Foresight News has published its latest weekly “Web3 bulletin,” grouping the past week’s notable crypto coverage into three buckets: stories, debates, and project-focused analysis.
Stories: quant trading, QuadrigaCX, and the Hack VC case
In the “Stories” section, Foresight opened with the account of a crypto quant practitioner identified as Lao K, who has spent nine years in the market. According to the article, he first encountered crypto in 2016 and entered the industry in 2017. Over the last cycle, he invested in more than a dozen crypto quant teams and also backed crypto venture firms including Waterdrip Capital and Hack VC. His rough takeaway was stark: out of 10 quant teams, eight lost money, and one or two even blew up and disappeared.
Foresight said the easy era of cross-platform arbitrage has faded as market efficiency improved, while non-strategy risks such as exchange failures can wipe out principal directly. The article noted that after seeing multiple cycles, Lao K now places survival above headline returns. It also recounted some of the market episodes he lived through, including buying Antshares when it was still priced at 1 yuan and later seeing it climb to nearly 1,400 yuan, and buying 50,000 BNB with his team when BNB was also around 1 yuan, with the token now around $800. The recommended read was “I spent nine years doing quant in crypto: out of ten teams, eight lost money, and the real opportunity is hidden in long-tail markets.”
Foresight also revisited the QuadrigaCX case in Canada. The outlet wrote that Gerald Cotten, the founder of what had been Canada’s largest crypto exchange, died suddenly during his honeymoon in India, after which the company said only he knew the passwords to wallets holding a large share of customer assets. The report framed a misspelled death certificate as the thread that led to a broader fraud narrative: Cotten allegedly controlled the exchange’s private keys alone, used alias accounts to fabricate balances and misappropriate customer assets, and relied on deposits from new users to honor withdrawals. The shortfall tied to the case was described as more than C$169 million.
Foresight added that four years after the company said the wallets were inaccessible, five wallets linked to the exchange moved about 104 BTC. Ernst & Young, which handled the bankruptcy process, denied initiating those transfers. The recommended article was “Crypto Story Club ① | A death certificate with a misspelled name that exposed Canada’s biggest crypto exchange scandal.”
The third feature in this section centered on the death of former Hack VC partner Hsin-Ju Chuang. Citing hoodline and local police notices, Foresight said Chuang, a 37-year-old North Las Vegas resident, was found dead on the evening of Aug. 24 near the Fields Road exit on Interstate 15 in California’s Mojave Desert. The California Highway Patrol received the report at 9:48 p.m. that night and responded to the scene. The case remains under investigation by the Barstow station, while the specific cause of death has not been released and autopsy and toxicology reports from the San Bernardino County coroner’s office are still pending.
The article said temperatures in the area had reached about 108 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, or around 42 degrees Celsius, and remained above 80 degrees Fahrenheit at night, though no conclusion has been reached on whether the heat was related to the incident. Foresight also stressed that Chuang had been the central figure in a prior workplace dispute involving Hack VC. In the early hours of Aug. 24, she posted on X that she was rejecting a settlement proposed by the firm and planned to release evidence gathered during her employment, alleging excessive work demands, disregard for employee health rights, and improper handling of insurance after her departure. The recommended article was “Former Hack VC partner found dead in the California desert after refusing a settlement.”
Crypto debates: Vitalik, Zcash, Circle, Apple, and fruit-fly narratives
In the “Crypto Debates” section, Foresight highlighted Vitalik Buterin’s appearance at the 2026 Shanghai Blockchain International Week. According to the article, Buterin joined the Sept. 23 summit remotely and presented a vision for a “cryptographic world computer.” Rather than forcing every task onto one chain, he argued, a stronger blockchain system can distribute work and then rely on mathematical proofs to verify that the work was completed correctly.
Foresight said this framework puts privacy, scalability and artificial intelligence on the same map. User devices could process part of the workload locally, transactions could be validated and aggregated before they hit the chain, and the blockchain itself would only handle what needs full network consensus. The article also pointed to zero-knowledge proofs, fully homomorphic encryption, new Ethereum Improvement Proposal work, and AI-assisted code verification. That coverage appeared under the title “Vitalik at Shanghai Blockchain International Week: building a ‘cryptographic world computer.’”
