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Binance Buys $100 Million Circle Stake in Five-Year USDC Distribution Deal
Binance purchased a $100 million equity stake in Circle on September 17, 2026, acquiring approximately 1,237,011 Class A shares at $80.84 per share in a private placement at a 5% discount to the prevailing market price, paired with a five-year commercial agreement that replaces two prior short-term deals. The shares carry a lock-up of up to two years prohibiting sale, transfer, pledge, or hedge, and the lock-up is tied to the duration of the commercial arrangement. Under the agreement, Circle pays Binance a monthly incentive fee structured as a percentage of USDC held in Binance's Modular Smart Contract Wallet, while Binance commits to actively promoting USDC on its platform; either party may terminate early under specified conditions. Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said the real asset Binance is buying is distribution reach into the fastest-growing crypto markets, while Binance co-CEO Richard Teng called the $100 million investment and five-year commitment a long-duration strategic bet. Circle's existing USDC supply sits at roughly $60 billion, and the deal is designed to close the gap with Tether's USDT in emerging markets ahead of the GENIUS Act enforcement cliff on January 18, 2027, which will require stablecoin issuers operating in the United States to maintain 1:1 reserves, submit to monthly attestations, and comply with federal oversight.
X Expands Cashtag Trading Links With Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, Interactive Brokers and Moomoo
Elon Musk's X widened its U.S. Cashtag system on Sept. 22, connecting stock, ETF and cryptocurrency pages to five outside trading platforms through a new U.S. Cashtag Partner Program with Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, Interactive Brokers and Moomoo. Users can now tap "Trade" after opening a supported ticker such as $BTC or $TSLA, with X displaying a live price chart and related posts before showing available trading partners. The actual transaction takes place on the chosen partner's app or website, not on X itself, and execution, eligibility and account terms all sit with the partner exchange or brokerage. Kraken said its Cashtag integration covers nearly 2,500 assets across its centralized and decentralized offerings, while Interactive Brokers said new eligible U.S. clients can get a $100 promotional credit by opening and funding an account through the Cashtag flow. The rollout builds on an earlier X feature called Smart Cashtags and stays separate from X Money, the platform's payments product, which currently offers no direct link for funding trades.
CME Group to Launch Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap Futures on October 19
CME Group plans to launch futures contracts for Bitcoin Cash and Uniswap on October 19, expanding its crypto derivatives lineup. The contracts, subject to regulatory review, will be available in both standard and Micro sizes, the derivatives marketplace said in a Tuesday announcement. Bitcoin Cash futures will represent 250 BCH per contract, while Micro Bitcoin Cash futures will represent 25 BCH; Uniswap futures will cover 10,000 UNI, with Micro contracts representing 1,000 UNI. Giovanni Vicioso, CME Group's global head of cryptocurrency products, said the new products are being introduced in response to client demand as crypto markets mature and participants require broader, regulated tools to navigate evolving digital asset related price risk. The new contracts add to CME's existing futures offerings covering Bitcoin, Ether, XRP, Solana, Cardano, Chainlink, Stellar, Avalanche and Sui. CME's cryptocurrency futures and options recorded an average daily volume of 279,800 contracts during the first half of 2026, representing $8.3 billion in notional value, with average open interest of 264,600 contracts worth $15.4 billion in notional value, and the exchange said its expansion into Cardano, Chainlink, Stellar, Avalanche and Sui futures this year has generated more than $1 billion in total notional value year to date.
Coinbase Opens IPO Share Buying to U.S. Retail Investors
Coinbase is giving U.S. retail investors access to initial public offerings through its platform, the crypto exchange said Monday. Eligible customers can now request IPO allocations directly through the Coinbase app, starting with smart ring maker Oura's IPO this week, and will be able to request shares at the offering price before the stock begins trading publicly. The feature is offered through Coinbase Capital Markets, the company's FINRA-registered broker-dealer, which participates in IPOs as a best-efforts selling-group member, collecting customer orders and sending them through clearing partner Apex Clearing Corporation. Coinbase cautioned that allocations are not guaranteed because final allocations depend on underwriter supply and total customer demand, so requests may be filled in full, in part, or not at all. The exchange also said its allocation system will favor investors who hold their IPO shares longer, with customers who sell within 30 days potentially barred from IPOs for the next 60 days and facing smaller future allocations for repeated quick selling. The move comes as Coinbase builds what it calls an Everything Exchange, and earlier this month it partnered with payments infrastructure provider Moov to bring stablecoin payment, settlement and funding services to more than 1,000 U.S. community banks and credit unions.
Anthropic Releases Cheaper Opus 5.5 Model Ahead of Planned IPO
Anthropic PBC unveiled Claude Opus 5.5, a new artificial intelligence model it says performs similarly to its more capable Fable 5.1 offering on most work while costing significantly less to use than the prior Opus 5 option. The company said the new model also generates output faster than Opus 5 and writes more clearly. Anthropic plans to expand its 5.5 family of models with new versions of Claude Sonnet and Haiku in the coming weeks. The release comes as the Claude maker competes with OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.'s Google and a long list of Chinese firms for customers, and as it prepares for a highly anticipated Wall Street debut expected as soon as this fall, while rival OpenAI waits until next year. Opus 5.5 is the first new model since Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei called on the industry to support slowing the pace of AI development and said his firm would implement new safety steps, including bringing on third-party evaluators. Anthropic said Opus 5.5 was tested by external firms including METR and Frontier Design before its release, and that it is implementing safeguards similar to its more powerful Fable model meant to limit riskier cybersecurity and biology uses.
