The seizure highlights vulnerabilities in crypto banking partnerships, potentially deterring small banks from engaging with crypto firms.

The post US seizes Capstone’s bank accounts over alleged illegal transfers for Tether and Bitfinex appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Sequans' strategic Bitcoin exit reflects a broader corporate shift towards stabilizing financial structures over speculative crypto investments.

The post Sequans Communications completes Bitcoin treasury exit after selling final 314 Bitcoin appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

PayPal's PYUSD expansion could revolutionize global remittances by reducing costs and settlement times, challenging traditional financial systems.

The post PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin expands to 70 new markets globally appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The competition for AI talent between Wall Street and Silicon Valley intensifies, reshaping recruitment strategies and investment approaches.

The post Citadel expands quantitative investing operation, seeks AI talent from Silicon Valley labs appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

A potential rate hike could tighten monetary policy, impacting borrowing costs and economic growth amid persistent inflationary pressures.

The post Bailey signals potential Bank of England rate hike amid high energy prices 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.

Bitget said its $351.6 million wallet breach bears the hallmarks of North Korean hackers as investigators race to trace and freeze stolen assets.

The crypto exchange said analysis of IP activity and blockchain transactions showed the Sept. 24 attack closely matched techniques used by known North Korean hacking groups. Bitget has reported the incident to relevant authorities and enlisted blockchain security firms Mandiant and SlowMist to investigate, Chief Executive Officer Gracy Chen said.

Onchain analyst Specter separately linked the XRP taken from Bitget to funds stolen during the $24 million AFX hack in July, which was attributed to the TraderTraitor cluster associated with North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The Bitget attribution remains under investigation and has not yet been independently confirmed by its external security firms.

The breach affected ETH, XRP, BNB, AVAX, USDT, USDC and other assets across Ethereum, XRP Ledger, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism, BNB Chain and Base. XRP accounted for the largest loss on a single network, Chen said.

Bitget said some blockchain foundations have already confirmed freezes of addresses associated with the attacker. Any successful recovery could reduce the final loss from the $351.6 million of assets initially identified as affected.

Cold wallets remained secure, according to the exchange, while Bitget Wallet, its separately operated self-custodial product, was unaffected.

Bitget's protection fund faces its largest test

The attack has also put Bitget’s financial backstop under scrutiny as withdrawals remain suspended during a wider security review.

Bitget said losses left after its assessment will be borne by its User Protection Fund, which holds 5,500 Bitcoin valued at more than $464 million. Chen said the company would replenish the fund after covering the incident.

A loss equal to the full $351.6 million estimate would amount to roughly 76% of a fund valued at $464 million. The eventual draw could be smaller if assets are frozen or recovered, while the fund’s dollar value can also change with Bitcoin’s price.

Bitget said it has additional resources beyond the fund. Chen disclosed more than $1 billion in proprietary assets and said customer funds remain backed on a 1:1 basis.

The company has yet to say how much of those resources it will need, how much will come directly from the protection fund, or what the fund will hold after it makes customers whole.

Its latest proof-of-reserves report, published Sept. 17, showed an aggregate reserve ratio of 135% across 19 assets, but the snapshot came before the attack and does not reflect the exchange’s post-breach position.

Withdrawals will remain unavailable until Bitget completes additional security checks. Chen said the company would announce a reopening window once it could do so with confidence rather than commit to a timetable before the review is finished.

That leaves investigators pursuing two outcomes simultaneously: recovering assets before they move beyond reach and determining how much of Bitget’s own balance sheet it will ultimately need before customers regain full access to their funds.

The post Bitget’s North Korea-linked $352 million hack could drain 76% of its protection fund appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitquery flagged $117.7 billion in Solana DEX trades in a 30-day sample, where repeated round trips supplied much of the recorded turnover. The blockchain data company's Sept. 24 reconstruction challenges using gross volume as a stand-in for demand from independent traders.

It leaves a question of how much an outside user could actually trade at a useful price in the same pools.

From Aug. 24 through Sept. 22, Bitquery examined $201.4 billion in trades it could value in dollars across Solana pools it indexes. Its rules classified 58.4% of that sample as circular or botlike, and about $111.6 billion of the flagged amount (95%) involved buying and selling the same token through the same pool inside one transaction, according to its Solana analysis.

One Sept. 14 example shows how the number can grow. A wallet bought a token named Claude from a PumpSwap pool, while a second wallet sold nearly as many units back to that pool inside the same transaction.

Bitquery found that both signed it, and the two pool trades recorded about $2,000 of volume. The token name does not indicate a connection to Anthropic.

Bitquery also identified two groups of 20 and 50 wallets with strikingly similar trading records. Together they accounted for $26.3 billion of the flagged amount. The firm grouped wallets by their volumes and token counts, without tracing their funding.

Bitquery counted trades priced in SOL, USDC or USDT in pools covered by its index. Other quote assets and some routed venues fell outside the sample, and the firm says fewer of its checks could run on Solana than on the other chains it studied.

Its figure reflects the activity its rules flagged in one window, not a rate for all Solana DEX trading.

A Sept. 24 snapshot of DefiLlama's Solana DEX dashboard showed $75.9 billion in rolling 30-day volume. Bitquery's window ended two days earlier.

Subtracting Bitquery's flagged dollars from that dashboard total would combine different dates and different pools.

Bitquery also made a same-date comparison, saying $83.7 billion of its indexed Solana trades were outside its flagged category, while DefiLlama counted $78.8 billion across the chain for Aug. 24 through Sept. 22.

Bitquery described the close totals as partly coincidental: DefiLlama includes venues Bitquery misses and excludes pools Bitquery keeps. The $83.7 billion is a remainder under Bitquery's rules, with its independent-user share still unknown.

On PumpSwap, DefiLlama's published method counts pools with specified quote tokens, at least $5,000 in total value locked, and at least 50 unique traders. Its adapter code implements those thresholds.

Bitquery screens transactions and wallet behavior instead. A pool balance and a count of trading addresses alone cannot show whether those addresses represent separate users.

This is why the competitive signal changes after screening. A venue may lead a turnover table while a portion of its recorded activity comes from wallets repeatedly crossing the same pool.

Equally, trades left outside Bitquery's screen remain unclassified by that test. Neither dashboard gives a matched measure of orders an independent trader could execute without substantial price movement.

Solana's pool history is not its depth

The exact Claude/SOL pool in Bitquery's transaction example displayed effectively empty reserves and $0 liquidity in a GeckoTerminal snapshot retrieved Sept. 24.

Its prior trading record could still be large while a new trader faced no meaningful liquidity there at the time of that snapshot.

The relevant execution test needs a token pair, trade size, and timestamp. Jupiter's swap documentation describes a quoted expected output followed by an actual execution result, with prices able to move before a quote is used.

To estimate the liquidity available after repeated round trips are set aside, historical reserves, comparable routes, and realized fills for flagged and unflagged pools are needed. Bitquery's volume total alone supplies none of those measurements.

The token pools in this investigation also sit beside distinct Solana markets. Jump Crypto's April publication examined March fills in SOL/stablecoin markets run through proprietary automated market makers.

Jump participates in that market, and those results cannot describe execution in the PumpSwap token pools Bitquery flagged. One segment's results should not determine the chain's liquidity standing.

Fees offer another incomplete shortcut. DefiLlama's chain-fee table tracks a separate measure from PumpSwap's liquidity-provider, protocol, and creator fees. Neither recorded turnover nor any of those fee totals tells a trader the price impact of a particular order.

Bitquery's new screen shows why Solana's reported DEX activity needs a closer look at who generates it and where.

The $117.7 billion figure applies to indexed pools and rules, while the spendable depth left for independent users remains unmeasured. Solana's competitive position on execution will depend on pair- and size-specific fills across comparable venues.

The post Solana DEX volume spike hides circular trades, and automated bots are blamed appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Payy has frozen its stablecoin payment network, including card transactions, after saying its Ethereum bridge contract was exploited and drained on Sept. 24.

Its announcement covers deposits, withdrawals, transfers, and card purchases, leaving the ordinary ways to move or spend funds through Payy unavailable while the company investigates.

Payy's statement puts the bridge incident at 4:21 a.m. UTC. It said all Payy Network transactions were paused during the investigation and promised further updates. Because the pause includes the card, the interruption extends beyond stablecoin transfers and into purchases made through the app.

A transaction on Ethereum occurred at block 26044909 at 4:21:23 a.m. UTC in which 1,832,149.4681 USDC left a Payy rollup contract. The company's statement did not specify a USDC amount or identify a transaction hash, so the reported transfer measures one contract outflow while the total scope remains open.

A fuller loss figure depends on Payy's accounting of the bridge beyond the movement visible in that single reported transaction.

Payy's customer exposure remains unclear

Payy's description of the bridge being drained of its full balance refers to that contract.

The Sept. 24 statement supplied no breakdown of the drained balance or a figure for customer losses, and it also gave no technical cause for the exploit.

The operational effect is more immediate. During the pause, users cannot deposit or withdraw on Payy Network, send transfers, or complete card transactions through the service. That includes both moving stablecoins and spending them through the card.

The company did not say how many users had active balances or attempted a payment during the interruption, so its announcement gives no measured count of people affected.

Payy said it was following incident response guidelines and would publish updates. The questions now are when each transaction function will return and whether the bridge loss affects customer balances. Its initial announcement gave neither a restoration timetable nor a customer-loss figure.

For users, the service freeze is the confirmed consequence today, while the financial exposure remains to be determined.

The post Payy bridge exploit freezes crypto cards, and no balances remain safe appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ondo Finance launched three on-chain portfolio tokens on Sept. 24 using investment strategies BlackRock developed for the company. The tokens give buyers economic exposure to diversified baskets, but they are securities issued by Ondo, not interests in BlackRock funds.

Only eligible non-US investors who complete onboarding can redeem the tokens directly with Ondo, according to its launch release and product terms.

The first three products are Ondo High Income (BLKHIon), Ondo Diversified Growth (BLKDIGon) and Ondo High Growth (BLKGRWon). They draw on portfolio strategies BlackRock developed for Ondo, and Ondo implements the allocations using tokenized assets and rebalances the portfolios on a preset schedule, the company said in its launch explanation.

Holding a portfolio token gives economic exposure to a weighted basket that includes Ondo Stocks, which track equities and exchange-traded funds. It does not give the holder a right to the underlying funds or securities.

Ondo's legal disclosure calls each token a separate security issued by Ondo Global Markets (BVI) Limited.

BlackRock Fund Advisors supplies model allocations to Ondo but does not make investment decisions for the on-chain portfolios. Ondo decides how to implement the models and manages, sponsors, and administers the products.

BlackRock does not manage the portfolios or owe advisory or fiduciary duties to token investors, and the company is generally not required to update its model after delivery. Ondo decides whether to apply any changes, so an on-chain portfolio may differ from the corresponding model.

Strategy for BlackRock onboarding

Ondo's FAQ says direct minting and redemption require an eligible person outside the US to complete identity and anti-money-laundering checks.

The process also screens for US-person status, restricted jurisdictions, and prohibited persons. Ondo processes redemptions only for eligible holders who have completed onboarding.

A person may still receive or hold a portfolio token without completing that process because the tokens are transferable on-chain, subject to jurisdictional and other restrictions. Possession alone does not qualify the holder to redeem with Ondo.

The ability to move a token between wallets is therefore distinct from eligibility to redeem it with the issuer.

Ondo describes peer-to-peer transfers as available around the clock, including through supported third-party platforms. That capability does not show that a buyer will be available at a given price or that a holder can exit immediately.

