Track market-moving stories before they get noisy

Zcash (ZEC) has soared into cryptocurrency’s top 10 following a powerful rally that briefly pushed its price above $1,000, intensifying trading activity and market risk around the fast-moving asset.

Rally pushes Zcash above $1,000Zcash jumped approximately 20% in the span of 24 hours, climbing to a peak of $1,023 on Friday. This surge boosted ZEC’s market capitalization close to $17 billion, before steadying around $983 with a market cap near $16.6 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.

The strong rally secured Zcash’s place as the 10th-largest cryptocurrency by market value, marking its highest position in years as fresh demand sent volumes soaring.

Leveraged trading intensifies volatilityOpen interest in ZEC futures rose dramatically to about 2.3 million ZEC, equivalent to nearly $2.3 billion at prevailing prices. This amount represents around 14% of Zcash’s total market capitalization, an outsized footprint that analysts say highlights aggressive positioning across derivatives markets.

The spike in leveraged activity led to heavy losses for bearish traders. Within 24 hours, roughly $36.6 million in leveraged ZEC positions were forcibly closed, with $34.5 million of liquidations targeting traders who bet against the asset’s price. Short positions accounted for approximately 94% of the reported liquidations.

A surge in short liquidations can fuel an ongoing rally further, as traders covering their positions must buy back ZEC, creating additional demand pressure.

While leveraged trading has driven sharp gains for bullish participants, analysts warn that the same leverage can amplify downside moves in the event of a reversal, given the scale of current futures positions.

MetricValue24-hour ZEC price high$1,023Current ZEC price$983Market capitalization$16.6 billionOpen interest (futures)2.3 million ZEC / $2.3 billion24-hour liquidations$36.6 millionShort liquidations$34.5 millionETF conversion fuels institutional demandThe latest rally follows a pivotal change for U.S. investors: Grayscale, a leading digital asset manager, completed the conversion of its long-standing Zcash trust into The Zcash ETF. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the ETF structure and new name in late August. Shares now trade under the ZCSH ticker, offering investors regulated brokerage-market access to ZEC.

Momentum had been building for weeks, with ZEC already moving higher after Grayscale filed an amended ETF application that included plans to list on NYSE Arca and a 2.5% management fee. These developments have returned Zcash to price levels last seen during the 2018 bull cycle, highlighting institutional progress as a major catalyst for the current surge.

Grayscale is recognized as one of the world’s largest managers of digital currency investment products, often providing traditional financial channels with access to cryptocurrencies.

Mini dictionary: ETF, or Exchange-Traded Fund, is a regulated investment product that tracks the price of an asset and can be traded like a stock, enabling broader investor access and liquidity for underlying cryptocurrencies like ZEC.

Analysts highlight risks from leverageZcash’s dramatic entry into the upper tier of the crypto market goes beyond short-term speculation. With open interest in ZEC futures now representing nearly one-seventh of the coin’s entire market value, analysts emphasize that the leverage currently propelling sharp gains could just as quickly intensify downside pressure if sentiment shifts.

The interplay of institutional products like ETFs and elevated futures activity places ZEC at the center of a key test for both new and experienced investors, as the asset’s liquidity and price trajectory remain tightly linked to broader trends in cryptocurrency markets.

The growth of Hedera Council’s network of Strategic and Community Partners continues, with the addition of two new partnerships. This partnership program leverages the skills, networks and resources of industry leaders to drive real-world adoption of Hedera. 

Hedera Council’s latest collaborations expand Hedera’s capabilities for secure, decentralized infrastructure for real-world use cases, while enhancing Hedera’s technical offerings. Hedera’s latest Strategic Partner is WISeKey, a global expert in cybersecurity, digital identity and IoT solutions. As Hedera’s fourth Strategic Partner, WISeKey joins the Global Blockchain Business Council, Halborn and the Institutes RiskStream Collaborative.

Accelerating Authentication and Digital ID on Hedera

Based in Switzerland, WISeKey is strongly embedded in Web3 infrastructure, offering secure authentication and identification solutions for IoT, blockchain and AI. SEALCOIN AG, one of WISeKey’s established subsidiaries, focuses on the development of the SEALCOIN platform, which enables the autonomous exchange of verified, high value data secured by post-quantum cryptography. 

“Becoming a Strategic Partner of the Hedera Council reinforces WISeKey’s commitment to building trusted infrastructure for an increasingly connected and autonomous world,” said Carlos Moreira, Founder and CEO of WISeKey Group. 

“By combining WISeKey’s expertise in digital identity, cybersecurity, PQC-secure semiconductors and space-based IoT with Hedera’s enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology, we can accelerate the deployment of trusted digital ecosystems where devices, machines and organizations can identify, authenticate and transact securely at global scale. This partnership is an important step in turning decentralized technologies into real-world infrastructure for the digital economy.”

This strategic partnership builds on an existing use case in the Hedera ecosystem. Earlier this year, the Hashgraph Group launched the QAIT Q-Day Security Assessment Platform on the SEALCOIN Quantum Marketplace. The platform was designed to help enterprises, governments and critical infrastructure operators evaluate, monitor and mitigate cybersecurity risks associated with the emergence of quantum computing. 

Jonathan Llamas, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at SEALCOIN AG, added: “SEALCOIN was created around a simple premise: billions of connected devices and autonomous machines will increasingly need to transact with each other without sacrificing identity, security or trust. Hedera has been an active contributor to this vision, with a dedicated team of experts from its ecosystem working alongside us in the development of the SEALCOIN platform. By combining trusted device identity with Hedera’s scalable distributed infrastructure, we are building the foundations for machines to authenticate, exchange value and transact autonomously at global scale. This Strategic Partnership is a natural continuation of that collaboration and an important step toward making trusted machine-to-machine commerce a reality.”

Expanding Reach in Latin America

Hedera Council also proudly welcomes its eighth community partner, SpaceDev. The Council’s Community Partners bring strong ecosystem alignment and active participation, while driving adoption and awareness. SpaceDev is a Latin American software company, which has previously leveraged Hedera for its Blockchain for Energy (B4E) platform. This turned carbon-capture initiatives into auditable on-chain assets, replacing manual, error-prone workflows with a standardized, automated pipeline. 

As the Council’s newest Community Partner, SpaceDev brings its expertise in delivering digital products that offer secure, real-world solutions. Previously, SpaceDev has created software for platforms including Tether, WalletConnect, Rarible and UFCStrike, among many others. 

Currently ranked No. 2 among Clutch’s top blockchain companies, SpaceDev combines global reach with strong regional roots. Beyond its client work, the company supports the growth of Uruguay and Latin America’s blockchain landscape through educational programs, community events, and social initiatives that broaden access to technology.

Juan Manuel Sobral, CTO and co-founder of SpaceDev and President of the Blockchain Chamber of Uruguay, said: “Joining the Hedera Council Community Partner Program feels like a natural milestone in a story SpaceDev has been writing for years. We grew from Uruguay with the conviction that world-class technology can be created in Latin America, and that technical excellence becomes even more meaningful when it’s shared through education, community, and new opportunities. This recognition belongs to the talented people behind SpaceDev, as well as the clients and partners who have trusted us to bring ambitious ideas to life.”

To learn more about the Hedera Council partnership program, visit hederacouncil.org.

Robinhood Chain stopped producing new blocks on Friday, leaving transactions stalled for at least 14 minutes. Robinhood has disclosed neither the cause of the outage nor an estimated recovery time.

The network normally settles a block every tenth of a second. At that pace, a 14-minute stall accounts for roughly 8,400 blocks that were never produced.

Robinhood Chain network appears to have experienced an outage. Source: Block ExplorerWhat the Explorer ShowedThe chain’s tip sat several minutes old while the network kept accepting nothing new. Pending transactions read zero across the preceding half hour.

Traffic into the stall had been heavy. Blockscout put the prior 24 hours at 14.14 million transactions, on an average fee of $0.48.

🚨 Robinhood Chain suffered a network outage today, halting block production and stalling transactions for over 14 minutes.

Block explorer data shows block creation has only intermittently resumed, with the cause of the disruption still unknown. pic.twitter.com/nZtglQUZ2t

— BeInCrypto (@beincrypto) September 4, 2026 Robinhood Markets (HOOD) runs no public status page for the chain. That leaves block explorers as the only live window onto whether it is running.

Why a Single Sequencer MattersRobinhood launched the chain’s mainnet on July 1, built on Arbitrum’s Nitro software. Every block carries one poster address, a vanity string spelling the word sequencer in hexadecimal.

That design means one operator orders all traffic. When it stops, users have no second sequencer to fall back on and no way to force their transactions through.

L2BEAT, which grades Layer 2 decentralization, ranks Robinhood Chain below Stage 0, its lowest tier. The tracker flags that single sequencer and instant contract upgrades. Only two whitelisted actors can dispute invalid states.

Robinhood Chain on L2BeatThose trade-offs carry more weight now. L2BEAT values assets on the chain at $2.46 billion.

BeInCrypto reported earlier this week that the chain set a decentralized exchange (DEX) record. That record daily DEX volume topped $1.06 billion, driven by meme coins rather than tokenized stocks.

Fee income from that traffic has spilled into the wider Arbitrum ecosystem, lifting both Uniswap’s revenue base and ARB itself.

A brokerage that halts trading owes its customers an explanation. Whether Robinhood treats a chain outage the same way is the open question.

The cryptocurrency market experienced a significant rally on Friday, September 4, 2026, as a major short squeeze unfolded and key regulatory news broke from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Data from CoinGlass indicated that 105,019 traders saw positions worth $566.90 million liquidated in the past 24 hours, with $478.91 million of these from short positions. The total crypto market capitalization reached $2.711 trillion, expanding to $2.82 trillion when derivatives are included.

Regulatory action reshapes crypto landscapeThe SEC issued Order No. 34-106268, granting Nasdaq Texas, LLC accelerated approval to amend Rule 5711(d) to define “digital commodity” in its rules, legalize actively managed crypto strategies, and permit ETFs to hold up to 15% of their net asset value in instruments that initially do not meet strict eligibility criteria.

In the order, the SEC named Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), Solana (SOL), and XRP as digital commodities that currently qualify for inclusion in these products. This represents a formal acknowledgment within the exchange’s governance framework, though it does not carry the force of law nationwide.

The SEC’s move follows a wave of decisions from 2025 and 2026, including the September 2025 reduction of crypto ETP approval times from 240 days to 75 days and a March 2026 joint SEC and CFTC interpretation that classified a group of cryptocurrencies, including BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, ADA, AVAX, DOGE, SHIB, and LINK, as commodities.

In June, regulators cleared T. Rowe Price’s multi-asset crypto ETF, TKNZ, which can flexibly rotate holdings among these coins.

Despite this momentum, legal certainty remains pending. The Senate will hold a vote on the CLARITY Act on September 15, while the House of Representatives has signaled potential delays after canceling its September legislative sessions. The National Sheriffs’ Association, in a recent letter, withdrew objections to DeFi, adopting a neutral position and reducing some lobbying pressure. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse commented, “Making America the crypto capital of the world is within reach — let’s finish the job.”