Olas Unveils Small AI Model That Matches GPT-4.1 in Forecasting Test
Olas unveiled a new AI model Tuesday that was trained on more than 200,000 prediction market forecasts and matched OpenAI's GPT-4.1 in a test of its ability to predict real-world events. Olas-Predict-R1-14B achieved 75.8% accuracy across 2,628 previously unseen markets, compared with 75.4% for GPT-4.1 and 71.4% for the underlying DeepSeek model, according to benchmark materials shared with Benzinga. Olas, which develops autonomous AI agents that research and trade on prediction markets, trained the model using 214,529 forecasts from 5,116 resolved markets, and fine-tuning improved the model's Brier score by roughly 20%. David Minarsch, CEO of Valory and founding member of Olas, told Benzinga the results suggest cheaper, specialized AI models are putting increasing economic pressure on the industry's most advanced general-purpose systems, and said frontier models may need to find new markets to maintain their growth rates. Olas says its model can run on a single GPU and its weights are publicly available, letting developers run it themselves instead of paying a closed AI provider for each forecast. In a separate experiment requested by Benzinga, Olas-Predict gave Nvidia a 70% chance of ending 2026 as the world's largest company by market capitalization, while Polymarket traders currently put Nvidia at 78%.
SoFi and Mastercard Launch First Bank-Issued Stablecoin Card Settlement
SoFi Bank N.A. and Mastercard announced on September 22 that live stablecoin settlement is now running across SoFi's debit and credit card program on Mastercard's global payments network, with SoFiUSD becoming the first stablecoin issued by a nationally chartered, FDIC-insured U.S. bank for production card-network settlement. SoFi is migrating its entire card program, expected to process more than $25 billion in annualized volume, onto blockchain rails. SoFiUSD is fully reserved, redeemable 1:1 for cash, and runs on Ethereum and Solana, and when it settles across Mastercard's Multi-Token Network the counterparty risk sits inside the federal banking perimeter rather than outside it. Mastercard expanded its stablecoin settlement support in June 2026 to include USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, and SoFiUSD side by side, while Visa has already built $20 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume on nonbank stablecoins. SoFi's Galileo technology platform is expected to extend SoFiUSD settlement to other issuing banks, and merchants get 24/7 instant settlement at zero cost through SoFi's Big Business Banking platform without holding the stablecoin themselves. The GENIUS Act enforcement cliff on January 18, 2027, and the OCC's recent pace of digital-asset bank charter approvals mean the competitive landscape is still being written.
Anthony Scaramucci said on CNBC's Squawk Box on Tuesday that Treasury Secretary Bessent's signal of support for the long end of the curve, not the Clarity Act, is what drove Bitcoin's recent rally. Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, argued that a pledge to step in at the ten- or thirty-year maturities tells investors something about the fiscal and monetary conditions requiring intervention, making a fixed-supply asset more attractive. He set the Clarity Act aside, saying it would have helped tokenization and some layer-one tokens but that Bitcoin stands alone as a digital store of value. Bitcoin traded at $85,732.79 as of 13:42 UTC on September 22, 2026, up 14.37% over one week from $75,584.17 on September 15, but still down 23.32% over one year and 1.20% year to date. Scaramucci also said he sold Bitcoin on September 15 to pay taxes, with proceeds hitting his JPMorgan account in about ten minutes, and attributed part of the recent move to a short squeeze over the past three weeks.
Elon Musk's X Launches Crypto Trading for US Users
Elon Musk's social media platform X has launched a feature letting U.S. users trade Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies through partner platforms Interactive Brokers and Gemini. Users tap a tag such as "$BTC" on X along with a "trade" button and are then taken to Interactive Brokers or Gemini to buy and sell crypto. The move is the first step in X's broader plan to offer stock and crypto trading directly on its platform, part of Musk's stated ambition to turn X into an "everything app" with banking features. X already offers real-time prices and charts for cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the platform claims 245 million global users across all devices. Bitcoin was trading right around $86,000 U.S. on Sept. 22.
Palo Alto Networks launches AI cybersecurity service using Anthropic and OpenAI models
Palo Alto Networks said on Tuesday it would launch a new cybersecurity service for businesses that uses advanced AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI to help identify security vulnerabilities across corporate systems. The service, called Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense, will use cyber-focused AI models including Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Cyber, along with open-weight models. It is designed to continuously test web applications, application programming interfaces and cloud infrastructure, helping customers identify vulnerabilities and possible attack paths as their digital environments change. Palo Alto said the service would also provide guidance on fixing security gaps, including code-level fixes and virtual patching options. The company said the service would be available globally through annual subscriptions, with pricing based on the mix of OpenAI, Anthropic and open-source models selected by customers.
