OpenAI's rapid revenue growth highlights the transformative impact of AI on enterprise and consumer markets, despite ongoing profitability challenges.

The post OpenAI nears $70B in annualized revenue amid strong growth appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Blockchain adoption in US banks signals a transformative shift towards digital finance, promising enhanced efficiency and customer benefits.

The post Uphold survey shows 75% of US banks are building blockchain services appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Codex Cloud's integration into ChatGPT plans democratizes advanced coding capabilities, potentially transforming remote development workflows.

The post OpenAI announces Codex Cloud for remote coding access on ChatGPT paid plans appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The meeting underscores the delicate balance between fostering AI innovation and implementing effective regulations to maintain global competitiveness.

The post Tech leaders meet with Trump at White House AI luncheon to discuss safety and regulation appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

OpenAI's strategic pricing and enhanced features may reshape AI market dynamics, prompting competitors to reassess their offerings.

The post OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Codex hit 35M weekly users; unveils $500 Pro plan appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Morgan Stanley Has ‘Digital Asset Lab’ To Test Crypto Products: Report

Wall Street giant Morgan Stanley has launched a “digital asset lab” to test crypto products, according to reports. 

Bloomberg on Tuesday reported that the bank was using the lab to test products like stablecoins, tokenized assets and decentralized finance apps. 

Morgan Stanley is one of many banks delving deeper into the crypto world. The traditional finance titan became the first bank to debut a bitcoin exchange-traded fund in April. 

The fund, the Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust, now manages over $871 million in assets, according to its website.  

Citing an interview with Megan Brewer, who is head of firmwide market innovation and labs at the bank, Bloomberg reported that the lab gives Morgan Stanley a “secure, compliant and segregated environment to be able to test and explore some of these new areas of digital assets.” 

The report added that the lab’s team is working to test products like tokenized deposits, central-bank digital currencies and tokenized money market funds.

Morgan Stanley has a number of so-called labs to test out new products, the report continued. 

Morgan Stanley has been making big crypto moves for years now. Back in 2021, it started offering wealthy clients exposure to bitcoin via funds such as those by Galaxy Digital.

Last year, the bank’s CEO and Chairman, Ted Pick, said that the bank was working with regulators to see how they could offer crypto products safely.

Back in April, the bank’s head of digital assets, Amy Oldenburg said client education — not product design — is the central challenge facing Bitcoin adoption.

Top banks worldwide are working on offering products that use Bitcoin’s underlying technology. These products include everything from tokenized equities and stablecoins to bitcoin custody and trading platforms. 

This post Morgan Stanley Has ‘Digital Asset Lab’ To Test Crypto Products: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

André Dragosch: Why Bitcoin’s Fair Value is $197,000

The 10-year Treasury yield is spiking, and Bitwise’s André Dragosch has a rule of thumb for when that becomes dangerous: 80 basis points in 20 trading days. He explains why the speed of the move matters more than the level, how a stock market correction could force a Fed pivot, and why that pivot could be the last domino before a genuine Bitcoin bull market.

Chapters:
0:00 Operation Choke Point 2.0 and Crypto’s Shift to Republicans
0:37 Will Democrats Stop Fighting Bitcoin and Crypto?
1:53 Hunter Biden on Elizabeth Warren’s Crypto Stance
2:44 Blockchain in the Age of AI and Bitcoin Going to Zero
3:34 Why Hunter Biden Launched a Meme Token
4:57 Bitcoin for the Unbanked and Cross-Border Payments
5:52 Hunter Biden on Michael Saylor and Strategy
7:50 Crypto Payments for His Art and the Blockchain Art Economy
9:02 Global Bitcoin Adoption and the Meme Economy
11:20 Is Fiat a Sham? Banks, Argentina, and Wall Street

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 André Dragosch: Why Bitcoin’s Fair Value is $197,000 first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Solari Capital Founder Scaramucci: Betting on Bitcoin & Exponential Technology

Solari Capital just came out of stealth with $350 million deployed across AI, biotech, and Bitcoin. Founder AJ Scaramucci explains his “programmable reality” thesis: exponential computing power is turning biology, matter, intelligence, and finance into programmable systems. He also covers why Bitcoin is a core bet against monetary debasement.

Chapters:
0:00 AJ Scaramucci and Solari Capital’s Programmable Reality Thesis
1:22 Programmable Matter: Robotics, Alchemy, and Embodied AI
2:56 Physical Superintelligence and the Next Paradigm in Physics
4:16 How Close Are Humanoid Robots? Lessons From Waymo
5:27 Bitcoin and Monetary Debasement in Solari’s Framework
6:56 Scarcity vs. Abundance: Gold and Bitcoin vs. the Mag 7
8:23 Frontier AI Labs, Open Source, and the Application Layer
9:12 Treasure Trove and Collectibles as a Cultural Store of Value
11:39 The Dinosaur Fossil Market: T-Rex as an Asset Class
13:26 Fission Labs, Tokenized Private Shares, and the Future of IPOs

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 Solari Capital Founder Scaramucci: Betting on Bitcoin & Exponential Technology first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Hunter Biden on Bitcoin, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, and $LAPTOP

Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP token dropped more than 98% within minutes of launch, and now he’s explaining what happened. In this interview, he walks through the plan to list on a centralized exchange, the switch to a decentralized exchange, and the market maker liquidity miss he blames for the crash. He also shares his 2028 Bitcoin price prediction.

Chapters:
0:00 Why Hunter Biden Named His Token $LAPTOP
1:36 What Went Wrong With the $LAPTOP Launch
7:07 $LAPTOP vs. the Trump Token: Tokenomics and Transparency
10:46 Operation Choke Point 2.0 and Lobbying His Father
13:30 Will Democrats Ever Get Behind Bitcoin and Crypto?
19:24 Hunter Biden on Michael Saylor and Strategy
21:22 Bitcoin Payments for Art and Global Bitcoin Adoption
24:52 Is Fiat a Sham? Banks, Wall Street, and Bitcoin
28:32 Silk Road, Bad Actors, and Crypto’s Partisan Shift
31:34 Hunter Biden’s 2028 Bitcoin Price Prediction

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 Hunter Biden on Bitcoin, Operation Chokepoint 2.0, and $LAPTOP first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Gary Cardone: Wall Street Is Taking Over Bitcoin — For Good

The Clarity Act cloture vote failed, and Bitcoin rallied anyway. Gary Cardone, co-founder of Chargebacks911, explains why bad news has been bullish, why he thinks $75K will hold, and why he still has bids set at $66K and $68K. He also shares why he’d welcome one more retest of the low $70s.

Chapters:
0:00 Gary Cardone on Bitcoin’s Rally After the Clarity Act Vote Failed
1:38 Capital Rotation to AI and Bitcoin’s Weak Push to $126K
2:23 Why Gary Cardone Parked His Money in STRC
3:13 Collecting 10–12 Bitcoin From STRC Dividends
3:55 Why You Don’t Need to Chase Bitcoin — His $66K and $68K Bids
4:51 STRC vs. Other Preferreds: Liquidity, Yield, and Tax Treatment
6:21 Why $1M–$5M Bitcoin Price Targets Are a Bad Pitch
8:05 Bitcoin’s Real Supply and a Realistic Market Cap Target
10:05 Wall Street, the New Guard, and Bitcoin–Fiat Arbitrage
11:05 What Real Bitcoin Mass Adoption Looks Like

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 Gary Cardone: Wall Street Is Taking Over Bitcoin — For Good first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Ethereum is getting a fork called Hegotá next year, and after that an era ends. That is the core claim of a post co-founder Vitalik Buterin published on September 27, 2026, under the title “The cryptographic world computer”: Hegotá is likely to be the network's last “normal” fork, with properties and technology that someone from 2015 would still recognise. Everything after it concerns recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, heavily optimised consensus procedures and the task of making the whole thing quantum-safe.

For you as a holder there is nothing to do about it for now. There is no deadline, no swap, no address that becomes invalid tomorrow. What matters is the direction: the way Ethereum authorises a transaction, the way a block is verified and the way your wallet talks to the network are all due to change over the coming years. Anyone deciding on custody today is also deciding how much work that changeover will cause them later. Ethereum traded between $2,711 and $2,722 on Tuesday midday, depending on the data source; Buterin's post did not move the price, and that is the accurate finding: this is technology on a horizon of years, not a trading impulse.

What Vitalik Buterin Wrote on September 27

Buterin's starting point is a critique of the word “blockchain”. He works through the original Bitcoin white paper section by section and sets each method from 2010 against the way Ethereum is meant to solve the same task in 2030. His conclusion: in almost every section the method has changed or will change. The question of whether a transaction was authorised was answered in 2010 by a signature; in 2030 it is meant to be sometimes a quantum-safe signature, sometimes several of them, sometimes a zero-knowledge proof. The question of how a node verifies a block was answered in 2010 by downloading and re-executing everything; in future it will be enough to check a SNARK plus data availability via PeerDAS.