Zcash was another centerpiece. Foresight traced the token’s path from its early launch mania to a much later rebound. The article said ZEC once traded at 25 BTC per token on Bitfinex and even printed a nominal 3299.99 BTC/ZEC on Poloniex, which translated to more than $2 million at a time when bitcoin was around $700. It added that from Nov. 2, 2016 until before Sept. 14 this year, ZEC did not revisit levels above $1,500. In July 2024, the token fell to less than $16, its historical low, before staging a nearly 100x move over the next two years. Foresight framed the story as the long-delayed echo of cypherpunk convictions around digital privacy. The related feature was “Zcash’s 100x myth? No, this is an idealist ‘revenge.’”
On stablecoins, Foresight focused on Binance’s investment in Circle. According to the report, Circle, the issuer of USDC, said on Sept. 22 that Binance had invested $100 million in the company by subscribing for Class A common shares. The two sides also entered a new five-year commercial agreement to expand the promotion and use of USDC on Binance and focus on emerging markets. Circle had already been paying Binance to promote USDC, and under the new arrangement it will continue to pay monthly incentive fees.
Foresight cited documents Circle filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying both the commercial agreement and the stock subscription agreement were signed on Sept. 17, and the equity transaction closed shortly after signing. Binance subscribed for 1,237,011 Class A common shares at $80.84 per share, giving Circle roughly $100 million in financing. Circle added in its Sept. 22 announcement that the subscription price represented a 5% discount to the pre-closing market price. The story was covered in “Binance invests $100 million in Circle as USDC’s distribution deal is renewed for five years.”
Foresight also examined fresh speculation around Apple and stablecoins. The report said stablecoins were listed as a plus in recruiting for an Apple Pay-related finance role, prompting discussion about whether Apple’s payments arm could be exploring a new direction. At the same time, the publication said the listing should be read as a hiring signal rather than a product launch notice. It added that Apple has entered a new management phase, with John Ternus serving as chief executive and Tim Cook moving to executive chairman. Taken together with Cook’s earlier public remarks, hiring activity across teams, and third-party crypto services already available in Apple’s ecosystem, Foresight said there are multiple signs of Apple’s contact points with Web3, but not all of them point to a product.
Another cross-sector talking point came from the intersection of neuroscience and crypto. Foresight wrote that after Google completed a synaptic map of the full central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly, projects such as FLYBRAIN and MurMur quickly turned the idea into Web3-native narratives. One example in the report was the FLYBRAIN token, which at one point reached a market value of $55.94 million after launching on Robinhood Chain, with an intraday gain as high as 1500%.
The token was launched by an account called Fruit fly dev. Foresight said the setup uses real connectome data from the fruit fly’s central nervous system to simulate a fly brain on GPUs in real time, then maps market buying and selling into sensory signals. Buys are treated as sugar, sells as bitterness, and large orders as dopamine or shadow. The simulated fly’s motor neurons generate trading instructions under fixed rules, and the token is issued by the virtual fly’s own wallet. The outlet added that the account has been followed by Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z. On Sept. 15, Binance founder Changpeng Zhao wrote on X, “Would be cool to see someone make ‘immortal fruit flies’ on BNB Chain.” Foresight said that post pushed the topic deeper into Web3 discussion. The related piece was “Google just mapped a fruit fly brain, and Web3 has already started ‘raising flies’?”
Project insights: Ink, Variational, POL, FTX, Kalshi, and Trueo
In project coverage, Foresight first reviewed the Ink ecosystem backed by Kraken. According to the article, Ink uses Kraken’s exchange traffic and the OP Stack-based Superchain infrastructure to build a DeFi-focused network. As of Sept. 22, 2026, Ink had around $211 million in total value locked in DeFi and about $173 million in stablecoin market capitalization. Its ecosystem spans lending, perpetuals, token issuance, and tokenized assets. Foresight described derivatives trading as a relative bright spot while saying spot liquidity remains weak. With expectations around an INK token rising, the question it posed was whether exchange assets and users can be converted into durable on-chain demand. That analysis appeared under the title “Token expectations are heating up: what stands out in Kraken’s Ink ecosystem?”
Foresight then turned to Variational, which has scheduled its token generation event for the fourth quarter of 2026 and disclosed a more complete token allocation framework. The article said 32% of the supply will go to a genesis airdrop based on users’ Variational points balances and will unlock in full at TGE. Another 18% will go to an ecosystem reserve managed by the Variational Foundation. The remaining 50% will be split between the team and investors, locked for 12 months after TGE and then unlocked over at least three years. The exact split between team and investor allocations will be disclosed before TGE.
