the transaction.

Crypto can then support rewards, payments, access or economic participation underneath that system without pretending to be part of GTA 6 itself.

Wanted Network is building around that coordination gap

Wanted Network is one example of a platform designed around this model.

It is an independent creator campaign network starting with gaming and is not affiliated with Rockstar Games or Take-Two Interactive. Its current Missions use structured creator briefs, submission requirements and review to onboard creators and test participation. Approved activity can contribute to Heat, the platform’s creator reputation score, while Mission-specific rules determine eligibility and rewards.

That current layer is distinct from the planned commercial layer.

Wanted Network’s whitepaper describes Sponsored Missions as externally funded creator campaigns in which advertisers fund structured briefs for the network. Those campaigns are intended to connect advertiser demand with eligible creator work rather than automatically paying everyone who submits content.

The project also separates reputation from token utility.

Heat is intended to support ranking, reputation and eligibility. WNTD is the planned Solana SPL utility token for creator rewards, access, platform tools and broader ecosystem participation as those functions become available.

The platform does not need WNTD to exist inside GTA 6. It is trying to build an economic layer around creators and campaigns that form around major gaming attention cycles.

The bigger bet: creator marketplaces become financial infrastructure

The first era of the creator economy was about distribution.

The next era may be about infrastructure.

Creators already know how to make content. Brands already know they want attention. The missing layer is increasingly everything between those two points: discovery, trust, campaign execution, reputation, payment and repeat commercial relationships.

GTA 6 could make that gap unusually visible because the attention wave will be enormous and the creator supply will be global.

If that happens, the winners may not be the companies trying to force crypto into the game.

They may be the companies that make it easier for creators to turn cultural attention into structured commercial opportunity—and make the payment layer feel almost invisible.

That would be a quieter crypto revolution than the industry is used to.

It may also be a much more useful one.

Explore Wanted Network

Website: https://wantednetwork.io

Whitepaper: https://wanted-network.gitbook.io/wanted-network-docs

X: https://x.com/Wanted_Network

Get Seen, Get Paid, Get Wanted

The post GTA 6 Could Turn Sponsored Content Into a New Crypto Payments Market appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ethereum price fell 1.22% to $2,487.51 at 4:40 a.m. ET. A weekly close below $2,550 keeps the $2,400 support level exposed.
• August CPI rose 0.4% monthly, while annual inflation held at 3.4%. CME FedWatch then showed an 87% chance of a September rate hike.
• U.S. spot Ether ETFs drew $216.4 million on September 11. Those ETF inflows reversed the previous day’s $29.9 million net outflow.
• An X commentator calculated a 60.62% Q3 gain through September 13. Repeated rejections still keep the $2,550 weekly level in focus.

The Ethereum price fell to $2,487.51 after a 0.38% seven-day decline. The move pushes the token below $2,500 after repeated tests of nearby resistance. According to Coingecko data, ETH price traded within the $2,400-to-$2,550 range.

Short-term pressure follows stronger U.S. inflation readings, firmer Treasury yields, and reduced weekend liquidity. Yet the wider picture is mixed, as spot Ether funds recorded fresh demand on Friday while Q3 performance stays strong. 

Traders now focus on the weekly close near $2,550. That level separates another failed breakout from a possible extension toward $3,000 during September trading.

Ethereum Price Weakens as Inflation Raises Rate Bets

Macro data explain part of the short-term weakness. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said August CPI rose 0.4% monthly and 3.4% annually. Core CPI increased 0.3% for the month, but annual core inflation eased to 2.4%. Meanwhile, final-demand producer prices climbed 0.4% monthly and 5.4% yearly.

Interest-rate futures responded quickly. CME FedWatch pricing showed an 87% probability of a quarter-point September increase after the CPI release. That reading rose from 72% one day earlier.

Firmer rate expectations lifted Treasury yields and raised financing costs across risk markets. The Ethereum price then encountered selling near an established technical ceiling.

Weekend conditions added another constraint. Crypto order books often carry less depth outside normal institutional trading hours. Smaller trades can therefore move prices farther and trigger leveraged positions. One derivatives heatmap places more than $1.21 billion in cumulative long exposure below $2,405. It estimates potential liquidations, not completed losses or on-chain transfers.

