Venus Protocol said it will end support for opBNB, Optimism and Unichain on Oct. 23, 2026, asking users with active positions on those networks to close positions and withdraw funds before the deadline. Elsewhere, Apple and Google have posted job openings tied to stablecoins and digital-asset infrastructure, according to Bloomingbit, though the listings do not show that either company plans to launch its own stablecoin product. In the market, BTC rose above $84,000 with a 24-hour gain of 4.59%, while monitoring accounts tracked a Garrett Jin-linked whale closing a 1,333 BTC long for an $8.38 million profit. Onchain Lens also reported that wallet Smartestmoney.hl still holds a 1.38 million HYPE long with unrealized profit swelling to $78.94 million. Morgan Stanley strategist Michael Wilson’s team warned that U.S. equities could face as much as a 7% short-term drop if financial conditions tighten further or energy prices jump, even as the bank still expects stronger earnings to support a rebound later in the year. The roundup also covered Zhipu’s plan to open-source ZCode, Bitnomial’s filing for single-stock perpetual futures, and this week’s major token unlocks.

A dense set of crypto, AI and macro developments emerged between Sept. 20 and Sept. 21. Saudi Arabia’s central bank said it is no longer part of the mBridge cross-border central bank digital currency project, adding that the move was not tied to pressure from the United States. In the U.S., Coinbase Derivatives filed a rulebook tied to planned single-stock perpetual futures, but the proposed $100 billion market-cap threshold would exclude Coinbase itself, along with Strategy and smaller crypto-linked equities. On-chain activity also drew attention: meme trading platform gmgn moved 23,550 BNB in fee revenue to Pionex over the past week, the TRUMP team shifted another large batch of tokens to BitGo, and a whale that had previously sold ETH at a profit bought back $20 million worth of Ether from Binance. Elsewhere, Token Unlocks flagged a heavy week ahead for XPL, H, SOSO and several other tokens, while ZetaChain governance approved a proposal to migrate ZETA to a native Solana SPL token on a 1:1 basis. The update stream also included a revised Staked SEI ETF filing from Canary Capital, comments from CZ on how he runs his X account, confirmation that Vitalik Buterin will speak remotely at ETHShanghai 2026, and new projections from Wall Street banks that U.S. Treasury bill issuance could reach roughly $1 trillion over the next year.

TechFlowPost reported that a group of tokens, including XPL, H, and STBL, are set for notable unlocks between Sept. 21 and Sept. 26. The largest unlock on the list is XPL, scheduled for Sept. 25, with a value of about $157 million, equal to 63.20% of its circulating supply. STBL follows with an unlock worth about $7.4 million on Sept. 26, representing 77.79% of circulating supply. RIVER is also due for a sizable release on Sept. 21 at about $23.89 million, or 37.50% of circulating supply, while H is set to unlock about $19.38 million on Sept. 25, accounting for 7.34%. Other projects on the schedule include ID, MBG, SOON, AERO, SOSO, and BIGTIME, each with unlock ratios and dollar values listed for the week.

Token Unlocks data shows that several crypto tokens are scheduled for sizable unlocks next week, including XPL, H, SOSO, STBL, SOON, BIGTIME, ID and MBG. The largest of the group is Plasma (XPL), which is set to unlock about 1.76 billion tokens at 8:00 p.m. Beijing time on Sept. 25. The release is valued at about $158 million and equals roughly 63.20% of its circulating supply ratio cited in the data. Humanity Protocol (H) follows with an unlock of about 266 million tokens worth around $19.2 million, while SoSoValue (SOSO) is set to unlock about 23.46 million tokens worth around $6.8 million. Token Unlocks also listed upcoming releases for STBL, SOON, Big Time, SPACE ID and MBG By MultiBank Group, with values ranging from about $2.4 million to $5.3 million. The schedule covers unlock times, token amounts, ratios versus circulating supply, and estimated values for each project.

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.

Anthropic is facing a widening backlash after CEO Dario Amodei argued in his Sept. 12 essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier,” that frontier AI development should slow so safety research, interpretability work and regulation can keep up. The reaction has gone well beyond disagreement over policy. Investor Michael Burry publicly attacked recent calls from Anthropic and OpenAI to put the brakes on AI, calling the message “self-serving” and arguing that an industry-wide slowdown would most benefit the companies already in front. He also tied the rhetoric to IPO storytelling, saying claims that a company is so powerful it could become dangerous can serve as a promotional frame. The criticism deepened after U.S. commentator Kevin Bass mapped what he described as an “AI Doom Machine”: overlapping links between Anthropic backers, philanthropy, AI safety organizations, third-party model evaluators and media projects focused on AI risk. Bass questioned whether evaluator independence is credible when those institutions share funding ecosystems, while also arguing that Anthropic’s rising valuation could feed more money back into the same safety narrative and regulatory push. The debate is landing as Reuters reports Anthropic is preparing a potentially record-setting IPO of up to $100 billion at roughly a $2 trillion valuation, with Nvidia discussing an investment of up to $10 billion. The Wall Street Journal separately reported that Anthropic may pitch investors on a total addressable market above $30 trillion, even as the company has committed more than $100 billion over 10 years to Amazon cloud services and has a roughly $30 billion Microsoft Azure partnership.

TIME devoted its latest cover story to AI risk under the headline "The AI Tipping Point," pushing a debate once mostly confined to AI safety circles further into the U.S. mainstream. The cover itself featured a Claude prompt asking, "How dangerous are you?"\n\nThe timing follows a week in which an Anthropic researcher resigned over concerns about AI going out of control, while tech leaders including Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk publicly called for slowing down AI development. According to the source material, the discussion has also quickly spread from industry circles into Washington, drawing in both the White House and Congress.\n\nWhat had been a narrower argument over whether superintelligence could become uncontrollable is now being treated as a broader political and social issue in the United States. The shift, as framed by the magazine cover and the surrounding public debate, shows how AI safety concerns are no longer staying within specialist communities.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said Google’s in-house Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, can recoup their investment in about one year, while the overall payback period for Google AI servers is under two years. That disclosure has pushed investor attention toward the supply chain, where industry sources say TPU demand is still rising. According to the report, Google Cloud’s AI infrastructure customer base now stretches beyond AI labs into financial services, capital markets, high-performance computing, public-sector organizations and research institutions. Named examples include hedge funds, Deutsche Börse and the U.S. government’s Genesis Mission energy project. As workloads diversify, Google is said to be launching more TPU programs tailored to different computing needs. Third-party research from SemiAnalysis compared Google’s seventh-generation TPU v7 Ironwood with Nvidia’s B200 and B300 in FP8 inference. In one test setting, Ironwood posted a lower cost per million tokens than both Nvidia chips. Still, SemiAnalysis said results vary significantly depending on development maturity and latency requirements, and noted that Nvidia remains ahead in FP4 because Ironwood lacks native FP4 support. On the supply side, MediaTek has been increasing its share, while Broadcom continues to hold major training-side TPU orders.