Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Most open-source software operates on a simple premise: take the code, do whatever you want. Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder decided that was a terrible business model for Layer 2 infrastructure, and built a licensing structure that makes forking the code without paying up effectively pointless.

The mechanism is called “community source” licensing, and it creates an economic leash on any chain that uses Arbitrum’s Orbit/Nitro stack but settles outside of Arbitrum One or Nova. Those chains must send 10% of their net revenue back to the ecosystem. Of that 10%, eight percentage points flow to the Arbitrum DAO treasury, which is governed by ARB token holders, and the remaining two points go to the Developer Guild.

Why Robinhood Chain is the perfect test case Robinhood Chain launched its mainnet on July 1, 2026, operating as a dedicated Ethereum Layer 2 that settles directly to Ethereum rather than through Arbitrum One. The chain was purpose-built to handle tokenized stock offerings, a product line Robinhood had been testing on Arbitrum One since June 2025 before deciding it needed its own dedicated infrastructure.

The financial results have been hard to ignore. On September 1, 2026, Robinhood Chain posted record single-day fees of $3.75 million. In July 2026 alone, the chain contributed $360,000 to the Arbitrum DAO, which represented roughly 35% of the DAO’s total monthly income for that period.

For Robinhood, the math still works comfortably. The company retains approximately 90% of its net revenue under the arrangement.

The anti-fork philosophy The entire licensing structure exists because Goldfeder and the Offchain Labs team made a deliberate early decision to reject fully permissive open-sourcing. If you release your code under a standard open-source license like MIT or Apache 2.0, any well-funded company can clone it, deploy their own chain, and capture 100% of the economics. The original developers and their community get nothing.

This approach stands in direct contrast to the Optimism ecosystem, which has embraced more permissive licensing terms.

The landlord economics of Layer 2 The September 2026 debate between Goldfeder and Solana’s Anatoly Yakovenko brought this tension into sharp focus. The discussion centered on fee economics and revenue retention models, highlighting fundamental disagreements about how blockchain infrastructure should be monetized.

For ARB token holders, the arrangement has tangible governance implications. The 8% flowing to the DAO treasury means token holders have a direct economic interest in the success of chains like Robinhood’s. In July 2026, Robinhood Chain’s $360,000 contribution represented 35% of the DAO’s total monthly income for that period.

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

Key Highlights ARK Invest divested 19,491 Advanced Micro Devices shares valued at approximately $9.9 million via its flagship ARKK ETF The investment firm acquired 575,700 Archer Aviation shares for $3.4 million, demonstrating confidence in electric vertical takeoff aircraft ARK purchased 93,290 Cerebras Systems shares totaling $17.2 million even as the stock declined 32.4% from its May peak The AI chipmaker delivered impressive Q2 results with 103% revenue expansion reaching $209.9 million, while cloud segment surged 287% Palantir Technologies shares valued at $6.5 million were offloaded while ARK increased holdings in Beam Therapeutics and CRISPR Therapeutics ARK Invest, led by Cathie Wood, executed several notable portfolio adjustments on September 9, 2026, moving away from established technology stocks while amplifying exposure to artificial intelligence infrastructure and biotechnology companies.

The most substantial divestment involved Advanced Micro Devices. The firm liquidated 19,491 shares via its ARKK ETF, representing a transaction value approaching $9.9 million. This move extends ARK’s recent trend of decreasing its AMD stake throughout the previous week.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., AMD

Additionally, ARK divested 38,395 Palantir Technologies shares generating $6.5 million in proceeds and reduced its Tempus AI exposure through the sale of 68,759 shares valued at $4.4 million.

Regarding acquisitions, ARK secured 575,700 Archer Aviation shares in a $3.4 million transaction. Archer specializes in electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, and this investment strengthens ARK’s commitment to the emerging urban air mobility sector.

Cerebras Becomes Major Focus for ARK The most significant acquisition involves ARK’s persistent accumulation of Cerebras Systems shares. On August 25, the firm acquired 93,290 shares distributed across two exchange-traded funds, representing approximately $17.2 million in value at execution.

Cerebras stock has experienced sustained downward pressure. The shares declined 8% over the preceding month and have retreated 32.4% since their May 14 market introduction. The decline intensified following the company’s August 18 Supernova presentation, when shareholders realized gains.

Nevertheless, Wood apparently identifies substantial long-term opportunity. Cerebras delivered second quarter revenue of $209.9 million, representing a remarkable 103% increase compared to the prior year period. Cloud segment revenue specifically reached $127.7 million, climbing 287% year-over-year.

Profitability metrics have raised questions among observers. Core gross margin registered 40.6% in Q2, declining from 46.5% recorded in Q1. Executive leadership attributes this compression to temporary factors, specifically rental costs for systems leased back from cloud partners at premium rates.

Company guidance anticipates margin recovery by the fourth quarter as additional company-owned infrastructure becomes operational. Over the longer horizon, management projects achieving core gross margins exceeding 60%.

Financial Position and Street Sentiment on Cerebras Cerebras concluded the second quarter holding more than $8.6 billion across cash, restricted cash, and marketable securities. The company maintains access to an untapped $850 million revolving credit line.

The organization has committed to over 600 megawatts of data center infrastructure, either currently operational or scheduled for activation by the close of 2027. Production capacity has expanded fourfold relative to the first half of 2025.

Within ARK’s portfolio construction, Cerebras represents 2.68% of the ARK Innovation ETF holdings and 2.73% of the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF composition.

Among Wall Street research analysts, 8 out of 11 assign Strong Buy recommendations to Cerebras. The consensus price objective of $283.91 indicates potential appreciation of 35.1%, whereas the most optimistic forecast of $330 suggests possible gains reaching 57.1% within a twelve-month timeframe.

During the identical trading session, ARK also accumulated shares of Beam Therapeutics, CRISPR Therapeutics, and Robinhood Markets, while simultaneously disposing of positions in Twist Bioscience and 10X Genomics.

Today we’re introducing Akita, a new polynomial commitment scheme (PCS) that provides quantum-resistant security for zero-knowledge proving systems. The first production-ready primitive of its kind, Akita delivers post-quantum security alongside proof sizes that are 2x to 8x smaller than current post-quantum alternatives.

Akita is a standalone primitive and can be adopted by any proof system seeking post-quantum security. Its first major deployment will be inside Jolt, the ZK proving system developed in partnership with a16z crypto that underpins the Zero blockchain. This makes Jolt the fastest production-grade zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) that offers quantum resistance, all while delivering dramatically smaller proofs - a major step in building Zero for a post-quantum world.

You can read the full technical paper and explore the Akita implementation on GitHub.

What is Akita? Akita is a polynomial commitment scheme, the foundational component inside a ZK proving system responsible for committing to and proving the correctness of a computation trace. Replacing this component with a quantum-secure alternative secures the entire proving stack, as the rest of the stack is information-theoretically secure.

Akita’s architecture is lattice-based, the same class of mathematics standardized by NIST for post-quantum encryption and signature, currently rolling out to protect all encrypted internet traffic in the near future.

Akita's performance profile is distinct from existing post-quantum proving approaches:

Proof size: Post-quantum proving systems built on hash-based schemes typically produce proofs of 200kb or more. Akita produces proofs that are 65-80kb in size, a 2x to 8x reduction depending on the application. Proving time: Proving with Akita is 2–3x faster than what Jolt currently delivers. Memory usage: Akita reduces Jolt's memory usage by ~2x. In fact, beyond storing the polynomial itself, Akita uses sub-linear memory for commitment & proving, allowing the proving system to scale to enormous program sizes without reliance on recursive composition.
Lattices over hashes There are two primary paths to post-quantum proving systems: hash-based schemes and lattice-based schemes. While hash-based approaches have seen significant development, lattice-based assumptions offer additional upsides:

Drastic reduction in proof size Dramatic performance improvements for sparse workloads Simpler integration with the rest of the post-quantum Internet Akita is the first commitment scheme to bring lattice-based security to a production-ready ZK proving system.

A landmark deployment: Jolt Akita is an open-source primitive that any proof system can use to enable quantum-resistant proving. Its first deployment will be inside Jolt, the zkVM developed in partnership with a16z crypto. This implementation means that Jolt can deliver post-quantum security while simultaneously decreasing proof size and accelerating prover speed by 2-3x. Akita makes Jolt the state-of-the-art zkVM on most major axes of interest: proof size (amongst post-quantum solutions), prover time, and prover memory.

Looking ahead Akita represents the first significant step toward a fully quantum-secure Zero stack. As the industry works to harden systems against potential threats from quantum computing to current cryptographic assumptions, building quantum-resistant infrastructure is a critical priority. More work is yet to be done, and will continue as we approach mainnet and beyond.

Read the full research paper and view Akita's source code.

Key Takeaways HYPE token has surged to a new all-time high of $88, marking a 50%+ gain throughout September 2026 Open interest on the Hyperliquid platform has climbed to an unprecedented $14.3 billion, representing a $3.57 billion monthly increase Mid-August integration with Coinbase’s Base App brought new users to the Hyperliquid platform The platform successfully absorbed a $820 million token unlock event on September 6 without significant downward pressure Token burn totals have exceeded 48.45 million HYPE, accounting for 4.84% of the total maximum supply The Hyperliquid native token HYPE has climbed to a fresh all-time high of $88, pushing its market capitalization close to the $20 billion threshold. This represents a remarkable surge of more than 50% over the current month.

Hyperliquid (HYPE) Price Total open interest throughout the Hyperliquid ecosystem has reached an all-time peak of $14.3 billion. This level stands just 3% below the $14.7 billion milestone achieved prior to the October 10, 2025 market collapse, when open interest plummeted 56% to $6.5 billion within 24 hours.

The platform’s resurgence occurred in two distinct waves. Initially, HIP-3, Hyperliquid’s builder framework, spearheaded the comeback. Between March 2026 and August, HIP-3’s proportion of aggregate open interest expanded from 18% to beyond 34%, with these markets registering $4.44 billion in OI.

Source: Coinglass The second phase has seen momentum transfer to Hyperliquid’s primary cryptocurrency perpetual trading markets. During the last 30 days, aggregate open interest increased by $3.57 billion, while HIP-3 markets experienced a $119 million decline.