Technical readings do not yet show a decisive trend, as the MACD indicator is residing on the negative sentiment while the RSI is at 58.92. Meanwhile, Williams %R is 54.027.

The platform classifies all three readings as neutral signals overall. However, price location gives the weekly close greater weight.

Analyst Ted Pillows says a close below $2,550 could weaken the ETH outlook during the coming weeks. The threshold overlaps key 50-week moving-average resistance around $2,542–$2,550.

Ethereum price must regain that zone to reduce immediate rejection risk. Failure would keep $2,405 and $2,400 visible as nearby downside levels. A deeper break could accelerate forced selling across heavily leveraged centralized exchange positions.

ETF Inflows and Whale Activity Shape the ETH Outlook

Fund flows offer a counterweight to the pullback. Farside Investors recorded $216.4 million in U.S. spot Ether ETF inflows on September 11. The result reversed a $29.9 million outflow from September 10. It also lifted the September 8-to-11 total to $196.9 million.

Those figures show uneven demand, not a continuous withdrawal. BlackRock’s ETHA led Friday with $148.8 million, followed by Bitwise’s ETHW at $29.1 million. Fidelity’s FETH added $11.4 million, while Grayscale’s ETH fund took in $5.1 million. ETF inflows therefore continued despite the macro repricing.

On-chain activity presents a more divided picture. Lookonchain tracked a whale’s five-day sale of 167,855 ETH worth $408 million. The Ethereum price still held near $2,500 after that distribution, which suggests buyers absorbed a large supply event. Earlier reported withdrawals cut exchange balances by 116,000 ETH during early September.

Market sentiment is mixed, while resistance has limited follow-through. An X commentator calculates ETH’s Q3 gain at 60.62% through September 13. That ranks as its second-best third quarter, behind a 66.55% increase in 2025. Those figures follow declines during both Q1 and Q2.

Even so, historical performance does not confirm an advance. Ethereum price continues moving inside a band, with $2,500 acting as a near-term pivot. A weekly close above $2,550 would improve the ETH outlook and expose $3,000. Continued rejection would keep the market focused on $2,405.

Fund demand stayed positive through the week. It does not remove immediate liquidation risk. At $2,487.51, Ethereum price sits between institutional inflows and an unresolved weekly resistance test.

The post Ethereum Price Faces $2,550 Test Despite Strong 2026 Q3 Gains appeared first on Blockonomi.

Crypto sentiment is shifting quickly, and anyone searching for the best altcoins to buy has more than established names to watch. XRP remains in focus as ETF activity continues to draw attention, while Monero is holding its place as a leading privacy-coin story despite recent volatility. With crypto news today moving fast, the next opportunity may not necessarily be another established token.

That is where Apeing enters the picture. Its presale is LIVE, Stage 3 has already reached 59.66% progress, and the current $0.0004 price is tied to a limited allocation before the next stage moves to $0.0005. For buyers watching the presale closely, the current stage represents a chance to enter before the scheduled price increase changes the equation.

Best Altcoins to Buy: Apeing Turns the Presale Into the Main Event

The Apeing presale is not sitting still. Stage 3, known as Paper Hand Panic, contains 300 million $APEING tokens and more than $80,000 raised. The project has also reached over 270 holders. That creates a straightforward presale dynamic: the allocation is being consumed while the price schedule is moving upward from stage to stage.

Apeing is built on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token with a fixed 16.75 billion supply and a 33-stage presale structure. The stated listing price is $0.01, giving the project a clearly defined progression from early presale pricing toward its planned market debut. Instead of making the story about another established meme coin chasing yesterday’s attention, Apeing puts the spotlight on participation while the presale is still underway.

Best Altcoins to Buy: Why Stage 3 Matters Right Now

Stage 3 is priced at $0.0004, while the next stage moves to $0.0005. The difference may look small on paper, but it reinforces the central feature of a staged crypto presale: the entry price changes as each allocation progresses.

Apeing also gives its community multiple ways to participate beyond simply holding $APEING. Its Ape Referral system adds 10% extra tokens for buyers while referrers can receive a 10% reward. That turns community growth into part of the token experience rather than leaving holders on the sidelines.

