Xi Jinping's optimism may foster improved US-China relations, potentially stabilizing global markets and enhancing bilateral cooperation.

The post Xi Jinping optimistic on US-China cooperation under Trump administration appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Meta's AI-driven success with Muse highlights the transformative potential of consumer AI, reshaping market dynamics and investor confidence.

The post Meta Platforms shares break out, signaling renewed market momentum appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Geopolitical tensions and Fed rate hikes may lead to sustained pressure on gold prices, impacting investment strategies and market dynamics.

The post Gold prices dip amid Iran tensions, Fed rate hike expectations appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The ongoing conflict's impact on oil markets could lead to prolonged global energy supply instability, influencing strategic market decisions.

The post JPMorgan sees ongoing US-Israeli conflict with Iran impacting oil markets appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Oracle's ongoing financial obligations despite power issues highlight the risks of large-scale tech investments and the limits of force majeure.

The post Oracle obligated to pay data center investors despite power issues appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Nearly $352M Moved From Crypto Exchange Bitget Wallets in Suspected Hack

An estimated $351.6 million in crypto has been moved from digital asset exchange Bitget’s hot wallets in a suspected hack. 

The platform’s CEO said in a Thursday statement that Bitget’s security team activated an emergency response when the movements were detected. Blockchain security firms had flagged the issue earlier in the day.  

“At 18:31 UTC on September 24, 2026, Bitget’s security systems detected unauthorized transfers from some of our hot wallets,” Bitget CEO Gracy Chen wrote on X. “Our security team activated emergency response protocols immediately.”

She added: “Bitget has navigated multiple market cycles. We will not run from this. Every dollar and every decision will be accounted for, transparently and in full.”

Victoria, Seychelles-based Bitget is the sixth biggest exchange, processing over $1.1 billion in trading volume per day, according to CoinGecko data. 

The incident comes as crypto security is in the limelight after a string of breaches this year have the community reeling. Just in July, hackers targeted a firmware bug in the popular bitcoin hardware wallet, Coldcard, to steal nearly $120 million in user funds. 

And this month, purported white-hat hackers withdrew about 4,000 bitcoins — worth about $320 million at the time — from Blockstream’s Liquid sidechain’s federation wallet.

Chen added that the exchange’s cold wallets remained fully secure and that user funds were safe. 

She wrote: “Bitget operates a three-tier wallet architecture — the breach contained only a portion of the hot wallet and warm wallet layers.”

According to the statement, deposits and trading remain fully operational but withdrawals are temporarily paused until a security review is complete. 

Blockchain data firm Arkham Intelligence created a dashboard soon after the unauthorized transfers showing that a number of different cryptocurrencies — including stablecoins — had been moved from the Bitget hot wallet. 

While Bitcoin was not on Arkham’s list, crypto security firm Hacken later said on X that the largest cryptocurrency had been moved. 

This post Nearly $352M Moved From Crypto Exchange Bitget Wallets in Suspected Hack first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

New York Sues Polymarket, Calling Prediction Market an Illegal Gambling Operation

New York Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Kathy Hochul on Thursday filed a lawsuit against crypto-based prediction market Polymarket, accusing the platform of running an unlicensed gambling operation in the state.

An investigation by the Attorney General’s office concluded that these markets meet New York’s legal definition of gambling because users stake money on uncertain outcomes they cannot control. 

Polymarket never obtained a license from the New York State Gaming Commission, the suit alleges, and so avoided the taxes that licensed casinos and mobile sportsbooks pay. That revenue helps fund public schools, youth sports programs and problem gambling treatment.

The suit comes as regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the  Commodity Futures Trading Commission are working to regulate crypto-powered prediction markets. 

Polymarket and rival Kalshi argue they aren’t gambling sites at all, but rather federally regulated exchanges offering “event contracts,” a type of derivative, which would put them under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than state gaming laws. 

The CFTC agrees, and it has joined the fight on the platforms’ side. In 2026 it sued nine states, arguing that it should have exclusive nationwide authority over the industry.

Thursday’s complaint also says the platform is open to users aged 18 to 20, although New York requires mobile sports bettors to be at least 21. 

“By skirting New York’s laws, Polymarket is targeting the most vulnerable,” James said. Hochul added that the company had “knowingly” violated state law and put underage users at risk.

The state is asking a court to bar Polymarket from operating as an unlicensed gambling business in New York. It also wants the company to forfeit its illegal gains, repay harmed users and pay fines equal to three times those gains.

The lawsuit is the latest in a string of New York actions against gambling-adjacent platforms. James and Hochul sued rival prediction market Kalshi in July, and James sued Coinbase and Gemini in April over similar claims. Earlier this month, James secured $8 million from the leading operator of sweepstakes casinos.

Polymarket launched in the United States in December 2025, initially letting users bet on sporting events with plans to expand into markets on a wide range of topics. 

This post New York Sues Polymarket, Calling Prediction Market an Illegal Gambling Operation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

SEC Commissioner Hester ‘Crypto Mom’ Peirce Advocates Privacy-Preserving Tech 

Outgoing Securities and Exchange Commission Commissioner Hester Peirce has said that regulators should rethink how they monitor the financial system, and to press for less personal data collection, not more. 

In a speech Wednesday focusing on digital identity systems and decentralized networks, Peirce took aim at know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering rules.

U.S. regulators are now racing ahead with crypto rulemaking. Peirce, who earned the nickname “crypto mom” for her friendly approach to watchdogging the space, is set to leave the SEC in November. 

“Today society is at a crossroads,” Peirce said at the SIFMA’s Digital Assets Conference in New York. 

“Down one path lies the status quo: more data collection, more intermediary surveillance, more ‘know your customer’ requirements that turn our financial rails into a panopticon.”

“Down the other path lies an opportunity to use new technologies to improve our ability to catch criminals while collecting less personal information than ever before, and monitoring more sparingly to protect Americans’ privacy.”

Peirce argued that piling up ever more data on law-abiding customers to help find criminals doesn’t work. In her view, bigger “haystacks” make the needles harder to find, while every stored data point raises the risk of leaks or misuse. 

She criticized a regulatory mindset fixated on “data go up,” comparing it to crypto enthusiasts’ obsession with rising prices.

Peirce pointed to cryptographic tools such as zero-knowledge proofs and attribute-based credentials, which can confirm facts like a person’s age, accredited-investor status, or absence from sanctions lists without revealing the underlying personal details. 

She also urged the SEC to let firms rely on identity checks already performed by other regulated institutions, rather than making every firm collect and store the same sensitive information.

Under President Joe Biden, the SEC was tough on the crypto space, with its Biden-appointed former Chair Gary Gensler frequently suing major crypto companies for allegedly selling unregistered securities. 

Peirce was appointed to lead the Crypto Task Force in 2025. The regulator has taken a far more friendly approach to watchdogging the space since Donald Trump became president again. 

Now, regulators are saying they want to create clear rules for the fast-moving industry, despite landmark legislation, the Clarity Act, being blocked last week. 

Despite Commissioner Peirce’s alias, she previously said she would not describe herself as an advocate of the industry, but rather a “freedom maximalist.”

This post SEC Commissioner Hester ‘Crypto Mom’ Peirce Advocates Privacy-Preserving Tech  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Jeff Booth: Why $1 Million BTC is Thinking too Small

Is a $1 million Bitcoin price target thinking too small? Jeff Booth thinks so, and he explains why valuing Bitcoin in dollars means pricing it from a game that’s rigged by debasement. He argues that Bitcoin isn’t just a coin or an asset, but the beginning of a decentralized, secure, and private protocol stack that will look a lot like the internet. In his view, Bitcoin is evidence of the first free market that has ever existed.

Chapters:
0:00 Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow & Technological Deflation
0:30 AI Valuations & Why Free Markets Push AI Prices Toward Zero
1:29 AI Deflation vs the Debt-Based Monetary System
2:38 $40 Trillion US Debt, Bond Yields & the $350 Trillion Insolvent System
4:06 AI Singularity Claims, Fear & Monopoly Regulation
6:50 Productivity & Bitcoin’s True Value in a Deflationary Future
8:43 Why a $1 Million Bitcoin Price Target Is Thinking Too Small
10:11 Bitcoin Adoption Timeline & Why Bitcoin Isn’t Just an Asset
12:38 Bitcoin Payments & Circular Economies Scaling Worldwide
13:49 Bitcoin-Backed Private Equity & Owning Businesses Forever

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Jeff Booth: Why $1 Million BTC is Thinking too Small first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Saifedean Ammous: The Bond Crisis & Bitcoin’s Rise as a True Macro Asset

Bitcoin’s volatility is falling, and Saifedean Ammous calls that the most bullish development in Bitcoin right now. Bear-market drawdowns have shrunk from roughly 87% to 77% to about 54% this cycle, which moves Bitcoin closer to an investable asset for money managers. Saifedean explains why the halving still drives the four-year Bitcoin cycle and why fewer people are buying with leverage at the top. He also discusses how markets may eventually arbitrage these cycles away.

Chapters:
0:00 Tether, Bitcoin & the Dollar Milkshake Theory
1:45 How the US Carries $40 Trillion in Debt as the World’s Reserve Currency
4:21 Treasury Yields Hit Multi-Decade Highs & the Bond Market Bear Case
7:00 War Spending, Iran & the Collapse of Fiscal Hope
9:20 Stablecoins vs Banks & the Hidden Treasury Rollover Risk
15:11 The Longest Hash Rate Bear Market in Bitcoin History
18:47 Why Miners Are Pivoting to AI Data Centers
21:31 The Halving, Bitcoin Cycles & Shrinking Drawdowns
25:56 MicroStrategy, Strive & Bitcoin Treasury Companies
29:07 The Humble Peasant Theory of High Finance

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Saifedean Ammous: The Bond Crisis & Bitcoin’s Rise as a True Macro Asset first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Two pools that exchange TIX for other issued tokens accounted for 97.24% of the seven-day automated market maker (AMM) volume in XRP Ledger (XRPL), according to XRPL.to's Sept. 24 feed.

Neither pool contains XRP, so the outsized reading says far more about the provider's volume measure.

XRPL.to listed a 2.82069 billion seven-day volume total, including 1.68 billion for XPM/TIX and over 1 billion for RLUSD/TIX.

Those figures describe the provider's tally. The two pools were created Sept. 21 and list the same TIX issuer and pool creator, and XRPL.to counted 69 XPM/TIX trades and 116 RLUSD/TIX trades in its rolling seven-day window.

Neither had recorded a trade in the latest 24 hours at the Sept. 24 check. The count shows that fills occurred, but it does not establish how many independent traders took part or what those fills were worth.

A routed payment can pass through more than one pool, so pool-level counts should not be read as separate end-to-end customer payments.

What the XRPL ledger shows

A check of the XPM/TIX pool account found about 1,545 XPM and 9.69 million TIX in its reserves. The RLUSD/TIX account held only trace amounts of both assets and zero XRP.

The nearly empty account is a current liquidity warning, while the earlier trading window needs its dated balances to show what a trader could have exchanged then.

A validated payment from Sept. 22 provides one view of actual settlement. It routed through TIX and both AMM accounts, used about 5.89 XPM, and delivered 0.030177 RLUSD. Its ledger metadata shows the token balance changes at each pool.

However, it doesn't explain why an end-to-end payment and the two pool legs involved are counted differently.

The ledger's AMM rules allow pools to exchange two issued assets without an XRP trading side. Transactions still incur XRP network fees, and a longer payment route can use XRP elsewhere. Neither mechanism turns activity inside these two pools into evidence that someone bought new XRP.

To establish that demand, the trades would need to be traced through any XRP legs and separated from inventory participants already held.

XRPL dashboard leaves token-token pools out of its headline XRP-paired value locked because those reserves are harder to price in dollars. DefiLlama's XRPL DEX page showed $55.1 million in seven-day volume, while its adapter uses XRP-pair and AMM XRP-volume metrics.

Those figures cannot be set directly against XRPL.to's token-token tally as though they counted the same trades at the same prices.

The open question is the value attached to each TIX fill in XRPL.to's total. Until that conversion can be reproduced against the on-chain trades, the 97.24% concentration is best understood as a feature of one reported measure.

For XRP holders, recurring volume in pools that actually hold XRP, backed by verifiable reserves and valued fills, would be a more direct sign of trading demand. Such evidence would also distinguish a one-window spike from trading that persists after the newest pools have aged and their initial liquidity has changed.

The post Two obscure pools fuel 2.8B XRPL volume, but only 185 trades caused it appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin researchers have proposed a system for private transfers directly on the network without requiring a soft fork or changes to its consensus rules.

The Sept. 24 paper from [[alloc] init] researchers Clara Shikhelman, Mikhail Komarov, and Aleksei Moskvin introduces Shielded Bitcoin, a metaprotocol designed to conceal transaction amounts, senders, recipients, and links between transfers while publishing its protocol data through Bitcoin mainnet.

The design adapts techniques pioneered by Zcash, including encrypted notes, public nullifiers and zero-knowledge proofs, but does not introduce a separate blockchain. Bitcoin instead provides the publication and ordering layer from which participants reconstruct the private transaction state.

That would extend Bitcoin privacy beyond existing techniques such as CoinJoin, PayJoin and Silent Payments, which can complicate transaction tracing or reduce address reuse but leave amounts and other transaction details visible.

Bitcoin would carry the transactions without validating the privacy layer

The proposal avoids waiting for a Bitcoin upgrade by moving the privacy logic above the network’s consensus rules.

Users would hold BTC-denominated value as encrypted notes. When funds are transferred, the sender would publish an envelope containing encrypted outputs, public nullifiers marking previously held notes as spent, and a zero-knowledge proof establishing ownership and value conservation.