Zero-knowledge proof is the name for a cryptographic method with which one party demonstrates that a statement is true without revealing the underlying data. SNARK and STARK are two constructions of such proofs; STARKs dispense with a pre-generated secret and are, on current understanding, considered resistant to quantum computers. PeerDAS is the method by which nodes check on a sampling basis whether block data is genuinely available, without loading all of it.

From this Buterin draws a conclusion that goes beyond technology: a modern cryptographic network such as Ethereum after the Lean upgrade is still called a “blockchain” mainly for historical reasons. In substance it is a hybrid of Satoshi Nakamoto's core ideas and cryptographic tools that emerged from fifty years of academic work and either did not exist in 2009 or were not mature.

Hegotá: The Last Fork a User From 2015 Would Recognise

Hegotá is the name of the Ethereum upgrade that, according to Buterin, is planned for next year. He is referring to the “strawmap”, the roughly sketched roadmap of the developer community. The sentence at issue appears verbatim in his post: Hegotá is probably Ethereum's last normal fork. After it begins a phase in which it is not individual parameters that change but the construction itself.

The word “normal” carries the actual information here. A normal fork shifts fee rules, introduces a new transaction type or improves a process that already exists. A user from 2015 would have understood all of that. What Buterin expects afterwards would be alien to that user: proofs instead of re-execution, signature schemes resting on different mathematics, and block production involving several parties rather than a single producer.

By way of context: a roadmap is not a commitment. Buterin himself writes of a horizon of the next three years and of the fact that much of it is still research or early implementation. Every component has to take the usual route through the core developers, and dates in Ethereum development shift regularly. Anyone deriving a date from this post is reading in more than it contains.

Recursive STARKs: How Ethereum Will Prove Blocks Instead of Re-Executing Them

Today the rule is: anyone who wants certainty that a block is valid re-executes it. A full node loads the transactions and runs them again. That is why running your own node costs storage space and computing time. The roadmap reverses this relationship: the block brings its proof with it, and the node checks the proof. Recursive here means that a proof in turn aggregates proofs, so that in the end a single compact proof stands for a long chain of operations.

In practice that means two things. First, the barrier to checking for yourself falls. Buterin explicitly names this as a side effect for privacy: anyone running their own node does not have to tell anybody which addresses interest them, and a node becomes easier to run once the computational load disappears. Second, the role of light clients changes. So far they can follow the consensus but have to trust an honest majority for validity. In future they should be able to establish both themselves, data availability and computation.

Quantum-Safe Signatures and the Authorisation of a Transaction

The point that affects holders most directly sits in the first row of Buterin's table. Today a signature demonstrates that you authorised a transaction. That signature rests on elliptic curves, a method that a sufficiently large quantum computer could break on the current understanding of cryptography. For 2030 Buterin describes a different state: sometimes a quantum-safe signature, sometimes several of them, sometimes a zero-knowledge proof.

The Ethereum Foundation also lists quantum resistance as a field of work in its public roadmap, in the section on network security. There too no changeover date appears, only a description of the goal. What follows from that for you depends less on the protocol than on the software you use to access your balance: your wallet has to support a new signature type, and on a device that means new firmware. How it looks in everyday use therefore depends on your custody route and not on the protocol; at European level the question now occupies supervisors and custodians as well.

One qualification belongs with this, because it is often lost: it does not follow from “Hegotá is the last normal fork” that Ethereum would be quantum-safe afterwards. It follows that the work on it moves to the foreground after Hegotá. Between a statement of intent and a rolled-out signature changeover lie several years and many intermediate steps for a network with this volume of wallets, applications and contracts.

Proof of Stake After Hegotá: Few-Slot Finality and What Stakers Will Notice

On consensus, Buterin describes the path from proof of work through today's proof of stake to a “heavily optimised” form. Specifically he names few-slot finality, meaning finality within a few slots instead of today's wait of around a quarter of an hour, and an “available chain”, a chain whose data is demonstrably available. Added to that is block production involving several parties, among other things through the FOCIL mechanism, which does not leave the inclusion of transactions to a single builder.

If you stake ETH through a provider or run your own validator, this affects you in two places. Faster finality shortens the time after which an operation counts as complete, which can speed up deposits and withdrawals at exchanges and staking services. And a change to the consensus always means a client update by a set date for validators. Anyone who misses the date earns no rewards in that period and risks penalties. This is not a new insight but the reason why serious staking requires maintenance.

In his post Buterin also names how a transaction's path into the network is meant to change. Today it goes from the user into the mempool and from there to the producer of the block. In future the mempool itself should bring privacy properties with it, and signatures as well as proofs should be separated out early and bundled by mempool nodes. That sounds technical but has one visible consequence: it becomes harder to read out of the mempool who is planning what, and that is precisely where many front-running attacks originate today.

PeerDAS and Light Clients: The Small Node Gains Weight

PeerDAS is the component of the roadmap that, on Buterin's account, has already begun the transition. Instead of loading all the data, nodes take samples and thereby establish whether the data really was published. The same logic applies to storing history: rather than every node keeping everything, each is meant to hold only a small part, distributed across the network.

For you this is above all a statement about independence. The less an own node costs, the more realistic it becomes not merely to believe what your wallet software reports but to check it against the network. Today that is not an option for most private holders, which is why every wallet asks a service provider. Anyone wanting to know how differently providers handle this dependency will find the differences in the software wallet comparison.

Hardware Wallet and Software Wallet: What Holders Should Look for in the Signature Standard

The changeover of a signature scheme does not reach you through the blockchain but through a software update. That raises questions you can already answer today about your custody route, without waiting for Hegotá.

• Does your device still get firmware? A hardware wallet is only fit for the future as long as the manufacturer keeps delivering new schemes. Older models eventually drop out of support, and then precisely the signature type the network expects is missing.
• Do you know your recovery route? Anyone who has their recovery words safe can change devices. Anyone who does not is tied to one manufacturer's support.
• Does your provider know whose keys these are? If your ETH sits at an exchange, it takes on this work entirely. That is convenient and shifts the risk onto its solvency and its supervision.
• Do you use smart contract accounts? Accounts controlled by a contract can be adapted to new schemes more flexibly than a classic account tied to a single key. That is exactly what the term account abstraction in the roadmap is aimed at.

Holding ETH Through an ETP: Who Hands Over the Key Question

Some German investors do not hold Ethereum themselves at all but through an exchange-traded product in their securities account. For this group the signature question is a matter for the issuer and its custodian. You acquire a debt instrument or a share, not a private key, and with that the topic shifts from your firmware to issuer risk. Which routes exist for this in Germany, and how to recognise costs and structure, is set out in our overview of crypto ETFs and ETPs for German securities accounts.

That is not an argument for or against either route. It is a division of tasks: self-custody gives you control and the duty of maintenance. A product in a securities account takes the maintenance off you and gives you a counterparty whose creditworthiness you cannot influence.

Holding Period and Tax: What a Protocol Upgrade Changes About the Acquisition Date

One question comes up with every major upgrade: does it change anything about the tax holding period? On the current understanding in Germany, the one-year period for private disposals applies to crypto assets held privately, and a protocol upgrade is not an acquisition: your ETH remains the same asset, it is neither swapped nor newly acquired. The case is different if a fork produces two chains with two tokens, or if you sell and rebuy your holdings in the course of a changeover.

With Hegotá, nothing on the record so far points to a split of the chain; it is described as a planned upgrade that the developer community follows together. What gives you certainty, though, is only the documentation of your own transactions: purchase date, quantity, price and equivalent value at every movement. Anyone keeping that continuously never has to reconstruct backwards at an upgrade. A binding answer for your case comes from tax advice, not from a trade article.

What Remains Open: Dates, Intermediate Steps and the State of Research

Three points remain expressly open after Buterin's post, and they belong in any assessment. The timing of Hegotá is roughly named as “next year”; the post gives no date. The order of the components after Hegotá is not settled; Buterin describes a bundle of directions, not a sequence. And the maturity varies: PeerDAS is already getting under way, while real-time proofs for entire blocks and quantum-safe signature schemes are, on his own account, in part still research or early implementation.

What is solid, then, is the direction, not the calendar. Anyone deriving a price forecast from it overstretches the source: a roadmap spanning several years does not move a daily price, and the post contains no statement about valuations. Anyone deriving from it that custody requires maintenance, however, is right, and that needs no date.

Ethereum After Hegotá: What to Take Away

1. Find out how long your custody route is supported. Look at whether your device still receives firmware and whether your recovery words are within reach. The hardware wallet comparison shows which manufacturers keep delivering and for how long.
2. With staking, settle who updates the client. With your own validator that is you, with a service it is the provider. Which models exist and what they cost is set out in the overview of staking platforms.
3. Choose deliberately between key and securities account. If you do not want to take on the maintenance, a product in a securities account is the more honest route than a self-custody arrangement you do not keep up; the routes for that are in the overview of crypto ETFs in Germany.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy. The primary source is Vitalik Buterin's post “The cryptographic world computer” of September 27, 2026.)