Making America the crypto capital of the world is within reach — let’s finish the job.

Market rally driven by economic data and ETFsThe rally followed comments by Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller, who pointed to ongoing disinflation and supported stable interest rates at the Fed’s upcoming meeting. This calmed some market tensions, while the Japanese yen strengthened 2% amid speculation about a rate hike from Japan’s central bank.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $730.87 million in daily inflows, with BlackRock’s IBIT contributing $454 million and pushing total BTC fund assets above $103.34 billion—equivalent to 6.32% of all Bitcoin in circulation. Ethereum ETFs gained $141.24 million, leading to $115.08 million in ETH short liquidations.

Zcash soars 2,300% on AI privacy demand and ETF inclusionZcash (ZEC) climbed 94% over the last 30 days and more than 2,300% in the past year, driven by a sharp short squeeze and renewed privacy concerns as artificial intelligence technology advances. CoinGlass reported $36.46 million in forced ZEC liquidations, nearly all from short positions, with open interest reaching $2.3 billion.

The introduction of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra model, which scored 98.6% on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark and enables fully autonomous computer operation, sparked further investor attention. After AI agents were found to have made over 15,000 unauthorized edits to the DseWiki database in Germany, privacy-focused investors looked to Zcash’s zero-knowledge technology as a protective measure against automated surveillance.

In parallel, Nasdaq’s new 15% net asset value buffer rule allowed asset managers to buy ZEC for regulated multi-asset funds, further fueling the short squeeze.

Mini dictionary: Zero-knowledge technology refers to cryptographic protocols that allow one party to prove to another that a statement is true without revealing any information beyond the validity of the statement itself. Zcash employs this technology to provide enhanced privacy for blockchain transactions.

Institutional flows and industry restructuringSpot XRP ETFs continued their inflow streak to 11 sessions, accumulating a total of $1.68 billion, with $6.14 million added in a single day. Daily liquidations for XRP stayed modest at $11.39 million. RLUSD stablecoin supply on the XRP Ledger surpassed $1 billion, and the network received approval from the Bank for International Settlements to record official statistics.

On-chain data revealed large-scale Ethereum sales, with one institution selling 29,735 ETH valued at $72.1 million. Abraxas Capital maintained a $291.4 million short hedge on Hyperliquid, and Multicoin Capital transferred 150,000 HYPE tokens, worth $12.8 million, to Coinbase.

The sector also saw ongoing risk management and listing adjustments. After a $1.7 million exploit at Notional Finance, Binance placed AVA, GNS, SCR, and TOWNS under a Monitoring Tag, and announced the listing of MarsCoin (MARSCOIN) with a Seed Tag. KuCoin and Kraken are set to follow with their own reviews on September 7 and 11, respectively.

This period of explosive growth represents a shift toward maturity as major crypto assets like BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP channel liquidity through regulated ETF products.

The bitcoin-to-gold ratio climbed above 18, its highest level since January, though analysts noted that historic ETF inflows often precede local corrections. September seasonality—dubbed “Rektember” by traders—is considered a significant risk ahead of the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting and the Senate’s CLARITY Act vote, both scheduled for the middle of the month.

Asset30-day Performance (%)1-year Performance (%)ETF Inflows (Latest, $ million)Zcash (ZEC)942,300Included in new ETF allocationXRPN/AN/A6.14 (daily), 1,680 (cumulative)Bitcoin (BTC)N/AN/A730.87 (daily), 454 from BlackRock IBITEthereum (ETH)N/AN/A141.24

Burn Page Returns Error as Data Goes MissingThe official burn tracking page on Shibarium is currently failing to load, leaving $SHIB holders without visibility into one of the token's core deflationary mechanisms.

The contract address in question, ethereum:0x95ad61b0a150d79219dcf64e1e6cc01f0b64c4ce, tracks tokens permanently removed from circulation. It remains unclear whether the outage reflects a technical fault or a broader reporting change.

How the Shibarium Burn Mechanism WorksToken burning sits at the centre of Shibarium's value proposition.

The Shiba Inu team later introduced ShibTorch to automate this process further.

Despite the mechanism running in the background, the scale challenge is significant.

The data outage comes at a sensitive moment for the project. Whether it is a temporary technical glitch or something more structural, the community is watching closely given how central burn reporting is to sentiment around $SHIB.

Sources:
Coin Turk: Shibarium burn data page fails to load
The Crypto Basic: Shibarium quietly burns hundreds of millions of SHIB
MEXC: What is SHIB burn and how it affects your investment

Two Protocols, One Goal: Lowering the Barrier to Token Creation@Injective has integrated two no-code protocols, Trippy Pump and TokenStation, to simplify on-chain asset creation for both retail users and developers. The move removes one of the more persistent friction points in crypto: the need for smart contract programming just to get a token off the ground.

Trippy Pump uses a bonding curve mechanism supporting $INJ, $USDC, and $SAI trading pairs. Once a project crosses a defined capital threshold, it is automatically graduated to @ChoiceXchange liquidity pools, providing immediate market depth without any manual intervention from the creator.

TokenStation, described by the Injective team as the first native token launcher on Injective, gives creators direct control over every parameter of their asset. Creators can set a token's name, symbol, logo, and initial supply, and can also manage mint and burn functions after launch.

Instant Price Discovery for Emerging AssetsThe practical effect of combining these two tools is that meme tokens and experimental assets can now reach live markets with price discovery and liquidity in place from day one. The new infrastructure removes that requirement entirely.

The integration sits within a broader period of active development on Injective.

Together, Trippy Pump and TokenStation position Injective as a destination for permissionless asset launches, competing with similar launchpad infrastructure on other Layer 1 networks while keeping the process accessible to non-technical users.

Sources:
Injective Blog: How to Launch a Token on Injective
Injective Docs: Token Launch
TokenStation Official App

Nine Tokens Dropped Across Two PlatformsJapan's @sbivc_official and @BITPointJP are removing nine digital assets from their platforms as part of a wider service integration tied to a corporate merger.

Holders wishing to exit should note that all sales and withdrawals must be completed by October 28, after which remaining balances will be liquidated at market value and converted to Japanese yen for account credit in November.

Merger Backdrop and Jasmy's Response

Jasmy CEO @H_Hara_Jasmy has moved quickly to reassure the community, confirming that the discontinuation stems from internal BITPOINT handling policies and does not reflect any change to the protocol's business activities or the Jasmy Chain development roadmap.

The delistings arrive at a sensitive moment for JASMY holders, as the token has faced similar actions from other Asian exchanges in recent months. Investors in affected assets across both platforms are advised to act well before the October 7 purchase cutoff and the October 28 final withdrawal deadline to avoid automatic liquidation.

Sources:
COINOTAG: Japan's BITPOINT to Delist BNB Among 6 Tokens on October 28
New Economy Japan: BITPOINT delisting announcement (Japanese)
Phemex: What Is JasmyCoin? IoT Data Protocol Trading Guide

Institutional Bitcoin buying is no longer a novelty. It is now a line item on balance sheets managing trillions of dollars, and the latest figures from BlackRock make that point without any need for embellishment.

BlackRock clients purchased approximately $453.96 million worth of Bitcoin in a single transaction, continuing a pattern of institutional accumulation that has reshaped how traditional finance thinks about digital assets.

The numbers behind the move During the week of August 17 through 25, BlackRock clients bought a combined $1.33 billion in Bitcoin, marking the largest weekly total since October 2025.

The broader U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF market reflected the same momentum. Total inflows across all spot Bitcoin ETFs reached approximately $3.3 to $3.52 billion in August 2026. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, known by its ticker IBIT, captured the majority of those flows.

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IBIT currently holds around $59 to $60 billion in assets and routinely accounts for more than 75% of daily spot Bitcoin ETF inflows.

Bitcoin was trading around $78,000 during the period in question, providing the price context against which these dollar-denominated inflow figures were built.

How BlackRock actually does this BlackRock does not speculate on Bitcoin. The firm has been explicit about its operating model: it transacts in Bitcoin only when client demand for exposure is present. That demand is expressed through purchases of IBIT shares, and BlackRock then acquires the underlying Bitcoin to back those shares, using Coinbase Prime as its custody partner.

Since IBIT launched in January 2024, cumulative client buying through the vehicle has reached what BlackRock describes as tens of billions of dollars.

Tracking firms like Arkham Intelligence have been monitoring on-chain flows associated with BlackRock’s Bitcoin addresses, giving the market a near-real-time window into accumulation activity. The $453.96 million figure reflects that kind of granular institutional transparency.

What this signals for the market The concentration of inflows into IBIT specifically has competitive implications for the rest of the spot Bitcoin ETF field. IBIT’s asset base and daily volume dominance give it a self-reinforcing advantage, as institutional investors often prefer the most liquid vehicle in a category.

BlackRock has noted publicly that many of its clients are using Bitcoin as a diversification tool, adding an asset with low historical correlation to traditional stocks and bonds.

The prior comparable weekly inflow figure was in October 2025, suggesting these spikes in institutional buying tend to cluster around specific market conditions rather than running at a constant elevated rate.

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

Pocket Bitcoin said on Sept. 3 that its August security incident exposed additional personal and financial information involving 5,411 customers, expanding the scope described in its initial disclosure.

Summary

Pocket Bitcoin confirmed that two exposed data groups contained records involving 5,411 customers in total. Bank transaction lists exposed names, addresses, transfer amounts, dates and sometimes customer IBAN account numbers. Another 291 customers faced possible exposure of identity documents, Bitcoin addresses and sensitive funding records. Pocket said its customer databases, transaction systems, private keys and customer Bitcoin remained directly unaffected. Authorities in Switzerland and Liechtenstein received notifications, while Pocket also formally filed a police report. The Swiss Bitcoin services provider identified two distinct groups after completing its forensic investigation. One contained bank transaction information involving 5,120 customers. The other covered correspondence containing potentially more sensitive records from 291 customers.

Pocket Bitcoin breach exposed two data groups The larger group consisted of transaction lists that partner banks sent to Pocket Bitcoin during compliance checks. Those lists contained customer names, residential addresses, transfer amounts and transaction dates. Some also included the IBAN connected to a transfer.

⚠️ Update zum Sicherheitsvorfall bei Pocket Bitcoin

Unsere Untersuchung ist abgeschlossen.
Dabei hat sich gezeigt, dass in einzelnen Fällen weitere Daten betroffen sind als in unserem ersten Beitrag beschrieben.

Wir haben dazu zwei betroffene Gruppen identifiziert. https://t.co/XASbu1wTQH

— PocketBitcoin.com 🏦👉🔑 (@PocketBitcoin) September 3, 2026 The smaller group involved correspondence Pocket Bitcoin sent to partner banks. Depending on the customer, the exposed material included names, postal addresses, public Bitcoin addresses, identity document copies and source-of-funds records.

The company said the information appeared in different combinations, meaning every customer in the 291-person group did not necessarily have every listed data type exposed. Pocket Bitcoin has contacted affected customers individually with details about their cases.