Core Perpetuals Growth Drives HYPE Value The transition toward core perpetual markets carries significant implications for HYPE valuation. These primary markets channel approximately 97% of generated fees directly into HYPE token buyback programs. Conversely, HIP-3 builders retain the option to keep as much as 50% of fees generated within their respective markets.

During the most recent 24-hour period, Hyperliquid executed buybacks and burns of 15,350 HYPE tokens valued at roughly $1.32 million, with an average acquisition price of $86.17. Aggregate burns have now reached 48.45 million HYPE tokens, equivalent to 4.84% of the protocol’s maximum supply.

Two significant developments contributed to the recent open interest explosion. Coinbase initiated routing of Base App users toward Hyperliquid during mid-August. Additionally, President Trump announced that the CFTC is actively pursuing a framework to bring Hyperliquid operations onshore under regulatory oversight.

Major Unlock Event Failed to Halt Momentum A predetermined unlock of 9.92 million HYPE tokens—valued at approximately $820 million—occurred on September 6. Contrary to market apprehensions, the price maintained its upward trajectory toward $89. Analysis of previous unlock events revealed that only minimal quantities of released tokens historically made their way to centralized exchanges.

This is the picture we've been waiting for on $HYPE

Point of control at $82 has now lined up perfectly with the ascending support trendline, the volume shelf and the trend are holding as one. Every dip into this zone keeps getting bought.

Price is getting batted down at the… pic.twitter.com/GVK0XkXRRx

— MB.hl (@MBxxvv) September 8, 2026

Market analyst MB.hl provided detailed technical analysis via X, highlighting that the $82 point of control has converged with an ascending support trendline and a substantial volume shelf. The analyst emphasized that sophisticated traders maintain heavily skewed long positions at $74 million compared to just $15 million in shorts, with institutional players and prominent figures uniformly positioned bullishly. MB.hl expressed confidence that HYPE will mount another attempt at surpassing its all-time high.

Examining the daily timeframe, HYPE has rebounded from an intraday low of $81.82 to currently trade at $86.05. Critical resistance levels are positioned at $88–$90. A decisive close above the $90 threshold could establish a pathway toward $95, with $100 representing the subsequent target.

Hyperliquid [HYPE] faces a renewed supply concern as Galaxy Digital transferred around 95,270 HYPE, valued at nearly $8.11 million, to Bybit and OKX within four hours, as reported by Onchain Lens. 

The firm deposited 36,420 HYPE worth $3.10 million to Bybit and another 58,850 HYPE, valued around $5.01 million, to OKX.

Separately, a whale continued taking profits through a number of repeated exchange deposits. According to Lookonchain, the whale deposited 232,610 HYPE, worth $19.67 million, into Bybit and Gate within two weeks.

Both transactions combined placed nearly $27.78 million in HYPE onto exchanges, triggering a supply pressure.

Spot outflows counter concentrated selling At press time, Hyperliquid had recorded a negative spot netflow of near $3 million despite the deposits from the large holder. 

The negative figure does not represent the total withdrawal volume but rather indicates the aggregate outflows exceeded the inflows.Therefore, the broader withdrawals partly countered the exchange-side supply pressure created by Galaxy Digital and the whale deposits. 

Continued negative netflows could reduce the readily available supply on exchanges so long as demand remains stable, strengthening the accumulation narrative behind HYPE.

However, persistent selling from the larger-holders could challenge buyers, especially if these deposits eventually translate into sustained market sales.

Source: CoinGlass Funding rebound restores bullish positioning The derivatives’ positioning, on the other hand, added another layer of support as market participants rebuilt bullish exposure after a short-term bearish shift.

HYPE’s OI-Weighted Funding Rate recovered after dropping sharply into the negative territory on the 8th of September. Subsequently, the rate then returned to the positive territory, reaching approximately 0.006% on September 9.

Generally, a positive funding rate indicates that the long-position holders paid shorts, implying fresh long-side positioning across the derivatives markets. However, for this case, the abrupt reversal also reflected rapidly changing market participants’ positioning. 

The growing long exposure could support HYPE in case buyers continue absorbing the large-holder supply. Alternatively, strong leverage could likely increase the risks associated with downside liquidation in case the concentrated selling overwhelms demand.

Source: CoinGlass RSI divergence challenges HYPE’s rising structure On the daily timeframe chart, HYPE preserved its ascending channel structure after the broader recovery carried the price above the $76.54 resistance zone. 

At the time of analysis, HYPE traded around the $86.48 area, keeping the $88.14 price level as the immediate barrier hindering further upside advance. 

However, the RSI indicator introduced developing weakness beneath the bullish price structure set up. The indicator declined towards the 63.75 level after previously pushing above the 80 overbought territoy. 

More noteworthy, the RSI kept forming descending highs while HYPE continued forming higher highs within its rising channel structure. The bearish divergence implies that the buying strength weakened irrespective of the sustained price uptrend. 

Meanwhile, the Parabolic SAR remained below the prevailing price at $80.70, protecting the broader bullish structure despite the weakening RSI. 

Source: TradingView A successful breakout above the $88.14 resistance zone could therefore invalidate the divergence and open a move towards the $100 price level. 

However, persistent RSI bearish divergence could likely trigger a breakdown of the channel structure, bringing the $80.70 and $76.54 support levels back into focus.

Final Summary About $27.78 million in large-holder transfers tests HYPE as spot outflows counter added supply. HYPE remains inside its rising channel, although falling RSI warns of weakening buying strength.

The Hyperliquid Policy Center (HPC), which has ties to the Hyperliquid Foundation, has filed an amicus brief urging the court to dismiss the CME’s lawsuit against the CFTC. HPC cited two defects in the CME’s lawsuit and alleged that the exchange is simply trying to block innovation in the futures market.

Hyperliquid Advocacy Group Files Brief Against CME HPC announced in an X post that it had filed an amicus brief urging the court to dismiss CME’s lawsuit against the CFTC, which challenges the approval of the first perpetual futures contract for a U.S.-regulated exchange. CME sued the regulator in June after it approved perpetual futures on Kalshi.

The Hyperliquid group’s brief notably follows the CFTC’s filing last week, in which it also urged the court to dismiss the CME lawsuit. The regulator had argued that there was no plausible competitive injury to the CME, contrary to its claims.

Similarly, the HPC argues in its amicus brief that the CME has no injury that gives it legal standing, citing this as one of the suit’s defects. The advocacy group noted that the derivatives exchange relies on the doctrine of competitor standing to supply an injury, but that the doctrine applies only when government action intensifies competition in a fixed market and injury to the plaintiff follows as a matter of economic logic.

“The CFTC order it challenges does nothing of the kind,” the Hyperliquid advocacy group asserted. On the second defect, the HPC said that the “CME is an unsuitable challenger because its interests fall outside the zone of interests of the CEA provisions it invokes.”

CME Accused Of Attempting To Block Innovation The HPC claimed that the CME’s lawsuit is an attempt to halt innovation in the U.S. futures markets. The group noted that the CFTC’s approval of the first-ever U.S. perpetual futures contract on a U.S.-regulated exchange confirmed that every U.S. derivatives exchange, including the CME, can list the same type of contract.

“At least for now, CME has decided not to. But instead of leaving other futures exchanges to make their own commercial decisions, CME has asked a court to take the decision out of their hands. We filed this brief because CME’s anticompetitive effort must fail,” the Hyperliquid advocacy group said.

CME argues that these perpetual contracts are swaps, not futures. As such, the exchange believes the regulator went about the approval the wrong way because it didn’t follow the formal rulemaking process.

Meanwhile, the HPC’s amicus brief comes as Hyperliquid, an offshore perpetual decentralized exchange, eyes entry into the U.S. As CoinGape reported, Hyperliquid and Kraken’s parent company Payward are in advanced talks to bring selected crypto perpetual futures to U.S. traders.

For more on futures trading, check out Best Crypto Derivative Futures Trading Platforms

Fintech veteran Wojciech Kaszycki has identified three tests for real bank adoption of Bitcoin: client custody balances, credit-funded spot trades and its use as loan collateral, following Standard Chartered’s launch of deliverable BTC and ETH trading for eligible UAE institutions.

Summary

Standard Chartered now offers institutional BTC/USD and ETH/USD trading through its existing electronic channels. Kaszycki said bank credit lines, custody, and back-office integration matter more than a familiar trading screen. Bitcoin-backed loans with published collateral haircuts would show that banks can price and manage the asset’s risk. Crypto-native venues may retain their advantage in weekend liquidity, derivatives, and trading outside banking hours. Standard Chartered has put Bitcoin trading on existing bank rails Standard Chartered said on Sept. 3 that eligible institutions can trade deliverable Bitcoin and Ether through its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, making it the first global systemically important bank to offer institutional digital asset spot trading in the UAE.

The service supports BTC/USD and ETH/USD trades through the bank’s existing electronic channels, including interfaces already used for foreign exchange. Clients can choose where their assets settle, either using Standard Chartered’s UAE custody platform or another custodian.

As crypto.news previously reported, the bank introduced the UAE service more than a year after launching the same trading model through its UK branch in July 2025. Standard Chartered had already begun offering regulated digital asset custody in the UAE in September 2024, initially supporting Bitcoin and Ether with Brevan Howard Digital as its first client.

Wojciech Kaszycki, founder and chairman of Mobilum and a strategy advisor to Warsaw-listed BTCS S.A., told crypto.news that placing digital assets on a bank’s foreign exchange interface only removes one small obstacle for institutions.

According to Kaszycki, treasury teams care more about the identity of their counterparty, internal risk approval, custody standards, auditor acceptance, and the way each trade enters the company’s accounting system.

“Nobody on a treasury team ever says: ‘I’d buy bitcoin if only it looked like my EUR/USD ticket.”

A meaningful system, in his view, would connect Bitcoin trades to the credit lines, limits, confirmations, and back-office processes that institutions already use for currencies. Such integration would let a treasury department treat crypto as a regular balance-sheet item instead of running it as a separate project.

“If it’s just a new ticker in the GUI and everything behind it is manual, it’s a demo,” Kaszycki said.

Drawing on his work with a listed Bitcoin treasury company and a Dubai family office, he added that trading against a bank credit line without sending funds to a venue in advance would make it easier to secure board approval.