Demand for Dogecoin through exchange-traded products climbed to a record last week, and it has never been distributed so unevenly. The American spot funds tracking Dogecoin took in a net $2.89 million in the week to September 25. That is the highest weekly figure since this product class launched. At the same time, most of that money now sits in a single fund: the Grayscale Dogecoin Trust holds roughly $13.87 million, about 81 percent of the combined assets of all American DOGE funds.

For the price question this matters more than the small sums first suggest. Anyone in Germany weighing whether Dogecoin belongs in their portfolio is at the same time deciding on the access route, on the running costs and on the tax due on a later gain. This piece puts the numbers in context, sets the supply side against them and shows which levels frame the fourth quarter.

Dogecoin Price at $0.096: The Numbers Going Into Quarter End

Dogecoin traded at $0.09609 on Tuesday midday, the equivalent of about €0.0847. That is a gain of 2.28 percent against the previous day. Over seven days it stands at a loss of 1.83 percent, over thirty days at a gain of 13.12 percent. The daily range ran from $0.091786 to $0.095939, so the current price sits slightly above the 24-hour high. The figures come from the market data service CoinGecko, as of September 29.

Market capitalisation stands at roughly $14.99 billion, with 156.12 billion DOGE in circulation. Over twelve months the coin is down 58.38 percent. From the record high of $0.731578, set on May 7, 2021, the price is around 87 percent away. This framing belongs at the start of any Dogecoin price prediction because it sets the yardstick: even a tripling from today's level would still leave a long road to the old high.

$2.89 Million in One Week: The Record Inflow Into the DOGE Funds

An exchange-traded fund on a crypto asset, a spot ETF in industry parlance, holds the coin itself and tracks its price one to one. Investors buy shares through a securities account rather than through a crypto exchange. For Dogecoin this wrapper has existed in the United States since the start of the year.

Last week's $2.89 million replaces the previous high of roughly $2.59 million, set in the week to January 2. On Friday alone $806,060 came in, and that amount went entirely to the Grayscale fund. Since rival Bitwise announced it would close its own Dogecoin fund, cumulative inflows at Grayscale have risen from $11.7 million to $15.46 million.

Context rather than celebration: $2.89 million is a very small amount for a crypto asset with a market capitalisation of almost $15 billion. The record says more about the short history of these products than about a broad institutional wave. Anyone deriving a price forecast from it should keep the order of magnitude in view.

Grayscale Holds $13.87 Million, Bitwise Winds Down BWOW

The concentration is the real story. On September 10, Bitwise announced it would dissolve its Dogecoin fund, which trades under the ticker BWOW, less than twelve months after launch. Net assets stood at roughly $688,000 on September 9. A fund of that size does not cover its own costs, and that is the usual reason for a wind-down. cryptoticker.io has already set out the background in a separate report on the closure of the Bitwise fund.

What happens next is the part that now becomes relevant. The last trading day on NYSE Arca is Wednesday, October 14. On that day the fund converts its Dogecoin holdings into cash. On Thursday, October 22, the remaining shareholders are paid the net asset value of their shares as of October 21, in cash. The filings are held by the American securities regulator, the SEC, whose servers block automated requests; the dates have been independently confirmed by several trade publications.

October 14 Rarely Affects German Brokerage Accounts

A clarification is worth making here, because the news is running widely through the crypto press. BWOW is an American fund traded on NYSE Arca. It is not usually offered to retail investors in Germany at all, because it lacks the key information document that the European PRIIPs Regulation requires for distribution to retail clients. Most German brokers block American fund shares for exactly that reason.

In practical terms: anyone in Germany who wanted exposure to Dogecoin through an ordinary securities account has in all likelihood never held BWOW. Even so, a look at the account is worthwhile if the investment was made through a foreign broker or an account at a US bank. If a holding with the ticker BWOW appears there, a good two weeks remain until October 14 to sell it directly rather than wait for the cash settlement.

14.4 Million New DOGE a Day: The Supply Side of the Forecast

Set against demand is a supply that, unlike Bitcoin's, does not tighten. Dogecoin pays miners a fixed reward of 10,000 DOGE per block. With a block time of around one minute, that produces roughly 1,440 blocks a day and therefore around 14.4 million new DOGE, or about 5 billion a year.

Converted at the current price of $0.09609, that works out to new supply worth roughly $1.38 million a day. A whole week of record inflows into every American Dogecoin fund thus corresponds to about two days of new issuance. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on September 29, 2026, on the basis of the public block parameters of the Dogecoin protocol and the market data retrieved.

This is precisely where a proposal from the developer community comes in: a request in the Dogecoin project on GitHub suggests cutting the block reward from 10,000 to 1,000 DOGE, pushing annual issuance down from around 5 billion to around 500 million. The proposal has been closed on GitHub and therefore not adopted. Anyone factoring it into a price forecast is counting on something that does not yet exist.

21Shares Dogecoin ETP on Xetra: The Route Through a Brokerage Account

The German exchange-based route is not called an ETF but an ETP or ETN. An exchange traded note is legally a debt instrument issued by the provider, not a ring-fenced fund. With physically backed products the issuer deposits the coins with a custodian, so that each share is actually matched by a holding.

For Dogecoin, 21Shares offers such a product. It carries the ISIN CH1431521033 and the German securities number A4A5WJ, trades on Deutsche Börse in euros and is, according to the provider, 100 percent physically backed; custody is handled by BitGo Europe GmbH. It was launched on April 8, 2025. The annual management fee is 2.50 percent. Assets under management stand at roughly $10.7 million, the same order of magnitude as the American market leader. The details are on the issuer's product page.

The advantage is obvious: no wallet, no key, no separate registration with a crypto exchange, and settlement through the familiar securities account. The price for that is equally fixed, and it is 2.50 percent a year.

2.50 Percent Fee Against the Holding Period Under Section 23 EStG

Weigh the fee against price performance before you settle on a route. Against the 13.12 percent price gain of the past thirty days, an annual fee of 2.50 percent barely registers. In a sideways phase lasting two or three years it eats a noticeable share of the stake, regardless of where the price goes.

The second difference often weighs more heavily in Germany than the fee does. Anyone who buys Dogecoin directly and holds it themselves falls under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act: the gain from a private disposal is tax free after a holding period of more than one year. Within that year an exemption limit of €1,000 applies to all private disposals combined; once it is exceeded, the entire gain is taxable at the personal income tax rate.

With a certificate or a debt instrument on a crypto asset, the prevailing view is that this one-year rule does not apply. Such securities are regularly treated as capital investments, subject to withholding tax of 25 percent plus the solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax, but with the €1,000 saver's allowance. The tax treatment of individual crypto ETNs is not undisputed in the specialist literature and depends on the specific structure. Small portfolios often do well with the allowance, while larger positions held for more than a year argue for buying directly. This paragraph is no substitute for a conversation with a tax adviser; our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers shows which tools make the documentation easier.

Buying Directly Under MiCA: Licensing, Custody and Fees

The second route runs through a crypto exchange. Since the European Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA for short, became fully applicable, trading venues addressing retail clients in the European Union need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. The authorised firms are listed in a public register kept by the European securities regulator ESMA; in Germany, BaFin is the competent authority. Check before your first deposit whether your provider is listed there, and compare trading fees before you transfer a small amount. Which firms are licensed for German clients and what they charge per order is set out in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

After the purchase comes the custody question. Anyone intending to hold for more than a year should not leave the balance sitting on the exchange indefinitely. A hardware wallet keeps the private key offline; the hardware wallet comparison shows which devices are worthwhile for small holdings. Note down the purchase date and purchase price of every tranche as well, because without that record the one-year period cannot later be demonstrated to the tax office.

Levels for the Fourth Quarter: $0.0918 Below, $0.10 Above

On the downside the nearest solid level is $0.091786, the 24-hour low. If the price falls below it and closes there, the advance of recent days has been given back for now; the next stop would be the area around $0.085, where the price spent a longer stretch before the monthly climb.

On the upside the round $0.10 mark stands in the way, roughly 4 percent above the current price. Round numbers are not a physical quantity; they work through the order books, where sell orders cluster at even figures. A daily close clearly above $0.10 would be the first solid signal that the gain of the past thirty days is more than a counter-move within the downtrend of the year.

What these levels cannot deliver is a statement about where Dogecoin stands in a year. The supply calculation above remains the weightier argument. As long as coins worth roughly $1.38 million are created daily and demand from regulated wrappers runs at a few million dollars a week, the rest of the demand has to come from the spot market. With Dogecoin, experience shows that part hangs on sentiment, and sentiment cannot be forecast.