The two groups cover 5,411 customers combined. Other customers may have had email addresses or support conversations exposed under the company’s original disclosure, but Pocket said those without a new personal notification should continue relying on that initial notice.

Core databases and customer Bitcoin were unaffected Pocket Bitcoin said attackers did not compromise its main customer or transaction databases. Instead, the records came from correspondence and bank-generated lists stored in a copied backup within the affected support system.

This distinction explains why data resembling transaction and identity records was exposed even though the underlying databases remained secure. The affected support material contained copies of information produced or received during regulatory compliance procedures.

Pocket Bitcoin operates as a noncustodial service and does not hold customers’ private keys. The company said Bitcoin balances were never accessible to the attacker, while buying and selling services continue to operate normally.

A disclosed Bitcoin address cannot authorize a transfer. However, linking a public address to a customer’s identity may allow another person to inspect its visible blockchain activity. Pocket noted that moving Bitcoin cannot erase the address’s existing transaction history.

Exposed records create physical phishing risks Pocket Bitcoin said it currently has no indication that the exposed information has been misused. That statement reflects information available after its investigation and does not guarantee that misuse will not occur later.

“As things stand, we have no indication that any of the affected information has been misused,” Pocket Bitcoin said.

The company identified forged letters and other physical communications as particular risks because names and postal addresses were included. A fraudster could refer to a genuine bank transfer or Bitcoin transaction to make an impersonation attempt appear credible.

Email addresses and login credentials were not linked to the two newly identified data groups, according to Pocket Bitcoin. The company therefore said it does not see a direct targeted email-phishing risk arising specifically from those records.

The incident follows several disclosures involving customer information held outside core crypto systems. As crypto.news reported, three recent breaches exposed 253,487 records, raising concerns that residential and transaction data could support phishing or physical targeting years later.

A separate August incident at Bits of Gold potentially exposed customer identity, banking and wallet information through a third-party system. That investigation similarly found that customer funds and passwords remained unaffected.

Pocket Bitcoin notified regulators and police Pocket Bitcoin reported the incident to Switzerland’s Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner and Liechtenstein’s Data Protection Office. It also filed a police report but did not identify the suspected attacker or provide details about the investigation.

The company said the vulnerability behind the incident has been closed and additional safeguards have been installed. It is reviewing how bank correspondence and related compliance records are stored and transferred.

Pocket expects to publish more information about those changes in the coming weeks. It does not expect to identify further exposure categories, although it said it would notify customers if later findings changed that assessment.

Affected users should monitor bank activity and treat unexpected letters, calls or messages cautiously. Pocket Bitcoin said it will never ask customers to disclose a seed phrase or transfer Bitcoin through an unsolicited telephone call or letter.

XRP Tops the Agenda for Wealth Managers$XRP is emerging as one of the most talked-about digital assets among professional investors. Despite that breadth, XRP stood apart.

A poll taken during the session underscored how early many advisers still are in the crypto adoption curve.

ETF Flows and Institutional Holdings Signal Broader InterestThe interest expressed in that room is backed by real money moving into the market.

Regulatory filings paint an equally notable picture on the institutional side.

It is worth noting a caveat on those figures. Still, the direction of travel is clear: professional capital is moving into the XRP market in a way that was not possible before the launch of regulated spot products.

Sources:
Crypto.news: XRP interest grows among wealth managers, Bitwise says
CoinDesk: XRP ETFs pull in $170 million over eleven days as Goldman tops institutional holders
Hokanews: XRP ETFs Extend Inflow Streak to 11 Sessions as Institutional Holdings Reach $183 Million

Hargreaves Lansdown opened access to nine Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded notes on Sept. 3, bringing regulated cryptocurrency exposure to eligible users of the United Kingdom’s largest retail investment platform.

Summary

Hargreaves Lansdown added nine Bitcoin and Ether ETNs for eligible users through Advanced Investing service. Approximately two million platform clients may access products after successfully completing required investor protection checks. Investors must self-certify, pass an appropriateness assessment, and complete a 24-hour cooling-off period before access. The FCA reopened eligible crypto ETNs to retail investors in October 2025 under safeguards nationally. Crypto ETNs track asset prices without giving investors direct ownership of Bitcoin or Ether themselves. The products come from BlackRock’s iShares, WisdomTree, 21Shares, Invesco, CoinShares and Bitwise, according to a Financial Times report. The issuers charge annual product fees ranging from 0% to 0.35%.

UK’s Largest Investment Platform Hargreaves Lansdown Opens Bitcoin and Ether ETNs to 2 Million Investors

According to the FT, the UK’s largest investment platform, Hargreaves Lansdown (HL), will open crypto ETN trading to its approximately 2 million investors from September 3,… pic.twitter.com/a37mVTK3ex

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) September 3, 2026 Hargreaves Lansdown serves approximately two million investors. However, the crypto ETNs are only available through its Advanced Investing service and are not automatically accessible to every customer.

Hargreaves Lansdown adds crypto after long delay The launch comes almost 11 months after the Financial Conduct Authority ended its four-year restriction on retail access to qualifying crypto ETNs. Other major British investment platforms had already introduced the products.

Hargreaves Lansdown initially adopted a more cautious position. In October 2025, the platform told investors that “Bitcoin is not an asset class,” while acknowledging that some customers might still want speculative exposure.

Doug Abbott, Hargreaves Lansdown’s chief product officer, said the platform delayed its launch to ensure client testing and safeguards were properly designed. He said customers should understand the products and encounter the “right level of friction” before investing.

The company’s current crypto ETN page warns that the instruments are volatile and high risk. It says investors could lose all the money they commit.

Investors face eligibility checks and a waiting period Customers must first self-certify as advanced investors. They must then complete an online appropriateness assessment designed to test whether they understand the products and associated risks.

Eligible customers must also complete a 24-hour cooling-off period before viewing the available ETNs. They need either a Fund and Share Account or a self-invested personal pension to buy, hold or sell the instruments.

Hargreaves Lansdown charges a 0.35% annual platform fee for holding crypto ETNs, capped at £12.50 per month. Dealing charges range from £3.95 to £6.95, depending on the customer’s trading frequency. These charges are separate from each product’s management fee.

The notes trade during London Stock Exchange market hours. They do not provide continuous 24-hour trading like cryptocurrency exchanges.

Crypto ETNs provide exposure without direct ownership Crypto ETNs are listed financial instruments designed to follow the price of an underlying digital asset. Investors purchase a note issued by a financial institution rather than buying Bitcoin or Ether directly.

The issuer arranges custody of the underlying cryptocurrency. Customers therefore do not control private keys, manage wallets or withdraw the digital assets represented by their investment.

This structure introduces risks that differ from direct cryptocurrency ownership. Investors depend on the issuer, custodian, trading venue and investment platform. Product fees and market spreads may also cause returns to differ from movements in the underlying asset.

Crypto.news previously reported that BlackRock listed its Bitcoin product on the London Stock Exchange after the retail restrictions changed. The listing was among several products introduced as regulated providers prepared for wider individual access.

FCA rules restrict how platforms offer crypto ETNs The FCA lifted its retail prohibition on qualifying crypto ETNs on Oct. 8, 2025. Products must appear on the regulator’s Official List and trade through a recognized U.K. investment exchange.

The regulator classifies the products as restricted mass-market investments. Its official guidance requires appropriateness assessments, customer categorization, cooling-off periods and prominent risk warnings.

Platforms cannot offer incentives encouraging customers to invest. They must also identify an appropriate target market and take reasonable measures to prevent foreseeable consumer harm.

As crypto.news reported when the policy was announced, the FCA reopened retail access while keeping crypto derivatives prohibited. The regulator said investors would not receive the same protections available for conventional regulated investments.

Demand remains an open question Hargreaves Lansdown said it had received a consistent level of customer enquiries about crypto ETNs, particularly from experienced investors. That interest has not yet established how many eligible clients will invest.

Other platforms have described British retail uptake as modest. Restrictions preventing newly purchased crypto ETNs from being held in conventional stocks-and-shares ISAs may also limit demand.

The launch nevertheless gives Hargreaves Lansdown customers a regulated route to Bitcoin and Ether price exposure without opening an exchange account. Future adoption will depend on investor demand, cryptocurrency prices and whether the available product range expands.

Kalshi prediction market has expanded its perpetual futures (perps) offerings to include BNB, Cardano (ADA), and AAVE. The platform shows perpetual contracts for AI altcoins such as Worldcoin (WLD) and Venice Token (VVV) are also live for trading after approval from the US CFTC.

BNB, ADA, WLD, AAVE & Venice Token Perps Trading Goes Live on Kalshi Kalshi has added BNB, ADA, AAVE, WLD, and VVV to its line of US CFTC-regulated perpetual contracts. The products debuted under the trademark “American Perpetuals,” which aims to offer CFTC-regulated perpetual futures contracts for trading in the United States.

Notably, the prediction market platform filed for these perpetual futures with the CFTC last week. The max leverage varies by crypto asset, such as 4.5x for BNB and 1.9x for Venice Token.

Kalshi now offers perpetuals trading for Bitcoin and 17 altcoins such as ETH, XRP, SOL, HYPE, and Zcash. Notably, the perpetuals are CFTC-regulated, don’t have an expiration date, and settle in USD.

As CoinGape reported earlier, Kalshi last launched Zcash (ZEC), Near Protocol (NEAR), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Shiba Inu (SHIB) perps. However, approvals for XLM, DOT, and HBAR are still pending with the US CFTC.

The approvals came despite CME Group’s lawsuit against the US CFTC and Chairman Mike Selig, alleging these contracts are swaps. This week, the CFTC filed a motion to dismiss the CME lawsuit, arguing the exchange lacks standing on its competitive-injury claims.

BNB, ADA, WLD, AAVE and Venice Token Perps. Source: Kalshi

Prices Rebound amid More Perpetual Futures Approval by CFTC BNB price jumped more than 5% to $729 amid broader crypto market recovery. The price is currently trading around $723, with a massive 83% rise in trading volume in the last 24 hours.

ADA price has skyrocketed almost 10% to $0.222 as RealFi sets October 1 mainnet launch. Cardano price outlook shows further upside to $0.28.

Meanwhile, AAVE, WLD, and VVV prices also jumped higher as the US Treasury bought back $12.5 billion of debt in its latest Treasury buyback operation.

If you’re looking to explore prediction markets amid the dip in the crypto market, check out these best crypto prediction markets of 2026.

Notional Finance may have suffered a $1.7 million exploit involving an escrow contract, blockchain investigators reported on Sept. 4. The reported losses include approximately $69,242 in DAI and $1.66 million in USDC.

Summary

Researchers reported $1.7 million in DAI and USDC leaving an escrow contract linked to Notional. The reported losses comprise $69,242 in DAI and $1,658,423 in USDC, according to Specter researchers. The suspected attacker exchanged the stablecoins for 689.2 ETH before depositing funds into Tornado Cash. PeckShield cited Specter’s findings, while Notional had not publicly confirmed the incident when last checked. The exploit’s technical cause, affected users and prospects for recovering assets remain publicly unconfirmed. Security firm PeckShield cited findings published by blockchain investigation group Specter. Neither report provided a complete technical explanation of how the assets left the contract.

