The meeting could influence US AI policy, balancing innovation with accountability, impacting global tech competition and regulatory standards.

The post Donald Trump and Mike Johnson to meet with tech CEOs on AI next week appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

OpenAI's AI agent incidents highlight urgent need for robust regulatory frameworks to ensure data privacy and accountability in AI systems.

The post OpenAI discloses dozens of AI agent incidents, including leak of 53 user images appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

EIP-4444's optimizations enhance Ethereum's accessibility, reducing entry barriers for node operators and promoting network decentralization.

The post Ethereum node sync improved to under half a day with EIP-4444 optimizations appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Atlas Energy's strategic shift towards AI infrastructure highlights the growing synergy between energy and tech, with potential long-term gains.

The post Atlas Energy Solutions surges as much as 19% after landing $613M in contracts with frontier AI lab appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Misreporting in DeFi can undermine trust, highlighting the need for accurate information and transparency to maintain user confidence and market stability.

The post AlphaFi reportedly winding down after misconfiguration, SUI Foundation role unclear appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

North Korean Hackers Linked to $388M Bitget Crypto Exchange Theft: CEO

Hackers from North Korea targeted crypto exchange Bitget on Thursday, according to an update from the CEO, making away with close to $388 million in digital assets — more than originally reported. 

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said Friday that the higher figure “reflects a more complete accounting of transfers during the incident.” Chen had first reported that over $350 million had been moved.

Security firms first flagged unauthorized transactions from the Victoria, Seychelles-based exchange’s hot wallets on Thursday before the company announced it had frozen withdrawals.

Bitget is the sixth biggest crypto exchange, processing over $1 billion in trading volume per day, according to CoinGecko data. 

“Based on IP behavior patterns and on-chain analysis, the attack method in this incident is highly consistent with known patterns of North Korean hacker organizations,” Chen wrote on X on Friday. 

She added: “Our goal is to complete a full recovery as soon as possible. We will announce the specific time window immediately upon confirmation.”

In a security update, the exchange said it identified the digital assets stolen, which mostly included ethereum, tron, and USDT stablecoin — and no bitcoin. But a stolen funds tracker does show that the attacker has over $28.8 million in the leading cryptocurrency. 

Crypto stealing criminals — especially from North Korea — have become more sophisticated and faster since last year. Experts have said that the use of artificial intelligence tools is allowing cyber crooks to work more efficiently. 

U.S. authorities have long alleged that hacking groups with ties to the North Korea’s government, such as Lazarus, steal from crypto exchanges. 

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. They then returned 85% and demanded to keep the rest as ransom days later.

This post North Korean Hackers Linked to $388M Bitget Crypto Exchange Theft: CEO first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin ETFs Extend Winning Streak With Nearly $3B in Inflows

Bitcoin exchange-traded funds are on a winning streak, with investors buying for six consecutive days.

The funds — managed by the likes of BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley — have received over $2.8 billion in new investment since September 17, according to Farside Investors data. 

On Monday alone, investors bought nearly $1 billion in shares  — the most since October 6, when the funds received over $1.2 billion and the price of the leading cryptocurrency hit a new all-time high of $126,080. 

Still, Bitcoin’s price on Friday is only up modestly: it recently stood at nearly $83,975 after reaching as high as $87,330 on Monday. Over the past seven days, the coin’s price has surged by nearly 4%. 

While the price of the leading cryptocurrency has since dipped from earlier this week, Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart pointed out that the average ETF buyer is now in profit after the estimated ETF cost basis surged above $81,72 for the first time since January.  

Investors have a renewed interest in Bitcoin since the U.S. Department of the Treasury in August said it would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. 

Bitcoin’s price rallied as the move pushed 30-year Treasury yields down and weakened the dollar. Since the August announcement, U.S. Treasury yields have surged again. 

Bitcoin continued its run last week, shrugging off the fact that lawmakers had blocked landmark crypto legislation, the Clarity Act, and the Federal Reserve had hiked interest rates. 

Some analysts have said that the leading cryptocurrency is now in a bull run. Crypto market data firm CryptoQuant this week wrote that the leading cryptocurrency crossed above its 365-day moving average, a signal that the asset has finished being in a bear market.  

Bitcoin notched a record of $126,080 in October of last year but then began to sink later that month after the biggest liquidation event in crypto history saw over $19 billion in bets closed. But the so-called debasement trade — where investors throw money at an asset to hedge against a currency losing its value — is hot again, and bitcoin’s price has benefited as the dollar has weakened.

This post Bitcoin ETFs Extend Winning Streak With Nearly $3B in Inflows first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Proposes Daily Dividends For Preferred Stocks

Bitcoin treasury company Strategy wants to pay investors daily dividends on four of its preferred stocks.

The largest corporate holder of bitcoin said Friday that it was asking shareholders to approve the move, which would pay investors dividends every calendar day — including weekends and holidays — on STRF, STRC, STRK, and STRD. 

“If approved and adopted, we believe this would reduce reinvestment lag, enhance liquidity and market efficiency, and increase price stability,” Strategy said in a statement. Stockholders will attend a meeting to vote on the proposal on October 28. 

Strategy slowed down with its aggressive bitcoin buys this year, as the largest cryptocurrency fell into a bear market. The Nasdaq-listed company instead focused on protecting its balance sheet and sold chunks of its bitcoin. 

Friday’s announcement claimed the move would help both investors and common stockholders. 

“We believe these enhancements can also benefit our common stockholders by increasing the attractiveness and utility of our Digital Credit instruments, supporting our ability to access preferred equity capital efficiently and expanding the capital markets toolkit we use to execute our Bitcoin Treasury strategy,” Strategy added in a statement. 

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

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

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

The company would buy bitcoin every Monday but slowed down its buys after announcing a program under which it may sell BTC  from time to time to generate up to $1.25 billion in proceeds for the USD reserve, additionally fund preferred stock dividends and interest expenses or fund repurchases. 

Strategy said in a filing Monday that it last week bought 950 bitcoins for $75.7 million — its first buy since August. 

Its Nasdaq-listed stock (MSTR) is down nearly 50% over the past year after the price of bitcoin took a hit. 

But since the company started buying bitcoin in 2020, MSTR has appreciated by nearly 1,000%. 

This post Bitcoin Treasury Strategy Proposes Daily Dividends For Preferred Stocks first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Is US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth a Bitcoiner? This Is What His Accounts Say

U.S. Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth holds more cash than he does bitcoin. 

That’s according to his newly released 2025 annual financial disclosure, which shows he has  between $16,000 and $65,000 in the leading cryptocurrency while a bank account holds $1 million in cash. 

Hegseth, who was appointed Defense Secretary in January 2025, is part of the most crypto-friendly administration the U.S. has had. 

President Donald Trump was backed by digital asset industry bigwigs and last month pushed for landmark crypto legislation, the Clarity Act, to pass. 

Hegseth’s Office of Government Ethics filing also showed that he and his wife have retirement accounts containing investments worth roughly $2.05 million to $4.35 million.

Some of the investments include exchange-traded funds like the tech-heavy Invesco QQQ Trust and the closed-end fund the Apollo Diversified Real Estate Fund. 

Transactions made by Hegseth including sales of Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple stock. 

The bitcoin stash held by Hegseth is kept in a Coinbase wallet, the filing states. 

Hegseth’s crypto holdings are modest compared to the Trump family’s, which has made billions in crypto ventures since the president took office. 

President Trump personally disclosed that he’d made more than $1.4 billion from the family’s digital asset ventures, making crypto his largest income source and far ahead of real estate and legal settlements.

His family — including sons Eric and Donald Jr. — made $2.3 billion from four crypto ventures through the end of April 2026, a Reuters investigation reported this year. 

Critics, including Democrats, have accused Trump of profiting from crypto while shaping policy on it. The White House has consistently denied any conflicts of interest, and Trump has pointed to stock trading by members of Congress, particularly Nancy Pelosi, calling for a ban on the practice.

This post Is US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth a Bitcoiner? This Is What His Accounts Say first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Mitchell Askew Explains What 15M Inactive BTC Means for Bitcoin’s Next Move

Bitcoin is rallying despite a Fed rate hike and the failure of the Clarity Act, and the on-chain data suggests sellers may be nearly exhausted. Mitchell Askew, Head of Blockware Intelligence, breaks down long-term holder supply, which hit an all-time high of 15 million BTC this summer. He explains why so many coins sitting still signals more room for price to run. He also shares what Bitcoin ETF flows reveal about institutional buyers returning to the market.

Chapters:
0:00 Mitchell Askew of Blockware Intelligence on Bitcoin’s Rally
0:22 Is Bitcoin Selling Pressure Exhausted? Long-Term Holder Supply
1:36 Bitcoin ETF Flows & Returning Institutional Buyers
2:36 Why the Four-Year Halving Cycle Is Breaking
4:06 AI Data Centers Pulling Compute Away From Bitcoin Mining
5:56 The Hash Rate Bear Market: Should Bitcoiners Worry?
6:58 Stranded Energy, Global Mining & AI Data Center Arbitrage
8:12 Why Gen Z Isn’t Buying Homes
9:58 Will Gen Z Ever Save in Bitcoin?
11:26 Shallower Drawdowns & the Future of Bitcoin Cycles

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 Mitchell Askew Explains What 15M Inactive BTC Means for Bitcoin’s Next Move first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

IBM announced a beta connection between its Digital Asset Haven and SWIFT's shared ledger for tokenized deposits on Sept. 24, using an ISO 20022 Messaging Adapter that lets participating institutions instruct ledger transactions through standard payment messages.

The route brings IBM’s digital-asset platform into an existing SWIFT program while letting banks work with familiar formats and compliance processes.

IBM also announced a separate on-premises beta for institutions that want to run Haven in their own data centers.

Standard messages connect to tokenized deposits

Digital Asset Haven brings together wallets, key management, transaction signing and policy controls for regulated organizations.

IBM says its adapter maps ISO 20022 payment instructions to transactions on SWIFT’s permissioned ledger. This lets institutions use the payment messages they already exchange to test transfers of bank-issued tokenized deposits.

The adapter works alongside Haven’s digital-asset controls and Hyperledger Besu connectivity. IBM says institutions already participating in SWIFT's program have tested tokenized deposits on the shared ledger with Haven.

Participating clients can move digital assets around the clock through the ledger, according to IBM. Final settlement still uses existing mechanisms, including real-time gross settlement systems, so a tokenized-deposit transfer can move ahead of the final settlement step.

That distinction matters for banks assessing a continuous service: the beta adapter provides a route to instruct and move value on the ledger while established systems complete the underlying payment.

SWIFT said in July that its ledger was ready for initial use, with 17 banks preparing to pilot live tokenized-deposit transactions in a controlled rollout. IBM’s September announcement adds Haven as a beta route into that existing effort.

On-premises beta keeps Haven in client data centers

The second beta lets clients run Digital Asset Haven entirely inside their own data centers on IBM Z and LinuxONE, without a public-cloud dependency. IBM says both the solution layer and key-management layer stay within the client’s environment.

That gives regulated institutions direct control over the infrastructure used for custody and transaction management as they evaluate digital-asset services.

IBM says the on-premises option uses the same architecture, APIs, and workflows as Haven’s SaaS and hybrid deployments. Institutions can evaluate that deployment choice separately from the SWIFT connection.

A bank could focus on where its keys and platform operate while testing whether the messaging adapter fits its payment processes. Tom McPherson, general manager of IBM Z and LinuxONE, framed the expansion as a way for regulated institutions to participate in emerging digital-asset networks while retaining control of critical operations.

The post IBM links 17 banks to the SWIFT ledger, but the cloud risk persists appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A Bitcoin address sent 4,499.99987779 BTC to a single destination in a transaction confirmed at 02:30:04 UTC on Sept. 25, 2026.

The output was still unspent at a 13:33 UTC check, leaving nearly 4,500 BTC visible at one address after the move.

At Coinbase's BTC/USD low and high of $84,152.88 and $84,882.18 during the 02:00-03:00 UTC hour that included confirmation, the Bitcoin output had an estimated value of about $379 million to $382 million. That price window helps size the transfer.

The transaction spent eight outputs from the source address and created one output at the destination. Its largest input was 4,499.99986261 BTC, received on April 21, 2022. That principal output had not moved for more than four years before the Sept. 25 transaction.

The address wasn't completely inactive during that period. Its transaction history shows seven later deposits, each worth only a few hundred satoshis, between Dec. 30, 2024 and Sept. 11, 2026.

Together they totaled 2,821 satoshis (0.00002821 BTC). The nearly 4,500 BTC principal was long held, while small later Bitcoin payments still reached the address.

At the 13:33 UTC snapshot, the receiving address had one confirmed incoming Bitcoin output totaling 4,499.99987779 BTC, no spent output, and no mempool transaction. The source address's eight inputs were combined into that single output, with 1,303 satoshis paid as a network fee.

Those records show a confirmed on-chain transfer, but they do not identify who controls the destination. They also do not establish that the address belongs to an exchange, that Bitcoin was sold, that beneficial ownership changed or that an off-chain trade occurred.

A Bitcoin transfer can precede any of those events, yet this transaction alone follows from none.

The balance says nothing about the holder's other wallets or any trades elsewhere, and a later transaction could change it. That is why any claim about the coins' current location needs a time-stamped address check, while any claim about trading needs separate evidence.

Large movements of old coins can draw attention because traders watch for potential supply reaching exchanges. Here, the full output remained at one address at the time of the check, with no visible onward transfer.

A later spend would be observable on Bitcoin's blockchain, but its purpose would still need separate evidence.

The post Dormant whale moves $380M Bitcoin, leaving the sale question unanswered appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin is holding near $84,000 even as a historic US bond selloff pushes Treasury yields to decades-high levels.

The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 5.22%, extending a move that has taken borrowing costs to their highest level since 2007. The 30-year yield reached a fresh 22-year high of 5.5185% before trading around 5.511%, up nearly five basis points on the session.

The surge is raising the hurdle for Bitcoin and other risk assets by offering investors yields above 5% on US government debt while simultaneously lifting financing costs throughout the financial system.