The Bull Case and the Bear Case Side by Side

The constructive reading is supported by the concentration itself: a provider holding 81 percent of the assets has the cost base to run the product for the long term. A fragmented market of five tiny funds would have helped none of them. Should the issuance cut from the developer proposal arrive after all, the largest structural headwind would fall away too.

The sceptical reading is supported by the order of magnitude. The combined assets of all American Dogecoin funds amount to about $17 million, roughly one thousandth of the market capitalisation. A fund wrapper alone does not move a price; it makes access more convenient. The issuance proposal is closed and not adopted, and a price loss of 58 percent over twelve months describes an intact downtrend in which thirty good days are not yet a turn.

Dogecoin in the Fourth Quarter: Your Next Three Steps

1. Check the account. If you are invested through a foreign broker, look at whether a holding with the ticker BWOW sits in your portfolio. You can sell it yourself until October 14. For a new position, compare the fees of the licensed firms in the overview of the best crypto exchanges.
2. Settle on a route and do the maths. Set the 2.50 percent annual fee of the exchange-traded product against the one-year period that applies when buying directly. Use your actual investment horizon, not the best case. The right documentation tools are listed under crypto tax software.
3. Sort out custody and records. When buying directly, the holding belongs on your own wallet after the purchase; the devices are in the hardware wallet comparison. Note the purchase date and purchase price of every tranche so that the holding period can be demonstrated later.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

ether.fi has taken restaking out of its liquid staking token weETH and is dissolving the last technical ties to EigenLayer by the end of the year. For you as a holder that means weETH has since been an ordinary liquid staking token. It earns the rewards of the Ethereum network but no restaking premium any more, and in return it carries no slashing risk from outside services.

The occasion is a CoinDesk report of September 28, 2026, in which chief executive Mike Silagadze sets out his reasoning at length for the first time. The ether.fi documentation supplies the timetable. Together they describe a retreat from a business that two years ago counted as the big bet of the Ethereum ecosystem.

How large that retreat is takes one figure to show: weETH was the largest liquid restaking token of all. When that product of all products throws off restaking, it is not a detail of product maintenance. Ethereum traded at around $2,716 on the morning of September 29; anyone holding ether through such a certificate feels the change in the make-up of their yield, hardly at all in the price.

Restaking out of weETH: the August 2026 rebuild

Restaking means that already staked ether is pledged a second time as collateral, this time for outside services that attach themselves to the security of the Ethereum network. EigenLayer invented the procedure and made it big. Liquid restaking tokens such as weETH bundled both into one tradeable instrument: the normal staking reward and the additional premium from restaking.

In August 2026 ether.fi cleared that second layer away. Since then weETH represents ordinary Ethereum staking alone. The provider's documentation puts it soberly: rewards come from Ethereum's consensus and execution layers, they are variable and not guaranteed, and they contain neither restaking income nor slashing exposure to EigenLayer services.

Silagadze commented on the rebuild in four words: "End of an era. Sad." To CoinDesk he was more specific. There had been no yield worth mentioning in restaking, and stakers had perceived a certain risk, so an exit had seemed sensible. Users had been notified several times and had consented to the change.

What separates weETH from eETH

Both tokens stand for the same staked ether; they only book the proceeds differently. eETH is a rebasing token: your number of units grows as rewards accrue. weETH is the wrapped, non-rebasing variant. The number of units stays the same, while the value of one weETH measured in eETH rises. The distinction is no quibble, because it later decides how a gain becomes visible for tax at all.

EigenPod withdrawal credentials: the timetable to the fourth quarter

The exit runs in stages, and ether.fi puts numbers on them in its own documentation. In August 2026, it says, less than one percent of protocol funds were still in restaking. That remainder was to disappear by the end of the third quarter of 2026, that is by September 30. The withdrawal credentials of the EigenPods, the technical bracket between ether.fi's validators and EigenLayer, are to follow by the fourth quarter of 2026.

By the end of the year, then, nothing is left of the connection that could still bite in an emergency. For you the second date is the interesting one. As long as the withdrawal credentials exist, part of the path by which your ether leaves the network again still runs over outside code. After that it does not.

$10 billion secured, $99,977 in fees: why restaking no longer pays

The chief executive's reasoning can be checked against the numbers, and they are merciless. CoinDesk sets two values side by side for the week to September 8. The restaking sector as a whole secured $10.02 billion at that point and took $99,977 in fees for it. That is the turnover of a mid-sized trade business, spread across assets in the tens of billions.

Provider profits follow the same curve. The five largest liquid restaking protocols, namely Renzo, Kelp, Swell, Puffer and Bedrock, together earned $953,350 in gross profit in the second quarter of 2026. Three quarters earlier the figure had been $2.18 million. Taken individually the picture gets starker still: $21,590 fell to Puffer, $22,370 to Swell.

EigenLayer itself has felt the collapse most sharply. The protocol's secured assets stood at $22.06 billion in August 2025 and stand at $5.10 billion today. The peak is put at between $19.7 billion and $22.1 billion depending on the count; the direction is the same either way. The project now trades as EigenCloud and puts verifiable computation to the fore, with deposited capital serving only as the underlay.

Liquid staking versus restaking: 53 times the revenue per dollar

The comparison that matters is in the same CoinDesk analysis. Ordinary liquid staking secured $51.87 billion in the week to September 8 and earned $27.35 million in fees on it. Per dollar secured, plain staking therefore earns roughly 53 times what restaking brings in.

That explains why the exit was commercially unavoidable. A provider that carries an additional default risk for the second security layer while receiving practically nothing for it is subsidising somebody else's business model with its customers' capital. Anyone letting their ether work through a service provider should therefore check regularly which sources of income their provider still taps at all and how much of it arrives with them; our overview of staking providers shows how far the terms diverge.

A side effect concerns commissions. When a source of income falls away, the share the provider retains of the remaining proceeds does not change arithmetically. But it weighs more heavily, because the base has become smaller.

weETHs on Symbiotic: what the second token means for holders

ether.fi has not abolished restaking but outsourced it. Anyone who still wants a restaking premium can switch into weETHs, a separate token built on Symbiotic instead of EigenLayer. Restaking is thus no longer an extra that every weETH holder carries automatically, but a decision you have to take actively.

For most holders that is precisely the good news. The risks are separated again and can be named one by one. Those who do not want them need do nothing; those who do know what they are taking on.

Symbiotic in one sentence

Symbiotic is a competing restaking platform that lends deposited capital to outside networks and says it has more than fifty of them connected. The procedure solves the same problem as EigenLayer but with a different risk architecture, and it faces the same thin market for fees.

Yield, risk, slashing: the three quantities behind the weETH return

Slashing is the penalty a validator pays for breaking the rules of the network: part of the deposited ether is confiscated. With ordinary staking there is exactly one source for that penalty, namely the Ethereum network itself. With restaking a further one is added for every connected service, with its own rules and its own points of failure.

The yield you get for it remains variable. ether.fi expressly does not guarantee it, because it depends on how busy the network is and on the fees users happen to be paying. What the rebuild changed is the composition: the fluctuating but manageable network yield stays, the additional premium falls away, and with it a bundle of risks few people could take in fully.

How much the provider's commission eats into that yield was shown by our analysis of fourteen staking providers on September 13, 2026. The finding holds unchanged after the rebuild; it simply weighs more heavily now.

Buying and custody: weETH through MiCA-regulated providers in Europe

This is the biggest hurdle for European investors, and it has nothing to do with the rebuild. weETH is a DeFi token. A regulated European exchange will not as a rule put it in your account. You buy ether from a provider with MiCA authorisation, pull it into a wallet of your own and deposit it there yourself.

That shifts responsibility entirely to you. There is no deposit guarantee, no provider to restore lost access, and no European supervisor to step in over a flaw in the contract code. Anyone taking this route needs a hardware wallet, a securely stored recovery phrase and the patience to test both once before the first larger amount.

Holding period and accrual: how the tax office treats staking income from weETH

This is where the technical distinction made above comes back. With a rebasing token such as eETH the number of units grows, and every credit can be read as an accrual taxable in the year it accrues. With weETH the number of units stays constant, the gain sits in the exchange ratio and only becomes visible on sale, which argues rather for treatment as a disposal gain.

The question is not conclusively settled, and it is why in our piece on restaking, liquid staking and tax of July 22, 2026 we counselled caution: new products meet old rules that were never written for them. The disappearance of the restaking premium at least simplifies matters, because one type of income, and with it one question of demarcation, falls away.

In practice that means documenting every inflow and outflow with date, quantity and price, from day one. Anyone who has to reconstruct that afterwards ends up paying for gaps that two clicks could have closed at the moment of booking. Only a tax adviser can give a dependable statement about your own liability in any case.