Anyone unable to redeem directly would depend on a third party willing to take the token, subject to that venue's rules and market conditions.

The post Ondo unlocks BlackRock portfolio strategies, but only non-US traders benefit appeared first on CryptoSlate.

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.

You entered your phone number and your email address into a contact form on a website because an AI-powered crypto trading platform was advertised there. In that case, in the assessment of the German financial supervisor, you very probably never contacted a trading platform at all. You filled in an advertising page whose purpose, according to BaFin's findings, is to collect contact details and pass them on to operators of unauthorized online trading platforms.

BaFin published this assessment on September 23, 2026, together with the names of 39 websites. The most important sentence in it for you is this: the damage does not begin with the first transfer, but at the moment the form is sent. From then on your record exists as tradable goods.

The short version, if you are in exactly that situation right now: pay no money. For the time being, do not take calls from unknown numbers, or end them after the first sentence. Secure the website address, the date and every message you have received. Everything else follows below, ordered by what you have already done.

What BaFin published on September 23, 2026

The Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, BaFin for short, is the German authority supervising banks, insurers and, since European crypto regulation, providers of crypto-asset services as well. The authority is allowed to issue a public warning when it suspects that someone is operating without authorization.

On September 23, 2026 it reported what it calls a platform series. In the language of supervision, a platform series is a group of near-identical websites that differ only in their name and very probably come from the same source. In this case there are 39 addresses, appearing mostly in bundles of three: the same invented name as .com, .net and .org.

The authority describes the mechanism itself as follows: interested parties "are asked to leave their data in a contact form on the websites concerned. According to BaFin's findings, the customer data is then passed on to operators of unauthorized online trading platforms that are not supervised by BaFin." The pages are therefore suspected of "primarily serving to initiate business for crypto-asset services provided without authorization."

Two further findings appear in the same notice. First, according to the supervisor the websites have no legally valid imprint. Second, BaFin points to a possible connection with further series it has already warned about. It names the operators themselves as unknown.

If you want to know what these series looked like in the summer of 2026, the background is in our article on the BaFin warnings about crypto platform series from August. The construction of the pages is known. What is new is their business model.

Why the contact form is more dangerous than the first transfer

The familiar fraud patterns in crypto almost always run through money: you pay in, you see rising gains in a customer area, and when you try to withdraw, demands for payment appear for supposed fees, taxes or releases. That is the scheme consumer advice centers and police have been describing as cybertrading fraud for years.

The series reported now starts one step earlier. On the authority's account the websites take no money at all themselves. What is generated are leads. In sales jargon a lead is a qualified contact record: name, phone number, email, often along with how much someone wants to invest. That record is worth considerably more to the buyer than any random address, because it documents a demonstrated interest in crypto investments.

Three things follow from this that make the difference to the classic scheme.

The contact comes with a delay. Days or weeks can lie between sending the form and the first call, because the record is resold first. Many of those affected therefore no longer connect the call with the page they filled in.

The record stays in circulation. It can be passed on repeatedly. A single completed form can draw calls for months, including from providers that have nothing to do with the original website.

And the page itself disappears without consequence. With no imprint, no named operator and no payment relationship, there is nobody against whom you could assert a claim. That is exactly why securing the evidence stands at the start of this article rather than the question of compensation.

BaFin classifies the approach soberly as business initiation. For you as a crypto investor that means: the valuable part of the business has already taken place before anyone has even spoken to you.

Which 39 websites BaFin names

The authority publishes the addresses with the dot in brackets so that they are not clickable. We reproduce them in the same notation. According to its own account, these are the pages known to BaFin so far:

coravelis(.)com · jorvaki(.)com · jorvaki(.)net · jorvaki(.)org · levorelio(.)com · levorelio(.)net · levorelio(.)org · lexovario(.)com · lexovario(.)net · lexovario(.)org · loravexo(.)com · loravexo(.)net · loravexo(.)org · mavriten(.)com · mavriten(.)net · mavriten(.)org · monvaret(.)com · monvaret(.)net · monvaret(.)org · natrovex(.)com · renvaki(.)com · renvaki(.)net · renvaki(.)org · semtovexo(.)org · solkrane(.)com · solkrane(.)net · solkrane(.)org · tavorello(.)com · tavorello(.)net · tavorello(.)org · varezuno(.)com · varezuno(.)net · varezuno(.)org · vordeli(.)com · vordeli(.)net · vordeli(.)org · zarevuno(.)com · zarevuno(.)net · zarevuno(.)org

Two things can be read from the list that go beyond the individual case. The names are pronounceable invented words without meaning, which mean nothing in any language and can therefore be registered worldwide. And the bundles of three across .com, .net and .org are an indication that the loss of individual domains was planned for from the outset.

Important for your own check: this list is a snapshot. BaFin explicitly writes "known so far" and points to possible connections with further series. If the website you visited is not listed here, that is no clean bill of health. Conversely: if it is listed here, you hold an official assessment that you can present to a bank or the police.

Section 10(7) of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act: the legal basis of the warning

By its own account the notice rests on section 10(7) of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act, abbreviated KMAG in German. The detail looks technical, but it explains why the warning looks the way it does.

The Crypto Markets Supervision Act is the German act accompanying the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, known as MiCA. It governs who may provide crypto-asset services in Germany and which powers the supervisor has in doing so. Those powers include informing the public about providers suspected of operating without authorization.

The logic of the wording follows from this. The authority writes "according to BaFin's findings" and "are suspected of" because a warning under this provision is not a court ruling and does not require one. What is meant is a supervisory assessment intended to protect consumers before proceedings are concluded. For you that means two things: the warning is solid enough to use towards third parties, and at the same time it is not a criminal finding against named individuals.

The reverse conclusion is what matters in practice. Banking business, financial services and crypto-asset services may only be offered in Germany with an authorization. Anyone offering crypto-asset services without that authorization is acting unlawfully, irrespective of whether anyone was harmed in the end.

How to spot a lead page before you send the form

According to the supervisor's account, the pages warned about share features that can be checked without specialist knowledge. The following points are no substitute for legal advice, but they are worked through in a few minutes.

The imprint. BaFin names the missing legally valid imprint as a shared feature of all 39 pages. A valid imprint contains a name that can be served with legal process, an address, a commercial register number and a contact option that actually works. A bare contact form is not an imprint. Nor is a mailbox address without a register entry.

The authorization status, with one important objection. Check the company name given in BaFin's company database. It shows whether a company is authorized. A hit alone is not enough, however. On its page about fraudulent trading platforms the supervisor explicitly describes how perpetrators pose as staff of reputable companies that are listed in the commercial register or supervised, misusing the names and details of uninvolved firms. From that follows the only check that holds: take the phone number and the address from the database, not the ones from the website, and ask there whether the contact was genuine.

What the page asks for. An authorized trading platform lets you open an account and then identifies you. A page that offers nothing but a contact form and no route to direct registration is collecting contacts, not trading.

The promise. Software that supposedly achieves reliable returns through artificial intelligence does not exist. Where predictable profits are advertised, caution is not an overreaction. How credibly such offers are now presented is described in our article on AI-driven crypto crime.

Where the contact came from. Did the page arrive through an advertisement on a social network, through a message in a messenger app or through a post that looked like a news report? All three routes are common with the series reported. A detailed checklist for providers is in our guide on how to check crypto providers before your first deposit.

What is actually traded on these trading platforms

Anyone who gets drawn into a conversation is rarely offered what the advertising promised. BaFin describes the typical course of these trading platforms in its consumer section, and you should know three points from it before you even think about it.

What is traded is mostly contracts for difference, not coins. A contract for difference, CFD for short, is a bet on the price movement of an underlying without you ever owning that underlying. On the supervisor's account, the supposed advisers push people into such products on commodities, equities, indices, currencies or cryptocurrencies. Anyone who believes they are buying Bitcoin is acquiring no crypto-assets in these cases.

The money runs through a wallet that is not yours. For payment processing, according to BaFin, those affected are told to set up an account at an online trading venue; the money paid in is converted into Bitcoin, and the coins then end up in the criminals' wallet. Sometimes the payment destination given is the account of a private individual who receives the money and forwards it. For that person the process has legal consequences of its own, because anyone making their account available comes under suspicion of money laundering. Never let your account be used for third-party payments, not even for a commission.

Remote access is the point at which it becomes expensive. The offer to support you through the process by remote maintenance software leads, according to the supervisor, all the way to access to your online banking and the opening of accounts and wallets in your name. There is no reason to share your screen with a provider. An authorized exchange never asks for it.

The practical counter-test is simple and works in every one of these cases: demand the wallet address on which your crypto-assets are supposed to sit, and check it in a blockchain explorer. Without verifiable transaction data on a blockchain there are no coins, only a display on a website. The details are with the supervisor itself: a warning about fraudulent trading platforms.

Already entered your data? These five steps count now

If no money has changed hands, your position is considerably better than it feels. The most likely damage is a record in circulation, and something can be done about that.

First: document before anything disappears. Note the full website address, the date and time of your entry and the details you gave. Make a screenshot of the page while it is still reachable. This evidence can neither be obtained nor reconstructed later.

Second: submit nothing further. Send no copy of your ID, no bank details, no wallet addresses and no screen sharing. The request to install remote maintenance software for "verification" is a known pattern and leads to direct access to your devices.

Third: handle calls in a controlled way. You do not have to pick up. If you do pick up, say nothing about your financial circumstances and confirm no data, not even apparently harmless details such as your date of birth. A simple "not interested" and hanging up is entirely sufficient.

Fourth: separate your credentials. If you set a password on the page that you also use elsewhere, change it everywhere immediately. Activate two-factor authentication on your exchange and email accounts, preferably through an app rather than by text message.

Fifth: report the warning. If the website is not on the list, you can report it to BaFin through its contact channels. It costs nothing and is the route by which further series come to light in the first place.

What you do not need in this situation are paid recovery services. As long as no money has changed hands, there is nothing to recover.

The callback: what happens on the phone and what you do not say

The call is the actual sales process, and it follows a recognizable course. Knowing it takes the pressure out of it.

At the start there is almost always a friendly stocktaking: how much experience do you have, what amount could you commit, which cryptocurrencies interest you? These questions feel like advice and are an assessment. The answers decide how intensively the contact is pursued.

Then comes a small entry amount, often in the region of 250 euros, combined with the promise that you can withdraw at any time. The sum is deliberately low, because it lowers the inhibition threshold while establishing a payment relationship.

In the third step a customer area displays gains. That display is a representation on a website and no evidence of actual crypto transactions. Anyone who wants to know whether trading really took place needs verifiable transaction data on a blockchain, that is, wallet addresses that can be checked independently.

Finally comes the point at which the withdrawal fails and demands for payment appear: supposed fees, supposed taxes, supposed release amounts. From here on, police and consumer advice centers describe the process consistently as investment fraud.

Three sentences are enough for the entire conversation. You name no amounts. You confirm no data. You hang up. No reputable provider loses a customer that way, and an unauthorized provider loses access.

A postscript on the second wave: after a loss, supposed recovery services, law firms or consumer advocates often get in touch, offering to retrieve the money. These callers draw their contacts from the same lists. An advance payment for a recovery is as a rule the second loss.

What rights the General Data Protection Regulation gives you against unknown operators

Formally you hold the rights under the General Data Protection Regulation against anyone who processes your personal data. In practice the position with these pages is uncomfortable, and it is fairer to say so openly.