“The Notional Finance escrow contract may have been exploited,” PeckShield said, preserving uncertainty about the incident’s status.

#PeckShieldAlert Specter has reported that the Notional Finance escrow contract may have been exploited, resulting in $1.7M in ethereum:0x6b175474e89094c44da98b954eedeac495271d0f and $USDC lost.
The exploiter has swapped the stolen funds into 689.2 $ETH and deposited them into… pic.twitter.com/Wd5Dc3MWtL

— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) September 4, 2026 Notional Finance exploit report identifies two addresses Researchers identified two Ethereum addresses allegedly connected to the movement of the assets. The first address is 0xC954…De69, while the second is 0xDaCC…Ce38.

The addresses were labelled as theft addresses by Specter. That description remains an investigator attribution rather than a finding confirmed by Notional Finance, law enforcement or a court.

The available reports do not identify the precise escrow function involved. They also do not establish whether the event resulted from a smart-contract vulnerability, compromised credentials, faulty permissions or another cause.

Stablecoins were reportedly converted into 689.2 ETH The suspected attacker reportedly exchanged the DAI and USDC for approximately 689.2 ETH. The Ether was then deposited into Tornado Cash, according to Specter and PeckShield.

Tornado Cash is a set of Ethereum smart contracts designed to reduce the visible connection between deposits and later withdrawals. Its use can complicate blockchain tracing, although depositing assets into the protocol does not independently prove criminal ownership or intent.

The rapid conversion of stablecoins may also reduce opportunities for issuers or centralized platforms to restrict the assets. Both DAI and USDC can be followed publicly before conversion, while subsequent withdrawals from a mixer become harder to associate with the original address.

In related coverage, crypto.news reported that an address tied to the Drift Protocol exploiter moved $44 million through Tornado Cash after remaining inactive for several months.

No technical cause or official response is available Notional Finance had not published a public incident report or confirmation through its official account when checked. The project had also not disclosed whether contracts were paused, whether remaining assets were secured or whether users needed to take protective action.

The lack of confirmation means the reported $1.7 million loss should remain described as preliminary. It is also unclear whether the affected assets belonged directly to users, the protocol treasury or another party using the escrow contract.

No verified market reaction can be attributed to the report. Without an official assessment, linking token-price movements or changes in deposited value directly to the suspected exploit would be premature.

Previous recoveries depended on rapid containment DeFi projects commonly respond to suspected exploits by pausing vulnerable contracts, contacting stablecoin issuers and exchanges, tracing connected wallets and offering return agreements. Those options can become more limited after assets enter privacy protocols.

Some projects have still recovered positions or protected unaffected products after an attack. As crypto.news reported, Term Labs recovered its affected fixed-rate positions following an $8.5 million governance exploit, although several products remained closed.

Stake DAO also secured its Ethereum backing and closed a bridge after an unauthorized minting incident, according to related coverage. Those cases involved direct project responses that are not yet available for Notional Finance.

Meanwhile, Notional Finance operates as an Ethereum-based lending protocol focused on fixed-rate, fixed-term borrowing. Its documentation explains that deposited currencies can support borrowing obligations denominated in other currencies. 

This makes contract-level accounting and collateral controls central to maintaining solvent user positions. However, researchers have not established whether the reported escrow incident affected Notional’s primary lending system, a separate integration or an older contract.

DAI and USDC have long formed part of Notional’s supported lending markets. The protocol’s technical materials describe currency pairs connecting those stablecoins with their interest-bearing equivalents. 

The reported loss therefore involves assets used within Notional’s broader lending architecture, but the available evidence does not show that open loans, collateral balances or fixed-term positions were affected. An official contract identification is needed before the exposure can be measured accurately.

What happens next for Notional Finance The next confirmed update would likely need to establish which contract was involved, how the transactions were authorized and whether other funds remain exposed. A post-mortem could also clarify the ownership of the lost assets.

Investigators may continue tracking any Ether withdrawn from Tornado Cash. Exchanges and blockchain analytics companies could monitor later transactions, but the reported mixer deposits make attribution and recovery more difficult. Until Notional publishes an assessment, the scale, cause and effect on users remain unresolved.

Avalanche (AVAX) is currently consolidating within a symmetrical triangle, as price volatility contracts and market participants anticipate a significant move. Technical analysis points to a critical moment for AVAX, with the asset trading at $7.29, a daily volume of $201.18 million, and a market capitalization of $3.14 billion. After recording a 2.06% gain in the last 24 hours, bullish sentiment is building, though traders remain alert to both upside and downside risks.

Price consolidation and breakout levelsAnalyst Crypto With Gopal identified the consolidation structure on the one-hour chart, with AVAX forming a symmetrical triangle. This pattern highlights the balance of power between buyers and sellers, resulting in narrowing price action around the $7.20 level. Resistance is concentrated in the $7.60 to $7.70 zone, a region bulls must reclaim to establish further momentum.

A decisive breakout above this resistance is likely to shift market sentiment in favor of the bulls, setting the stage for an advance to $7.95.

Conversely, a failure to overcome resistance or a breakdown below the triangle could accelerate bearish momentum, placing $6.50 as a possible lower target for AVAX in the near term.

The converging trendlines in AVAX price signal tightening volatility, with a key test ahead at the $7.60–$7.70 resistance. A successful breakout could pave the way to $7.95, while rejection risks a drawdown to $6.50.

Institutional tokenization expands with CashlinkAvalanche’s progress in tokenizing real-world assets is supported by its recent integration with Cashlink. The European-based tokenization platform is leveraging Avalanche for institutional securities, strengthening regulatory-compliant digital asset issuance and management.

Through this partnership, Cashlink’s institutional clients can create and oversee tokenized securities directly on Avalanche. This bridges the gap between traditional finance and on-chain infrastructure, as institutions increasingly seek blockchain solutions for asset issuance and transfer.

Financial institutions such as KfW, NRW.BANK, DZ Bank, Tradias, and Helaba are already utilizing the Cashlink network, which has processed over €1 billion in transactions across more than 300 live issuances.

While technical setups like the contracting triangle and the need to break key resistance levels remain pivotal for AVAX’s short-term outlook, a broader transformation is underway in asset management. Instead of relying on intermediaries, Wall Street and major investors are shifting toward Web3 solutions. Platforms like 1stepSwap now enable users to hold shares of leading U.S. companies and commodities such as gold and silver directly within their crypto wallets. By tokenizing real-world assets and instantly identifying optimal market prices, these platforms remove middlemen from the investment process.

As integration efforts between Cashlink and Avalanche deepen, institutional tokenization and blockchain adoption continue to advance, reinforcing Avalanche’s position within regulated digital finance.

Despite positive forecasts, market caution prevails, and price action will depend on whether bulls can secure a close above the $7.60–$7.70 range. Otherwise, the risk of a move back toward $6.50 remains notable, underscoring the importance of monitoring key technical levels.

PeckShield reported that an address tied to the Tectonic hack transferred 2,658.9 ETH, valued at $6.65 million, to Tornado Cash on September 3. The incident has drawn attention from exchanges and blockchain investigators, as the move represents one of the largest unrecovered sums following the Cronos network exploit on August 30.

Chain rollback leaves funds on Ethereum untouchedTectonic, recognized as the leading lending platform on Cronos, experienced a major security breach that prompted validators to halt the blockchain within hours. Cronos, a blockchain network built by Crypto.com, later announced the restoration of block production from block 90,896,189, rolling the chain back to just before the hack.

Though the rollback reversed nearly all funds connected to the attacker within the Cronos chain, it could not reclaim assets already bridged to Ethereum. Approximately $74 million in stolen funds were traced by PeckShield across three addresses. Of this amount, $60 million remained in one Cronos wallet, $8 million in a second, and $6 million on Ethereum.

Independent data showed the Ethereum balance at 2,592.2152 ETH, or $6.29 million, after the incident. According to TRM Labs, the attacker moved stolen funds initially using USDC, then converted them into roughly 2,500 ETH.

On-chain researchers, including Weilin Li, used $75 million as the estimated total loss, while archive-node analyses suggested that up to $119.5 million may have been impacted if contracts deployed by the attackers before the exploit are included.

SourceTotal Stolen ($ Million)Funds on Cronos ($ Million)Funds on Ethereum ($ Million)PeckShield74686TRM Labs / Weilin Li75UnspecifiedUnspecifiedArchive-node analysis119.5Includes contractsIncludes contractsPrice manipulation triggers catastrophic lossesSecurity firm TRM Labs explained that the attacker exploited TONIC, the native token of Tectonic, which had only $305,000 in weekly trading volume prior to the incident and a 20% collateral ratio. Halborn, a blockchain security company, found that the hacker artificially inflated the price of TONIC by nearly 100 times within 20 minutes, then used the overpriced token to borrow high-value assets from nine lending platforms.

Subsequent investigations revealed a second attacker’s wallet, raising the lost value estimate from $66 million to $75 million. The hack caused Tectonic’s total value locked (TVL) to plummet from $121.7 million to just $3 million, as tracked by DeFiLlama.

The attack on Tectonic hollowed out the platform, with TVL plunging more than $118 million within hours.

Tornado Cash remains the key laundering avenueWhile the $6.65 million transacted via Tornado Cash represents a smaller portion of the overall exploit, the transaction route stands out due to Tornado Cash’s continuing role in crypto money laundering. TRM Labs documented that Tornado Cash received over $700 million in 2026 through June alone, making it the largest mixer protocol on Ethereum networks.

Besides being used to conceal illicit transactions, Tornado Cash has also supported legitimate privacy needs. The US Treasury removed the protocol from its sanctions list on March 21, 2025, but it remains under close watch for its role in facilitating major attacks.

The Cronos network’s rollback sparked a discussion about blockchain finality. Halborn emphasized that rolling back the chain limited losses but also undermined confidence in ledger immutability. Amid this uncertainty, CRO, Cronos’s native token, lost about 10% of its value in one day.

Mini dictionary: Tornado Cash, a decentralized privacy protocol on Ethereum, allows users to mix coins and obscure transaction trails, making it popular among both privacy advocates and cybercriminals seeking to launder assets.

Tornado Cash plays a pivotal role in laundering stolen cryptocurrency, remaining critically important to law enforcement, exchanges, and the wider crypto ecosystem.

Record rise in price-manipulation attacksThe Tectonic exploit mirrors a broader spike in price-manipulation attacks this year. PeckShield counted 50 major hacks in August alone, a 67% increase from July’s 30 incidents, though total losses decreased to $136.3 million from July’s $270 million. Among these, the Tectonic incident accounted for the largest loss of the month and ranked as the fourth-largest crypto theft in 2026.

TRM Labs has recorded 32 price-manipulation exploits so far in 2026, setting a new yearly record. Experts highlight that attackers often exploit low-liquidity tokens when protocols assign them significant collateral power, enabling rapid losses across protocols and networks.

The Tectonic case demonstrated how quickly such attacks can escalate, progressing from price manipulation to cross-chain laundering, and ultimately challenging the industry’s security and regulatory frameworks.