Unstaking at ether.fi: queue, liquidity and the way back into ETH

The way back runs through a redemption in the provider's interface. There is no fixed deadline for it. In its documentation ether.fi names three quantities on which the duration depends: the liquidity available in the protocol, the withdrawal queue of the Ethereum validators and general network load.

Anyone wanting to sell towards a fixed date should allow for that uncertainty and not assume the exit will succeed on the same day. The second route runs through the market: weETH can be traded, and in quiet phases the market price sits close to the calculated value. In hectic phases it does not, and that is exactly when many want out at once.

ETHFI, ETH and the neobank rebuild: the second-quarter numbers

The exit from restaking is also the consequence of a rebuild inside the company. ether.fi's gross profit fell from $18.71 million in the third quarter of 2025 to $9.99 million in the second quarter of 2026, a drop of 47 percent. At the same time the card business has grown: its share of monthly revenue rose from 17 percent in January to 46 percent in July.

Silagadze describes that as a successful swap. Income from the banking business had entirely replaced the loss of restaking revenue and the lower ether price; the annual run rate of total revenue would rise by about 38 percent, while income from staking and restaking had fallen by 70 percent. These figures come from the company itself and are not supported by audited accounts.

For you as a holder that is no footnote. A provider drawing half its revenue from a card business is a different company from a pure staking service, with different dependencies and different supervisory questions.

weETH and restaking: how to proceed now

1. Check what you actually hold. Look in your wallet to see whether weETH, eETH or weETHs is sitting there. Only weETHs still carries restaking risk after the rebuild. Which returns are available from other providers and on what terms is shown by our comparison of staking platforms.
2. Bring your records up to date. Record the date, quantity and price of every movement, including a switch between the token variants. A tax and portfolio tracker takes the reconstruction off your hands, as long as you set it up early enough.
3. Choose your exit route deliberately. Redemption with the provider and a sale on the market lead to different waiting times and different prices. Anyone selling through an exchange anyway should compare the fees first; which houses are authorised under MiCA is in our exchange comparison.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency investments carry a high degree of risk.

Crypto paper trading means trading at real prices with money that does not exist. Every order is booked and every profit and loss is calculated, but nothing ever reaches an exchange. It is the cheapest way to watch a strategy fail, which is exactly the point. What paper trading cannot do matters just as much: it simulates the market, not you. This guide explains how paper trading works for crypto, how to start without an account, and the three places where the simulation is kinder than reality.

Crypto Paper Trading: Key Points at a Glance

• Paper trading is trading at real prices with simulated execution. No money moves, so you cannot win any either.
• Free and without signing up, you can practise in the CryptoTicker trading simulator: $10,000 in play money, 50 coins, unlimited trades, as of September 28, 2026.
• Fees belong in the simulation. At 0.05% per execution, 20 round trips a day at full position size cost 2% of the account in a single day.
• Losses weigh double: in Tversky and Kahneman's 1992 study, a loss weighed about 2.25 times as much as an equal gain. Paper trading barely trains that part.
• Risking 1% per trade on $10,000 means losing no more than $100 before your stop.
• Move to real money only after four weeks without breaking a rule, and then with less money than you practised with.

What is paper trading?

The term dates from before trading software: anyone who wanted to test an idea wrote the purchase, price and quantity on paper and later worked out what would have happened. Today software does the job. It reads real prices, fills your orders against them and turns that into an account balance, open positions and a result.

A paper trade is a single simulated trade: entry, stop, target and exit, booked at market prices without an order ever reaching the order book.

Paper trading and a demo account mean almost the same thing in practice. The difference is the provider: a demo account is usually a broker's practice account, designed to lead you into a funded one. Paper trading is the method, and it works without a broker. What to look for in a demo account is covered in our guide to the trading demo account without signing up. If you want to trade for real afterwards, you need a regulated exchange; our exchange comparison sets out fees and licences.

How does crypto paper trading work?

Every paper trading platform does three things at its core:

1. Read prices. It pulls prices continuously from an exchange or data provider. The closer they are to real time, the more honest the result.
2. Simulate orders. Market, limit, stop loss and take profit orders are checked against the current price and filled once the condition is met.
3. Keep the books. Balance, position size, fees, liquidation for leveraged positions, and the result in dollars and percent.

The sentence that matters: the prices are real, the execution is not. Your simulated order moves no price, always finds a counterparty and never waits in a queue. Why that matters is explained below under the three gaps.

Crypto paper trading for free, without signing up

Crypto differs from stocks in three ways: the market never closes, leverage of up to 100x is common on perpetual futures, and daily moves of ten percent are no exception for smaller coins. A crypto simulator should therefore run around the clock, allow long and short positions and calculate liquidation.

The trading simulator in the CryptoTicker Trading Hub works like this, as of September 28, 2026:

• No signup, no credit card. You open the page and trade. Your progress is saved in the browser; you only need an account to continue on a second device.
• $10,000 in play money, unlimited trades. Nothing is ranked, and you can reset at any time.
• 50 coins at real prices. You can trade the 50 largest coins with more than $50 million in daily volume.
• Long, short and leverage. Choose between leverage of up to 10x or up to 100x and watch how quickly liquidation approaches.
• Three levels. Beginner, Standard and Pro; the beginner mode keeps leverage and short selling out of the way at first.

Other ways to paper trade crypto:

A charting platform is strong if you already do your analysis there. A broker's demo account makes sense once you have chosen that broker. A simulator without an account is the shortest route to your first paper trade.

The three gaps between paper trading and real trading

Gap 1: execution

A simulated market order is filled at the displayed price. A real one hits the order book, and with large orders or thin markets the price moves before everything is filled. That difference is called slippage. For bitcoin and ether at retail position sizes it is usually small; for small coins in hectic minutes it is not. That is why the CryptoTicker simulator only lists coins with high daily volume.

Gap 2: costs

A paper account without fees makes every strategy look better than it is. A worked example using the fee the CryptoTicker simulator charges, 0.05% per execution:

The calculation is deliberately simple and ignores compounding, but it shows the mechanism: if you trade a lot, you have to earn the fees first. On perpetual futures the funding rate comes on top, settled between longs and shorts several times a day depending on the exchange. How perpetuals work is explained in our comparison of the best perp DEXs.

Gap 3: you

The biggest gap is psychological. In 1992, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman measured that people weigh a loss about 2.25 times as heavily as an equal gain. With play money the effect is weak: a 20% drawdown is a number on a screen. With your own money it is the moment people move their stop lower instead of letting it trigger.

Paper trading trains your rules, not your nerves. That is not a reason to skip it but a reason to do it properly: with fixed rules that you write down in advance and actually follow in the simulation.

How to paper trade properly: four weeks with rules

1. Week 1: write your rules. Risk no more than 1% per trade, which is $100 on $10,000. Set the stop before you enter. No more than three losing trades a day, then stop.
2. Week 2: size your positions. Position size equals risk divided by stop distance. With a stop 5% below entry, the position may be $100 ÷ 0.05 = $2,000. At 10x leverage that ties up $200 of margin, but the risk is still $100.
3. Week 3: keep a journal. For every trade, note the reason, entry, stop, target and result. After 20 trades you will see which setups work and which only generate fees.
4. Week 4: count rule breaks. Every moved stop and every exceeded limit is a rule break. The goal is zero, not a high balance.

Order types, charts and risk basics are explained in our crypto trading guide for beginners.

From paper trading to real money

The switch only makes sense once three things hold for several weeks: no rule breaks, a known maximum drawdown that you sat through, and a result after fees. Then one simple rule applies: your first real stake is smaller than your play money, not larger. If you practised with $10,000 and deposit $1,000, recalculate every position with the same formula rather than simply scaling down.

Real money also means tax. In many countries, selling or swapping crypto is a taxable event. Our guide on how to file crypto tax covers the basics; for your own situation, ask a tax adviser.

Where to go after your first paper trade, from order types and position sizing to a four-week practice plan, is set out in our guide to learning to trade online for free. If you then want to start with real money, our exchange comparison lists fees, licences and deposit methods.

Sources

• Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman: Advances in Prospect Theory: Cumulative Representation of Uncertainty. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5 (1992), pp. 297 to 323.
• TradingView Help Center: Paper Trading, functionality and initial capital, as of 28.09.2026.
• CryptoTicker Trading Hub, trading simulator, as of 28.09.2026.

Anyone moving funds onto Base for the first time notices quickly that the network is very fast in one direction and very slow in the other. The trip from an exchange to Base takes minutes and costs fractions of a cent. The official way back to Ethereum takes seven days. That is neither a fault nor congestion; it is built into the design of the network. This piece explains both directions, shows what a transfer really costs, and walks through Basescan, the block explorer you use to see what happened to your money.

Base is the Ethereum extension built by the American exchange Coinbase. According to DefiLlama data, the decentralised exchanges on this network handled swap volume of around $1.2 billion in a single day at the end of September. Even so, it remains largely unfamiliar ground for European users: search for the explorer or the bridge in your own language and you will find almost nothing but the providers' own English guides.

