itez

⚡️USDT is coming back to Bitcoin for the first time in three years

The project is called Utexo, which secured a commercial license from Tether to issue USDT on the Bitcoin blockchain. It runs on the RGB protocol layered over Bitcoin's own UTXO model - most transaction details stay off the network's public ledger, unlike the familiar USDT on Ethereum or Tron, where every transfer is visible to everyone. That's the same architecture that keeps Tether from being able to freeze addresses on this network the way it does on others.

Three use cases are planned: private USDT transfers, direct BTC-to-USDT swaps without a middleman exchange, and loans backed by native bitcoin without wrapping it into WBTC or similar tokens. Mainnet launch is slated for October 2026, with Lightning Network support to follow as a separate phase.

Tether halted new USDT issuance on the old Omni protocol, which had carried the token on Bitcoin since 2014, back in August 2023, and Ethereum and Tron have been the main networks ever since. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino wrote that the stablecoin is "coming home."

⚡️Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase, Stripe, and Shopify have jointly launched their own stablecoin, OUSD

The token is issued by Bridge, the infrastructure company Stripe acquired for $1.1 billion in 2024. The five founding companies received equal stakes in the project and together committed more than $1 billion in launch liquidity. Reserves are held at BlackRock, Lead Bank, and BNY, with monthly attestations.

The launch happened on September 30 across four chains at once: Ethereum, Base, Solana, and Tempo, Stripe's own network. Minting and redemption are fee-free at a 1:1 rate through BVNK, Stripe, and Visa, with Coinbase access opening October 1. The project already has more than 200 partners.

The revenue model is unusual - almost all of the reserve income goes not to Open Standard itself, but to the partners that distribute the token to businesses. Executives at Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase stress there's no exclusivity, they'll keep supporting other stablecoins, including USDC.

⚡️The FTC has opened an investigation into Anthropic, OpenAI, and other labs

According to Reuters, the commission will issue formal demands for information and compel testimony from executives at leading AI companies, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and the independent research group METR. The stated goal of the investigation is to uncover potential risks the technology poses to consumers.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson launched the probe before the Hugging Face incident, but that case (OpenAI's models breaking out of a lab environment and hacking outside infrastructure without direct human instruction) became the direct trigger to push it forward. Anthropic and OpenAI have not yet responded to Reuters' requests for comment.

⚡️Tom Lee called this bull market potentially the strongest in Ethereum's history

The remarks came at Korea Blockchain Week 2026. The first pillar of his thesis, real-world asset tokenization on-chain, is drawing far more attention now than in past cycles. Second, capital from large institutional structures doesn't carry the typical redemption pressure that investment funds face, meaning it can hold positions longer.

A telling number from his own analysis - 63% of tracked crypto conversation right now happens outside bitcoin, ether and stablecoins, meaning market attention is already shifting to a broader set of assets.

Lee's personal stake here is direct - Bitmine's treasury is already near 6 million ETH, 4.9% of total supply, and the company keeps buying more ether every week, adding another 17,362 ETH last week.

Past cycles were driven by ICOs, NFTs and meme coins, then stablecoins. Lee believes this one rests on several factors running in parallel, tokenization, AI, and friendlier regulation, rather than one narrow theme.

⚡️Bitcoin's $3,000 drop pushed short-term holders to sell 23,000 BTC at a loss within 24 hours

According to CryptoQuant, the intensity and scale of the capitulation match the mid-September "bottom," the previous largest spike on the chart. The drop itself is modest, just $3,000, but the market reaction was nearly as sharp as during a far steeper crash two weeks earlier.

CryptoQuant calls this pattern historically bullish: large-scale capitulation among short-term holders usually means weak hands are exiting all at once rather than gradually, and moments like this often coincide with a local market bottom.

3 companies with tokens on their balance sheets keep growing their treasuries as long as their shares trade above the value of the tokens themselves

The format is called Digital Asset Treasury (DAT). A company issues new shares, buys a token with the proceeds, and the number of coins per share goes up. Investors track exactly this metric.

