A broad mix of crypto, AI and macro headlines landed between Sept. 20 and Sept. 21, led by a membership change at mBridge, a Solana migration plan for ZETA, large token transfers, and fresh projections for U.S. short-term debt issuance.
Saudi central bank says it has exited mBridge
The Saudi Central Bank, or SAMA, said it has exited mBridge, the cross-border central bank digital currency platform. The change had not been disclosed earlier.
SAMA said it joined the project as an observer in 2023, took part in minimum viable product development in 2024, and stopped being a member after completing a proof of concept on May 13, 2025. It also rejected claims that the move was linked to pressure from the United States.
mBridge was launched in 2021 by the Hong Kong Centre of the BIS Innovation Hub. Its co-builders include the Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. The Bank for International Settlements transferred the project to the central bank partners in October 2024. The Monetary Authority of Macao joined this year and went live in June.
Coinbase derivatives filing sets a $100 billion market-cap bar
According to the SEC filing SR-COIN-2026-002, Coinbase Derivatives submitted a related rulebook on Sept. 18 and plans to launch single-stock perpetual futures.
Based on current market values, Coinbase and Strategy are worth about $51.2 billion and $59.1 billion, respectively, both below the proposed $100 billion threshold for eligible underlying stocks. Smaller crypto-linked names such as MARA, Hut 8 and Strive would also fail to qualify.
If the standard is applied as written, the initial universe would be concentrated in large U.S. equities such as Apple, Microsoft, Tesla and Nvidia.
Rhodium Group estimates Chinese AI model revenue at a fraction of top U.S. peers
Research firm Rhodium Group estimated that seven Chinese AI model companies, including DeepSeek, Moonshot, Z.ai and MiniMax, generated a combined annual recurring revenue of about $10.7 billion from March through August. That figure equals roughly 10% of the combined revenue cited for OpenAI at $40 billion and Anthropic at $65 billion.
Among the Chinese companies, ByteDance led with $4 billion in ARR as of July, while Alibaba stood at $2.4 billion as of August.
Large token unlocks scheduled for next week
Data from Token Unlocks shows that XPL, H, SOSO and several other tokens are set for sizable unlocks next week.
- Plasma (XPL) will unlock about 1.76 billion tokens at 8:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 25, equal to about 63.20% of circulating supply and worth about $158 million.
- Humanity Protocol (H) will unlock about 266 million tokens at 8:00 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 25, equal to about 7.34% of circulating supply and worth about $19.2 million.
- SoSoValue (SOSO) will unlock about 23.46 million tokens at 5:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 24, equal to about 5.97% of circulating supply and worth about $6.8 million.
- STBL (STBL) will unlock about 210 million tokens at 6:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 26, equal to about 4.42% of circulating supply and worth about $5.3 million.
- SOON (SOON) will unlock about 20.24 million tokens at 4:30 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 23, equal to about 3.62% of circulating supply and worth about $3.8 million.
- Big Time (BIGTIME) will unlock about 333 million tokens at 8:00 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 25, equal to about 13.34% of circulating supply and worth about $2.7 million.
- SPACE ID (ID) will unlock about 69.88 million tokens at 8:00 a.m. Beijing time on Sept. 22, equal to about 4.56% of circulating supply and worth about $2.4 million.
- MBG by MultiBank Group (MBG) will unlock about 23.6 million tokens at 8:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 22, equal to about 5.04% of circulating supply and worth about $2.4 million.
On-chain transfers and whale activity
Meme trading platform gmgn transferred 23,550 BNB, or about $17.34 million in fee revenue, to the Pionex exchange over the past week.
An official TRUMP allocation wallet moved 8.73 million TRUMP, worth about $17.99 million, to BitGo custody. Over the past two weeks, the team has transferred about 31 million TRUMP, worth about $70.64 million, to BitGo.
A whale that sold ETH in August for a $3.7 million profit bought back into Ether. Over the past hour, the wallet sent 40 million USDC to Binance and has since withdrawn 7,567 ETH worth $20 million.
Garrett Jin closed a ZEC short that had been open for three months, taking a loss of $36.13 million. The report said cumulative losses stand at $12.77 million. He is now holding a long position of 1,330 BTC worth $107.77 million, with an unrealized profit of $3.71 million.
Qwen open-sources a new image model, Zhipu addresses privacy concerns
According to Qwen’s official blog, Alibaba’s Qwen team has open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.1. The model uses only 7B parameters for the visual generation component, combines text-to-image generation and image editing in one model, natively supports transparent image generation and editing, accepts up to 10 reference images for multi-image composition, and supports localized editing methods such as selection and brush-based modification. The team also said it improved fidelity in portrait and product editing as well as text layout.
Zhipu said its AI coding tool ZCode will be formally open-sourced. In response to earlier issues, and after remediation work, the company invited the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and NSFOCUS to conduct security audits. Zhipu said open-sourcing the project is the first step in addressing outside concerns over ZCode’s data handling, and that it plans to move the tool further toward a community-driven model by inviting downloads, code inspection and outside contributions.
CZ, Vitalik and event updates
Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, or CZ, said his personal X account has not been managed by a team or interns in recent years and that he has not used any AI automation tools. He said every post and reply has been written manually by him.