The right of access under Article 15 GDPR obliges a controller to tell you which data it processes about you and to whom it has passed the data on. The right to erasure under Article 17 GDPR obliges it to delete the data when there is no longer a legal basis. Consent once given can be withdrawn at any time.

Both presuppose that a reachable controller exists. With websites that have no legally valid imprint and unknown operators, that is precisely what is missing. A request for access sent to a contact address on these pages leads nowhere at best, and at worst confirms that a reachable person sits behind the address.

Two routes remain worthwhile nonetheless. The first runs through the data protection authority of your federal state, where you can file a complaint. That body has investigative powers you do not have. The second concerns the companies that contact you afterwards: whoever calls you and gives a company name is a tangible controller. Against that caller you can object to the processing, demand information about the origin of your data and require erasure. It is precisely that information which makes the chain of transfers visible.

Record the outcome in writing. A documented refusal can be used by the supervisory authority; a phone call without a note cannot.

Money has changed hands: criminal complaint, bank and complaint to BaFin

If payment has already been made, the order changes. Then speed counts, and the first hours are the most valuable.

Turn first to your bank or payment service provider. With card payments and direct debits there are recovery options tied to short deadlines. With bank transfers the bank can attempt a recall as long as the amount has not yet left the recipient account. Banks look closely at crypto transactions in any case, which works in your favor here.

Then file a criminal complaint with the police, online or at a station. Bring everything you have secured: addresses of the website, names and phone numbers of the callers, payment receipts, screenshots of the customer area and, if available, the wallet addresses to which crypto-assets have gone. Those addresses are often the most solid trail for investigators, because transactions on a blockchain remain permanently traceable.

Report the matter to BaFin as well. The supervisor will not get your money back for you, but tips from the public are the basis for warnings like the one of September 23. The report runs through the authority's contact channels and costs nothing.

To the tax office, because the scheme works with exactly that. One of the most frequent demands before a supposed payout is that a tax must be paid first. That is in no case how it works in Germany. Taxes on investment income or private disposal transactions are settled with the tax office through your tax return, never as an advance payment to a trading platform. No authority and no bank demands money so that a balance is released. Whether and how fictitious gains and actual losses from a fraud case have tax effects is a separate question, which we have covered in our article on phantom gains in crypto investment fraud. Settle it with a tax adviser, not with the caller.

And once more, because it is the most expensive mistake after the first one: pay nothing in order to obtain a payout. No commission, no release fee, no advance tax payment. A demand of this kind is not an obstacle on the way to your money, it is the point of the whole exercise.

Where to buy instead: MiCA authorization and the company database

The practical consequence of a warning like this is not to avoid cryptocurrencies. What makes sense is to check the provider before the first click, and since European regulation there is a solid basis for that.

A company that provides crypto-asset services in the European Union needs an authorization for it. Authorized providers appear in public registers, are subject to requirements on the custody of customer assets and have a complaints office that can be reached. A company listed there may still charge fees you dislike. But there is a company with an address, a register entry and a supervisor.

Three checks are enough in practice. Does the exact company name appear in BaFin's company database or in the register of the competent European supervisor? Does the imprint lead to an address that can be served with legal process, with a commercial register number? And are you identified before you can trade? Anyone answering yes to all three questions has passed the basic check. An orderly comparison is in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

The second part concerns custody. If you want to hold Bitcoin for longer, the question of where the keys sit is more important than any fee table. How the price has developed and which assessments are circulating is set out in our Bitcoin price prediction. How to secure holdings independently of an exchange is shown by the hardware wallet comparison. A provider without authorization can offer you neither, because in case of doubt it does not trade at all.

BaFin warning on the AI crypto platform: what to take away

1. Check the provider before you enter anything. An imprint with an address that can be served with legal process, the exact company name in the company database, identification before the first trade. If you are looking for regulated points of contact, you will find them in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. If you have already left data, secure the evidence and submit nothing further. Website address, date, screenshot. After that no copy of your ID, no bank details, no remote access, no payment. Which features unauthorized providers share is set out in the guide to checking crypto providers.
3. Separate custody and trading. What you hold long term does not belong permanently in an account whose operator you cannot identify. The options for that are in the hardware wallet comparison.

The full notice with all 39 addresses is with the supervisor itself: BaFin warns about the platform series "AI-powered crypto trading platform".

(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.)

The crypto market is telling two very different stories today. Bitcoin is nursing an 8% weekly loss and trading just above $84,000, yet scroll one line down the rankings and the screen turns green: XRP, Cardano, Chainlink and Dogecoin are all up double digits on the week, and privacy coins are posting numbers we have not seen since 2016. Money is not leaving crypto, it is rotating. Here is the full breakdown of crypto prices today, why Bitcoin is lagging, and which altcoins are stealing the show.

Why Is the Bitcoin Price Down This Week?

Bitcoin ($BTC) is trading at $84,097, down 0.41% over the past 24 hours and 8.32% over the past seven days. The pullback from September's highs leaves BTC slightly negative for the year at minus 3.90%, with a market cap of $1.68 trillion and around $36.5 billion in daily volume.

The macro backdrop is doing most of the damage. Futures markets are now pricing in as many as four Fed rate hikes by June 2027, and the combination of rising bond yields and a stronger dollar has taken the wind out of both Bitcoin and gold. On top of that, an $80 million wave of long liquidations hit the market as BTC stalled around the $84,000 level, with traders now watching $82,800 as the next line of support.

The silver lining: institutions are buying the dip. US spot Bitcoin ETFs have flipped back into accumulation mode, adding around $347 million in a single day with BlackRock and Fidelity leading the buying, part of a roughly $4.6 billion rebound that has erased the year's earlier outflows. Price is falling, but the structural demand story is quietly improving underneath it.

Which Altcoins Are Pumping While Bitcoin Bleeds?

While $Bitcoin gave back 8% this week, the altcoin market barely blinked. Cardano (ADA) leads the large caps with a 16.57% weekly gain to $0.2494, closely followed by XRP, up 15.72% to $1.53, and Chainlink (LINK), up 15.13% to $13.58 and still climbing with an 8.91% move in the last 24 hours alone. Dogecoin (DOGE) added 13.19% on the week, Solana (SOL) gained 10.39% to $116.50, and even Ethereum (ETH) managed a solid 7.74% weekly advance to $2,677 despite the drag from BTC.

This is a classic capital rotation. Derivatives data underlines it: altcoin futures open interest has overtaken Bitcoin's for the first time since 2024, meaning traders are actively positioning in alts rather than simply hiding in BTC. When Bitcoin dominance slips while total market activity stays elevated, altcoin traders usually read it as the early innings of an alt-friendly phase. The caveat: rotations built on leverage can unwind just as fast, as this week's $80 million liquidation flush reminded everyone.

Are Privacy Coins the Biggest Winners of 2026?

The standout story of the year keeps getting bigger. Zcash (ZEC) is trading at $1,574, up another 6.30% this week and an eye-watering 207% year to date, making it comfortably the best performer in the top ten. Zoom out further and the move is historic: Glassnode data puts ZEC's gain at roughly 2,500% over the past year, a run that lifted it from around 82nd place by market cap into the top ten, at levels not seen since 2016.

Several things are feeding the fire. Grayscale converted its Zcash Trust into ZCSH, the first US spot ETF built around a privacy coin, opening the door for institutional money. At the same time, the share of ZEC locked in the fully private shielded pool has grown sharply, which analysts read as holders taking coins off the market rather than preparing to sell. The whole sector has followed: privacy coins now command a combined market cap of over $33 billion and are the only crypto sector trading above their October 2025 levels.

Monero (XMR) tells the same story with less drama, up 1.81% today, 6.01% on the week and 31.62% year to date at $570. One cloud on the horizon: new EU rules set for mid-2027 would bar regulated exchanges from listing privacy coins like Zcash and Monero, so the regulatory endgame for this rally is far from settled.

How Do Crypto Prices Look Today?

Here is the top of the market at a glance:

Hyperliquid (HYPE) deserves a special mention: at +265% year to date it is the only asset outperforming Zcash in the top ten, proof that the market keeps paying up for real on-chain revenue. For more crypto insights, check the CryptoTicker charts page.

What Is Next for the Crypto Market?

The short-term script is written by the Fed. As long as markets keep pricing in more rate hikes, Bitcoin will struggle to reclaim its September highs, and the $82,800 level is the support bulls need to defend to keep the structure intact. A decisive break below it would put the psychological $80,000 zone back in play. On the upside, steady ETF inflows from BlackRock and Fidelity suggest that dips are being absorbed by longer-term buyers rather than triggering panic.

For altcoins, the rotation is the trend to watch. If Bitcoin stabilizes, the strength in XRP, ADA, LINK and SOL could accelerate into a broader altcoin run. If macro pressure intensifies, expect leveraged alt positions to unwind first and fastest. And keep an eye on the privacy sector: with an ETF now live and EU delisting rules looming in 2027, Zcash sits at the intersection of the year's most powerful narrative and its biggest regulatory risk.

The Federal Reserve published two proposed rules on September 24, 2026 that set out in detail for the first time what a payment stablecoin must be backed by and how quickly an issuer should redeem it. For you as an investor in Germany one sentence puts everything else in order: these rules apply to issuers that sit under the supervision of the US central bank. Your right to redeem a stablecoin you hold in Germany, by contrast, comes from the EU's MiCA regulation. The Fed proposal is therefore above all a reason for you to settle a different question: who stands behind your token, and against whom could you actually direct your claim?

The distinction sounds technical and decides, in an emergency, whether you get your money back at face value or only the price an exchange happens to quote. This article sorts out both: what has been proposed in Washington, and which rights and duties follow from that for your holdings in Germany.

What the Fed proposed for payment stablecoins on September 24, 2026

The central bank has published two so-called notices of proposed rulemaking, that is, formal drafts followed by a comment period. Both implement the GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law, and concern exclusively issuers of payment stablecoins supervised by the Federal Reserve.

A payment stablecoin in this framework is a token meant to represent a fixed amount of money and intended for payments. The first draft governs the substance behind it. According to the Fed's statement, supervised issuers must back their stablecoins fully with eligible reserve assets; named are short-dated US government securities, known as Treasury bills, and certain other high-quality liquid assets. On top of that come standardized capital requirements meant to cover credit and operational risks of the stablecoin business, rules for risk management and requirements for the custody of the backing assets.

The second draft is procedural law. It creates a dedicated application process for banks under Fed supervision that want to issue payment stablecoins. Anyone planning to do so must submit a business plan and financial records, among other things. The draft also sets out how objection, hearing and the final decision on an application proceed.

Neither draft is applicable law yet. The Fed will accept comments for 60 days after publication in the Federal Register. Only afterwards will it decide whether the rules arrive, and in what form. You can find the announcement directly at the Federal Reserve.

Full backing with short-dated T-bills: what is meant to count as a reserve

The core of the first draft is a positive list. Not every security works as a reserve for a token that customers want to swap back into dollars at any time. Short-dated Treasury bills are the benchmark, because they carry almost no price risk and can be sold quickly in large amounts.

Why Treasury bills rather than simply bank deposits

A bank deposit is legally a claim against the bank. If the institution runs into trouble, a stablecoin issuer's reserve turns into an insolvency claim. That connection is precisely why supervisors on both sides of the Atlantic argue about the composition of stablecoin reserves. In the EU the matter pulls in the other direction: there the legal framework requires issuers of e-money tokens to hold a considerable part of the reserve as bank deposits, something the European Central Bank has itself recently named as a risk.

