Polymarket faced a fraud attack during its U.S. expansion
According to The Wall Street Journal, prediction market platform Polymarket’s U.S. business was hit by a large fraud attack in February this year. Bad actors used accounts linked to stolen debit cards and tried to move at least $10 million through betting activity and withdrawals.
The report said a payment processor at one point classified and rejected more than 80% of the deposit transactions it handled as fraudulent. That was far above the roughly 1% industry norm cited in the story.
People familiar with the matter said employees warned CEO Shayne Coplan about the risks, and Coplan responded that the company should keep growing and pay fines later if regulators found problems. Polymarket said it has built systems to identify and respond to suspicious activity and is committed to working with regulators and law enforcement.
Goldman Sachs and Citizens see possible upside from the SEC’s innovation exemption framework
Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Citizens said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed five-year “innovation exemption” framework could benefit Coinbase, Robinhood, and Circle. The framework would allow eligible tokenized U.S. stocks to trade through automated market makers, or AMMs, on public blockchains.
For Coinbase, the analysts said the company could gain from custody, tokenization infrastructure, stablecoins, and its Base business. At the same time, Coinbase’s current exchange uses an order-book model, so operating this type of venue directly could require new AMM infrastructure.
Robinhood’s stock tokens issued overseas do not currently include full shareholder rights, which means the product would need changes to fit a U.S. framework. Circle could benefit from demand for USDC as a settlement and collateral asset in onchain markets.
The analysts also said limits on trading volume, issuer objection rights, and the constraints AMMs face in deep markets could cap the policy’s effect on traditional exchanges.
Strategy led Nasdaq 100 components over the past month
Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy and traded as MSTR, rose about 47.6% over the past month. That made it the best-performing stock among Nasdaq 100 index components, ahead of names including Meta, AMD, and CrowdStrike.
Crypto professional’s family was held hostage in France
In Vendin-le-Vieil in France’s Pas-de-Calais department, a man working in the cryptocurrency industry, his wife, and their two children, aged 8 and 12, were held and tied up at their home by four people.
Investigators are explicitly considering whether the case involved a demand for cryptocurrency. The man and his daughter were assaulted. The man alerted police at around 8:00 on Sunday, and the four suspects then fled. The amount of losses has not been made clear.
Robinhood Chain processed more than 600 million transactions
Robinhood Chain has processed more than 600 million transactions since late April, while paying only about $49,000 in onchain fees to Ethereum over the same period.
Another onchain analysis said that on Sept. 3, Robinhood Chain collected about $4.5 million in fees in a single day while paying only about $400 to Ethereum. The article said L2 transaction fees are mainly captured by sequencer operators, while Ethereum’s direct revenue may be limited to Blob data fees.
Although Robinhood Chain uses ETH as its gas asset and relies on Ethereum for data availability, its sequencer and validation mechanisms still show strong centralization features. The article argued that rising L2 transaction volume does not necessarily translate directly into economic value for Ethereum, and that Ethereum needs to strengthen its role as a neutral cross-platform settlement and security layer.
Weekly project updates from Sept. 13 to Sept. 19
Hyperliquid launched manual lending
Hyperliquid said it has launched a manual lending feature that lets users post HYPE and BTC as collateral and borrow quote assets including USDC and USDT. Borrowed assets incur interest, while supplying quote assets earns interest, with rates determined by utilization. The feature shares HyperCore infrastructure with cross margin, and lending assets had reached $269 million as of today.
Hyperliquid co-founder Jeff Yan said the platform uses a modular design. It first builds a standalone lending protocol on HyperCore, then integrates lending with perpetuals, spot trading, and trade outcomes through the cross-margin system. He said this structure allows lending risk to be managed independently, gives idle stablecoin collateral a way to earn interest, and makes overall system risk easier to analyze.
Polygon plans to permanently burn 100 million POL
Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal said Polygon plans to permanently burn 100 million POL. The related contract has already been deployed to testnet and will go live on mainnet after the Security Council completes its final signatures.
After that, the community could continue burning POL that enters the fee collector on a quarterly basis. Since January 2026, POL has been in a deflationary state. Base network fees continue to flow into the fee collector, which has accumulated about 121 million POL so far. Polygon’s revenue year to date in 2026 stands at $24.5 million.
Solana cut its target block interval to 250 milliseconds
Solana has reduced its target block interval from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds, targeting four slots per second. But the compute and data capacity of each slot was reduced at the same time, so total transaction capacity is broadly unchanged.
The change gives wallets, exchanges, and trading applications more timely onchain data and shortens epoch length to about 30 hours. It also reduces the time window for offline signing and delayed approvals. A move to 200 milliseconds has not yet been scheduled for mainnet.