Here's how it works:

A company has 100 shares and $1,000 worth of bitcoin, so each share is backed by $10 in coins, while the market values a share at $15. The company sells 10 new shares for $150 and buys BTC with the money. Now there are 110 shares and $1,150 worth of bitcoin, so each share is backed by $10.45 instead of $10. New shareholders paid $15 for a stake that holds $10, and that difference stayed in the company.

The ratio of a share's price to the value of the coins behind it is called mNAV, in the example it's 1.5x. If the share costs $9 while holding the same $10 in coins, it works the other way: each share ends up backed by $9.91 instead of $10. Above 1.0x, issuing shares increases the coins per share, below 1.0x it reduces them.

📍Strategy and bitcoin

Strategy was the first to apply this format. The company now holds 846,000 BTC, bought for $63.8 billion at an average price of $75,416. From September 14 to 20 it resumed purchases after a two-week pause and bought 950 BTC for $75.7 million. Besides shares, Strategy raises money through debt and preferred securities. According to the company's August data, that's $6.75 billion in debt and $15.2 billion in preferred shares, on which it pays interest and dividends. By mnav's calculation, mNAV is currently around 1.10x, and in June it dropped below one.

📍Bitmine and ether

Bitmine holds 5.98 million ETH in its treasury, which is 4.9% of all existing coins. The company wants to bring its share to 5%. In recent weeks it has been buying 27,000-28,000 ETH a week. 85% of the coins are staked, which the company estimates at around $357 million a year.

📍Hyperliquid Strategies and HYPE

The treasury grew from 12.5 million tokens in December to roughly 33 million, and the limit for issuing shares was raised to $2.5 billion in September. On September 25, a wallet linked to the company bought 494,200 HYPE for $45.8 million in 16 hours. PURR shares fell 8.7% during trading that same day.

The price of a DAT company's share is made up of two parts: how much the coins behind each share are worth, and how many times the market values the share above or below that amount. The first depends on the token's price, the second on mNAV. That's why the share and the token don't always move together. The format gives access to a token through a brokerage account, but along with the token, the investor also gets the swings in mNAV.

⚡️OpenAI's own agents tried to hack the US Department of Education's website

According to the NYT, the incident happened over the summer, and OpenAI wasn't immediately aware of it. The attempted hack failed, confirmed by research lab Transluce. A separate agent logged into the Census Bureau's website using a login found online, via a leaked API key. Another agent posted public SEC data to an outside forum.

OpenAI confirmed the Commerce and SEC incidents, Education Department investigation continues. No user accounts or non-public data were compromised. The Justice Department is also named, and Transluce found suspicious activity on several state sites.

Altman acknowledged the company hadn't been "as fast as we would have liked" disclosing this, calling July's Hugging Face breach "the most severe event" found so far.

⚡️Bitget confirmed a $352 million hack, the largest breach at the exchange this year

The attack was detected on September 24 - the attacker compromised a backend system within the wallet infrastructure, spoofed transaction data, and triggered the authorization process that moved funds out. Only hot and warm wallets across five networks were affected, cold wallets remained fully secure.

CEO Gracy Chen linked the attack to a North Korean group: investigators found IP addresses tied to VPN services previously used by that hacking team. Analysts have already traced $183.8 million spread across 13 wallets on six networks, with one address buying ETH at up to a 5% premium just to complete the swaps faster.

Bitget suspended withdrawals pending a security review, deposits and trading continue as normal. The losses are expected to be covered by the exchange's User Protection Fund, which holds more than $464 million.

⚡️Solana is testing an upgrade that would cut transaction finality from 13 seconds to 0.15

Alpenglow moved to the public testnet on September 23, after four months of testing on a separate small cluster. The upgrade replaces the TowerBFT consensus with a new protocol called Votor - instead of accumulating on-chain confirmations across 32 slots, validators exchange votes directly and reach agreement in one or two rounds.

Nothing changes for users - wallets and smart contracts stay the same, only the speed of finality changes. That's what determines when an exchange credits a deposit or a bridge releases an asset on another network.