ETHShanghai 2026 is scheduled for Sept. 22 in Shanghai. The event is themed “Ethereum Renaissance” and will cover Ethereum development, AI × Web3, decentralization and personal sovereignty, prediction markets, stablecoins and tokenized U.S. equities.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin will attend remotely and deliver a keynote on EIP-8288. The event is co-hosted by ETHPanda, PANews and The Excited Few, with special support from Wanxiang Blockchain Labs, GCC and ETH HK Hub.
U.S. Treasury comments, Congress and bill issuance forecasts
U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent responded to criticism about “capital flight” by saying that if capital were truly leaving the United States, the data would not show continued strong foreign demand for U.S. assets, and Treasury auctions would not remain well bid.
Bessent said the U.S. dollar accounts for 89.2% of global foreign-exchange trading and that foreign investors still hold large amounts of U.S. assets. He also said the latest data shows continued job growth, expanding business investment and capital spending, and equipment investment in the second quarter of 2026 running nearly 20% above the level at the end of the Biden administration.
He added that Treasury buybacks are intended to increase market liquidity and optimize the maturity structure of debt, not to directly intervene in the U.S. Treasury market, which he described as worth more than $30 trillion.
Wall Street banks expect the United States to borrow about $1 trillion over the next year through short-term Treasury issuance to meet rising government funding needs. Bank of America expects net new borrowing, excluding refinancing of maturing debt, to reach about $1.07 trillion in the fiscal year ending September 2027. JPMorgan expects Treasury bill issuance in 2027 to total about $1.09 trillion, while Goldman Sachs expects $961 billion.
Those forecasts come as long-term U.S. borrowing costs have climbed to their highest level since 2007. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had previously hoped to push down long-end rates by expanding buybacks of Treasuries with maturities from 10 to 30 years.
Bank of America expects outstanding Treasury bills to rise to about $8 trillion by next September, equal to 24.3% of marketable Treasuries. Goldman Sachs also expects the share to reach 24.3% next year and 24.9% in 2028. That would put the ratio close to pandemic-era highs, while the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee had previously recommended keeping the long-run share near 20%.
Analysts said heavier bill issuance can lower current funding costs but raises refinancing risk later. Mark Cabana, head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America, said the Treasury is balancing supply and demand in the bond market, but large bill issuance could make interest expense “larger and more volatile.” At the same time, the Federal Reserve has bought large amounts of short-term Treasuries this year, and money market funds, with about $8 trillion in assets, continue to provide demand support.
Legislative and regulatory developments
U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis said Democrats had previously required crypto projects that raised more than $25 million from the public to provide audited financial statements, and that the requirement had been written into the CLARITY Act. She said Democrats later voted against advancing the bill.
The Senate held a procedural vote on Sept. 15 to move the CLARITY Act forward, but the effort did not pass.
The Bank of Russia proposed draft rules that would cap commercial banks’ exposure to crypto assets and related instruments at 1% of their own capital. The draft covers direct holdings, derivatives, loans, bonds and other exposures linked to crypto or foreign digital instruments.
The proposal remains in draft form. It is scheduled for formal release in the fourth quarter of 2026, would take effect 10 days after publication, and banks are expected to begin reporting related data from January 2027.
ZetaChain migration, SEI ETF filing and a BTC market call
According to the ZetaChain governance page, Proposal 68 passed with 99.4% voting in favor, 0.3% against, and 58% participation, above the 40% quorum requirement. Under the proposal, ZETA will convert 1:1 into a native Solana SPL token, with total supply unchanged.
The detailed migration plan, including the snapshot height, claim process and L1 shutdown schedule, still requires a second proposal. Anuma, a private AI application with more than 300,000 users, will also migrate to Solana.
Canary Capital filed a second amended S-1 registration statement for its Staked SEI ETF. The fund would hold spot SEI. The new amendment makes major changes to the staking mechanism, with about 90% of assets expected to be staked and BitGo serving as the exclusive custodian.
Galaxy head of research Alex Thorn said on X that BTC closed the week above its 50-week moving average for the first time in 45 weeks. Based on historical experience, he said reclaiming the 50-week moving average strongly confirms that the bear-market bottom has been established. Bitcoin has risen 29% in 35 days, according to his post.
Uniswap domain dispute and selected AI notes
Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said on X that the original holder of the Uniswap.com domain had asked for a seven-figure price, which the team refused to pay. He said Sam Bankman-Fried later bought the domain for a seven-figure sum and pointed it to a fork project. Because the domain was used maliciously, the legal team eventually recovered it at no cost.
PANews’ AI Watch also highlighted several AI items from the past 24 hours. Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen open-sourced Qwen-Image-2.1 on GitHub, with the company calling it Qwen’s strongest open-source image generation model and saying a related post drew nearly one million impressions. Simon Willison released the llm-keys-ui 0.1 plugin to securely pass API keys to a target machine when using Codex Remote. Another item cited a newly hired engineer at a large company who said the team’s specification documents, code, tests, PRDs and tickets were all generated by Claude Code, while management believed “shipping code is not the bottleneck,” leaving employees working 12 to 13 hours a day just to press enter.