Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Kraken’s official announcement states that Kraken Derivatives will delist 77 perpetual contracts at 12:00 UTC on October 1, covering assets including 2Z, AEVO, AIXBT, AKT, ANKR, ARKM, AR, BLUR, CELO, ENJ, GMT, GMX, IOTA, MINA, NEO, THETA, VET, ZIL, ZRX, and others. Once trading on these contracts is halted, they will be settled and removed from the platform. Separately, Kraken will delist perpetual contracts for SUN, MTL, IOST, and XVS on September 3, and COTI perpetual contracts on September 7.

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Arthur Hayes: GPIF May Re-Examine Internal and External Asset Allocation; 'Money Printing Feast' Ahead

Arthur Hayes stated in a post that Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) is considering a re-examination of its overseas and domestic asset allocations, which he cited as one of the factors behind today’s roughly 2% drop in the euro against the yen. Hayes argues that shifts in GPIF’s asset allocation could trigger large-scale capital reallocation, dubbing this the start of a “money printing feast”. He also recommends reading his latest article “Atencion” for more related perspectives.

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Analysis: Bitcoin may be shifting from a 4-year cycle to a 6 to 8-year cycle.

On-chain analyst Willy Woo has published a post noting that Bitcoin has long been shaped by its halving mechanism, creating a relatively regular 4-year cycle. But as the supply boost from halving continues to fade, this endogenous cyclical driver is growing less significant. Woo highlighted that BTC’s current annual new supply makes up roughly 0.8% of its total supply, a figure set to fall further to 0.4% going forward. Meanwhile, short-term debt cycles in traditional financial markets typically span 6 to 8 years, leading him to argue Bitcoin may be gradually transitioning from its prior 4-year cycle to a 6 to 8-year one. The present period could mark the transitional stage of this cyclical structural shift.

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Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC): Digital asset firms must apply for licenses by September 30, or face potential penalties.

According to an official announcement from Australia’s Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), firms relying on ASIC’s "no-action position" for the digital asset sector must apply for or amend an Australian Financial Services (AFS) license by September 30, 2026. Failure to meet this deadline may lead to violations of financial services laws starting October 1. ASIC added that entities needing either an Australian market license or a clearing and settlement (CS) facility license must also notify the regulator of their application intent in writing by the same date, and complete pre-application meetings. Firms failing to satisfy these requirements may face civil and criminal penalties, with maximum fines equal to 10% of their annual turnover. Since updating its digital asset regulatory guidelines in October 2025, ASIC has received over 45 relevant license applications. The regulator stated that ending transitional regulatory exemptions for digital asset businesses is a key step toward bringing the sector under formal regulatory oversight. Additionally, Australia’s Digital Asset Framework Amendment (DAF Act) was passed by parliament in April 2026, received royal assent on April 8, and will officially take effect on April 9, 2027. Even after the new framework is implemented, some existing licenses will remain valid.

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GPT-6 Astra Set for Launch: GPT-6 Spotted in OpenAI’s Official Repository

Insight Beating AI Flash News: GPT-6 has directly appeared in OpenAI’s official GitHub repository. An OpenAI developer submitted a Pull Request (PR) to the Computer Use example project, adding two environments: gpt6-js-image and gpt6-py-image, with the branch named codex/gpt6-computer-use-images. The two environments are tailored for JavaScript and Python respectively: the former is pre-installed with Playwright and Chromium, while the latter uses PyAutoGUI, Chromium, and a Linux desktop environment, enabling agents to view screens and operate browsers and desktops. The PR has not been merged yet, and it does not include GPT-6 API calls—it is only preparing the runtime environment for Computer Use. Sam Altman recently stated in an interview that past models’ computer operations have always been too slow or unreliable, but Astra made him feel for the first time that “it has reached a level comparable to humans”. He now directly lets the model retrieve messages across different applications instead of opening and searching for them one by one himself.

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Microsoft Consolidates AI Agent Research: AI Frontiers Merged from Microsoft Research into MAI

Beating AI News Flash: Microsoft has transferred its AI Frontiers lab from Microsoft Research to Microsoft AI (MAI), led by Mustafa Suleyman. Established in October 2023, the lab focuses on small models and agents. It has contributed to projects including AutoGen, FARA, Magentic-One, Magentic-UI, and Phi. The multi-agent open-source framework AutoGen was later merged with AI application development SDK Semantic Kernel into Microsoft’s unified agent development framework, Microsoft Agent Framework. AI Frontiers will continue its work on cutting-edge agent and model research. MAI is also training a series of models and has formed a Superintelligence team, aiming to develop the so-called "Humanist Superintelligence" – defined by Microsoft as a high-capacity AI that addresses specific problems, remains under human control, and serves people. Ece Kamar, former head of AI Frontiers, recently left Microsoft after 16 years with the company. She has cited founding AI Frontiers as one of the highlights of her Microsoft career, and has not yet announced her next move.

17 minutes ago

BonkGuy noted that BNB Chain meme coin MarsCoin has surpassed $110 million in market capitalization, hitting a new all-time high.

Trader BonkGuy (Unipcs) stated in a post that MARSCOIN reminds him of SAFEMOON on BNB Chain in 2021, which once hit a market capitalization of around $17 billion. BonkGuy noted that MARSCOIN boasts a stronger narrative, integrating multiple hot concepts including Elon Musk, CZ, Mars, and SpaceX, making it one of the key assets in the BNB Chain meme coin segment. Fueled by growing market attention, GMGN data shows that the market cap of MarsCoin, a meme coin in the BNB Chain ecosystem, has surpassed $110 million, currently standing at $105 million, with a 24-hour gain of 41.7%.