The amount being transferred and the identities of the counterparties would remain hidden.

Bitcoin miners and nodes would not validate the shielded state themselves. Instead, implementations following the Shielded Bitcoin rules would scan BTC blocks and replay accepted transfer envelopes in their recorded order, producing a common note tree and spent-note set.

Bitcoin would therefore provide the timestamped transaction history and ordering needed to reconstruct the system, while the metaprotocol would handle encrypted balances and transfer verification.

The current implementation profile uses OP_RETURN to publish the encrypted transfer data, though the researchers leave open the possibility of other publication methods.

That architecture differs from Zcash, where the network’s consensus rules enforce shielded transaction validity directly. Shielded Bitcoin would keep BTC consensus untouched while deriving a separate private state from data anchored to the chain.

Some metadata would remain visible. Transaction timing, fees, input and output counts, and characteristics of the Bitcoin transaction carrying the encrypted data could still give observers clues.

The paper also includes viewing capabilities that could allow users to selectively disclose transaction information without surrendering control of their funds, creating a route for auditing or compliance where required.

Sam Callahan, the director of strategy and research at Bitcoin treasury company OranjeBTC, said the development fits a broader view that Bitcoin can accumulate functionality without competing with other blockchains feature by feature.

Callahan said:

“People still misunderstand Bitcoin’s moat. Bitcoin doesn’t need to win every feature race. Privacy, speed, and functionality can be built over time. The moat is its decentralization, security, and credible monetary policy,” he added. “And on those dimensions, nothing else comes close.”

The design remains incomplete at one critical boundary: moving ordinary BTC into and out of the shielded system.

Peg-in and peg-out mechanisms sit outside the current specification. Those components would need to lock Bitcoin on mainnet, represent that value inside the private note system, and later release the corresponding BTC when users exit.

[[alloc] init] expects those flows to rely on its PIPEs v2 work, but the researchers have yet to publish the detailed construction.

That leaves open questions around whether entry and exit can be made trustless, private, and resistant to transaction linkage. A distinctive deposit amount, withdrawal amount, or timing pattern could still connect activity at either end of the shielded system.

Other deployment choices also remain unresolved, including the final proof system, publication format, and how light clients can verify shielded state without replaying the full relevant Bitcoin history.

Privacy coins face fresh pressure as Zcash rally tests the thesis

The proposal comes as privacy-focused cryptocurrencies again attract investor attention, reviving a long-running debate over whether dedicated privacy networks retain an enduring technological advantage over Bitcoin.

André Dragosch, Bitwise Europe Head of Research, described Shielded Bitcoin as a “potential headwind for privacy coins,” reflecting the risk that features once associated with separate networks could increasingly be reproduced around Bitcoin without altering its monetary rules or base-layer consensus.

That argument becomes more consequential for Zcash, where privacy has become central to the token’s recent revaluation. ZEC climbed above $1,600 this week as shielded activity accelerated and investors returned to the idea that Zcash offers native transactions that can conceal senders, recipients, and amounts.

Usage has moved alongside price. Weekly shielded transactions recently reached 62,379, their highest level since 2022, while nearly 5 million ZEC were held in shielded pools this month. The network also settled more than $23 billion in transfer volume last week, its strongest weekly total since 2021.

Shielded Bitcoin pressures that narrative because it seeks to deliver comparable transaction confidentiality while keeping BTC as the underlying asset. If the system eventually works as designed, users seeking stronger privacy would have another route besides moving into a dedicated privacy coin.

The post Bitcoin researchers target privacy coins with Zcash-style shielded transfers appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A flaw in older Lightning Terminal software could mark a Bitcoin Lightning invoice paid after the payment was cancelled and returned to its sender, Lightning Labs disclosed on Sept. 21, 2026.

A merchant relying on that invoice status could release goods or credit without receiving funds. The company describes that risk but gives no tally of actual merchant losses.

The issue was a mismatch between the software's invoice record and the payment's outcome. A Lightning payment uses a hashed time-locked contract (HTLC) to carry funds.

In this case, the HTLC was canceled on the network and returned to the sender, while the receiving node still recorded the invoice as settled. The advisory does not describe a failure of Bitcoin's base chain.

Lightning Terminal bundles tapd, software for Taproot Assets, with the lnd Lightning node. In the affected setup, tapd enabled its invoice interceptor and treated any HTLC carrying custom wire records as an asset payment.

Some sender implementations added an experimental endorsement record even to ordinary BTC payments, causing tapd's strict-forwarding rule to instruct lnd to cancel the HTLC set. The trigger did not require the merchant to have any open asset channels.

The second defect sat in lnd. When an interceptor canceled the HTLC set, affected versions canceled the payment on the wire but still marked its invoice as settled in the database.

That meant the error stood in another client of lnd's HtlcModifier interface that canceled an HTLC set could produce the same mismatch. Lightning Labs rates the vulnerability high severity because a false paid status could lead an operator or payment service to release value against a payment that never completed. According to the advisory, the sender's funds were not at risk.

Fixes shipped before disclosure

Lightning Terminal v0.15.0-alpha bundles fixes for both defects. Lightning Labs lists earlier Terminal versions as affected, along with taproot assets through v0.5.0 and lnd 0.18.4-beta through 0.18.5-beta.

The tapd trigger was fixed in v0.5.1 on Feb. 12, 2025. Terminal v0.14.1-alpha included that fix, but its bundled lnd version still had the underlying invoice-state defect.

lnd v0.19.0-beta fixed the accounting error on May 22, 2025. The September 2026 advisory therefore disclosed a vulnerability whose relevant fixes had shipped in 2025. For Terminal operators who cannot update and have no asset channels, Lightning Labs identifies --taproot-assets-mode=disable as a way to avoid the observed tapd trigger.

The post Lightning Labs discloses critical bug marking canceled invoices paid, risking free product delivery appeared first on CryptoSlate.

New York has sued Polymarket, alleging its US prediction market is an unlicensed gambling business operating across the state.

On Sept. 24, Attorney General Letitia James asked a New York state court to stop QCX LLC, which operates as Polymarket US, from offering event contracts without a state gaming license and to order restitution, disgorgement, and potentially substantial penalties. The petition covers contracts tied to sports, elections, culture, and other events.

The action targets a company that is also regulated at the federal level. QCX has been a Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-designated contract market since July 2025, placing the lawsuit within a broader dispute over how federal derivatives oversight interacts with state gambling laws.

New York says Polymarket contracts amount to gambling

New York's case starts with the structure of Polymarket's contracts.

Users buy contracts tied to the outcome of future events, with winning positions ultimately paying according to whether the specified event occurs. The state argues that because customers risk money on outcomes outside their control, the transactions meet New York's definition of gambling.

The petition describes Polymarket as offering what is “quintessentially wagering” under the guise of event contracts and alleges that the company accepts public wagers despite having no license from the New York State Gaming Commission.

Kathy Hochul, New York's Governor, said:

“Calling it a ‘prediction market’ doesn’t change the facts. If you’re taking bets in New York, our gambling laws apply.”

The state cited Polymarket's marketing in its case. The company announced its US app in December 2025 with “sports—followed by markets on everything” and advertised itself as “legal in all 50 states.” An earlier promotion said users would be able to “TRADE EVERY FOOTBALL GAME IN ALL 50 STATES.”

Investigators said the platform offered markets involving the New York Mets, college football games, the New York governor's race and reality television show “Big Brother.” The petition also alleges Polymarket repeatedly advertised and solicited users located in New York through the internet and social media.

Sports contracts add another layer to the state's case. New York requires mobile sports wagering operators to hold a state license, while Polymarket has none, according to the filing.

The attorney general also alleges violations of the federal Wire Act through the transmission of sports wagers, information used to place them, and communications confirming payments across state lines.

Age restrictions are also central to the complaint. Polymarket allows users aged 18 and above, while New York requires mobile sports bettors to be at least 21. The state is asking the court to prohibit Polymarket from allowing people under 21 to wager on the covered event contracts.

James tied those requirements to New York's broader argument that unlicensed operators avoid safeguards and taxes imposed on licensed gaming companies.

“By skirting New York’s laws, Polymarket is targeting the most vulnerable and depriving New York families of critical services and support,” James said. New York says gambling tax revenue supports schools, youth programs and treatment for problem gambling.

State seeks triple gains and $100,000 penalties

The remedies sought by New York extend beyond shutting down Polymarket's sports contracts.

James wants a permanent injunction preventing the company from operating an unlicensed gambling business within or from New York, including by offering contracts tied to “sports, culture, elections, and other events” without obtaining the required state licenses. The requested order would also cover advertising, marketing, and soliciting participation in those contracts.

That wording would place political and cultural markets alongside sports contracts under the same requested restrictions rather than confining the case to products that resemble conventional sportsbook wagers.

New York also wants Polymarket to provide an accounting that identifies its customers and itemizes bets placed, customer losses, and gains the company received. It is seeking full restitution for customers, damages, and disgorgement of money obtained through the alleged violations.

The state is also seeking a penalty equal to three times Polymarket's gains from the alleged illegal activity.

Sports wagering carries a separate potential cost. The petition seeks $100,000 for each offering or attempt to offer unauthorized sports wagering or mobile sports wagering within or from New York. It does not specify how many offers could ultimately qualify, leaving the size of that portion of any potential penalty unresolved.

The attorney general alleges Polymarket has operated or indirectly operated a sports wagering platform in New York since at least Jan. 23, 2025, and has continued to advertise it to people in the state.

Polymarket becomes latest target of New York prediction-market push

The lawsuit follows a series of similar actions by New York against companies offering event contracts under prediction-market structures.

James sued Coinbase Financial Markets and Gemini Titan in April, alleging their prediction markets constituted unlicensed gambling because customers could bet on sports, elections and entertainment events.

Those cases also sought forfeiture of alleged illegal profits, restitution and fines equal to three times the companies' profits from the challenged activity.

New York followed in July with a lawsuit against Kalshi, another CFTC-designated contract market. That petition similarly sought to stop Kalshi from operating an unlicensed gambling business, recover alleged illegal gains, compensate users and impose fines equal to three times its gains.

The Kalshi dispute had already tested the boundary between federal derivatives regulation and state gambling enforcement.

Earlier in July, James and Hochul said Kalshi had lost a lawsuit against the New York Gaming Commission and pledged to continue applying state gambling laws to prediction markets.

The Polymarket petition now asks the same state court system for a comparable package of relief, while adding allegations tied to Polymarket's own sports promotions and New York activity.

The post New York sues Polymarket, seeks triple gains and $100,000 penalties over prediction markets appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitget has suspended withdrawals after unauthorized transfers drained about $351.6 million from a limited number of its hot and warm wallets.

The crypto exchange detected the transfers at 18:31 UTC on Sept. 24 and activated its emergency response procedures within minutes, Chief Executive Officer Gracy Chen said. Bitget’s cold wallets and most assets held on the platform were unaffected.

Chen said customer balances remain accurate and the losses are covered by Bitget’s User Protection Fund, which currently holds more than $464 million. Deposits and trading continue to operate normally while withdrawals remain paused pending a security review.

She said:

“The full amount of this loss falls within the coverage of Bitget's User Protection Fund.”

The exchange has identified and flagged addresses connected to the transfers and notified law enforcement agencies and on-chain security firms. It has yet to disclose how the wallets were compromised and said it would not speculate on the attack vector while the investigation remains underway.

Bitget plans to provide hourly updates and publish a full incident report within 24 hours, including the root cause and corrective measures.

September crypto losses surge past April

The breach comes during Bitget’s eighth-anniversary campaign, which the exchange launched this month as it expands beyond crypto into equities, foreign exchange and other markets under its Universal Exchange strategy.

It also makes an already expensive month for crypto security even more costly.

DeFiLlama had recorded about $331 million in losses across 17 September incidents before the Sept. 19 Fetch.ai exploit. Subsequent attacks pushed that figure above $342 million, with most of the damage linked to a roughly $320 million incident involving Liquid Network.

Adding Bitget’s $351.6 million in affected assets would push September’s reported total above $684 million, making it the costliest month of 2026 on a gross-loss basis.

That would surpass April, when crypto exploits generated about $646.9 million in losses, largely because of the Drift and KelpDAO attacks. Those two incidents accounted for roughly $577 million of the month’s total.

The September figure could still change as investigations determine whether affected assets are recovered or ultimately classified as losses.

For Bitget, the immediate focus is restoring withdrawals. Chen said the exchange would keep them suspended until its security review is complete and pledged that “every dollar and every decision will be accounted for, transparently and in full.”

The post Bitget’s $351.6 million hack pushes September crypto losses to 2026 high appeared first on CryptoSlate.

No, you cannot buy a house in Germany with Bitcoin. Since April 1, 2023, section 16a of the German Money Laundering Act has banned exactly that: the purchase price for a domestic property may not be settled in cash, nor in crypto-assets, gold, platinum or gemstones, whatever the amount involved. Your Bitcoin holdings still work as a down payment for a mortgage, but only along a single route: you sell them, have the euro amount paid into an account in your own name, and prove to the bank and the notary, without gaps, where the money came from.

That shifts the real task away from the purchase and towards the paperwork. Anyone who has moved coins across several wallets and exchanges over the years rarely fails on the value of the portfolio, and almost always on the missing proof of origin. This article sets out what German banks accept as a down payment, which documents close the chain, how the holding period changes the sum available to you, and in which order to proceed.

Can you pay for a property in Germany directly with Bitcoin?

The short answer is no. The reason lies in an explicit statutory rule, not in the convenience of the banks. The Money Laundering Act, GwG for short, is the German law that requires banks, notaries and other obliged parties to check and document the origin of the assets used. Since 2023 it has contained a prohibition of its own for property transactions.