Then there is Ape Wars, a competition-driven feature designed around the project’s degen culture. Combined with the referral mechanics, it gives Apeing a social layer that feels distinctly different from simply buying a token and waiting for a chart to move.

The tokenomics add another layer. Apeing allocates 40% of its 16.75 billion supply to the presale, while 30% is allocated to staking and 10% to liquidity. The liquidity allocation is stated to be locked for 18 months, while the 1% team allocation is locked for one year before six months of vesting.

A Quick Look at the Apeing Price Path

At the current $0.0004 Stage 3 price, a $100 investment would buy 250,000 $APEING tokens. If the presale advances to the next stage at $0.0005, those tokens would have a theoretical value of $125, representing a 25% increase based solely on the stated stage-price difference. This highlights the potential benefit of entering during Stage 3, although the scheduled presale increase does not guarantee future returns or market performance.

How to Buy Apeing Presale

Getting into the Apeing presale follows a short process.

1. Connect your wallet: Use a regular Ethereum wallet such as MetaMask or Trust Wallet. Smart/passkey wallets are not supported.
2. Select your payment: Pay with supported crypto or Visa/Mastercard. Card payments still require an Ethereum wallet connection.
3. Enter your amount: Choose how much you want to spend or specify the amount of $APEING you want.
4. Buy: Check the payment, currency and connected wallet, then select Buy Now and confirm.
5. Activate referrals: Purchases of $25 or more activate a personal referral code.

Presale $APEING remains permanently linked to the wallet used for the purchase, so wallet credentials should never be shared. This makes it the best altcoin to buy.

XRP Keeps the Institutional Story Moving as ETF Interest Holds

XRP remains firmly on the crypto radar as ETF activity continues to shape its market narrative. Current reports place XRP near $1.42, with spot ETF inflows reaching an eighth consecutive week, although the latest weekly inflow was considerably smaller than the previous record.

The broader XRP story also continues to center on payments, institutional infrastructure and activity around the XRP Ledger. Recent coverage has highlighted upcoming protocol improvements alongside continued interest in XRP investment products. For traders searching crypto news today, XRP therefore remains one of the established altcoins commanding attention while newer projects compete for the next wave of community interest.

Monero Holds the Privacy Spotlight Despite Recent Volatility

Monero has delivered a very different crypto narrative. XMR surged strongly through August and briefly pushed toward the $500-plus area before a sharp September correction. Current reports put XMR around the $495 to $510 range, with the latest weakness attributed to profit-taking and leveraged positioning rather than a confirmed new protocol event.

The privacy sector itself has been unusually strong, with recent market coverage noting that privacy coins have substantially outperformed many other crypto categories since the prior Bitcoin peak. Monero also continues to see active development, with September community work focused on ongoing technical projects and future protocol improvements. That keeps XMR firmly in the conversation for anyone tracking crypto news today.

Conclusion:

XRP brings institutional attention and ETF momentum, while Monero continues to command the privacy-coin conversation. Both demonstrate how established crypto narratives can suddenly accelerate when market attention shifts.

Apeing offers a different setup. Its presale is already LIVE, Stage 3 has a limited 300 million-token allocation, and the current $0.0004 price applies before the next stage moves to $0.0005. With Ape Referral and Ape Wars adding community-driven mechanics, Apeing is turning the presale itself into part of the experience.

The stage is active. The allocation is being consumed. The price schedule is already moving. If you want the current Apeing stage price, the window to this best altcoin to buy now is open.

For More Information:

Website: Visit the Official Apeing Website

Telegram: Join the Apeing Telegram Channel

Twitter: Follow Apeing ON X (Formerly Twitter)

FAQs About Best Altcoins to Buy

Is XRP one of the best altcoins to buy?

XRP remains a major altcoin story, with ETF inflows and XRP Ledger developments keeping it in focus. Apeing offers a separate early-stage presale narrative through its live Stage 3.

Is Monero one of the best altcoins to buy?

Monero remains a leading privacy-focused cryptocurrency and has attracted significant market attention recently. Apeing differs by giving participants access to a live, staged presale.