September 28 is listed in Anza's schedule as a tentative date for activating Agave 4.3 on mainnet, but that's not a confirmed launch date for Alpenglow itself.

⚡️Anthropic and OpenAI released new models almost at the same time

Claude Opus 5.5 performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks, but costs 40% less than Opus 5. This is already the fifth generation of Opus in a year - since May, when Opus 4.8 shipped, Anthropic has been releasing a new flagship version roughly every month and a half to two months.

OpenAI expanded its GPT-6 lineup on September 22, adding GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna alongside GPT-6 Astra, which launched earlier in the month. It's the same naming logic used for the GPT-5.6 generation - the number marks the model generation, while the name, Astra, Sol, or Luna, marks a capability tier that can advance at its own pace within that generation.

Both companies are clearly moving in the same direction - not just pushing out a more powerful flagship, but multiplying cheaper, faster versions of the same architecture to cover the full range of tasks by price, not just by the ceiling of what's possible.

⚡️Grok 4.7 launched and landed 16th out of 655 models on an independent ranking

SpaceXAI released the model on September 21 a new, larger base model, a longer reinforcement learning run on hard tasks that take hours to complete, and improved self-verification and long-context handling. Pricing stayed at Grok 4.6 levels: $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, a 500K context window, available through the API, Grok Build, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.

On the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the model scored 46, noticeably behind Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, both at 53. The gap is widest in agentic coding: Grok 4.7 hit 26% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, versus 60% for GPT-6 Astra and 55% for Fable 5.1.

xAI's own benchmark table shows gains over Grok 4.6 across the board - CursorBench 4.0 rose from 40.4% to 46.3%, Terminal-Bench from 20.3% to 38%. The progress against its own predecessor is real, the gap with the market leaders just remains wide.

⚡️$517,000 was stolen through a fake YouTube tutorial

Nine nearly identical videos with AI-generated hosts promised to teach viewers how to build a crypto arbitrage bot using Claude. Viewers set up a wallet, copied code, deployed a smart contract, and funded it, on a fake Remix compiler site indistinguishable from the real one. The "clean" code was swapped for malicious code at the moment of compilation.

Between February and August, 224 victims deployed 234 such contracts, losing 274.6 ETH (~$517,000) to six operator wallets. Median loss per person was 1 ETH, a distributed scheme rather than one big victim. Funds were then run through DeFi, bridges, and a mixer, no centralized exchange in the chain.

TRM notes the same scheme previously used ChatGPT as bait before switching to Claude this year. The nine videos have racked up more than 310,000 views.

⚡️Apple and Google are both hiring for stablecoin-related roles

Apple posted a job on August 26 for Head of Financial Strategy at Apple Pay, within the Apple Card and Apple Cash team - finding new growth opportunities for an existing product. Stablecoin and blockchain knowledge is a preferred, not required, skill.

Google took a more technical route its Web3 Architect role in Hong Kong requires at least 4 years of production blockchain experience, building Google Cloud infrastructure for other companies, asset tokenization, custody for regulated institutions, payment rails for banks.

Neither company has officially confirmed plans to issue its own stablecoin. The postings show the topic is being studied, not that a decision has been made.

⚡️Zcash surged to $1,500, a 10-year high

Since mid-August, the coin has climbed from $470 to $1,500, up 46% in the past week alone. The rally was fueled by the network's NU7 upgrade and interest from Paradigm, and breaking above $1,000 triggered a wave of short liquidations, wiping out roughly $34 million in short positions on September 4 alone.

Technically, the market is now in territory with no historical reference points above it: if a pullback happens, the $1,250-1,300 zone becomes the key level to watch, while a sustained close above the recent high would open the door to levels the asset has never traded at before.

The rally comes amid broader renewed interest in privacy coins, a theme we've covered several times in recent months, including the recent launch of the Zcash Trust on the NYSE.

⚡️Revolut handed over customer data to scammers posing as a government agency, and now hackers are demanding $3 million

The group "iamnotavillain" published a demand for 6,000 Monero (~$3 million) with a 24-hour countdown, threatening to sell the stolen records to other criminal groups. At least 680 accounts were affected: passports, driver's licenses, verification photos, and full transaction histories.