Crypto Market Nears $3 Trillion as Bitcoin Jumps Toward $87,400
On the morning of Tuesday, September 22, the cryptocurrency market found itself near the historic $3 trillion market capitalization level after a massive short squeeze. A powerful impulse pushed Bitcoin toward $87,400, forcing bears to close positions worth $557.79 million. Binance suddenly dropped 19 coins, XRP broke $1.55 via a symmetrical triangle, and Shiba Inu's SHIB 'Bull Combo' quest hit a wall.
Bitcoin Tops $86,000 as Analysts Declare Crypto Winter Over
Bitcoin held above $86,000 on Tuesday after a multi-session rally that analysts say marks the end of the token's cyclical crypto winter. The token jumped more than 5% on Friday and another 6% on Monday, breaking solidly above its 50-day moving average. Sean Farrell, head of digital assets, told Yahoo Finance the breakout is credible and that the crypto winter is over, though he cautioned the path higher may not be linear. Compass Point analyst Ed Engle wrote that crypto is in the early innings of a new bull market with few signs of overheating, while Nansen senior research analyst Nicolai Sondergaard attributed the move to a combination of renewed ETF demand and a large short squeeze. Altcoins also surged after the Securities and Exchange Commission granted a five-year exemption last week for trading in certain tokenized stocks, a move that followed the Senate's failure to advance the Clarity Act. The total cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at $2.94 trillion on Monday, about 30% below its record valuation in October, when bitcoin reached an all-time high of more than $125,000.
Kalshi Seeks CFTC Approval to Offer Margin Trading on Event Contracts
Kalshi filed with federal regulators on Tuesday to seek approval to offer leverage on event contracts, a practice already common on Wall Street for stocks and futures. The filing with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the federal regulator for event contracts, comes from Kalshi Klear, the company's internal clearing house. Kalshi already provides leverage on its perpetual futures contracts but has yet to receive the same approval for its prediction markets, where all event contracts on regulated U.S. exchanges are currently entirely collateralized. A Kalshi spokesperson told CNBC the company would avoid offering margin on its sports event contracts as well as its culture and mention markets, and said marginable contracts, if approved, would be accessible only to self-clearing members with direct relationships to Kalshi Klear that meet certain capital requirements. Kalshi also said it is seeking a system in which capital requirements to obtain leverage increase as event contracts near their expiry date, a change it says would make longer-dated prediction markets more attractive to institutional traders.
Robinhood CEO Says Crypto Will Overtake Sports in Prediction Markets
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev told Jim Cramer on Mad Money that crypto contracts already take a disproportionate share of Robinhood's prediction markets business and that within a few years sports will actually be in the minority. Robinhood's event-contract revenue jumped more than tenfold year over year to $156 million in the second quarter, making it the company's fastest-growing business line, while contracts traded 4.7 billion times in August, roughly 15 times the year-earlier volume. The business now rests on three legs: Robinhood launched on top of Kalshi, then added Rothera, its own CFTC-licensed joint venture with Susquehanna, and this month took minority stakes in Crypto.com and its prediction-market spinoff OG.com to add a third partner to clear and settle trades. Tenev's crypto-over-sports bet also moves the mix away from the legally contested category, after the Ninth Circuit ruled last month that Nevada can regulate Kalshi's sports contracts, splitting with the Third Circuit, and New Jersey asked the Supreme Court to settle it. He pointed to the Clarity Act as an example of what users can trade, noting that prediction markets called the bill's failure before the Senate did, with Polymarket odds falling from 35% to 11% ahead of the vote.
The European System of Central Banks has asked the European Commission to delete a MiCA rule that forces large stablecoin issuers to hold 60% of reserve funds in commercial banks, the same clause Tether refused an EU license over. The ESCB, which groups the European Central Bank with the national central banks of all 27 EU member states, filed its comments on Tuesday as part of the Commission's review of MiCA, the bloc's crypto rulebook. The filing argued that money swinging with token creation and redemption is not stable deposit money and that heavy redemptions could drain it from lenders overnight, so it wants a minimum share of reserves held in assets maturing within one to five working days. The same filing said regulators face material challenges enforcing the rules because non-compliant crypto firms still reach EU customers, and the ECB has separately warned that euro stablecoin expansion could squeeze bank lending. Under MiCA the deposit floors are tiered, with ordinary issuers required to keep 30% of funds in bank deposits and issuers the EU labels significant required to keep 60%. Tether, which issues USDT, the largest stablecoin, never sought the license, and chief executive Paolo Ardoino has argued since 2024 that the floor makes tokens less safe, noting EU deposit insurance stops at 100,000 euros. Revolut dropped USDT for Europe this year, and BeInCrypto reported in July that Circle was backing a MiCA rule change that could bring Tether back. The consultation closes on September 30, and the 30% and 60% floors remain law until EU lawmakers amend MiCA, with Tether still holding no EU authorization.
$51 Million of Bitcoin Moves After 14 Years of Dormancy
$51 million of Bitcoin has moved after sitting dormant for 14 years, as ancient holders return to the market. The reactivation comes after a recent price breakout across the crypto ecosystem that sparked ultra-bullish momentum. The transfer marks one of the longest dormancy periods ever recorded for a Bitcoin holding of this size.