Yet crypto has absorbed the latest leg of the bond rout relatively calmly so far. Bitcoin remained inside a roughly $83,000 to $85,000 range after retreating from this week's high near $87,000.

Camran Khosravi, an analyst at Bitwise, said Bitcoin has gained about 22% since Aug. 19 even as the 10-year real yield climbed 50 basis points. Real yields have risen steadily, while Bitcoin posted most of its gains early in the period and then held much of them.

That leaves traders confronting whether Bitcoin can continue resisting one of the sharpest increases in risk-free yields in decades.

5% Treasury yields raise Bitcoin’s opportunity cost

The pressure has been building for months, with Jefferies noting that the 10-year yield is on track for a seventh consecutive monthly increase. That would tie the longest such streak in data going back to 1970.

Demand at this week's Treasury auctions has also shown signs of strain.

James Lavish, co-managing partner of Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, said a $44 billion sale of seven-year notes Thursday cleared at 5.085%, up sharply from 4.512% in August and the highest auction yield since April 1993. The auction tailed the prevailing market yield by 0.7 basis points, while its bid-to-cover ratio slipped to 2.42 from 2.50 previously.

The Treasury discontinued seven-year notes in 1993 before reintroducing the maturity in 2009, making the latest auction yield the highest in roughly 33 years.

Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, said the selloff reflects forces visible for some time, including heavy government and corporate borrowing, strong economic activity, and reduced willingness or capacity among some traditional Treasury buyers.

He argued that investors may also remain anchored to the unusually low yields that followed the 2008 financial crisis, leaving markets less prepared for borrowing costs that stay structurally higher.

The economic data are adding to those longer-term pressures.

The Federal Reserve raised its target range by 25 basis points last week, while strong business activity, resilient employment and elevated energy costs are keeping expectations of further tightening alive.

S&P Global's preliminary September composite purchasing managers' index jumped to 58.4 from 56.0, its strongest reading since July 2021. Companies increased payrolls at the fastest pace in more than four years while input costs climbed to near a four-year high.

Those readings have reinforced concern that an economy running hotter than expected could keep inflation pressure elevated and force policymakers to maintain restrictive conditions for longer.

With yields now above 5%, that repricing is also changing the investment case for bonds themselves.

Jurrien Timmer, director of global macro at Fidelity Investments, said a 5% 10-year yield provides bond investors with a substantial cushion. By his calculation, a 100-basis-point decline in yields could generate an 11.9% return, while a rise to 6% would produce a loss of only about 1.9%.

That asymmetry raises Bitcoin's opportunity cost because the asset pays no coupon or dividend while government debt now offers nominal yields above 5%.

Timmer nevertheless said Bitcoin remained among the leading assets in his current multi-asset framework, alongside commodities, while long-duration bonds were lagging.

Bitcoin sheds leverage without a comparable price collapse

Bitcoin's adjustment to the macro shock has so far been more pronounced in derivatives positioning than in its spot price.

CryptoQuant data show combined Bitcoin open interest across Binance, Gate.io, HTX and Bybit falling to about $10.3 billion on Sept. 25 from $12 billion on Sept. 22.

The $1.7 billion decline represents a 14.3% contraction in leveraged exposure, compared with only about a 2.3% decline in Bitcoin from roughly $86,000 to $84,000 over the same period.

The reduction was broad-based, led by a roughly $710 million decline on Gate.io and a $680 million drop on Binance, while HTX and Bybit also recorded lower open interest.

Open-interest data cannot establish whether longs or shorts accounted for most of the reduction because contracts disappear when either side closes a position. The scale of the contraction relative to Bitcoin's price decline nevertheless shows that traders have substantially reduced leverage without producing a proportional break in spot.

That deleveraging can reduce the fuel available for cascading liquidations, although large pockets of leveraged positioning remain around the current market.

CoinGlass' 24-hour liquidation heatmap shows concentrations around $85,300 to $85,700 above Bitcoin, with additional liquidity near $83,000 and a larger cluster around $80,000 below.

BlockScholes said the surge in long-term Treasury yields had yet to produce a comparable expansion in crypto volatility, with Bitcoin remaining inside its recent range while 30-day implied volatility stayed near the lower end of its recent range.

That leaves the Treasury market as an increasingly important test of whether Bitcoin's recent resilience can persist.

A further rise in the 10-year above 5.2%, or in the 30-year beyond 5.52%, would test whether the bond-market shock can finally break through Bitcoin's recent resistance.

Falling yields would ease that pressure after the cryptocurrency absorbed a double-digit contraction in selected-exchange leverage while largely maintaining its spot range.

The next major test comes from the Fed's preferred PCE inflation gauge on Sept. 30, followed by the September employment report on Oct. 2. Strong readings could give bond traders further reason to push long-term yields higher and subject Bitcoin's relative resilience to a more sustained macro test.

The post Bitcoin survives a 5.2% Treasury shock as traders slash $1.7 billion in leverage appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitget has raised the estimated value of assets taken in its Sept. 24 breach to $387.5 million as exchanges and security firms mobilize to freeze and recover the stolen funds.

The new estimate is up from $351.6 million after further on-chain tracing identified Zcash and TRON assets that were excluded from Bitget's initial accounting, Chief Executive Officer Gracy Chen said in a Sept. 25 update. She said the increase reflected transfers made during the original incident and that no additional unauthorized transactions had occurred.

Bitget said its investigation with blockchain security firms Mandiant and SlowMist remains underway, with further forensic findings expected as investigators establish how attackers breached its systems.

The exchange first detected the unauthorized transfers from some hot wallets at 18:31 UTC on Sept. 24 and suspended withdrawals while keeping deposits and trading operational. Its security team has since identified and patched the underlying vulnerability, according to the latest update.

The higher loss estimate comes as Bitget shifts its response toward tracing and recovery, drawing support from other crypto exchanges, blockchain projects and security companies.

Exchanges join effort to freeze stolen assets

Bitget said it has already frozen some affected assets in coordination with industry partners, though it has not disclosed their value.

Binance and Bybit are among the exchanges publicly supporting the recovery. Bybit's Chief Executive Officer Ben Zhou said the company would assist Bitget and update its LazarusBounty platform to track the stolen funds, returning support Bitget provided after Bybit's own $1.5 billion breach in 2025. Bitget said it would use LazarusBounty as a main channel for its recovery campaign.

Chen said exchanges, foundations and security teams had already moved to freeze some attacker-controlled assets. Bitget has also published a real-time tracing dashboard, a reporting portal and an API containing attacker addresses to allow exchanges, stablecoin issuers, bridges and other infrastructure providers to monitor the funds.

The exchange paired those efforts with a new Recovery Bounty Program offering rewards tied directly to frozen or returned assets.

Eligible parties whose voluntary actions freeze stolen funds can receive 5% of the amount successfully frozen. Bitget is separately offering 5% of funds successfully recovered through eligible voluntary efforts.

Freezes secured before the program's announcement can also qualify.

Bitget will determine eligibility and bounty amounts, while actions carried out under court orders, law enforcement requests or other compulsory legal processes are excluded.

The program could make the recovery campaign increasingly dependent on whether stolen assets reach infrastructure that can block their movement. Stablecoin issuers and centralized exchanges can freeze certain assets or accounts, while native cryptocurrencies moved to self-custodied addresses can be harder to stop.

Withdrawals remain the next test

For customers, withdrawals remain suspended more than a day after the breach.

Chen said Bitget is working to restore the service and will announce its withdrawal plan by Sept. 26 at 04:00 UTC. The company has not said withdrawals themselves will necessarily resume at that time.

Its latest security update says technical teams are validating the remediated systems and completing required checks before withdrawals can safely resume. Deposits and trading remain available.

Bitget previously said customer balances remained accurate and that its User Protection Fund, which held more than $464 million when the incident was disclosed, covered losses.

The revised $387.5 million estimate narrows that headline cushion to about $76.5 million before accounting for any assets recovered from the attackers. The protection fund's role will depend partly on how much of the stolen crypto Bitget and its industry partners ultimately recover.

The immediate milestone is the withdrawal announcement due Sept. 26. Beyond restoring customer access, the tracing effort will determine how much of the $387.5 million Bitget ultimately has to absorb and how much it can claw back through the exchange-wide recovery campaign.

The post Bitget’s hack just got $36 million bigger, and now there’s a bounty on the stolen crypto appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Old Magic Eden NFT approvals could still put some former users at risk months after the company closed its Ethereum marketplace. A September 25 warning from wallet security service Revoke.cash says that a vulnerability in Limit Break's Payment Processor V2 affects wallets that still authorize the contract to move NFTs. Those approvals remain active until owners revoke them.

The notice says security researcher 0xQuit used the vulnerability to move 3,832 NFTs from approved wallets as zero ETH sales. He described the transfers as a whitehat rescue and said the assets were being held in a custody wallet until it was safe to return them, according to Revoke.cash. The figure counts transfers reported in the notice; the service had not established how many NFTs, if any, malicious actors took.

Magic Eden ended EVM marketplace support on March 9, 2026. Its listings and offers were offchain and ceased to be visible or actionable on the site. The operator approval users gave the processor exists onchain, however. Closing the marketplace did not cancel that separate permission, leaving people who have not traded there for months with a live exposure.

Which Magic Eden NFT approvals should users revoke?

Revoke.cash says users should revoke Payment Processor V2 approval on Ethereum. It also warns anyone who approved Payment Processor V3 on ApeChain to revoke that separate permission. An NFT operator approval lets a contract move assets on a wallet's behalf. A permission granted for marketplace trading can outlast the listing that prompted it, so former users need to check the approval itself rather than their old sale history.

Canceling a listing will not protect an exposed wallet, Revoke.cash said. Its FAQ also explains that disconnecting a wallet from a website leaves onchain approvals active. The incident page includes an exploit checker so users can inspect whether their address is affected and revoke the relevant permission. The warning applies to the named processor approvals; it does not establish that losses occurred on both Ethereum and ApeChain. Revocation is a preventive step, the FAQ says: it reduces future exposure but does not retrieve assets already taken. That distinction makes checking old permissions urgent even while the full incident outcome remains unknown.

The technical details of the flaw had not been published in Revoke.cash's September 25 notice, and the service said it remained unclear whether malicious actors had taken any NFTs. The reported rescue leaves the final loss figure unresolved. For holders with lingering approvals, the action identified in the warning is to revoke access to the affected processor contracts.

The post Old Magic Eden NFT approvals put users at risk after whitehat moves 3,832 NFTs appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The coalition agreement does not protect the one-year holding period for crypto assets. Since September 25, 2026 that is no longer a supposition but the statement of a Union member of parliament himself: replying to a citizen’s question on abgeordnetenwatch.de, CDU Bundestag member Lars Ehm wrote that the agreement contains “no concrete undertaking on the unchanged continuation of the one-year holding period for crypto assets”. He went on: a commitment to abolish it can “no more be derived from it than a binding promise of its unchanged continuation”. Anyone who has assumed until now that the coalition had written tax exemption after one year into stone was relying on something that was never there.

In the short term that changes nothing about the legal position for you as an investor, but a great deal about the basis on which you plan. The one-year period still applies, and it applies for the whole of 2026 as well. What matters is the cutoff date set out in the draft bill from the Federal Ministry of Finance: anyone buying after December 31, 2026 is to fall under the new system. That leaves less than four months in which you can still place purchases under the old rule. This article sorts out what is documented, what remains open, and which three things can actually be checked right now.

What Lars Ehm replied, and why it is more than a quibble over words

The answer comes from the public question portal abgeordnetenwatch.de, where citizens can write to members of parliament directly and where the replies remain permanently visible. Ehm begins by setting out the current legal position correctly: in private assets, Bitcoin and other crypto assets can fall under other economic goods pursuant to section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, and where they are held for more than a year, the gain on disposal is in principle tax-free.

The politically relevant part comes afterwards; the answer was first documented by Blocktrainer on September 25, 2026. Ehm declines to promise how he will vote, on the grounds that he will base his conduct on the actual bill, whose final wording has yet to be settled. For a member of parliament that is a customary position and a constitutionally clean one, because the free mandate rules out binding oneself in advance. The position does, however, have a side effect: it strips the value from the argument that has calmed this debate for months.

Up to now the line of defence ran like this: abolishing the holding period is not in the coalition agreement, so it will not happen. The first half of that still holds. The second does not follow from it, and that is precisely what a member of the parliamentary group that negotiated the agreement is now saying. A coalition agreement is not a law in any case and cannot be enforced in court; it is a statement of political intent. What is not in it is therefore neither prohibited nor guaranteed.

The holding period under section 23 of the Income Tax Act: what remains unchanged in 2026

For the analysis to hold, here is the rule being fought over. The one-year holding period is the span between the acquisition and the disposal of an economic good held as a private asset: where more than a year lies between the two, the gain is free of income tax under section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the Income Tax Act. Where it is less, the gain counts as other income and is taxed at your personal rate.

Three points on this regularly get lost in the excitement:

• The exemption limit. Gains from private disposal transactions within the one-year period remain tax-free as long as the total gain from all such transactions in the calendar year stays below 1,000 euros. An exemption limit is not an allowance: once it is breached, the entire amount is taxable, not merely the excess.
• A swap is a disposal. Anyone swapping Bitcoin for Ether or for a stablecoin is disposing of an asset for tax purposes. The period for the asset received starts afresh on the day of the swap.
• The period runs per acquisition. It is not your holding that is a year old, but each individual tranche. How that is added up is set out below.

These three points are the foundation everything else rests on. The remainder of this article assumes them.

The draft bill: a flat 25 percent withholding tax instead of your personal rate

What the Federal Ministry of Finance is preparing under minister Lars Klingbeil is not a small correction to the holding period but a change of system. Under the draft bill that has become known, gains on crypto assets are in future to be subject to a uniform withholding tax of 25 percent, plus the solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax, and regardless of how long the assets were held. For tax purposes crypto assets would thereby move to where shares and fund units already sit today.