In practice that means: even if a seller were willing to accept coins, and even if both sides recorded it in the purchase contract, the transaction could not be validly performed. The notary who applies for the transfer of title at the land registry must be shown evidence of the non-cash payment. Without that evidence the transfer cannot proceed, and without the transfer you do not become the owner.

The reverse idea does not hold either. Some buyers hope that part of the purchase price could be settled in coins at the notary's desk and only the remainder through the bank. The prohibition recognises no de minimis threshold. It applies to the obligation as a whole, and therefore to a small part-payment as well.

What section 16a of the Money Laundering Act has banned since April 1, 2023

The provision applies to legal transactions covering the purchase or exchange of domestic property, and to the acquisition of shares in companies whose assets include domestic property. The obligation owed may only be discharged by means other than cash, crypto-assets, gold, platinum or gemstones. The wording can be read at the federal justice ministry in the official text of section 16a GwG.

The consequence of a breach is more unpleasant than many expect. A prohibited payment does not render the purchase contract void, but the payment loses its discharging effect. In legal terms: the seller's claim to the purchase price continues to exist. Anyone who has paid in coins has therefore not paid the price in law and owes it again, while the transferred holdings can only be recovered under the general law of unjust enrichment. For a financing running into several hundred thousand euros, that is a risk out of all proportion to the effort of an ordinary bank transfer.

One detail often gets lost in advice: the rule applies only to legal transactions concluded on or after April 1, 2023. It does not apply to older contracts. Since the provision has now been in force for more than three years, only residual cases are affected today.

What counts as a down payment at the bank and what counts as collateral

Two terms are constantly confused in conversations with the bank, and the confusion costs negotiating position. A down payment is the freely available funds you contribute to the property financing yourself, reducing the loan amount required. Collateral, by contrast, is an asset the bank may seize in an emergency, without it reducing the loan amount. In a classic property loan the collateral is the property itself, registered by way of a land charge.

Crypto holdings can count towards the down payment once converted into euros. As collateral they are of practically no use at German banks. The building society Schwäbisch Hall puts it plainly in its guide on cryptocurrency as equity: Bitcoin as security for a loan has so far been rejected by the banks. As a source of equity, the route is open, but only through conversion into euros.

How large a down payment you need depends on the house, your income and the credit terms. Advisory practice works on the rule of thumb that the incidental purchase costs should come entirely from your own funds, plus roughly twenty percent of the purchase price. Those incidental costs are no sideshow: land transfer tax ranges from 3.5 to 6.5 percent depending on the federal state, notary and land registry account for around 1.5 to 2 percent, and where an agent is involved further percentage points are added. Together that lands at roughly 9 to 15 percent of the purchase price, depending on location and who is involved.

Why banks do not accept crypto holdings as collateral

The reason lies in the valuation logic of property financing. Banks work with the mortgage lending value, a deliberately conservative figure that should still be achievable in a weak property market. It regularly sits below the market value of the property. For a residential building, that figure can be derived plausibly through a valuation using comparable properties, replacement cost and income capitalisation.

Crypto holdings resist that logic on several counts at once. The price can move by double-digit percentages within days, which makes any valuation on a thirty-year horizon questionable. Enforcement in the event of default is legally cumbersome, because the bank can realise nothing without the private key. And any realisation would have to run through a trading venue whose liquidity is not guaranteed. A land charge has the land registry behind it; a wallet has no equivalent.

This reticence is no verdict on crypto as an asset class. Deutsche Bank announced custody of Bitcoin, Ether and selected stablecoins for institutional clients from 2026. Custody for large clients and acceptance as loan collateral in retail banking are two different things, though, and the second does not automatically follow from the first.

How crypto holdings become a recognised down payment: the route through the euro

The sequence is unspectacular, and that is precisely its strength. You sell the amount you need on an exchange or through a broker, have the euro equivalent paid out to an account in your own name, and bring that amount into the financing as your down payment. What matters is that the payout goes to your own account and not to a third party's. Every intermediate step through another person tears open the chain of evidence and creates exactly the suspicion the Money Laundering Act is aimed at.

One point deserves more attention than it usually gets: the choice of trading venue. An exchange based and authorised in the EU gives you machine-readable annual statements, trading histories and payout records in a form a bank accepts. A provider without European authorisation often does not, and a later export can turn out to be impossible if an account has been frozen or a service discontinued. So if the sale is still ahead of you, it is worth looking at our crypto exchange comparison with documentation in mind, and not only fees. The difference between two providers here is not measured in tenths of a percent, but in whether the financing goes through.

Allow time as well. Between the sell order, the credit to the reference account and the onward transfer to your own current account, several working days pass depending on provider and amount. With larger sums, checks are added that extend the process.

What proof of source of funds banks and notaries require for crypto

Proof of source of funds is the evidence showing where the money used came from. It is no formality to be dealt with by way of a screenshot. The review is risk-based: the more conspicuous a transaction looks, the deeper the bank and the notary probe. A six-figure euro amount arriving from a crypto exchange shortly before a property purchase reliably falls into the higher risk class.

What is typically required is a closed chain: wallet, then exchange, then your own bank account, then the notary's escrow account or the seller. Each transition needs its own record. Completeness is what counts, not the volume of paper. A single transfer confirmation does not answer the question of origin, because it shows only the final step.

This scrutiny does not only reach you when buying property, incidentally. In the opposite direction, when depositing funds at an exchange, a query about the source of funds can trigger a freeze. How that plays out and which documents help there is described in our article on a crypto deposit frozen over the source of funds. The logic is the same; only the direction of the money flow differs.

Which documents prove the chain from wallet to exchange to account

Gather the records before the first meeting with the bank, not after. An application that goes into a second round for want of documents loses time and often the interest rate initially offered. These are the documents asked for in practice:

• The complete trading history from the exchange as a machine-readable export, not as a screenshot. A CSV export can be checked; a photograph cannot.
• Purchase records for the original acquisition, ideally with date, quantity and euro equivalent.
• Bank statements showing the deposit made to the exchange at the time, that is, the origin of the money originally used.
• Wallet addresses and transaction identifiers for movements that ran outside an exchange.
• The exchange's payout record for the sale, together with the matching statement from your current account.
• For coins from mining, staking or airdrops, the relevant statements, because such inflows are treated differently for tax than a purchase.

A gap is not the end of the world, but it has to be explicable. A discontinued exchange, a lost login or a wallet from the early years all happen. Write such cases up in advance in a short, factual note and attach whatever still exists. A gap that is named openly and explained plausibly is usually accepted; one passed over in silence leads to a query at the worst possible moment.

How the holding period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act decides your available sum

Selling for your own home is, for tax purposes, a private disposal transaction. The governing provision is section 23 of the Income Tax Act, which can be read in the official text of section 23 EStG. The holding period is the span between the acquisition and the sale of a coin position. Where more than a year lies between the two, the gain is entirely tax-free, with no upper limit. Sell within the year and your personal income tax rate applies.

Beneath that sits an exemption limit of 1,000 euros a year. The difference from an allowance is decisive and is constantly confused: with an allowance, that amount would always stay tax-free and only the excess would be taxable. With an exemption limit, the treatment flips as soon as the limit is reached. A gain of 999 euros stays untaxed; a gain of 1,010 euros is taxable in full. For a financing where every available euro counts, that is a figure worth knowing in advance.

The calculation becomes concrete once you run it against your own holdings. Suppose you need 80,000 euros as a down payment and hold positions from two different years. The older ones are past the one-year mark and deliver their amount tax-free. The younger ones trigger a tax charge at your personal rate, falling due the following year, which you have to set aside. Sell the younger ones first and you will later be short of money you had long since earmarked. Which position was acquired when therefore helps determine your financing sum and is no mere bookkeeping question. Anyone who has accumulated many transactions over the years will not get around a clean schedule; a look at the crypto tax software and portfolio trackers saves weeks of manual work here and supplies at once the records the bank and the tax office want to see.

Why the sale belongs before the financing meeting

Banks work with euro amounts sitting in an account. A portfolio carrying price risk does not appear as a down payment in the affordability calculation, because its value on the day the loan is paid out may differ from its value on the day of the meeting. Walking into the advice session with a portfolio statement and planning the sale only after approval means negotiating over funds that do not yet exist for the bank.

The opposite mistake is just as expensive. Selling before a property is even in sight means bearing the tax consequence and giving up any price movement, without gaining planning certainty in return. The sensible moment lies between the two: once a specific property has been found and the financing request is being prepared, but before the documents are submitted. Then the amount is fixed, the records are fresh, and the bank sees a figure rather than an intention.

What the banks' three-month rule means for your bank statements

Many institutions ask for the last three months of bank statements in order to assess income, spending and the origin of the down payment. A larger inflow from a crypto exchange within that window inevitably leads to a query. That is not particular scepticism towards crypto. Every conspicuous inflow is treated this way, a gift or a severance payment included.

From that follows a practical recommendation: if you are planning the sale anyway, carry it out so that the inflow and its record are visible and explained within the review window. An inflow that disappears precisely between two statement periods strikes a case handler as more in need of explanation than a harmless one. Attach the exchange records without being asked. That shortens processing measurably, because the query falls away.

How savings banks and cooperative banks separate crypto trading from credit assessment

One observation causes many customers confusion. The same savings bank that now offers crypto-asset trading in its app still does not treat your crypto holdings as collateral in a credit assessment. What lies behind the institutions' entry into trading is described in detail in our article on the launch of crypto trading at Sparkasse.

The contradiction is only apparent, because two different departments work with two different rulebooks. The securities and custody business sells you access to an asset class and earns fees. The credit department has to secure a claim over decades and is subject to regulatory requirements on the soundness of collateral. That one house offers both says nothing about the second question. So do not count on a portfolio held at your own house bank easing the negotiation. What counts is the euro amount in the account and the quality of your records.

What is different in the United States and why it changes nothing in German practice

In the United States things are genuinely moving. On June 25, 2025, the regulator FHFA directed the two large mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to develop a proposal for how crypto holdings can be taken into account as reserves in the risk assessment of residential mortgages, without prior conversion into US dollars. The directive is confined to holdings demonstrably held on a trading platform regulated in the United States, and requires haircuts for price volatility.

Two limitations matter for you. First, the subject there was reserves in the risk assessment, meaning proof of funds held alongside the down payment, and not payment of a purchase price in coins. Second, as of mid-2026 no finally approved guideline for broad application was in place. For a property purchase in Germany it has no bearing in any case: German law applies here, and section 16a GwG rules out payment in crypto-assets. Anyone inferring from American headlines that their German bank will soon calculate along similar lines is planning on a basis that does not exist here.

Which mistakes most often sink the financing

Most refusals in this context trace back to a few readily avoidable patterns:

1. Payout to someone else's account. A sale whose proceeds land in the account of a parent or partner breaks the chain. Where family funds are involved, they belong documented as a gift in their own right, not mixed in.
2. Screenshots instead of exports. A photograph of an app view is not evidence. What is required is a complete, machine-readable export.
3. Tax not set aside. Sell within the one-year period and you have to pay the following year. If that amount is counted into the down payment, it will be missing later for repayments.
4. Incidental costs underestimated. Banks usually do not finance land transfer tax and notary fees. Allocate the entire crypto proceeds to the purchase price and you stand before the incidental costs with no funds.
5. Documents left too late. Exchange exports going back years take time, and with discontinued providers they are sometimes no longer obtainable. Noticing that only after the property has been secured means losing the deadline.

A last word on expectations: even with clean documents, approval remains a decision on the individual case. Income, term, repayment rate and the valuation of the property weigh more heavily than the question of where the down payment came from. Complete proof of origin removes one obstacle; it does not replace a sound affordability calculation.

Crypto as a down payment: what to take away

1. Calculate first, sell afterwards. Go through your positions by acquisition date and separate the holdings past the one-year mark from the younger ones. Only when you know which part is tax-free and what tax charge the rest triggers do you know your real down payment. The practical steps of selling, including payout routes, are set out in our overview on selling Bitcoin.
2. Gather the records before you go to the bank. Trading history as an export, purchase records, bank statements for the original deposit, payout record. Check whether your trading venue supplies these documents in a usable form at all; the exchange comparison helps with that assessment, and if you are switching provider, pull the exports beforehand.
3. Document the tax side in writing. A traceable schedule of all acquisitions and sales serves two purposes at once, the tax office and the credit case handler. With one of the crypto tax tools you produce it once and use it twice.

(As of September 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

On the evening of Thursday, September 24, 2026, the crypto exchange Bitget said it detected unauthorised outflows from part of its wallets at 18:31 UTC and suspended withdrawals in response. The figure the company itself gives is around $351.6 million. For a European investor, the most important detail is not the size of the loss but the withdrawal freeze: anyone still holding a residual balance at Bitget cannot reach it right now.

That hits a group already working against the clock. Since July 1, 2026, providers without MiCA authorisation have been barred from taking on new business in the European Economic Area. Bitget has exited the EEA market in stages and told existing customers to withdraw their balances. That single remaining route is now temporarily closed.

What happened at Bitget: hot wallets, warm wallets and $351.6 million

A hot wallet is an exchange wallet whose private key stays permanently connected to the internet. It has to be, because withdrawals are meant to settle in seconds. A cold wallet keeps the key offline instead, usually on separated hardware; it is slow, but out of reach for an attacker working over the network. Between the two sits the warm wallet, an intermediate tier with limited but real network access.