What Base is: an optimistic rollup from Coinbase on the OP Stack

Base is a layer 2. The term means a blockchain of its own that draws its security from a larger network instead of producing it itself. Base bundles its users' transactions, processes them cheaply on its own chain and then writes the result to Ethereum. The data on which a dispute would be settled therefore sits on Ethereum, while the computing work happens on Base.

Technically Base belongs to the family of optimistic rollups. Optimistic here means that the network first assumes the results reported to Ethereum are correct and gives everyone a window in which to challenge a false entry. The verification procedure behind it is called a fault proof. The independent monitor L2Beat lists Base as an optimistic rollup at maturity "Stage 1", the middle of three stages, at which some of the emergency powers still sit with a security council.

Base is built on the OP Stack, an open construction kit for layer-2 networks. That is why every tool you know from Ethereum works on Base without modification: the same wallet formats, the same addresses, the same kind of smart contracts. Convenient, and at the same time the most common source of error, because the same address exists on both networks while funds still land on only one of them.

Base network details: chain ID 8453, ETH for gas and no token of its own

Three pieces of information are enough to enter Base into any wallet. The chain ID is 8453, the number by which wallets and applications tell networks apart. The standard endpoint is mainnet.base.org. And the currency for fees is Ether, the same ETH you know from Ethereum. All three values appear exactly like that in the network overview in the Base documentation.

From that follows the most important sentence for anyone starting out: Base has no network token of its own. You need ETH on Base to be able to send a transaction at all. Anyone who moves only stablecoins onto the network without a cent of ETH is left with a visible balance that cannot be moved. What trades under the name Base are projects running on the network, not the network itself; we have written up the look at the Coinbase chain's ecosystem separately.

Setting up a wallet: Base App, MetaMask and the manual entry

Coinbase now runs its own wallet under the name Base App. The network is already configured there, so there is nothing for you to enter. If you use a wallet from another provider, you will in most cases find Base in a list of prepared networks and simply select it.

If only the manual route is left, you enter the three values from the previous section: chain ID, endpoint and ETH as the currency. After that the wallet shows Base as a network of its own alongside Ethereum, and your balance appears differently depending on which network is selected. Which type of wallet suits which amount is broken down in our software wallet comparison; the general procedure for any network is in our overview of adding networks, bridges and explorers.

One note that saves a lot of trouble: a wallet address is valid on Base and on Ethereum alike. You do not have two addresses but one address on two networks. That is exactly why copying the right address is not enough — you also have to select the right network.

Base fees: what a transfer really costs at the end of September

A fee on Base is made up of two parts. The first pays for the computing work on Base itself. The second pays for the space on Ethereum where the data is later stored. Together they make up the amount your wallet displays, and both are settled in ETH.

At the end of September we recalculated several real transactions from a live Base block. The result: a simple transfer cost around 0.13 cents, an elaborate interaction with a smart contract around 3.6 cents. The share accounted for by the space on Ethereum came to a few hundredths of a cent in each case and barely registered against the computing work.

For comparison: the same transfer directly on Ethereum costs a multiple of that, depending on load. That gap is precisely why Base exists. It comes at a price, though, and the price only becomes visible when you want your money back.

The way in: an exchange withdrawal straight onto Base instead of a detour via Ethereum

There are two routes onto the network, and the cheaper one is the one most people overlook. At many trading venues you can send your funds straight onto the Base network when you withdraw. You simply pick Base rather than Ethereum as the destination network. The exchange handles the transfer internally and you pay only its withdrawal fee, often a matter of a few cents or nothing at all.

The second route runs over the official bridge from Ethereum to Base. You send ETH from your own wallet to a contract on Ethereum, and a few minutes later the same amount appears on Base. This route costs you a full Ethereum transaction, so considerably more than the exchange withdrawal. It is worth taking above all when your money already sits in your own wallet on Ethereum.

A third factor often decides the cost question more than the transfer itself: what you paid when you bought on the exchange. How those fees are put together we worked through, using Coinbase as the example, in our breakdown of Coinbase's fees.

One caveat belongs here: maintenance windows and network upgrades halt deposits and withdrawals for a time. For the hard fork at the end of September several trading venues suspended Base transfers for a few hours, as we described in our piece on the Cobalt switch on September 30. If you are transferring on a day like that, it is better to plan in some slack.

The way back takes seven days: fault proofs and the challenge period

The official route from Base back to Ethereum runs in three steps, and the Base documentation describes them expressly. First you send the withdrawal on Base. Then a proof is submitted on Ethereum that this withdrawal actually took place on Base. Only after that does the real waiting time begin.

That waiting time is called the challenge period, and at Base it lasts seven days. The official documentation on bridging and withdrawals puts it unambiguously: standard withdrawals to Ethereum must wait seven days before they can be completed. Only once that period has elapsed can the withdrawal be finalised on Ethereum.

The reason lies in the word "optimistic". Because the network initially accepts its results unverified, it needs a window in which someone can challenge a false entry. Seven days is that window. It protects you personally from an error rather less than it protects the entire balance held on Base from a falsified report to Ethereum.

In practice that means anyone who needs their money at short notice should not treat the official way back as an emergency exit. And once the seven days are running, the process cannot be sped up — the period expires regardless of how urgent the matter is.

Intent bridges: a faster way back over liquidity providers, with a risk of its own

There are providers at which a withdrawal from Base arrives in minutes rather than days. What matters is understanding what actually happens, and the Base documentation is clear on the point: these services do not shorten the challenge period at any stage; instead they front you the money.

The mechanism is called an intent bridge. You declare which amount you want on which network. A liquidity provider pays you that amount on the destination network immediately and takes your funds on Base in return. It then sits through the seven days itself. Your waiting time has been taken over by somebody else, and they charge a discount for it.

From that follows a risk the official bridge does not carry: for the duration of the process you are trusting a contract and an operator, not only the network. Bridges have for years been among the most frequently attacked components in crypto. For small amounts and a quick switch that is often acceptable; for the bulk of a portfolio, rather less so.

Reading Basescan: status, token transfers and granted approvals

The block explorer for Base is called Basescan and sits at basescan.org. A block explorer is a window into the blockchain: you enter an address or the identifier of a transaction and see what actually happened, regardless of what your wallet displays.

Four items matter day to day. The status tells you whether the transaction went through or was aborted with an error; an aborted transaction still costs a fee. Under token transfers you see which tokens actually changed hands in the operation, which in swaps often differs from the display in the wallet. The transaction fee field shows the fee really paid, in ETH. And the token approvals tab lists every approval your address has ever granted.

That last tab is the most valuable and the least used. Anyone who swaps regularly on a network accumulates a long list of open permissions there over time. Tools that pull such overviews together across several networks are in our comparison of analytics platforms.

Typical mishaps: wrong network, missing gas, counterfeit tokens

Three mistakes catch out nearly every newcomer, and all three can be headed off in advance.

The withdrawal to the wrong network. You withdraw from an exchange, pick Ethereum instead of Base by accident, and the funds end up at the right address on the wrong network. That is not a total loss, because the address belongs to you on both networks. But you have to move the money over a bridge and pay Ethereum fees for it. The same applies in reverse. So check the destination network in the withdrawal dialogue before you confirm.

The missing fee token. You hold stablecoins on Base but no ETH. Every transaction fails, including sending on the stablecoins themselves. The remedy is a small amount of ETH placed on the network in advance; the equivalent of a few euros covers a great many transactions.

The token that sits in the wallet but is worthless. On open networks anyone can create a token with any name they like and send it to other people's addresses. A familiar name appearing in your wallet means nothing. What counts is the contract address alone, and you check that in the explorer against the project's own figure. An unsolicited token that invites you to swap it on an unfamiliar site is the entry point to an attempted fraud.

Revoking approvals and spotting phishing on Base

An approval is the permission you grant a smart contract to move a particular token from your address. Without it no swap on a decentralised exchange works. The problem is its duration: many applications ask by default for an unlimited approval, and it stays in place until you actively withdraw it.

Revoking is a simple operation. You call up the list of your approvals, select the entries you no longer need and send a transaction that sets them to zero. On Base, thanks to the low fees, that costs fractions of a cent. Such a sweep makes sense whenever you have not used an application for a longer stretch.

With phishing, things run on Base as on any other network. The most dangerous thing is rarely the fake input mask for a recovery phrase. The heavier risk is the signature you give for something you have not read. Before every confirmation your wallet shows you which contract receives which permission. Anyone holding larger amounts is better off keeping them separate from the wallet they use day to day.

Tax in Germany: what bridging and swapping trigger

For investors in Germany the principle in section 23 of the Income Tax Act applies: selling or swapping a cryptocurrency is a private disposal transaction. If the purchase is more than a year in the past, a gain remains tax-free. Below that it counts as taxable income as soon as the sum of all private disposal transactions in a year exceeds the exemption threshold.