A draft bill, in procedural terms, describes the earliest stage: a ministry’s working draft, still ahead of agreement within the federal government, ahead of a cabinet decision, and a long way ahead of a first reading in the Bundestag. It is not applicable law and never has been.

Two figures from the draft are worth knowing all the same, because they set out the timetable. The new rules are to take effect from the 2027 assessment period. Automatic tax deduction by crypto service providers, the equivalent of the capital gains tax your bank already withholds, is only to arrive from 2028. In between lies a year in which the tax applies but is still settled through your tax return.

Whether the switch works out more expensive or cheaper for you depends on your personal tax rate and on your investment horizon. Anyone trading on short horizons with a high marginal rate may even come out ahead with a flat 25 percent. Anyone holding for years, by contrast, loses a complete exemption. The two calculations lead to markedly different results depending on how long you hold.

Cutoff date December 31, 2026: how the planned grandfathering works

The draft provides for grandfathering, and it is the reason this article can contain a recommendation at all. The new rules are to apply only to crypto assets acquired after December 31, 2026. For everything acquired before that, the existing system with the one-year period is to continue unchanged, even if you only sell years later.

From that follows an uncomfortably simple calculation. Fewer than a hundred days separate today from the cutoff date. Every tranche you buy until then would fall permanently under the old rule according to the draft. Every tranche after it would not. That is the only lever a retail investor has in this matter at all, and it closes at the turn of the year.

Two warnings belong right beside it. First, the grandfathering sits in a draft and not in the federal law gazette. It can fall in the legislative process, be postponed, or be cut differently. Second, a tax deadline is not a reason to buy. Anyone pushing money into a volatile market solely because of a possible change in tax law is trading a manageable tax risk for a considerably larger price risk. According to CoinGecko, the Bitcoin price stood at around $84,085 at about 20:45 UTC on September 25, 2026, a good 33 percent below its all-time high from October 2025. Nobody knows how that will develop by the end of the year.

We have already worked through the cutoff date and its details when the draft became known: crypto holding period: the December 31, 2026 cutoff date in the draft.

FIFO and the acquisition date: where grandfathering fails in practice

Grandfathering only helps those who can demonstrate that they fall under it. And this is where things turn awkward for many portfolios, because the allocation hangs on the individual acquisition rather than on the holding as a whole.

FIFO stands for first in, first out and describes the consumption sequence the tax authorities apply to fungible economic goods held in the same wallet: when you sell, the units acquired first count as the first to be disposed of. For the holding period that is usually favourable, because the oldest pieces leave first. For grandfathering tied to a cutoff date it is the decisive mechanism, because it determines which of your tranches is touched at all when you sell.

Three sources of error follow from this. All of them can still be fixed today and only with difficulty after the turn of the year:

1. Missing proof of acquisition. Without a purchase record showing date, quantity and value, the moment of acquisition cannot be demonstrated. Where exchange accounts have been closed, or where providers have left the market, an export can no longer be obtained after the fact.
2. Transfers between wallets. Anyone moving holdings back and forth without documenting the transfer produces gaps that tax software later reads as fresh purchases. On paper, the acquisition date then shifts later.
3. Mixed holdings. Where old and new tranches sit in the same wallet, the consumption sequence decides what leaves when you sell. Anyone wanting to preserve grandfathered legacy holdings has to know which units those are.

In practice that means the work worth doing now is documentation rather than buying. A clean transaction history with unbroken acquisition dates is the basis on which grandfathering can be claimed at all. Which tools merge the histories of several exchanges and wallets and produce FIFO evidence is set out in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers. What the tax office wants to see in an audit is essentially the same thing: acquisition date, quantity, value, and a traceable path from purchase to sale.

Savings plans, staking and swaps: where the cutoff date hurts most

Three constellations deserve attention of their own, because the cutoff date works differently there than it does for a single purchase.

Savings plans. A savings plan creates a fresh acquisition every month, with its own date and its own period. If it runs across the turn of the year, the draft splits it into two groups: instalments up to and including December 2026 with grandfathering, instalments from January 2027 in the new system. Both sit in the same wallet and look identical in the portfolio. Without clean documentation for each instalment, that separation can no longer be shown later.

Staking and lending. Two questions come together here that are readily conflated. The ongoing rewards are already taxable today at the moment they accrue, as other income, independently of any holding period. Separate from that stands the question of when the units received count as acquired. Where that moment falls after the cutoff date, under the draft they would be new holdings. A staking position running across the turn of the year therefore produces units in the new regime on a rolling basis, even though the capital committed is old.

Swaps. Every swap is a disposal and an acquisition at once. Anyone swapping legacy holdings for another coin in January 2027 sells tax-free, provided the one-year period has run, and at the same moment buys new holdings that would fall permanently under the withholding tax. Portfolio reallocations that are due anyway would therefore be cheaper before the cutoff date than after it. Whether a reallocation makes economic sense is a separate matter.

From draft bill to the law gazette: what the process still allows

How likely the reform is to arrive is an assessment and not a fact. Only the procedural stage is verifiable, and that can be described without speculation.

A draft bill passes through interdepartmental coordination, consultation with the federal states and associations, a cabinet decision, three readings in the Bundestag and the Bundesrat. At each of these stations the content can change, and tax laws are regularly rewritten right into the finance committee. The December 31, 2026 cutoff date is therefore the element of the whole draft carrying the greatest uncertainty: the later the process runs, the harder a retroactive cutoff date becomes to sustain.

What can be derived from Lars Ehm’s statement is limited, and no more should be read into it. It shows that at least one Union member of parliament does not read the coalition agreement as a barrier and reserves his decision for the actual draft. It does not show how the parliamentary group as a whole will vote, and it is not the announcement of a reversal. Anyone already reading the end of the holding period into it is overstretching a single answer on a citizens’ portal.

The opposing position has nevertheless grown weaker. The Union had declared in the spring that it saw no reason to change crypto taxation, a position that counted as solid until this answer. Between “we see no reason” and “I am not committing myself” lies a difference that investors should factor in.

Three responses that pay off, and three that do not

From everything said so far follows a manageable list. What makes sense is whatever stays right even if the reform never arrives.

What is worth doing: export the complete transaction history of every exchange and wallet you use and secure it outside the platform while the accounts are still open. Document the acquisition date for each tranche, transfers between your own wallets included. And pull reallocations that are planned anyway forward, ahead of the turn of the year, instead of pushing them into the new one.

What is not worth doing: putting additional capital into the market purely because of a draft. Selling legacy holdings in a panic before the cutoff date, when those are precisely the ones meant to keep the protection. And betting on a tax optimisation that only works if the draft becomes law exactly as it looks today.

Anyone having to assemble their history should also check whether the venues they use supply complete tax reports for the German market at all. Where such a report is missing, only the raw data export remains, and that can no longer be obtained once an account has been closed.

The crypto holding period and the coalition agreement: what to take away

1. Stop treating the coalition agreement as a shield. A Union member of parliament has stated publicly that it writes down neither the abolition nor the continuation of the holding period. That does not change the law in force, but it does change your planning assumption. First get a complete overview of your own acquisition dates, for instance with a tool from our comparison of crypto tax tools.
2. Secure the evidence before the cutoff date arrives. The planned grandfathering for purchases up to December 31, 2026 only helps if you can evidence the acquisition date of each tranche. Export the histories of all your accounts, including the rarely used ones, and check while you are at it whether your exchange provides a German tax report; our exchange comparison gives the overview.
3. Separate the tax deadline from the investment decision. A cutoff date is a reason to put your records in order and to bring forward reallocations that were planned anyway. It is not a reason to put additional capital into a volatile market. If you buy regularly in any case, check instead that your instalments are running with clean documentation; the providers for that are listed in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plans.

This article is no substitute for tax advice. With larger holdings, with staking rewards, or with an incomplete history, a visit to a tax adviser is the cheaper option.

(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 funding rate is the recurring payment between the long and the short side of a perpetual contract, and on most venues it is the largest single cost of holding a position. When the rate is positive, longs pay shorts; when it is negative, the flow runs the other way. Settlement usually takes place every eight hours, and the calculation is simple: position size multiplied by the rate for that interval. Anyone using leverage pays this charge on the full notional value of the position, even though only a fraction of that sum is their own money.

That is where the misunderstanding starts, and it is the reason this article exists. A rate of 0.01 percent per interval sounds like nothing at all. Annualised, it works out at almost 11 percent of the notional value, and at ten times leverage that is the equivalent of your entire stake. A trade that gets the direction of Bitcoin right can still end the month in the red because of this charge alone.

This guide explains how the funding rate comes about, how to calculate your own payment, what the rate tells you about market sentiment, and which levers genuinely bring the cost down.

What the funding rate is and why it exists at all

A perpetual future, or perp for short, is a derivative on a price with no expiry date. That design creates a problem of its own. A conventional futures contract expires and settles at a closing price, which inevitably pulls its price back towards the spot market. A contract that never expires has no such anchor. Left to itself, it could trade at any distance above or below the spot price.

The funding rate is that anchor. The rate is not a fee the venue keeps for itself; it is a payment between market participants, in which the more expensive side pays the cheaper one. If the perp trades above the spot price, holding a long position becomes steadily more expensive and holding a short position steadily more rewarding. That economic incentive pushes the contract price back towards spot. Bybit describes exactly this function in its documentation on the funding rate.

Two terms are needed here. The mark price is the reference price a venue uses to value your position and to trigger liquidations; it is derived from the spot market across several exchanges and is insulated against brief swings in the venue's own order book. The contract price is the price at which the perp is trading at that moment. The gap between the two is the raw material of the funding rate.

How often settlement happens and why the timestamp decides

The major venues settle mostly in eight-hour steps, frequently at 00:00, 08:00 and 16:00 UTC. Some platforms and some individual contracts settle hourly, which makes each payment smaller without changing the total. Which interval applies to your contract is stated in the venue's contract specification, and it is the first figure to look up before holding anything for longer than a session.

The settlement logic matters just as much. Only traders holding an open position at the moment of the timestamp pay or receive anything. There is no pro-rata calculation for the time between two settlement points. Open a position two minutes before the timestamp and you pay the full rate. Close it two minutes beforehand and you pay nothing, even after holding the position for almost eight hours.

What this means for short-term trades

For positions that are closed within a single interval, funding is not a cost factor at all; there, trading fees and the spread decide the outcome. For anything held overnight or across several days, funding is often the dominant item. The metric therefore belongs in the same preparation as your liquidation threshold, and we have already shown how to read it alongside open interest as a market signal using a concrete Bitcoin example.

What the funding rate is made of: premium index and interest component

The formula the major venues use has two parts. The premium index measures how far the contract price sits above or below the mark price, weighted across the depth of the order book rather than taken from a single quote. The interest component stands for the theoretical cost of holding capital in one currency instead of the other; in its introduction to funding rates, Binance gives a standard value of 0.03 percent per day for this, which is 0.01 percent per eight-hour interval.

The two are combined through a capped difference: the premium index is added to the deviation between the interest component and the premium index, with that deviation limited to a narrow corridor of typically plus or minus 0.05 percent. In calm markets the rate therefore oscillates around the interest value. In heavily one-sided markets the premium index dominates, and the rate can run all the way to the upper limit of the contract in question.

Those upper limits differ considerably from venue to venue and from contract to contract. For you that means the rate you see in an exchange app is a value for one interval, on that specific venue, for that specific contract. It cannot be transferred to other platforms, and it does not hold for the next interval either, because it is recalculated continuously. Until settlement, the figure on display is an estimate.

How to calculate your funding payment in three steps

The calculation needs three figures: the notional value of the position, the rate for the interval, and the number of intervals you hold the position for. The formula is: payment equals notional value multiplied by the funding rate. The decisive point is that the notional value of the position is meant here, not the margin you have posted.

Worked example: you hold a long position with a notional value of $10,000. The funding rate stands at plus 0.01 percent per eight-hour interval.

1. Payment per interval: 10,000 multiplied by 0.0001 gives $1.00.
2. Payment per day: across three intervals that is $3.00, or 0.03 percent of the notional value.
3. Annualised: 0.03 percent multiplied by 365 gives 10.95 percent of the notional value.

If the rate stands at plus 0.05 percent per interval, which happens in strongly bullish phases, the same $10,000 costs you $5.00 per interval, $15.00 a day and a good 54 percent of the notional value over a year. A negative rate reverses the direction: as a long holder you then receive a credit.

For your own preparation it pays to convert the rate into a daily figure and set it next to your expected holding period. A position you intend to hold for two weeks carries roughly 0.42 percent in costs on the notional value at 0.03 percent a day, before the price has moved at all. That number belongs in your target setting, so that your price target actually covers the cost.

What a high funding rate says about market sentiment

Because the rate arises from the gap between the contract price and the spot price, it is a measure of how one-sided positioning has become. A persistently and clearly positive rate shows that the long side is willing to pay for its leveraged exposure. A negative rate shows the opposite. Analysts read a sentiment picture into this, and some derive risk warnings from it: heavily one-sided positioning can trigger liquidations during a sell-off that then amplify the sell-off itself.

Two caveats belong with that. First, the rate is a state reading and not a forecast; historically, high rates have accompanied both price declines and further gains. Second, it is a value for one venue. The picture only becomes meaningful once several large platforms point in the same direction while open interest rises at the same time. Taken on its own, the funding rate is useful for the cost calculation, and not for a statement about where the price is going.

Why leverage multiplies your funding costs

The funding payment is measured against the notional value of the position, while your return is measured against the capital you have put up. That difference is the most important sentence in this article. On the $10,000 notional from the example, at ten times leverage, you post $1,000 in margin. The $3.00 of funding per day then amounts to 0.3 percent of your own capital, every day, regardless of where the price goes.

Held for a month, that is around nine percent of your stake; over a quarter, more than a quarter of it. At a rate of 0.05 percent per interval and the same leverage, the burden comes to roughly 1.5 percent of your equity per day. A position like that has to move substantially in your favour just to break even on costs, and it does so under leverage that brings the liquidation threshold uncomfortably close.