SUI rebounded strongly on September 3, 2026, after a period of weakness in late August. Analyst Ali Martinez flagged a potential reversal signal, while Kravata, a regulated stablecoin payments provider, launched a new Sui-based payments system for its Latin American customers.

SUI price surges on renewed volumeAt the time of reporting, SUI was trading at $0.7668, representing a 7.54% daily increase. The trading volume also showed a significant rise, climbing by 49.43% within a day to reach $578.04 million. Over the past week, SUI gained 0.56%, according to data from CoinMarketCap.

This renewed activity comes as traders and analysts highlight technical and fundamental factors supporting the latest move.

Technical indicators and analyst outlookAli Martinez pointed to a TD Sequential “9” bullish pattern on SUI’s daily chart, noting that it signaled a possible trend reversal after a phase of persistent declines. The indicator, commonly used to assess trend exhaustion, appeared as SUI found support between $0.70 and $0.72 following the August correction.

The TD Sequential indicator identifies potential reversal points after a prolonged price move. A “9” setup can suggest that selling pressure is waning, but a confirmed uptrend requires further price action and momentum.

Buyers repeatedly stepped in around the $0.70 support area, helping to stabilize SUI and limit additional declines. Martinez noted that the next phase may see a recovery spanning one to four daily candlesticks, depending on market dynamics.

Sustained accumulation in the $0.70 to $0.73 range could drive SUI’s price higher, with targets at $0.79 and $0.85 if support holds, according to analyst BitGuru.

A close below this support would weaken the recovery trend, with volume and a break above resistance levels still needed for stronger bullish confirmation.

IndicatorCurrent ReadingResistance/TargetPrice$0.7668$0.79 / $0.85Support$0.70 – $0.73Volume$578.04 millionMomentum indicators and ecosystem developmentTradingView data showed the Relative Strength Index (RSI) at 55.62, holding above the neutral 50 level but below the moving average of 56.69. While this level does not indicate overbought conditions, it suggests moderate bullish momentum for SUI.

The Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) line registered at 0.0089, slightly below the signal line of 0.0115, with a histogram value of -0.0026. This points to lingering short-term bearish pressure on the daily chart.

On the ecosystem front, Kravata announced its regulated stablecoin payments infrastructure is now live on Sui. The Latin America-focused company stated on September 2, 2026, that its solution enables approximately five million customers to perform stablecoin transactions, make payments, and manage global wallets—all with zero gas fees and settlement within seconds.

Mini dictionary: Kravata, a regulated stablecoin protocol, provides digital payment solutions tailored for the Latin American market, allowing users to conduct stablecoin transactions and manage digital wallets with no transaction fees.

Sui’s official account also highlighted the instant settlement capabilities and integration for Latin American users, boosting regional adoption and creating new payment use cases for SUI.

Sui’s official post indicated that Kravata now offers regulated stablecoin infrastructure for Latin America, enabling instant money transfers, payouts, and global accounts with zero gas fees for five million users.

Observers indicate that this integration could strengthen SUI’s use case as it attempts to maintain its price recovery. Market participants are closely watching key support areas, volume, and resistance zones for the next move.

LIT rose 13% to $4.21 and has doubled in 30 days as traders position for a U.S. perpetuals opening that Lighter has not applied for. Robinhood order flow now supplies 17% of the exchange's daily volume, against 12% on a 30-day basis, while perp DEX volume across the sector fell 30% over seven days.

Perpetual DEX tokens outran bitcoin over the past month, led by Lighter's LIT, on trader positioning for a U.S. regulatory opening that neither the exchange nor the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has announced.

The bid is regulatory. Volume across perpetual DEXs fell 30.13% over the past seven days to $20.85 billion a day, according to DefiLlama. The one thing measurably growing under Lighter is order flow from Robinhood, and the Robinhood product that produces it is closed to U.S. users.

LIT traded at $4.21 at 20:20 UTC on Thursday, up 13% over 24 hours, 13.8% over seven days and 99.5% over 30 days, for a $1.05 billion market value and a $4.21 billion fully diluted value, according to CoinGecko. The token ranged between $3.69 and $4.33 on $146.7 million of volume and ranks 70th. Bitcoin rose 5.5% over the same 24 hours to $81,492 and 26.9% over 30 days.

Doubling In A MonthThe rally is concentrated in two names. edgeX's EDGE rose 47.5% over 24 hours and 60.4% over seven days to $0.6113, on a $214 million market value and $45.2 million of volume. The exchange traded $1.272 billion over 24 hours and buys back EDGE with platform revenue, having repurchased 4.79% of supply to date, its tokenomics page states.

Hyperliquid's HYPE added 6.1% to $85.99, holding a $19.13 billion market value and trading within 1% of the record $86.71 it set on Aug. 27. Aster's ASTER fell 1.5% to $0.7274, the only decline among the group. GMX rose 3.6%, dYdX 4.1% and Drift 4.2%, each below bitcoin's move.

Over 30 days the ranking separates further: LIT up 99.5%, edgeX up 71% and HYPE up 50.8%, against ASTER at 19.9% and bitcoin at 26.9%. The venues that gained share this year carried the move; the 2021-era perpetual protocols did not.

No Filing, No DocketLighter founder Vladimir Novakovski holds one of the 43 seats on the CFTC's Innovation Advisory Committee, which the agency named in 2026 and convened for the first time on Aug. 20. The agency's readout of that meeting lists crypto's regulatory evolution, artificial intelligence and compute in derivatives markets, and prediction markets. Perpetual futures do not appear on it.

No public CFTC docket names Lighter, and the exchange has not filed to register as a designated contract market. Its committee seat carries no trading authorization.

The sector-wide opening is real. The CFTC issued a policy statement on listing perpetual contracts in June and followed with staff letter 26-19, a no-action position letting registered exchanges convert perpetual-style digital commodity futures into true perpetuals by dropping expiration dates. The Defiant covered the first U.S.-regulated bitcoin perpetual futures approval and Kraken and Coinbase bringing perps onshore. None of it names Lighter.

President Donald Trump said on Aug. 20 that CFTC Chairman Michael Selig was working to bring Hyperliquid into the U.S. "in a fully compliant and legal fashion." The Defiant reported at the time that no docket had opened and no registration application had been filed. LIT gained 59.5% over the two weeks that followed.

Hyperliquid's Named PathHyperliquid has a named counterparty with a license. Bloomberg reported on Aug. 31 that Hyperliquid Labs and Payward, Kraken's parent, plan to list crypto perpetual contracts on Bitnomial, a CFTC-registered exchange Payward owns, and that Payward has presented an outline of the arrangement to the agency. U.S. traders would reach the contracts through Bitnomial, with no direct connection to Hyperliquid's venue. No launch date or terms have been announced, and the structure would not give Hyperliquid U.S. exchange status.

Lighter has announced no equivalent arrangement.

Robinhood's Growing ShareRobinhood launched its chain's mainnet on July 1 with perpetual futures inside Robinhood Wallet powered by Lighter, running on a dedicated Lighter instance built for Robinhood Chain that uses USDG as its quote asset. Robinhood committed 11 million LIT to the community and pays Wallet traders double the points they earn on Lighter's own web app. The product excludes users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Switzerland, the UAE and Singapore.

That instance traded $240 million over 24 hours, $1.735 billion over seven days and $5.205 billion over 30 days, against $5.306 billion since DefiLlama began tracking it on Jul. 20, its data shows. Ninety-eight percent of its lifetime volume came in the past month.

Set against Lighter's totals of $1.416 billion, $11.324 billion and $44.908 billion over the same windows, Robinhood supplied 16.9% of Lighter's volume over 24 hours, 15.3% over seven days and 11.6% over 30 days, per The Defiant's calculation from DefiLlama data. Deposits on the Robinhood instance rose from $10.4 million on Jul. 20 to $57.5 million on Thursday. Lighter's total value locked reached $655.4 million, up 24.9% from $524.6 million on Aug. 5, with open interest at $1.245 billion.

The Defiant reported in July that Robinhood Chain carried more tokenized stock volume than Solana's venues combined, and on Aug. 31 that the chain generated more daily app revenue than Ethereum, at $2.66 million against $1.28 million.

Zero Fees, Thin TakeLighter lists 244 perpetual markets and charged zero maker and taker fees on them, according to its public API. The exchange's own endpoint recorded $1.547 billion of quote volume across 2.03 million trades over 24 hours. BTC accounted for $816.6 million of it, ETH $301.2 million, LIT itself $55.5 million and gold $48.2 million. The HOOD perpetual, tracking Robinhood's own stock, rose 13.3%.

Lighter collected $4.41 million of fees over 30 days, keeping $3.26 million as protocol revenue and directing $2.64 million to token holders. Against $44.908 billion of volume that is a take rate of 0.98 basis points. Hyperliquid earned $68.91 million on $209.814 billion over the same period, or 3.28 basis points, per The Defiant's calculation from DefiLlama data. The Robinhood instance produced $769,998 on $5.205 billion, or 1.48 basis points, monetizing better than Lighter's blended rate.

Lighter buys back LIT with trading fee revenue through daily 24-hour TWAPs and pays stakers a fixed 6% APR with a three-day unstaking lockup, its documentation states. Annualized, the 30-day fee run rate is about $53.7 million against a $4.21 billion fully diluted value.

Hyperliquid remains four to five times larger by every volume measure, at $7.038 billion over 24 hours and $209.814 billion over 30 days, with $13.683 billion of open interest and $6.654 billion of total value locked. Lighter ranks behind Hyperliquid and Aster, which traded $2.465 billion over 24 hours. The Defiant covered Lighter reaching the top of the perp DEX volume table and disclosing a $68 million raise.

Abraxas Capital, a London-based digital asset firm managing over $4 billion, just scooped up 16,554 ETH worth roughly $39 million. At the same time, the firm is sitting on 120,178 ETH in short positions on Hyperliquid, the decentralized perpetual futures exchange.

The two-sided trade The firm’s short exposure on the platform has frequently exceeded $700 to $900 million in gross positions across ETH, Bitcoin, and Solana. Of that, Ethereum consistently accounts for the largest single-asset chunk, with ETH shorts ranging between $120 million and $194 million depending on the day.

Earlier in August, Abraxas withdrew 73,872 ETH from Binance over a four-day stretch, a haul worth approximately $173 million. The latest 16,554 ETH purchase adds to that accumulation pattern.

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Abraxas is collecting ETH at spot prices while using short positions to earn funding rates and hedge against downside risk. When the market pays you to hold shorts (because long traders are paying a premium), you can accumulate the underlying asset while your short positions generate yield.

Profits in the hundreds of millions On August 29, Abraxas posted a $21 million profit in a single 24-hour window, generated from a portfolio containing $472 million in short positions. That kind of daily return, roughly 4.4% on the short book alone, illustrates why the firm keeps scaling into this approach.

The total short exposure has at times ballooned to between $598 million and $783 million across all assets on Hyperliquid. On-chain analysts have been tracking Abraxas’s wallets closely, and the firm frequently ranks among the platform’s top traders by volume.