Inheritance dispute around Ondo Finance escalated
Ondo Finance founder Nathan Allman died in May this year without leaving a will. His parents then inherited an estate that included Ondo holding company equity and a large amount of ONDO tokens.
Nathan’s half-sister, Lani Clinton, and Ondo investor David Chen recently asked a Hawaii court to impose a limited conservatorship over estate-related interests held by Nathan’s 77-year-old mother, Kathleen Allman. They alleged long-term alcohol abuse and declining cognition and judgment, and asked the court to assess whether she has dementia.
Kathleen denied the allegations and said the filing was another move by the camp around acting CEO Ian De Bode to fight for control of Ondo. She had previously sued De Bode, accusing him of trying to seize control of the company after Nathan’s death and arranging compensation and equity awards for himself worth more than $10 million.
World launched the financial app World Money
World said it has launched World Money, a self-custodial financial app, in more than 150 countries and regions. The app includes stablecoin payments, investing, yield products, and global cross-border transfers, and supports balances in eight fiat and digital currencies.
Through its Stripe integration, World Money gives U.S. users a path to fund through Apple Pay and convert into stablecoins. The app also includes deep integrations with prediction market platform Kalshi and decentralized lending protocol Morpho.
Lido proposal would authorize an emergency CEX liquidity market-making mechanism
The Lido community has introduced a proposal to authorize an emergency LDO centralized exchange liquidity market-making mechanism. The stated goal is to address the risk that weaker LDO trading volume could reduce natural market-making interest, worsen liquidity, or even lead to exchange delistings.
If approved, the authorization would remain available for two years. Once the Growth Committee determines that LDO exchange liquidity is insufficient and activates the mechanism, the plan would allocate up to $1.5 million worth of LDO from the Lido DAO treasury as a callable inventory lending line for market making, along with up to 480,000 USDC for fixed market-making service fees and related costs for as long as 12 months.
The Lido Ecosystem Foundation said it would prioritize a structure using foundation-controlled CEX accounts with API permission limits. Market makers would not receive withdrawal rights, borrowed LDO could not be used for governance voting, and market manipulation and attached structures such as call options would be prohibited.
Aave proposed custodied collateral lending
Aave submitted a new governance proposal to launch Custodied Collateral Lending based on Aave V4. The proposal would allow institutions to borrow stablecoins against assets held in custody at Anchorage.
During the life of a loan, the underlying collateral would remain with Anchorage, which would maintain the collateral management system, record balances and lifecycle events, and sell the underlying assets over the counter if liquidation occurs. Chainlink CustodySync would mirror custody balances onchain through non-transferable receipt tokens, while Chainlink price oracles would provide consistent pricing data to both Aave and the custodian so loan-to-value ratios stay aligned. Borrowed stablecoins could be sent directly to the borrower’s address in a single transaction.
The product would run in a separate Liquidity Hub within Aave V4 and remain isolated from existing markets.
Starknet launched a private prediction market trading service
Starknet’s ecosystem team said Off Market, a privacy-focused prediction market trading service based on Polymarket, has gone live on Starknet mainnet. Users can build prediction market positions without publicly linking their trading activity to their accounts.
The service is meant to reduce information exposure around onchain positions and trading behavior. Starknet had previously introduced the STRK20 privacy framework to support privacy features for onchain assets and applications.
Linera shut down because of insufficient funding
The Linera team said in a Discord announcement that the project is ceasing operations immediately because of insufficient funding. Its token sale on Sonar drew nearly $900,000 in subscription commitments but did not reach the minimum threshold required to complete the sale, and all subscription funds have been returned.
The team then tried to secure emergency financing to carry the company to mainnet launch but failed to raise the required capital. Linera is now gradually shutting down its applications and Discord community. User points balances will remain on record, but the team said it cannot promise any future rights tied to those points.
The team added that it still hopes to complete protocol development and launch the application in the future, but it cannot provide a timeline. Linera was founded by former Meta researcher Mathieu Baudet and raised about $12 million across two rounds in 2022 and 2023. a16z participated in both rounds, alongside investors including Borderless Capital, GSR, Matrixport Ventures, and Flow Traders.
Cronos proposal would direct all Ult and Cronos Launch revenue to CRO buybacks and burns
lezzokafka, a maintainer of the Cronos GitHub repository, published a governance proposal that would use all revenue from Ult and Cronos Launch, both under Cronos Labs, to buy back CRO on the open market and burn it onchain every month, with the hash of each burn transaction disclosed.
Operating, infrastructure, and growth-related expenses would be covered by existing capital. The proposal also calls for using strategic reserves to support future staking rewards on Cronos POS, filling the gap as token issuance declines while keeping current staking parameters unchanged.
The measure has entered voting as onchain governance proposal No. 37. Voting is scheduled to end at 10:02 Beijing time on Oct. 3, and the buyback-and-burn contract is still under development.