What are the best altcoins to buy in a live presale?

Apeing stands out among early-stage options with its LIVE Stage 3 presale, $0.0004 current price, community competitions and referral mechanics.

What rewards does Apeing offer?

Apeing features staking tiers of 10%, 25%, 50% and 85% APY, plus a referral system offering 10% extra tokens to buyers and a 10% reward to referrers.

The post Could XRP and Monero Stay in the Spotlight While Apeing Emerges as One of the Best Altcoins to Buy Before Stage 3 Ends? appeared first on Blockonomi.

Key Takeaways

• The DICE ETF from Tema ETFs debuted on September 9, providing indirect investment opportunities in prediction market leaders Kalshi and Polymarket
• Investments are made through special purpose vehicles holding private company shares, not prediction market trading contracts
• Recent funding rounds valued both Kalshi and Polymarket at more than $20 billion each, with reports of Kalshi pursuing a $40 billion valuation
• Both platforms exceeded $10 billion in monthly trading volume during the summer months
• Regulatory uncertainty persists as multiple states challenge the platforms’ classification, potentially treating them as gambling operations

On September 9, Tema ETFs introduced the Tema Trading and Prediction Markets ETF to the market. Trading under the symbol DICE, this fund provides retail investors with an unprecedented opportunity to gain exposure to private prediction market companies Kalshi and Polymarket before they potentially go public.

Since both platforms remain privately held, ordinary investors have been locked out until now. The DICE ETF solves this problem through special purpose vehicles—investment structures that aggregate capital from multiple investors to purchase shares in pre-public companies.

While Kalshi and Polymarket represent the fund’s primary attractions, they account for roughly 15% of total holdings combined. The remaining portfolio consists of established public companies including Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, Intercontinental Exchange, and Coinbase.

Investors in the fund will pay a gross expense ratio of 0.75%.

The Surging Prediction Markets Sector

The prediction markets industry has experienced explosive growth recently. Both major platforms recorded monthly trading volumes exceeding $10 billion during summer months, fueled in part by high-profile sporting competitions such as the World Cup.

According to Tema President Steve Munroe, prediction market trading activity could expand nearly twentyfold to hit $1 trillion annually by decade’s end. These projections have captured the attention of asset managers seeking to create investment vehicles targeting this emerging sector.

Recent private financing rounds have assigned valuations surpassing $20 billion to both Kalshi and Polymarket. Industry sources indicate Kalshi may be pursuing additional capital at a $40 billion valuation.

According to Tema, the fund’s holdings in both Polymarket and Kalshi were acquired at approximately 10% to 13% below their most recent private valuations. Should either company complete an initial public offering at premium valuations, ETF shareholders could realize gains from their early-stage exposure.

Regulatory Headwinds Pose Challenges

The path forward isn’t without obstacles. Multiple state governments are contesting how Kalshi and Polymarket should be legally classified. The central dispute centers on whether their sports-related prediction contracts constitute financial instruments or gambling activities.

Both platforms maintain they should fall under federal oversight from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Their position is that these contracts serve as financial derivatives, not wagers.

However, an unfavorable Supreme Court decision could reclassify these operations as sportsbooks subject to state gambling regulations. This outcome would restrict their ability to operate in states where sports wagering remains prohibited, including major markets like California, Georgia, and Texas.

Neither platform has publicly disclosed plans for an initial public offering. When contacted, Kalshi declined to discuss potential IPO timing. Polymarket did not provide a response to inquiries.

DICE isn’t the only ETF offering pre-IPO exposure to these companies. The ERShares Private-Public Crossover ETF maintains a $30 million position in Kalshi, while the KraneShares Public-Private AI and Technology ETF holds a smaller Polymarket stake.

At present, DICE represents among the most accessible routes for mainstream investors seeking exposure to the prediction markets sector, despite ongoing regulatory questions surrounding the industry’s future.

The post DICE ETF Offers Early Access to Kalshi and Polymarket Shares Before Public Debut appeared first on Blockonomi.

Ripple veteran David Schwartz recently said quite convincingly that XRP could eventually overtake bitcoin by market capitalization. However, he outlined the significance of the right conditions and that such a development wouldn’t come from BTC’s deterioration.