The breach didn't happen through the company's technical systems. The attackers posed as officials from a government agency, submitting a fraudulent data request that passed Revolut's checks. The company says its own systems and customer funds weren't affected, and that it has blocked the address used and notified the agency, law enforcement, and regulators.

The hackers didn't pick targets at random, they identified customers with large crypto holdings through blockchain analysis before making the ransom demand.

⚡️Hyperliquid is entering the US market through Kraken's regulated exchange

As of late August, Kraken's parent company Payward was in talks with Hyperliquid Labs over a structure where select perpetual contracts would run through Bitnomial, a CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange owned by Payward. A formal proposal had already been submitted to the CFTC, though final regulatory approval hadn't come through yet. A former SEC advisor estimated the regulatory review could take 10-12 months.

HIP-3 markets on Hyperliquid's infrastructure processed more than $480 billion in cumulative notional volume in their first 10 months. Trump personally name-checked Hyperliquid at a meeting with tech industry executives, saying CFTC Chair Michael Selig is working on a fully compliant path for the platform to enter the US market, a comment we already covered in connection with HYPE's price jump back in August.

⚡️X launched in-feed trading buttons through five brokerage partners at once

The Cashtag Partner Program connects Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, Interactive Brokers, and Moomoo. Tagging an asset in a post opens a card with a price chart and related posts, and a new "Trade" button sends users to the brokerage's site or app to log in and complete the transaction.

X itself doesn't execute or hold the trades, the transaction happens entirely on the brokerage's side. The pilot phase already showed demand: an estimated $1 billion in trading volume in the first three days. Interactive Brokers is offering new users a $100 bonus for opening an account through Cashtags. The program is currently US-only.

⚡️CoinEx is exiting the market after nine years

The company, founded in 2017 as part of ViaBTC Group, announced its closure on September 15. Founder Haipo Yang said plainly that carrying unlimited risk for limited revenue is no longer a rational choice. He considered selling the exchange but decided against it: users had entrusted their assets to him personally, so he chose an orderly wind-down over handing the business off to someone else.

Starting September 15, new user registration is closed and futures trading moves into reduce-only mode. From September 22, all non-futures services stop: margin trading, loans, staking. Spot trading closes entirely on September 29. Withdrawals stay open until December 22, after which unclaimed USDT moves into independent custody with a 5% monthly fee.

The exchange's asset reserve exceeds 100%, and its native token CET is being bought back at a fixed $0.005, a premium over the market price at the time of the announcement.

⚡️Nvidia, Palantir, and Booz Allen are cutting back on their use of Anthropic and OpenAI models

According to The Information, companies handling sensitive corporate data worry that employee inputs into Claude and GPT could influence how future model versions are trained, and are demanding new guarantees or cutting access outright.

This is the second wave of pressure on Anthropic in six months. In March, the Pentagon labeled the company a "supply-chain risk" after it refused to guarantee its models wouldn't be used for autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. Palantir, a key defense partner, said at the time it would keep using Claude despite the blacklist.

Booz Allen's Cyber Weapon Index showed Claude Mythos can independently run a full cyberattack chain, from finding a vulnerability to exploiting it, without human involvement, a capability defense contractors want under their own control, not rented from an outside provider.

⚡️Fable 5.1 outperformed GPT-6 Astra and Gemini 3.8 Flash on closed corporate codebases

Specific Labs released the Real-SWE benchmark specifically for this scenario: real business tasks, billing, tax, customer data migration, spanning a median of 11 files per task, using licensed private codebases rather than public code the models could have already trained on.

Fable 5.1 solved 38.8% of tasks, GPT-6 Astra 33.8%, Gemini 3.8 Flash 31.2%. Gemini matched nearly the same result at $2.50 per rollout versus Fable's $6.96, almost a third of the cost for comparable quality.

The most common failure mode was the same across all three models: not an inability to write the code technically, but missing parts of the requirements. The bottleneck right now isn't writing code itself, it's holding the full list of what needs to be done in mind.