Bitget describes its custody setup as a three-tier architecture built from exactly those layers. According to chief executive Gracy Chen, quoted by CoinDesk, only part of the hot and warm wallet tier is affected and the cold wallets are intact. The amounts on-chain observers could see diverged at first: blockchain analysts reported movements of roughly $178 million to $183 million in the opening hours, while the company puts the figure at $351.6 million. A spread like that is normal in the first hours after an incident, because outside observers only see the transactions they have already been able to attribute.

The outflows were spread across fifteen transfers and seven assets on several networks, according to an analysis by CryptoSlate. The largest single block, 44.4 percent, was Ethereum; BNB, AVAX and the stablecoin USDT were among the others affected. Notably, the funds were then consolidated into a single address.

The exchange treats deposits and withdrawals differently: deposits and trading continue to run, the company says, and only withdrawals are paused for the duration of the security review. Bitget announced hourly updates and a full report on the root cause within 24 hours. Neither had appeared by the time this article went to press.

Why the withdrawal freeze hits existing European customers hardest

To a European investor the case may look remote at first, because Bitget is no longer permitted to write new business here. That is precisely what makes the situation more awkward rather than less. When a provider withdraws from the EEA in an orderly fashion, existing customers are usually left with exactly one action: withdraw. If that route is blocked for an indefinite period, the people affected lose the only option regulation had left them.

A second deadline runs alongside, unrelated to the incident. On September 18 Bitget announced it would delist the trading pairs COTI/USDT, SAGA/USDT and RVN/USDT on September 24 at 10:00 UTC. For those three assets, withdrawals run until December 24, 2026, 10:00 UTC, according to the announcement. Anyone still holding positions there has a date in the calendar and a blocked withdrawal route at the same time. That combination is why waiting does not resolve itself here.

In practice: check today whether you are affected at all. Log in, note the balance with the date and time, take a screenshot and file a withdrawal request as soon as the function reopens. A documented balance is the basis for any later claim and for your tax return. Do not respond to emails or direct messages offering help with the withdrawal in this situation: a withdrawal freeze is exactly the moment when fraudsters approach customer lists with supposed recovery services.

MiCA and the ESMA register: which exchange is allowed to serve you

The European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short, has since 2025 required every provider offering crypto-asset services in the EEA to hold an authorisation as a CASP (crypto-asset service provider). Authorised providers appear in a public register kept by the European securities regulator ESMA. The transitional rules for legacy providers expired on July 1, 2026.

Bitget holds no such authorisation and does not appear in that register. The company has applied for a licence in Austria and is building a European entity in Vienna; until a licence is granted, it offers no services in the EEA. What looks like a formality in hindsight is the real difference for you: with an authorised provider you would have a European supervisor to address, reporting duties and documented custody requirements. Without authorisation that whole apparatus is missing, and you depend on the company's assurances.

From that follows the first check, and it reaches beyond this one case. Find out under which company and in which country your provider is actually authorised, and compare that against the ESMA register. If you want a starting point, our overview of regulated crypto exchanges for European investors lists the providers that have cleared this hurdle. The obligations those companies face under the MiCA licensing regime are a separate subject we have set out elsewhere.

One misunderstanding comes up often: a MiCA authorisation is no shield against hacks. It obliges the provider to meet organisational requirements and to segregate client assets, and it gives you a regulated counterparty if something goes wrong. It does not prevent the technical break-in.

Three wallet tiers at an exchange: what actually protects your balance

When you hold coins in an exchange account, you do not own coins on the blockchain. You own a claim against the company. The exchange runs an internal ledger of your balance and keeps all customer holdings pooled in its own wallets. That distinction matters the moment the exchange's holdings fall below the sum of the claims against it.

Splitting funds into hot, warm and cold is the standard answer to that risk. The large majority of customer holdings is meant to sit offline, while only a working float is kept online, large enough for day-to-day withdrawals. If the split works as intended, a break-in at the hot wallet reaches only that working float. In this case, though, the sum the company names runs into the hundreds of millions, which shows how large that float gets at a major exchange.

From that you can derive a question to put to any provider: does it publish proof of reserves, and can that proof be verified independently? A meaningful attestation names addresses, a cut-off date and a method by which customers can confirm their own balance was included. A press release with a total and no verifiable addresses does not meet that bar.

The protection fund is not deposit insurance: what $464 million in cover means

Bitget points to its own protection fund, which the company says holds more than $464 million and will cover the loss in full. That is a solid commitment only within the frame in which it is meant, and that frame differs fundamentally from what you know from your bank account.

Statutory deposit insurance in the European Union protects bank balances up to 100,000 euros per customer and institution. It rests on a directive, is supervised by the state, and applies whether or not the bank wants to pay. A crypto exchange's protection fund, by contrast, is a voluntary reserve held by the company. The company itself decides on payout, priority and amount. No statutory deposit insurance exists for crypto-assets in the EU, and MiCA does not create one.

This says nothing about Bitget's willingness to pay; it describes the nature of the instrument. A protection fund can absorb a loss in full, and funds in this industry have done so before. What you cannot do is rely on it the way you rely on a bank guarantee.

Self-custody and hardware wallets: when moving off an exchange account pays

Self-custody means you hold the private key to your coins yourself and nobody else can dispose of them. A hardware wallet is a small device that generates that key and keeps it permanently separated from your computer; transfers are confirmed on the device and the key never leaves it. The seed phrase is the sequence of words from which the key can be restored, and therefore the actual access to your assets.

The advantage is obvious: a break-in at an exchange does not reach holdings that sit on your own device. The downside is often underestimated. Self-custody comes with no recovery hotline. A lost or photographed seed means permanent loss, and in August 2026 a flaw in the key generation of certain offline devices showed that this route carries risks of its own.

A workable rule of thumb separates funds by purpose. Amounts you actively trade may sit at a regulated exchange, because you need to be able to act quickly there. Anything you intend to hold for months, and whose loss would hurt, belongs on your own hardware. If you are moving funds for the first time, read up in our hardware wallet comparison first and send a small test amount before you move the rest.

One element of diligence costs nothing and is regularly forgotten: write the seed phrase down by hand, keep it separate from the device, and never store it as a photo, a text file or in cloud storage. Total losses in self-custody rarely trace back to an attack on the device. Usually a copy of the seed existed somewhere that somebody else could reach.

Tax and the holding period: what a frozen balance means for your return

A withdrawal freeze is, for tax purposes, a non-event to begin with. As long as your coins sit in the account and merely cannot be moved, you have neither sold nor swapped, and no disposal has taken place. In Germany the one-year holding period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act keeps running during this time, because it attaches to acquisition and disposal, not to availability.

It looks different once a blocked balance turns into an actual loss. Whether and how a loss from stolen or no longer withdrawable crypto-assets can be claimed for tax has not been settled in Germany and depends on the individual case. The federal finance ministry did not take a clear position on theft losses in its guidance on crypto-assets. What follows for you is above all a duty to document on your own account: secure account statements, transaction lists and the provider's notices with dates while you still have access to your account.

If you already run a portfolio tool, record the event there as a separate item rather than keeping it in your head. Our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers shows which programmes produce records in a form a tax office accepts. For larger amounts a tax adviser is the cheaper option, because a wrongly stated loss position triggers questions later.

September 2026 in the hack ledger: Liquid Network, Bitget and the year's total

The incident does not stand alone. On figures CryptoSlate compiles from DeFiLlama, losses from attacks in September 2026 already stood at roughly $342 million before the Bitget incident. With the loss now reported, the month adds up to more than $684 million, surpassing the previous high for the year set in April at $646.9 million.

The largest single item before that came in early September from the Liquid Network at around $320 million, where the attackers stated they had acted as white hats. Smaller incidents followed, among them an attack on a hot wallet belonging to the provider Duelbits worth about $7 million. For context, a monthly tally depends heavily on a few large individual cases, and no trend for the coming quarter can be read from it.

For judging your own risk, another observation is more useful anyway. The large losses of this year arose overwhelmingly where assets sat pooled with a single custodian. That holds for the orderly cases too: both the shutdown of BitMEX on September 23 and the announced closure of CoinEx at the end of the year put customers in the same position, having to pull balances under time pressure off a platform they could no longer choose. Bitcoin itself barely reacted to the news that evening; the market now treats a break-in at a single exchange as an event belonging to that exchange.

Checking the Bitget hack: what to take away

1. Establish today whether you are affected, and document the position. Log in, note balances with date and time, save the transaction list and the provider's notices, and file the withdrawal request as soon as the function reopens. For the three trading pairs delisted on September 24, the withdrawal window closes on December 24, 2026. Keep the records in the form a tax office will later want to see — the tools for that are in our comparison of crypto tax software.
2. Check the authorisation of every exchange you use. Find out which company in which country is liable for your account, and match it against the ESMA register. A provider without CASP authorisation may not serve you in the EEA, and in a dispute you have no European supervisor to turn to. The houses that have cleared this hurdle are in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Separate trading holdings from long-term holdings. What you move around may sit at the exchange; what you hold for months belongs on your own hardware, with the seed phrase written by hand and kept apart from the device, and a small test amount sent before the first large transfer. The devices and how they differ are in our hardware wallet comparison.

A final note that applies at the time of writing: Bitget reported the incident itself, quantified the loss and promised cover from its own protection fund. Whether withdrawals reopen quickly, and whether the promised root-cause report answers the open questions, could not be foreseen as this article went to press. Until then the sober rule this evening has confirmed again applies to you: a balance at an exchange is a claim against a company, and its worth depends on that company being able and permitted to pay.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Whether a crypto gain raises your health insurance contribution hangs on a single question: how are you insured? If you are compulsorily insured as an employee, a private disposal gain has no effect on the contribution. If you are voluntarily insured, as a self-employed person or as a high earner above the compulsory insurance threshold, it counts. And if you are covered without contributions through your partner's family insurance, a single gain can tip that cover over for months.

This article sorts the three cases, gives the 2026 thresholds from the reference values ordinance, and shows which distinction moves the most money: the one between a taxable and a tax-free gain.

The decisive lever: what counts as income for social insurance purposes

Social insurance does not invent an income concept of its own; it borrows one from tax law. Under section 16 of Book Four of the German Social Code, total income is the sum of the income within the meaning of income tax law. That one sentence decides almost everything that follows.

For Bitcoin and other coins, section 23 subsection 1 sentence 1 number 2 of the Income Tax Act applies for tax purposes. If you sell within one year of buying, the gain is a private disposal and therefore taxable income. If you sell after a year has passed, the transaction is not taxable at all. It appears in no category of income, and it therefore does not raise total income within the meaning of section 16 SGB IV either.

From this follows the most important rule of thumb in this article: the holding period works twice over. That single period decides your income tax and, in many constellations, your health insurance contribution along with it. A gain of 6,000 euros after fourteen months is tax-free and, as a rule, irrelevant for social insurance. The same gain after ten months is neither.

A second point up front, because it often gets muddled: what matters is the realised gain, not the value of your holding. A portfolio that has risen in price without your having sold generates no income and moves no contribution. Health insurance contributions are assessed on receipts, not on assets. That sets them apart from procedures in which the holding itself is precisely what matters, such as the seizure of coins.

Case 1: compulsorily insured as an employee

Anyone compulsorily insured in the statutory health insurance scheme as an employee pays contributions on their employment earnings. That is the pay from the employment relationship, and only that. Income from capital, from letting property or from private disposals does not belong to it.

A crypto gain therefore does not raise your contribution in this case, not even when it is large and not even when it arises within the one-year period. You still have to declare it for tax as soon as the sum of all private disposal gains reaches the threshold in section 23 EStG. Where that belongs in the forms is set out in the article on where to enter crypto in your tax return.

Two qualifications are worth knowing. If your trading becomes a commercial activity, through its scale, its organisation and the use of borrowed capital for instance, the picture changes completely, because earned income from self-employment then arises. Where that line runs is covered in our article on the difference between private and commercial trading. And anyone who becomes self-employed on a full-time basis alongside the job may lose compulsory insurance as an employee.

Case 2: voluntarily insured, and why total economic capacity counts here

Voluntarily insured means anyone who is not subject to compulsory insurance and nevertheless stays in the statutory fund. That mainly concerns the full-time self-employed and employees whose pay exceeds the compulsory insurance threshold. Section 240 SGB V applies to this group, and its subsection 1 sets a markedly wider yardstick than employment earnings: it must be ensured that the contribution burden takes account of the member's total economic capacity.

The details are set uniformly by the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds. The underlying idea: all receipts that cover the cost of living are drawn on, irrespective of their classification for tax. A taxable gain from a private disposal falls under this. With a tax-free gain after the one-year period the position is less clear-cut, because no point of connection in tax law exists there. Where in doubt, clarify this with your fund beforehand and have the answer given to you in writing rather than fighting it out afterwards.

The 2026 figures

The Social Insurance Reference Values Ordinance 2026 sets the limits between which all of this plays out:

The contribution assessment ceiling is the cap here. Anyone whose contributory receipts already sit above it pays not a cent more because of an additional crypto gain. The minimum assessment basis follows from section 240 subsection 4 SGB V, under which at least a ninetieth of the monthly reference value is to be applied for each calendar day.

What a gain actually costs

Reckon with the general contribution rate of 14.6 percent, the fund's own supplementary contribution and the long-term care insurance contribution. Voluntary members without an employer bear the total alone. With a taxable gain of 10,000 euros and a combined rate of roughly twenty percent, you end up in the order of some 2,000 euros in additional contributions, provided you stay below the contribution assessment ceiling with it. The exact figure depends on your fund and your other receipts, but the order of magnitude shows what is at stake.

The provisional assessment and the recalculation

For the self-employed, the fund initially assesses contributions provisionally under section 240 subsection 4a SGB V, on the basis of the most recent income tax assessment. The final calculation only happens once the assessment for the year in question is available. A crypto gain from 2026 may therefore only catch up with you in 2027 or 2028, but then retrospectively for the whole year. Anyone who has spent the gain by then faces a back payment with nothing to set against it.