Why Hyperliquid matters here Hyperliquid operates on its own Layer-1 blockchain and has carved out a niche as the go-to venue for on-chain perpetual futures trading. Its native token, HYPE, has attracted attention partly because institutional players like Abraxas are generating enormous volume on the platform.

What this means for the ETH market The dual approach of accumulating spot ETH while maintaining enormous short positions suggests Abraxas is positioning for multiple scenarios. If ETH drops, the shorts profit. If ETH rises, the spot holdings appreciate. And regardless of direction, funding rates from perpetual futures provide a steady income stream.

A sudden ETH rally would generate unrealized losses on the shorts that need to be managed carefully, even if the spot book offsets some of that pain. Abraxas has faced unrealized losses during volatile stretches, though cumulative profits have remained positive.

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

ProCap Financial just sold 50 Bitcoin to buy back more than 2% of its outstanding shares at roughly a 40% discount to net asset value. The company now holds approximately 5,305 BTC, making it one of the larger publicly traded Bitcoin treasury firms on the Nasdaq.

When a company’s stock trades at a 40% discount to the value of the assets backing it, every dollar spent on buybacks effectively acquires $1.67 worth of Bitcoin exposure. For remaining shareholders, each share now represents a bigger slice of the company’s Bitcoin pile.

The buyback playbook This isn’t ProCap’s first time running this particular play. Back on June 1, 2026, the company sold roughly 52 BTC to fund a repurchase of 2 million shares, that time at an even steeper discount of approximately 50% to NAV.

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The pattern is deliberate. ProCap has a board-approved share repurchase program, authorized in December 2025, with a budget of up to $100 million. The company has been executing buybacks at discounts ranging from 25% to 35% throughout 2026, with this latest round and the June transaction representing the more aggressive end of that spectrum.

After the latest transaction, ProCap’s shares outstanding sit at 86,764,282, with a NAV per share of roughly $3.71 as of the market close on September 2, 2026. The company’s Bitcoin holdings have fluctuated between approximately 5,000 and 5,457 BTC during 2026.

How ProCap got here ProCap Financial, trading under the ticker BRR on the Nasdaq, went public in 2025 through a SPAC merger. The company raised more than $750 million to establish its Bitcoin treasury, including $516.5 million in preferred equity and $235 million in convertible instruments. The target was to build a treasury of up to $1 billion in Bitcoin holdings.

The firm was founded by Anthony Pompliano. Beyond its Bitcoin treasury strategy, ProCap operates an AI-based financial platform called Silvia.

What the discount arbitrage means for investors Every time the company executes one of these trades, it slightly reduces its total Bitcoin holdings but increases the Bitcoin backing per remaining share. The $100 million repurchase authorization gives ProCap significant runway to continue this strategy.

The risk is that ProCap is selling Bitcoin to fund these buybacks. The 50 BTC sold in this latest transaction represents less than 1% of the total treasury. The company’s holdings have already dipped from a 2026 peak near 5,457 BTC down to the current 5,305.

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

Cover image via depositphotos.com Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.

A sharp price gap has emerged in the U.S. stock market: spot XRP ETFs are rising twice as fast as the token itself. While the token is posting an intraday gain of 7%–8%, shares of some regulated funds are surging by 16%–17%.

CryptoQuant analyst "Xaif_Crypto" was the first to draw attention to the anomaly. According to his post, all seven spot XRP ETFs in the U.S. entered the green during the trading session, recording an interim trading volume of $19.7 million.

Heatmap of U.S. spot XRP ETFs trading green intraday on September 3, 2026, Source: TradingViewOn spot exchanges, XRP was trading around $1.44 at the time, up 7.04% over the past 24 hours, confirming a breakout from its local descending channel and a rebound from the August low of $1.00. 

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However, the performance of instruments listed on the NYSE and Nasdaq diverged. Major funds from Bitwise (XRP: +8.47%) and Franklin Templeton (XRPZ: +8.36%) are moving in line with the spot market. At the same time, products with lower net assets have broken sharply away from it: Grayscale shares (XXRP) are up 17.10%, XRPT has gained 16.78%, and UXRP has risen 17.01%.

This divergence, which created an unusual imbalance, is likely linked to a local supply-and-demand distortion in U.S. exchange order books. The sharp move in the underlying asset may have triggered a short-term shortage of sellers in less liquid funds.

As a result, market orders began pushing ETF share prices higher, creating a substantial premium to the net asset value of their underlying holdings (NAV) and allowing the funds to outperform the token's daily advance by around 100%.

Paradox of the day: funds rise while investors withdraw moneyWhile order books move into premium territory, data from SoSoValue reveals the other side of the picture: this surge in prices is taking place without any inflow of new capital. The sector even closed the previous session in negative territory, recording net outflows of $7.20 million. The entire amount came from profit-taking by large investors and was concentrated in a single fund, Bitwise. All other issuers recorded zero flows.

Daily total net inflow and asset tracking chart for spot XRP ETFs, Source: SoSoValueIn other words, this is not an influx of fresh capital but an aggressive internal repricing of ETF shares against a total daily trading volume of $27.22 million.

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U.S. XRP ETFs currently hold $1.42 billion, equivalent to 1.67% of the token's total market capitalization, while cumulative net inflows since their launch have exceeded $1.68 billion.

Against the backdrop of the developing spot-market trend, U.S. exchanges have effectively seized the initiative. A situation in which a derivative financial product begins driving short-term price action faster than the underlying asset itself could become a new reality for the market.

In brief Spot Ethereum ETFs posted $48.08 million in net outflows Wednesday, ending a 12-day inflow streak that had pulled in $1.62 billion. Spot XRP ETFs recorded $7.2 million in outflows, snapping an 11-session run that brought in roughly $170 million and pushed cumulative inflows to $1.68 billion. Bitcoin ETFs rebounded with $101.15 million in net inflows, a day after posting $236.5 million in outflows, their largest single-day exit since July 31. US spot Ethereum and XRP ETFs broke their winning streaks on Wednesday. Bitcoin funds went the other way, pulling in $101.15 million in fresh money, per SoSoValue and Decrypt data.

ETFs, or exchange-traded funds, are funds that trade like stocks and let investors buy exposure to a cryptocurrency's price through a regular brokerage account instead of holding the coin itself. Crypto ETFs have been extremely popular among investors, and market observers keep a close eye on the money going in and out of these funds as a key indicator of current sentiment.

Bitcoin ETF Net Flows. Image: DecryptEthereum ETFs had logged 12 straight days of net inflows, meaning more money came into the funds than left them every single day for two and a half weeks. That streak gathered $1.62 billion before ending Wednesday with $48.08 million walking out the door.

BlackRock's iShares Ethereum Trust (ETHA) led the exodus with $53.4 million in outflows. Fidelity's FETH lost $26.2 million, and Grayscale's Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE) shed $23.5 million. BlackRock's staked Ethereum ETF, ETHB—a fund that locks up its Ethereum to earn network rewards and passes some of that yield to shareholders—absorbed part of the damage with $52.9 million in inflows.

Ethereum ETF Net Flows. Image: DecryptXRP told a similar story on a smaller scale. Its 11-session streak had brought in about $170 million, lifting cumulative inflows to $1.68 billion, before Wednesday's $7.2 million outflow. The withdrawal came almost entirely from Bitwise's XRP fund, while the four other XRP products, issued by Franklin, Canary, 21Shares and Grayscale, recorded no flows either way.

Bitcoin moved in the opposite direction. Wednesday's $101.15 million inflow reversed Tuesday's $236.5 million outflow, the category's largest single-day exit since July 31, when BlackRock's IBIT alone accounted for 85% of the damage. This time IBIT led the comeback, pulling in $115.45 million on its own, more than the day's entire net total, while Grayscale's original GBTC fund still lost $56.21 million.

The whiplash caps a volatile stretch. Bitcoin ETFs pulled in $3.52 billion in August, their best month of 2026, a run that included a $606 million single-day haul in mid-August, the biggest since May. Total net assets across the category now sit at $97.22 billion, with cumulative inflows near $54.7 billion since the funds launched in January 2024.

XRP ETF Net Flows. Image: DecryptSeptember has a habit of testing that momentum. Bitcoin has closed the month lower in eight of the past 13 years, a pattern Decrypt has tracked as Red September, and this year's version arrives with the Federal Reserve's rate decision landing September 15 to 16, the first hike debate since the central bank's 2022-2023 tightening cycle

Why the money picked BitcoinWednesday's split wasn't just Ethereum and XRP losing steam. Solana ETFs also posted a $6.13 million outflow the same day, meaning three of the four major crypto ETF categories retreated while only Bitcoin advanced. That's a narrower signal than "crypto is cooling"—it looks more like capital consolidating into Bitcoin specifically rather than spreading across digital assets broadly, a pattern that also showed up during last month's institutional buying spree.

In the most overly simplistic explanation, Bitcoin is the bigger, thus safer asset in the ecosystem.

Myriad: Bitcoin's next price move? Click to make your prediction.Another thing to consider comes with simple market expectation. Ethereum and XRP had each just run their longest inflow streaks in months, 12 and 11 sessions respectively, so a pause to lock in gains was overdue on both. Bitcoin, by contrast, was coming off Tuesday's outflow and had room to bounce.

The rest is macro nerves. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's hawkish Jackson Hole remarks pushed September rate-hike odds above 60% on the CME's FedWatch tool, and when crypto investors get defensive, Bitcoin is typically the first asset they buy back into and the last one they exit, since it carries the deepest liquidity and the longest institutional track record of any crypto ETF on the market. XRP and Ethereum, both newer and thinner by comparison, tend to see that caution show up as outflows first.

The simplest explanation tends to be the right one.

Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

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How the tax worksEvery time $FLOKI changes hands on a decentralised exchange, a small portion of the trade is redirected before it reaches the buyer. The contract address on Ethereum is 0xcf0c122c6b73ff809c693db761e7baebe62b6a2e.

The tax applies only to DEX activity. Trades executed on centralised exchanges are similarly untouched, leaving DEX buys and sells as the sole source of treasury inflows from this mechanism.

A rate cut driven by the DAO, with a path to zeroThe current rate is the result of a landmark governance decision.

@FLOKI has signalled the tax is not a permanent fixture. No timeline has been set.

Until that point, the treasury remains funded by the levy on every DEX swap, with the DAO retaining control over how those funds are allocated and whether the rate changes further.

Sources:
Floki Whitepaper: Operations and Funding
CoinDesk: Floki Inu DAO Passes Proposal to Burn Over $100M Worth of Tokens
Floki Whitepaper: Multi-chain Protocol

Chainlink has partnered with Bottomline, a B2B payments technology provider, to bring secure cross-chain payment capabilities to Bottomline’s banking customers. The collaboration pairs Chainlink’s blockchain interoperability infrastructure with a legacy payments firm that processes hundreds of billions of dollars in annual volume.