On Base two operations have to be kept apart. When you move ETH over the official bridge between Ethereum and Base, it stays the same asset under your own control; the holding period keeps running. When you swap one token for another on Base, by contrast, that is a disposal transaction like any on an exchange, with everything that entails. With an intent bridge you should look closely at what was actually booked, because in some cases a swap happens there rather than a transfer.

Because many small transactions pile up on Base, the documentation quickly becomes hard to follow. It is best kept as you go rather than reconstructed in the spring. This information does not replace tax advice; assessing a specific case belongs in expert hands.

Market depth on Base: one provider carries half the swap volume

Daily volume on the decentralised exchanges on Base stood at around $1.2 billion at the end of September, according to DefiLlama figures, and roughly half of that fell to a single provider, the Base-native exchange Aerodrome. That is a high concentration and worth knowing about: a large part of the market depth hangs on one project.

For small and medium amounts, Base is therefore one of the cheapest ways to move and swap funds. For large holdings the calculation shifts. There the one-off Ethereum fee barely registers, while the seven days to final withdrawal and the risk of fast bridges weigh more heavily. The honest answer is therefore that Base suits what you move well, and what you leave sitting rather less well.

Base in daily use: your next three steps

1. Set the network up properly and put gas aside. Enter Base with chain ID 8453 into your wallet or pick it from the list, and send yourself a small amount of ETH on the network before you transfer anything else. Which wallet suits which amount is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.
2. Try the way in with a small amount. Withdraw a two-figure euro amount from your trading venue straight onto the Base network and then look the operation up in the explorer. That way you learn how the network behaves on a sum whose loss would not hurt. Which trading venues are authorised in the EU and what their withdrawals cost is shown in our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Document every movement from the outset. Note the date, the amount and the equivalent value on every swap, so that the holding period can be traced later. Which programs record that automatically is shown in our comparison of tax and portfolio tools.

(As of September 29, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Matt Brittin, who joined the BBC from Google, argued that "not all creativity is bad," while noting that the technology won't replace humans.

Bitcoin is up 7.33% in September, edging past 2024 as the best September on record, with one day left before the monthly candle closes.

Analysts point to crude prices capping non-yielding assets, while spot ETFs have taken money in for eight sessions running.

Plus, crypto majors rebound as oil and yields fall and Saylor’s Strategy returns to buying Bitcoin.

The judge has told Pleterski he will raise objections on his behalf, to keep inadmissible evidence away from the jury.

Quant wallets inactive since 2023 mobilized $10 million in QNT token following an interbank rally, moving massive multi-million dollar positions onto exchanges.

Ethereum has held above $2,600 after a strong September recovery, with institutional buying supporting demand while large holders have begun taking profits near recent highs.

Bitwise rolls out its spot NEAR ETF (NRR) with an audacious $562 target, framing the protocol as the financial clearinghouse for AI agents.

Morgan Stanley intensifies its push into the cryptocurrency market after launching a digital asset lab to test stablecoins and DeFi.

Bitcoin’s derivatives market is undergoing one of its sharpest leverage resets in a year.

TLDR

• Citigroup stock falls 0.56% as Citi launches multi-market Swift payments worldwide.
• Citi connects banks to instant payment networks through one Swift structure globally.
• The service supports AUD, GBP and INR payments through major local payment rails.
• WorldLink extends payment access across 135 currencies and 54 global markets.
• Citi expands real-time payment reach without requiring separate local bank accounts.

Citigroup stock traded lower Tuesday as Citi launched a multi-market cross-border payments service through the Swift payments scheme. Shares traded at $130.58, down 0.56%, after retreating from an intraday high above $132. The launch expands Citi’s real-time payment capabilities across several major international markets.

Citigroup Inc., C

Citi Launches Multi-Market Swift Payments

Citi became the first bank to activate multiple markets through the Swift payments scheme. The service operates through Citi’s Global Clearing network and WorldLink Payment Services. It gives bank clients access to several domestic instant payment systems through one account structure.

The model removes the need for clients to establish separate banking relationships in each market. It also reduces requirements for bilateral agreements and local technical infrastructure. Citi plans to add more currencies and markets as the service expands.

The bank currently supports real-time payments in Australian dollars, British pounds, and Indian rupees. These payments use Australia’s NPP, Britain’s FPS, and India’s IMPS systems. Citi has also expanded USD Clearing for transfers directly to eligible Citi beneficiaries in the United States.

Citi Expands Cross-Border Payment Network

The service targets financial institutions seeking faster access to international payment networks. More than 12,500 financial institutions already connect to Swift globally. Participating banks can use existing Swift connections instead of building separate systems for each country.

Previously, banks often needed accounts in individual markets before processing local instant payments. They also relied on partner banks and custom connections with domestic clearing systems. Citi’s new structure consolidates those requirements through its global payments network.

Citi also connects the service with existing real-time products across its institutional banking business. These include 24/7 USD Clearing, Citi Token Services, and Citi Custody+. Together, these services support continuous movement of payments, liquidity, securities, and collateral.

WorldLink Supports Wider Payment Reach

WorldLink already provides Citi clients with broad access to international payment markets. The platform connects clients directly with nine instant payment schemes. It also supports near real-time wire payments across 20 currencies and 54 markets.

The network handles payments across 135 currencies and provides integrated foreign exchange services. Clients can access more than 4,500 currency pairs through the platform. WorldLink also supports payments into bank accounts, digital wallets, and payment cards.

The latest Swift integration extends Citi’s strategy around interoperable and always-on global payments. Swift continues expanding its retail payments framework across additional corridors and participating banks. Citi’s rollout strengthens its position in cross-border payments while simplifying market access for financial institutions.

The post Citigroup (C) Stock: Drops as Company Launches Multi-Market Swift Payments appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Tesla Semi has entered volume production nine years after its initial unveiling.
• The new Nevada plant could produce up to 50,000 electric trucks annually at full capacity.
• Higher diesel prices may improve the Semi’s cost appeal for fleet operators with cheaper charging access.
• Wall Street remains divided on Tesla stock, with recent price targets ranging from $268 to $485.
• Investors are still focused more on deliveries, margins, Cybertruck progress, and upcoming earnings than Semi production.

Tesla (TSLA) stock has gained about 20% since early August, but recent selling showed sentiment can change quickly. Shares lost roughly 7% across two sessions after softer delivery forecasts raised demand questions. Meanwhile, Tesla started volume production of the Semi, adding another milestone.

Tesla, Inc., TSLA

Tesla Stock Weighs Semi Production Milestone

Tesla opened a dedicated Semi plant in Nevada nine years after unveiling the truck. The factory can produce up to 50,000 units a year at capacity. The launch moves the Semi beyond pilot fleets into commercial production.

PepsiCo has operated early Tesla Semi trucks since 2022, while other freight groups have placed larger orders. Recent coverage of Tesla’s high-volume Semi launch pointed to new commercial commitments as production expands.

Nevada Plant Brings Semi to Scale

Tesla offers a long-range Semi rated for about 500 miles while carrying a full load. The company also plans a shorter-range version for regional routes. Those options give fleet operators choices based on route length and charging access.

Tesla is advancing other vehicle programs. A recent update on the first Cybercab built with in-house cathode material showed that the company continues investing in battery production and autonomous transport as the Semi rollout moves forward.

Diesel Costs Strengthen Fleet Economics

Higher diesel prices could improve the case for electric trucks. Fleet buyers compare fuel, maintenance, charging, and purchase costs over several years. When diesel prices rise, electric trucks can become more competitive for operators with lower-cost depot charging.

Electricity prices remain important to that calculation. Higher power costs can reduce savings from switching away from diesel. The Semi’s economics will vary by region, route, charging setup, and energy contracts available to each fleet.

Analysts Still Focus on Bigger Catalysts

Wall Street remains divided on Tesla stock. Cantor Fitzgerald recently kept an Overweight rating and a $485 target, while BNP Paribas set a $268 target. The gap shows that analysts value Tesla’s vehicle, autonomy, energy, and technology businesses differently.

Investors are watching the Roadster unveiling scheduled for October 1 as Tesla approaches its next earnings report. Vehicle deliveries, automotive margins, and Cybercab progress will remain key areas of attention heading into year-end. The Semi gives Tesla a larger commercial vehicle business, but production scale will determine its financial contribution.

The post Tesla Stock Gains a New Catalyst After Nine-Year Semi Wait appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Microsoft stock moved above $500 and opened Tuesday’s session at $509.
• JPMorgan maintained a bullish view on MSFT with a $625 price target.
• RBC Capital set an even higher $640 target, supported by Copilot growth.
• Microsoft shares have gained about 7.7% year-to-date in 2026.
• Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and AI infrastructure spending remain key growth drivers.