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IOTA just shipped one of its most consequential upgrades to date. The Starfish consensus engine is now live on the IOTA mainnet, replacing the previous Mysticeti engine with a fundamentally different approach to how the network reaches agreement on transactions.

The upgrade, activated via protocol version 24 in release v1.21.1 around April 23, 2026, isn’t just a routine software patch. It’s a structural overhaul designed to make IOTA the kind of infrastructure that global trade systems can actually depend on, even when network conditions get messy.

What Starfish actually changes under the hood Starfish decouples the network’s progress from the synchronization of every single node. The chain keeps moving even if some validators are temporarily lagging, and those validators can catch up independently without dragging everyone else down.

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The technical architecture relies on a directed acyclic graph-based Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus model. Three specific mechanisms make this work. First, cordial dissemination handles how data gets spread across the network. Second, Reed-Solomon encoding ensures data availability even when some pieces are missing. Third, Data Availability Certificates, or DACs, provide cryptographic proof that transaction data is actually accessible when needed.

There’s also a new push pacemaker mechanism and a separation of metadata from payloads.

The early numbers are encouraging. Outbound recovery requests on the mainnet have decreased by approximately 10 times compared to the Mysticeti engine. Tail latency for transaction commits has dropped meaningfully, and variance under fluctuating network conditions is significantly lower.

Why trade infrastructure is the target The flagship initiative here is TWIN, the Trade Worldwide Information Network. It focuses on tokenizing essential trade documents like certificates of origin and bills of lading. A single container ship might carry goods backed by thousands of such documents, many of which are still handled manually or through fragmented digital systems.

The Starfish upgrade was specifically designed with this application in mind. Variable connectivity is a fact of life in global logistics. Ships lose satellite links. Port authorities in developing nations run on inconsistent infrastructure.

Official blog posts from the IOTA Foundation on April 28 and May 7, 2026 detailed how these technical enhancements directly map to the reliability demands of regulated sectors, with emphasis on real-world resilience rather than theoretical throughput benchmarks.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.

The IOTA Foundation has published its report for the second quarter of 2026, reporting significant progress in the expansion of TWIN. 

The main focus was on the activation of the Starfish consensus protocol, trade projects in Africa and the United Kingdom, and a stronger organizational alignment toward institutional use cases.

The IOTA Foundation is a non-profit organization that developed IOTA, a distributed ledger network. It was originally built for machine-to-machine transactions and IoT data integrity, with its native token IOTA trading on major crypto exchanges.

IOTA focuses on TWINAccording to the foundation, its development, research, design, and product teams have been brought closer together. As recently announced by co-founder Dominik Schiener, the IOTA Foundation intends to focus more strongly on TWIN following an organizational restructuring and layoffs, rather than continuing to pursue several separate initiatives. The quarterly report states,

“The Foundation is fully focused on supporting and scaling TWIN...By moving past isolated, general-purpose blockchain lines, we’re concentrating our talent on building a resilient, compliant, and production-grade network for the global economy."

The most important technical milestone was the activation of the Starfish consensus protocol on April 23. The upgrade is designed to improve the stability of the IOTA mainnet under real-world network conditions and ensure continuous operation even with limited connectivity.

At the same time, the team completed Protocol Version 29. This version includes additional security mechanisms for smart contracts. The core development of Starfish-Speed was also completed, with the aim of reducing latency.

IOTA also reported progress on the P-COOL transaction flow. The approach is intended to deliver higher performance while requiring roughly half the resources previously needed. The report states:

“Q2 was a success in making IOTA more capable for the people building on it and cheaper for the people running it...Core storage optimizations have successfully reduced the active node data footprint by approximately one-third in testing environments, significantly lowering long-term infrastructure and maintenance costs for operators."

TWIN expands in Africa and the United KingdomAt the application level, the Foundation primarily focused on trade infrastructure. Together with TradeMark Africa, the team worked on a business and fee model for deployment in Kenya.

Implementation of the ADAPT initiative also began in the second quarter. Developed together with the AfCFTA Secretariat, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, the project aims to enable digital identities, data exchange, and digital payments initially in Kenya, Nigeria, and Morocco.

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“Kenya, Nigeria, and Morocco have been selected as the first countries to implement ADAPT - the Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade initiative," the company wrote. 

For the Trade Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP), version 1.3.9 achieved a 95% success rate across all active test profiles, according to the report. Document channels between authorities in Kenya were also successfully tested from node to node.

In the United Kingdom, TWIN secured five key supporters for a letter of intent regarding the International Supply Network. Further integrations with port authorities, freight forwarders, and trade organizations are currently being prepared.

The TWIN Foundation recently announced that more than 30 countries are expected to go live by 2030. In Argentina, IOTA technology has also been implemented in a government project for transplant processes.

Trending on TheStreet RoundtableXRP eys bigger move as Binance open interest hits 2026 highMark Cuban has a blunt response to Coinbase CEORipple wants AI agents to pay with XRP and RLUSDNpm downloads point to growing developer activity around TWINBeyond the official country projects, there are also signs that TWIN is attracting more attention. On the Node Package Manager (npm) package platform, key components of the framework have recently been downloaded significantly more often.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@twin.org/dlt-iota?activeTab=versions

The core package currently reaches 18,222 installations within seven days. The IOTA-specific module, which connects the framework to IOTA technology, records 3,711 weekly installations.

The statistics show the latest npm download figures for the IOTA package used for TWIN integration.

These figures are not direct proof of active users or companies operating in production. However, they show how often TWIN’s technical components are being installed in development, testing, or build environments.

For a specialized framework in the field of digital trade infrastructure, the current level is nevertheless notable. It suggests that TWIN is not only being expanded strategically, but is also gaining increasing attention in technical practice.