Bottomline provides SaaS-based solutions for payments automation, financial messaging, fraud prevention, and treasury management. Its customer base spans roughly 1,200 financial institutions and 10,000 businesses globally. Those clients rely on Bottomline’s infrastructure to move money across networks like Paymode, and the firm has built deep expertise around compliance frameworks including Swift and ISO 20022 standards.

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Chainlink has been courting the traditional finance sector, positioning itself as the connective tissue between blockchains and legacy systems. The most prominent example is Project Pangea, an initiative involving over 50 banking institutions across Europe and South Korea. That project targets T+0 settlement for foreign exchange transactions. The banks participating in Pangea collectively manage more than $10 trillion in assets under management.

Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, known as CCIP, allows different blockchains and traditional systems to communicate with each other, which is critical for any financial institution that wants to use blockchain without being locked into a single chain.

Cross-border transactions between countries still routinely take days to settle. Fees can eat up 5% or more of a transfer’s value. The correspondent banking system that underpins most international payments involves multiple intermediaries, each adding cost and latency.

Bottomline’s emphasis on automation and compliance, particularly its alignment with ISO 20022 messaging standards, also matters. ISO 20022 is becoming the global standard for financial messaging.

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

Nearly four out of every five dollars of USDT0 sitting in DeFi protocols live inside Aave V3. The lending giant controls 78.6% of the roughly $872.7 million in USDT0 deposits across decentralized finance, a concentration of stablecoin liquidity that would make most traditional banks jealous.

That number becomes even more striking when you zoom out. Aave V3’s share of the combined USDT and USDT0 total value locked sits at approximately 62.8% of $6.1B across 29 protocols, translating to about $3.83B in stablecoin deposits under its roof.

The numbers behind the surge Over a roughly 90-day stretch leading into late July 2026, net USDT deposits on Aave V3’s Core market jumped by $526 million. That pushed holdings from $1.93B to approximately $3.03B, a 57% increase in about three months.

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Utilization rates on the platform frequently exceed 90%. Those sky-high utilization rates have forced Aave’s governance to keep pace. The protocol’s community passed several votes to raise supply caps, including a June 2026 increase that pushed the ceiling to $3.48B.

USDT0 and the cross-chain factor USDT0 itself deserves some explanation. Launched in early 2025, it’s essentially Tether’s omnichain version of USDT, designed to move seamlessly across multiple blockchains using LayerZero technology and a burn-and-mint mechanism. Since going live, USDT0 has facilitated over $85B to $100B in cross-chain volume.

Its presence on various Aave markets, including deployments on networks like Plasma, has made it a natural fit for the protocol’s multi-chain strategy.

What this means for DeFi lending For competing lending protocols, the challenge is significant. When one platform controls nearly 63% of all USDT and USDT0 TVL across 29 protocols, the remaining 28 are splitting roughly $2.27B among themselves.

The borrowing activity underpinning these numbers also reveals something about broader market sentiment. High stablecoin utilization rates typically indicate active leverage in the system, with traders borrowing stablecoins to deploy into volatile assets or to fund yield strategies elsewhere.

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

A two-month-old Layer 2 built by a stock brokerage is now processing more daily decentralized exchange volume than chains that have existed for years, and the market is only beginning to pay attention.

Summary

Robinhood Chain recorded roughly $945 million in daily decentralized exchange volume on Aug. 25, 2026, a new all-time high for the network and nearly double its previous record of $563 million set on July 8. The chain, which launched its public mainnet on July 1, has processed more than $47 billion in cumulative DEX volume in under two months, placing it fifth among all chains by 30-day volume at $15 billion. Uniswap serves as the dominant trading venue on the chain, and cumulative tokenized stock volume through Uniswap surpassed $1 billion by Aug. 21. Total value locked on Robinhood Chain surged from $4 million in June to roughly $1.4 billion by late August, a trajectory that no Ethereum Layer 2 has matched at this stage of its lifecycle. The 90-day gas subsidy that covers transaction fees through the end of September 2026 raises a central question: whether volume holds once users start paying for their own trades. Robinhood Chain processed roughly $945 million in decentralized exchange volume on Aug. 25, 2026. On the same day, the network handled 5.5 million transactions, tokenized stock volume hit a record $85 million, and a leveraged perpetual token product called pTokens went live on Arcus, the dYdX-built DEX backed by Robinhood Crypto. By any standard metric for a new blockchain, the day was historic.

Crypto Twitter, for its part, was busy arguing about memecoins and parsing Federal Reserve minutes. The chain that a publicly traded brokerage had quietly built into one of the most active networks in all of decentralized finance received roughly the same attention as a midcap altcoin listing on a second-tier exchange.

That disconnect between activity and attention says something about how the market prices narratives over infrastructure. Robinhood Chain is not a new token to trade. It does not have a native coin to speculate on. It is not the product of a pseudonymous team or a viral whitepaper. It is a piece of financial plumbing, built by a company that most of crypto still views with suspicion from the GameStop saga, and it is processing more daily volume than networks that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital.

The question is no longer whether Robinhood Chain can generate activity. It already has. The question is whether the activity is real, whether it lasts, and whether it changes anything about how traditional finance and decentralized finance relate to each other.

How Robinhood built a top-five chain in 56 days Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 built on Arbitrum Orbit, the chains-as-a-service framework that runs on the Nitro stack. It settles directly to Ethereum and uses Ethereum blobs for data availability. Block times run at 100 milliseconds, faster than Arbitrum One at 250 milliseconds and Monad at 300 milliseconds. The gas token is ETH.

The mainnet went live on July 1 at Robinhood’s “The World is Flat” keynote at the Old Royal Naval College in London. Within eight days, Uniswap swap volume on the chain had reached $500 million. By July 11, the chain was processing 7.6 million daily transactions and had recorded $3.1 billion in DEX volume in its first week alone.

By the end of July, Robinhood Chain had topped Ethereum in 24-hour application revenue. It had briefly surpassed Base in daily active users, logging 324,000 wallets against Base’s 275,000 on July 21. And it had placed itself in the top five chains globally by 30-day DEX volume, sitting behind Solana, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Base with roughly $15 billion in monthly throughput.

For context, Arbitrum One’s 30-day DEX volume during the same period was roughly one-quarter of that figure. Robinhood Chain, using the same underlying technology, was running four times the volume of the chain it forked from.

The volume breakdown: what is actually trading The Aug. 25 record was not driven by a single asset class. Three distinct categories of activity converged on the same day.

The first was memecoin speculation. Pons, a token launched through the chain’s launchpad ecosystem, accounted for roughly half of all DEX volume at its peak. CASHCAT, Robinhood Chain’s first breakout memecoin, had previously hit a $156 million market cap before Pons overtook it in late July. On Aug. 30, Pons alone contributed $445 million of the chain’s $874.8 million in volume that day, demonstrating the degree to which a single venue can dominate chain-level metrics.

The second was tokenized equities. Robinhood launched Stock Tokens as a flagship product at mainnet, offering ERC-20 representations of stocks like NVIDIA, Apple, GameStop, and SpaceX that trade around the clock in more than 120 countries. These tokens give holders economic exposure to the underlying stock rather than legal ownership of shares. By Aug. 21, cumulative tokenized stock volume through Uniswap had surpassed $1 billion. A tokenized Nasdaq-100 tracker called QQQB drove 288 percent of July’s tokenized equity volume, suggesting heavy concentration in index products.

The third was leveraged derivatives. Arcus launched pTokens on Aug. 25, wrapping leveraged perpetual accounts into transferable ERC-20 tokens including pBTC3x and pHOOD3x. The platform also began accepting tokenized stock collateral at a 50 percent loan-to-value ratio, creating a direct bridge between equity exposure and leveraged crypto trading that has no equivalent on any other chain.

The timing of the Aug. 25 spike also mattered. Bitcoin had rallied sharply since Aug. 17 on what Bloomberg called a record $2.7 billion wave of short liquidations, the largest since records began in 2021. A White House crypto meeting and a U.S. Treasury move to double long-dated bond buybacks added fuel. Bitcoin reached near $81,500 and Ether gained nearly 29 percent in a single week. That macro tailwind lifted activity across every chain, but Robinhood Chain captured a disproportionate share because its zero-fee environment made it the path of least resistance for traders looking to rotate quickly between assets.

The stablecoin layer underneath the trading activity tells its own story. Stablecoin market capitalization on Robinhood Chain reached $640 million by late August, with USDe from Ethena accounting for the bulk of inflows. Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product launched alongside the mainnet, offers an estimated 7 percent yield on USDG, the stablecoin developed in partnership with Paxos. The yield product serves as an anchor for capital that might otherwise leave the chain between trading sessions, giving the ecosystem a retention mechanism that pure trading chains typically lack.

The infrastructure advantage Robinhood brought to the table Most Layer 2 networks launch with a technical thesis and then spend months or years trying to attract users. Robinhood reversed the sequence. The company brought 27 million funded brokerage accounts, an existing mobile wallet, a compliance infrastructure built over a decade of regulatory engagement, and a brand that, whatever crypto natives think of it, is synonymous with retail trading for an entire generation of investors.

CEO Vlad Tenev framed the ambition in a recent interview: “Crypto is becoming the infrastructure that powers financial markets.” On Aug. 7, he described Robinhood Chain as the fastest-growing chain in history, noting that it reached 100 million cumulative transactions faster than any other network. Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee separately called the launch “one of the biggest crypto success stories” of 2026.

The revenue model also differs from most Layer 2 networks. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, 8 percent of chain revenue goes to a treasury controlled by governance token holders and 2 percent funds a developer guild. Robinhood keeps the rest. In July alone, the chain generated roughly $3.6 million in transaction fees, making it the top revenue-producing Layer 2 across the entire Ethereum ecosystem at 38 percent of the estimated $6.3 million in total L2 fees collected that month.

The company’s Q2 2026 earnings, reported on July 29, showed total revenue of $1.31 billion, beating Wall Street estimates. Net income rose 48 percent year over year to $573 million. Robinhood is not a startup hoping its chain will subsidize losses. It is a profitable company with a stock trading above $100 that can afford to invest in chain infrastructure without needing the chain itself to be immediately profitable.

The gas subsidy question The single most important variable in Robinhood Chain’s near-term trajectory is the 90-day gas fee subsidy that covers all transaction costs through the Robinhood Wallet. The promotional period, which began at mainnet launch on July 1, runs through approximately Sept. 29, 2026.

In mid-August, Robinhood reduced the subsidy threshold from $5 per transaction to $0.50, a 90 percent cut that suggests the company is already tapering the benefit rather than cutting it off all at once. The move signals a gradual transition rather than a cliff.

But the subsidy has clearly inflated activity metrics. When transactions cost nothing, the friction that normally separates casual browsing from actual trading disappears. The 16,000 new tokens created daily at peak memecoin activity in July were possible in part because launching a token was free. The 5.5 million daily transactions on Aug. 25 included activity that would not have occurred at even minimal gas costs.

The precedent from other chains is mixed. Base launched with heavily subsidized gas and retained strong activity after costs normalized, in part because Coinbase’s distribution kept funneling users to the network. Blast, by contrast, saw activity crater after its incentive programs wound down. The question for Robinhood Chain is whether the brokerage’s 27 million accounts provide a durable demand floor that subsidies merely accelerated, or whether the subsidy itself created demand that will not survive its removal.