For you this mainly yields one check question, and one you can actually answer: does the issuer of your stablecoin regularly publish what its reserve consists of, and who confirms it? Large issuers provide monthly breakdowns and attestations from audit firms. If both are missing, that is no proof of a problem and still a gap in what you know.

The order of magnitude at stake can be measured. Our own query of CoinGecko market data on September 25, 2026 at 06:48 UTC produced the following market capitalizations for the four largest dollar-linked stablecoins: Tether (USDT) around $183.7 billion, USDC around $75.4 billion, USDS around $9.7 billion and Ethena USDe around $4.9 billion. Together that is about $273.7 billion resting on promises of backing. For comparison: the price of Bitcoin stood at around $84,043 at the same moment.

Capital buffer and application process: what the second draft means for issuers

Capital requirements are something other than reserves. The reserve covers the tokens issued. Capital is the company's own funds cushion, meant to absorb losses from day-to-day operations, for instance from a system failure or the default of a service provider. The Fed wants to standardize these requirements instead of setting them case by case.

The US trade press reads more concrete figures out of the drafts than the announcement itself contains. According to an analysis by PYMNTS of September 24, 2026, supervised issuers are to hold at least one dollar of eligible reserves per dollar issued and to serve customer redemption requests within two business days. The Fed's press release contains no deadline in days and no backing ratio in figures. Anyone quoting the two business days is quoting a reading of the draft text and not the central bank's summary.

Fed Governor Michael Barr issued a statement of his own on the same day and struck a skeptical note in it. According to The Block's report of September 24, 2026, he worries that the standard of "significant or systemic" laid down in the law could have unforeseeable consequences for how reliably the central bank can establish whether an institution maintains compliant programs over time. That is the assessment of one governor, not a position of the board.

Does the Fed rule apply to your stablecoin in Germany?

For an investor resident in Germany the answer as a rule is: no, at least not directly. What governs is the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short. The regulation distinguishes two kinds of value-stable token, and that distinction determines your rights.

E-money token and asset-referenced token: the definitions in one sentence each

An e-money token is a crypto-asset that references the value of a single official currency, the euro or the US dollar for example. An asset-referenced token, by contrast, references a basket, such as several currencies, commodities or other assets. The dollar-linked stablecoins you meet in everyday use fall under the stricter category as e-money tokens.

The practical part follows from that. Anyone offering e-money tokens publicly in the EU needs authorization as an electronic money institution or credit institution, and the supervisor lists the authorized issuers in a register. A count of that register by cryptoticker.io on August 16, 2026 produced 23 authorized issuers. A token without an authorized issuer may no longer be offered to European retail customers, which is why some well-known names have disappeared from trading venues for customers in the European Economic Area.

In practice that means: first check whether the token in your account is issued by an issuer authorized in the EU, or whether your trading venue merely carries it as a non-EU product. On a regulated platform you can usually read this in the product description. If you have yet to choose a trading venue, the authorized providers are set side by side in the comparison of the best regulated crypto exchanges.

Redemption right under MiCA: at any time, at face value, free of charge

This is the point at which European law is ahead of the Fed draft. Under MiCA, holders of e-money tokens have a claim at any time that the issuer repay the monetary value of the tokens held at face value, in cash or by transfer. The issuer may not charge a fee for that redemption. Conversely, it may not pay interest on e-money tokens, which is why no issuer can offer you a yield on the bare token.

The words "at any time" are the actual news here. On the trade press reading, the Fed draft works with a deadline of two business days. The European claim names no such figure. It attaches to the holder's request. In practice an issuer will need identity verification and a payment route, and that takes time. Legally your starting position in the EU is still the stronger one.

Why your claim ends at the exchange and not at the issuer

Here lies the gap many investors overlook. The redemption claim is directed against the issuer of the token. If your stablecoins sit in the account of a trading platform, in most cases you do not hold the token yourself. You hold a claim against the platform, which books the token for you. Your route to redemption therefore hangs on the platform, and its solvency comes to stand alongside that of the issuer.

The difference only becomes visible under stress, and by then it is too late to reposition. A frozen account, a halt on withdrawals or insolvency proceedings separate you from a token whose backing is perfectly sound. Anyone holding the token in their own wallet has the issuer as counterparty and a direct route to redemption, provided the issuer serves retail customers at all. Many do so only above high minimum amounts and after their own identity checks.

There is a second layer that applies independently of insolvency. Issuers can freeze individual addresses when authorities order it or a suspicion of money laundering exists. A frozen balance is neither lost nor available, and the way back leads through the issuer instead of through the exchange.

Five points to check on your stablecoin holdings now

The Fed draft changes nothing for you legally today. It is, however, a good occasion to go through your own position once, because the check goes faster without time pressure than in an emergency.

1. Which token actually sits in the account. USDT, USDC, USDS and a synthetic dollar such as USDe are four different constructions with four different risk profiles. The ticker on the screen tells you nothing about the issuer.
2. Who the issuer is and in which legal system it sits. Authorization in the EU decides whether you have a redemption claim under MiCA or a claim under foreign law.
3. Where the token sits. On the exchange you hold a claim against the exchange. In your own wallet you hold the token and have the issuer as counterparty.
4. Whether the issuer discloses its reserve. Monthly breakdowns and attestations by an audit firm are the standard you can measure against.
5. Which routes are open to you if your trading venue drops the token. Delistings in the European Economic Area have repeatedly set deadlines for sale and withdrawal in recent months. Miss the deadline and you leave the conversion to the provider.

Stablecoin swaps and tax: why the switch is taxable in Germany

One point that regularly gets lost when repositioning: swapping one stablecoin for another is a disposal transaction in Germany. For tax purposes a stablecoin is another economic asset, not a euro balance, and therefore the move from one token into another is a tax-relevant event, even though the value does not change.

In practice the gain is usually small, because the price barely moves. Under the rules for private disposal transactions, gains stay tax free if more than a year lies between acquisition and sale; below that holding period your personal income tax rate applies, and an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies to the sum of all private disposal gains in a year. The real effort lies not in the tax burden but in the documentation: every swap needs a time, a quantity, a price and a counter value, and across repositioning over several platforms that quickly becomes hard to follow.

If you are going through your holdings anyway, you should put the records in order in the same pass. That is the moment when a tool that consolidates inflows and outflows across several accounts pays for itself.

What the draft is not yet: comment period and open points

In the United States several steps lie between a proposed rule and applicable law. The Fed collects comments for 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, evaluates them and then publishes a final version, which may differ from the current one. Which capital ratio ends up in place is therefore open.

Also open is how the two legal areas relate to each other. An issuer supervised by the Fed in the United States that offers in the EU through a subsidiary with MiCA authorization is subject to two sets of rules with different reserve requirements. Whether that leads to separate reserve pools per jurisdiction is in neither of the two drafts. For you as a holder that is the question of which pool stands behind your token, and today it can only be answered through the issuer's product documents.

What can already be observed, on the other hand: in stablecoins, supervision is moving on from the question of whether they are permitted to the question of how well they are backed. Both Fed drafts revolve around backing, capital and custody. That is the same direction MiCA has been setting in the EU since last year.

Checking your stablecoin redemption right: what to take away

1. Establish who stands behind your token. Check whether the issuer holds an EU authorization, because that determines whether you can assert the claim to redemption at face value at all. Trading venues with European authorization state this in the product details; an overview is offered by the comparison of the best regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Put the records in order before you reposition. Every swap between two stablecoins is a tax-relevant event with a time, a quantity and a counter value. A portfolio tool takes over the allocation across several accounts; the common programs are in the overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
3. Decide deliberately where the holdings sit. In an exchange account you share the platform's risk; in your own custody you carry the responsibility for the keys. If you want to take the second route, the devices are set side by side in the hardware wallet comparison.

(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.)

Stellar Lumens trades at $0.2212, or 0.1945 euros, on September 25, 2026 at around 04:51 UTC. That is 9.66 percent more than 24 hours earlier according to CoinGecko data, and the strongest daily move among the 25 largest cryptocurrencies. Behind the gain sits a development that has been building for months: the Stellar chain now carries tokenized real-world assets worth billions. Anyone planning to turn that into a purchase should settle three questions first, and none of them has anything to do with the chart. They concern the issuing address of the token, the buying route in Germany and the holding period.

cryptoticker.io collected this analysis itself on September 25, 2026. We queried Stellar's public Horizon interface and counted how many separate issuers carry the same stablecoin ticker there. The result explains why the ticker alone is not enough to base a purchase on.

Stellar Lumens (XLM) climbs to $0.22: the documented numbers

Stellar Lumens (XLM) is quoted at $0.221166 on September 25, 2026 at 04:51 UTC, according to CoinGecko. In euros that is 0.1945. Market capitalization stands at $7.73 billion, rank 20 in the overall market. Turnover over the past 24 hours came to $475.2 million.

More revealing than the daily gain is the comparison of two periods. Over seven days the coin is up 18.04 percent, over 30 days 17.97 percent. The two figures are practically level. That means the entire monthly gain was produced in the last seven days; before that the price moved sideways. Jumps of this kind after a long quiet spell matter for the question of entry timing, because they widen the distance to any pullback zone.

XLM remains far from its all-time high. CoinGecko dates that high to January 2, 2018, and the current price sits around 74.6 percent below it. A coin that stands at a quarter of its peak eight years on is not a latecomer catching up, but an asset with a long history of its own. That belongs in any assessment.

Tokenized real-world assets on Stellar: from $869 million to almost $4 billion

Tokenized real-world assets, RWA for short, are holdings from traditional finance represented as tokens on a blockchain. Typical examples are short-dated government bonds, money market fund units or corporate loans. The token is the representation, not the value itself; behind it stands an issuer who holds the underlying.

On Stellar this stock has grown sharply in 2026. According to an analysis by Cointelegraph based on a Dune Analytics dashboard maintained by Stellar, the chain's RWA market capitalization stood at $3.996 billion on August 29, 2026. At the end of 2025 it was $868.8 million. That is roughly four and a half times more within eight months. The same analysis puts $438 million of stablecoins with audited reserve backing on the chain.

Further inflows have been announced. The US securities settlement house DTCC intends to connect its tokenization service to Stellar, with tokenized assets due to become available there in the first half of 2027. The platform Tradable has said it will bring private credit of up to $1 billion onto the chain. MoneyGram launched its dollar stablecoin MGUSD on Stellar in June. On September 17, 2026 protocol upgrade 28 also went live on mainnet, which we assessed in a separate article on September 19.

One point matters for context: these sums sit on the chain, they do not sit in the XLM price. The lumen is the network currency used to pay fees and to post account reserves. A growing RWA stock raises the number of accounts and transactions, but it distributes nothing to holders. The link between stock growth and price is therefore indirect and not mechanical.

446 tokens on Stellar carry the name USDC: our count of September 25

For this article we queried Stellar's public Horizon interface on September 25, 2026, specifically the assets endpoint, page by page to the end of each list. We compared the issuing address of every entry against the address published by Circle. All calls returned status 200.

The result for the ticker USDC: 446 separate entries, each with its own issuing address. Exactly one of them comes from Circle. That genuine entry counts 2,431,447 authorized accounts and a total holding of 351,168,048.23 USDC, spread across accounts, smart contracts, liquidity pools and claimable balances. The remaining 445 entries carry the same ticker and have nothing to do with Circle.

The picture for the ticker EURC looks similar, only smaller: 70 entries, one of them from Circle with 40,121 authorized accounts and a holding of 3,678,796.49 EURC. The largest third-party EURC entry reaches 12,809 accounts. That is around 32 percent of the account count of the genuine token, and those accounts have opened a trustline to an address that issues no Circle product.