Case 3: covered by family insurance, and why the smallest limit applies here

Family insurance under section 10 SGB V is free of contributions. It is open to spouses, civil partners and children, as long as several conditions are met at the same time. Crypto gains regularly breach one of them: the family member must have no total income that regularly exceeds a seventh of the monthly reference value in a month.

For 2026 that means, concretely: 3,955 euros divided by seven gives 565 euros a month. Anyone in marginal employment may instead earn up to the marginal earnings threshold. And because total income under section 16 SGB IV is the sum of income within the meaning of tax law, a taxable crypto gain counts here in full, while a tax-free gain after the one-year period stays outside the reckoning.

The word regularly is the reason so many underestimate this threshold. A one-off gain is not simply added to the month it was received and forgotten about afterwards. One-off receipts are customarily looked at spread over twelve months. A taxable gain of 8,000 euros comes to roughly 667 euros a month when apportioned, and therefore sits above the limit, even though it arose on a single day.

What happens when it falls away

If family insurance falls away, no gap in cover arises, but a liability to pay contributions does. As a rule you become a voluntary member and pay at least the contribution on the minimum assessment basis. The retrospective effect is what makes it critical: funds check the conditions on a regular cycle with a questionnaire, and if it turns out months later that the limit was exceeded, the account is settled retrospectively. That is why a larger realised gain should be reported to the fund before it asks.

What happens with staking, lending and airdrops

Income from staking and lending is for tax purposes usually other income under section 22 number 3 EStG and therefore income within the meaning of tax law. This income flows continuously rather than once, which makes it trickier for the family insurance regularity test than a single disposal gain. For voluntary members it raises contributory receipts like any other income.

A widespread misconception concerns the valuation: what is taxed, and therefore also captured for social insurance, is the inflow in euros at the price on the day of receipt, not the later sale. Anyone drawing rewards in coins and leaving them where they are has income without having seen a single euro. For airdrops it depends on whether you provided something in return. Where that is entirely absent, there is often no taxable receipt at the time of the inflow.

In all three cases you need a robust record with the date, the quantity and the euro price for each inflow. A portfolio tracker with tax reporting takes this work off your hands and supplies the statement you can put before both the tax office and the insurance fund.

Evidence: what happens if you do not supply it

Section 240 subsection 1 SGB V contains a rule that gets expensive if you overlook it. If a member does not produce the requested evidence of their contributory receipts, a thirtieth of the monthly contribution assessment ceiling counts as the contributory receipt for each calendar day. You are then classified as though you had 5,812.50 euros a month, regardless of what you actually had.

The law allows a correction. If you apply for a fresh assessment within twelve months of that assessment being notified and submit the evidence subsequently, the contributions for the periods concerned are to be recalculated. That twelve-month period works as a cut-off in everyday practice: anyone who lets it pass stays stuck with the maximum classification.

The comparison with private health insurance

Privately insured people pay risk-based premiums according to tariff, age and state of health. Income plays no part there in the size of the premium, so a crypto gain does not move it. Income is relevant at only one point, namely the employer's subsidy for employees, and when switching back to the statutory fund, which is tied to the compulsory insurance threshold of 77,400 euros in 2026.

Anyone weighing the two systems as a self-employed person should factor in that fluctuating crypto income feeds straight through to the contribution in the statutory fund and does not in the private one. That is not an argument for switching, because switching is as a rule a one-way street with considerable consequences in old age. It is an argument for building the contribution effect into the planning of a sale.

How to keep the contribution effect small before a sale

The most effective lever sits before the sale, not after it. Four points are worth a look.

Wait out the one-year period wherever you can. A sale after more than twelve months of holding is tax-free and as a rule generates no total income. If your position is just short of the period and you do not absolutely need the liquidity, waiting is by far the cheapest measure. Check the period for each tranche, because it runs separately for each acquisition.

Choose the order of the tranches. If you have to sell, dispose first of the units that already have the one-year period behind them. Which selling routes are available and what fees they carry is something you decide independently of that, but you should be able to document how the tranches were allocated.

Keep the contribution assessment ceiling in view. If as a voluntary member your other receipts already put you above 5,812.50 euros a month, the contribution effect of an additional gain is zero. That check costs five minutes and may spare you an unnecessary postponement.

With family insurance, do the arithmetic beforehand. The 565-euro monthly limit is low, and a one-off gain is apportioned. If the sale can be stretched across several years, the cover may well be preserved. Have your fund confirm the method of calculation before you rely on it.

Crypto gains and health insurance: what to take away

1. Establish your insurance status first, everything else second. As a compulsorily insured employee, a private crypto gain leaves your contribution untouched. As a voluntary member it counts through section 240 SGB V; as a family member the 565-euro monthly limit decides whether contribution-free cover survives. Without that classification, every further calculation is worthless.
2. Keep a complete record of your inflows and sales with the date and the euro price. You need it for your tax return and for any evidence put to the fund, and without it voluntary membership risks classification at the contribution assessment ceiling. A portfolio tracker with tax reporting handles that as you go instead of once a year under time pressure.
3. Check the holding period for each tranche before any larger sale. Above the one-year mark the gain is tax-free and usually stays free of contributions; below it, it may hit you twice. If you want to keep your holdings cleanly separated for that purpose, orderly custody helps, for instance on a hardware wallet of your own with separate accounts for each acquisition period.

Sources in the text of the law: section 240 SGB V on the contributory receipts of voluntary members and the Social Insurance Reference Values Ordinance 2026.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice and not legal or tax advice. Contribution rates, reference values and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy, and have your individual case examined by your health insurance fund or a tax adviser.)

Yes, your crypto holdings count as assets for Bürgergeld, Germany's basic income support. They are a realisable asset within the meaning of the Social Code, they are valued at their market value, and they are set against the same allowances as an instant-access savings account or a share portfolio. What has changed since the summer of 2026: the allowances are no longer the same for everyone, and the one-year grace period at the start of a claim no longer exists for financial assets.

This article explains how much you may keep, which day decides the valuation, what you must tell the Jobcenter of your own accord, and the routes by which an authority learns of holdings you have not declared. All the figures come from the text of the law itself, not from advice portals.

Bürgergeld has become Grundsicherungsgeld: what changed on assets

The benefit that people still colloquially call Bürgergeld carries a new name in the law. Under section 19 of Book Two of the German Social Code, claimants capable of work receive Grundsicherungsgeld, basic income support. Official jargon and the search engines still lag behind; the decision letters do not. Anyone filing a claim today has the new rules applied, even if they searched for the old word.

More important than the name are two changes of substance. First, the blanket grace period for assets has gone. Assets used to be left untouched up to a high ceiling in the first year of a claim, and only then did the actual allowances bite. Under section 12 SGB II that grace period now applies only to owner-occupied residential property: a house or a flat you live in yourself stays out of the reckoning during the grace period, regardless of value and size. For portfolios, savings books and coins that buffer no longer exists. Your allowances apply from day one.

Second, the size of the allowance now depends on your age. For a crypto holder that is no marginal detail, because it can make the difference between an untouched holding and one you have to spend down, without anything about your holding having changed at all.

The asset allowances under section 12 SGB II: what your age decides

An allowance is the amount you may keep before anything at all is counted against you. Section 12 subsection 2 SGB II grades it by age, and it does so for each person in the benefit unit separately:

Under the law the higher amount applies from the beginning of the month in which you reach the relevant age threshold. Someone turning 41 on the 20th of a month therefore has 12,500 euros free from the first of that same month. With a holding that sits just above a threshold, that single month can decide the outcome.

Work it through on an actual holding. Bitcoin stood at roughly 74,100 euros on September 24, 2026 (CoinGecko, retrieved 18:40 UTC). A quarter of a bitcoin is therefore about 18,500 euros. For a single person aged 35 with an allowance of 10,000 euros, some 8,500 euros sit above the line and count as assets to be spent down. The same 0.25 BTC is fully protected for a 52-year-old with a 20,000-euro allowance.

Transferable allowances: how the benefit unit adds up

In social law a benefit unit is the circle of people who are jointly responsible for their upkeep, typically partners and minor children in the household. For assets, a rule applies there that many overlook: allowances the other members have not used up are transferred under section 12 subsection 2 SGB II to the person whose assets breach their own limit.

A couple aged 34 and 52 bring 10,000 plus 20,000 euros between them, so 30,000 euros. If the entire wealth sits in the younger person's wallet alone, that does no harm as long as the total stays below 30,000 euros. The older person's unused allowance moves across in the arithmetic. Hurriedly transferring your coins to your partner before a claim therefore gains you nothing the law does not already give you, and it may well invite questions.

The second half of the calculation gets overlooked too. Alongside the allowance, section 12 subsection 1 SGB II lists items that do not count as assets in the first place. These include reasonable household effects, one reasonable motor vehicle for each employable person in the benefit unit, insurance contracts earmarked for retirement provision, and state-subsidised pension savings. A crypto holding falls under none of these exceptions, not even if you personally regard it as your retirement provision. Number 4 of that subsection does protect assets expressly designated as retirement provision, but only for periods of full-time self-employment without contributions to the state pension scheme, and only up to a statutorily calculated maximum for each year begun.

Market value on the cut-off date: why the day you file decides your entitlement

Section 12 subsection 3 SGB II contains the sentence that weighs most heavily when prices move. Assets are to be taken into account at their market value, and the decisive moment for the valuation is the point at which the claim for an award, or for a renewed award, is filed. If you acquire assets only later, the moment of acquisition counts.

Market value is the price that could be achieved on the market. For a coin with an active exchange listing, that is the price on that day, not your purchase price and not the level from the week before last. Three things follow for you, and the third is where clawbacks arise in practice.

The cut-off date is a day, not an average. A holding that sits below the allowance on a monthly average can sit above it on the day of filing and then count in full. The reverse applies in your favour. Next: every renewal claim sets a new cut-off date. A holding that raised no eyebrows on the initial claim can be above the line at renewal if the price has risen in the meantime. And finally the rule works in the other direction too. Anyone acquiring coins while receiving the benefit, from staking rewards or an airdrop for instance, has new assets at the moment of receipt, which section 60 SGB I requires them to report without delay.

If you hold your assets spread across several wallets and exchanges, have a coherent consolidated statement ready for the cut-off date. A portfolio tracker with tax reporting delivers exactly that snapshot with date, price and source, and you will need it a second time for the tax office anyway.

Which crypto holdings count as realisable and which do not

Realisable in social law means you can turn the item into money or borrow against it within a foreseeable period. For a liquid coin on a mainstream exchange that is uncontroversial. The edge cases are the interesting ones.

Locked, pledged and illiquid holdings

Coins tied up in staking for a fixed term cannot be sold immediately. That does not reduce their value, however, and a lock-up of a few weeks does not make them unrealisable. Long lock-up periods with no option to exit, or tokens without a functioning market, are a different matter. Here it comes down to the individual case, and here it pays to document the lock-up in writing rather than merely assert it.

Particular hardship

Section 12 subsection 1 number 7 SGB II exempts items and rights whose realisation would amount to particular hardship. That is a narrow exception for cases in which a sale would be economically unreasonable, for instance a sale well below value in a forced situation. As a rule it cannot be founded on a price loss since purchase. Anyone wanting to rely on it should discuss the point with an advice centre or a lawyer specialising in social law before writing it into the claim.

Debts

Assets are looked at gross as a matter of principle. An overdraft on your current account is not automatically netted off against a wallet. Anyone who has pledged coins as security for a loan should be able to document the pledge, because it genuinely does restrict realisability. How loans with coins as collateral work for tax and under civil law is set out in the article on bitcoin-backed loans, tax and the holding period.

The duty to cooperate under section 60 SGB I: what you must declare to the Jobcenter

The obligation to declare crypto is not in SGB II but one level above it. Under section 60 subsection 1 of Book One of the German Social Code, anyone who applies for or receives social benefits must state all facts that are material to the benefit. On top of that comes the duty to report changes in circumstances without delay, and the duty to name evidence and produce it on request.

That wording is deliberately broad. It does not turn on whether the claim form expressly asks about cryptocurrencies. What is material is whatever can influence the entitlement, and assets can influence it. The question about existing assets covers coins just as it covers a savings book, even if the word is missing from the form.

What changes during a claim is therefore reportable without delay as well: an inflow from staking or lending, an airdrop, an inheritance in coins, a sale that puts money in your account. Anyone who reports an inherited holding only months later also acquires an evidence problem, because they have to reconstruct the deceased's holding period and acquisition costs. How that is done is set out in our article on proving the holding period and purchase price of inherited bitcoin.

How the Jobcenter finds out about your coins

Many assume that a self-custodied wallet is invisible to an authority. That holds for the wallet itself, and it has long ceased to hold for the route that leads to it. Three channels are responsible, and they operate independently of one another.

The automated data comparison, and what it cannot do

Under section 52 SGB II, the Federal Employment Agency and the municipal bodies compare claimants' data automatically four times a year, on 1 January, 1 April, 1 July and 1 October. That comparison looks for pensions, for periods of compulsory insurance, for benefits from other institutions and for data on exemption orders reported to the Federal Central Tax Office. It does not capture crypto holdings. Anyone concluding from this that a wallet stays undetected draws the wrong conclusion, because the comparison is only the first of three routes.

The account data retrieval at the Federal Central Tax Office

Section 93 subsection 8 of the Fiscal Code expressly permits the authorities responsible for basic income support for jobseekers to retrieve account master data from the Federal Central Tax Office. The conditions are that it is necessary in order to examine the conditions of entitlement, and that a prior request for information addressed to you has not achieved its purpose or holds no promise of success. The retrieval yields no balances and no wallet addresses, but the master data of the accounts and securities accounts held in your name at German credit institutions.