Bitcoin collateral would offer a clearer adoption test Spot volume provides a poor measure of institutional adoption because trading activity can rise without showing whether companies or funds intend to hold digital assets, according to Kaszycki.

He instead pointed to custody balances held at banks for clients outside the crypto industry. Such balances would show that conventional companies, funds, and other institutions have chosen to hold Bitcoin through regulated banking relationships rather than merely trade it.

His second indicator is bank credit for spot purchases. Removing the need to prefund a trade would indicate that a bank’s risk department has assessed the asset, set exposure limits, and approved it within the institution’s credit framework.

Bitcoin entering bank lending books would provide the strongest signal, he said, especially if lenders disclose the haircuts applied to the collateral. A haircut reduces the value that a bank assigns to pledged property when calculating how much it will lend.

“When a bank has to price it, custody it, and liquidate it if needed, that’s adoption. Everything else is marketing,” Kaszycki said.

Banks in the United States have already started moving in this direction. An August report on JPMorgan collateral cited Bitcoin haircuts of 30% to 50%, meaning $1 million in pledged BTC could support between $500,000 and $700,000 in loan proceeds, depending on the borrower and loan terms.

According to the report, accepting Bitcoin as collateral also creates liquidation risk because a steep price decline could trigger margin calls and forced sales. Lenders therefore need rules for valuation, custody, collateral monitoring and liquidation before placing BTC alongside assets such as bonds, equities or gold.

Kaszycki also pointed to listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings on their balance sheets. BTCS holds Bitcoin as a treasury asset on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, and he said the audit process requires more work than completing the trade itself.

Separate custody leaves a settlement problem Allowing clients to use their preferred custodian offers flexibility, but Kaszycki said splitting execution and custody creates a familiar settlement risk. One party may need to transfer first, prefund the transaction, or use an escrow provider trusted by both sides.

Deliverable spot trading requires the buyer to receive the underlying Bitcoin or Ether rather than a cash-settled contract linked to its price. When the digital asset and cash travel through separate systems, completion of one leg can occur before the other.

Kaszycki compared the setup with foreign exchange settlement in 2005. In his assessment, Bitcoin can reach final settlement in under an hour at any time, while the dollar transfer may remain tied to SWIFT processing, bank opening hours, and payment cutoffs.

“The slow leg is fiat,” he said.

Tokenized bank deposits or regulated stablecoins could place the cash and asset legs on compatible systems, allowing payment-versus-payment settlement in which both transfers complete together, according to Kaszycki. Custodians would also need conditional release functions instead of waiting to confirm receipt of a wire before releasing the crypto.

For transactions between several banks, he said a netting network modeled on CLS could reduce the gross amounts that counterparties exchange bilaterally. Without such a system, banks must rely on credit lines, approved wallet lists, settlement windows, and staff monitoring blockchain explorers.

Standard Chartered has already tested ways to separate exchange activity from asset storage. Under a collateral-mirroring arrangement introduced by OKX in April 2025, institutions can keep eligible assets with the bank while their value appears in an exchange trading account. The framework later added BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized U.S. Treasury fund as eligible collateral in April 2026.

Banks could win regulated flows while exchanges retain liquidity Large banks can capture more institutional crypto trading because corporate treasuries, investment funds, insurers and Gulf sovereign institutions often prefer counterparties that already support their compliance and credit requirements, Kaszycki said.

Clients may accept a higher spread in return for access to a bank’s balance sheet, documentation, and established relationship. Kaszycki expects banks to source prices from crypto-native markets before adding a spread for institutional customers.

Crypto exchanges would retain several advantages under such a structure. Their markets operate continuously, including weekends, while banks remain organized around business hours and existing staffing models. Native venues also offer more assets and deeper derivatives markets, where much of crypto price discovery still occurs.

“At BTCS, we already do most of our size OTC with market makers rather than on order books, exactly for settlement flexibility,” he said. “Banks are just the next step in that same logic.”

U.S. rules now give national banks room to participate in several parts of the process. A December 2025 report on OCC guidance explained that national banks may conduct matched crypto transactions as riskless principals, provided they offset the exposure and comply with trading, anti-money laundering and third-party risk controls.

Earlier OCC guidance also confirmed that national banks can provide crypto custody and execution or outsource those functions to qualified providers. Banks remain responsible for managing the risks created by sub-custodians and other outside firms.

An August review of the U.S. custody market found that BNY, State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citi had launched or were preparing direct digital asset custody services. The report linked increased bank participation to the SEC’s January 2025 withdrawal of Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 and OCC letters confirming banks’ custody authority.

Kaszycki said banks extending spot credit would show that their risk teams had built formal models for Bitcoin, while disclosed collateral haircuts would reveal how lenders value its volatility. On the corporate side, he would count listed companies whose auditors approve Bitcoin holdings, a process BTCS has already completed for its Warsaw-listed treasury.

Senator Cynthia Lummis has intensified calls for urgent action as the Senate prepares for a landmark vote on the CLARITY Act scheduled for September 15. This legislative decision is expected to have significant implications for the future of digital asset regulation in the United States.

The Senate faces key crypto legislation deadlineThe upcoming cloture vote requires 60 Senators to move the CLARITY Act forward. All 53 Senate Republicans have pledged support, leaving the bill seven votes short of the supermajority needed. These must come from Democratic Senators if the legislation is to proceed.

Failure to secure cloture would delay federal crypto policy reform until at least 2030. Senator Lummis, in a direct challenge to her colleagues, presented the decision as a pivotal choice facing Congress. She stated,

Next week, my colleagues have a choice: they can choose American innovation and strong consumer protections, or cede the future of finance to China.

Her stark message underscores the wider stakes, as the crypto industry keenly monitors developments in Washington ahead of the vote.

House schedule poses additional hurdlesEven if the Senate advances the CLARITY Act, the legislative process could stall in the House of Representatives. Republican leadership in the House has canceled the final two weeks of its September session, with members scheduled to depart Washington by September 17.

Given that the Senate’s procedural steps typically take one to two weeks following a cloture vote, any amended bill would not reach the House until after most lawmakers have left. If the House is required to consider Senate amendments, delays could extend until the legislative session resumes in mid-November.

One community member pointed out that the House schedule alone presents a serious risk for the bill’s passage this year, regardless of the Senate’s outcome.

Industry impact and ongoing negotiationsThe CLARITY Act aims to clarify the federal regulatory framework for digital assets, allocating jurisdiction between the SEC and the CFTC. For holders of $XRP and similar tokens, this could remove lingering uncertainties and open new avenues for development, even though federal courts have already granted some level of clarity for XRP.

The final unresolved issue between the House and Senate is an ethics provision. House Financial Services Chairman French Hill has suggested this gap is narrow and could be overcome through negotiation. However, timing remains a major obstacle due to conflicting schedules between chambers.

Amid evolving market structure, a dramatic shift is unfolding in how investors access traditional financial assets. As regulatory frameworks for digital assets develop, institutions and individuals are increasingly turning to platforms like 1stepSwap. These solutions enable investors to directly hold tokenized shares of U.S. companies or precious metals like gold and silver in crypto wallets, bypassing traditional intermediaries and leveraging real-time price discovery. This trend highlights the urgency of updating financial regulation as Wall Street adapts to Web3 infrastructure.

Community engagement and political dynamicsThe anticipated vote has mobilized significant attention within the digital asset community. Prominent market commentators have raised questions about partisan resistance, with some noting that China maintains strict financial regulations and challenging political motives behind any opposition.

A leading XRP analyst, EGRAG CRYPTO, expressed public appreciation for Senator Lummis’s efforts to champion domestic innovation, stressing the global stakes for U.S. leadership in financial technology.

The remaining sticking point centers on an ethics measure, though negotiators believe this difference is small enough to resolve. Industry observers suggest the narrow gap may be overcome, provided chambers can align procedural timelines.

Some community members have voiced skepticism, alleging that certain lawmakers seek to block the bill to avoid handing the current administration a legislative victory, rather than out of genuine policy disagreement.

Crypto investors and advocates are warning that the choices made in Congress next week may influence voting patterns in future elections, as public calls to hold lawmakers accountable become more pronounced.

17h05 ▪ 6 min read ▪ by Ariela R.

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According to data published by CryptoQuant, Ethereum reserves on crypto exchanges hit a multi-year low on September 8, 2026. These platforms now hold only 14.88 million ETH. This tightening coincides with a staking record at 35.91% as well as sustained ETF inflows. Enough to fuel hopes of a price increase! Analysis.

In Brief Crypto platform reserves fall to 14.88 million ETH, a multi-year low. About 6.42 million ETH have left exchanges since July 2025. Staking now locks 43.1 million ETH, 35.91% of the supply. Sales from intermediary wallets, however, slow down the supply shock scenario. Why Are Ethereum Reserves on Crypto Exchanges Hitting a Multi-Year Low? After a nine-year low reported in February 2025, the amount of Ethereum held directly in the wallets of crypto platforms peaked at 21,301,177.2 ETH on July 1, 2025. In fourteen months, nearly 6.42 million ETH have thus left exchanges. These were withdrawn to:

personal wallets; institutional custody solutions; staking contracts. On Binance, the trend is clearly confirmed. ETH reserves have dropped to about 3.74 million tokens. This is their lowest level in three months.

Chart showing ETH reserves on Binance fallen to about 3.74 million, their lowest level in three months. Source: CryptoQuant Historical data also confirms the extent of the phenomenon:

At the peak recorded in 2021, crypto exchanges held over 33 million Ethereum. The available supply on platforms has thus been halved in five years. In January 2026, reserves were close to 16.2 million ETH before falling below 15 million at the end of April. On July 23, 2026, Ethereum reserves on CEXs stood at 15.1 million ETH. Crypto: Ethereum Staking Hits a Record at 35.91% of Circulating Supply According to CryptoQuant, about 43.1 million ETH were staked on September 8, 2026. This represents approximately 35.91% of the total circulating supply. This level is an absolute record for the crypto network. It significantly surpasses the 32% threshold reached at the end of May 2026, which was already a historic high at the time. This shows that the long-term accumulation dynamic has never really reversed since the launch of staking on Ethereum.

