Crypto, policy and macro headlines piled up between Sept. 10 and Sept. 11, led by a reported $100 million investment from Nasdaq Inc. into Payward, the parent of crypto exchange Kraken, and a newly released U.S. Senate draft of the Clarity Act that would require non-decentralized DeFi protocols to register with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Corporate moves and platform developments
People familiar with the matter said Nasdaq Inc. is investing $100 million in Payward, the parent company of Kraken. The move comes as Nasdaq continues building infrastructure to support tokenized stock trading. The funding, made through Nasdaq’s venture arm, values the crypto company at $21 billion and expands on a partnership the two sides announced in March.
Prediction market platform Polymarket appointed Warren Jenson as its first chief financial officer. Jenson previously held senior finance roles at Nielsen and LiveRamp and formally joined Polymarket this week. The report said the company is seeking a new funding round while trying to regain growth momentum in competition with Kalshi.
Coinbase reached a partnership with payments infrastructure provider Moov to bring stablecoin payment acceptance, settlement and real-time funds services to more than 1,000 community banks and credit unions served by Moov. Under the arrangement, Coinbase’s regulated digital asset infrastructure, including custodial wallet accounts and its Payments API, will be embedded directly into Moov’s existing payments platform, allowing financial institutions to offer consumer stablecoin payments, merchant acceptance, settlement and payouts without building a crypto stack from scratch.
Coinbase also renamed Base App back to Coinbase Wallet and positioned the self-custody app as a multichain trading gateway and a “test kitchen” for products and assets not yet available on the centralized exchange. Coinbase Wallet now supports more than 10 networks, including Base, Robinhood Chain, Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB Chain, Monad, Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon and Avalanche. It also connects to Hyperliquid for perpetual futures trading and supports long-tail assets, prediction markets and tokenized stocks. Coinbase said the wallet emphasizes “no KYC, no waiting, no borders,” though some features remain geographically restricted. The company said prediction markets and tokenized equities will undergo strict product and compliance review, and that revenue will come from onchain trading and social copy trading.
Bybit said it plans to launch a “super app” in Europe that combines bank accounts, cryptocurrencies, stock trading and derivatives. Founder and CEO Ben Zhou said the company has obtained an electronic money institution license from Austria’s Financial Market Authority and already holds a MiCA license that covers the European Union. He said a MiFID license is expected in about two months. With the EMI license, users would be able to open personal accounts with IBANs for payroll, bill payments and local or third-party transfers while also using stablecoins and other digital assets. After securing MiFID approval, Bybit plans to offer regulated derivatives and direct access to U.S. stocks. Zhou said the company, founded in 2018, now has more than 80 million users. He also said cooperation with xStocks on tokenized shares will continue and direct equities trading may be offered through partners such as Alpaca or Saxo Bank.
trade.xyz launched its Events market, designed to bring trading on sports, politics, economics and financial market events into a unified account. Users can deposit spot BTC in the same account, borrow USDC through portfolio margin, trade perpetual contracts tied to pre-IPO names such as SpaceX, and use event contracts to hedge earnings-related risk or speculate on sports outcomes. The first Up/Down event contracts cover equities, commodities and pre-IPO assets. Liquidity and continuous price discovery come from trade.xyz perpetual markets deployed on Hyperliquid HIP-3. The platform said contracts will use XYZ market prices to determine outcomes and will not rely on external oracles.
Robinhood listed JUGGERNAUT and FRONG.
Kalshi, after receiving approval from the CFTC, launched perpetual contracts tied to gold and silver, extending its futures product lineup. Kalshi had previously disclosed that monthly trading volume in its commodity-linked contracts exceeded $400 million. A separate update said the company plans to seek regulatory approval to offer regulated perpetual futures tied to individual stocks including Nvidia.
Bitwise said it will liquidate its spot Dogecoin ETF, BWOW. Oct. 14 will be the final trading day on NYSE Arca, and investors will receive net asset value in cash on Oct. 22. The company said the move is part of ongoing product-line optimization in response to shifting investor demand.
MoneyGram launched its first stablecoin-backed Visa card in Colombia. The company said the card debuts with support for USDC and is expected to add support for its own dollar-pegged stablecoin, MGUSD, in the near future. MoneyGram entered stablecoins in 2021 through work with the Stellar Development Foundation on cash-to-USDC and USDC-to-cash services, and introduced MGUSD in June this year.