For crypto it is nevertheless the most effective channel, because almost every holding came into being via a bank account. Anyone transferring euros to an exchange and later receiving euros back leaves a trail on the bank statement that leads to the exchange. From there section 60 subsection 2 SGB II carries on: anyone who holds balances or safeguards assets for a person receiving benefits must provide information to the Employment Agency on request. An exchange that holds your coins in custody falls under that provision.

The reporting duty for crypto service providers since 2026

The third channel is new. With the Crypto-Asset Tax Transparency Act, Germany implemented the EU's DAC8 directive, which builds on the international CARF framework. Since 1 January 2026, reporting crypto-asset service providers have had to collect data on their users and transmit it to the Federal Central Tax Office, which exchanges it with the tax authorities of the other member states. The first reporting period is the 2026 calendar year, with transmission in the year that follows.

What gets reported is identification data along with aggregated figures on purchases, sales and transfers for each crypto-asset. That is a tax procedure to begin with and not a social data comparison, and a Jobcenter does not receive these reports automatically. It does shift the starting point, though: a holding that is on file with the tax office is also documentable to another authority if a dispute arises. What that means for tax is described in detail in the article on where to enter crypto in your tax return.

If you have to spend down crypto: holding period, section 23 EStG and the double trap

If your holding is above the allowance, the Jobcenter will require you to spend down the excess before benefits are paid. In practice that means selling. And this is precisely where two sets of rules meet that know nothing of each other.

For tax purposes, coins count as other assets within the meaning of section 23 subsection 1 sentence 1 number 2 of the Income Tax Act. A sale within one year of acquisition is a private disposal and the gain is taxable. After a year has passed it is tax-free. Anyone selling under time pressure because the Jobcenter insists on the assets being spent down can therefore trigger a taxable gain they would not have had with a little more patience.

The second half of the trap: the sale proceeds are not income in the month of receipt but remain assets, because they derive from an asset that already existed. They are therefore not counted as income on top. The gain from them can, however, trigger a tax payment in the following year for which the money is no longer there. Anyone who has to sell should therefore set aside the likely tax out of the proceeds before spending the rest. Which routes exist for selling and where the fees sit is a topic of its own, and the differences are not incidental in a forced sale.

One point you should not overlook: within limits, you may determine the order and the timing yourself. If part of your coins has already passed the one-year mark and another part has not, it is as a rule more favourable to sell the older ones first. Social law does not prescribe which units you dispose of; it is interested only in the result.

What happens if you conceal crypto

If an undeclared holding later comes to light, the authority revokes the award decision for the periods concerned and reclaims the benefits paid. The clawback is measured by what you would have been entitled to had you declared correctly, and it can span several award periods. On top of that, incomplete statements about assets can bring administrative fine proceedings or criminal proceedings in their wake.

That is the expensive route, and it is avoidable. The cheap route is a complete declaration with clean supporting documents, in which you set out yourself, where there is doubt, why in your view a holding should not be taken into account or only in part. An authority handed a complete set of facts decides a question of law. An authority that finds a holding by itself decides on your credibility.

If a decision treats you wrongly on the substance, an objection is open to you, as a rule within one month of notification. The deadline is stated in the decision itself. Free advice is available from the social welfare associations and from independent advice centres, and with larger amounts a lawyer specialising in social law is worth the money.

Preparing your evidence: what to assemble before you file

The effort lies in the documentation, hardly at all in the form-filling. So assemble before you file what you are going to need anyway.

• A statement of all holdings by coin and by place of custody, with the position as at the day the claim is filed.
• That day's price for each coin, with the source and the time of retrieval, so that the market value applied is verifiable.
• The acquisition data, meaning date, quantity and purchase price, because they decide the one-year period for tax.
• Evidence of lock-ups, pledges or commitments that genuinely restrict realisability.
• The bank statements showing deposits to and withdrawals from exchanges, because that is the route along which questions come anyway.

Self-custodied holdings should be listed just as fully as a balance on an exchange. An authority cannot establish a wallet address by itself, and the missing declaration weighs more heavily later than the holding does. If you have kept your coins exclusively on trading platforms so far, transferring them to a hardware wallet of your own is incidentally no way to hide assets. Moving the coins changes nothing about the duty to declare and nothing about the valuation; it changes only who holds the keys.

Drawing the lines: seizure, insolvency and basic income support are three separate procedures

The allowances in SGB II apply exclusively to social benefits. When a private creditor reaches for your assets, the attachment exemption limits of the Code of Civil Procedure apply, and those amounts are different ones. A holding that is protected for basic income support can still be realised by a bailiff. How access to coins works in practice is set out in the article on whether bitcoin can be seized by creditors and insolvency administrators.

Just as non-transferable are the rules of personal insolvency and those of social assistance under Book Twelve of the Social Code, which has an asset framework of its own. Anyone facing several of these procedures at once should have them examined separately, because a statement in one procedure can have quite different consequences in another.

Crypto and Bürgergeld: what to take away

1. Work out your allowance from your age, not from something you read somewhere. There are four bands between 5,000 and 20,000 euros per person, and within a benefit unit unused allowances are transferred. Then draw up a statement of holdings as at the day you intend to file, most easily with a portfolio tracker with tax reporting that supplies the price, the date and the source along with it.
2. Declare all holdings in full and report every change immediately. The duty follows from section 60 SGB I, regardless of whether the form asks about cryptocurrencies. Document your figures once too often rather than once too rarely, and keep ready the bank statements showing the transfers to exchanges. Where the figures belong in your tax return is shown in the article on where to enter crypto in your tax return.
3. Check the one-year period before a forced sale. Coins you have held for more than a year can be disposed of tax-free under section 23 EStG. Where in doubt, sell the oldest units first, compare the selling routes and their fees beforehand, and set aside the likely tax out of the proceeds before you spend the rest.

Sources in the text of the law: section 12 SGB II on assets to be taken into account and section 60 SGB I on the statement of facts.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice and not legal advice. The state of the law, prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy, and where in doubt have your individual case examined by an advice centre or a specialist lawyer.)

Chainlink traded at $12.96 on September 24, 2026 at 16:46 UTC, 5.72 percent higher than 24 hours earlier (source: CoinGecko). Over the week the gain is 13.36 percent. The trigger dates back two days: the IT services group Infosys is making the Chainlink stack a standard in its banking and payments software. What that means for you as a LINK holder in Germany rests on three questions the announcement itself does not answer.

Chainlink price today: $12.96, daily low of $12.11

The numbers in detail, all from CoinGecko as of September 24, 2026, 16:46 UTC: Chainlink stands at $12.96. The daily low was $12.11 and the reported daily high $12.78. The current price therefore sits above the reported 24-hour range, which is normal during an active move because the database range lags the tick.

Market capitalisation is $9.68 billion, good for rank 16. Over 24 hours, LINK worth $499 million changed hands. Roughly 748.1 million LINK are in circulation. The all-time high of $52.70 dates from May 9, 2021, more than four times above today's price.

Two conflicting figures exist for the weekly move, and they are not smoothed over here. CoinGecko reports 13.36 percent over seven days, while the US finance portal 24/7 Wall St. cited 8.3 percent on the week and 9.1 percent on the month in its September 24 analysis. The difference comes down to different measurement points within a day in which the price swung by more than seven percent. For 2026 as a whole, LINK is down roughly 43 percent according to the same analysis.

What Infosys and Chainlink announced on September 22

On September 22, 2026, Chainlink said that Infosys would use the Chainlink stack as a standard component in its software for banks and payments. Infosys is an Indian IT group whose financial services arm runs systems that, by the company's own account, carry 1.7 billion customer accounts.

The agreement covers six services. The Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, or CCIP, is a transfer standard for moving messages and value between different blockchains. The Chainlink Runtime Environment, or CRE, is an execution environment in which banks define workflows that run partly on their own servers and partly on a blockchain. The Automated Compliance Engine, or ACE, checks automatically whether a transaction meets regulatory requirements before it is executed.

Three data services complete the set. Proof of Reserve is a procedure that continuously and mechanically demonstrates whether a posted reserve actually exists. Data Feeds deliver price data to a smart contract at fixed intervals; Data Streams deliver it on demand and with lower latency. All six fall under the oracle category: an oracle is a bridge that carries outside-world data into a blockchain in a form that a contract there can rely on.

1.7 billion accounts: what the number proves and what it does not

The 1.7 billion figure is the reach of Infosys, not the number of banks that have committed to Chainlink. These are accounts administered through systems run by Infosys clients. Not one of those banks has stated, in connection with the announcement, that it will use the Chainlink stack or hold LINK.

That distinction is the heart of the day. Standardisation on the vendor side lowers the hurdle for any individual bank that later wants to integrate. It does not replace that bank's own decision. The path from standardisation in a product catalogue to live settlement runs through tenders, regulatory sign-off and budget cycles, and the announcement settles none of those steps.

Why LINK first lost 4.4 percent on the news

The sequence of the price move is what stands out. In the 24 hours after the announcement, LINK fell 4.4 percent, according to the September 24 assessment by 24/7 Wall St. Only then did the price turn, and today it trades 5.72 percent higher.

The analysis gives three reasons for that first decline: the partnership names no participating banks, it sets no timetable and it says nothing about fees. A technical point is often overlooked on top of that. A bank can use CCIP and settle in dollars or in a stablecoin without ever holding LINK. The connection between network usage and demand for the token is therefore not automatic; it depends on how the fees are ultimately paid and passed on. The number of newly created Chainlink addresses on the day of the announcement was below the previous day's figure and below the monthly average.

Bottomline and Swift: the run-up on September 3

The Infosys deal is the second major infrastructure event within three weeks. On September 3, 2026, Bottomline, by its own account one of the three largest service providers in the Swift ecosystem, announced a strategic partnership with Chainlink. Bottomline says it moves more than $16 trillion in annual payment volume for over 600 bank clients in 92 countries. That deal also centres on CCIP and CRE, and there too the names of individual banks are missing.

Two announcements of the same pattern in quick succession make a picture: Chainlink is positioning itself with the banks' suppliers rather than with the banks themselves. That is strategically sound, because a single supplier reaches many institutions at once. For valuing the token, however, it merely pushes the decisive question back a step.

If you want to know how far German institutions have come with their own crypto offering, the situation at the Sparkasse and Volksbank networks is covered separately. That is the level at which you as a customer would actually notice a change.

Buying LINK under MiCA: the route that remains open to you in Germany

A clear framework has applied to purchases since the EU's MiCA regulation took full effect. MiCA stands for Markets in Crypto-Assets and governs across Europe who may offer and hold crypto-assets. In practice, your provider needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider in an EU member state, and that authorisation then applies throughout the single market.

Check three things before you buy. First, whether the provider actually holds the authorisation and in which country it was granted. Second, whether LINK is listed there for spot trading and not only as a contract for difference, because those are two entirely different transactions for tax purposes. Third, whether you can withdraw the coins to an address of your own, because a venue without withdrawals is unsuitable for longer holding periods. An overview sorted by those criteria is in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

One note on offers from the United States: reports of new trading options at US brokers generally do not apply to the German market, because those firms hold no retail authorisation here. The European route remains the one that matters for you.

Holding period and tax: what applies when you sell LINK

In Germany, crypto-assets held privately count as other assets under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If you sell LINK at a profit within one year of buying it, that profit is taxable and is charged at your personal income tax rate. Once a year has passed, the gain on a sale is tax-free.

A threshold of 1,000 euros applies to all private disposals in a year taken together. A threshold is not an allowance: if you come in one euro above it at 1,001 euros, the entire amount is taxable, and not just the single euro. Allocation generally follows the order of acquisition, the FIFO principle, under which the coins bought first count as the ones sold first.

In practical terms for an occasion like today: if you bought LINK less than twelve months ago and are now considering a sale into the strength, work out the tax effect first. A clean transaction history is the precondition for that, and it is best collected as you go rather than in April.

Staking LINK: why the holding period becomes the question

Chainlink runs its own staking programme, in which you post LINK and receive a reward for it. Staking here means that your balance serves as security for the reliability of the oracle network and stays locked for a cooldown period before you can withdraw it again.

Two levels must be kept apart for tax purposes. The running income from staking counts as other income and is taxable in the year it is received; a separate threshold of 256 euros a year applies to it. The sale of the underlying coins still falls under section 23. The once-common worry that staking extends the holding period to ten years was cleared up by the Federal Ministry of Finance in its circular on the income taxation of crypto-assets; one year remains the rule.

Check your provider's cooldown period and the capacity limit of the pool before you commit anyway. If you want to stay able to sell within the next few weeks, a locked balance with a multi-week notice period is the wrong instrument. Terms differ considerably between providers, from the minimum amount to the length of the lock-up.

Leverage and liquidation: what an infrastructure story does not support

News about software standards is not a catalyst that pays off within days. Anyone using leverage on it is not betting on the partnership but on a short-term price move, and that can run in either direction.

On the mechanics: with a leveraged product you post only a fraction of the position value as collateral. Liquidation means the exchange closes your position by force as soon as that collateral is used up. At ten times leverage, an adverse move of roughly ten percent is arithmetically enough, and usually somewhat less once fees and funding costs are deducted. LINK alone ran a range of $12.11 to $12.96 in today's session, about seven percent. Price in a day like that before you open any position size.

If you use derivatives in any case, the funding rate and the liquidation threshold belong among the terms you need to know before opening a position; the differences between venues are considerable.