Marvell Debuts Industry-First 2nm Optical Interconnects at ECOC 2026
Marvell Technology unveiled industry-first 2nm optical interconnect solutions for AI data centers at ECOC 2026 on 21 September 2026. The new 2nm products target higher bandwidth for AI clusters and aim to support growing data movement inside hyperscale facilities, with Marvell highlighting power efficiency features and integrated security for AI networking workloads. The launch spans 2nm 400G-per-lane PAM4, 800G ZR/ZR+ with MACsec and 1.6T ZR demos, extending Marvell's presence across both inside-the-rack links and data center interconnect. Marvell Technology develops semiconductor solutions that move and process data across data centers and network edges, and it already operates at a scale that reflects its US$214.2b market value. The company said the next proof points will be design wins and production ramps rather than demos, with investors watching attach rates into 1.6T and 3.2T switches, adoption of the 800G ZR/ZR+ pluggables with MACsec in hyperscale networks, and customer wins tied to the 102.4 Tbps CPO platform over the next product cycles.
Cyera Raises $400 Million Goldman Sachs Extension to Series G
Cyera announced a $400 million extension from Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives to its Series G round, which was led by Evolution Equity, to accelerate its mission of building a unified platform that governs access for every human, machine, and AI agent across the enterprise. The new investment will continue to support new capabilities across Cyera's AI Security product roadmap, fuel deeper expansion in the federal market, and drive continued international growth across EMEA and APAC. Cyera has secured the data layer since day one and this year extended that control to agents acting on it, with Agent Guardian and Cyera Endpoint giving enterprises visibility and accountability across AI agents, tracking tool calls, database queries, and actions from the cloud to endpoint devices where local agents such as Claude Code and Cursor increasingly perform sensitive work. The acquisition of Oasis Security brings that visibility together with non-human identity management in a single system, connecting where sensitive data lives with who or what can actually reach it. Cyera, valued at over $12 billion, is backed by investors including Accel, Blackstone, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Lightspeed, and Sequoia, and its customers include Paramount, Chipotle, and Valvoline.
Coinbase Outage Blocks Trading as Bitcoin Tops $85K and $919M in Shorts Liquidate
Coinbase suffered a roughly 70-minute service outage on Sept. 21 that blocked customers from buying, selling, trading, or viewing balances across its website, mobile app, and Advanced Trade, striking just as Bitcoin surged past $85,000 for the first time in eight months and later climbed above $86,000. The exchange first acknowledged the problem at 4:21 p.m. PDT, implemented a fix at 5:23 p.m., and declared the incident resolved at 5:31 p.m., saying customer funds remained safe and not disclosing the technical cause. The rally came with a major derivatives shakeout, as nearly $919 million in crypto short positions were liquidated, including more than $557 million tied to Bitcoin, while US spot Bitcoin ETFs drew fresh money and Bitcoin posted its first weekly close above its 50-week moving average in roughly 45 weeks. COIN shares finished Monday 3.5% higher at $201.05 on volume of roughly 14.4 million shares. Coinbase has not said how many customers were affected, though it reported $246 billion in assets on its platform as of June 30 and a 10.3% share of crypto trading volume under its methodology.
Visa Joins Circle's Arc L1 as Founding Validator After $20B Stablecoin Settlement Run Rate
Visa has joined the founding validator cohort for Circle's Arc L1 blockchain, moving the payments giant from routing stablecoin traffic to helping secure the network itself. The cohort includes BlackRock, DTCC, Mastercard, and ICE. Visa's stablecoin settlement volume rose from a $3.5 billion annualized run rate in November 2025 to $7 billion by April 2026 and to an annualized $20 billion by September, a 15x year-over-year increase. Visa runs a dual-chain strategy: Solana remains the primary venue for production settlement with partners Cross River Bank and Lead Bank on a seven-day cycle, while Arc L1, which launched its mainnet on September 16, 2026, is a permissioned, USDC-native environment built for financial markets and agentic AI economic activity. Rubail Birwadker, Visa's Global Head of Growth Products and Strategic Partnerships, said Arc represents the compliant, high-trust network infrastructure needed to support onchain payments growth, and Circle Chief Product and Technology Officer Nikhil Chandhok said the work reflects growing demand for USDC and settlement infrastructure. The build-out comes ahead of the GENIUS Act enforcement cliff on January 18, 2027, after federal agencies missed the July 2026 rulemaking deadline, and as Visa expands to over 160 card programs in more than 50 countries.
Paymob raises $35m pre-Series C led by Mubadala and EBRD
Paymob, a payments infrastructure provider operating across the Middle East and North Africa, has raised $35m in a pre-Series C funding round jointly led by Mubadala Investment Company and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Existing and other participating backers included British International Investment, Global Ventures and DPI Ventures. According to a statement from Mubadala, the capital will support Paymob's ongoing regional expansion across MENA, broadening its core digital payments acceptance operations and rolling out additional products aimed at SME merchants and agentic commerce. Co-founder and CEO Islam Shawky said the round will help accelerate the company's growth plan across the MENA region and fast-track its product roadmap to become the go-to payments platform for agentic commerce. The investment follows what the company described as strong financial and operational results over the past 18 months, during which Paymob's consolidated revenues across its four markets rose threefold while revenues from the GCC increased sevenfold, with nearly half of total revenue now coming from GCC markets. Since receiving its Retail Payment Services Licence from the Central Bank of the UAE in January 2025, Paymob has added about 20,000 merchants across its three GCC markets, and its omnichannel gateway supports more than 60 payment methods and serves over 390,000 merchants.