OpenAI introduced GPT-Live-1 in its API, a full-duplex voice model that can listen and generate speech at the same time. The company said the model improves handling of interruptions, pauses, background noise and long conversations, and supports telephone use cases. Developers can control tone, speed and dialogue style through system prompts, while deeper reasoning and tool use can be delegated to backend text models such as GPT-6 Astra or to third-party models. OpenAI said GPT-Live-1 scored 30 percentage points better than GPT-Realtime-2.1 on Full Duplex Bench. Early testing by language-learning platform Speak showed nearly an 80% reduction in mistaken interruptions during learner thinking pauses compared with traditional turn-based systems. The front-end voice layer is priced at $0.05 per minute, with backend model and agent framework fees billed separately.
OpenAI also launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a version of ChatGPT Work tailored for financial institutions and professional teams. The service combines the reasoning capabilities of GPT-6 Astra with financial datasets from providers including Daloopa, PitchBook and LSEG News. OpenAI said users can trace figures and conclusions to specific paragraphs, tables and cited sources, preview the original evidence, and use their firm’s Excel, Word and PowerPoint templates to generate editable financial models, research notes and pitch materials.
OpenAI Codex product lead Tibo said the company will pause new subscriptions to its $200-per-month Pro plan to protect the experience and access stability of Astra for existing users. He said other plans and API services remain available, and existing accounts are unaffected.
Google said the Gemini desktop app is now available on Windows 10 and 11, following the macOS version released in April. Users can press Alt+Space to call up Gemini for writing edits, summaries, idea generation and image or video creation, and can connect linked apps as personal agents.
AI chip startup Positron said it raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation. The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, SemiAnalysis Capital from analyst Dylan Patel, and Netscape co-founder Jim Clark. Positron said its prior financing round in February raised $230 million at a $1 billion valuation. The company also said it has delivered about 50 racks of its previous-generation Atlas servers to Oracle, with Jump Trading and Parasail also listed as customers.
SpaceX disclosed a major adjustment to how it builds AI data centers, a change that may slow expansion of new campus sites. People familiar with the matter said Elon Musk recently assigned a group of rocket engineers to the work, and that the team is taking a more cautious construction approach. Two years ago, Musk built data centers for his AI business at record speed.
A person familiar with the matter rejected a report that Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI was considering a dual listing in Hong Kong and Shanghai, calling the claim inaccurate. Earlier, the South China Morning Post had cited two people familiar with the matter saying the company was considering listings in both markets.
Policy and legal developments
U.S. Senate Republicans released a 630-page revised version of the Clarity Act, with a first procedural vote scheduled for Sept. 15. The updated text would require non-decentralized DeFi protocols to register with the CFTC, with detailed rules to be written by the CFTC and the Treasury Department. The DeFi provisions are limited to spot and cash digital commodity transactions, a change described as responding to concerns from tribal governments about prediction markets. The bill also clarifies the authority of credit unions to conduct crypto business.
The UK House of Lords voted 194 to 138 to approve an amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill requiring the Treasury to draft and publicly consult on a digital asset strategy within 12 months after the law takes effect. The strategy would cover crypto assets, stablecoins, tokenized securities and digital financial infrastructure, with attention on innovation, consumer protection and institutional access to banking, payments and clearing services. The amendment was proposed by Conservative peer Baroness Neville-Rolfe. The Labour government opposed it, and the bill must return to the House of Commons for consideration.
Sam Bankman-Fried appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking a retrial and asking the court to overturn the previously imposed $11 billion forfeiture order. He argues that the forfeiture violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines and also raised technical objections to the admission of evidence in the original proceeding. The Second Circuit had previously rejected related claims. The Supreme Court is expected to consider the case this year.
Exchange, protocol and product updates
Binance Alpha opened the third round of its Block Street, or BSB, airdrop. Users holding at least 246 Binance Alpha points can claim 342 BSB tokens on the Alpha event page. If the rewards are not fully distributed, the threshold will automatically drop by 5 points every five minutes. Claiming the airdrop consumes 15 Binance Alpha points.
Spark said it will shut down SparkLend on Gnosis Chain on Sept. 14. After the service ends, all outstanding loans may face liquidation. The team advised users to repay debt and withdraw collateral before the deadline. Spark said the shutdown is intended to reduce overall risk exposure and eliminate ongoing maintenance costs.
Liquid Network said that as of 10:00 UTC on Sept. 10, the network had entered a controlled recovery phase after a hack-related incident. As a precaution, block production has resumed, but transactions are not yet being processed while the network is monitored for full stability. Blockstream said required updates for Functionary nodes and bridge nodes had been successfully deployed, and that Functionary nodes are signing and validating blocks as expected. Peg operations, including PAK-authorized peg-outs, remain paused while the final recovery phase continues, including restoration of BTC/LBTC reserves. Liquid Network also warned users about scammers circulating fake updates and told them not to send funds to unknown channels or disclose private keys or seed phrases.