What we did not examine belongs to the honesty of this analysis: we did not investigate who stands behind the third-party entries or whether any intent to deceive lies behind them. Some of these entries are likely to be tests, learning projects or discontinued legacy assets. Nor did we assess the individual holdings of each third-party entry; the only striking point is that several of them report nominal quantities in the trillions, which suggests empty shells without backing. The figure of 446 is a count, not a verdict on anyone's intentions.

Trustline and issuing address: how to spot the genuine stablecoin on Stellar

A trustline on Stellar is an account's explicit permission to hold a particular token from a particular issuer. Without that line nobody can send you the token. That is precisely where the protection lies, and precisely where the mistake happens: open a trustline to the wrong issuer and you end up holding a token that looks like the well-known one while carrying a claim against nobody.

In practice you check three things before you confirm a trustline. First the complete issuing address, not just its first and last characters. The genuine USDC address on Stellar begins with GA5ZSEJY and can be verified in a public blockchain explorer. Second the linked domain: reputable issuers point to their own corporate domain through a standardized file. Third the order of magnitude, because a token with a handful of accounts is no established stablecoin, even if the ticker matches.

Anyone who buys through an exchange and leaves the coins there meets this question less often, because the exchange manages the trustline. As soon as you withdraw to your own wallet and accept a stablecoin there, the check is yours.

EURC versus USDC on Stellar: why German investors almost always carry dollar risk

Our count shows a clear imbalance. The 351.17 million USDC face 3.68 million EURC. At the conversion rate of September 25, around $1.137 per euro, the euro holding amounts to roughly $4.18 million. That leaves the euro stablecoin at a good one percent of the combined holdings on the chain.

For you as an investor in Germany this has an immediate consequence. If you rotate gains from XLM into a stablecoin to step out of price risk for a while, on this chain you will most likely end up in a dollar asset. You are then trading price risk for currency risk. If the euro-dollar rate moves by five percent, your supposedly stable holding moves with it in euro terms.

The euro stablecoin EURC is authorized as an e-money token under the EU's MiCA regulation, which places its issuer under European supervision. That is an argument for the euro route, but it does not change the fact that liquidity on Stellar sits mostly in the dollar. Anyone who wants to take the euro route should first check whether their provider offers EURC at all and at what spread it converts.

Buying through a regulated exchange: what to watch for with XLM in Germany

XLM is available on the large trading venues licensed in the EU. Since MiCA applies in full, providers targeting customers in Germany need authorization as a crypto service provider; BaFin maintains the German permissions. In practice that means comparing three points before you buy: the trading fee, the spread between bid and ask, and the withdrawal fee if you want to move the coins to your own wallet.

The spread is often underestimated on small order sizes. On a coin priced at 0.19 euros, half a cent of difference looks small yet amounts to a good two percent of the stake. Two percent on the way in and two on the way out make four percent that the price has to recover first. An overview of the terms is in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges, where we set fees, spreads and withdrawal routes side by side.

The network fee itself is no cost factor on Stellar. The base fee at ledger 64,605,268, closed on September 25, 2026 at 04:55 UTC, was 100 stroops, meaning 0.00001 XLM per operation. The median of the fees actually paid was also 100 stroops. Converted, that is fractions of a cent. A transfer on Stellar becomes expensive through the provider's fees, not through the chain.

Auth revocable and clawback: when an issuer can freeze your stablecoin

Every asset on Stellar carries flags that define which rights the issuer retains. Two of them matter for holders. Auth revocable means the issuer can withdraw an authorization once granted; the balance can then no longer be moved. Clawback means the issuer can pull tokens directly from the account.

Our query of September 25, 2026 shows the following for the genuine Circle tokens on Stellar: for USDC and for EURC, auth revocable is set to active, while clawback is inactive. The issuer can therefore revoke an authorization, yet cannot unilaterally remove your balance. Neither is a scandal; both are the norm for regulated stablecoins, because the issuer has to implement sanctions and anti-money-laundering requirements. For you it does mean that a stablecoin in your own wallet does not have the same independence as the lumen itself.

None of this applies to XLM. The network currency is controlled by no issuer, there is no authorization and no seizure. Anyone who wants to avoid issuer risk entirely therefore holds the coin itself rather than a token issued on top of it.

Storing XLM: hardware wallet, minimum reserve and the cost of a trustline

Anyone moving XLM to their own wallet runs into a Stellar peculiarity: an account has to keep a minimum reserve and cannot be emptied completely. The base reserve at the ledger checked on September 25, 2026 was 0.5 XLM per entry. A new account occupies two entries and must therefore hold 1 XLM permanently. Every additional trustline costs another 0.5 XLM in locked reserve.

At the price of September 25 that is about 19 cents for the account and just under 10 cents per trustline. The amounts are small, but they are locked rather than spent: as soon as you close a trustline again, the reserve is released. Open a dozen trustlines out of curiosity and you tie up correspondingly more, while losing track of which issuers you have actually authorized.

For storing larger holdings a hardware wallet is the usual route, because the private key never leaves the device. Which devices support Stellar and how they differ in handling and price is set out in our hardware wallet comparison. What matters there is less the device than the question of where the recovery words are kept and who besides you could reach them.

Holding period and tax: what is left of an XLM gain in Germany

In Germany cryptocurrencies count as other economic assets. Gains from a sale fall under private disposal transactions in accordance with section 23 of the Income Tax Act. The holding period is decisive: if more than a year lies between acquisition and sale, the gain is tax free. Below that it is taxed at your personal rate, provided the sum of all private disposal gains in the calendar year reaches the exemption threshold of 1,000 euros.

Exemption threshold means: stay below it with a gain of 999 euros and you pay nothing. Land at 1,001 euros and you pay tax on the full amount, not just on the euro above the line. That edge is the reason why it pays to do the arithmetic shortly before the turn of the year.

Swapping XLM into a stablecoin is a sale for tax purposes. Anyone locking in gains in USDC or EURC ahead of a pullback triggers a disposal and starts a fresh period for the stablecoin. This is the point where the two themes of this article converge: the route into the supposedly safe harbor may cost tax, and on Stellar it leads mostly into a foreign currency.

Anyone trading several times a year needs a clean record of every acquisition with date, quantity and price, otherwise the holding period cannot be proven after the fact. The usual route for that is portfolio and tax software that reads the exchanges via an interface.

Levels above and below: what the XLM price is measured against now

Three reference points follow from the documented price data. The current level is $0.2212. Backing out the seven-day move of 18.04 percent puts the price a week ago at around $0.187; because the 30-day move is almost identical, that area also marks the level where the price spent the preceding month. On the downside it is the first area a pullback would run into.

On the upside the available data offers no comparably documented reference point. The all-time high from January 2018 sits around 74.6 percent above today's price and is no guide for the coming weeks. Analyst targets that circulate in phases like this we deliberately leave out as long as they are not attributed by name and reasoned.

What can be observed instead are the inflows on the chain. If the announced DTCC connection actually arrives in 2027, the number of accounts and transactions rises further. If it fails to appear or slips, one of the arguments currently made for the chain falls away. Both are verifiable, and both are a better yardstick than a price target without a sender.

Stellar and the USDC ticker: what to take away

1. Settle the buying route before the buying decision. Compare trading fee, spread and withdrawal costs at a provider licensed in the EU before you place an order; on a coin below 20 cents the spread eats proportionally more than it looks. The terms are in the comparison of the best crypto exchanges.
2. Check the issuing address before every trustline. 446 entries on Stellar are called USDC, one of them comes from Circle. Match the full address in an explorer before you accept a stablecoin in your own wallet, and keep the number of open trustlines small. For storage itself the hardware wallet comparison helps.
3. Record the holding period before you swap. Moving from XLM into a stablecoin is a sale and restarts the one-year clock. Keep every acquisition with date, quantity and price so the period stays provable; suitable tools are in the overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

(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.)

The three European financial supervisory authorities added quantum risk to their official autumn risk picture on September 23, 2026. Nothing about your holdings changes today, and the paper is not a warning about an imminent attack. What changes is the expectation placed on your provider: exchanges, custodians and banks in the EU now have to plan the migration of their encryption, and you can measure them against that.

This article sets out what the document actually says, which deadlines sit behind it, where the real attack surface lies for Bitcoin and Ether, and which three things you can check about your own custody without waiting for technology that does not yet exist.

What the EU supervisors wrote about quantum risk on September 23

Behind the paper stand the three European Supervisory Authorities, the ESAs: the banking authority EBA, the insurance authority EIOPA and the markets authority ESMA. Twice a year they publish a joint risk update in which the Joint Committee names the weak points of the EU financial system. The autumn 2026 edition appeared on September 23, and its core findings had been presented on September 10 at the Financial Stability Table of the EU Economic and Financial Committee. The statement is available in full at ESMA and at the EBA.

On quantum computing the text says the technology could transform the financial sector in central areas, from process optimisation through fraud and compliance monitoring to pricing. The same paragraph carries the flip side: the technology could equally create significant risks by undermining cryptographic systems that are used at scale to secure communications, transactions, databases and blockchains. Blockchains are named explicitly there, and not as a footnote to a banking topic.

The sentence that carries the urgency is a different one: the risks could materialise faster than any commercially viable application. In other words, the supervisors expect the ability to break old encryption to arrive before the economic benefit with which quantum computers are otherwise advertised.

Three weak points in one paper

The quantum topic does not stand alone. The ESAs name three fields: dependence on providers and infrastructure outside the EU, new technologies involving artificial intelligence and quantum computing, and the rapidly grown market for private credit. For crypto investors the first two fields are relevant, and they interlock. On the same September 23 ESMA additionally declared digital innovation a new supervisory priority from 2027, which shows that this is more than a one-off remark.

“Harvest now, decrypt later”: why intercepted data becomes a problem later

Harvest now, decrypt later describes an approach in which an attacker records encrypted data today and stores it, in order to decrypt it only once the necessary computing power exists. The attack therefore happens in two steps that can lie years apart.

For banking data, health records or contract documents that is the core of the problem, because their value does not expire. With a public blockchain the case is different and in one respect more uncomfortable: there, nobody has to intercept anything. The data lies open, permanently and retrievable by anyone. Whoever stores a copy of the chain today has everything they would need in ten years.

That is precisely why the distinction in the next section matters. The transaction history is always open. What decides the question is whether the public key belonging to a particular address is open as well.

Post-quantum cryptography: the migration deadline of end-2026 and who it binds

Post-quantum cryptography, abbreviated PQC, covers encryption and signature schemes that cannot be broken even by a powerful quantum computer. It rests on different mathematical foundations, and it is not about longer passwords.

The European timetable for this was not set by the Joint Committee. It comes from the NIS Cooperation Group, in which the member states work together. In June 2025 the group adopted a roadmap that the states endorsed. It provides for three stages: by the end of 2026 all member states should have begun the migration, meaning national strategies, inventories of the schemes in use and first migration steps. High-risk applications, which expressly include the financial sector, should be protected as early as possible and by 2030 at the latest. By 2035 the migration should reach as far as is practically feasible.

One point matters for placing this correctly: these deadlines bind member states, operators of critical infrastructure and supervised financial firms. As a private individual you are bound by no deadline. That is a relief, and at the same time it is the reason you have to look for yourself, because nobody migrates your self-custody on your behalf.

Elliptic curves, public keys and Bitcoin addresses: where the attack surface sits

Bitcoin and Ethereum sign transactions with schemes based on elliptic curves. A public key is computed from a private key, and that computation is easy in one direction and practically impossible in reverse. A sufficiently large quantum computer would make the reverse direction attackable, because a known method from quantum computing solves exactly this problem.