Levels above and below: how to tell a breakout from a pullback

On the upside, the first relevant level is today's area around $12.96; a daily close above it confirms the break out of last week's range. The next hurdle lies around $13.24, the level from which the price fell back after the Infosys news. Only above that does a recovery attempt become a trend.

On the downside, today's daily low of $12.11 is the first line of support. If the price falls back below it and closes there, today's move was a counter-move within the downtrend that stands at roughly 43 percent for 2026. Below that lies the zone around $10.93, where the week began.

These levels are orientation and not a forecast. Levels of this kind show you where your original assumption would have been disproved, and that is exactly what they are for.

Custody: exchange account, software wallet or hardware wallet

Where your LINK sits decides who has access if things go wrong. On an exchange account the provider holds the keys; you have a claim against it, but not the coins themselves in your hand. That is workable for short holding periods and for active trading.

A software wallet on your own device gives you the keys but ties security to the security of that device. A hardware wallet keeps the private key in a separate device that is never connected to the internet, which is the usual route for holdings meant to sit for longer. Which model makes which trade-off depends above all on how often you need access. Whichever route you take, the recovery words belong offline and in a different place from the device.

Putting the Chainlink and Infosys deal in context: what to take away

Today's rise has a real cause, and that cause is smaller than the figure of 1.7 billion suggests. Three steps follow from it:

1. Check your buying route before you react. Establish whether your provider holds MiCA authorisation, lists LINK for spot trading and permits withdrawal to an address of your own. The overview is in the comparison of the best crypto exchanges.
2. Calculate the holding period and the threshold, do not estimate them. If your LINK is younger than twelve months, determine the taxable gain before you sell and keep the 1,000-euro threshold in view. Tools that keep the history clean are in the comparison of crypto tax software.
3. Set the staking cooldown against your time horizon. A locked balance is not an available balance; check the notice period and the capacity in the comparison of staking platforms before you commit.

And the point that carries the whole story: standardisation at a software supplier is a precondition for adoption; it is not evidence of one. The next solid signal would be the first named bank with a date, or a fee structure that ties the token into the value chain. Until then the news stays what it is, a door opened without a date.

Sources in full: the report on the Infosys agreement of September 22, 2026 and the announcement of the Bottomline partnership of September 3, 2026.

(As of September 24, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

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A newly created wallet drained hot and cold reserves labeled as belonging to Bitget across multiple blockchains in under an hour.

A proposed class action accuses OpenAI of quietly routing real conversations to outside contractors through a program called Project Lily—without telling users first.

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XRP, Dogecoin, Ethereum and Stellar are trying to preserve their recent breakouts as correction covers the market.

JPMorgan says Bitcoin’s brief move above the crucial $85,000 production-cost level could ease pressure on miners after BTC spent a staggering 280 days below it.

Solana-based stablecoins can now be used to book flights across more than 300 airlines through crypto travel platform Nomadz, expanding the network’s real-world payments footprint into global travel.

BlackRock-designed investment portfolios are officially moving onto blockchain rails.

XRP trading in South Korea outpaces the U.S. as Upbit drives $224 million in daily volume, leaving Coinbase metrics behind.

TLDR

• Paramount Skydance stock climbs after launching a $7.5 billion loan plan
• New financing supports the company’s Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition deal
• Paramount prepares a broader $44.4 billion secured debt funding package
• Legal settlements help clear major hurdles for the Hollywood merger
• PSKY shares gain as investors track progress on the transaction

Paramount Skydance Corporation (PSKY) stock closed at $10.18, gaining 2.21% after recovering from early losses. The company advanced toward the $10.20 resistance zone as trading activity strengthened late in the session. The move followed Paramount’s launch of a $7.5 billion loan syndication to support its Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition.

Paramount Skydance Corporation Class B Common Stock, PSKY

Paramount Skydance Launches $7.5 Billion Debt Financing

Paramount Skydance started the senior secured term loan process as part of its broader merger funding plan. The financing supports the company’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and related debt repayments. Therefore, the loan represents a major step in completing the transaction’s financial structure.

The company plans to raise about $44.4 billion in additional secured debt alongside previously announced funding arrangements. Paramount will combine the new borrowings with cash reserves and equity financing proceeds. This strategy aims to provide the capital needed for the Warner Bros. Discovery purchase.

Bank of America, Citigroup, and Apollo are leading the debt financing process for the acquisition. The wider package includes investment-grade loans, bonds, and second-lien debt structures. , the financing effort ranks among the largest entertainment industry funding deals.

Warner Bros. Discovery Deal Moves Toward Completion

Paramount Skydance’s agreement to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery gained momentum after resolving legal challenges. The company settled an antitrust case involving several state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America. As a result, the merger moved closer to receiving final approvals.

The proposed transaction could reshape Hollywood by combining Paramount’s media assets with Warner Bros. Discovery’s entertainment portfolio. The deal would bring major brands and streaming platforms under one corporate structure. The companies continue preparing for completion after clearing key regulatory issues.

The merger remains supported by significant equity commitments from major financial backers. Larry Ellison has committed substantial equity support, while Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds joined the financing effort. However, the combined company would carry significant debt following the transaction.

PSKY Stock Gains as Financing Supports Merger Plans

Paramount Skydance strengthened as the company advanced its acquisition funding process. The shares recovered from intraday weakness and maintained positive momentum during the closing session. Meanwhile, market activity reflected attention toward developments surrounding the Warner Bros. Discovery agreement.

The combined Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery company is expected to carry considerable financial obligations after completion. Morgan Stanley analysts previously estimated the merged entity could hold substantial net debt. Therefore, the financing structure remains a central factor in the merger process.

Paramount Skydance continues working toward completing the Warner Bros. Discovery acquisition within the expected timeline. The company’s latest debt move marks another milestone in its strategy to finalize the transaction. Meanwhile, PSKY stock performance remains linked to progress surrounding the major entertainment merger.

The post Paramount Skydance (PSKY) Stock: Rises as $7.5B Loan Fuels WBD Deal appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• CFTC guidance now covers tokenized permitted assets and blockchain-based regulatory recordkeeping.
• Regulation 1.25 still limits eligible customer investments despite expanded guidance on tokenized assets.
• Tokenized collateral must preserve the same legal and economic rights as its traditional equivalent.
• Blockchain records can satisfy Regulation 1.31 if they remain reliable, accessible and producible.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission has expanded its crypto guidance to explain how regulated derivatives firms can handle tokenized investments and digital recordkeeping. The September 24 update addresses two practical questions facing regulated firms.

It covers customer funds invested in tokenized permitted assets and the use of blockchain systems for records. The revisions were issued by the agency’s Market Participants Division, Division of Market Oversight, and Division of Clearing and Risk.

However, the guidance does not change existing regulations. The underlying FAQs state that staff interpretations do not create enforceable rights, amend CFTC rules, or guarantee protection from future enforcement action.

Tokenized Assets Must Still Meet Existing Investment Rules

The latest clarification builds on guidance published in March covering the use of crypto-related infrastructure within existing derivatives regulations. A key distinction remains between tokenized assets representing permitted financial instruments and standalone cryptocurrencies that are not eligible under customer investment rules.

Earlier guidance said swap dealers may use tokenized forms of eligible collateral when those instruments satisfy existing regulatory standards. Those tokenized instruments must also provide legal and economic rights equivalent to the rights attached to their traditional versions.

However, the framework does not automatically make every cryptocurrency suitable for customer funds. The March FAQs specifically said Staff Letter 26-05 did not change the list of permitted investments under Regulation 1.25.

They also said futures commission merchants could not invest customer funds directly in payment stablecoins solely because those assets appeared within broader crypto guidance. The distinction keeps the focus on the underlying asset rather than its digital format.

As a result, tokenization can change how ownership or settlement is represented without changing whether the investment itself qualifies under existing rules.

Blockchain Records Must Still Meet Regulation 1.31 Standards

The second clarification addresses whether regulated firms can use blockchain technology to satisfy recordkeeping obligations. CFTC Regulation 1.31 already follows a technology-neutral framework for storing, retaining, and producing regulated records.

That structure was designed to accommodate changing electronic systems rather than require firms to use one specific recordkeeping technology. The updated guidance therefore gives firms a clearer compliance route for distributed ledger systems.

Records must still remain reliable, accessible, retained for the required period, and available when regulators request them. The update also aligns with Chairman Michael Selig’s recent comments about tokenization, stablecoins, and potentially continuous markets becoming more important within derivatives infrastructure.

For regulated firms, the main clarification is operational rather than expansive. Blockchain infrastructure can fit within existing CFTC compliance systems, but technology alone does not determine whether a structure is permissible.

The underlying asset, custody arrangements, accessibility of records, and existing regulatory requirements remain central to compliance.

The post CFTC Expands Crypto Guidance to Cover Tokenized Assets and Blockchain-Based Records appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• SMX stock drops as molecular marking technology gains manufacturing attention
• Company builds digital tools for material tracking and verification processes
• SMX platform connects physical materials with secure digital records
• Technology supports recycling, compliance, and supply chain transparency
• Molecular verification aims to improve trust across industrial markets

SMX (Security Matters) Public Limited Company (SMX) stock traded at $8.77, down 9.02%, after a sharp decline from the $9.60 area. The shares found support near $8.00 before recovering slightly during the afternoon session. The movement came as the company highlighted its molecular marking technology for improving manufacturing transparency.

SMX (Security Matters) Public Limited Company, SMX

SMX Stock Falls as Company Expands Material Traceability Technology

SMX develops technology that gives physical materials unique molecular identities and connects them with digital records. The system allows manufacturers to track material origin, recycled content, authenticity, and movement across supply chains. Therefore, the company aims to improve verification standards across industrial markets.

The technology focuses on replacing traditional tracking methods that depend mainly on documents and supplier information. SMX embeds markers into materials and links them with secure digital records. This approach helps companies verify product information throughout different stages of production.

Meanwhile, manufacturers face growing pressure to improve supply chain visibility and meet stricter compliance requirements. SMX positions its platform as a tool for industries seeking stronger material verification. The company’s solutions support sectors that require accurate records of production and material usage.

Molecular Technology Supports Trusted Manufacturing Processes

SMX’s Digital Material Passport Platform connects physical materials with digital information throughout their lifecycle. The platform records details from manufacturing through reuse, recycling, and resale. As a result, companies can maintain clearer records of material history and ownership.

The technology supports efforts to increase recycling efficiency by identifying materials and tracking their movement. Manufacturers can use verified information to improve resource management. This creates a system where materials maintain reliable digital identities beyond initial production.

SMX’s technology addresses challenges linked to global supply chains and sourcing verification. Companies increasingly require accurate information about materials and production methods. The platform provides a framework for improving transparency between manufacturers, regulators, and customers.

SMX Targets Greater Supply Chain Transparency With Digital Verification

The company’s molecular marking technology supports industries seeking better control over manufacturing data. SMX focuses on making material claims easier to confirm through digital verification. This creates opportunities for companies that need stronger proof of origin and compliance.

The technology can help manufacturers demonstrate domestic production standards through verifiable material records. Supply chain participants can access information about where materials originated and how they moved. This reduces reliance on traditional labeling systems alone.

SMX continues developing solutions designed for a manufacturing environment that values transparency and accountability. The company’s platform connects physical materials with digital records to strengthen industrial verification. However, SMX stock performance remains influenced by market activity and company developments as the business expands its technology adoption.

The post SMX (SMX) Stock: Drops as Molecular Technology Powers Future of Trusted Manufacturing appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• CoreWeave stock gains after JPMorgan raises its rating to overweight
• The bank highlights stronger pricing conditions across the compute market
• Premium short-term contracts support CoreWeave’s near-term revenue outlook
• The company continues expanding its role in large-scale computing services
• CRWV shares rise as brokerage confidence improves across the sector

CoreWeave, Inc. (CRWV) stock traded at $89.89, up 3.45%, after JPMorgan upgraded the company from neutral to overweight. The upgrade reflects stronger demand for computing capacity and improving pricing conditions. The brokerage also raised its price target to $125 from $120.

CoreWeave, Inc. Class A Common Stock, CRWV

JPMorgan highlighted CoreWeave’s ability to secure premium short-term contracts as demand remains strong. The company has increased its focus on flexible agreements that support higher pricing opportunities. Therefore, the upgrade reflects expectations for stronger business performance.

CoreWeave provides large-scale computing infrastructure for advanced technology companies and research operations. The company has positioned itself within the expanding market for high-performance computing services. Meanwhile, demand growth continues to support expansion across the sector.

JPMorgan Points to Stronger Compute Pricing Environment

The JPMorgan upgrade comes as computing demand continues to increase across multiple industries. The brokerage expects pricing conditions to improve as companies seek additional capacity. CoreWeave’s contract strategy has also become a key factor behind the rating change.

The company has expanded its infrastructure footprint to meet rising demand for computing resources. However, the sector continues to require significant investment in facilities and equipment. CoreWeave’s growth strategy depends on maintaining capacity while securing long-term customer relationships.

The latest rating change follows broader market attention toward companies linked to computing infrastructure. Other technology firms have also received updated ratings based on demand trends. As a result, brokerage activity has focused on companies positioned for future expansion.

CoreWeave Growth Strategy Supports Market Attention

CoreWeave entered the public market with a focus on providing specialized computing infrastructure. The company has attracted attention due to increasing demand from technology firms. Its business model relies on delivering scalable computing services through large infrastructure networks.

JPMorgan’s revised outlook highlights CoreWeave’s pricing power and contract flexibility. The company’s short-term premium agreements provide additional opportunities during periods of strong demand. These agreements can support revenue growth as capacity expands.

CoreWeave continues to develop its market presence while navigating infrastructure requirements. The latest upgrade places the company among firms benefiting from rising computing needs. The stock movement reflects renewed market attention following the brokerage assessment.