Uniswap Labs launched StablePair Hook, a Uniswap v4 hook designed for stablecoin pairs including USDC/USDT and USDC/USDG. Uniswap Labs said, “StablePair Hook gives traders consistent and predictable quotes on every swap, while allowing LPs to retain a larger share of the value they create.”
The company said the hook uses dynamic rather than fixed fees, adjusting fees based on how far pool pricing deviates from a reference price. When price remains near the reference, the hook adjusts swap fees to maintain a fixed bid-ask spread. If price moves outside that band, trades that push the deviation further do not pay fees because they give the liquidity pool a better price, while trades that bring price back toward the reference use a Dutch auction mechanism. Fees start high and fall with each block until a trader accepts them. Uniswap Labs said the first StablePair Hook pools will go live on Ethereum and will cover USDC/USDG and USDC/USDG pairs.
Minutes from Ethereum ACDC #186 showed developers tentatively scheduled the Glamsterdam upgrade for activation on the Sepolia testnet at 13:53 UTC on Oct. 6, though the timing still depends on stability in later testing. There is still no stable Glamsterdam devnet. Devnet-9, which includes 1,000 validator nodes, still cannot finalize properly. Earlier, Devnet-8 exposed a major consensus-layer bug that could potentially halt the entire network, and execution-layer EIP-8037 was also found to have implementation issues requiring client updates. Developers plan to continue with Devnet-10, and if it also proves unstable, the Sepolia schedule could be delayed. Upgrade dates for the Hoodi testnet and Ethereum mainnet remain undecided. Developers still hope for a December mainnet launch, but said there is no sign yet that client implementations are ready for deployment.
Market calls and onchain activity
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong told CNBC that bitcoin has bottomed and that reaching $400,000 by 2030 is a “reasonable goal.”
Analyst Killa said many traders keep focusing on “imbalances,” weekly fair value gaps, or low-volume zones inside specific price ranges. While those areas matter, Killa argued that in a bull market, imbalances created by strong upward moves are usually not fully filled. Looking at historical data, he said explosive candles from the bottom often remain unfilled. Based on that view, he does not expect BTC to retest the 2x leveraged long entry at $62,600 or the publicly shared average spot entry around $65,800. In his words, the absolute worst case might be some form of capitulation near $70,000. He said it is more likely that bitcoin holds in the $73,000 to $75,000 area and then begins another leg higher toward $85,000.
glassnode said BTC is currently capped below a resistance wall created by long-term holder selling in the $83,000 to $85,000 range, though investors are accumulating there. If price breaks below this newly formed high-volume trading area, the $75,000 level should be watched closely. If that level fails, glassnode said a deeper retracement toward $60,000 is possible.
CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost said a 25 basis point rate increase by the European Central Bank, combined with U.S. producer price data coming in above expectations, triggered bitcoin selling. He cited core PPI rising 4.6% year over year against expectations of 4.5%, and headline PPI climbing 5.4% versus a 5.1% forecast. Darkfost said the concern showed up sharply in bitcoin futures: within one hour, aggressive sell volume on Binance surged to more than $1.4 billion, and bitcoin-related positions saw more than $60 million in liquidations in less than an hour.
Nick Timiraos, often described as the “Fed whisperer,” said Friday’s inflation report will be the key to whether the Federal Reserve raises rates. He said Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech led investors to believe a rate increase had become more likely, but did not explain what would actually trigger such a move. Markets then filled in that gap on their own, and current expectations reflect a degree of tightening that Warsh never explicitly promised.
ARK Invest said competition in stablecoins has entered a winner-take-most phase and that the market at the $100 billion scale could become a contest between two players. It said the number of stablecoins with market capitalization above $1 billion has only grown from single digits in 2021 to 12 today, while the number above $10 billion has fallen from its 2022 peak and now consists only of stablecoins from Tether and Circle. Lorenzo Valente said entry into the $10 billion club is already difficult, that the $100 billion tier may be contested by only two issuers for a long time, and that the $500 billion level may be reached by only one issuer over a period of more than two years.