Analyst Dan Krupka Warns of Q4 2026 Crypto Crash After Relief Rally
Dan Krupka, founder of Connection Capital and former research head at Coin Bureau, is calling for caution and a fourth-quarter crash even as Bitcoin pushes back toward $86,000. Krupka, who laid out 2026's rhythm for subscribers on January 1, sees the current move as the tail end of a textbook relief rally setting up a brutal liquidity trap in the fourth quarter. He expects one last squeeze, with Bitcoin running another 20% to 30% to the $96,000 zone, Ethereum squeezing into overhead supply between $3,300 and $3,500, and Solana pushing up to $140 to $160, before momentum exhausts and a sharp retracement follows. On the macro side, he points to the US Dollar Index pressing resistance at its monthly Bollinger Band, warning that a breakout would drain liquidity from risk assets, and he notes warnings from Warren Buffett in mid-September and Michael Burry throughout 2026. Krupka says a standard 50% retracement would put Bitcoin back between $30,000 and $40,000, and he advises watching how price reacts around $96,000 rather than mistaking a mechanical bear market rally for a new supercycle.
Aviatrix Launches Harvest and Decrypt Protection for Post-Quantum Cloud Security
Aviatrix announced Harvest and Decrypt Protection, which it calls the first post-quantum protection that encrypts data and simultaneously governs what a compromised workload can reach, delivering crypto-agile encryption and Communication Governance as one policy in software on the network enterprises already run. The offering arrives a month before federal civilian agencies must file post-quantum migration plans on October 22, and ahead of the 2029 full quantum-readiness roadmaps published by Google and Microsoft; Amazon Web Services publishes no equivalent target. Harvest Protection comes with five free policies to start, with no trial clock and no purchase required, and is free to start for existing Aviatrix customers, with the first five policies and five nodes free with no license and no time limit. Aviatrix said its patented High-Performance Encryption engine removes the throughput trade-off that causes most enterprises to leave cloud transit unprotected, citing one Fortune 5 customer running 400 gigabits per second fully encrypted in production at line rate, and that key establishment on the control plane uses the ML-KEM standard today, with hybrid ML-KEM on the data plane a fast-follow release. The company is working with global systems integrators and security services providers and collaborating with Microsoft on the Quantum Safe program as the network traffic and Harvest Now, Decrypt Later containment solution. Aviatrix also cited deadlines including Executive Order 14412, which sets December 31, 2030, for post-quantum key establishment and December 31, 2031, for digital signatures on high-value assets, and said enterprises can begin with a free Containment Assessment that returns a provisional Blast Radius and harvest exposure read in about five minutes.
Strategy Swings to $8B Unrealized Profit as Bitcoin Tops $85K
Strategy's 846,000 Bitcoin holdings have swung back into roughly $8 billion of unrealized profit as Bitcoin rallied above $85,000, reversing the damage from a brutal second quarter. The Michael Saylor-founded company acquired its 846,000 BTC for approximately $63.8 billion at an average price of $75,416 per coin, and with Bitcoin trading around $85,000 on Monday those holdings are worth roughly $72 billion, leaving about $8 billion in unrealized gains. The turnaround follows an $8.2 billion net loss for the second quarter, when unrealized losses on the Bitcoin portfolio approached $10 billion at the downturn's worst point. Strategy also resumed accumulation, buying 950 BTC for $75.7 million between Sept. 14 and Sept. 20 at an average of $79,670 per coin, funded from cash rather than new share issuance, and ended Sept. 20 with a $5.04 billion USD Reserve and $1.05 billion in USD Cash. The company's largest capital allocation last week was not Bitcoin, however: it spent approximately $174 million repurchasing 1.77 million shares of its STRC preferred stock, more than twice what it spent on BTC, as management tries to move the preferred shares closer to their $100 par value and reduce future dividend obligations. Strategy's holdings represent just over 4% of Bitcoin's fixed 21 million supply cap, and every $1,000 move in Bitcoin changes the market value of its position by roughly $846 million.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs draw in $998.95 million, the most since October 6, 2025
US-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded total net inflows of $998.95 million on Monday, the highest value since October 6, 2025, and the ninth-largest inflow since these funds began trading on January 11, 2024. The inflows were led by BlackRock's IBIT at $381.37 million, followed by Ark's ARKB at $289.12 million and Fidelity's FBTC at $238.84 million. The inflows marked the first three-day streak in two weeks and came just days after Bitcoin was hit by the Senate's failure to pass a cloture vote on the Clarity Act and by the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike. The inflows brought the month-to-date total to $1.31 billion, following August's $3.52 billion, while Bitcoin's price surged 44% to $85,000 this quarter, outperforming all other major assets including gold. However, spot ETFs remain down $450 million year-to-date.