There is a middle scenario that the binary framing obscures. Volume could fall significantly from the Aug. 25 peak and still leave Robinhood Chain as a top-ten chain by DEX activity. A 60 percent drop from $945 million would still produce roughly $380 million in daily volume, which would place it ahead of most Layer 2 networks even without subsidies. The relevant question is not whether volume declines after the subsidy ends, because it almost certainly will, but whether the floor is high enough to sustain the ecosystem’s economic model.

The corporate chain land grab Robinhood Chain did not launch into a vacuum. It entered a market where every major financial technology company appears to be building its own chain. Coinbase has Base. Stripe acquired Bridge and is building payment infrastructure on it. Circle launched a new standard for stablecoin interoperability. Robinhood followed with its own Arbitrum-based rollup.

The pattern is clear: consumer fintech companies have concluded that owning the execution layer is more valuable than renting space on someone else’s chain. The economics are straightforward. A chain operator captures sequencer revenue, controls the fee schedule, and can subsidize specific types of activity to drive adoption. A tenant on another chain pays whatever fees the market demands and has no control over the user experience at the infrastructure level.

The comparison to Base is instructive. Base launched in August 2023 and has had three years to build its ecosystem. Its total value locked stands at roughly $5.47 billion as of late August 2026, compared to Robinhood Chain’s roughly $1.4 billion. Base processes more daily transactions on average. But Robinhood Chain closed the gap on several metrics in weeks rather than years, briefly surpassing Base in daily active users and consistently ranking within striking distance on DEX volume.

The difference is maturity versus momentum. Base has accumulated three years of liquidity, developer tooling, and protocol deployments. Robinhood Chain has a brokerage with 27 million accounts and a product, tokenized equities, that no other chain offers at the same scale.

The DEX-to-CEX ratio and what it means Robinhood Chain’s volume spike arrived during a broader structural shift in crypto trading. In July 2026, decentralized exchanges handled spot volume equal to 24.14 percent of centralized exchange volume, the highest ratio since The Block began tracking the metric in 2019. The ratio has roughly tripled in under three years, rising from below 10 percent for most of 2024 to its current level.

The irony is that the shift is being driven in part by centralized companies. Robinhood, a centralized brokerage, is routing volume through a decentralized exchange layer. Coinbase, a centralized exchange, is doing the same through Base. The line between centralized and decentralized finance is blurring in ways that do not fit neatly into the narratives that either side prefers.

For Robinhood specifically, the chain creates a flywheel that its centralized app cannot replicate. Stock Tokens traded on Uniswap generate fees that flow back to the Robinhood Chain ecosystem. Users who start with tokenized equities discover memecoin trading, lending protocols, and leveraged products. The chain becomes a surface area for financial experimentation that a regulated brokerage app cannot legally offer through its primary interface.

This is the strategic logic that the market has largely missed. Robinhood Chain is not a marketing exercise. It is a mechanism for Robinhood to offer products and services that its regulated brokerage cannot provide directly, while still capturing economic value from the activity.

The concentration risk The bull case for Robinhood Chain is compelling, but the data also reveals structural vulnerabilities that the headline volume numbers obscure.

On Aug. 30, a single protocol, Pons, generated 51 percent of the chain’s $874.8 million in daily volume. When one venue does half of all throughput, the chain’s activity metrics become a proxy for that venue’s performance rather than a measure of ecosystem health. If Pons loses momentum, the chain’s volume numbers could drop by half overnight without any change to the underlying infrastructure.

The tokenized equity market, while growing, remains concentrated as well. QQQB, a single Nasdaq-100 tracker, drove the majority of July’s tokenized stock volume. A dozen stocks clear at least $500,000 in daily volume, but the breadth of adoption is still narrow relative to the potential market.

Total value locked tells a similar story. Robinhood Chain’s TVL has surged to $1.4 billion, but this remains roughly one-quarter of Base’s $5.47 billion. The chain’s TVL-to-volume ratio is unusually high, meaning it generates more trading activity per dollar locked than most chains. That can be read as capital efficiency or as evidence that volume is being amplified by zero-cost transactions and speculative turnover rather than deep, sticky liquidity.

Stock Tokens also remain unavailable to U.S. residents, which excludes the majority of Robinhood’s 27 million funded accounts from the chain’s flagship product. The addressable market for tokenized equities is currently limited to users outside the United States, a significant constraint on growth.

The reflexive fee structure on Pons adds another layer of fragility. Eighty percent of the protocol’s fees fund automated token buybacks and burns. By Aug. 29, 29 percent of the original one billion token supply had been retired. That mechanism creates a self-reinforcing loop in rising markets: higher volume generates more fees, which fund more burns, which reduce supply, which pushes prices higher, which attracts more volume. In falling markets, the same loop works in reverse. Volume drops, burns slow, the supply compression narrative weakens, and traders move to the next opportunity. Chains built on reflexive tokenomics tend to experience sharp drawdowns when sentiment shifts.

What Robinhood Chain means for Ethereum Robinhood Chain settles to Ethereum. Every transaction on the chain ultimately posts data to the Ethereum mainnet through blobs. This means that Robinhood Chain’s activity, all $47 billion of it, contributes to Ethereum’s security budget and reinforces the network’s role as a settlement layer.

For Ethereum, the emergence of corporate-backed Layer 2 networks is a double-edged development. On one side, chains like Robinhood and Base bring millions of users into the Ethereum ecosystem who would never interact with the mainnet directly. They generate blob fees, consume blockspace, and create economic gravity around ETH as a gas token.

On the other side, these chains capture most of the value at the execution layer. Robinhood keeps the bulk of sequencer revenue, sharing only 10 percent with the Arbitrum ecosystem. The users on Robinhood Chain may never know or care that Ethereum exists underneath. The settlement layer becomes invisible infrastructure, essential but unrewarded relative to the activity it supports.

This dynamic is already visible in the fee data. Robinhood Chain surpassed both Ethereum and Base in 24-hour application revenue on Aug. 31, recording $2.66 million. The chain built on Ethereum is generating more application-level revenue than Ethereum itself on certain days.

The tension between Layer 2 growth and Layer 1 value capture is not unique to Robinhood Chain, but the scale makes it unusually visible. Ethereum’s blob fee revenue from all Layer 2 networks remains a small fraction of what those networks generate in sequencer revenue. The argument that Layer 2 activity is inherently good for Ethereum depends on the assumption that demand for blob space will eventually drive meaningful fee revenue back to the mainnet. At current utilization levels, that assumption remains unproven. Robinhood Chain’s success makes the question more urgent without answering it.

The September test The gas subsidy expires at the end of September. Between now and then, several developments will clarify whether Robinhood Chain’s trajectory is sustainable.

Arcus is expanding its leveraged product suite, adding new pToken pairs and increasing collateral types. If leveraged trading generates durable volume independent of the gas subsidy, it would suggest that the chain has found a product-market fit that goes beyond free transactions.

The DTCC is scheduled to launch tokenized securities infrastructure in October, which could either validate or undermine Robinhood’s first-mover advantage in tokenized equities. If institutional players enter the market with competing infrastructure, the value proposition of Stock Tokens may shift.

And Robinhood itself will face a decision about whether to extend, modify, or eliminate the gas subsidy. The company’s financial position gives it the flexibility to continue subsidizing transactions if it believes the long-term economics justify the cost. With $573 million in quarterly net income, a few million dollars in gas subsidies is a rounding error on the income statement.

What to watch Daily DEX volume after the gas subsidy expires on Sept. 29: a drop below $200 million would signal that free transactions, not organic demand, drove the majority of activity. Tokenized equity volume breadth: whether trading expands beyond QQQB and a handful of large-cap stocks to include a wider range of securities and index products. Protocol diversity: whether the chain develops multiple high-volume venues or remains dependent on one or two protocols for the majority of throughput. U.S. regulatory clarity on Stock Tokens: any indication that tokenized equities could become available to U.S. residents would dramatically expand the addressable market. TVL retention through Q4 2026: whether the $1.4 billion in locked value stays on the chain as incentives taper or migrates to competing networks. What is Robinhood Chain? Robinhood Chain is an Ethereum Layer 2 blockchain built on Arbitrum Orbit technology. It launched its public mainnet on July 1, 2026, and uses ETH as its native gas token. The chain settles directly to Ethereum and features 100-millisecond block times. Its flagship products include tokenized Stock Tokens, decentralized exchange trading through Uniswap, and lending through protocols like Morpho.

How much DEX volume does Robinhood Chain process? On Aug. 25, 2026, Robinhood Chain recorded roughly $945 million in daily decentralized exchange volume, a new all-time high. The chain has processed more than $47 billion in cumulative DEX volume since launching on July 1. Its 30-day volume of approximately $15 billion places it fifth among all blockchain networks, behind Solana, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Base.

What are Stock Tokens on Robinhood Chain? Stock Tokens are ERC-20 tokens that track the price of publicly traded equities like NVIDIA, Apple, GameStop, and SpaceX. They give holders economic exposure to the underlying stock rather than legal ownership of shares. Stock Tokens trade around the clock in more than 120 countries through decentralized exchanges like Uniswap on Robinhood Chain. They are currently unavailable to U.S. residents.

Is there a Robinhood Chain token? No. Robinhood has not issued a native governance or utility token for Robinhood Chain. The network uses ETH for gas fees. While several community-created tokens like CASHCAT and PONS trade on the chain, none of these are officially affiliated with Robinhood.

How does Robinhood Chain compare to Base? Base, built by Coinbase, launched in August 2023 and has roughly $5.47 billion in total value locked compared to Robinhood Chain’s $1.4 billion. Base processes more daily transactions on average and has a more mature ecosystem of developer tools and protocols. However, Robinhood Chain closed the gap on several metrics within weeks, briefly surpassing Base in daily active users and ranking within striking distance on daily DEX volume.

What is the gas subsidy on Robinhood Chain? Robinhood covers transaction fees for users trading through the Robinhood Wallet on Robinhood Chain. This 90-day promotional period began at mainnet launch on July 1 and runs through approximately Sept. 29, 2026. In mid-August, Robinhood reduced the subsidy threshold from $5 to $0.50 per transaction, signaling a gradual taper rather than an abrupt cutoff.

Who can use Robinhood Chain? Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2, meaning anyone with a compatible wallet can interact with it. However, the tokenized Stock Tokens product is available in more than 120 countries but is not available to U.S. residents. Other DeFi products on the chain, including decentralized exchange trading and lending, are accessible to users globally through wallets like Robinhood Wallet, MetaMask, and others.

How does Robinhood make money from the chain? Robinhood captures sequencer revenue from transactions processed on the chain. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, 8 percent of chain revenue goes to a treasury controlled by Arbitrum governance token holders and 2 percent funds a developer guild. Robinhood retains the remaining 90 percent. In July 2026, the chain generated roughly $3.6 million in transaction fees, making it the top revenue-producing Layer 2 in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions. Information is accurate as of Aug. 31, 2026.