This data is particularly important as the staking rate progression has occurred in leaps since 2021 with notable milestones:

around 30% at the turn of 2026; 32% in May; now nearly 36% in September. Each milestone mechanically removes a growing portion of the supply from liquid circulation. This reinforces the thesis of a structurally rarer digital asset in the crypto market.

Ethereum ETF Flows Add Another Piece to the Puzzle According to SoSoValue metrics, US spot Ethereum ETFs recorded approximately 2.345 billion dollars in net inflows since July 1, 2026. This brings their assets under management to 15.57 billion dollars.

Last week, net inflows into Ethereum ETFs fell to 218.4 million dollars (against 824 million dollars the previous week). This reflects a clear slowdown in institutional demand in the short term.

Chart showing net flows of US spot Ethereum ETFs. Source: SoSoValue The behavior of different onchain investor profiles confirms this mixed climate.

Crypto whales continue to accumulate, but at a slower pace: +82,000 ETH over the week. Conversely, retail investors are taking profits: wallets holding 1,000 to 10,000 ETH distributed 214,000 ETH, and those holding 100 to 1,000 ETH sold an additional 93,000 ETH. They represent a combined retail distribution of 307,000 ETH over the week, according to CryptoQuant data.

Towards a Supply Squeeze for ETH Crypto? Scenarios and Key Levels to Watch This Tuesday, September 8, the ETH price trades around $2470. This crypto asset shows a decline of about 1% over the last 24 hours, but a 1.96% increase over a seven-day period.

Technically, Ethereum trades above its 20, 50, 100, and 200 period exponential moving averages. Crypto experts generally interpret this signal as bullish in the medium term. Immediate resistance is at $2544, followed by $2626 and then $2786. On the support side, the first level lies at $2431, reinforced by the EMA 20 at $2385, then by the EMA 50 at $2192 and the EMA 200 at $2183.

Crypto analyst Ali Martinez offers an interesting prediction based on the URPD (UTXO Realized Price Distribution). This onchain indicator identifies zones where investors’ acquisition costs concentrate. According to him, Ethereum rests on a major support zone around $2475. About 2.86 million ETH previously changed owners there. The true resistance is between $2723 and $2822. This corresponds to a zone where over 10 million ETH were traded. As long as support holds, the scenario of a return to $2723 remains relevant.

In any case, Ethereum is entering a decisive phase. Will the reduction in available supply really confirm upward pressure on the ETH price? The answer in the coming months. Story to follow…

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Ariela R.

My name is Ariela, and I am 31 years old. I have been working in the field of web writing for 7 years now. I only discovered trading and cryptocurrency a few years ago, but it is a universe that greatly interests me. The topics covered on the platform allow me to learn more. A singer in my spare time, I also cultivate a great passion for music and reading (and animals!)

DISCLAIMER

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and should not be taken as investment advice. Do your own research before taking any investment decisions.

Consensys Software Inc. (CSI), founded by Ethereum’s co-founder Joe Lubin, will split into two independent entities, with the current entity rebranding to MetaMask. Meanwhile, the new entity will keep the Consensys name, with Lubin serving as CEO of one company and Executive Chairman of the other.

Consensys To Rebrand as MetaMask As Company Splits Into In a news release, the crypto firm announced that it will evolve into two independently operated companies as it separates its consumer and institutional businesses to pursue two of the largest opportunities in digital finance. The firm noted that CSI will continue to operate as the same company and rebrand as MetaMask.

MetaMask will operate the top crypto wallet, the firm’s flagship product, and its other consumer-facing products. Meanwhile, Joe Lubin will serve as the Chairman and CEO of this company.

Furthermore, CSI’s Protocols Group and institutional blockchain infrastructure business, including Linea and Ethereum infrastructure, will operate as a newly formed company and will retain the Consensys name. Mike Kriak will serve as CEO, David Cunningham as President, and Joe Lubin as Executive Chairman. The firm expects to complete this restructuring by the end of this year.

This move comes amid plans for an IPO and the potential launch of the MASK token. The firm had delayed its IPO to later this fall at the earliest, partly due to the bear market conditions witnessed this year, while there has yet to be an update on the MASK token, which was expected to follow the launch of its mUSD

 The Need For The Restructuring Joe Lubin noted that MetaMask has grown into the world’s most widely used self-custodial wallet and is becoming “something larger” as a platform where people also manage their finances while also custodying their assets. Earlier this year, the wallet launched ‘Money Account,’ a self-custodial account that lets users trade, spend, and earn with a single balance.

“Stepping into this role full-time is a recognition that consumer finance deserves the same focus and ambition that we’ve brought to building Ethereum itself,” Lubin said. Meanwhile, the new Consensys entity will continue to advance the top layer-1 network Ethereum and build applications and protocols for institutions at the app layer.

Commenting on the planned split, David Cunningham said,

Financial institutions and market infrastructure are moving to always-on operations with tokenization at the core…. We are now delivering the interoperability infrastructure that the world’s largest financial marketplaces need to coordinate this transformation with the required privacy, resilience and scale

In a recent update, Dogecoin [DOGE] has gained access to the Solana [SOL] ecosystem.

Thanks to the Sunrise protocol, Dogecoin, which normally existed on its own blockchain, can now be used inside the Solana ecosystem from the 7th of September.

For context, Sunrise is a cross-chain liquidity gateway associated with Wormhole infrastructure. It is designed to bring assets from other blockchains onto Solana in a standardized form.

How is this good news for Dogecoin? This, in turn, will now allow DOGE users to access Solana applications without manually navigating the multi-step bridging process.

To avoid complications, Sunrise also uses a unified mint for an incoming asset. This intends to prevent several competing versions of DOGE from fragmenting liquidity across Solana.

That said, DOGE has historically had limited DeFi functionality because its blockchain was primarily built for payments.

Now, by becoming accessible on Solana, DOGE can tap into the chain’s broader DeFi ecosystem. As a result, this would allow users to trade, provide liquidity, and potentially use DOGE in other financial applications. Here, the list includes platforms such as Raydium, Jupiter, and Kamino.

Early success with a hint of complications That said, just after three hours of going live on Solana, DOGE reportedly generated more than $10 million of Solana trading volume. In fact, over the last 24 hours, the volume has reached $19 million.

It’s pretty obvious that making DOGE easier to trade and use on Solana can increase accessibility, liquidity, and potentially demand. However, it’s also important to note that none of those will automatically cause DOGE’s price to rise.

This was proven as DOGE saw a modest drop in the past 24 hours as it traded at $0.08915 at press time. Additionally, AMBCrypto also reported that Dogecoin traders appear to be losing momentum, with selling pressure increasing and overall trading activity declining.

But with a hike of 27.2% in the past month, hope remains.

Source: X This coincided with Solana posting a strong 41% August rally. However, Robinhood Chain overtaking Solana in daily DEX volume has added to the ongoing FUD.

Impact on DOGE’s liquidity and SOL’s memecoin activity Yet despite these roadblocks, this integration could become a catalyst for a new wave of DOGE liquidity and memecoin activity on Solana. However, the real catalyst would be sustained liquidity and trading activity, rather than the initial launch-day volume alone.

This comes on the heels of DOGE’s perpetual market remaining highly volatile, with several sharp liquidation spikes as price moved between roughly $0.08 and $0.09.

Source: Coinglass All in all, the above chart clearly shows that  long liquidations have dominated several September sessions, reinforcing the risk of crowded bullish positioning. Meanwhile, t​he Solana memecoin market cap was trading at $3.69 billion at press time after a drop of 3.4% in the last 24 hours.

Final Summary A Dogecoin user can now access Solana applications without manually navigating the multi-step bridging process. This might increase accessibility and liquidity, but none of those would automatically lead to DOGE’s price surge.

Iran has reportedly changed its foreign-exchange framework to give companies more options for bringing export income back into the country, with the new arrangements permitting digital assets in international payments amid tighter US sanctions.

According to a Wednesday report from the Financial Times, Iranian businesses can now use Bitcoin (BTC) and Tether’s USDt (USDT) to pay overseas counterparties, with transactions processed through domestic crypto exchanges.

Exporters have also gained more control over money they earn outside Iran. Rather than sending those proceeds through the state-run exchange system and converting them at government-set rates, companies can put the funds directly toward their own import costs.

US Targets Iranian Crypto Assets and Exchanges Washington has meanwhile targeted Iranian activity in the crypto sector through measures covering both trading platforms and digital assets. In early June, the Treasury sanctioned four Iranian crypto exchanges under its “Economic Fury” campaign.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said shortly before those sanctions were unveiled that the United States had gained control of Iranian digital assets valued at approximately $1 billion.

Bessent announced another action on July 14, saying US authorities had directed the freezing of crypto worth more than $130 million in wallets connected to Iran’s central bank.

Separate blockchain research has also revealed the extent of crypto activity involving sanctioned Iranian parties. TRM Labs said in June that transactions linking CoinEx to sanctioned Iranian entities totaled more than $3.8 billion over more than seven years.

CoinEx disputed suggestions that it maintained business ties with the Iranian state or crypto trading platforms based in the country. The exchange also said it had not helped sanctioned entities obtain financing.

DisClamier: This content is informational and should not be considered financial advice. The views expressed in this article may include the author's personal opinions and do not reflect The Crypto Basic opinion. Readers are encouraged to do thorough research before making any investment decisions. The Crypto Basic is not responsible for any financial losses.

3 hours ago

According to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announcement, the DOJ’s Fraud Strike Force and the U.S. Department of the Treasury carried out coordinated law enforcement actions against Xinbi Guarantee, seizing and restricting over $52 million in crypto assets in a single day, bringing the total value of assets the strike force has restricted to roughly $938 million. Tether provided proactive assistance to the investigation. The DOJ alleges Xinbi operates primarily as an illegal fraud service marketplace on Telegram, offering custom investment scam websites and money laundering services to fraud rings, as well as recruiting human trafficking victims to work at scam hubs in Southeast Asia. Law enforcement has seized Xinbi’s Telegram channels and two crypto wallets holding a combined approximately $12 million, while restricting access to an additional 47 related wallets. The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) also designated Xinbi as a significant transnational criminal organization and sanctioned two additional entities that supported it. The strike force also assisted Madagascar in shutting down 13 scam hubs run by Chinese criminal groups, seizing over 3,200 electronic devices and leading to nearly 400 arrests in the country.