Bitcoin Reclaims $85,000 as Oil and Treasury Yields Retreat
Bitcoin pushed back above $85,000 for the first time in eight months, trading near $85,435 with a market capitalization of around $1.7 trillion after Brent crude fell back below $100 a barrel and the 10-year Treasury yield eased to roughly 4.96% from a recent high of 5.04%. The move followed a week in which Brent had topped $109 a barrel, a spike traders read as a direct threat to the inflation outlook. The same macro relief lifted the S&P 500 by 1.5% and the Nasdaq Composite by 2.1% in the session, evidence of a cross-asset move rather than one isolated to crypto. Bitcoin swung between $81,724 and $87,330 during the session, a spread of more than $5,600, and reported spot Bitcoin ETF inflows and short covering may have amplified the advance, though no verified figures for either accompany that claim. The article cautions that a single session of falling yields and retreating crude is relief from a worsening shock rather than confirmation of a sustained downtrend, and that signs of de-escalation tied to Iran and Hormuz are a market read rather than a resolved outcome.
Solstice CEO Says Crypto's Era of Extreme Volatility Is Over as Institutions Take Hold of the Market
Ben Nadareski, CEO of Solstice, a decentralized finance platform on the Solana network, said the cryptocurrency market is unlikely to return to cycles of extreme boom and bust, because deeper liquidity has brought stability to digital assets. In an interview on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction program, he stated that liquidity in major crypto trading pairs has increased significantly even during bear markets, and that crypto is increasingly becoming a market of institutional capital and household wealth rather than speculative trading. A December 2025 report from Glassnode together with Fasanara Digital found that Bitcoin's one-year realized volatility fell from 84.4% to 43%, while Bitcoin's daily spot trading volume rose to between 8 billion dollars and 22 billion dollars per day, up from 4 billion dollars to 13 billion dollars in the previous cycle. Nadareski also expects the value of stablecoins on Solana could surge past 50 billion dollars and approach 100 billion dollars within the next five years, from about 16 billion dollars currently according to DefiLlama data. Data from CEX.IO indicates that stablecoins accounted for 75% of all crypto trading volume in the first quarter of 2026, the highest share ever recorded.
ECB Launches Pontes Settlement System With XRPL-Based Axiology Among Four DLT Operators
The European Central Bank launched Pontes on Sept. 21, allowing tokenized securities transactions to settle in central bank money through the Eurosystem. Axiology is one of only four DLT operators connected at launch, alongside Cashlink, Clearstream and SWIAT, and its system is a private, permissioned infrastructure built from the open-source code of the XRP Ledger, though Pontes does not use public XRP for settlement. The system went live Monday with 13 market participants, including Deutsche Bank, Santander, Société Générale, and the European Investment Bank. Pontes initially operates between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. CET on TARGET business days, with the Eurosystem planning to extend operating hours and add functionality before moving toward a 24/7 service by mid-2028. The ECB also announced Monday that it will prepare to invest a small portion of its own funds in highly rated, euro-denominated tokenized securities, with those purchases eventually settling through Pontes.
SoftBank eyes over $11 billion junk bond issuance to fund OpenAI investment
SoftBank Group, led by billionaire Masayoshi Son, is considering raising more than $11 billion through junk bond issuance to increase its investment in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. Sources say the company plans to issue $10 billion in dollar-denominated bonds across three tranches and 1.1 billion euros in euro-denominated bonds across two tranches. Part of the proceeds will be used to support additional investment in OpenAI, with pricing of the bonds expected this Thursday, September 24. The bond sale comes after SoftBank poured nearly $65 billion into OpenAI, making Son's company a focal point of debt-financed AI investment amid growing industry safety concerns. Discussions are still at an early stage and figures may change. SoftBank is sounding out investors on yields for the bonds but has not yet formally discussed initial yield guidance. If priced at that level, yields on each tranche are expected to set a record high for SoftBank, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Uncertainty stemming from calls to slow AI development has also helped push up the cost of insuring SoftBank's debt against default, recently reaching a three-year high.
Dutch Police Arrest Two Men Over Fake EURC Rolex Crypto Scam
Dutch police have arrested two men accused of using counterfeit EURC tokens to buy real Rolex watches in an unusual cryptocurrency fraud scheme. The pair allegedly passed off fake EURC, the euro-backed stablecoin issued by Circle, as genuine to pay for the luxury timepieces. Authorities in the Netherlands say the scheme relied on the victims accepting the counterfeit tokens as real stablecoin payments. The two suspects were taken into custody as part of the investigation into the fraud. No further details on the value of the watches or the number of transactions were provided.
White hat hacker transfers 52.37 BTC from Coldcard hack into victim recovery fund
A white hat hacker has transferred 52.37 BTC to an address linked to a newly established recovery fund, the latest fallout from the July attack on the Coldcard hardware wallet, according to Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy Digital. The incident began on July 30, with multiple waves of attacks in the following days causing damage estimated at more than 100 million dollars in Bitcoin. The attackers exploited a vulnerability that caused wallets to generate seed phrases using a weak software-based random number source instead of the wallet's dedicated random number generator from Coinkite. The maker of Coldcard has since updated its firmware, though funds already exposed under the original seed phrases remain at risk. The 52.37 BTC transferred this week is a consolidation of tracked funds from the second wave of attacks, along with three other transaction traces identified as AA, AU and AX, and was sent to an address with an OP_RETURN message reading claim:cryptorecoverytrust.com. The transaction was confirmed in block 967,948. Thorn said the amount represents 2.8% of the total tracked hacked funds and about 40% of the second-wave funds confirmed as white hat hacker activity. A further 3.0134 BTC with no prior tracking history also flowed into the CRT address in the same transaction, which Thorn said was likely additional Coldcard funds recovered by the white hat hacker, though he stressed this still awaits confirmation. Victims can check whether their funds are in the recovered group at cryptorecoverytrust.com by searching with their own wallet address.