As such, we decided to go a bit deeper into the numbers and see what actually has to happen for Ripple’s token to emerge ahead of the current market leader.

Can XRP Overcome BTC?

The cryptocurrency community has long been dabbling with the question of whether (at least) one altcoin can replace BTC as the largest digital asset by market cap. For almost a decade, that alt representative was Ethereum (ETH), which didn’t exactly come close several years ago, but there was speculation about a potential Flippening. However, it never materialized.

The focus has now switched to Ripple’s XRP. During a recent X Spaces discussion, longtime Ripple exec and XRP Ledger architect David Schwartz said he believes it’s possible for the cross-border token to surpass BTC in terms of market cap. Moreover, he noted that such a wild scenario wouldn’t transpire because bitcoin had collapsed; instead, he argued that it would unfold under significantly different conditions.

At first, the broader crypto market would have to be dramatically more successful. Second, XRP would grow considerably faster than BTC due to the XRP Ledger’s functionality, adoption, and real-world usage.

A Loooong Way to Go

Let’s go directly to math and see where the issue stems from, as the numbers are daunting at current prices. BTC’s market is at about $1.55 trillion today, compared with approximately $87 billion for XRP. This makes the market leader around 18 times larger.

If we presume that bitcoin’s valuation remains unchanged, XRP would need to climb toward a $1.55 billion market cap simply to level the playing field. At today’s circulating supply, that would imply a mind-blowing surge to $24-$25 from the current $1.40 levels.

Schwartz’s scenario makes that hurdle even bigger, as he doesn’t believe BTC will remain stagnant. Instead, he noted that the entire crypto market could expand exponentially, meaning that BTC would most likely continue appreciating as well.

It’s worth noting that XRP has actually been closer to BTC in the past. A lot closer. And still couldn’t do it. Back in early 2018, XRP’s market cap had risen to $120 billion as the asset rocketed to its then-ATH. BTC’s market cap, on the other hand, was a more modest $250-$260 billion.

In other words, XRP was worth almost 50% as much as BTC at the time. Today, that ratio is down to 5%-6%, which makes Schwartz’s scenario even harder to materialize. But then again, nothing is impossible, right?

The post Could XRP Actually Flip Bitcoin? Former Ripple CTO Says Yes – But the Math Is Brutal appeared first on CryptoPotato.

For the first time since the breakout week in mid-August, the spot Bitcoin ETFs turned red, with more than $460 million leaving the funds over the past four business days.

The same cannot be said about the Ethereum counterparts, as they continue to gain significant net inflows as the underlying asset tries to extend its rally.

BTC ETFs See Red

The exchange-traded funds tracking the performance of the largest cryptocurrency registered their best week in months between August 17 and 21, attracting over $1.9 billion as BTC’s price soared from under $65,000 to almost $80,000 within days. The following couple of weeks were also quite bullish, with $924 million and $986 million in net inflows.

However, the trend changed last week. Monday was a non-trading day (Labor Day), and the net outflows began on Tuesday, with $46.65 million in net withdrawals. $120.24 million followed on Wednesday, $282.56 million on Thursday, and $13.29 million on Friday – the day that the CPI numbers came out.

Consequently, the total net outflows for the week reached $462.73 million. The total net inflows declined from $55.62 billion at the end of the previous business week to $55.15 billion on September 11.

BTC’s price had a volatile end to the week as well, dropping from $77,000 to $76,000 before it surged to $79,800, then returned to its starting point. Next week is expected to be even more eventful, as the CLARITY Act will get its moment in the US Senate, and the Fed will announce its next rate move a day later.

ETH ETFs Keep Gaining

The spot Ethereum ETFs also began the business week with investors withdrawing $24.29 million. Wednesday was more positive, as investors poured in $34.75 million. However, sellers were back in control with another $29.76 million taken out on Thursday.

Friday is what changed the entire week. Data from SoSoValue shows that the net inflows for the day hit a two-week peak of $216.41 million, which is quite a contrast to the BTC ETFs.

ETH’s price experienced massive volatility on that day. It traded at $2,440 just after the CPI announcement, but skyrocketed by over 8% within an hour or so, surging to $2,670 for the first time since late January. However, it was rejected there and returned to just over $2,500, where it has remained since.