Here is the message for holders. With the address formats common today, the chain does not hold the public key itself, only its hash. The key becomes visible only when you spend from that address for the first time. As long as an address has only received, the information needed for this attack is not public.

That leaves two groups with a clearly raised attack surface. First, very old holdings from the early days, where the public key sits directly in the chain. Second, addresses that were used again and refilled after a spend, because from the first spend onwards the key stays permanently visible.

On the question of how far the hardware is from that point there is no reliable year, and this article deliberately names none. What is documented is that the estimates are moving towards lower effort: work published by Google Quantum AI in March 2026 concluded that breaking the 256-bit curves in use should require considerably fewer physical qubits than older models had assumed, by roughly a factor of twenty according to the reporting on that work. That is a correction to an estimate, not a date.

Dependence on non-EU service providers: the second finding that hits your exchange

The finding that takes up more room in the paper than the quantum topic is dependence on providers outside Europe. The ESAs identify a persistently strong dependence on IT service providers and payment systems outside the EU, and point out that it remains visible in the financial infrastructures as well, where clearing, repo business and ratings are predominantly handled by entities outside the EU.

For you this is not an abstract subject, because a trading platform is first and foremost software. The servers, the custody system, the identity checks and often the settlement sit with service providers whose names appear in the terms and conditions rather than on the front page. When supervisors expect cryptographic migration, that whole stack has to move with it, and the migration is only as fast as the slowest supplier.

In practical terms: a platform licensed in the EU gives you a counterparty bound by European rules, and a supervisor able to ask questions. If the choice is still ahead of you, the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges breaks down the licences, the registered seat and the custody model for each provider. That does not replace reading the terms yourself, but it shortens the job considerably.

AI-assisted attacks: why phishing is the nearer risk than the quantum computer

In the same chapter the ESAs write that the rapid development of advanced AI systems could make cyberattacks more effective and harder to control, because attackers could find and exploit weaknesses at unprecedented speed. For insurers they expect more frequent and more severe claims as a result.

That ordering is worth holding on to, because public debate often runs it the other way round. Quantum risk is significant, and it has no date. Automatically generated phishing pages, convincingly written support messages and cloned voices on the phone are circulating today and cost holdings today. The same precaution works against both, and it is unspectacular: the private key never leaves the device on which it was created, and an approval is confirmed on a screen that does not belong to the sender of the message.

That is exactly the purpose of a hardware wallet: the signature is created inside the device, and the content of the transaction is displayed there. A compromised computer can then propose a false payment, but it cannot approve one unnoticed.

Exchange balance, hardware wallet or self-custody: what supervisors do not settle for you

The obligations arising from the risk picture are addressed to supervised firms. Where your coins sit therefore decides who carries the migration burden.

If the balance sits with a regulated exchange or a custodian, that provider carries the migration of its systems, and the supervisor can question it about them. In return you depend on its diligence and on its insolvency risk. If you hold the keys yourself, you carry the migration yourself, and in return nobody stands between you and your coins. A third variant is the split, in which an actively traded portion stays on the exchange while the long-term holding sits in self-custody.

What you can ask your provider

• Is there a published roadmap for post-quantum migration, and does it name years?
• Which parts of custody sit with service providers outside the EU, and who is your contact if something fails?
• Are deposit addresses generated fresh for each transaction or permanently reused?
• Can withdrawal addresses be locked and approvals tied to a second device?
• When was custody last audited, and is the result available to read?

The last three points take effect immediately, independently of any quantum debate. If the first question goes unanswered, that is no proof of negligence, but it does indicate how far the planning has got.

MiCA licence and custody duties: what you find in your provider's terms and conditions

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets applies in full, service providers need an authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider, CASP in the wording of the regulation, in order to offer trading and custody. The authorisation brings duties that bite at exactly the point at issue here: client holdings have to be segregated from the firm's own funds, custody has to be documented, and there are reporting and contingency duties for outages and attacks.

These duties are the lever through which a supervisory finding reaches the provider. An ESA risk picture is not a law and sets no deadline for an individual firm. It does feed into supervisory practice, and that is where an observation turns into a question in an examination report. Which duties apply in detail and when the transitional rules run out is set out in our overview of the MiCA obligations for crypto firms.

For your own records one point matters more in practice than any debate about the regulation: write down which provider holds which assets and under which authorisation. If a provider changes its offering or leaves the market, you need that overview immediately.

Moving wallets and the holding period: why a transfer between your own wallets is not a sale

Anyone who takes this as the occasion to move holdings from an old address to a new one, or from the exchange into self-custody, rightly asks the tax question. The basic rule in Germany is clear: a transfer between two wallets that both belong to you is not a disposal. There is no sale, so no gain arises, and the one-year holding period keeps running. Only a sale, a swap into another coin or a payment made with it is a taxable event.

In practice this rarely fails on the law and often on the documentation. A portfolio tracker that does not recognise a self-transfer as such books the outgoing leg as a sale and the incoming leg as a purchase. A gain that never existed then shows up in the report, and the holding period starts again inside the software. So anyone moving holdings marks the event in their tool as an internal transfer and keeps the transaction IDs. Which programs merge self-transfers reliably is shown by the comparison of crypto tax tools.

A second point concerns the sequence. If you are consolidating several addresses anyway, it is better done calmly than under time pressure, because every move is an operation in which an address can be copied down wrongly. The most common loss in this area has nothing to do with cryptography.

“Quantum-safe” coins and wallets: how to spot dubious offers

Every supervisory announcement carrying a technical buzzword produces offers that lean on it. The pattern is predictable, and so are the markers.

1. An offer promises protection and asks you to enter your existing recovery words for it, for a migration or a check, say. That is a theft attempt in every case, without exception.
2. A new token is advertised as quantum-safe and is therefore supposed to rise in value. The security properties of a protocol say nothing about the price of a token.
3. A year is named from which existing schemes are said to be broken. No such figure is reliable at present, including in the supervisors' papers.
4. There is time pressure, a countdown or an offer valid only today. A genuine protocol migration is announced and debated over months.

The protocols themselves work on this seriously, and visibly so. Proposals for quantum-resistant signature schemes are debated in open development processes, with specifications, testnets and objections. A migration of that size will surprise nobody who follows the developer channels of their own coin.

Quantum risk and custody: what to take away

The EU supervisors have moved a long-term risk into an ongoing supervisory process. That is good news, because it creates accountability where there was only debate before. Three steps follow for you, and none of them is urgent.

1. Sort your addresses. Check whether you hold balances on addresses that have already been spent from, and whether you manage very old holdings from the early days. Those are the parts that are affected at all. If everything sits with a provider, first check who holds the keys there, and compare the custody model in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Harden your approvals. The nearer risk is the attack on you rather than on the mathematics. Tie withdrawals to a second device, fix address book entries and sign larger amounts on a device kept for that purpose alone. The differences between the devices are set out in the comparison of hardware wallets.
3. Book your moves cleanly. When you reorder addresses, mark every self-transfer as such and keep the transaction IDs, so that the holding period does not restart in the report. Which programs handle that reliably is shown by the comparison of crypto tax tools.

And the sentence for calm: if the ability to break elliptic curves ever exists, your wallet will not be the first target. Ahead of it stand bank connections, government communications and the signatures that hold the internet together. That is why the topic appears in the risk picture of a financial supervisor and not in a warning notice to retail investors.

(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.)

The Shielded Bitcoin spec hides senders, receivers and amounts, but leaves how BTC enters and exits the system to a later paper.

The central bank opened two proposals for comment under the GENIUS Act, requiring issuers it supervises to back tokens fully with safe assets and creating an application process for banks seeking to issue stablecoins.

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.

Muse Charm is Meta's palm-sized gadget for talking to its Muse AI agent on the go. It has cameras, a fingerprint sensor, and its own cell connection.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has acknowledged that XRP is not always the best solution for payment-related use cases.

ChainLink is certainly closer to a continuation rather than market correction.

An early Bitcoin miner just broke 4 years of silence, securing a massive $194 million profit in a single on-chain move.

Near Protocol's rally continuation could be the next logical step, despite the overextension on multiple indicators.

Bitcoin could surge to $500,000 within roughly two years, according to Volmex Labs CEO Cole Kennelly.

TLDR:

• XRP whales accumulated 470M tokens worth about $724M across five days, according to Ali Charts data.
• XRP trades near $1.55 as a daily inverse head-and-shoulders pattern approaches the key $1.60 neckline now.
• EGRAG Crypto watches RSI 53 as a momentum gateway, with RSI 47 becoming the major level below it now.
• A sustained XRP move above $1.60 could activate a $2 pattern target, based on the measured setup shown.

XRP whales accumulated more than 470 million XRP worth about $724 million in five days, according to Ali Charts.

The accumulation coincides with an inverse head-and-shoulders pattern forming on XRP’s daily chart. XRP traded at $1.55, up 5.93% over 24 hours and 16.42% over seven days, according to CoinGecko data at press time.

XRP Price Tests a Key Technical Resistance

Ali Charts reported whale holdings rose from 12.37 billion to 12.80 billion XRP. That increase occurred between September 21 and 24.

The chart also shows an inverse head-and-shoulders structure developing after XRP rallied 27.6%. The token climbed from $1.25 to $1.58 before approaching the $1.60 neckline.

In this pattern, the neckline acts as a confirmation level for a potential bullish breakout. A decisive move above $1.60 would confirm the setup described by the chart analysis.

The measured move from that pattern points toward $2, based on the distance between its low and neckline. However, the target remains a technical scenario rather than a guaranteed price outcome.

XRP’s latest price data adds context to the setup. CoinGecko data shows XRP at $1.55, with $4.39 billion in 24-hour trading volume.

The current price leaves XRP close to the $1.60 level highlighted by Ali Charts. Traders may therefore watch whether buying pressure can push the token through that resistance.

XRP RSI Could Confirm or Reject Momentum

EGRAG Crypto is also monitoring XRP’s relative strength index, or RSI. The indicator can help track the speed and magnitude of recent price movements.

According to EGRAG Crypto, the 53 RSI region has repeatedly acted as a critical momentum gateway. The analyst wants RSI to cross its moving average above 53 before a potential continuation.

The proposed sequence includes a move above 53, a retest, and then a hold of 53 as support. EGRAG Crypto said momentum could then expand toward the 80 RSI region.

The alternative scenario centers on a failed move above 53. If momentum cannot reclaim that level, EGRAG identifies 47 as the major RSI level to watch.

A move toward 47 would represent another momentum reset before XRP establishes its next direction. This creates two technical checkpoints around the same broader price structure.

Together, the whale accumulation and chart signals provide separate indicators for traders. Whale balances describe holdings, while RSI and price patterns describe market momentum.

For XRP, the immediate technical focus remains the $1.60 neckline. Holding momentum above that level would strengthen the pattern confirmation, while rejection would leave the setup unconfirmed.

The post XRP Whales Accumulate 470M Tokens as $1.60 Breakout Nears appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• ARK Invest and Securitize announced the tokenization of the ARK Venture Fund on Sept. 24, 2026.
• The tokenized fund will launch on Ethereum, with Securitize handling onchain issuance and investor services.
• The fund holds about $1.3 billion in assets, with stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks.
• Investors get an onchain version of their fund interest, not direct tokenized shares of the portfolio companies.
• The fund’s NAV has risen from about $20 at its 2022 launch to roughly $60.50 as of Sept. 23, 2026.