From that follows a plain rule for practice: the higher the leverage and the longer the intended holding period, the more important it is to check the funding rate before you enter. For a position meant to sit for weeks, an open-ended leveraged contract is often the most expensive instrument available. Which venues offer which contracts on which terms is set out in our comparison of perp DEX platforms; what separates such a platform from a conventional exchange is explained in our article on what a perp DEX is.

How to reduce your funding costs

Several approaches work, and they do not rule each other out:

• Close before the timestamp. Anyone trading on short horizons anyway can avoid the payment entirely by unwinding the position before the settlement point.
• Use the direction of the rate. When the rate is negative, the long side gets paid. That is no reason to open a position against your own view, but it is an argument when choosing the moment of entry.
• Compare venues. The same contract carries different rates and different caps on different platforms.
• Reduce leverage. Less leverage means a smaller notional position for the same equity, and therefore a smaller funding payment.
• Switch to the spot market. Anyone with a longer horizon who does not need leverage pays no funding at all when buying directly.

The last point is the most effective and the most frequently overlooked. A perp is a tool for short horizons and for hedging. For a position held over months it carries costs that a spot purchase does not, and it carries a liquidation risk that a spot purchase does not have either.

Where perpetual futures are tradable for European retail investors

Access is the first hurdle European retail investors run into. Venues providing crypto-asset services to customers in the EU have required authorisation since the MiCA regulation came into force, and open-ended leveraged contracts in the form common outside the EU are usually not part of what authorised providers offer to retail clients. Anyone in Germany who wants leveraged exposure to prices will therefore mostly find it at supervised brokers with their own products, whose terms differ from those of a perp; our comparison of crypto brokers gives an overview.

It is wiser to keep your distance from offers with no recognisable authorisation that nevertheless advertise to retail clients in your own language: in a dispute there is no supervisory body to turn to, and deposits sit outside the European legal framework. Whether a provider holds a licence can be checked in the public registers of the supervisory authorities, and that check belongs before the first deposit.

What works differently for tax than a spot purchase

For tax purposes, perpetual futures are not coins held as private assets. Under German income tax law, gains from forward transactions count as investment income and therefore do not fall under the private disposal transactions of section 23 of the Income Tax Act. The one-year holding period, which makes a gain on a directly purchased coin tax-free once it has elapsed, does not exist for these contracts.

Because the rules on offsetting losses from forward transactions have been changed several times in recent years, and because the classification of an individual product depends on how the contract is structured, this is the point to clarify with a tax adviser before your first trade. Foreign venues generally do not issue a German tax report, which is why you should archive your own statements, funding payments included.

Three misconceptions that cost money

1. Funding is not a fee charged by the venue. The payment goes to the other side of the trade. Trading fees, the spread and any settlement costs come on top of it.
2. The rate on display is not fixed. Until the timestamp it is a continuously updated estimate, and in fast-moving markets it can shift considerably within a single interval.
3. A high rate is not a sell signal. It describes how the market is positioned and says nothing about the next move in the price.

Calculating the funding rate: what to take away

1. Work out the daily rate before you enter. Multiply the rate per interval by the number of intervals per day and set the result next to your planned holding period. Only once your price target exceeds those costs does the trade carry itself. Which platform runs which rates and caps is shown in our comparison of perp DEX platforms.
2. Convert the burden to your own equity, not to the notional value. At ten times leverage, a daily rate of 0.03 percent of the notional is a burden of 0.3 percent of your stake per day. If that becomes too expensive, reduce the leverage or pick a supervised provider from our comparison of crypto brokers.
3. Check whether you need the contract at all. For an unleveraged position held over months, a spot purchase pays no funding and knows no liquidation. Where you can buy directly and what it costs is set out in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

(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.)

Selling bitcoin privately is not a special case under German tax law. The same rule applies as for a sale through a crypto exchange: if more than a year sits between purchase and sale, the gain is tax free under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. Sell inside the one-year window and the gain becomes taxable as soon as all private disposals in a single calendar year together exceed the threshold of 1,000 euros. Whether the money changes hands as cash across a café table, arrives by SEPA transfer or runs through the escrow of a peer-to-peer marketplace makes no difference to that calculation.

The difference from an exchange sale lies elsewhere, and it is the reason for this guide: an exchange gives you a transaction report at the end of the year showing the acquisition date, the sale price and the gain. On a direct sale of bitcoin to a private individual, that report does not exist. You build the chain of evidence for the tax office yourself, and the best day to do it is the day of the sale.

This article explains how to calculate the taxable gain on a peer-to-peer sale, which documents you need, when the threshold tips over, what anti-money-laundering law expects of you, and where the figures belong in your tax return.

What is taxed is the gain, not the sale price

A private disposal is the sale of another asset within one year of its acquisition. Under German income tax law, crypto assets such as bitcoin or ether count as these other assets, which is why Section 23 applies rather than the flat withholding tax on investment income. Only the gain is taxable.

The calculation is plain: sale price minus acquisition cost minus associated expenses. The sale price is the amount you actually receive, in euros. The acquisition cost is the purchase price of the coins sold plus the proportionate purchase fee. Associated expenses cover costs attributable to the individual sale, such as the network fee for the transfer to the buyer's wallet or a fee charged by the peer-to-peer marketplace.

Worked example: in March you bought 0.2 BTC for 16,000 euros and paid an 80 euro purchase fee. In September you sell those same 0.2 BTC privately for 19,000 euros and pay a 12 euro network fee for the transfer. Your disposal gain is 19,000 minus 16,080 minus 12, so 2,908 euros. That amount is taxable, because less than a year separated purchase from sale and the threshold has been exceeded.

The rate applied to that gain is your personal income tax rate, the same rate that applies to your salary or your business profit. Private disposals carry no flat 25 percent rate of the kind that applies to interest and dividends. The solidarity surcharge is added, as is church tax if you are liable for it. The term speculation tax, used colloquially for this charge, appears in no statute; what is always meant is income tax on a private disposal.

When is a bitcoin sale tax free? The one-year holding period under Section 23

Hold your coins for longer than a year and the gain on sale is entirely tax free, regardless of its size. A gain of 50,000 euros after fourteen months of holding triggers no tax at all. This one-year speculation period is the most effective lever a private investor has on crypto assets under German tax law. The statutory text sits in Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act.

The period runs to the exact day. What counts is the acquisition date, meaning the day you acquired the coins, and the date of disposal. A purchase on May 14 means that a sale from May 15 of the following year onwards falls outside the one-year window. Deliver one day too early on a peer-to-peer sale and you lose the tax exemption for the coins concerned in full.

What does not extend or interrupt the one-year period

A transfer between your own wallets is not a disposal and does not restart the clock. You can therefore move your coins from an exchange to a hardware wallet before selling without touching the holding period. Staking and lending are a different matter: where coins are made available to third parties for use, the treatment of the holding period was contested for a long time, and the Federal Ministry of Finance dropped the earlier extension to ten years as far back as its 2022 version. If part of your holding comes back from staking, it is worth checking your own history before you sell.

The 1,000 euro threshold is not an allowance

Gains from private disposals within the one-year window are subject to a threshold of 1,000 euros per calendar year. It has sat at this level since the 2024 assessment period, having previously been 600 euros. The distinction between a threshold and an allowance decides the entire tax charge, and the two are regularly confused.

A threshold works on an all-or-nothing basis: stay below it and the gain remains entirely tax free. Exceed it by even a single euro and the whole gain becomes taxable, not merely the part above the line. An allowance, by contrast, would always be deducted. In concrete terms: a 999 euro gain from peer-to-peer sales is tax free, while a 1,001 euro gain is taxable on the full 1,001 euros.

Important for planning: the threshold applies to all private disposals in a year taken together. If you also sell gold inside the one-year window in the same year, or a collection, or other cryptocurrencies, those gains count towards the same pot. Losses from such transactions can be offset, which may push the total below the threshold. A loss inside the one-year window is only usable for that purpose, however, if you declare it in your tax return.

Cash, bank transfer or escrow: the payment method does not change the tax liability

German tax law grants no privilege to cash payment. Anyone swapping 0.1 BTC for a bundle of notes inside the one-year window has carried out the same taxable transaction as someone selling through a regulated platform. The gain arises at the moment of disposal, and receipt of the purchase price in cash is a receipt.

The same holds for a swap. If you hand over bitcoin in a direct deal and receive another coin or a stablecoin in return, that too is a disposal. It is valued at the market value in euros at the time of the swap. For the asset received, a fresh one-year period begins at that same moment. Paying for goods with bitcoin between private individuals is likewise a sale for tax purposes.

Selling to friends and family

A sale to people you know remains a sale, even at a friendly price. Sell noticeably below market value and the tax office may treat part of the transaction as a gift. A genuine gift, on the other hand, is not a private disposal: the recipient steps into your shoes and takes over your acquisition date and your acquisition cost. For the gift itself, the rules on gift tax may apply depending on the value and the family relationship, with allowances of their own.

FIFO and acquisition costs: which coins you hand over in a peer-to-peer sale

Bitcoin is divisible and carries no individual marking. Anyone who has bought at different prices over the years therefore has to determine which acquisition costs belong to the sale. That is the purpose of the FIFO method: first in, first out means the coins bought first count as the ones sold first. The method decides two things at once, because it fixes both the gain and the holding period of the units sold.

An example: you bought 0.3 BTC in January 2024 for 18,000 euros and a further 0.3 BTC in June 2026 for 30,000 euros. If you now sell 0.3 BTC privately, first in, first out treats the January 2024 coins as disposed of. The gain comes out larger, because the older acquisition costs were lower, yet it is tax free, because those coins were held for more than a year. Anyone who does not know the sequence either gives away a tax exemption or declares too much.

The Federal Ministry of Finance set out how this applies in its circular of March 6, 2025 (file reference IV C 1 - S 2256/00042/064/043), which replaces the earlier circular of May 10, 2022. Under that circular, a wallet-based or address-based view governs crypto assets held privately, and FIFO is permitted as the consumption sequence per wallet. In practice that means you account separately for each wallet and each exchange account. How that looks with old holdings scattered across several places is covered at length in our article on calculating acquisition costs and gains on a purchase made years ago.

Are crypto gains reported to the tax office?

New reporting obligations have applied to crypto-asset service providers since January 1, 2026. The German Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act transposes the EU directive DAC8 into German law and requires reporting providers to send user and transaction data to the Federal Central Tax Office, which passes the data on to local tax offices and to other states. The first reporting period is the 2026 calendar year, with transmission taking place the year after. The obligation falls on the provider, not on you as a user.

From that follows a particularity that is often misread in peer-to-peer trading. A deal you settle directly with another person, with no service provider involved, appears in none of these reports. That does not make the gain tax free. The tax liability arises from statute, not from a report, and your duty to declare exists regardless of what any platform reports. Anyone failing to declare a taxable gain risks a tax shortfall with the consequences that follow.

On top of that, both sides of a peer-to-peer deal leave traces. The blockchain transaction is permanently public, the counterparty may well have bought or sold through an exchange, and the arrival of the purchase price in your bank account is documented. The notion that a direct sale is an unobserved event does not hold up in practice.

Your chain of evidence on a peer-to-peer sale: which records the tax office expects

The circular of March 6, 2025 devotes its own section to the duties of declaration, cooperation and record-keeping, and makes clear that these cooperation duties apply to crypto assets held privately as well. Where a platform supplies a tax report, the tax authority examines whether it is plausible, internally consistent and not obviously incomplete, and whether the settings are apparent, such as the prices applied and the consumption sequence used. On a private sale there is no such report, so you have to produce the same traceability yourself.

A sensible approach is your own schedule, drawn up on the day of the deal and kept. It should contain:

• Date and time of the sale and of the original purchase, each with supporting documents
• Quantity in coins, to the full decimal place
• Sale price in euros and the form of payment
• The price applied and its source, where the price differs from market value
• Transaction ID of the blockchain transfer, sending and receiving address
• Network and platform fees paid, as associated expenses
• Details of the counterparty and, for a larger amount, a written agreement signed by both sides

A short sale confirmation on paper takes ten minutes and saves considerable effort in any later audit. The transaction history of the exchange where you originally bought the coins belongs in the archive too, because exchanges close, and access that works today is not guaranteed in five years. If you would rather not keep the document collection by hand, our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers covers software that can record your own transactions, including peer-to-peer deals you enter yourself, and output them as a tax report.

Anti-money-laundering law and due care when selling to strangers

Alongside tax, a private sale raises a second legal question that has nothing to do with the tax office. Anyone taking coins from an unknown person, or handing them over for cash of unclear origin, can end up in money-laundering proceedings, because negligent conduct alone can suffice where circumstances point to an illegal source. For you as the seller, the reverse applies: cash from a sale that you later deposit at a bank can prompt questions.

Questions of that kind discharge a statutory duty of the bank, which has to monitor business relationships on an ongoing basis and establish the plausibility of the origin of assets. They can be answered with exactly the documents from the previous section: purchase record, transaction history, sale confirmation. Sensible precautions during the deal itself are a public meeting place, the identity of the counterparty, a traceable payment trail, and declining any deal where the other side demands unusual haste or anonymity.

Anyone unwilling to carry that effort sells through a supervised provider. Platforms providing crypto-asset services to customers in the EU have required authorisation since the MiCA regulation took effect; which providers can show such a permission is set out in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges. The drawback is the identity check, the benefit is the report you receive at the end of the year.

Where disposal gains belong in the tax return

Gains from private disposals of crypto assets go into Anlage SO of the income tax return, in the section for private disposals. A gain exceeding the threshold must be declared, and a loss is worth declaring too, because it can be offset against other gains of the same income category and carried forward. Gains that are tax free because the one-year period has elapsed do not belong in Anlage SO, but should stay documented.

What has to be stated is the acquisition and disposal dates, the acquisition cost, the disposal price and the associated expenses. Where there are several transactions, attaching a schedule is advisable rather than entering totals with no derivation: a traceable table answers questions before they arise. The individual lines and boxes are explained in our article on where crypto gains are entered in the tax return.