Thus, the Ethereum ETFs extended their green streak to four in a row. Moreover, only one out of the previous 10 weeks has been in the red, and the outflows were quite modest, at just $2.26 million. Within this timeframe, the total net inflows have recovered from under $10.89 billion to $13.39 billion.

The post Ethereum ETFs Stay Strong as Bitcoin Funds Lose $460M in a Week appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Web3 gaming has spent years promising that blockchain would change what it means to own, earn, and trade inside games. The problem was that too many projects tried to prove the economics before they proved the game.

A token launched. An NFT collection followed. A reward loop appeared. Then someone eventually asked the uncomfortable question: is this actually fun? That question is becoming harder for Web3 games to avoid in 2026.

The sector is still active. Industry trackers still list thousands of gaming dApps; new projects are launching across multiple chains, and established companies such as Animoca Brands still operate major gaming and digital-ownership businesses.

But the easy-money phase is clearly gone.

Capital is more selective. Players are less impressed by the existence of a token. Projects that cannot keep users entertained are disappearing faster. The result may look painful from the outside, but it could be exactly what blockchain gaming needed.

The Token Is No Longer Enough

The first generation of play-to-earn games benefited from novelty. A game did not necessarily need to compete with the best traditional titles if the economic loop itself was the attraction. Players could tolerate simple gameplay because earning was part of the entertainment.

That model has obvious limits. If the token price becomes the main reason to play, the game becomes extremely sensitive to the token price. If new users are needed primarily to support rewards for existing users, the economy becomes fragile. If players leave the moment rewards fall, the project never built a real game community in the first place.

The healthier version of Web3 gaming flips the order. The game has to work first. Blockchain can then provide optional ownership, portable assets, open marketplaces, transparent rewards or other features that make sense for the particular game.

That sounds less revolutionary than the old pitch. It is also much more realistic.

Better Web3 Games Hide the Blockchain

One of the clearest changes in the current market is how often stronger Web3 titles try to reduce crypto friction. Players increasingly encounter browser logins, social accounts and familiar onboarding before they ever see a wallet.

That is a big philosophical shift. Earlier blockchain games often treated the wallet as proof that the product was Web3. Newer projects are more willing to treat blockchain as infrastructure that can sit behind the experience.

That is how mainstream software usually wins. Nobody chooses a streaming service because of the database architecture. Nobody downloads a competitive game because the payment processor is technically interesting. Players care about the experience.

If blockchain improves ownership or settlement without making the game worse, it can become useful infrastructure instead of the product’s entire identity.

The same logic applies to tokens. A token that has a real job inside an active economy can be useful. A token that exists mainly because the project wanted a token is much harder to defend.

The Market Is Becoming Brutally Selective

The current state of crypto gaming reflects that pressure. Recent 2026 industry snapshots show a market that is still populated but no longer receiving automatic capital simply for attaching blockchain to a game.

One August 2026 tracker counted more than 2,300 gaming dapps and a multi-billion-dollar gaming-token market, while another monthly report found very little traditional venture funding flowing into the sector during the same period.

That combination tells an interesting story. Web3 gaming has not disappeared. It has lost the assumption that every project deserves to survive. That is normal for a mature entertainment market.

Most traditional games fail too. Most studios do not create a blockbuster. Most multiplayer games struggle to retain an audience. The difference is that traditional gaming never promised that financial engineering could solve those problems.

Web3 gaming is learning the same lesson. Retention beats tokenomics. Community beats a roadmap. A good game beats a clever whitepaper.

Ownership Still Has a Real Use Case

None of that means digital ownership is useless. Games already contain enormous virtual economies. Players care about skins, collectibles, weapons, vehicles, land, trading cards and status items even when those objects never touch a blockchain.

The interesting Web3 question is whether some of those assets become more valuable to players when ownership is clearer, trading is more open or identity can follow a user across a broader ecosystem.

The answer will not be the same for every game. A competitive shooter may have completely different needs from a trading-card game. A persistent virtual world may benefit from open marketplaces more than a tightly balanced single-player experience.