US prosecutors open investigation into Binance over Iran sanctions violations
US prosecutors are opening a new investigation into Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, over whether it allowed transactions linked to Iran to slip through its platform. The US Attorney's Office for the Manhattan district is handling the investigation, together with the criminal division of the US Department of Justice, which is examining whether Binance's compliance team was aware of some Iran-linked trading activity and whether the exchange should have blocked it. The investigation follows a civil forfeiture complaint filed on September 14 seeking more than 61 million dollars in USDT tied to alleged proceeds from Iranian oil sales. The Justice Department said two Chinese companies, Blessed Trust and Hexa Whale, used Binance trading accounts to move funds from black-market Iranian oil sales, and prosecutors described a network of crypto addresses that allegedly received and distributed more than 1.5 billion dollars from illegal Iranian oil sales. However, prosecutors did not file the forfeiture action directly against Binance and did not accuse the exchange of wrongdoing in the complaint. Binance CEO Richard Teng said the company has a zero-tolerance policy toward sanctions violations and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement. The timing recalls the 2023 sanctions case in which Binance pleaded guilty and agreed to pay 4.3 billion dollars in financial penalties, while founder Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty separately.
Circle opens institutional USDC borrowing with Bitcoin via Morpho on Arc and Ethereum
Circle officially launched its Digital Asset-Backed Borrowing service on the Arc and Ethereum networks on September 21, allowing financial institutions that qualify for Circle Mint to deposit Bitcoin in exchange for wrapped collateral asset cirBTC and then borrow USDC through the Morpho lending market. Customers deposit native BTC, mint it into cirBTC, and deliver those tokens as collateral through a wallet they control; the borrowed USDC is then transferred into their Circle Mint account balance. The service remains limited to qualified institutions, excludes customers in New York, and is subject to jurisdictional scope and eligibility compatibility. Circle coordinates the overall user experience, but the selected market determines borrowing costs, collateral limits, liquidation thresholds, available liquidity, and availability. A snapshot dated September 21 of the Arc market for borrowing USDC against cirBTC collateral shows a liquidation loan-to-value limit of 86%, with borrowings of 14.13 million dollars, available liquidity of 162.85 million dollars, market size of 176.99 million dollars, and a utilization rate of 7.98%. Meanwhile, Circle's reserve dashboard reported 948.75081803 cirBTC outstanding against 951.25857454 BTC in reserves as of September 20, with roughly 397 cirBTC on Arc and roughly 552 cirBTC on Ethereum. The launch shortens the path from holding Bitcoin to USDC, but it does not turn variable-rate DeFi credit into a fixed-rate Circle loan, and the sustainability of cirBTC demand depends on continued borrowing activity and market conditions after launch day.
Ondo Launches New Feature to Tokenize Physical Stocks Directly Through Alpaca Partnership
Ondo Finance announced on September 21 a new feature that allows financial institutions and others to directly exchange physical U.S. stocks and ETFs they hold for corresponding tokenized products. The feature is integrated with Alpaca's Instant Tokenization Network, or ITN, a securities trading infrastructure provider. Eligible institutions can transfer shares held in their Alpaca account to an Ondo account and receive the corresponding stock tokens, called Ondo Stocks, or conversely redeem the tokens to receive physical shares. The service currently supports Ethereum and the BNB Chain, and is limited to institutions that have passed screening by both Ondo and Alpaca. Until now, Ondo offered a mechanism to issue tokenized stocks using cash or stablecoins, but even if an institution already held the underlying shares, it could not issue tokens directly using them and had to prepare separate funds. Under the new mechanism, held shares can be tokenized directly without the step of selling them and converting them into cash, making it easier to reduce funding costs and timing gaps that arise between physical stock inventory and tokenized positions. Because it becomes easier to replenish token inventory, Ondo says this will lead to narrower spreads, the difference between buying and selling prices, and greater liquidity.
Bitmine reaches 4.9% of Ethereum supply with 5.98 million ETH
Nasdaq-listed Bitmine Immersion Technologies announced that its Ethereum holdings reached 5,983,940 ETH as of the 20th. That equals 4.9% of Ethereum's total supply of 122.1 million ETH, meaning the company has achieved 98% of its stated "5% alchemy" goal in about 15 months. Since launching its Ethereum treasury strategy on June 30, 2025, it has purchased ETH every week, adding 27,562 ETH in the most recent week alone. It has staked 5,067,309 ETH, about 85% of its holdings, with a value of roughly 13.6 billion dollars. According to Chairman Tom Lee, staking revenue is expected to reach 357 million dollars on an annualized basis, and would reach 421 million dollars a year if all its ETH were staked.