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Tether has frozen $39.27 million worth of USDT held in 10 TRON addresses linked to Xinbi Guarantee, as reported by blockchain-analysis firm MistTrack. The move focuses attention on the use of stablecoins in suspected illicit financial transactions and the role stablecoin issuers play in restricting asset movement.

Addresses Linked to Telegram-Based Escrow NetworkMistTrack stated that its investigation traced the TRON addresses through blockchain activity and on-chain labeling tied to Xinbi Guarantee. Xinbi Guarantee is understood to operate as a Telegram-based escrow network, allegedly facilitating various financial arrangements.

The frozen USDT addresses collectively held $39,273,713 in funds at the time of the action. One of these addresses reportedly contained over $10 million in USDT when the freeze was implemented. Despite the large sum, Tether clarified that the measure did not disrupt the market, as the dollar peg of USDT remained stable at $0.9998 on September 9.

Tether did not disclose the detailed reasons for the freeze or whether it arose due to a law enforcement request. MistTrack emphasized that the presence of Xinbi Guarantee on international regulatory radars, alongside blockchain evidence, provided grounds for the freeze.

Mini dictionary: Xinbi Guarantee, a Telegram-based escrow service, is alleged to facilitate financial transfers using cryptocurrencies and has come under international scrutiny for possible connections to illicit activity.

Global Regulatory Pressure IncreasesXinbi Guarantee drew international attention after the UK imposed an asset freeze on Xinbi Company Limited in March 2026. Authorities linked Xinbi to two TRON wallet addresses suspected of involvement in scams and human rights violations, with British regulators citing connections to fraudulent activity and international regulation emerging as a response.

The latest Tether freeze follows a similar measure concerning wallets associated with Huione Guarantee, another Telegram-based escrow group. These developments underscore the central role that stablecoin issuers can play in limiting the use of their tokens for suspicious transactions, even though the blockchains themselves remain operational and unaffected.

Impact on TRON and Stablecoin OperationsTRON, an open-source blockchain known for low transaction fees and fast transfers, remains one of the leading networks hosting USDT transactions worldwide. USDT is now widely used for dollar-denominated cross-border payments and crypto trading, and its stability remains largely unaffected by actions involving particular wallets.

The freezing of USDT in specific addresses does not impact the usability or liquidity of USDT held by the general public. The stablecoin continued trading close to its dollar peg, and broader market activity for USDT showed no disruption following the latest freeze.

EventAffected USDTDateBlockchainNotable DetailsXinbi freeze$39.27 millionSeptember 2026TRON10 addressesHuione freezeUndisclosedEarlier in 2026TRONEscrow network-linkedTether’s ability to freeze assets in response to external pressure illustrates the practical power centralized stablecoin issuers hold over the movement of digital dollars, which remains a controversial topic within the global crypto landscape.

Tether continues to emphasize that freezing certain addresses has no effect on regular users and does not threaten USDT’s market stability or deny access to compliant holders.

Transfers Surge as Supply Contracts@StellarOrg processed $8.92 billion in stablecoin transfers over the past 30 days, a 50% increase from the prior month, according to rwa.xyz data. What makes the figure notable is that it arrived alongside a contraction in the stablecoin float. The supply of stablecoins held on the network fell 11.7% over the same window to $387.92 million, meaning the smaller pool of assets turned over roughly 23 times. Holder count rose 2.8% to 706,000.

High velocity on a shrinking float is a signal that stablecoins on Stellar are being actively used rather than sitting idle. The pattern aligns with a broader shift in how analysts track stablecoin markets. In 2026, supply has fallen while usage continues to compound, splitting a correlation that held for years. Stellar's 30-day data illustrates exactly that dynamic at the network level.

Momentum Building Across the QuarterThe monthly snapshot fits into a larger arc of growth for the network. Stablecoin payment volume on Stellar reached $5.5 billion in Q1 2026, an all-time high at the time, up 72% year over year, with velocity rising 75% over the same period. The record did not hold for long. Stablecoin transfer volume reached $11.4 billion in Q2, an all-time high and Stellar's first double-digit-billion quarter, with velocity holding around 33x.

Institutional participation has been a consistent driver. The institutions coming onto Stellar are the kind of organisations that define market structure, including U.S. Bank, Amundi, Société Générale, AllUnity, and Kenanga, Malaysia's leading independent investment bank. On the product side, Stellar added USDT0 to its network on September 2, 2026, giving users on the payments-focused blockchain access to more than $180 billion in USDT liquidity.

The fee structure also supports high-frequency use. In Q1 2026, the Stellar network averaged a transaction fee of $0.00026, underscoring the network's affordability for payments. Every stablecoin transaction on Stellar consumes and permanently destroys a small amount of $XLM in fees, and since the XLM supply is fixed, the more stablecoins circulate on Stellar, the greater the demand for XLM while the supply gradually shrinks.

The 30-day transfer figure reported by rwa.xyz lands in a period when Stellar is actively competing to become a primary settlement rail for regulated digital finance. Whether the velocity holds as the stablecoin float stabilises or recovers will be the number to watch in the weeks ahead.

Sources:
Stellar Development Foundation: Q2 2026 Network Update
Stellar Development Foundation: Q1 2026 Network Update
Messari: State of Stellar Q1 2026

@spaceandtime announced on Tuesday, 8 September, that it has integrated @chainlink's Confidential HTTP into its Virtual Vaults product. The move, amplified by Chainlink's own account, is designed to let institutional borrowers prove collateral positions to lenders without handing over raw API credentials to any counterparty.

How the credential flow worksWhen Virtual Vaults runs a balance check, the API call is routed into a sealed Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). Inside that enclave, the credentials are used to fetch the relevant account data and then discarded before the result leaves the environment. Node operators, the lender, and Space and Time itself are kept outside that process. The verified result is then settled onchain via a zero-knowledge proof, giving lenders cryptographic assurance of a borrower's position.

It is worth noting that Chainlink's Confidential Compute capability, which underpins Confidential HTTP, is still in the early stages of rollout. According to Chainlink's November 2025 blog post, Early Access was planned through its Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) in early 2026, with General Access to follow later in the year. Chainlink's own materials also caution that TEE-based systems require extra safeguards against hardware-level vulnerabilities, a consideration worth keeping in mind when assessing the strength of the trust model.

Chainlink's broader privacy standard brings together Confidential Compute, Blockchain Privacy Manager, and CCIP Private Transactions to help institutions connect existing systems to blockchain infrastructure without exposing proprietary data onchain.

The problem Virtual Vaults is built to solveInstitutional borrowers in digital asset markets routinely hold collateral across multiple exchanges and DeFi protocols at the same time. Space and Time argues that traditional verification methods, such as periodic auditor reports or point-in-time attestations, leave lenders working from data that is already stale by the time it arrives. Virtual Vaults, the company says, replace those snapshots with continuously updated, cryptographically verified collateral data covering both centralised and decentralised venues.

The core tension the Chainlink integration addresses is straightforward: lenders need real-time visibility into collateral, but borrowers cannot safely share raw API keys with a counterparty. Space and Time describes Virtual Vaults as providing real-time verification for lenders while borrowers retain full custody, with the sealed enclave acting as the neutral verification layer that publishes only the proof.

Sources:
Space and Time Virtual Vaults overview
Chainlink Confidential Compute blog (November 2025)

Crypto exchange Coinbase started integrating Morpho onchain lending protocol for customers in Brazil. It will enable users to earn more rewards on their USDC stablecoin holdings, with no lock-up required.

Coinbase Taps Morpho to Boost USDC Stablecoin Earnings for Brazil The crypto exchange is expanding its existing Morpho-powered DeFi Earn product to eligible customers in Brazil, according to an official announcement on September 9. The product availability will expand over the coming days.

Users can access lending features through the Lending tab on their Coinbase app to allocate USDC stablecoins. Coinbase moves the deposit to the Morpho protocol, matching lenders and borrowers on-chain.

The USDC accrues rewards in an audited vault curated by Steakhouse Financial. Users can withdraw their USDC stablecoin rewards at any time as there is no lock-up period.

Rates are market-driven and change with onchain supply and demand. Coinbase One subscribers receive a boosted rate where available.

Coinbase’s Earn product saw massive adoption in the US. Since launch, it has reached nearly $500 million USD in total supply and offered up to 7.4% APY. It has become one of the fastest-growing ways customers put USDC to work.

Deepening Utility for Brazilian Users Coinbase states the launch as another way for users to put idle USDC to work, alongside staking and existing USDC rewards. The company says the goal is to deepen USDC utility for Brazilian customers and connect them more closely to its broader Everything Exchange vision.

“The expansion reflects our efforts to make users’ assets work harder for them, alongside staking and USDC Rewards as pathways for users to build their wealth and become more connected to the Everything Exchange, said Fabio Plein, regional managing director for the Americas at Coinbase.

This creates a two-sided market in which lenders supply liquidity that borrowers use against crypto collateral. Notably, this onchain lending path is separate from Coinbase’s standard USDC Rewards program.

As CoinGape reported earlier, Visa is also pushing onchain lending deeper into everyday payments. The payments giant combined its settlement data with blockchain credit infrastructure to enable stablecoin-linked card issuers and fintechs tap working capital as they scale.

As decentralized finance lending platforms continue to dominate, check out the Best DeFi Lending Platforms in 2026.

The market takes ETH, wstETH, WBTC and cbBTC as collateral against USDC at loan-to-value ratios of up to 87%. Compound says borrowing is open to anyone, with approval required only for the 200,000 USDC in supplier rewards.

Compound Foundation has opened a USDC lending market that takes ETH, wstETH, WBTC and cbBTC at loan-to-value ratios of up to 87%, three weeks after relaunching the protocol around institutional credit.

The Institutional Market is the first product out of the $52 million program COMP holders approved in May, and it went live under a control structure the DAO never voted on. The Treasury Management Committee administers the market and a separate Safe holds authority over its collateral and parameters, an arrangement a Compound delegate is now asking COMP holders to reverse.

The market lends USDC against ETH, wstETH, WBTC and cbBTC, and runs on Compound v3. Compound holds $1.53 billion in total value locked with $638 million borrowed against it, sixth among lending protocols on DefiLlama and up 23% over 30 days. Ethereum carries $1.42 billion of that, or 93%. COMP trades at $20.88, up 9% over seven days, for a market cap of $212 million.

