The coming week brings a dense lineup of crypto market, policy, exchange, and token-unlock events. On Sept. 23, Wanxiang Blockchain Labs will host the 12th Global Blockchain Summit in Shanghai as part of Shanghai Blockchain International Week. The same day, BitMEX is set to shut down at 12:00 Beijing time after its parent board decided to close the exchange following a strategic review. Several exchange and product changes are also scheduled. Binance will delist Pax Dollar (USDP) spot pairs and end related services on Sept. 24, while Coinbase plans to suspend trading in IoTeX (IOTX). Binance is also supporting Stargate Finance’s STG token merger into LayerZero’s ZRO, including the removal of STG perpetual contracts. On the infrastructure and policy side, the Eurosystem’s DLT settlement project Pontes is due to go live on Sept. 21, with the European Central Bank framing it as an operational service rather than another pilot. Thailand’s SEC will close public consultation on a proposed stablecoin rule on Sept. 25. Token unlocks are another focal point. Plasma (XPL) is scheduled to unlock about 1.76 billion tokens on Sept. 25, equal to roughly 63.20% of circulating supply and valued at about $158 million. Humanity Protocol (H), Big Time (BIGTIME), SoSoValue (SOSO), SPACE ID (ID), MBG, SOON, and STBL are also on the calendar.

A packed calendar is lined up for Sept. 21-27, with several crypto market deadlines and product changes already scheduled. Moscow Exchange is set to launch crypto index perpetual futures tied to BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP and TRX on Sept. 22, offering cash-settled contracts priced in U.S. dollars and settled in rubles for qualified investors only. The same day also marks the deadline for The Sandbox’s SAND compensation claims tied to the Aug. 22 Base and BNB Chain bridge attack, while Zilliqa is expected to trigger its second exchange migration hard fork. On Sept. 23, BitMEX is due to shut down at 12:00 Beijing time after halting new user registrations, with remaining positions to be forcibly closed after the deadline. Sept. 24 brings another set of changes: Phantom will stop supporting Sui, Binance will delist all USDP spot pairs, and Coinbase will suspend trading in IoTeX (IOTX) across several services. On Sept. 25, oracle project Switchboard plans to end operations and terminate remaining support, while Binance Futures is scheduled to list next-quarter 0326 delivery contracts. The week also includes a series of public appearances by Federal Reserve officials, including John Williams, Philip Jefferson, Austan Goolsbee and Thomas Barkin.

ByteDance posted strong top-line growth in the first half of the year, but profit slipped as spending on artificial intelligence climbed, according to a report by The Information citing three people familiar with the matter. The company’s revenue rose about 30% year over year to roughly $120 billion, while net profit declined by a single-digit percentage to about $20 billion. The report said the sharp rise in AI-related spending was the main factor behind the earnings decline, a rare drop in profit after years of expansion. It added that ByteDance recently completed a roughly $30 billion bank loan, described as the largest of its kind, with part of the funds expected to support continued investment in AI infrastructure. The same report compared ByteDance with Meta Platforms. Meta’s revenue also increased 30% in the first half, reaching $117 billion, leaving the two companies with nearly similar revenue scale. Their valuations remain far apart, however: Meta’s market capitalization stands at about $1.7 trillion, while secondary market trading tracker CapLight estimates ByteDance’s valuation at $630 billion. The report also said TikTok’s U.S. business has been accelerating its e-commerce push after completing a data security architecture restructuring in January, helping support overall revenue growth.

A Premier League loan is a temporary transfer. A club can register up to four in a season, no more than two at once, and only one from the same club at a time.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has signed a $29.6 billion loan agreement with 28 banks, including HSBC and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, according to a report cited by ChainCatcher. The loan carries a three-year tenor, with an extension option of up to five years, and is priced 0.68 percentage points above the benchmark rate. It ranks as Asia’s second-largest loan this year, behind SoftBank’s $40 billion financing arranged in March. Bloomberg reported that ByteDance plans to use the proceeds for general corporate purposes as it advances its artificial intelligence goals. The company previously borrowed $10.8 billion from around 20 lenders in 2024, while the latest deal was initially marketed at $20 billion. ByteDance was valued at about $550 billion in February, and Bloomberg said in May that the company was weighing up to $70 billion in spending in 2026 on data centers and other AI infrastructure. The financing news came as Elon Musk, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called for a slowdown in the AI race and raised safety concerns. Separately, a Bitcoin Suisse report projected that spending by the largest U.S. hyperscale computing companies will top $800 billion this year and exceed $1 trillion in 2027.

ChainCatcher reported, citing a market update and a person said to be familiar with the matter, that SoftBank Group has secured an $11.87 billion loan to support its investment in OpenAI. The reported amount is above the company’s earlier $10 billion target. No additional details were provided in the input on the lending structure, timing, participating institutions, or other financing terms. The report was presented as a market message rather than a formal company announcement, and the available source text did not include further comment from SoftBank or OpenAI. Given the brevity of the source, the key disclosed point is the size of the reported loan and its intended use in backing SoftBank’s OpenAI investment plan.

Binance Research says the AI trade is no longer centered only on semiconductors and hardware. In its latest report, the firm argues that the market has started rotating toward software, capital markets and other second-order beneficiaries as the economics of model usage, infrastructure spending and revenue realization change. The report says the push to maximize token consumption effectively ended in the second quarter of 2026. Enterprises are paying closer attention to token efficiency per task as AI agents spread, while open-weight models have gained share because they offer roughly 90% of the capability of closed models at about one-sixth of the cost per call. Binance Research cited OpenRouter data showing weekly token volume at 137 trillion in early September 2026, around 20 times the level seen at the start of the year. At the same time, capital spending by the five largest U.S. cloud operators has climbed to around 105% of operating cash flow in 2026, up from 41% in 2023, pushing combined free cash flow into negative territory. The report argues that equity markets are now rewarding spending that clearly converts into AI revenue growth and penalizing spending that does not. It also says market leadership is broadening in 2026, with Binance users cutting concentrated semiconductor exposure and reallocating more capital toward software and capital markets names.

Bitcoin holders who need cash do not always have to sell. They can post BTC-linked assets as collateral and borrow against them, keeping exposure to Bitcoin’s price while unlocking liquidity. The catch is that many crypto lending applications run on other blockchains, so users often rely on custodial wrapped Bitcoin products such as WBTC, cbBTC, or Circle’s cirBTC rather than native BTC itself. That shift changes the risk profile. The borrower is no longer relying only on Bitcoin, but also on a custodian to hold the underlying coins, on redemption rules to work as promised, and on a lending protocol to function correctly. Even if a wrapped token is fully backed, redemption access, settlement delays, regional restrictions, and liquidity across supported markets can all determine whether that token is actually useful as collateral. The article examines how minting and redemption work, why wrapped tokens still track BTC downside, how liquidations can force users to lose Bitcoin exposure without selling voluntarily, and why product differences between WBTC, Coinbase’s cbBTC, and Circle’s cirBTC matter. The central question is not whether a token says it is backed by Bitcoin, but whether the holder can reliably get Bitcoin back.