Deadlines: the tax return for a calendar year is in principle due by July 31 of the following year. Anyone instructing a tax adviser or an income tax assistance association has considerably longer. Where the history across several years is hard to follow, where the trading takes on commercial features, or where the amounts are larger, tax advice is worth the money; this guide is no substitute for it.

When private trading becomes a business

The rules in this article apply to crypto assets held as private assets. Anyone trading at high frequency, working with other people's capital, presenting themselves outwardly as a dealer, or building an organisation for the purpose, can move close to a commercial activity. Different provisions then apply: the one-year period falls away, the gains become business income, and bookkeeping duties arrive along with trade tax depending on the circumstances.

A private investor selling coins a few times a year is a long way from that. Anyone regularly acting as counterparty for others, however, and earning an income from the spread between purchase and sale, should have the classification examined professionally before the tax office does it for them. Mining and commercial brokering likewise fall into a different category from the occasional private sale.

What could still change in crypto taxation

The one-year holding period is politically contested. The draft federal budget of July 3, 2026 contains a proposal to treat gains from crypto assets like investment income in future, meaning like interest, dividends and share gains. That would end the tax exemption after one year and bring a flat rate instead. As at the time of this article, the proposal is a political plan.

For your decision today, then, the law as it stands applies: for as long as Section 23 remains in its current form, a gain after more than a year of holding stays tax free. Anyone holding a larger position with unrealised gains should keep an eye on the legislation without letting a draft drive them into a hasty sale that breaks the holding period and thereby triggers exactly the tax it was meant to avoid.

Common mistakes when selling bitcoin privately

Four patterns recur in practice, and all four are avoidable:

1. Selling shortly before the anniversary. A few days of patience decide whether the gain is entirely tax free. Every sale deserves a look at the purchase date of the units concerned.
2. Assuming cash is invisible. The transaction is taxable, and depositing cash at the bank creates a documentation duty of its own.
3. The forgotten swap. Anyone exchanging coin for coin in a direct deal has sold, even without seeing a single euro.
4. Missing documentation of the purchase. Without evidence of the acquisition cost, the tax office can estimate the gain, and an estimate rarely lands in your favour.

Selling bitcoin privately: what to take away

1. Check the purchase date first, then the price. Use first in, first out per wallet to work out which units you are handing over and how long they have been held. If the purchase is more than a year back, the gain is tax free; if it is less, calculate the gain and compare it with the 1,000 euro threshold. Tools for that are covered in our comparison of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
2. Build the chain of evidence on the day of the sale. Purchase record, transaction ID, quantity, price, fees and a short written confirmation from the counterparty. If you would rather skip that effort, sell through a supervised provider from our overview of regulated crypto exchanges, which will supply you with an annual report.
3. Enter the gain in Anlage SO, and a loss as well. A declared loss reduces the tax on other disposal gains in the same year. Which selling routes exist alongside a private deal, and what they cost, is shown in our comparison on how to sell bitcoin.

(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.)

A company that announced in July 2025 that it intended to hold one hundred thousand bitcoin by the end of 2030 holds not a single one today. French semiconductor maker Sequans Communications said on September 24, 2026 that it had sold the last 314 bitcoin on its balance sheet, completing its retreat from its own crypto reserve. If you hold a share like this because it promised easy access to bitcoin through your usual broker, this is the moment to open your portfolio this evening.

The case is instructive because it exposes a mechanism that nobody notices in quiet markets. A treasury stock's link to bitcoin is a board decision, and decisions can be reversed. Anyone invested here is buying corporate policy along with the price exposure.

Sequans and the last 314 bitcoin: what was announced on September 24, 2026

In a statement headed "Sequans Completes Bitcoin Treasury Exit and Emerges with a Solid Financial Foundation", the New York-listed company writes that it has sold the 314 bitcoin still carried on its books as of June 30, 2026. That completes the exit, which began with the repayment of its convertible bond in May 2026. According to the company, no crypto assets remain on the balance sheet, and no liabilities beyond state-funded research projects.

Chief executive Dr Georges Karam frames the step as a return to the core business: full strategic and financial attention now goes back to the semiconductor business supplying cellular chips for connected devices. The company points to product revenue growth of more than 80 percent in the second quarter of 2026 against the same quarter a year earlier, and a six-month order backlog that it says has more than tripled.

What the statement expressly does not name is the proceeds. No figure appears in the document, either for the final 314 bitcoin or for the sales in the months before. That gap matters for any valuation, and we return to it below.

From 3,234 bitcoin to zero: the wind-down in four stages

Measured against its own ambition, the strategy was short-lived. The sequence, according to company statements and trade press reports:

• June 2025: the bitcoin reserve begins, funded by a capital raise of roughly 377 to 384 million dollars in equity and secured convertible notes.
• July 2025: the target is set, one hundred thousand bitcoin by the end of 2030. Holdings stand above 3,000 coins at this point.
• October 3, 2025: peak holdings of about 3,234 bitcoin.
• November 2025: 970 bitcoin are sold to repay half of the convertible bond.
• May 2026: the remaining convertible is redeemed and holdings fall to around 658 bitcoin.
• June 30, 2026: 314 bitcoin remain on the balance sheet.
• September 24, 2026: those last 314 bitcoin are sold and the exit is complete.

The striking element is the role of the convertible bond, which first made the purchase possible and then forced the sale. Two of the four wind-down steps are explicitly attributed to its repayment, which means the bitcoin holding was never free capital. It was the counterweight to a debt with a due date.

What a convertible bond is

A convertible bond is a loan that the creditor can exchange for shares in the company under agreed conditions. For the company it is cheaper than a conventional bank loan, because the creditor pays for that exchange option. The cost arrives when the option is used: new shares are created, and existing shareholders hold a smaller claim on profits. If the option goes unused, the money has to be repaid, on a date that takes no interest in where bitcoin trades that day.

Cost basis of 116,643 dollars against a price of 83,935 dollars: the calculation we ran ourselves

Sequans reported a net investment of roughly 377.2 million dollars for its peak holdings and an average purchase price of 116,643 dollars per bitcoin. Those figures can be set against the current market price. cryptoticker.io collected this data itself on September 25, 2026.

Method in one sentence: a direct call to CoinGecko's public market interface on September 25, 2026 at 18:48 UTC (HTTP 200), multiplying the bitcoin price reported there by the peak holdings Sequans disclosed. One object was examined, the bitcoin spot price in US dollars as an aggregate across the venues CoinGecko covers.

The price stood at 83,935 dollars at that moment, with a daily range of 83,230 to 85,208 dollars. Against the stated average cost basis of 116,643 dollars, the market price is therefore about 28 percent lower. Applied to peak holdings of 3,234 bitcoin, an acquisition value of 377.2 million dollars stands against a present market value of roughly 271.4 million dollars, a difference of some 106 million dollars.

What we could not verify, and what this calculation therefore does not say: it says nothing about what Sequans actually realised. The sales are spread across eleven months, individual selling prices were never disclosed, and bitcoin traded both well above and well below today's level over that period. The figure is a snapshot of the gap between cost basis and current price, not a business result. Anyone looking for a result of that kind will find it only in the company's audited accounts.

Why a bitcoin treasury stock is not bitcoin: the board risk

A treasury stock is a stake in a company that, among other things, holds bitcoin. That sounds like a technicality and it is the heart of the matter. You acquire no claim on any particular quantity of bitcoin. You acquire a share of the whole company, including its debts, its operating business and its management decisions.

The Sequans case shows how that works in practice. Whoever bought the share in the summer of 2025 to gain bitcoin exposure through a familiar broker now holds a pure semiconductor company. The reasoning behind the change is commercially sound, and the decision was taken without shareholder involvement. Nobody holding bitcoin directly in their own wallet or at an exchange carries that risk.

The reverse direction applies too. A company can also add to its holdings at a point when you had no intention of adding to yours. Both directions are decisions taken by other people about the exposure you carry in your portfolio.

Dilution and maturity: how the financing feeds through to the share price

Bitcoin treasury strategies are rarely paid for out of operating cash flow. The usual route runs through new shares, through convertible bonds, or through a mixture of the two, as at Sequans with roughly 384 million dollars in June 2025. For you as a shareholder that produces two effects that sit inside the share price and nowhere in the bitcoin price.

The first is dilution. When new shares are issued, the same corporate value is spread across more of them. The second is maturity pressure. A bond has a repayment date, and if there is not enough cash on hand when that date arrives, whatever can be sold has to be sold. That is exactly what happened here twice, in November 2025 and in May 2026.

For anyone assessing a treasury stock, that leads to a sober question with no connection to the bitcoin price: which debts fall due when, and from which source are they meant to be serviced? If the answer contains the word bitcoin, the holding is tied to a calendar.

Crypto tax rules: capital gains tax on the share, Section 23 of the Income Tax Act on the coin

Here lies the distinction most often lost in debates about treasury stocks, and it hits your after-tax return directly. In Germany, two routes to the same underlying asset carry two entirely different tax regimes.

The share

Gains on the sale of shares count as investment income and fall under the flat withholding tax of 25 percent, plus the solidarity surcharge on that amount and church tax where applicable. Without church tax the combined rate comes to roughly 26.375 percent. There is no holding period after which the gain becomes tax free: hold for ten years and you pay the same tax on the gain as you would after ten days. The only exemption is the saver's allowance of 1,000 euros per person per year. With a domestic securities account the bank withholds the tax directly.

The coin

Directly held crypto assets count as other assets. A sale within one year of purchase is a private disposal under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, and the gain is then taxed at your personal income tax rate, which can sit above or below the flat rate. Once a year has passed, the gain is tax free regardless of its size. Inside the one-year window, total gains of less than 1,000 euros in a year remain untaxed, and that figure is a threshold rather than an allowance: exceed it and the entire amount becomes taxable, not merely the excess. Assessment runs through your own tax return, with nothing withheld automatically.

In practice that means the tax treatment of the directly held coin is considerably more favourable over a long holding horizon, while the share can have the edge over very short holding periods combined with a high personal tax rate. Bear in mind that legislation on the taxation of crypto assets from 2027 is currently in progress and its outcome is open; anyone making a decision today with the one-year window in mind should follow the state of that legislation and take tax advice in case of doubt. This article is not tax advice.

Premium to holdings value: how to see what a bitcoin costs in a share wrapper

Treasury stocks frequently trade above or below the value of their crypto holdings rather than at it. The metric for this sets the company's market capitalisation against the value of the coins it holds, adjusted for debt and the operating business.

A premium means you pay more for a bitcoin in a share wrapper than you would in the market. The justification usually offered is that the company can raise capital cheaply and keep buying. A discount means the opposite. A discount typically widens when the market starts doubting whether the financing is sustainable, and it can widen without the crypto holding itself shrinking at all.

Checking this before you buy is uncomfortably simple: multiply the number of coins held by the current price, subtract net debt and compare the result with the market capitalisation. If the market capitalisation sits well above it, you are paying a premium that can disappear again without bitcoin losing a cent. At Sequans the holding is now zero, which makes the metric moot, and the share once again values the chip business.

The three routes to bitcoin compared: treasury stock, ETN and direct purchase

Anyone who wants bitcoin exposure in a portfolio has essentially three options in Germany, and they differ in access, custody, tax and risk.

The treasury stock works through any securities broker, appears in your account statement and requires no wallet of your own. In exchange it carries corporate and financing risk, depends on board decisions, and falls under the flat withholding tax with no holding period.

Exchange-traded notes on bitcoin, usually labelled ETN or ETP, also trade through a securities account. A bitcoin spot fund under European fund law is not permitted here, which is why the exchange-listed route runs through these notes; the physically backed versions place the coins with a custodian. Their tax classification depends on the specific structure and is not clear-cut in every case, which makes this route a matter for examination where the one-year window is concerned. We have set the structures, cost ratios and custodians side by side in our overview of crypto ETFs and ETNs in Germany.

The direct purchase through a trading platform gets you the coin itself, and with it the one-year window under Section 23. Since the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, known as MiCA, providers need authorisation to serve retail clients in the EU, and that authorisation can be checked in the supervisor's public register. Which venues hold it and what they charge in fees is shown by our crypto exchange comparison. In return, custody becomes your responsibility here.

Custody on a direct purchase: exchange, hardware wallet and the question of the keys

On a direct purchase, custody decides the largest remaining risk. Leave the coins on the trading platform and the platform holds the keys, which leaves you dependent on its solvency and its security arrangements. The breach at a major trading platform this week, with damage running into the hundreds of millions, was a reminder that this risk is not theoretical.

The alternative is self-custody through a hardware wallet, where the keys never leave a device that has no internet connection. The price is personal responsibility: lose the recovery phrase and the balance is lost, with no institution able to reset it. For amounts whose loss would hurt, this is the standard recommendation, and it holds whatever the price happens to be doing.

Levels and checkpoints: how to read the situation over the coming weeks

Three things about this story can be verified concretely, without any forecast being required.

On the upside the signal would be a company launching a treasury strategy afresh, or adding to its holdings without taking on debt. That would suggest financing conditions have turned, and it could be checked against the company's own statement.

On the downside the signal would be a second complete exit within a short span, particularly one justified as this one was by the repayment of a bond. The maturity dates of the large convertible bonds are public and appear in annual reports.

On the price itself, bitcoin moved in a daily range of 83,230 to 85,208 dollars on September 25, 2026, according to our reading at 18:48 UTC. The average cost basis of 116,643 dollars reported by Sequans sits above that range, and for as long as that remains the case, other companies with late purchases from 2025 are in the same position. Anyone setting levels for their own portfolio should write them down before buying rather than after.

Open questions: proceeds, timing of the sale and the balance sheets of other treasury companies

Three points remain unresolved after the announcement and deserve to be named rather than estimated. First the proceeds: no prices are available for the final 314 bitcoin or for the earlier sales, so the accounting effect cannot be calculated. Second the timing of the sale within the reporting period, which can account for a difference of several million dollars. Third the question of whether other companies with comparable financing will follow the same pattern; nothing can be demonstrated on that today, and speculation about other companies' balance sheets has no place in an article of this kind.

