Besxar, a startup founded by former OpenAI employee Ashley Pilipiszyn, has begun validating a space-based semiconductor manufacturing prototype using SpaceX Falcon 9 missions. The company’s thesis is straightforward: instead of spending billions to recreate ultra-clean, near-vacuum conditions on Earth, use the vacuum of space itself as the manufacturing environment. Besxar argues that microgravity also removes thermal convection and buoyancy effects that can disrupt atomic arrangement during crystal growth, a factor it believes could improve compound semiconductor quality. The company signed an agreement with SpaceX in October 2025 to validate its orbital manufacturing concept over about 12 Falcon 9 flights. Its first mission, Mission Asimov, launched on July 5, 2026, carrying two V1 Fabship manufacturing pods on a suborbital Falcon 9 booster flight. The pods returned to Earth after several minutes and carried compound semiconductor wafer samples including GaAs and AlInAsSb from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia. Post-flight inspection, according to Compound Semiconductor, found the containers intact and the wafers free of cracks, warping, and visible damage. Besxar plans a staged roadmap over the next two years, moving from wafer heating tests to single-material deposition and then to multi-material growth. The company has raised nearly $14 million, including a $9 million seed round co-led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC, and says its long-term goal is to produce wafers for advanced power chips used in data centers, robotics, and electric vehicles.

Ethereum briefly surged nearly 10% after the latest CPI release, climbing from $2,433 to $2,667 in a sharp move that analysts linked to whale activity. According to analyst alicharts, the number of Ethereum transactions worth more than $1 million rose by nearly 14% during the rally, suggesting that large holders were active behind the move. The analyst also said ETH is now approaching a major resistance zone. More than 10 million ETH had previously changed hands between $2,700 and $2,800, creating what alicharts described as a sizable supply wall. That range now stands out as the key area bulls, especially whales, would need to break through before Ethereum can make a run toward $3,000. The move came shortly after CPI data was released, with the price reaction unfolding over a short period.

Suiyuan Technology has gone public on Shanghai’s STAR Market after an eight-year buildout that investors describe as one of the longer and harder commercialization cycles in China’s AI chip sector. The company opened at RMB 410 per share, up 188.37% from its IPO price of RMB 142.18, giving it a market value of RMB 176.4 billion, the highest opening-day market capitalization among this year’s new listings so far. Founded in March 2018 by chip veterans Zhao Lidong and Zhang Yalin, Suiyuan spent years developing domestic cloud AI training chips, a segment investors viewed as more capital-intensive and technically difficult than inference chips or edge-focused products. Before listing, the company completed 10 equity financing rounds, with investors including Delta Capital, ZhenFund, Yunhe Capital, Tencent Investment and Sunshine Insurance-affiliated Sunshine Ronghui Capital. Its prospectus shows that by the end of 2025, Suiyuan had completed four generations of computing architecture and five cloud AI chips, with all five succeeding on the first tape-out. Revenue reached RMB 990 million in 2025, while net loss narrowed to RMB 1.164 billion. Still, customer concentration remains a major point of attention: Tencent was both Suiyuan’s largest customer and largest shareholder, with direct and indirect sales to Tencent accounting for 83.79% of 2025 revenue and Tencent Technology and its affiliates holding 20.26% of the company.

Robinhood Chain’s gas revenue fell sharply after its early-September fee spike, but on-chain activity remained elevated. DefiLlama data shows the network brought in $943,728 in gas revenue on Sept. 10, down 82.6% from the $5.44 million peak recorded on Sept. 4. Daily fees also dropped from $6.04 million to $1.05 million over the same period, marking the chain’s lowest daily revenue since Aug. 29. The retreat in revenue did not come with a comparable drop in usage. DEX volume stood at $1.87 billion on Sept. 10 versus $1.89 billion on Sept. 4, while seven-day DEX volume reached $12.34 billion, up 26.5% from the prior week’s $9.76 billion. Sept. 8 set a record at $2.06 billion, and Friday’s still-incomplete trading day had already reached $2.42 billion. Blockscout data shows the chain processed 13.6 million transactions on Sept. 10, compared with 13.98 million on Sept. 4, a decline of roughly 3%. Average cost per transaction, based on daily fees divided by transaction count, fell to about $0.077 from $0.43. The data points to cheaper blockspace rather than weaker demand. Robinhood Chain remained the second-largest network by daily revenue, and the largest over the trailing seven-day period.