"With today's Institutional Market launch, we are taking the first step toward building infrastructure to meet institutional client demands, including better capital efficiency, clearly defined risk, and a much higher standard of service," said Aaron Schnarch, executive director of Compound Foundation. "We are encouraged by the market demand, and look forward to launching additional capabilities over the coming months."

Oversubscribed At LaunchCompound says the market was oversubscribed on day one, with DeFi Saver, K3, KPK and Yearn taking part. The company gave no figure for how much was subscribed.

"Compound is combining the capital efficiency of onchain markets with the level of service institutional participants expect. The ability to access more efficient borrowing while working directly with a team that understands institutional requirements makes this a compelling new market for us," said Marcelo Ruiz de Olano, co-founder and CEO of KPK.

Four Assets, One BorrowThe collateral list is short and liquid: two forms of ether and two forms of wrapped bitcoin.

Compound's argument is that a market holding only those four assets can run higher loan-to-value ratios than one that has to price the tail, and that lenders capture better economics as a result. Borrowing is open to anyone. The approval process and a 100,000 USDC minimum deposit apply to the boosted supplier rewards, which run to 200,000 USDC paid pro rata over three months against a $20 million supply cap.

Compound's market page puts ETH at an 87% loan-to-value ratio, wstETH at 85%, and WBTC and cbBTC at 81%, with a $10 million borrow cap on each. Liquidation factors run from 93% on ETH to 86% on the two bitcoin assets, and liquidation penalties from 5% on ETH to 10% on WBTC and cbBTC.

The Foundation has described the market to delegates as an Institutional Comet built under v3.5, outside the V4 roadmap the DAO funded, to test an institutional use case. Compound also says v3 has run four years without an exploit, a claim worth stating as the company's own.

Who Holds The KeysCompound delegate ugurmersin asked COMP holders on Sept. 9 to move ultimate control of the market to Compound governance, writing that the DAO "does not currently appear to have ultimate control over Institutional Comet" and that he could find no governance authorization for the current structure or any way for COMP holders to revoke it. The proposal would leave day-to-day operation with the Foundation and the committee while requiring the administrators to publish a full permissions map within 10 business days and transfer ultimate authority within 30. It also notes that the committee's mandate from the DAO covers treasury management, not administering a lending market. The Foundation had not responded on the forum as of Wednesday.

Mostly Still In ReserveCOMP holders approved the budget on May 8, with 1.88 million COMP in favor and none against, and it executed two days later. The Foundation made it public on Aug. 17 alongside four hires from Coinbase, Anchorage, NEAR and Maple. Schnarch, the executive director, was chief operating officer of Anchorage Digital and chief executive of Coinbase Custody. The two-year budget runs $28 million for operations and $24 million for growth, but only $14 million went to the Foundation's multisig; the other $38 million sits in reserve against milestones that include a staffed engineering team and a production v3 integration kit.

Shipping an institutional product three weeks in is the first of those milestones met in public. Whether the remaining $38 million follows is a DAO decision, not a Foundation one.

The $480 Billion LineCompound's boilerplate puts the protocol at "approximately $480B in deposits and borrowing volume" since 2018. Compound sits behind Aave's $17.5 billion and Morpho Blue's $9.6 billion in a lending category holding $50.2 billion across 639 protocols, with 3.1% of the total.

Compound wrote the template for onchain lending in 2018 and now holds less than a tenth of Aave's deposits, and the institutional market is its attempt to win back size on terms and service rather than rates. Compound calls it the first in a planned series built around different collateral types and borrower profiles.

CORRECTION, Borrowing is open to anyone and approval applies only to the supplier rewards; COMP holders approved the program in May and the Foundation made it public in August; the participant is K3. The story has also been updated with the market's liquidation parameters and with a governance proposal filed Sept. 9.

Aave Labs just made it a lot easier for AI agents to talk to its lending protocols. The team launched a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI applications a single, standardized endpoint to pull live data from both Aave V3 and V4, replacing the patchwork of static datasets and third-party wrappers that developers previously had to cobble together.

The server, accessible at mcp.aave.com, connects to Aave V3 deployments across 21 different blockchains and to Aave V4 on Ethereum and Avalanche. Think of it as a universal translator between AI models and Aave’s on-chain infrastructure.

What the MCP server actually does Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is a standardized way for AI applications to access external data and tools in real time. Aave’s implementation offers approximately 40 tools that cover everything from market data retrieval to transaction preparation.

Users and AI agents can check wallet positions, examine health factors (the metric that determines how close a position is to liquidation), simulate potential actions before committing capital, and prepare unsigned transactions. That last part matters: the server is non-custodial by design, meaning it can assemble a transaction for you but never holds your keys or signs anything on your behalf.

For a concrete example: an AI portfolio manager could now query a user’s Aave positions across multiple chains, identify that a health factor on one position is trending dangerously low, simulate a partial repayment to see how it would improve the ratio, and prepare the exact transaction needed to execute it. All in one flow, all from one data source.

Why this matters for DeFi’s AI race Aave’s approach is notable for its scope. Supporting V3 across 21 chains means the MCP server covers the vast majority of Aave’s deployed capital. Adding V4 on Ethereum and Avalanche signals that the team views this integration layer as forward-looking, not just a convenience feature bolted onto legacy infrastructure.

The non-custodial architecture is a deliberate design choice that addresses one of the thorniest questions in the AI-agent space: who controls the keys? By limiting the server to unsigned transactions, Aave sidesteps the trust problem entirely. An AI agent can do everything up to the point of execution, but a human (or a separate, purpose-built signing module) still has to approve the final step.

The roughly 40 tools available at launch suggest Aave is thinking about this comprehensively rather than offering a minimal viable product. Market data, position management, risk simulation, and transaction preparation cover the core workflows that any AI-powered DeFi application would need.

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

Uniswap [UNI] has overtaken Circle [CRCL] to become the second-highest fee-generating crypto protocol. The timing couldn’t have been more peculiar though, with Circle pushing into payments through its Tazapay buy.

Here’s the rundown!

Uniswap overtakes Circle! Uniswap generated about $66.8 million in protocol fees over the past week. That development pushed the platform ahead of Circle.

It is now also the second-highest fee-generating crypto protocol after Tether [USDT].

A contributor to this growth might just be Robinhood’s new Ethereum L2. More users and transactions on the network have increased demand for on-chain trading, something that has worked in Uniswap’s favour.

Circle bets bigger on USDC Payments with Tazapay acquisition While Uniswap has been gaining ground, Circle may just be playing a different game though.

The stablecoin behemoth will soon buy Singapore-based payments platform Tazapay. The deal is reportedly worth about $400 million, all-stock. The transaction is expected to close in 2027, pending regulatory approvals.

Irfan Ganchi, Senior Vice President of Payments at Circle, said,

Combined with Circle’s existing network, Tazapay extends our coverage to move money anywhere stablecoin payments are being adopted globally.

Tazapay already handles more than $25 billion in annualised payment volume. They also work with over 60 banking and fintech partners. Its local payout network reaches more than 100 markets. This suggested that Circle would get a much wider base for moving USDC across borders.

Accordig to Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire,

We are excited to bring the team in-house and work together towards accelerating Circle’s mission.

Notably, stablecoins already make up around 60% of Tazapay’s transaction volume.

AMBCrypto previously reported that Circle’s USYC was also in a close race with BlackRock’s BUIDL in the tokenized Treasury market. The gap between the two was small, so money inflow or outflow can quickly change their positions.

Circle has been connected to the company for some time. It previously invested in Tazapay through Circle Ventures, and Tazapay has also been a design partner for Circle Payments Network since 2025.

Final Summary Uniswap generated about $66.8M in weekly protocol fees, overtaking Circle. The latter is expanding USDC payments with its $400M Tazapay acquisition.

In July, Brazil’s Securities and Exchange Commission, the CVM, created a dedicated Tokenization Working Group to study the registration, custody, trading, and settlement of securities using distributed ledger technology.

The group has also been tasked with proposing an experimental regulatory regime for tokenized securities, placing tokenization directly within the regulator’s agenda for the modernization of Brazil’s capital markets.

Meanwhile, Brazilian tokenization platform Liqi Digital Assets and XDC Network have renewed their partnership for another two years and raised the total targeted issuance from $500 million to $2 billion through 2028.

The new agreement consists of the original $500 million, which the companies say has already been completed, alongside a further $1.5 billion in planned issuance.

Liqi Reached Its Original $500 Million Target Nine Months Early The expansion follows faster-than-expected issuance under the companies’ first agreement.

Liqi and XDC initially signed their partnership in April 2025, setting a target of up to $500 million in real-world assets over 24 months. According to the companies, that target was reached in roughly 15 months, nine months ahead of schedule.

This makes Liqi the largest issuer of yield-bearing assets on XDC, according to the company. The company says approximately $835 million has now been tokenized across 386 series and 60 asset pools, supported by 378 smart contracts deployed on XDC mainnet.

Daniel Coquieri, CEO and co-founder of Liqi Digital Assets, said the original target was set at a time when institutional demand was harder to gauge.

“We signed the first agreement with a target that looked aggressive: half a billion dollars in two years. We delivered in fifteen months, because Brazil’s structured credit market was already there – what was missing was the infrastructure. We tripled the commitment because demand tripled. What we are building is not a blockchain pilot: it is the rail that regulated banks and originators run credit through, with auditable collateral and on-chain settlement.”

Under the renewed agreement, XDC will remain Liqi’s exclusive blockchain for RWA issuance. The companies intend to expand into additional forms of structured credit, trade finance and receivables generated by larger originators.

Tokenized Credit Is a Growing Part of the RWA Market The credit focus is key because the RWA market is expanding beyond the tokenized US Treasury products that drove much of its earlier institutional growth.

RWA.xyz currently tracks $7.82 billion of distributed tokenized credit and another $37.73 billion of represented credit assets across more than 2,500 assets. The category includes corporate credit, structured credit, specialty finance and other forms of non-sovereign debt.