Checking bitcoin treasury stocks: what to take away

1. Look at what you actually hold. Open your portfolio and check, for every position you bought because of bitcoin, whether the company still holds any coins today and how many. The figure appears in the latest quarterly report or in the announcements on the investor relations page. If you would rather track the price itself than corporate policy, you will find the authorised venues and their fees in our overview on how to buy bitcoin.
2. Factor in the tax before you reshuffle. Moving from the share to the coin is a sale subject to the flat withholding tax, after which the coin starts a fresh one-year window. Keep a complete record of purchase dates and acquisition values, otherwise the tax office will end up estimating them; which programmes handle that is shown in our crypto tax software comparison.
3. Settle custody before you buy, not afterwards. Decide in advance how much may sit on the trading platform and above which sum the coins move to a device of your own. The devices and their backup procedures are covered in our hardware wallet comparison.

The lesson from the Sequans exit is unspectacular and useful for that reason: a bitcoin on a company's balance sheet belongs to that company. Everything that follows from it for you depends on decisions taken somewhere else.

Sources: the statement from Sequans Communications dated September 24, 2026 and the reporting by Cointelegraph. The price data comes from our own reading of CoinGecko's market interface on September 25, 2026 at 18:48 UTC.

(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.)

A Bitcoin forecast worth anything today does not consist of a single number, but of a range, a reason and an action. The Bitcoin price stands at $83,877 at 16:40 UTC on September 25, 2026, the equivalent of 73,605 euros (retrieved from CoinGecko, market data API). The measured volatility of the past 30 days produces a band between roughly $73,600 and $94,200 for the coming month, within which the price will stay with a probability of about two thirds. More important than that band, though, for you as a German investor is the calendar: the third quarter ends on September 30, the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act took effect on January 1, 2026, and Germany's transition period under MiCA expired on December 31, 2025. This article adds both sides together: the levels the market sets, and the checks you can carry out today regardless of the price.

Bitcoin forecast on September 25, 2026: what the price is currently measuring

As of 16:40 UTC, Bitcoin stands at $83,877. Over the past 24 hours the price has lost 1.1 percent, moving between $83,230 and $85,208. Over seven days it is up 3.4 percent, over 30 days up 7.6 percent. The twelve-month view looks different: there it is down 25.0 percent. Market capitalisation is $1.685 trillion, trading turnover over the past 24 hours $37.6 billion, and 20,089,253 Bitcoin are in circulation.

The all-time high of $126,080 dates from October 6, 2025. The current price sits 33.5 percent below it. Anyone reading a forecast today that names the all-time high as the next waypoint should know this figure: from $83,877 to $126,080 is a gain of 50.3 percent. That is no argument against such a target, but it frames the time horizon in which it would be reachable.

The sentiment index from alternative.me, which builds a value between 0 and 100 out of volatility, trading volume, market dominance and survey data, stands at 71 points on September 25, placing it in Greed territory. The previous day it also stood at 71. A high reading is not a sell signal; it says only that the market is pricing in little fear right now. For your planning that means one thing above all: the price of hedging is lower in such phases than it is after a slump.

The range of the past 30 days: $75,590 to $86,597 as the frame for any forecast

For this article, the daily closing prices of the past 180 days were retrieved from CoinGecko's market data API and analysed. The result is the most robust part of any forecast, because it predicts nothing but measures.

• Lowest level of the past 30 days: $75,590 on September 16, 2026.
• Highest level of the past 30 days: $86,597 on September 22, 2026.
• Lowest level of the half-year: $58,566 on July 1, 2026.
• Moving average of the past 50 days: $75,318.
• Moving average of the past 180 days: $71,007.

Two things stand out. First, Bitcoin ran through a range of 14.6 percent within six trading days between September 16 and September 22. Second, the current price sits 11.4 percent above the 50-day average and 18.1 percent above the 180-day average. Both lines are therefore below the price, and both are rising. That is the technical starting position from which forecasts for the fourth quarter are built.

How wide a month really is: volatility as a forecasting frame

Volatility is the measure of how strongly a price fluctuates around its own path. The same 180 daily data points give an annualised volatility of 42.5 percent for the past 30 days, and 38.2 percent across the full half-year. The average daily move of the past 30 days is 1.49 percent, regardless of direction.

Scaling the annual volatility of 42.5 percent down to one month produces a standard deviation of 12.3 percent. Applied to today's price, that means a band from $73,586 to $94,168 for the coming four weeks. Calculated over one week, the band shrinks to $78,934 to $88,820. On the assumption of normally distributed returns, around 68 percent of all paths lie within one standard deviation.

That assumption is deliberately conservative, because it understates the tails: crypto markets produce extreme days more often than a normal distribution expects. The band is therefore not a guarantee but a lower bound for the width you should reckon with. Anyone reading a forecast that names a single figure for four weeks rather than a range is ignoring these measured 12.3 percent.

Upside levels: the September high at $86,597 and what lies beyond it

The next level to the upside is the September high of September 22 at $86,597, 3.2 percent above the current price. That level matters because the market turned there three days ago: whoever bought at the peak is currently sitting on a small loss and tends to sell on a return to break-even. That behaviour creates supply and turns a high into a resistance.

Above $86,597 the air thins out, because not a single daily closing price of the entire half-year lies higher. The next reference point from the record is the all-time high at $126,080. A forecast expecting that leap within a few weeks demands a move of 50.3 percent, a good four monthly standard deviations. Such a path would be realistic across several quarters, not across a change of quarter.

In classical chart analysis, a breakout counts as confirmed by a daily close above the level accompanied by rising turnover. The $37.6 billion turnover of the past 24 hours is the benchmark against which you can measure that.

Downside levels: the 50-day line at $75,318

To the downside two levels lie close together, and that is precisely what makes them robust. The 30-day low of September 16 is at $75,590, 9.9 percent below the current price. The 50-day moving average is at $75,318, 10.2 percent below it. Where a trough and a closely watched average line sit at almost the same level, buy orders and hedges accumulate.

If that zone breaks, the next stop is the 180-day average at $71,007, 15.3 percent below the current price. Below that, within this half-year's data window, there is no notable zone of concentrated trading until the July low of $58,566. The distance from the current price to that point is 30.2 percent.

In practice that means: if you want to set a selling threshold, it does not belong on a round number like $80,000 but below the zone that has actually held. A threshold just above $75,318 is reached by any ordinary daily move of 1.49 percent as soon as the price so much as tests the zone.

Holding period and quarter-end: why the calendar sets your selling date

This is where the German view parts company with any international forecast. Under the Federal Ministry of Finance circular of March 6, 2025, Bitcoin counts among the other economic assets within the meaning of section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act. If you sell privately held coins after more than twelve months, the gain is tax-free regardless of its size. If you sell within the twelve months, the gain is taxable at your personal income tax rate.

From that follows a check you can carry out today and which depends on no price forecast: look in your purchase record for the tranches bought between September 26 and December 31, 2025. Those positions cross the one-year mark in the coming quarter. For each of them the date matters more than the forecast, because selling a few days before the deadline costs you the full tax rate on the gain, while selling a few days after costs nothing.

Under the circular of March 6, 2025, the same applies to holdings you have lent out or staked in the meantime: the holding period stays at one year. The running income from staking or lending is to be considered separately and arises as other income. A detailed treatment of the German rules is in our overview of crypto tax in Germany.

The 1,000-euro exemption limit and FIFO: what to calculate before every sale

An exemption limit of 1,000 euros per calendar year applies to gains from private disposals within the one-year period. The term exemption limit is to be taken literally and differs from an allowance: if your total gain from such transactions is 999 euros, it stays tax-free. If it is 1,001 euros, the entire amount is taxable, not merely the one euro above.

Which coins you actually sell is decided by the consumption sequence. The customary method, accepted by the tax authorities, is first-in-first-out, under which the units bought first count as sold first. Where several purchases are spread across the year, that order determines whether a sale hits an old, tax-free tranche or a young, taxable one.

A worked example at today's price: you bought for 4,000 euros in February 2026 and again for 4,000 euros in July 2026. If you sell part of it now, FIFO reaches the February tranche first, which would become tax-free in February 2027. Anyone who overlooks that gives away a deadline they can hardly get back. If you use several exchanges and wallets, you need a seamless record across all accounts for this, otherwise each platform calculates only its own slice.

Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act: what your exchange reports from 2026

Since January 1, 2026, the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act has applied in Germany, implementing the EU directive DAC8. According to the overview of the act by audit firm KPMG, retrieved on September 25, 2026, the current calendar year 2026 is the first reporting period. Providers must transmit the data to the Federal Central Tax Office by July 31, 2027. For breaches, section 18 of the act provides for fines of up to 50,000 euros per case.

What gets reported are trades, exchange transactions and transfers, together with details about you as the user. In practice that means: what you declare for the current year in your tax return can be reconciled from 2027 with the data from your exchange. Anyone who puts their records in order only once the report has already been filed has missed the easier route.

The check that follows from this is unspectacular and effective: before the quarter ends, export the complete transaction history of every exchange you used in 2026, and file it together with the wallet addresses through which you processed withdrawals. Exchanges change export formats, discontinue services or lose authorisations. An export you pull today is available; one you need in 2027 may no longer be.

Buying under MiCA: Germany's transition period has expired

MiCA is the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets. It requires authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider for operating a trading platform, for exchange transactions and for custody on a client's behalf. Germany brought the national transition period forward to December 31, 2025 through its crypto markets supervision act, ending it half a year earlier than the latest EU-wide deadline of July 1, 2026. Since January 1, 2026, providers without authorisation may no longer render services in Germany.

For you that is a concrete check before your next purchase: look up whether the provider you buy through is listed in BaFin's company database or operates under an EU passport from another member state. A provider without authorisation is not automatically disreputable, but in a dispute you stand outside the supervisory framework, and deposit protection does not cover crypto-assets in any case.

If you switch providers, the switch itself becomes a tax matter: transferring your own holdings between your own wallets is not a sale and triggers no tax, but it must be documented so that the acquisition data, and with it the holding period, are preserved. Which platforms are authorised for German investors and how they differ on fees and withdrawal routes is shown by our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

Custody: what to check before the next swing

The measured volatility of 42.5 percent has a side effect that rarely appears in forecasts: in hectic phases, load and waiting times at exchanges rise, and that is exactly when you want access. Anyone holding larger amounts therefore does well to separate the trading position from the long-term position.

Three checks are possible today without any view on the price. First: is your recovery phrase held in two physically separate places, and is at least one copy protected against fire and water? Paper in a desk drawer does not meet that. Second: have you ever tested the recovery process, meaning restoring the wallet from the phrase on a second device? An untested backup is an assumption. Third: at every exchange you still use, is two-factor sign-in set to an app or a security key rather than to SMS?

Which devices meet these requirements, and how they differ in handling and backup procedure, is a question of the backup method and of usability, not of price.

Leverage and liquidation: what a 1.49 percent daily move means for your account

Anyone trading with leverage should read the forecast not in price targets but in probabilities. From the measured monthly volatility of 12.3 percent it is possible to estimate how often an adverse move grows large enough to liquidate a leveraged position. On the simplifying assumption of normally distributed returns and disregarding financing costs, the picture for a one-month period is:

• Three times leverage, liquidation at an adverse move of around 33 percent: about 0.3 percent probability.
• Five times leverage, liquidation at around 20 percent: about 5.2 percent.
• Ten times leverage, liquidation at around 10 percent: about 20.8 percent.
• Twenty times leverage, liquidation at around 5 percent: about 34.2 percent.

The figures are a lower bound, because real price paths swing out at the tails more often than the model does, and because liquidations can be triggered before the calculated point once the margin call takes hold. At twenty times leverage, three and a half times an average daily move of 1.49 percent is arithmetically already enough to end the position.

For retail investors in the EU, leverage on crypto contracts for difference is capped at two times in any case. Anyone using higher leverage with providers outside that framework loses not only this protection but also trades products whose tax treatment departs from the simple one-year rule: gains from derivatives fall under investment income and not under section 23 of the Income Tax Act.

Fees: what one percent costs at $83,877

Fees are the only part of a forecast that is certain to materialise. On a purchase of 5,000 euros, a spread of one percent costs 50 euros; at one percent on both the buy and the sell side, 100 euros in total. By way of comparison: the average daily move of 1.49 percent amounts to 74.50 euros on the same sum. Your trading costs therefore sit in the same order of magnitude as an average trading day.

Two cost types are regularly overlooked. First, the gap between the buy and sell price at providers who advertise zero percent order fees and place the margin in the price. Compare the displayed rate at the moment of purchase against a reference rate. Second, the withdrawal fee in euros and the network fee on a transfer, which on small amounts can account for the largest share.

Anyone buying monthly should recalculate both once a quarter. On a savings plan of 200 euros a month, a one percent spread is 24 euros a year, and 1.5 percent is 36 euros. Over five years that is the equivalent of roughly two monthly instalments.

Three scenarios for the fourth quarter, each with its reasoning

Sideways within the measured band, $73,600 to $94,200. This scenario needs no new piece of news; it is the continuation of the measured volatility. It is therefore the most likely outcome for the coming four weeks, as long as neither the September high nor the zone around $75,300 is durably broken.

Upward through $86,597. A daily close above the September high with rising turnover opens the area in which the half-year record holds no further resistance. The first realistic stage is the upper edge of the monthly band at around $94,200, which is 12.3 percent above today's price. In this scenario the all-time high at $126,080 remains a target for several quarters, not for weeks.

Downward through $75,318. Should the price fall below the double zone of the 30-day low and the 50-day average, the next stop is the 180-day average at $71,007. If that break is confirmed as well, no load-bearing zone remains before the July low at $58,566. For leveraged positions this scenario is the most expensive; for investors with the one-year deadline in view it is above all a question of the selling date, not of selling as such.

None of the three scenarios is a recommendation. What they do is assign consequences to levels, so that you know in advance what you will do at which price.