The post CoreWeave, Inc. (CRWV) Stock: Gains Momentum as JPMorgan Sees Strong AI Demand appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Oracle stock declines as Project Jupiter faces New Mexico permit challenges and delays
• The company invokes force majeure terms to limit risks from possible project setbacks
• Project Jupiter remains central to Oracle’s large artificial intelligence expansion plans
• Data center hurdles raise concerns around infrastructure delivery and future revenue timing
• Oracle continues its cloud growth push despite rising development and funding pressures

Oracle (ORCL) shares traded at $138.43, down 6.13%, after reports highlighted challenges around its New Mexico data center project. The decline followed concerns about Project Jupiter and possible delays affecting the planned facility launch. Oracle has moved to protect its financial position as the large infrastructure project faces regulatory obstacles.

Oracle Corporation, ORCL

Oracle Moves to Reduce Exposure From New Mexico Data Center Project

Oracle notified the project developer about a force majeure provision linked to Project Jupiter, according to reports. The move aims to delay certain payments if the facility fails to start operations in 2028. Oracle stated that the project remains on its planned schedule.

Project Jupiter forms part of a major infrastructure expansion involving Oracle, OpenAI, and SoftBank. The New Mexico campus targets 2.45 gigawatts of power capacity for advanced computing workloads. The project has faced permit issues and public concerns over energy demand.

The facility depends on supporting infrastructure, including power solutions from suppliers such as Bloom Energy. Regulatory decisions affecting energy routes have created additional challenges for the development timeline. Delays could affect the broader rollout of the planned data center network.

Oracle Faces Revenue Timing and Funding Pressure

Oracle has expanded its data center capacity to support growing cloud service demand. The company reported $664 billion in remaining performance obligations from future contracted sales. Delays in infrastructure delivery could affect the timing of revenue recognition.

The company has increased spending to build additional capacity for large computing contracts. This expansion contributed to negative free cash flow of $5.4 billion in its latest earnings report. As a result, funding requirements remain a key factor in Oracle’s infrastructure strategy.

Rising borrowing costs have also created pressure for companies developing large facilities. Oracle continues to balance long-term cloud growth with higher infrastructure expenses. The New Mexico project remains a major part of its future expansion plans.

Oracle’s latest move highlights challenges facing large data center developments across the technology sector. The company continues to pursue its infrastructure goals while addressing regulatory and financial concerns. Project Jupiter’s progress will remain linked to permit approvals and construction timelines.

The post Oracle (ORCL) Stock: Retreats as New Mexico AI Campus Faces Permit Challenges appeared first on Blockonomi.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering an initiative to promote dollar-denominated stablecoins overseas.

The goal, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans, is to protect the dollar’s place as the world’s reserve asset and to raise demand for US Treasuries, which stablecoin issuers typically hold as reserves.

Joint Ventures and Federal Agencies Under Discussion

Per the report, the initiative could involve several federal agencies, including the Treasury Department and the State Department. The US International Development Finance Corp. (DFC) could also be part of the plan.

One option under consideration involves creating joint ventures between the government and private-sector firms to support stablecoin projects in overseas markets.

That’s probably where the DFC would come in, as it often partners with private companies to advance US foreign policy goals, and its head is incidentally Ben Black, son of Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black. Apollo has reach in crypto and stablecoins, including a partnership with Coinbase Asset Management that lets users borrow against their digital assets.

Stablecoins are typically pegged to traditional currencies, with issuers generally maintaining reserves in cash and short-term government debt to back the tokens, and the US government’s proposal will focus on the dollar-backed versions, which could create a potential source of demand for US Treasuries as their circulation expands.

President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law last year, establishing a federal framework that requires stablecoin issuers to hold reserves that include the dollar and short-term Treasuries. Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, has also argued that stablecoin adoption could strengthen the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency.

Dollar Tokens Dominate, Euro Market Is Still Small

DefiLlama data puts the total stablecoin market cap at about $306 billion, with Tether’s USDT holding nearly 60%. According to RWA.xyz, dollar-pegged stablecoins represent about $305 billion of that market cap, with their euro-backed counterparts holding nearly $805 million, and almost $81 million goes to those pegged to the Brazilian real.

The platform’s net flow data also shows positive flows for several dollar stablecoins, including $1.2 billion for USDC and $1.1 billion for USDT, followed by $819 million for Ethena’s USDe and $355 million for Ripple’s RLUSD. Meanwhile, Visa Onchain Analytics recorded $6.4 trillion in total stablecoin transaction volume over the last 30 days, with a total transaction count of 1.7 billion.

However, Washington’s plan has come at a time when other economies are developing competing payment infrastructure. For example, China’s digital yuan is already being used in Project mBridge, while the European Central Bank is advancing its digital euro project and recently launched an initiative connecting blockchain markets with existing European payment systems.

More than 12 euro stablecoins are now fully authorized under the MiCA framework, including EURR, issued by Stripe-owned Bridge, which Revolut started rolling out to select customers in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal in August.

The post Report: US Weighs Overseas Push for Dollar Stablecoins to Boost Treasury Demand appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Just a few days ago, SUI crossed the $1 psychological level and surged to a four-month high of $1.05.

Bears then stepped in and pushed the price down to $0.95 (per CoinGecko), but according to popular analyst Ali Martinez, the bull market has already begun.

Why So?

The X user said that after an 83% drop during the bear market, SUI has flashed one of its most important macro bullish signals. Specifically, the Parabolic SAR dots have flipped below price on the weekly chart, indicating a shift from a downtrend into a new uptrend.

“The indicator is designed to identify trend direction and potential reversals, with dots below the price signaling bullish momentum. After such a deep correction, this weekly flip suggests that SUI has finally entered a new bull market,” the analyst claimed.

This isn’t the first time Martinez has touched on the asset this month. Several days ago, he outlined three key reasons why the price can soon reach $1.40. Some of those include the Tom DeMark Sequential, which printed a 13th buy signal in late July, and the SuperTrend indicator, which also flipped to “buy.”

Lucky and Michael van de Poppe have also paid attention to SUI lately. The former argued that the token has been screaming NEAR vibes, highlighting its “strong development, growing ecosystem, and plenty of momentum” behind its network.

“Expecting SUI to go on a majestic run from here,” the X user added.

Michael van de Poppe warned that SUI may experience a correction (as it did), but could then jump toward $1.16 and $1.60 in the coming period.

For his part, Crypto With Gopal noted that the coin has printed a massive double bottom on its chart. He said SUI has defended the $0.55-$0.60 zone for the second time, while the neckline sits near $2.70.

“A confirmed breakout could signal a major momentum shift. The chart projects a potential move toward $5.00 if the neckline breaks convincingly. Market sentiment: Bullish setup – breakout confirmation is key,” the analyst projected.

Additional Forecasts

Earlier this week, Crypto Tony identified $1.12 as the first bullish target about to be hit, saying he plans to take some profits once the price reaches that level.

KALEO has also been quite vocal on the matter. The analyst first claimed that SUI looks like “it’s finally ready to break out.” Shortly after, they predicted a quick squeeze from $1 to $2, adding that people forget how fast the asset can run once it starts rallying.

The post SUI Flashes a Key Macro Signal: Has the Bull Market Begun? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A clear difference has emerged in the long-term MVRV levels of major crypto assets. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chainlink are slightly above 0%. This means the average market participant who has held these assets over the past year is still sitting on a small profit.

XRP and Dogecoin, on the other hand, are in a different position.

Deep MVRV Discounts

According to the latest findings by Santiment, XRP’s 365-day MVRV stands at around -11.75%. DOGE is even lower at about -19.26%. The negative readings essentially mean that many long-term holders are currently holding unrealized losses. A lower MVRV can sometimes point to lower selling pressure.

Fewer traders are sitting on large profits that could lead to immediate selling. In previous instances, periods of heavy unrealized losses have also created longer-term recovery opportunities.

Santiment stated that XRP and DOGE currently stand out because their long-term holders remain deep in the red even as the market recovered.

“BTC, ETH, and LINK aren’t suddenly ‘bad buys’ just because their MVRV is slightly positive. But when comparing opportunities, assets far below 0% often deserve extra attention. The deeper the losses compared with other coins, the more interesting the setup can become.”

Fresh Selling Pressure

After a strong start to the week, the crypto market has started to cool off. XRP has been hit particularly hard in the latest pullback. Ripple’s native token dropped more than 7% over the past 24 hours and is now trading near the $1.48 level. Ali Martinez believes that “everything comes down to $1.60.” As such, a decisive break above this could confirm the pattern and trigger another 30% rally toward $2.

The OG meme coin, meanwhile, is also among the poorest performers in the past day as it shed 6.6%.

It faced a setback earlier this month when Bitwise announced that it would shut down its spot DOGE ETF, BWOW, after roughly 10 months, citing changes in investor demand and its plans to optimize its product lineup. The fund was scheduled to trade on NYSE Arca until October 14 before being liquidated.

However, investor interest in US-based spot DOGE ETFs appears to have picked up since then. These funds raked in $909,650 on Monday, and around $1.2 million on Tuesday, pushing weekly net inflows above $2 million.

The post XRP and DOGE Are Deep in the Red: Could That Be a Bullish Signal? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

New York Attorney General Letitia James and Governor Kathy Hochul sued Polymarket’s US arm on Thursday, alleging the prediction market has been running an illegal gambling operation in the state without a license.

The suit targets QCX LLC, which does business as Polymarket US and launched in the United States in December 2025, letting users bet money on sporting events and other outcomes.

Triple Fines and Restitution Sought

The state argues those markets meet New York’s legal definition of gambling because their results are uncertain and outside the bettor’s control, and says the company never obtained a license from the New York State Gaming Commission or paid the taxes licensed operators owe.

The complaint also says Polymarket lets users aged 18 to 20 trade, while New York requires mobile sports bettors to be at least 21.

James is asking the court to halt Polymarket’s unlicensed gambling operations in New York, order it to forfeit all illegal gains and pay restitution to harmed users, and impose fines equal to three times those gains.

“Our gambling laws exist to protect New Yorkers, prevent the potential harms of problem gambling, and ensure funding for educational and public benefit programs,” James said.

Hochul said Polymarket had knowingly violated state law and put New Yorkers at risk, particularly underage users most vulnerable to problem gambling.

“We’ll fight for our users,” Polymarket Chief Legal Officer Neal Kumar said in a statement reported by the Associated Press.

Kumar added that the company started in a small New York City apartment, now employs more than 350 people in the city and intends to stay.

Kalshi, Coinbase and Gemini Came First

The case follows the state’s lawsuit against Kalshi in July, which made the same unlicensed gambling and underage access arguments and was filed in Manhattan state court. James sued Coinbase and Gemini in April over their prediction market products.

Likewise, Baltimore separately sued both Kalshi and Polymarket on August 13, alleging they misled consumers about whether their products were legal and properly regulated.

The platforms argue that states have no authority over them because the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) regulates them at the federal level. Kalshi has said its contracts are federally regulated derivatives, not gambling products subject to state gaming laws, and the CFTC has opposed state regulation of the sector.

The post New York Sues Polymarket Over Alleged Unlicensed Gambling and Underage Trading appeared first on CryptoPotato.

[PRESS RELEASE – Willemstad, Curaçao, September 24th, 2026]

1win Markets has launched Crypto Live, a new category for short-term cryptocurrency price predictions. The new format allows users to predict whether the price of major cryptocurrencies will move higher or lower over a selected period, with intervals ranging from five minutes to one day.

Crypto Live turns crypto price movements into a simple two-option prediction. Instead of trying to guess exactly where Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana will trade next, users choose whether the price will be Higher or Lower than it was at the beginning of the round.

At launch, Crypto Live features BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP and DOGE, with prediction rounds available across five timeframes.

How 1win’s Crypto Live works

• Pick a coin: BTC, ETH, SOL, BNB, XRP or DOGE
• Choose a timeframe: 5 min, 15 min, 1 hour, 4 hours, or 1 day
• Make the call: Higher or Lower
• Watch the price: follow the market during the round
• Get the result: when time runs out, the closing price is compared with the price at the start of the round

For example, Bitcoin is trading at $110,000 when a five-minute round begins. A user who thinks BTC will be above that price five minutes later selects Higher. If Bitcoin finishes the round above $110,000, Higher wins; if it finishes below, Lower wins.

The same format applies across every available cryptocurrency and timeframe, with new rounds repeating throughout the day.

Crypto Live brings a faster format to 1win Markets. While many prediction markets focus on questions that can take days, weeks or even months to resolve, Crypto Live is built around decisions with near-immediate outcomes. The shortest rounds take just five minutes from the opening price to the final result.

The format also removes the need to predict an exact price target. A user doesn’t need to decide whether Bitcoin will reach $112,000 or Ethereum will hit $4,500. The question is simply about direction: will the price be higher or lower when the timer reaches zero?

With crypto trading 24/7, Crypto Live allows users to make predictions across different market conditions and time horizons — from a five-minute BTC move to where SOL, ETH or DOGE could be by the end of the day.

Additional features are planned following the initial launch, including the ability to make predictions on upcoming rounds and manage multiple active positions more easily.

Crypto Live is available as a dedicated category within 1win Markets.

About 1win

Founded in 2016, 1win is a crypto entertainment platform in the global gaming industry. Operating across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1win offers a wide range of entertainment products adapted to regional audiences. In 2026, 1win welcomed rapper Tyga, UFC legend Ilia Topuria, reggaeton star Nicky Jam, Olympic champion and UFC fighter Gable Steveson, and Nina Drama, UFC interviewer and content creator, as members of the 1win VIP community.

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