That is why forcing the same token model into every genre was always unlikely to work. Blockchain has to earn its place feature by feature.

The Creator Layer May Be More Valuable Than the Game Token

There is another possibility that Web3 gaming discussions often overlook. The most useful crypto economy may not live inside the game at all. Modern games create economic activity around themselves.

Streamers produce entertainment. Video editors create clips. Modders build experiences. Communities organize events. Brands sponsor creators. Fans make guides, art, commentary and entire media businesses around games they do not own.

That creator layer has its own problems. Payments are fragmented. Campaign work is difficult to coordinate. Small creators can be hard for brands to discover. International payouts create friction. Reward systems are often opaque. Those problems are much closer to the kinds of infrastructure blockchain can realistically help with.

Crypto can settle payments across borders. Tokens can coordinate incentives in a defined network. On-chain systems can make some reward flows transparent. None of that requires a player to buy an NFT before they are allowed to enjoy a game.

That distinction becomes especially important as enormous mainstream launches such as GTA 6 concentrate attention around creator communities.

Where Wanted Network Makes a Different Bet

Wanted Network is built around that external creator economy rather than trying to manufacture a blockchain game. Its Missions system gives creators structured challenges with defined objectives, submission rules and reward opportunities.

Creators can build reputation through Heat and earn WNTD-powered rewards for qualifying participation. As the network expands, the same framework is intended to support advertiser-funded creator campaigns. That means WNTD has a role inside a creator marketplace rather than pretending to be necessary to gameplay.

Wanted Network’s advertiser model is designed to connect campaign demand to WNTD use, including supported routes where advertiser spending can create market purchases of WNTD and token burns.

Whether that model succeeds will depend on the same thing every useful token economy eventually depends on: real activity. Creators have to want the opportunities. Brands have to value the output. Campaigns have to produce something economically useful.

The token cannot substitute for that activity. It can only help coordinate it.

Web3 Gaming’s Next Win May Look Almost Normal

That may be the broader lesson for Web3 games too. The strongest version of blockchain gaming probably will not constantly remind players that it is blockchain gaming.

It will look like a good game with unusually flexible ownership. Or a competitive game with a transparent reward system. Or a creator ecosystem with better ways to coordinate paid work.

The technology becomes more credible when users stop being asked to care about the technology itself. That is why the difficult phase Web3 gaming is going through may ultimately be healthy.

Weak projects are being forced to answer the question the industry should have asked from the beginning. Would anyone still want this if the token disappeared?

For the games that can answer yes, blockchain finally has a chance to become an advantage instead of a distraction.

More About Wanted Network:

Website — https://wantednetwork.io

Discord — https://discord.gg/wantednetwork

X — https://x.com/Wanted_Network

Disclaimer: The above article is sponsored content; it’s written by a third party. CryptoPotato doesn’t endorse or assume responsibility for the content, advertising, products, quality, accuracy, or other materials on this page. Nothing in it should be construed as financial advice. Readers are strongly advised to verify the information independently and carefully before engaging with any company or project mentioned and to do their own research. Investing in cryptocurrencies carries a risk of capital loss, and readers are also advised to consult a professional before making any decisions that may or may not be based on the above-sponsored content.

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The post Web3 Games Aren’t Dying — They’re Finally Being Forced to Become Good Games. What About Wanted Network? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

ZEC’s most recent surge, which got it close to $1,300, has managed to revive considerable comparisons between it and Bitcoin – in particular because both of them have a maximum supply of 21 million coins.

However, prominent analyst filbfilb argues that matching circulating supply alone says very little about valuation. He has developed a series of models that attempt to better quantify how much of Bitcoin’s network value Zcash has actually managed to earn.

The analyst compared ZEC with Bitcoin using metrics such as transaction activity, transferred value, circulating supply, as well as potential future convergence between both networks.

Current Activity Suggests Bullish Biases May Be Overblown

Zcash currently has slightly less than 17 million coins in circulation, which approximately matches an earlier stage in Bitcoin’s issuance history.

But instead of simply applying Bitcoin’s valuation at that particular point to ZEC, filbfilb adjusted it based on relative network usage.