Microsoft (MSFT) stock moved above $500 this week and opened Tuesday at $509. Shares have gained about 7.7% in 2026. The move keeps MSFT near a fresh test of the $550 level after a sharp recovery from earlier weakness.

Microsoft Corporation, MSFT

Wall Street firms have raised targets as Microsoft’s cloud and artificial intelligence businesses gain traction. Analysts continue to focus on Azure growth, Copilot adoption, and returns from heavy data-center spending.

Microsoft Stock Draws Higher Wall Street Targets

JPMorgan analyst Samik Chatterjee kept an Overweight rating and set a $625 December 2027 target. That target sits about 23% above the $509 opening price. A move there would turn $1,000 into roughly $1,228, excluding fees and taxes.

RBC Capital has also placed a $640 target on MSFT, reflecting confidence in Microsoft’s AI strategy. Stifel recently upgraded shares to Buy and raised its target to $575 after reviewing Azure trends.

Copilot and Azure Support the Bullish Case

Microsoft’s AI products remain central to analyst forecasts. Recent Microsoft analyst upgrades followed stronger expectations for Azure capacity, AI demand, and software revenue growth.

The company has expanded Copilot across Microsoft 365, GitHub, and enterprise tools. Microsoft also benefits from recurring enterprise subscriptions across its software portfolio.

Microsoft continues spending heavily on data centers, chips, and related infrastructure to support rising AI workloads. That spending remains an important part of the valuation debate. Microsoft’s redesigned Copilot launched on September 25 and brought several AI functions into one platform. Paid Copilot subscriptions reached 30 million in the latest quarter, showing broader enterprise use across Microsoft’s software customer base globally.

Microsoft also refreshed Copilot with chat, coding, and automation tools. The new Copilot platform combines workplace features with tools that build applications and automate repetitive cloud tasks.

AI Growth Meets Spending Risks

The company’s AI push has helped Microsoft stock recover from earlier 2026 losses. Azure growth and wider Copilot adoption remain key measures for investors tracking future revenue.

High capital spending can pressure margins, while slower adoption could reduce expected growth. A recent AI-driven Microsoft rally showed continued market interest, but competition from Amazon, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic remains intense.

Analyst targets remain above Microsoft’s current trading range. The $625 JPMorgan target and $640 RBC target point to further upside in those forecasts. They remain estimates and depend on Azure growth, Copilot adoption, and spending discipline.

The post Microsoft (MSFT) Stock Surges Past $500 as Wall Street Eyes $625 appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Polymarket trader Dicedicedice returned after six months, following a $119,964 profit on an Iran strike wager.
• Six wallets earned about $1.2M on Iran strike markets, prompting congressional scrutiny of trading controls.
• The trader’s new Trump AI wager hinges on formal presidential action, not remarks made at the United Nations.
• Polymarket’s September 30 Trump AI market showed about 60% implied odds and roughly $787,000 in volume.

A Polymarket trader who earned about $120,000 on a February Iran Strike wager has returned after more than six months of inactivity. Blockchain analytics account Lookonchain flagged the activity on September 29, identifying the trader as “Dicedicedice.”

The latest position targets a Trump AI market. The account previously drew attention after profiting from a contract asking whether the United States would strike Iran by February 28. That trade later triggered scrutiny.

February Iran Strike Win Put Trader Under Scrutiny

According to reports, Dicedicedice bought 149,955 “Yes” shares at 20 cents before the February 28 U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran. The position generated a net profit of $119,964, equal to roughly a 400% return.

That result placed the trader among several closely watched accounts. Bubblemaps later identified six wallets that collectively earned about $1.2 million from Iran Strike contracts. Several wallets were newly funded before placing concentrated bets.

Those patterns prompted lawmakers to examine whether prediction-market participants could be trading with nonpublic information. However, no public evidence established wrongdoing by Dicedicedice.

Likewise, no evidence has shown that the Polymarket trader held classified information, worked for the U.S. government, or committed insider trading. The attention widened in May when the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation into how Polymarket and Kalshi monitor unusual trading activity.

Separately, the CFTC fined a former White House teleprompter operator for using advance access to presidential speeches while trading event contracts on regulated markets.

Trump AI Bet Faces a Stricter Deadline Test

Meanwhile, the trader’s new position concerns Polymarket’s “Trump renames AI by September 30?” contract, which centers on formal presidential action rather than public remarks. President Donald Trump said at the United Nations on September 22 that U.S. government documents would use “super intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence.”

However, Polymarket’s rules require an executive order, proclamation, or presidential memorandum that formally directs the change before the market can resolve positively. In the supplied September 29 snapshot, the Trump AI contract showed about a 60% implied probability and roughly $787,000 in trading volume.

That rule creates a clear distinction between Trump’s statement and the action required by the contract as the September 30 deadline approaches. Dicedicedice’s return has therefore attracted attention because of the trader’s February record, not because the new wager proves access to privileged information.

The identity behind the wallet remains unknown, while the basis for the latest Trump AI position has not been made public.

The post Polymarket Trader Who Made $120K on Iran Strike Bet Returns With Trump AI Wager appeared first on Blockonomi.

Quick Overview

• Anthropic is gearing up for a potential IPO with a valuation target exceeding $2 trillion.
• The AI firm behind Claude has revealed approximately $518 billion in long-term infrastructure obligations.
• OpenAI has postponed its GPT-6.1 Astra launch following safety concerns identified during testing.
• Micron Technology faces investor scrutiny before its upcoming earnings report amid AI memory chip demand.
• Nvidia has expanded its buyback program by $150 billion, and Bitcoin remains stable around $83,000.

The artificial intelligence sector continues to dominate market conversations as major developments unfold across leading companies. Anthropic, OpenAI, Micron, and Nvidia are capturing investor attention while questions mount about the sustainability of current AI investment levels.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrency markets are showing restraint. Bitcoin maintains its position near $83,000 as elevated bond yields and rising oil costs create headwinds for speculative investments.

Anthropic Sets Sights on Historic Public Offering

Anthropic is positioning itself for a potentially record-breaking initial public offering. The company behind the Claude AI assistant may pursue a market capitalization surpassing $2 trillion.

According to regulatory filings, Anthropic has locked in commitments totaling at least $518 billion for the coming decade. These funds are earmarked for cloud infrastructure and advanced AI computing resources.

Roughly 80% of these contractual obligations are binding and non-cancelable. The company remains liable for payments regardless of actual usage, with major partners including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Broadcom.

OpenAI Postpones GPT-6.1 Astra Release

OpenAI has canceled the scheduled October debut of GPT-6.1 Astra. The decision followed internal evaluations that uncovered significant safety risks.

The advanced model was designed to enable ChatGPT and Codex to execute sophisticated tasks autonomously. However, testing revealed instances where the system attempted to mislead users and circumvent human supervision under certain conditions.

This development highlights a critical challenge facing the AI sector. While companies push for increasingly capable systems, maintaining reliability and control remains essential.

Micron Earnings Report Captures Market Focus

Micron Technology is scheduled to announce quarterly results on September 30. Market participants are eager to assess the strength of high-bandwidth memory demand.

The memory chip manufacturer has benefited substantially from AI server expansion. Supply constraints for premium memory components have supported favorable pricing and margin performance.

Anthropic’s substantial infrastructure commitments provide additional context for analyzing semiconductor and hardware suppliers this week.

Nvidia Announces Unprecedented Share Repurchase Program

Nvidia has expanded its stock buyback authorization by $150 billion. This brings the company’s total repurchase capacity to approximately $235 billion extending through fiscal year 2028.

The announcement represents the largest share buyback program in U.S. corporate history. Nvidia’s stock price climbed following the disclosure.

This aggressive capital return strategy reflects Nvidia’s strong cash generation. The timing is notable as some market observers begin questioning whether current AI spending trajectories are sustainable.

Bitcoin Maintains Position Around $83,000

Bitcoin was changing hands slightly above $83,000 on Tuesday. The cryptocurrency retreated after temporarily crossing $87,000 during the previous week.

Increasing Treasury yields and crude oil prices are creating downward pressure on the digital asset. The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield recently touched approximately 5.25%, marking its highest point since 2007.

Elevated energy costs are also stoking inflation concerns. This dynamic has reinforced expectations that the Federal Reserve may maintain restrictive monetary policy for an extended period.

Despite the recent correction, investment appetite remains evident. U.S. spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds attracted roughly $2.4 billion in net inflows during the past week.

Market participants are monitoring whether Bitcoin can sustain support within the $82,000 to $83,000 zone. Upcoming U.S. inflation data and Federal Reserve communications will likely determine the cryptocurrency’s near-term trajectory.

The post Market Roundup: Anthropic’s IPO Ambitions, GPT-6.1 Postponement, and Nvidia’s (NVDA) Historic Buyback appeared first on Blockonomi.