HYPE climbed past 94 USDT on Sept. 21, extending its record run with a 24-hour gain of 9.33%, according to OKX market data. The day’s roundup also featured a regulatory filing from prediction market platform Kalshi, which is seeking approval to list perpetual contracts tied to U.S. stocks. The proposal has been submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, but it has not been approved. Elsewhere, Circle-backed blockchain Arc launched an agent payments feature through its Facilitator Service, giving x402 developers a custodial access route that accepts USDC and supports onchain settlement across Arc, Base, and Polygon without requiring Relayer keys or a separate gas wallet. Vietnam also said it plans to issue its first licenses to crypto asset service providers in 2026 under a pilot legal framework, while stepping up regulatory coordination with Austria’s Financial Market Authority. Other items in the market update included strong gains in crypto-related U.S. equities, a warning that pPOLY is not an official Polymarket token or direct equity exposure, criticism from ZachXBT over the zkSNARKs NFT project, and Standard Chartered’s long-term price targets for ARB through 2030.

PANews’ latest daily roundup spans market calls, security incidents, project updates, regulation and whale activity across crypto. Among the headline items, analyst PlanB said Bitcoin has moved above its 50-week moving average at about $79,000 and is now targeting the 100-week moving average near $89,000, arguing that the bear market has ended. On the equities side, Cointelegraph reported that MicroStrategy, trading as MSTR, was the best-performing Nasdaq-100 component over the past month with a 48% gain. The report also covered a major fraud case in Istanbul involving more than $3 billion, where authorities arrested 191 suspects in a cross-agency operation. In the U.S., Kalshi and Kraken parent Payward filed applications tied to perpetual contracts linked to individual stocks. Project-side developments included Universal’s planned wind-down over 60 days, MultiversX pausing its mainnet after confirming an attack attempt, and a dispute between Chengming Technology and Zhipu over alleged unauthorized data uploads by the ZCode client. Security and on-chain data featured heavily as well. Forbes reported that North Korea-linked hackers infected more than 30,000 devices through fake job offers and stole data from over 7,000 crypto wallets, with at least $10.71 million flowing to attacker-controlled wallets. PANews also highlighted losses at Fetch.ai and NuNet, several large leveraged positions, and comments from Michael Saylor, Vitalik Buterin, Peter Schiff, Jiang Zhuoer and ZachXBT.

The floor price of zkSNARKs, an NFT project in the ZEC ecosystem, has dropped below its auction settlement level, according to data on the project’s official website cited by BlockBeats on Sept. 20. The current floor stands at 0.976 ZEC, or about $1,420. Earlier coverage said the project’s final auction clearing and settlement floor price was 1.5 ZEC, meaning the collection is now trading below that level. The move marks a break below the previously reported settlement benchmark. BlockBeats also referenced earlier public accusations from @LeonidasNFT, a well-known builder from the Bitcoin inscriptions era. He alleged that the zkSNARKs team had previously been serial “entrepreneurs” in the Ordinals sector and claimed that many of their projects were scams. The report did not provide additional comment from the project team in the cited brief.

On-chain investigator ZachXBT criticized the zkSNARKs NFT collection, describing it as another generic 10,000-piece profile-picture set with no real utility. In his post, he argued that teams behind such projects can raise eight-figure sums across multiple chains and then walk away. He listed what he described as the project’s structure: roughly $17 million in fundraising, a 10% team allocation, 5% royalties, and a mint price of about $2,000. He also said the setup appeared similar to the kind of “exit liquidity” behavior often seen in the Ordinals scene, adding that few actual ecosystem builders were promoting it. Earlier, zkSNARKs published its auction results on X. The figures showed 16,971 bids, all 8,000 items allocated, a clearing price of 1.5 ZEC, or about $2,190, total volume of 25,305 ZEC, or about $36.94 million, and 13,309 ZEC, or about $19.43 million, due for refunds.

Zcash’s NFT scene is drawing fresh attention as ZEC extends a sharp rally from roughly $200 earlier this year to nearly $1,500, according to a PANews article by Nancy carried by MarsBit. The price move has pulled capital and attention back into the Zcash ecosystem, where a new wave of NFT projects is taking shape around privacy, identity, marketplaces, launchpads, and revenue-sharing models. Among the projects highlighted, zkSNARKs ran a blind auction for 8,000 items and drew 16,971 bids, clearing at 1.5 ZEC for total sales of about 25,305 ZEC, or roughly $36.94 million. ZADDR, another project centered on readable identities and private payments, said its NFT introduction post has topped 1.5 million views and that it has received thousands of whitelist applications. Other collections, including Zec Punks, ZecCat, ZecFrogs, BITFOOTS, Zec Bit, and Zecutives, are experimenting with shielded ownership, dual-chain distribution, application-layer NFT rules, and token-based mint mechanics. Taken together, the projects show that activity on Zcash is moving past simple profile-picture drops. Teams are tying NFTs to private ownership, cross-chain transfers, wallet design, reputation systems, and marketplace infrastructure as interest in the network rises again.

Zcash’s ecosystem is drawing fresh attention after ZEC posted a weekly gain of more than 40% and climbed past $1,500, according to OKX market data cited in the source article. The current wave of interest is centered on privacy-themed identity and PFP NFTs, with projects such as zkSNARKs, ZecBit and zaddr standing out as some of the most discussed names on the network. The article also points to a small but growing infrastructure layer around Zcash collectibles and token issuance. That includes zecmarket, a general NFT marketplace; zebra.family, which lets users attach IPFS CIDs or media types to Zcash transactions to create on-chain collectibles known in the community as Zordinals; and Zordinals.fun, a platform that supports both NFT inscriptions and meme token launches for a fee of 0.001 ZEC. At the same time, the report highlights clear risks. Leonidas, an early builder in the Bitcoin inscriptions space, publicly accused the zkSNARKs team of running multiple scam projects in Ordinals. Separately, OKX Wallet flagged a possible phishing risk tied to a domain linked from Zordinals.fun’s navigation. The source article’s conclusion is straightforward: Zcash remains in a very early stage, infrastructure is still thin, and users need to assess project and wallet risks carefully.

The zkSNARKs NFT project in the ZEC ecosystem said its auction has concluded, with 16,971 bids submitted and 8,000 NFTs allocated. The final clearing price was set at 1.5 ZEC. According to the project, the sale used a uniform-price sealed-bid format: bids were ranked from highest to lowest, the top 8,000 bids won allocations, and unsuccessful bidders will receive full refunds. The team also said secondary market trading will open tomorrow and refunds will be processed within 24 hours. On the same day, @LeonidasNFT, described in the source as a well-known builder from the Bitcoin inscriptions era, publicly accused the zkSNARKs team of being serial entrepreneurs from the Ordinals sector and said many of their past projects were scams.

Wang Chun, co-founder of mining pool F2Pool, recalled blacklisting the entire Zcash team six years ago after a member repeatedly confused EST and EDT. He called it one of his "best decisions," and sarcastically linked the error to a BlockFi incident where $701.4 was mistakenly sent as 701.4 BTC. Wang also revealed he cleared his ZEC position last week and switched to DOGE. The critique echoes his 2020 comments questioning the team's understanding of zkSNARKs.