Bonk Guy wrote on X that after revisiting the relative performance of USELESS against major meme coins, he found that USELESS had reached all-time highs on ratio charts versus PEPE, DOGE, PENGU, WIF, FARTCOIN, BONK, SPX and SOL. He said nearly every observable indicator suggests USELESS could become “the meme king of this cycle,” with market capitalization potentially reaching multiple billions of dollars. He also said USELESS kept attracting large numbers of new holders during the current pullback and that any correction would be worth buying aggressively as long as price remains in the current range ahead of the fourth quarter.
A wallet linked to Cumberland, address 0x091D, withdrew 8.5 million PONS worth $6.55 million from Gate over the past week.
Address 0xaaa…4a26e opened a new ETH position after five months, spending 4.82 million USDT six hours earlier to buy 1,951 ETH at a cost basis of $2,469.6, then depositing the holdings into Morpho.
Macro data and rate expectations
U.S. producer prices rose 5.4% year over year in August, above market expectations. Initial jobless claims in the U.S. came in at 206,000 last week, slightly above expectations.
After the PPI release, markets raised their bets on a rate increase at next week’s Federal Reserve meeting. Based on CME federal funds futures pricing, the implied probability of a 25 basis point increase at the Sept. 15-16 meeting was about 65% before the report and rose to about 70% afterward. Separate CME FedWatch data showed a 28.8% probability of no change by September and a 71.3% probability of a cumulative 25 basis point hike. By October, markets implied a 17.6% probability of no change, a 54.8% probability of a cumulative 25 basis point increase and a 27.6% probability of a cumulative 50 basis point increase.
Another market analysis said the 5.4% annual PPI reading for August came in above the 5.3% consensus, while core PPI on a monthly basis was 0.2%, below the 0.3% expectation, sending mixed signals as Fed officials debate whether to raise rates next week. That analysis said markets now fully expect a rate increase in October. The PPI release came one day before the next CPI report, which is expected to show relatively moderate core inflation. Some Fed officials have already suggested that the Sept. 15-16 decision could depend on what this week’s reports reveal.
The U.S. 30-year Treasury yield rose to 5.34%, the highest level since 2007. Separately, a large “mystery” options trade bet that the sell-off in Treasuries would push the 10-year yield above 5%. The premium paid for the position was about $14 million. The trade would reach breakeven if the 10-year yield climbed to about 5.1%, and profit would rise to about $15 million if the yield reached 5.2%. The report said selling pressure had again pushed the 10-year yield toward the 2023 peak just above 5%.
Another update said the 10-year Treasury yield touched 4.97% on Friday, the highest level since 2023 and close to a peak not seen since 2007, as investors positioned ahead of U.S. inflation data. The yield has climbed 18 basis points this week. Padhraic Garvey, head of Americas research at ING, said, “A 5% 10-year Treasury yield looks like a foregone conclusion, not just a forecast. It is a worrying period for the bond market.”
U.S. stocks moved lower during the session, with the Dow down 0.44%, the Nasdaq down 1.26% and the S&P 500 down 0.64%.
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 fell 2.28%, while South Korea’s KOSPI dropped 3.29% early in the session and touched 7000. SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics each fell about 4%. At the same time, Japan’s 10-year government bond yield rose 5.5 basis points to 2.965%.
The U.S. midterm election season is entering its final stretch. The report said prediction markets currently favor Democrats to win control of the House, while the Senate race has tightened and Republicans hold a slight edge on Kalshi and Polymarket. Futures tied to the Cboe Volatility Index show increasing demand for protection against S&P 500 volatility in early November. Evercore ISI recommended a straddle strategy on the State Street SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust to position for possible swings. The market also expects two Fed rate increases by early 2027. The same report said investors increasingly see a Democratic House and a narrowly Republican Senate as the most market-friendly combination with the lowest risk of disruptive policy changes, though it added that the outcome is far from guaranteed.
Additional AI updates highlighted by PANews
PANews AI Watch listed several other developments from the past 24 hours. DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash, the smallest model in its new architecture family, with native multimodal visual understanding. The company said it scored 90.9 on GPQA Diamond and reached a 3471 rating on Codeforces. It also said performance, cost and speed all surpass V4 Pro, which it plans to phase out.
Anthropic published a threat intelligence report saying Iranian actors used Claude in activities targeting U.S. Navy bases, automating dossiers on Americans and carrying out influence operations on social media. The report named Haiku, Sonnet and Opus as the models involved.
Cognition launched SWE-2, a software engineering model. According to the company, SWE-2 scored 50.0% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, one point behind Fable 5.1 while reducing cost by 64%. It said the model is post-trained on the 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3 and supports configurable reasoning effort for the first time.