Checking the Bitcoin forecast: what to take away

1. Sort your purchase dates before the quarter ends. Check which tranches cross the one-year mark in the fourth quarter, and note the dates. A tool that tracks the deadlines automatically is in the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.
2. Check your buying route and its authorisation. Look up whether your provider has been authorised since the end of the German transition period, and compare spread and withdrawal fees against the alternatives in the overview of the best crypto exchanges.
3. Test your custody, do not assume it. Restore your wallet once from the recovery phrase on a second device. Which devices support that comfortably is shown by 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.)

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Solana, Zcash, Chainlink and Cardano are testing crucial technical levels as crypto momentum strengthens, with key breakouts and resistance zones coming into focus.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, widely known as “Crypto Mom” for her influential role in shaping U.S. cryptocurrency policy, has formally submitted her resignation.

Bitcoin tests the key $83,000 level ahead of a crucial weekly close that could redefine the technical market framework for Q4 2026.

Binance has added two new crypto assets to its alpha platform, allowing its users access to exclusive investment opportunities.

CoinMarketCap has acquired CoinGlass, one of the crypto industry’s most widely used platforms for tracking Bitcoin, XRP, Shiba Inu and other tokens’ liquidations, open interest and derivatives activity.

TLDR:

• Google PageBreak found more than 500 verified XSS vulnerabilities across company web applications after testing suspected exploits in live environments.
• Dedicated validators test JavaScript payloads and other attack paths, keeping false positives close to zero before reports reach engineers.
• Two XSS flaws surfaced among hundreds of applications built with high-assurance frameworks, limited to internal applications or debug endpoints.
• Google plans a closer link between PageBreak and CodeMender so teams can review generated fixes beside confirmed security findings.

Google PageBreak has identified more than 500 cross-site scripting flaws across the company’s first-party web applications. The AI security agent tests suspected weaknesses against working services before product teams receive a report. That validation step separates usable exploits from believable but faulty model-generated attack descriptions.

Google began PageBreak as a pilot in November 2025 and made it a formal project in January 2026. Google’s Product Security team said the system found XSS flaws on sensitive company domains. Google did not name the affected applications or disclose a severity breakdown. The figure covers its web application estate.

Google PageBreak Filters XSS Flaws Before Team Review

PageBreak sends each candidate issue to a dedicated validator rather than routing every alert to engineers. For an XSS vulnerability, the validator injects JavaScript into the relevant page and observes whether it executes. Google said that process holds false positives close to zero. It prevents untested claims from reaching product teams for review.

Google PageBreak also tests whether injected inputs alter database queries, expose files through path traversal, or trigger code execution. Another validator examines requests that may reach internal services. Those checks let the system assess several attack classes. They also keep reports focused on working paths.

Most scans use Gemini 3.1 Pro or Gemini 3.5 Flash. Separate tools perform the exploit checks. The validators do not come from the AI agent itself. Google repeats attempts because models can abandon a productive route. They can also pursue an attack path that fails under actual application conditions.

Unverified results do not leave the internal security workflow as confirmed bugs. Teams can use them to refine future scans or create additional validators. This distinction matters because language models can produce detailed security narratives. Those narratives may not reproduce when tested in an application.

Google said its system validates more than browser scripts. It can check whether an injected input changes a database query. It can also identify file exposure through path traversal. Each candidate needs an independent proof before engineers treat it as a vulnerability.

Google PageBreak Extends Testing into Repair Workflows

Google PageBreak found two XSS vulnerabilities among hundreds of applications built on its high-assurance web frameworks by September 4. Both cases involved internal applications or debug endpoints with missing protections. That count applies only to the framework group. It does not cover the more than 500 findings across Google’s wider application estate.

The result tests framework protections under repeated automated scans. PageBreak can inspect code paths across services through the company repository. Security data from live web traffic can connect a requested page with relevant source code. Existing scanners also provide authenticated access to internal sites.

That environment sets PageBreak apart from a public model scan. External researchers cannot usually inspect Google code, traffic data, or protected testing systems. Google PageBreak therefore reflects an internal security workflow with deep operational access. The count does not show that another organization could get the same result by running Gemini alone.

Google plans to connect Google PageBreak more closely with CodeMender, an agent designed to generate security fixes. Product teams could then review a proposed repair beside a confirmed vulnerability. The company said the pairing could reduce work created by a large volume of verified findings. Google gave no timetable for integration.

Comparable verification problems affect crypto software, where AI tools can create many plausible reports. The Ethereum Foundation has used separate reviewers to reproduce agent-generated findings. A Bitcoin Red Team scan found only 24.7% of reported issues had reproducible proofs at the time. Google has not said it will make PageBreak available to external projects.

The post Google PageBreak Finds More Than 500 XSS Flaws Across Web Apps appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Buybacks on functional crypto systems don’t signal a promise of essential managerial efforts.
• Non-functional systems face stricter scrutiny if buybacks are framed as yielding returns.
• Staking Receipt Tokens may qualify as digital commodities under certain issuer structures.
• SEC staff stress these FAQs are nonbinding and carry no legal force or effect.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission staff released new FAQs on September 25 clarifying how token buybacks and liquid staking fit within federal securities laws.

The guidance explains that announcing a buyback of a non-security token on a functional crypto system does not amount to a promise of essential managerial efforts.

This distinction matters for issuers navigating the Howey test and determining whether their tokens qualify as investment contracts under current SEC interpretations.

Buyback Programs and Functional Systems

The FAQs, issued by the Division of Corporation Finance, address a common industry practice. Issuers often run buyback programs for treasury management, supply reduction, or rebalancing purposes.

According to the new guidance, these announcements do not constitute a promise to undertake essential managerial efforts when the underlying crypto system is already functional.

The analysis changes for systems that are not yet functional. A buyback announcement could be treated as such a promise if the issuer frames it as “creating yield or return for token holders,” according to the FAQs.

This distinction ties directly into the Howey test, which examines whether purchasers expect profits based on the efforts of others.

Journalist Eleanor Terrett summarized the update on X, writing that the new FAQs are “clarifying how the Commission’s March interpretive release” applies to token functionality and staking receipts. She added that the guidance reflects staff views only and carries no legal force.

The FAQs also reaffirm an earlier position from the Commission’s August proposing release. Securing, maintaining, or enhancing a functional system does not involve essential managerial efforts. The same applies to funding or sponsoring development projects that support network effects.

Staking Receipt Tokens and Classification Guidance

The FAQs further address how Staking Receipt Tokens are classified under the Interpretive Release. A receipt tied to a digital commodity that is not subject to an investment contract functions as a digital tool. It evidences ownership of an underlying asset rather than creating new financial rights.

However, classification can shift depending on the issuer. A Staking Receipt Token issued by a protocol-based Liquid Staking Provider may itself qualify as a digital commodity.

Its value derives from the programmatic operation of a functional crypto system, alongside ordinary supply and demand dynamics.

The staff also clarified how promotional language factors into the analysis. Promoting a system’s current utility and capabilities likely does not, on its own, create a promise of managerial efforts. Indefinite statements about future utility receive similar treatment when profit potential is not mentioned.

Notably, the document states the answers have “no legal force or effect” and do not alter existing law. Issuers and market participants should treat the guidance as interpretive context rather than binding regulation.

The post SEC Staff Clarifies Token Buybacks and Liquid Staking in New FAQs appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Bybit’s Restricted Counterparty List includes Garantex, Bitzlato, EXMO, Payeer and dozens of platforms.
• The list also names Lazarus Group, Hamas, Ansarallah and ISIS-K as sanctioned organizations.
• Bybit screens transactions on an ongoing basis and may suspend accounts linked to violators.
• Huione Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee face scrutiny over facilitating illicit fund transfers in Asia

Bybit has released a comprehensive Restricted Counterparty List identifying crypto platforms, wallets, and organizations barred from its services.

The list spans trading platforms, payment processors, mixers, darknet markets, and sanctioned entities such as Lazarus Group, Hamas, Ansarallah, and ISIS-K.

The exchange said it actively screens transactions against these names and reserves the right to suspend accounts, block funds, and report violations to regulators.

Bybit Names Dozens of Restricted Platforms and Services

The Restricted Counterparty List includes well-known names such as Garantex, Bitzlato, EXMO, Payeer, and Nobitex. Other flagged platforms include Bitpapa, Chatex, Cryptex, Grinex, and Rapira. The exchange also named WhiteBird, OMPFinex, Ramzinex, HTX, and Wallex among restricted services.

Additional entries cover Tetherland, Bit24, QvaPay, and two guarantee marketplaces, Huione Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee. These marketplaces have drawn scrutiny for facilitating illicit fund transfers across Southeast Asia.

Mixing services Samourai Wallet, Bitcoin Fog, and ChipMixer appear on the list as well, alongside darknet markets Sinbad and Hydra Market.

Bybit cited its Platform Terms and Conditions as the basis for the restrictions. Under Section 23 of these terms, and Section 28 of the BVAPO Terms, the exchange does not offer services to entities designated under applicable sanctions frameworks.

This includes names on the U.S. Treasury’s Specially Designated Nationals list, the EU’s Consolidated Financial Sanctions List, and equivalent registries maintained by competent authorities worldwide.

The exchange said its screening process runs on an ongoing basis rather than as a one-time check. Where a connection to a prohibited entity is identified, Bybit may suspend or terminate accounts linked to that entity. It may also block related transactions, file regulatory reports, and liquidate open positions tied to the account.

Sanctioned Organizations and Compliance Obligations Outlined

Beyond crypto platforms, the list names organizations tied to security concerns, including Lazarus Group, also known as Hidden Cobra.

Hamas, referred to as the Islamic Resistance Movement, appears alongside Ansarallah, commonly known as the Houthis. ISIS-K, listed as ISIS-Khorasan, rounds out the named organizations.

Bybit outlined user obligations tied to these restrictions in its terms. Users who transact with, transfer funds to, or otherwise engage with a prohibited entity violate the platform’s terms. Users who become aware of such a transaction are required to inform Bybit immediately under the policy.

The exchange stated it reserves the right to take all necessary steps to maintain compliance with applicable laws. This includes cooperation with regulatory bodies and law enforcement authorities across relevant jurisdictions. Bybit did not specify a timeline for updates to the list.

The move reflects a broader pattern among major exchanges tightening compliance amid rising regulatory pressure. Platforms handling sanctioned counterparties face growing scrutiny from global financial watchdogs.

Bybit’s published list gives users a reference point for avoiding inadvertent violations tied to these entities.

The post Bybit Unveils Restricted Counterparty List, Blacklists Lazarus Group and Dozens of Crypto Platforms appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Meta stock drops 3.35% as shares move toward the $750 support zone
• Meta introduces Muse AI features for its growing smart glasses lineup
• Charm device expands access to Meta’s consumer AI technology ecosystem
• The company plans over 100 AI glasses styles by year-end
• Meta continues building wearable AI products beyond smartphones

Meta Platforms (META) shares traded at $751.51, down 3.35%, after selling pressure pushed the stock lower from the $770 area toward the $750 support zone. The decline followed Meta’s announcement of new AI glasses features linked to its Muse agent and Charm device. The company continues expanding its consumer AI strategy through wearable technology and connected devices.

Meta Platforms, Inc., META

Meta Stock Falls After New AI Glasses Developments

Meta Platforms reported plans to bring Muse capabilities to its AI glasses lineup as the company expands its consumer AI products. The feature allows the glasses to respond to what users see and support tasks during ongoing conversations. Meta also introduced Charm, a smaller device designed for users to interact with Muse.

The company stated that Muse will support functions such as shopping, payments, work integrations, and daily assistance. Meanwhile, Meta plans to expand its AI glasses range to more than 100 styles by year-end. The move strengthens Meta’s focus on wearable devices beyond traditional smartphone-based experiences.

META shares fell during the trading session on September 25, 2026. Shares fell 2.8% to $755.815 at 10:13 am ET before continuing the broader intraday decline. The stock later traded near $751.51 as selling pressure remained active.

Meta Expands Muse Across Wearable Technology

Meta’s AI glasses strategy builds on the company’s efforts to combine hardware, software, and artificial intelligence features. The company aims to increase daily usage through devices that provide direct access to its AI services. The expansion adds another layer to Meta’s existing social media and technology operations.

Muse will include features that connect users with digital services while using Meta’s glasses. The system will also have its own email address, which supports broader communication features. These updates position Meta’s glasses as a central part of its consumer technology roadmap.

The company has continued investing heavily in artificial intelligence products and infrastructure. Meta has introduced several AI-focused initiatives across its platforms, including social applications and hardware products. The latest announcement highlights its effort to expand AI access through physical devices.

META Valuation Reflects AI Growth Focus

Meta’s valuation snapshot on September 25 placed the company below its GF Value estimate of $856.24. The figure showed META trading 11.73% below that estimate. The valuation data does not confirm future performance but reflects current market calculations.

The company’s future revenue opportunities from Muse depend on adoption of its AI glasses and related services. Meta has highlighted areas such as subscriptions, purchases and advertising as potential business models. However, the company has not provided confirmed revenue figures from Muse.

Meta continues to develop its AI ecosystem while maintaining its core advertising business. The company’s wearable technology expansion adds a new product category alongside its existing platforms. META shares remain focused on market reactions as the company advances its AI glasses plans.

The post Meta Platforms (META) Stock: Drops as AI Glasses Push Muse Into the Spotlight appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• NetApp NTAP shares gained as PEAK:AIO acquisition plans boosted AI infrastructure focus
• PEAK:AIO technology will expand NetApp’s metadata and file system capabilities
• The deal aims to support larger data environments and advanced workloads
• NetApp combines ONTAP expertise with PEAK:AIO scalable architecture solutions
• Acquisition strengthens NetApp’s position in the evolving infrastructure market

NetApp, Inc. (NTAP) shares gained 1.48% to $200.16 as the company announced plans to acquire PEAK. The deal targets stronger AI infrastructure capabilities by adding advanced metadata architecture and parallel file system technology. NetApp expects the acquisition to improve large-scale data management for growing AI workloads.

NetApp, Inc., NTAP

NetApp Expands AI Infrastructure Strategy Through PEAK Deal

NetApp announced its agreement to acquire PEAK, a company focused on high-performance metadata systems. The transaction supports NetApp’s strategy to build infrastructure for expanding enterprise AI applications. Furthermore, the deal adds specialized technology to its existing data management portfolio.