FTX founder reportedly bought Uniswap.com for over $1 million and redirected it to a rival site
Hayden Adams, founder of the decentralized exchange Uniswap, said on X on September 21 that Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the crypto exchange FTX, bought the domain Uniswap.com for more than $1 million and redirected it to the rival site SushiSwap. According to Adams, the domain's owner at the time first offered it to Uniswap for more than $1 million, but the company declined to buy it, after which Bankman-Fried acquired the domain and redirected it to SushiSwap. SushiSwap is a DEX launched in 2020 based on Uniswap's design, and Adams commented on the purchase, saying it was probably done to show off his power and to annoy us. After the redirect, Uniswap Labs filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organization, and as a result the domain was transferred to Uniswap. The WIPO ruling found that the redirect from Uniswap.com to SushiSwap constituted bad-faith use likely to confuse users, and in September 2021 it ordered the domain transferred to Uniswap Labs; it now redirects to the company's official trading interface.
Hayes Says AI Slowdown Is a Cover for Weak Earnings; Insurance-Sector Hole Becomes a Bitcoin Catalyst
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and chief investment officer of the investment firm Maelstrom, wrote in his newsletter "Crypto Trader Digest" on the 21st that the slowdown in AGI development announced by Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX, while framed as a matter of "safety," is in reality a move to mask deteriorating profitability. He said the AI compute demand from these three companies underpins more than 1 trillion dollars in investment-grade debt, plus hundreds of billions of dollars in lower-rated debt and loans, and argued that a slower development pace is an issue that feeds directly into financial markets and the global supply of dollars. Behind this, he noted, is price competition from cheap Chinese-made AI models, with U.S. models unable to compete against Chinese models priced at roughly one-hundredth of their level. He warned that slower development would destroy compute demand and could erode the value of AI-related capital investment, much of which is financed with debt. He further noted that private equity firms are increasingly buying insurers and setting up affiliated reinsurers to satisfy regulatory capital buffers without any real funding burden, and said that among these affiliated reinsurance assets, the portion tied to AI data center debt and private credit to AI-related companies could reach as much as 1.54 trillion dollars. If compute demand from the AI giants slows more than expected, he said, rating agencies would downgrade AI data center debt, the insurers holding it would be forced to set aside additional capital, and the U.S. government would face a choice between becoming the "buyer of last resort" for compute or bailing out the insurance industry as it did for the U.S. insurance giant AIG in 2008. Either path, he said, leads to the same result: an expansion of the money supply, and if easy monetary conditions persist, that will act as a factor pushing up the prices of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin as a destination for speculative capital.
Bitcoin Surges to $86,000 as FOMO Hits Highest Level Since 2024
Bitcoin jumped 6.42% intraday, trading at $86,447, driven by FOMO sentiment that reached its highest level since December 2024. Data from Santiment shows short liquidations surged to $556 million intraday, while open interest rose 9.38% over 24 hours to $61.33 billion, and total trading volume spiked 39%. Net ETF inflows turned positive at $317.10 million as of September 21, while Strategy purchased an additional 950 BTC. If Bitcoin can hold above the $86,000 level, it may reclaim the Fibonacci extension level at $90,000, but a drop below this could see a pullback to the $82,000-$84,000 range.
SJWD digital bond closes 500 million baht booking in 46 seconds on Paotang
The digital bond of SCG JWD Logistics Public Company Limited, or SJWD, the company's first digital bond, was fully subscribed at 500 million baht in just 46 seconds through the bond trading wallet on Krungthai Bank's Paotang application. Ravin Boonyanusasna, head of the money and capital markets business at Krungthai Bank, said the bank aims to develop digital financial infrastructure so that businesses can access funding sources efficiently and to broaden opportunities for the public to access investment products in the capital market. This success reflects investor confidence in SJWD and the potential of the wallet on Paotang, which supports end-to-end investment from subscription and payment to receiving interest and principal and trading in the secondary market. Krungthai Bank said it will continue to develop investment technology and services to expand fundraising options for businesses.
Cohesity Launches Agent Resilience to Protect and Recover AI Agent Infrastructure
Cohesity introduced Cohesity Agent Resilience, a new Cohesity Data Cloud capability that discovers, protects, and recovers the infrastructure behind enterprise AI agents, at its Cohesity Catalyst event. The capability is available now to select customers, with general availability targeted for the end of 2026, and launches with support for Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Amazon Bedrock Agents, while Microsoft and Google agent platforms are on the roadmap. Cohesity also outlined its vision for Autonomous Cyber Resilience, which uses agentic workflows to automate its five-step cyber resilience framework covering protection of data, identity, applications, and agents, recoverability, threat remediation, application recovery practice, and risk posture optimization. The company additionally introduced the Cohesity AI Resilience Academy, beginning with a free, self-paced Foundations of AI Resilience with Cohesity course of 25 to 30 minutes that Catalyst attendees can access early, exclusive to them for approximately two weeks before entering the broader Cohesity Academy catalog. Cohesity cited fifth annual Cohesity Global Cyber Resilience Report findings that 56% of organizations said they were not well prepared to detect or contain unintended actions by AI agents and automated workflows, and 58% were not very confident in verifying the integrity of AI models and related data after a cyberattack.