ARK Invest, the investment firm founded by Cathie Wood, is bringing its ARK Venture Fund onto the Ethereum blockchain. The firm announced the move with Securitize, a company that builds tools for tokenized assets.

The announcement came on Sept. 24, 2026. Eligible investors who access the fund through Securitize will be able to hold a blockchain-based version of their stake.

The fund had grown to roughly $1.3 billion in assets by late June. Its portfolio includes stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks, among other technology companies.

What Goes Onchain

Securitize will handle the fund’s onchain issuance and the investor experience. The tokenized version will be available on Ethereum at launch.

Investors are not getting blockchain versions of OpenAI or Anthropic shares. Instead, they receive an onchain representation of their interest in the fund that owns those stakes.

The ARK Venture Fund is not an exchange-traded fund. It is an actively managed closed-end interval fund that invests in both private and public companies.

Its target mix is about 80% private companies and 20% public companies. Investors cannot sell shares whenever they want.

The fund offers quarterly repurchase windows for about 5% of outstanding shares. If too many investors ask to sell at once, requests may be reduced on a prorated basis.

“Tokenizing the ARK Venture Fund puts our conviction in the evolution, if not revolution, of capital markets into practice,” said Wood, who serves as founder, CEO and CIO of ARK Invest.

Wood said the move is part of the firm’s mission to widen access to disruptive innovation. She added that Securitize has built the regulated infrastructure needed to make that possible.

Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize, said ARK’s investment in his company reflected a shared belief in tokenization. He said the launch shows how asset managers can move established investment products onto modern capital markets infrastructure.

ARK Invest made a strategic investment in Securitize in October 2025. That deal set the stage for the new product.

Securitize manages about $5 billion in assets as of August 2026. It works with firms such as Apollo, BlackRock, BNY, Hamilton Lane, KKR and VanEck, and says it is the only company running regulated digital securities infrastructure in both the U.S. and EU.

The Fund’s Performance Since Launch

The ARK Venture Fund launched on Sept. 23, 2022. Its net asset value started near $20 per share.

By Sept. 23, 2026, the NAV stood at about $60.50. That is roughly three times its starting level, before accounting for share class and distribution differences.

Returns have varied from year to year. The fund gained about 61% in 2023, 7% in 2024 and 56% in 2025.

The fund carries a net expense ratio of about 2.90% and has limited liquidity. Valuations of private holdings can change sharply when those companies raise new money.

In the second quarter of 2026, the fund returned 20.21%. ARK Invest named SpaceX and Anthropic as the biggest contributors to that gain.

So far in 2026, the fund is up around 32% through late September. Eligible investors can find details on the tokenized version at securitize.io/arkvx.

The post ARK Invest Tokenizes $1.3 Billion ARK Venture Fund on Ethereum With Securitize appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• A Cryptoquant analyst says a bitcoin holder cost basis signal has confirmed a bull market.
• This is the fifth time the signal has appeared, after 2012, 2015, 2019, and 2023.
• The measure leaves out long-term coins that have not moved in seven years.
• U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $2.06 billion from Sept. 21 to Sept. 23.
• Daily ETF inflows slowed from $999 million to $346.9 million over those three days.

Bitcoin has shown a market signal that one analyst says confirms a new bull market. The signal has now appeared five times in the cryptocurrency’s history.

The analysis came from Darkfost, a contributor at the data firm Cryptoquant. He shared his findings on Sept. 24.

He said the reading confirms a recovery he expected in July. At that time, a separate signal on July 11 suggested the bear market was nearing its end.

“This is the 5th occurrence, which gives a bit more credibility to the dynamic bitcoin is putting in place, though there’s always a margin for error, and I prefer to point that out,” he wrote in a post on X.

How the Bitcoin Signal Works

The measure looks at cost basis. This is an estimate of the average price that holders paid for their coins.

It compares two groups: short-term holders and active long-term holders. The bullish signal happens when the short-term group’s cost basis rises above that of the long-term group.

According to Cryptoquant’s chart, this crossover happened before in 2012, 2015, 2019, and 2023. The latest reading is the fifth in that series.

Which coins are counted matters. Darkfost only includes long-term coins that have moved at least once in the past seven years. He admits that the seven-year cutoff is arbitrary.

Glassnode, another data firm, separates short-term and long-term holders using a holding period of about 155 days. The seven-year filter is an extra step that decides which long-term coins count as active.

More than 3.5 million bitcoin older than 10 years remain untouched, according to the post. Darkfost estimated that this amount grows by about 8,000 to 30,000 bitcoin each month.

That monthly change has turned negative only once since 2019. It happened after an old miner moved about 100,000 bitcoin. Coins from wallets that had been inactive for five to 15 years also moved again in 2026.

ETF Inflows and Cycle Outlook

Darkfost linked part of the shift in bitcoin’s momentum to money entering through exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. A spot bitcoin ETF lets investors buy fund shares through a brokerage account instead of holding coins themselves.

Cryptoquant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju shared a separate outlook on Sept. 22. He said a larger market and more institutional ownership could soften the extreme rallies and crashes seen in past cycles.

He forecast returns of three to five times for bitcoin this cycle. He said a milder bear market would follow.

U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs took in $2.06 billion from Sept. 21 to Sept. 23, according to Farside data. Each day brought net inflows, though the amounts got smaller.

The stretch began with $999 million on Sept. 21, the funds’ largest single-day inflow of 2026. Inflows then fell to $714.7 million on Sept. 22.

On Sept. 23, net inflows came in at $346.9 million. The data shows demand during the period of the signal, but it does not prove that ETF buying caused the crossover.

The post Bitcoin Bull Market Signal Appears for Fifth Time, Cryptoquant Analyst Says appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Evercrest filed a civil claim against LayerZero and Bryan Pellegrino over April’s $292 million rsETH exploit.
• KelpDAO alleges LayerZero failed to disclose risks despite reviewing and approving its bridge configuration.
• LayerZero argues KelpDAO’s 1-of-1 verifier setup created the key security weakness behind the exploit.
• KelpDAO is migrating rsETH cross-chain transfers to a new security framework following the bridge attack.

Evercrest Technologies, the entity associated with KelpDAO, has sued LayerZero and CEO Bryan Pellegrino in British Columbia. The case centers on April’s rsETH bridge exploit, which drained about 116,500 rsETH, worth $292 million. KelpDAO alleges LayerZero failed to disclose security risks, while Pellegrino has called the claims “meritless.”

KelpDAO Takes $292 Million in rsETH Dispute to Court

The civil claim escalates a dispute that began after the April 18 attack on KelpDAO’s LayerZero-powered bridge. KelpDAO alleges failures within LayerZero’s security infrastructure contributed to the loss.

KelpDAO also alleges LayerZero failed to adequately disclose weaknesses linked to its technology before the attack. The complaint says LayerZero had reviewed and approved KelpDAO’s bridge deployment and configuration in writing.

LayerZero and Pellegrino dispute that account of responsibility. Pellegrino called the lawsuit “meritless” and said he plans to defend the case in Vancouver.

The court has not determined responsibility for the exploit, and the allegations remain subject to legal proceedings. The case now moves the months-long dispute from public statements into a Canadian courtroom.

LayerZero and KelpDAO Disagree Over Bridge Security

The April attack began after an attacker socially engineered a LayerZero developer and obtained session credentials. The attacker then entered LayerZero’s RPC cloud environment and compromised internal nodes. LayerZero reported these findings in its final investigation.

The compromised nodes supplied false blockchain information to LayerZero’s Decentralized Verifier Network. A denial-of-service attack also disrupted an external RPC provider used by the verification system.

KelpDAO’s rsETH bridge used a 1-of-1 DVN configuration, meaning one verifier could approve cross-chain messages. The compromised verifier approved a message claiming rsETH had been burned on another chain.

No corresponding burn had occurred, but the Ethereum-side contract released 116,500 rsETH to the attacker. Chainalysis described the incident as an attack against off-chain infrastructure rather than the bridge’s smart contract code.

LayerZero argues the single-verifier design created the critical failure point and says it had recommended stronger configurations. KelpDAO contests that position and points to LayerZero’s alleged approval of its setup.

KelpDAO Moves rsETH Away From LayerZero Infrastructure

KelpDAO has since started moving rsETH cross-chain transfers to a different security framework. The protocol previously identified Chainlink CCIP as the replacement for its LayerZero-based bridge.

Recovery efforts have also continued separately from the Canadian lawsuit. Authorities and ecosystem participants froze portions of the assets linked to the attacker after the April breach.

LayerZero’s investigation attributed the operation to TraderTraitor, a threat group associated with North Korea’s Lazarus Group. In addition, the independent researchers cited by LayerZero reached the same attribution.

The British Columbia case will now address competing claims over responsibility for the bridge’s design and compromised infrastructure. However, any allocation of legal liability remains for the court to determine.

The post KelpDAO Sues LayerZero and CEO Bryan Pellegrino Over $292M rsETH Exploit appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Block has joined the x402 Foundation and added Bitcoin Lightning support to the x402 payment protocol.
• x402 is an open standard that lets AI agents pay for API access, data and digital services on their own.
• Block said Lightning suits the low-cost, high-volume payments that AI agent commerce will need.
• Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Coinbase and the Solana Foundation also back the x402 Foundation.
• The move builds on Block’s work with the Universal Commerce Protocol for small businesses.

Block has joined the x402 Foundation and added Bitcoin Lightning support to the x402 payment protocol. The company, which is led by co-founder Jack Dorsey, announced the move on Thursday.

The step is part of Block’s wider push into payments for AI agents. These are software programs that can carry out tasks and make purchases for people, such as booking services or buying data.

With the addition, AI agents using x402 can send payments over the Lightning Network. Lightning is a system built on top of Bitcoin that is designed for faster and cheaper transactions.

What x402 Does

x402 is an open payment standard. It lets AI agents and web services pay for things on their own, without a person approving each purchase.

The standard covers payments for API access, data and digital services. An API is a tool that lets one piece of software request information or services from another.

The x402 Foundation launched in April. It operates under the Linux Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports open source technology projects.

Block now joins a list of large technology backers. These include Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, which runs Amazon’s cloud computing business.

Crypto companies also support the foundation. Coinbase and the Solana Foundation are among the members.

Why Block Chose Lightning

Block said Lightning is suited to the kind of payments that agentic commerce will depend on. The company pointed to the network’s ability to handle low-cost, high-volume transactions.

AI agents may need to make many small payments in a short time. For example, an agent might pay a small fee each time it pulls data from a web service.

Card payments often carry fees that make very small purchases costly to process. Lightning payments, by contrast, usually settle within seconds and often cost less than a cent.

Steve Lee leads Spiral, Block’s Bitcoin development initiative. He shared the company’s view on the new integration in the announcement.

“Bringing Lightning to x402 is a concrete step toward making Bitcoin everyday money for people and the agents acting on their behalf, and we’re excited to help the industry build on it,” Lee said.

Block has worked on Bitcoin projects for several years. Spiral, which funds and builds open source Bitcoin tools, is one of the ways the company supports that work.

The x402 move builds on Block’s role in another project. The company already takes part in the Universal Commerce Protocol.

That protocol is an effort to enable AI-driven commerce for small businesses, according to Block’s announcement.

The announcement did not include figures on how many developers or businesses are expected to use the new Lightning support.

Block’s announcement on Thursday marks its formal entry into the x402 Foundation. The company said it is excited to help the wider industry build on the new Lightning support.

The post Block Joins x402 Foundation, Adds Bitcoin Lightning Payments for AI Agents appeared first on Blockonomi.