Tokenized Credit Market Snapshot as of September 9, 2026. Source: RWA.XYZ Liqi’s activity sits within this part of the market. According to the company, assets already issued on XDC include trade receivables, payroll-deductible loans, debentures, corporate credit and Brazilian receivables certificates. Issuances have involved institutions including Itaú BBA, Banco BV, Banco ABC Brasil and Creditas.

Diego Consimo, Head of LATAM at XDC Network, said:

“These are structured credit operations, originated within the regulated financial market, that now use blockchain as an effective part of their infrastructure.”

For XDC, securing additional issuance also strengthens its exposure to the RWA sector at a time when competition between blockchains for tokenized assets is growing.

Ethereum currently leads distributed RWA value with around $17.6 billion, followed by BNB Chain, Solana and Stellar, according to RWA.xyz.

Brazil Brings Tokenization Into Capital Markets Brazilian regulators are also increasing their focus on how tokenized assets should operate within the existing financial system.

The CVM’s new working group includes representatives from 14 areas of the regulator and has already begun discussions with organizations including ANBIMA, ABCripto, ABToken and other capital-market participants. Its mandate includes examining custody, registration, trading and settlement using DLT systems.

Brazil’s Central Bank has separately explored tokenized finance through Drex, a DLT-based environment designed for regulated financial intermediaries and programmable financial services.

Commercial issuance and regulatory development are therefore beginning to come together. Credit instruments can already be created and settled through blockchain systems, while regulators are working through how those systems should interact with established securities-market rules.

The Liqi-XDC agreement offers an indication of the volumes that could follow if institutional adoption continues. However, the $2 billion commitment remains a forward target rather than completed issuance, with $1.5 billion still scheduled to be brought on-chain during the next two years.

For Brazil’s tokenization market, reaching that target would show that tokenized credit can progress from comparatively small deployments into repeat issuance involving regulated banks, originators and established financial instruments.

The amount of Shiba Inu's available supply has substantially decreased by multiple tens of millions of tokens after the network concluded a massive burn event on the last day.

Amid the consistently growing Shiba Inu network activity, the leading meme token has recorded a massive four-figure surge in its daily burn rate, according to data from Shibburn.

46.25 million SHIB faces permanent exitAlthough momentum surrounding the Shiba Inu price movement is beginning to slow as the price stalls slightly above the $0.0000052 mark, the latest on-chain data shows that the Shiba Inu supply is getting tighter.

HOT Stories

As of Tuesday, September 8, the data shows that a total of 46.25 million SHIB has been sent to dead or irretrievable wallets over the last 24 hours, driving a substantial 1,307% surge in its burn rate during the period.

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This massive burn activity has driven the SHIB weekly burn volume to surpass 126 million SHIB, worth about $678 at SHIB's current trading price.

Shiba Inu price slowsAlthough substantial increases in the Shiba Inu burn metric could provide a bullish signal for the asset, as they often indicate strong network growth, they do not directly influence its price movement.

It is important to note that large burn activities tend to reduce the amount of supply available for sale, boosting demand for the asset while improving its scarcity.

With the asset currently trading in the red, the divergence between its price movement and such a large burn activity is not extremely significant to market analysts, as the metric cannot solely drive a price increase for SHIB.

Tue 08 Sep 2026 ▪ 13 min read ▪ by Ering N.

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Under the “AI crypto” label, search engines lump together networks that do not do the same job. Some sell an intelligence market, others graphics rendering, software agents, or model training.

A dated reference point to measure the gap: on July 29, 2026, Qubic put its outsourced computing offer into production on its mainnet, according to the recap the project published on August 6, 2026; that same week, the Render network completed 98.4% of its token migration to Solana. Two announcements, two distinct businesses. This article compares five networks by function, with stated criteria, rather than by market performance.

There is no single category of “AI crypto.” Qubic uses mining for model training, Bittensor runs a decentralized intelligence market, Fetch.ai develops autonomous agents, Render supplies GPU resources, and NEAR wants to become a transaction infrastructure for AI agents. Comparing them therefore depends first on the intended use, rather than on their market capitalization.

Key Points Five “AI crypto” networks compared by function, not by price: Qubic (training via mining), Bittensor (intelligence market), Fetch.ai (agents), Render (rendering and GPU compute), NEAR (L1 for agents). Qubic (QUBIC) put its outsourced computing into production on mainnet on July 29, 2026; uPoW consensus, 676 Computors (451 quorum), 15.52M TPS certified by CertiK (April 2025, test peak). Bittensor (TAO): market cap ~$3.43B (April 2026), 128 subnets capped. Fetch.ai (FET): ~$549M (April 2026), ASI rebrand still pending. Render (RENDER): ~$718.7M (August 2026), 98.4% migration to Solana. NEAR: ~$2.5B (mid-2026), “AI agents” pivot. Price and market-cap figures are dated, given as orders of magnitude, not a buy recommendation. The five criteria in this comparison None of these projects is presented here as “best.” Each is described according to five objective criteria, the same for all: the building block it occupies in the AI stack (compute, training, inference, rendering, agents), the technical mechanism that produces it, verifiable traction on a given date, dependence on another ecosystem, and known limitations.

Data self-reported by a project is flagged as such; validations from named third parties (auditors, journals, fund managers) are flagged as well. Market-cap and price figures move from one day to the next: they are dated, and serve to indicate an order of magnitude, not to recommend a purchase.

How does Qubic use mining to train AI? Building block Qubic holds a position the other four do not claim in the same way: training neural networks directly through mining work. Its consensus, Useful Proof of Work (uPoW), a variant of proof of work in which miners’ computation serves a useful task instead of solving puzzles with no other purpose, directs that power toward model training, the Aigarth project.

Mechanism The network is validated by 676 Computors, a set of nodes recomposed at each epoch based on mining performance; 451 of them must agree to validate. Qubic does not store transaction history but a balance ledger (Spectrum), in a so-called tick-based model with no virtual machine. Outsourced computing has been in production on mainnet since July 29, 2026, according to the Qubic recap of August 6, 2026 (data self-reported by the project).

Traction Qubic highlights a throughput of 15.52 million transactions per second certified by auditor CertiK. That figure dates from April 2025 and corresponds to a test peak, never to sustained daily throughput: it should be cited with that caveat. On the research side, the project claims a score of 0.28 on the ARC-AGI-3 reasoning test, up from 0.18% in July 2026; these scores are self-reported and should be checked against the official leaderboard. The related work (Multi-Neuraxon) was published in the proceedings of the AGI-26 conference by Springer and awarded at IEEE AMLDS 2026 in Osaka, two named third-party endorsements. A second halving occurred at epoch 227, on August 19, 2026, raising the token burn rate from 55% to 77.5% of the weekly emission.

Dependency Own chain (Layer 1). The bridge to Ethereum (QBridge, via Vottun) is in production; the bridge to Solana (Avicenne) has been paused since July 2026 and should not be presented as imminent.

Limitations The main documented objection concerns decentralization. Several analyses note that a fixed set of 676 Computors with a high quorum makes coordination easier but opens a risk of capture, all the more so as the project remains led by its founder and as a governance component, the Arbitrator, controls critical levers (the Computors list, network parameters). Qubic responds that the Computors are selected on merit and recomposed at each epoch, and that the Arbitrator caps at 225 the number of identities a single entity may hold. Liquidity is a second limitation: QUBIC trades mostly on mid-tier platforms, with no top-tier listing to date.

How does Bittensor and its intelligence market work? Building block Bittensor is a market: it pays out in TAO for the production of “machine intelligence,” spread across specialized subnets, each in a distinct AI task (language-model pretraining, confidential inference, data, oracles).

Mechanism Since the overhaul known as Dynamic TAO, each subnet has its own token, called Alpha, and its own liquidity pool; it is the market, not the validators, that decides through these tokens which subnets receive the most daily TAO emissions. The network caps the number of active subnets, set at 128 in early 2026, with an extension planned toward 256.

Traction As of March 25, 2026, the combined market cap of subnet tokens reached about $1.12 billion, close to 27% of TAO’s. The number of active subnets, around 32 in early 2025, quadrupled in a year. An April 2026 guide put TAO at around $317 for an indicative market cap of about $3.43 billion. Grayscale filed a Bittensor trust application, and spot TAO ETFs have been filed, with a decision expected by observers by the end of 2026.

Dependency Own chain. Bittensor is not built on another L1.

Limitations Real usefulness remains uneven from one subnet to another: several analyses note that long-term value will depend on subnets’ ability to generate sustained revenue, not just a narrative. The first emission reduction (halving) of December 2025 brought TAO’s schedule closer to Bitcoin’s, without guaranteeing demand.

What is Fetch.ai for in the AI-agent economy? Building block Fetch.ai provides autonomous economic agents, software endowed with a cryptographic identity that negotiate and transact on a user’s behalf. The project is today one of the pillars of the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI), formed in 2024 from the merger of the Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and Ocean Protocol tokens, with CUDOS as compute partner.

Mechanism The whole is anchored by the FET token. A point readers often get wrong: the ticker change from FET to ASI was proposed on a one-to-one basis, but it has not happened; as of September 3, 2026, the asset still trades under the FET ticker on major platforms. Ocean Protocol withdrew from the alliance in October 2025, leaving Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and CUDOS.

Traction As of April 1, 2026, FET was worth about $0.24 for an indicative market cap of about $549 million, down roughly 92.7% from its all-time high. Circulating supply, as of mid-2026, was about 2.26 billion tokens out of a maximum of about 2.72 billion, close to 83%. The alliance touts a product catalog (the ASI:One agentic platform, ASI-1 models, ASI:Cloud compute, the ASI:Chain chain targeted for late 2026 or early 2027).

Dependency Alliance ecosystem: the token consolidates four original communities, which is both its argument (a full stack, from model to chain) and its fragility.

Limitations The FET-to-ASI rebrand has been “pending” for more than a year, and Ocean’s departure is a reminder that “one alliance, one token” remains an unresolved coordination problem. The metrics to watch are the number of active agents deployed and the volume of paid inference, not the narrative.

Is Render a GPU rendering network or a true AI crypto? Building block Render connects creators who need graphics compute power with node operators who rent out their idle GPUs. It is, originally, a 3D rendering and visual-effects network that is extending its offer toward compute and inference for AI.

Mechanism The RENDER token pays for rendering jobs and rewards GPU providers, under a so-called Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium model: tokens are burned as jobs are executed, which ties token supply to the network’s real activity.