Foresight said this clarifies the project’s earlier statement that about 50% of tokens would be allocated to the community, since the 32% genesis airdrop plus the 18% ecosystem reserve add up to exactly 50%. The airdrop formula given in the article was: the amount of VAR received by an individual equals the individual’s points divided by the final total of effective points, multiplied by 32% of the total token supply. The publication also said the project has raised about $61.8 million to date, connects to more than 500 asset types across crypto and equities, and plans to use protocol treasury revenue to buy back and burn tokens. Details on investor and team unlock cadence and buyback rules have not yet been disclosed. The recommended piece was “Variational sets TGE for Q4 2026, with 32% of the genesis airdrop fully unlocked at launch.”
Polygon’s POL burn was another headline item. Foresight wrote that on Sept. 23, Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal said the POL burn contract was ready and could be triggered by any community member. More than three hours later, he posted a Polygonscan transaction hash showing that 100 million POL had been permanently burned. At roughly $0.10 per token that day, the batch was worth about $10 million and represented around 1% of total supply. The tokens did not come from the foundation treasury. Instead, they came from a network base-fee collection contract.
Foresight added that Nailwal had previously said the collection address held about 121 million POL. The first burn removed 100 million, or about 83% of that balance, while the rest will stay in the collector and can be triggered by the community on a quarterly basis later. Even so, the article said POL did not get the usual market response often associated with burn narratives, with the token still hovering near $0.10. Combined with business contraction, the departure of co-founders, rounds of layoffs, and a pivot toward blockchain payments, Foresight said the burn looked more like a periodic fee recovery event than a full answer to supply expansion. The article was titled “A $10 billion token only burns $100 million units: is POL’s deflation story a joke?”
FTX liquidation activity also made the list. Citing on-chain analyst EmberCN, Foresight said on Sept. 23 that the FTX / Alameda Research asset liquidation team moved 27,372 ETH, worth about $75.32 million, to Wintermute through six wallets. The report said Wintermute often handles such flows through OTC buying or by first hedging with short derivatives positions and then distributing spot inventory gradually across exchanges.
Foresight went on to say that after multiple rounds of creditor distributions, the FTX recovery trust still held roughly $400 million in crypto assets. It added that five prior distribution rounds have already returned funds measured in the tens of billions, and the overhang that once loomed over the broader crypto market has weakened substantially. The corresponding piece was “FTX transfers 27,000 ETH. How much selling power does it still have left?”
Kalshi became another flashpoint after questions were raised about its volume statistics. Foresight said that on Sept. 20, Kalshi crypto lead IcoBeast.eth posted a chart showing Kalshi crypto with $363.9 million in trading volume and a 96.7% market share, far ahead of Polymarket’s $12.3 million. Users in the replies challenged the figure, arguing that much of the volume could be wash trading. IcoBears.eth replied, “If the platform charges fees, who would wash trade?”
Foresight said critics focused on the combination of thin ETH perpetual open interest and unusually high turnover, arguing that rebate structures could make self-matching easier. It also said Kalshi’s prediction-market business can inflate reported volume through high-odds multi-leg combinations. Kalshi responded by pointing to compliant reporting and industry-standard counting methods. The related article was “Kalshi accused of wash trading: the prediction market’s most misunderstood case?”
The final project in the roundup was Trueo. Foresight wrote that on Sept. 22, the decentralized prediction market protocol announced that it would deploy on Ethereum mainnet. Trueo had been native to Base since its launch in March 2025, and project lead MilliΞ later confirmed the move. A few hours after that, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted that he was looking forward to it, writing: “It’s great to see Ethereum L1 get a strong new competitor in prediction markets. It is committed to decentralization and ethics, rejects corporatized, soulless slop, and is genuinely trying to use this economic primitive to do something valuable.”
Foresight said TRUE, the project’s token, briefly surged 10x after Buterin’s mention. The article added that the protocol is trying to move away from the tendency of crypto prediction markets to slide into speculative gambling through a yield-bearing TYD token and a seven-layer chained arbitration oracle structure. At the same time, it noted that liquidity remains thin and trading activity is still weak. The feature was titled “TRUE jumps 10x after Vitalik mentions it: what is Trueo?”
Foresight ended the roundup with a standard caution that markets carry risk and that the material does not constitute investment advice.