Uniswap Labs has launched StablePair Hook, a Uniswap v4 tool that introduces dynamic liquidity-provider fees for two Ethereum stablecoin pools: USDC/USDT and USDC/USDG. Instead of using one fixed fee at all times, the mechanism adjusts charges based on the pool price, how far it sits from a reference rate, and the direction of an incoming trade. When a pool moves outside a configured price band, corrective trades are subject to a fee that decays once per block until someone takes it, allowing the pool to keep part of the arbitrage opportunity as fee revenue. Uniswap says the design is meant to address the tradeoff seen in fixed-fee stable pools, where low fees leave more spread to arbitrageurs while higher fees can make quotes less competitive. The company also said stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps on its protocol reached $43.4 billion in the second quarter. For now, StablePair is limited to the two Ethereum pools, and only Uniswap Labs can create pools against the hook. Pool parameters and fee logic can later be changed through Uniswap governance without forcing liquidity to move into a new pool.

Spark has opened its USDT savings vault to OKX users, allowing eligible customers to earn onchain yield on stablecoin balances from inside the OKX app without setting up a wallet or bridging funds themselves. Under the arrangement, OKX aggregates customer deposits and routes them into Spark Savings USDT on X Layer, OKX’s Ethereum Layer 2, while the funds enter the same vault contract used by other X Layer participants rather than a separate exchange-only pool. The vault currently pays 3.5%, according to the rate stored in the contract, while Spark said its total USDT savings stood at about $361 million, with nearly all of that on Ethereum. Governance previously set the X Layer vault’s supply cap at 750 million USDT and its maximum yield at 6%. Spark also disclosed how losses would be absorbed inside the Sky ecosystem and pointed to risk controls tied to X Layer, including a $5 million outbound transaction limit and a 100% capital requirement ratio for the chain buffer until further review. The product is available to eligible OKX users outside the European Union and, according to Spark, excludes countries in the European Economic Area and other jurisdictions restricted by OKX.

Nasdaq said on Sept. 10 that its strategic investment arm, Nasdaq Ventures, has agreed to invest $100 million in Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken. The deal also expands cooperation on tokenized equities, with both sides working on Nasdaq Equity Tokens, or NETs, and related 24-hour market infrastructure. Nasdaq said NETs could launch as early as the second quarter of 2027. The project is aimed at more than wrapping U.S. stocks into blockchain-based tokens. Nasdaq has framed NETs as a structure designed to preserve the regulatory framework, issuer control, and shareholder rights attached to the original shares, including proxy voting, corporate actions, and shareholder interaction. That sets it apart from Kraken’s existing xStocks, which are backed 1:1 by underlying shares for price exposure but do not give holders direct ownership of the stock, legal voting rights, or claims on residual assets in liquidation. Payward’s xStocks business has grown quickly. The company said in July that more than 500 xStocks were listed, cumulative trading volume had topped $35 billion, and holders were nearing 200,000. By early September, related company materials showed cumulative volume above $40 billion, with nearly $20 billion settled directly on-chain. Nasdaq and Payward next plan to build issuance, trading, settlement, and interoperability infrastructure linking NETs and xStocks.

A new paper highlighted by a16z Crypto argues that financial institutions do not need to rely on permissioned blockchains to satisfy anti-money laundering, counter-terrorist financing, and sanctions obligations. Written by Rebecca, chief operating officer and chief legal officer at Jito Labs, the piece says current law already allows banks, broker-dealers, and asset managers to build products on permissionless networks as long as controls are applied where institutions actually have control. The article points to recent examples of institutional adoption, including Franklin Templeton’s use of permissionless chains for its on-chain U.S. government money fund share records since 2021, BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund shares on Ethereum from March 2024, and Apollo’s tokenized access to its Diversified Credit Fund across six permissionless networks from January 2025. It also cites public positions from FinCEN, OFAC, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, arguing that enforcement is based on risk management and system design rather than an impossible zero-risk standard. The paper also addresses two practical objections: whether institutions must identify every validator, and whether public ledgers can protect trading privacy. It says neutral protocol-level transmission should be treated more like internet or phone infrastructure, and that tools such as confidential transfers, audit keys, address rotation, account abstraction, and zero-knowledge-based systems are starting to make privacy-preserving compliance workable on public chains.