Traction As of August 1, 2026, RENDER was worth about $1.39 for a market cap of about $718.7 million (rank 102), down roughly 89% from its March 2024 high. The network announced in July 2026 that it had migrated 98.4% of its tokens to Solana, following a community vote initiated back in 2023. At the Breakpoint 2025 conference it presented an AI compute subnet called Dispersed, marking its extension beyond rendering.

Dependency Solana, now the token’s main chain after the migration from Ethereum (via Polygon for part of the historical path).

Limitations Graphics rendering and large-model training are not the same business: Render’s extension into AI compute is real but recent, and several analyses note that value capture by the token remains uncertain against centralized cloud providers.

Why is NEAR repositioning toward AI agents? Building block NEAR is a general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain, launched around scalability through sharding (Nightshade), that is repositioning itself as an execution layer for the “agent economy”: it wants to become the default rail for AI agents transacting across chains.

Mechanism Two building blocks carry this shift: NEAR Intents, goal-driven transactions executed across chains, and chain abstraction, which lets users manage assets on several networks without handling bridges. A “fee switch” activated in 2026 directs part of the revenue from these executions toward NEAR buybacks.

Traction As of mid-2026, NEAR showed a market cap of about $2.5 billion. The token had risen about 115% over the 90 days before the end of May 2026, driven by this AI narrative. A sign of the network’s standing in the sector: in its second-quarter 2026 rebalancing, Grayscale’s Decentralized AI fund trimmed its position but kept NEAR as its top holding, at about 31.35%, ahead of Bittensor and Render.

Dependency Own chain, with an explicitly multi-chain thesis (chain abstraction assumes routing activity from other networks).

Limitations The AI pivot is recent. A July 2026 analysis noted an average throughput of 7,000 to 12,000 transactions per day across the ecosystem’s applications: the open question is whether the “agent rail” thesis translates into measurable adoption, or remains a narrative valuation.

So which AI crypto does what in 2026? Qubic stands out for model training via mining.

Bittensor runs a decentralized market for intelligence services.

Fetch.ai develops infrastructure meant for autonomous agents.

Render mainly supplies GPU resources from its historical rendering business.

NEAR aims to provide the blockchain infrastructure that lets agents transact.

Functional summary table NetworkPositioningAI building blockMechanismChainDated tractionMain limitationQubicTrainingNeural networksuPoWL1Compute live 07/29/26Decentralization of the 676 Computors and the Arbitrator’s roleBittensorAI marketSubnetsDynamic TAOL1128 subnetsUneven real usefulness across subnetsRenderGPURendering/computeBurn-and-MintSolana98.4% migrationExtension into AI compute still recentFetch.aiAgentsAutonomous agentsFET/ASIASI$549M AprilASI Alliance coordination and ASI rebrand still pendingNEARInfrastructureAgentsIntentsL1~$2.5BReal adoption of the AI-agent positioning still to be proven The next test for these five networks will therefore not be their valuation alone. It will be about measuring how much compute, how many agents, inferences or AI services their architectures actually produce. For Qubic, one of the next verifiable points will notably be the comparison of its self-reported ARC-AGI-3 score against the benchmark’s official leaderboard.

FAQ What is Qubic's Useful Proof of Work (uPoW)? It is a consensus derived from proof of work in which miners’ computation trains neural networks (the Aigarth project), instead of solving puzzles with no purpose.

What is Aigarth? Qubic’s AI research initiative, powered by mining; it claims an ARC-AGI-3 score of 0.25% (self-reported, in strict offline mode).

Which AI crypto shows the highest throughput? Qubic highlights 15.52M TPS certified by CertiK (April 2025), but this is a test peak, not sustained daily throughput.

Bittensor or Qubic: what is the functional difference? Bittensor is an intelligence market in subnets that rewards AI production; Qubic embeds model training in the act of mining itself.

Has the FET-to-ASI token rebrand happened? No. As of September 3, 2026, the asset still trades under the FET ticker on major platforms.

Qubic or Bittensor: which AI crypto actually trains models? Qubic trains models directly in its mining: its Useful Proof of Work (uPoW) consensus directs miners’ power toward training neural networks, the Aigarth project. Bittensor, for its part, is a market that pays out in TAO for subnets producing AI work, without tying training to consensus.

What is the difference between Render and Qubic for AI compute? Render rents out idle GPU power, originally for graphics rendering, with a recent extension toward compute and AI inference. Qubic is not a rental market: its uPoW consensus embeds model training (Aigarth) in the very act of mining. Two distinct approaches to compute.

Which AI crypto specializes in autonomous agents? Fetch.ai (FET) is the project most directly specialized in autonomous agents: software with a cryptographic identity that negotiate and transact on a user’s behalf, within the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI). NEAR positions itself instead as an execution layer for these agents rather than as an agent provider.

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Ering N.

Independent author, specialized in decentralized artificial intelligence and crypto ecosystems. I analyze projects by what they actually do, not by the noise around them.

Osmosis, the prominent decentralized exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem, suspended key operations for its synthetic Bitcoin asset on September 9 after an exploit on the Nomic blockchain allowed an attacker to double-spend nBTC. The exchange froze minting, redemption, deposits, and withdrawals for alloyed BTC (allBTC) while moving to contain the damage.

An emergency upgrade managed to lock 22.65 BTC in the attacker’s address before the funds could be moved. Approximately 39.84 nBTC were compromised in the incident, meaning more than a third of the asset backing that allBTC holders were counting on was suddenly in question.

What happened and how much is at stake The exploit targeted a flaw in a custom forwarding mechanism on the Nomic chain, a Cosmos-based blockchain designed to bring Bitcoin into the broader interchain ecosystem. That flaw allowed false vouchers to be created through a double-spend of nBTC, which is essentially a wrapped representation of Bitcoin living on Nomic.

Those fraudulent vouchers then made their way to Osmosis via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. The IBC protocol itself wasn’t compromised, and Osmosis’s own systems weren’t breached directly. The vulnerability lived upstream, on Nomic’s side.

The 39.84 nBTC affected represents roughly 36% of alloyed BTC’s total backing on Osmosis. That figure accounts for approximately 30% of the total BTC exposure across the entire exchange.

Osmosis moved quickly after detecting the issue. The team paused all inflows and outflows related to allBTC and pushed through an emergency chain upgrade. That upgrade successfully froze 22.65 BTC sitting in an address linked to the attacker, preventing further extraction of the stolen funds.

Trading of BTC in existing liquidity pools has continued despite the freeze. But the suspension of minting and redemptions effectively means no one can create new allBTC or cash out existing holdings until the situation is resolved.

The recovery plan Osmosis has outlined a two-pronged approach to making affected users whole. First, the team plans to propose a governance vote to seize the 22.65 BTC currently frozen in the attacker’s address. In the Cosmos ecosystem, governance proposals can authorize on-chain actions if enough token holders vote in favor, giving the community direct say over how stolen funds are handled.

Second, Osmosis intends to tap the community pool to cover the gap between the frozen BTC and the total amount compromised. The goal is to restore the 1:1 backing of alloyed BTC, ensuring that every synthetic Bitcoin token on the platform is fully collateralized again.

A full incident report and detailed recovery plan are expected in the coming days. The timeline for restoring normal operations, including minting and redemptions, hasn’t been specified yet.

Why cross-chain bridges keep breaking The exploit targeted Nomic’s custom forwarding mechanism, exactly the type of bespoke infrastructure that tends to harbor undiscovered vulnerabilities. The IBC protocol itself can be battle-tested over time, but the custom pieces bolted onto it often haven’t faced the same scrutiny.

Alloyed BTC on Osmosis is designed to function as a unified Bitcoin asset that aggregates multiple bridged versions of BTC into a single tradeable token. But that design also means a vulnerability in any single backing asset, like nBTC from Nomic, can compromise the integrity of the whole product. In this case, nBTC represented a large enough share of allBTC’s backing that a single exploit threatened more than a third of the asset’s collateral.

What to watch from here The immediate question is whether the governance proposal to seize the frozen BTC will pass and how quickly the community pool can cover the remaining shortfall. For Osmosis users holding allBTC, minting and redemption remain frozen, and full restoration depends on governance action and community pool funding. Trading that continues in liquidity pools provides some liquidity outlet, but it is not the same as being able to freely redeem the underlying asset.

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

Chime Financial just decided to stop renting and buy the house. The publicly traded neobank announced on September 8 that it will acquire Stride Bank, N.A. for $590 million in cash, with plans to rebrand the institution as Chime Bank, N.A. once the deal closes.

The move transforms Chime from a fintech that relies on partner banks to process its transactions into something closer to a full-fledged bank, at least structurally. Stride has been Chime’s banking partner for over seven years, so this is less of a blind date and more of a long-overdue marriage.

The math behind the deal The $590 million price tag works out to roughly 1.5 times Stride’s tangible book value. Chime expects the acquisition to generate more than $100 million in net synergies. The savings come from two main sources: eliminating the sponsor bank fees Chime currently pays, and expanding its lending product suite with direct control over a bank charter.

The deal is structured as an all-cash transaction and is expected to be immediately accretive to earnings per share.

Chime also bumped its financial outlook alongside the announcement. Full-year 2026 revenue guidance now sits at $2.76 to $2.77 billion, representing 26% to 27% year-over-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA guidance climbed to between $481 million and $489 million. Investors noticed: Chime’s stock (NASDAQ: CHYM) rose approximately 6% in after-hours trading following the news.

Why Stride, and why now Stride Bank, founded in 1913 and headquartered in Enid, Oklahoma, is the kind of institution that most consumers have never heard of but millions have unknowingly used. As Chime’s banking partner, Stride has been the entity that technically holds customer deposits and issues Chime-branded debit cards.

One strategic detail stands out. Chime plans to keep Chime Bank’s assets below $10 billion. That threshold matters because of the Durbin Amendment, a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that caps debit card interchange fees for banks with more than $10 billion in assets. Banks below that line collect higher fees per swipe.

Chime will also continue its relationship with The Bancorp Bank, N.A. for the time being, suggesting the transition to full in-house banking will be gradual rather than an overnight switch.

The regulatory path to closing this deal runs through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve. Chime expects approvals to land in the first half of 2027.

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