The popular cross-border token continues with its highly volatile trading sessions, but today it’s in the right direction. After yesterday’s slump to under $1.50, the asset has rebounded swiftly and now sits over 6.5% higher than it was 24 hours ago.

Here are some of the possible reasons why and what’s next.

ETF Inflows Keep Rocking

Although the entire market tanked yesterday, XRP’s nosedive was quite painful on its own, as the asset was violently rejected at $1.65 and slumped to under $1.50 within 24 hours. Today’s situation is rather similar in terms of more profound price moves, but in the opposite direction. BTC is up by 1.6% today, similar to BNB, while ETH has gained under 2.5%. XRP stands out with a daily surge of 6.6% as of press time and now sits at $1.55 after rebounding from the key $1.50 support.

This rather notable volatility has not deterred investors gaining exposure to the asset through the spot Ripple ETFs. Despite the sluggish start with $0.00 in reportable data on Monday, the funds went on a roll in the following three days, attracting $20.02 million on Tuesday, $18.04 million on Wednesday, and another $14.89 million on Thursday, which is our first possible reason behind the impressive rebound.

The cumulative net inflows have skyrocketed to yet another all-time high of over $1.76 billion. Other notable developments in XRP’s recent performance that could have pushed the asset’s price higher include whale activity, as these large market participants acquired over 1.5 billion tokens in 96 hours last week.

Short Squeeze?

Data shared by popular crypto commentator on X, Xaif Crypto, outlined the third possible reason behind today’s remarkable comeback. He noted that the XRP/USD trading pair printed a substantial surge in short liquidations of over 45% on the 4-hour chart. Such developments could lead to a deeper short squeeze as traders have to close their positions and buy tokens to cover their losses. Xaif added that longs followed with a “brutal +16.11% swing right after.”

Meanwhile, fellow XRP Army member Bird speculated that the token has just flashed a “green light” and predicted that the next move higher has begun after a “perfect leveraged long flush and backtest.” His first target sits at $1.80 by the end of the week, which is rather optimistic as of now.

Green light

The next move up for XRP has begun after a perfect leveraged. long flush and backtest.

$1.80 by EOW pic.twitter.com/lT67PxFVa7

— Bird (@Bird_XRPL) September 24, 2026

The post Why Is Ripple’s (XRP) Price Up Today: September 25 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum’s tradable supply on crypto exchanges has fallen to a record low. Only 3.49% of ETH is now held on tracked platforms

In fact, fresh data from Santiment reveals that another 1.16% of ETH supply has moved off these trading venues since June 1.

Shrinking Supply

Exchange balances had already dropped to their lowest levels since Ethereum’s early years this summer. The decline means fewer ETH tokens are immediately available for trading or selling. However, lower exchange supply does not guarantee a rise in its price.

Santiment explained that a major reason behind this is the growing use of ETH in staking and DeFi. Around 35% of Ethereum is estimated to be staked. The network also has about $53 billion locked in DeFi, which gives holders more ways to earn yield or keep their coins active on-chain.

To top that, long-term holders are also keeping more ETH away from exchange order books. Large treasury holders are adding to this trend. BitMine, for example, reported staking more than 5 million ETH earlier this month.

If demand for the crypto asset increases while exchange supply remains limited, buyers could have fewer readily available coins to purchase.

Network Demand Stays Strong

Ethereum has been one of the best-performing assets. It climbed from around $1,900 to $2,800 in a span of a month before falling back toward $2,660. Despite this, its network activity is exhibiting signs of strength. CryptoQuant reported that Gas Used is currently around 217.1 billion, up 0.26%. The small increase suggests that demand for Ethereum block space has not fallen sharply during the price correction.

Priority Fees are showing a stronger move as the latest figure stands near $464,000, up 26.74% over the past day. Priority Fees are payments users make to encourage faster transaction processing. The sharp rise means that users are competing more for available block space.

This points to continued activity across the network. At the same time, Blocks Mined remains almost unchanged at around 7,147, which essentially indicates that the rise in fees is not coming from a major increase in block production. Instead, existing blocks are seeing stronger demand and higher fee competition.

According to CryptoQuant, the $2,600-$2,650 area remains an important support zone for the leading altcoin. If ETH manages to hold the level while network activity and Priority Fees stay high, it could potentially move back toward the $2,700-$2,800 range.

The post Ethereum Is Disappearing From Exchanges Fast: Here’s Where All the ETH Is Going appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin options worth roughly $15.9 billion are set to expire on Deribit at 8:00 AM UTC today, covering about 184,000 BTC contracts.

The expiry comes with the OG crypto trading near $84,000 after retreating from an eight-month high above $87,000, putting recent price gains against a large options settlement.

The Friday Expiry By the Numbers

An expiry snapshot earlier in the week showed the Bitcoin batch carried a notional value near $15.9 billion, a max pain price of $75,000 and a put/call ratio of 0.69. Max pain is the strike where the largest amount of options value would expire worthless.

A put/call ratio below 1 means there are more call contracts than puts. That can point to a mildly bullish positioning or hedging bias, but it does not establish where Bitcoin will trade after expiry.

Deribit CEO Luuk Strijers also posted around the same time that options open interest had climbed above $50 billion, representing about 74% of market open interest, and about one-third of that OI was due to expire during the Friday cycle.

Large butterfly trades have also appeared around October expiry dates, with some of the biggest structures targeting $95,000 for October 30, and they include short-dated calls intended to finance the trades.

Deribit’s own expiry alert, posted later on September 24, put the BTC expiry at about $14.4 billion in notional value, with a 0.84 put/call ratio and $78,000 max pain.

There was another $2.13 billion from Ethereum, bringing the combined BTC and ETH expiry to about $16.53 billion, with the different figures showing how quickly options positions can change as expiry approaches.

The expiry also comes after changes to Deribit’s trading infrastructure, with the platform rolling out a 10-millisecond speed bump on its Bitcoin and Ethereum perpetual futures and published figures from a matching engine overhaul, cutting median latency from 4.7 milliseconds to 76 microseconds.

Bitcoin Heads Into Expiry After Volatile Week

The primary cryptocurrency has had a rough end to the week after an otherwise strong run. As CryptoPotato reported earlier, it dropped to $75,000 last Wednesday before rallying past $80,000 into the weekend, climbing to $87,000 by Monday, and topping that mark again on Wednesday morning before a rejection pulled it back under $84,000.

At the time of writing, it had gone back above $84,000 by a couple of hundred bucks, according to data from CoinGecko, representing a slight 0.1% drop in 24 hours, although it managed to keep its gains for the week at about 10%, also jumping 7% across the last 30 days.

However, it is still 25% lower than where it had been a year ago and is stuck 33% below its record high of over $126,000.

The post How Will Crypto Markets Move After $16B in Bitcoin Options Expire Today? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitget says its security systems flagged unauthorized transfers from a portion of its hot wallets at 18:31 UTC on September 24, with roughly $351.6 million in assets affected.

The exchange says every dollar of that loss falls under its User Protection Fund, so customers’ balances will stay intact even with withdrawals paused as it reviews the incident.

What Bitget Says Happened

According to CEO Gracy Chen, Bitget runs a three-tier wallet system, and the breach touched a slice of the hot and warm wallet layers. Cold wallets, which hold the bulk of the exchange’s assets, were not affected, and the security team’s emergency protocols kicked in within minutes of the detection, flagging and reporting the addresses tied to the abnormal transfers.

The exchange’s User Protection Fund currently holds more than $464 million, well above the $351.6 million shortfall, and Bitget plans to use it to cover the full loss.

“We will not run from this, and every dollar will be accounted for,” Chen wrote in an update posted on X. She added that a full incident report, covering root cause and corrective steps, would follow within 24 hours of the initial notice.

According to Bitget, the attacker got into a backend system inside its wallet infrastructure, used it to spoof transaction data, and tricked the exchange’s authorization process into releasing funds.

Chen ruled out a private key compromise, which narrows what went wrong, and stated that containment is confirmed, with no further unauthorized transfers possible.

Lazarus Group Could Be Responsible

On-chain investigator Specter claimed that the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group was behind the attack, a position supported by analyst Conor Grogan.

“Generally they do these on the weekends but perhaps they had a limited window for the exploit and didn’t want to risk it,” Grogan wrote.

The incident adds to what has been an eventful stretch for crypto exploits, with $1.1 billion stolen across 212 incidents in the first half of the year, and more than half of that traced back to the Lazarus Group.

The post Bitget Reports $351M Hot Wallet Breach, Says User Funds Are Covered appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s cross-border token remains highly appealing to institutional investors, while whales have also accumulated a significant amount of tokens lately. Despite these positive factors, XRP has slipped 8% after a red wave swept through the broader market.

Meanwhile, one of the company’s top executives shared the stage at the MESA Forum with representatives from financial giants like BlackRock and HSBC to discuss stablecoins (like RLUSD), tokenized deposits, and other topics.

ETFs and Whales

Spot XRP ETFs have attracted substantial capital lately, showing that more conservative investors continue to increase their exposure to the asset. As CryptoPotato reported, these financial vehicles posted 10 consecutive green weeks, while the cumulative total net inflows reached roughly $1.75 billion. The past two days have been highly beneficial, too, signaling that the streak is likely to continue.

Companies that have launched spot XRP ETFs so far include Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Canary Capital, 21Shares, and Grayscale. However, others are awaiting regulatory approval and may soon join the list.

Recently, T. Rowe Price updated its crypto ETF filing, which will allow exposure to multiple cryptocurrencies, with XRP sitting at a 9.15% weight. For its part, Exchange Listed Funds Trust filed the “CYBER HORNER S&P 500® and XRP 75/25 Strategy ETF” with the SEC. If it receives the necessary thumbs-up, the product will enable investors to gain exposure to both the stock market and Ripple’s native token in a 75/25 ratio.

Institutional investors are not the only ones interested in XRP lately. Last week, whales acquired over 1.54 billion units in about 96 hours. The accumulation began shortly after the CLARITY Act failed in the US, triggering a pullback and suggesting that large investors see lower prices as a buying opportunity.

Ripple, BlackRock, and More

Recently, Reece Merrick (Managing Director, Middle East & Africa at Ripple) posted a photo of himself with representatives from BlackRock, HSBC, and other financial institutions. He said the individuals were on stage at the MESA Forum discussing stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and tokenized MMFs. The topic has also moved to RLUSD (Ripple’s stablecoin), with Merrick saying:

“Stablecoins: The always-on layer moving value between institutions without existing relationships (why RLUSD was built not to replace bank money, but to let it travel).”

He also stated that the UAE is open for business, is actively building, and hinted that Ripple has already established a serious presence in the region. For instance, in summer 2025, the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) recognized RLUSD as a crypto token within the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC).

The stablecoin officially launched in December 2024 and has since received backing from well-known exchanges and institutions. Its market capitalization has surged to the current $2.37 billion, making it the 43rd-biggest cryptocurrency and the ninth-largest stablecoin.

XRP Price Outlook

Earlier this week, Ripple’s cross-border token spiked to nearly $1.65, representing the highest level since the start of 2026. However, the broader market has corrected over the past 24 hours, and XRP has plunged to $1.47 (per CoinGecko).

X user Diana claimed the asset is now fighting to reclaim $1.50 to start a new rally. She outlined $1.61 as the major wall bulls need to attack and envisioned a rise to the $1.70-$2 range if they succeed.

For more price forecasts, read our dedicated article here.

The post Important Ripple News and XRP Price Update: September 25 appeared first on CryptoPotato.