The acquisition combines PEAK’s metadata architecture with NetApp’s ONTAP software platform. This integration aims to improve storage performance for large computing environments. Therefore, organizations can access stronger systems for handling complex and data-intensive workloads.

PEAK developed technology designed for demanding computing operations with support from research institutions. The company created solutions that improve metadata scaling and global file access. Consequently, NetApp plans to use these capabilities to support larger data environments.

NetApp Targets Scalable Storage Growth With Advanced Data Systems

NetApp stated that the combined platform will support massive file environments and multi-exabyte deployments. The architecture separates metadata services from stored data to improve scalability. In addition, the approach helps organizations manage growing infrastructure requirements.

The planned integration introduces parallel access features for large-scale workloads. NetApp will maintain its focus on security, resilience, and operational simplicity. Meanwhile, PEAK technology will expand options for customers managing advanced computing systems.

The acquisition reflects rising demand for infrastructure that supports modern data operations. Companies continue developing larger computing environments that require faster and more efficient storage solutions. As a result, NetApp aims to strengthen its position in the expanding infrastructure market.

The company expects PEAK’s technology to complement its existing product ecosystem. The integration will focus on improving performance across demanding workloads. Additionally, NetApp will provide global resources and operational expertise to expand adoption.

The acquisition adds another step in NetApp’s long-term infrastructure development strategy. The company continues adapting its offerings for changing enterprise technology needs. Through the PEAK transaction, NetApp seeks to deliver more scalable data solutions for future workloads.

The post NetApp, Inc. (NTAP) Stock: Rise as PEAK:AIO Acquisition Targets AI Infrastructure Growth  appeared first on Blockonomi.

HIFI, the New York stablecoin infrastructure company that took part in DTCC’s July tokenized securities trades, raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital, it said on Thursday, with the money going to licenses, cards and capital markets.

Matthew Miller, Managing Partner at Left Lane Capital, joins the board. HIFI said its platform moves more than $7 billion a year and that usage among existing customers has grown more than fourfold in six months.

Companies building on it have also onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals, with payouts reaching 87 countries, the team stated.

Repo Trades and Visa Payouts

Sumitomo is rebuilding its cash management and trading operations on the platform, Dapper is building digital marketplaces on it, and Arival Bank uses it for stablecoin payments.

A Form D that HIFI Bridge, Inc. filed with the SEC on September 3 covers a $27.3 million equity offering, $21.8 million of which has been sold to 24 investors since a first sale on August 19.

DTCC ran production trades with tokenized DTC-held securities on July 15 across more than 30 firms, among them BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Nasdaq, covering collateral pledges, securities lending and Treasury and repo settlement, before an October launch of its tokenization service.

HIFI said it was part of the tokenized repo pilot and also supported a live tokenized repo trade on Tradeweb between DRW and Marex, settled on Canton with USDCx as the cash leg. This month HIFI launched stablecoin push-to-card payouts through Visa Direct, starting with payouts to more than 4 billion Visa cards worldwide, and has integrated with the Circle Payments Network.

Visa and DTCC are founding validators of Circle’s Arc blockchain alongside BlackRock, Mastercard and Standard Chartered.

“We think of settlement as one problem, not three,” said Zach Walsh, CEO of HIFI.

Licenses, Cards and Capital Markets

The round will pay for additional regulatory licenses so more of the stack runs under HIFI directly, a bigger team in New York and abroad, and an extension from payments into cards and capital markets, where Walsh said custody and control remain the hardest problems.

Payment stablecoins gained a federal framework under the GENIUS Act in July 2025, and stablecoin supply stands near $307 billion, per Blockworks.

On the securities side, the SEC issued an Innovation Exemption on September 17 that lets permissioned venues trade tokenized US stocks onchain.

“HIFI is building an important layer in that market, giving developers the infrastructure to create products that can operate across networks and borders,” Miller said.

The post HIFI Raises $37M Series A to Build Settlement Rails for Tokenized Money appeared first on CryptoPotato.

KelpDAO has filed a lawsuit against LayerZero and its co-founder Bryan Pellegrino, accusing the bridge provider of security failures behind the $292 million exploit of its rsETH token in April.

The suit, filed in British Columbia, is KelpDAO’s most direct attempt yet to hold LayerZero accountable after months of public disagreement over what caused the breach.

KelpDAO Accuses LayerZero of Security Failures

In a statement posted on X on September 25, KelpDAO alleged that the exploit resulted from LayerZero’s failure to disclose weaknesses in its technology and prevent an infiltration of its security infrastructure.

“Rather than take responsibility, over the last few months, LayerZero and Mr. Pellegrino publicly blamed us for their failures,” KelpDAO stated. “But the record is straightforward: LayerZero reviewed and endorsed—in writing—our deployment and configuration of LayerZero’s technology.”

That directly challenges LayerZero’s argument that the attack was isolated to KelpDAO’s rsETH configuration because the bridge used a 1-of-1 Decentralized Verifier Network, or DVN.

Under that setup, LayerZero’s own DVN was the sole verifier, meaning a forged cross-chain message could be accepted without a second independent verifier rejecting it.

LayerZero maintained that it had recommended using multiple DVNs to avoid such a single point of failure. But KelpDAO pushed back on that account in a May 6 report. The protocol argued that the 1-of-1 configuration was not an unusual setup chosen against LayerZero’s guidance. Instead, it claimed the configuration followed LayerZero’s official documentation and default deployment practices.

Up until supposed white-hat hackers drained $320 million from Liquid Network (most of which was returned) and today’s $351 million Bitget hot wallet breach, the KelpDAO incident had been the largest crypto security exploit of 2026.

Cyvers at the time estimated that about $293.7 million in rsETH was drained, with the attacker moving the assets into ETH across Ethereum and Arbitrum, while lending protocols including Aave V3, Compound V3, and Euler were also affected.

Pellegrino Ready to Defend Himself

In its own words, KelpDAO wants to set the record straight and “hold LayerZero and Mr. Pellegrino accountable for the harm they have caused.”

And the LayerZero CEO responded within hours on X, confirming that Evercrest, KelpDAO’s parent entity, had filed a notice of civil claim against him and his company in British Columbia.

“The claim continues to be meritless, will meet them in Vancouver and defend myself accordingly,” he wrote.

Also on X, Solana Foundation’s Seraphim Czecker summed up the mood around founding DeFi as something closer to a Game of Thrones plotline, where you are either at the top making hundreds of millions of dollars or your business is suffocating and dying.

“If you get hacked, you get sued into oblivion and lose years to court battles,” he added.

The post KelpDAO Sues LayerZero and CEO Bryan Pellegrino Over $292M Hack appeared first on CryptoPotato.

On September 25, a wallet linked to pseudonymous security researcher Quit pulled 3,832 NFTs out of hundreds of unrelated wallets, the first visible sign of a rescue operation built around a bug in LimitBreak’s Payment Processor V2 contract.

The operation eventually relocated 23,155 NFTs worth nearly $6 million, while a separate exploit path left 660 WETH unrecovered.

White Hat Operation Moves Thousands of NFTs

The incident first drew attention when NFT trader Cirrus reported that a wallet had drained 3,832 NFTs from more than 100 wallets. Quit, who is also the VP of Blockchain at Yuga Labs, later confirmed that the transfers were part of a white-hat operation.

“Everything in 0x71cF3f5724bD2B72Ef6464992aCd26216DE7fe33 is safe and will be returned once they are no longer at risk,” the researcher wrote.

They explained that the underlying issue involved Payment Processor V2. At 9 a.m. EST, an attacker used the bug to take 10 Meebits, 50 Otherdeeds, 10 World of Women NFTs, and 235 Despertae Apewives.

Quit then found that many other NFTs were exposed to the same vulnerability, but the situation was complicated by the fact that V2 could not be paused. LimitBreak was able to pause Payment Processor V3 after being contacted, but V3 on ApeChain also temporarily could not be paused.

“The only path towards protecting affected assets was to run a whitehat operation,” noted Quit.

In total, 23,155 NFTs were rescued, with the researcher estimating their value at approximately $6 million. Owners will later be able to claim the assets after revoking the vulnerable approvals.

However, the rescue did not recover every asset exposed to the flaw, as Quit later found that the vulnerability could also be exploited in reverse to steal WETH, putting 660WETH at risk.

“Worked through the entire night to save ~$6M worth of NFTs and all I’ll be able to think about is the $1.7M in WETH I wasn’t fast enough for,” they said on X.

A Second Breach the Same Day

The NFT incident happened nearly the same time as a breach on Bitget, where hackers moved more than $351 million from a portion of its hot and warm wallets, while cold storage, holding most of the exchange’s assets, stayed untouched.

As CryptoPotato reported earlier today, Bitget chief executive Gracy Chen attributed the loss to a compromised backend system that allowed an attacker to spoof transaction data rather than a stolen private key. She also said that affected customers will be reimbursed, with the money coming from Bitget’s $464 million user protection fund.

XRP made up the largest single share of cryptocurrency that was stolen, with over 100 million units worth upward of $158 million spread across a handful of wallets.

The post White Hat Operation Rescues 23K NFTs After Payment Processor Exploit appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange announced a delisting move that will primarily affect its Ukrainian clients.

Binance has been making headlines lately amid regulatory challenges in the European Union, and reports say US prosecutors have been examining alleged Iran-linked trading on the platform.

The Latest Announcement

Binance revealed that it will close UAH deposits and withdrawals via Fiat Trade UAH and delist the USDT/UAH spot trading pair. These services will no longer be supported after September 28.

“All open orders on the USDT/UAH Spot trading pair will be automatically removed after trading ceases. Users are advised to manage their UAH balances and open orders before the above deadlines,” the company clarified.

The exchange also said it will automatically convert all remaining UAH balances to USDT by September 30. No action is required from users who choose this option.

UAH is the symbol for the Ukrainian hryvnia, the official currency of the Eastern European country. The move is likely to disappoint some of the local users, as it means one less gateway between the domestic financial system and the crypto market.

Ukraine has in fact emerged as a stronghold for Binance, with millions of Ukrainians using its services. Earlier this year, the company focused on some of its strongest markets and launched seven new official WhatsApp channels. One of those is specifically dedicated to users in Ukraine.

Binance’s Issues

The European Union’s MiCA regulatory framework took effect on July 1, and crypto platforms that couldn’t obtain the required license were not allowed to offer services to local clients. Binance, which applied through Greece, was rejected, and many users indeed reported disruptions.

Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal disclosed that Christine Lagarde (President of the European Central Bank) has personally asked Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis to block Binance’s bid for permission. According to the media outlet, the main reasons are the company’s earlier guilty plea to US money laundering and sanctions violations, and fears that allowing the entity into Europe would push more people toward dollar stablecoins just as the ECB was trying to launch its own digital euro.

Meanwhile, Binance recently faced a new investigation in the United States over potential violations of sanctions on Iran. According to Bloomberg, local authorities have been examining whether the exchange enabled certain trading activity linked to the Asian country on its platform.

Recall that in 2023, the firm agreed to plead guilty and pay $4.3 billion in penalties to resolve US anti-money-laundering, sanctions, and money-transmission violations. At the time, its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), was sent behind bars for four months and paid a $50 million fine. Donald Trump later granted him a presidential pardon.

The post Important Binance Announcement Concerning Ukrainian Users: What’s Happening? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

DeFi protocol Ethena (ENA) announced a partnership with Binance and began backing USDe with stocks on Friday, essentially buying the exchange’s bStocks and shorting its matching equity perpetuals to earn the funding that leveraged longs pay.

Ethena is partnering with @Binance as our first venue for the extension of the basis trade into equity perpetuals, one of the most exciting updates to the USDe collateral backing since launch.

This expands the addressable market of underlying collateral from $2.5 trillion of… pic.twitter.com/be4Mz7XHk1

— Ethena (@ethena) September 25, 2026

Ethena Seeks To Break Records In Crypto Perpetuals

It is the same hedged trade that has backed the $4.9 billion synthetic dollar with crypto since launch, and also the same structure that Ethena has run on Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Solana (SOL).

In other words: hold the spot asset, short the perpetual, and collect the funding that leveraged longs pay. Here, the spot leg is a bStock, issued by Binance affiliate BTech Holdings Limited and backed one-for-one by custodied shares.

Ethena said in its post on X that Binance’s equity basis has averaged about 11% annualized over the past six months, and that the exchange gives eligible delta-neutral accounts (Ethena’s among them) lower priority in auto-deleveraging.

“We expect the market opportunity size for equity perpetuals to far exceed the $15b+ of crypto perpetuals captured by Ethena last cycle,” the company wrote.

Flagging bStock Terms

The allocation follows a framework Kairos Research wrote for the Ethena Risk Committee. A name qualifies on $25 million of perpetual open interest over 14 days, 30 days of funding history, and a matching tokenized stock on the same venue, among other conditions.

Seventeen of Binance’s 67 pairs passed, Nvidia, Tesla, and SpaceX among them, on a venue holding $2.14 billion of the $2.9 billion measured across four exchanges.

Across 37 earnings events, the underlying stocks gapped 9.9% on average while the hedged position moved 20.3 basis points. Carry on the approved Binance names had halved in a month to about 7%, with two names negative. The report made bStocks approval conditional on a side letter with the issuer, because holders have no proprietary interest in the backing shares and every bStock contract sits behind a single upgrade key.

CryptoQuant data showed Binance handling 76% of the $250 billion in equity perpetual volume traded in July, and its tokenized U.S. equities reached $100 million in assets within two weeks of their June launch. ENA traded at $0.24 on Friday, up 12% in 24 hours, per CoinGecko.

USDe supply peaked at $14.8 billion on October 4, 2025, per DefiLlama. Ethena last widened the collateral this way when it added Bitcoin to USDe’s backing in April 2024, with supply at $2 billion.

The post Ethena Partners With Binance to Back USDe With a Tokenized Stock Basis Trade appeared first on CryptoPotato.