At the equivalent issuance stage, Zcash’s TX activity amounts to roughly 3.71% of Bitcoin’s. When that percentage is applied to Bitcoin’s historical market capitalization, the result produces an implied ZEC price of approximately $254.

A second model compares both networks today. At the moment, Zcash processes roughly 1.01% of Bitcoin’s transaction count, which, when applied to BTC’s current market cap, results in an implied value near $944 per ZEC.

As you can notice, both of these numbers sit below the recent high that ZEC made.

ZEC’s Privacy Changes the Calculation

Filb notes an obvious weakness when applying the transaction count model: a $10 transfer and a $10 million transfer each count as a single transaction. The model, therefore, also considers the dollar value transferred across each network.

Zcash complicates that calculation. That’s because shielded transactions hide transfer amounts. He assumes that 58% of transactions are shielded and that the average shielded transaction carries the same dollar value as an observable one.

Under those assumed conditions, Zcash reaches approximately 12.34% of Bitcoin’s equivalent-stage transfer value, compared with only 3.71% using the previous model.

Blending those two measurements equally results in an estimated network progress of about 8.03%.

Convergence is Important

This is where the numbers become substantially larger.

If Bitcoin’s current network valuation is treated as a potential long-term destination, the transaction-only model results in a price of roughly $3,457 per ZEC under a hypothetical 100% Bitcoin value-capture scenario.

Once he blends the transaction and privacy-adjusted transfer model, it reaches roughly $7,480, while 25% and 50% capture assumptions assume $1,870 and $3,740, respectively.

It’s also important to note that these are but scenarios. They are not price targets or probabilities. He has also highlighted certain limitations, including differences between architectures, as well as the inability to measure shielded transfer values.

The takeaway is that ZEC, at current highs, already appears relatively expensive when compared to what its network has achieved today. Whether that valuation ultimately changes depends on whether the cryptocurrency can continue closing the gap with Bitcoin.

The post Can Zcash Really Follow Bitcoin? This Model Puts ZEC to the Test appeared first on CryptoPotato.

For the ninth consecutive week, the exchange-traded funds tracking the popular cross-border token were in the green, attracting nearly $19 million, similar to the previous week.

The cumulative total net inflows hit another all-time high, but the underlying asset continues to struggle with its breakout attempts as its mid-August rally came to a halt.

Another ATH

During the last full week of August, the spot XRP ETFs marked their best performance since early December 2025, attracting $110.49 million. This followed another impressive week, in which the net inflows neared $40 million.

The inflows slowed down at the start of September but remained well in the green. Although there was still a single day in the red for the first time in a month, the funds gained $18.96 million during the week that ended on September 4. The next one, which was just four business days long, saw similar inflows of $18.98 million.

The numbers on Tuesday were quite modest, with just $1.55 million. However, Wednesday brought $12.29 million, followed by another $5.14 million on Thursday. Interestingly, Friday was a no-action day, according to data from SoSoValue, with net flows of $0.00. This was rather unexpected given the massive market turbulence that day, but more on that later.

Ultimately, the XRP ETFs reached another all-time high of $1.7 billion. Bitwise’s XRP fund, which recently surpassed $500 million in assets, has extended its cumulative net inflow lead – $608 million compared with $490 million for Canary Capital’s XRPC.

XRP Still Struggles

The underlying asset exploded during the market breakout between August 19 and 22, skyrocketing by 70% in less than 72 hours. It jumped from $1.00 to $1.70, where it was rejected and driven south hard, despite the positive ETF flows.

It tried to take down the crucial $1.40 resistance in the past week, only to be halted again. On Friday, it went through a wild two-hour ride after the release of the CPI numbers. It went from $1.36 to $1.32 before it soared to almost $1.45. However, it was stopped once again, and now struggles below $1.40.

Crypto analysts are now split on its short-term potential. Ali Martinez, for instance, warned that whales have started to secure profits, while the network activity has dumped hard, which could lead to another leg down. In contrast, Celal Kucuker outlined a pattern that previously led to a 600% surge and suggested that it could run it back.

The post XRP ETFs Smash Another All-Time High as Inflow Streak Hits 9 Weeks appeared first on CryptoPotato.