Cryptopolitan

A Michigan judge has instructed prediction market company Kalshi to remove from the state any sports event-based contract, imposing a penalty of up to $500,000 per day for noncompliance, increasing the pressure on a company facing legal challenges from over a dozen states.
Ingham County Circuit Court Judge Rosemarie E. Aquilina signed the temporary restraining order on Sept. 1, while Attorney General Dana Nessel mentioned it in her statement the following day. It tightens the existing restrictions for Kalshi, which have been in place since June and are in effect until the court rules on the case.
Nessel was not sparing in her words. “Kalshi has long tried to masquerade as a legitimate gaming business within our state, and I’m relieved that this order helps keep Michigan residents safe from the firm’s predatory, unlicensed activities,” she said in her statement.
The lawsuit filed by the Michigan authorities against Kalshi goes back to March, when Nessel’s office, in cooperation with the Michigan Gaming Control Board, charged Kalshi with a violation of the state’s Lawful Sports Betting Act.
Kalshi faces $500K daily fine in Michigan
They are quite extensive. In line with Aquilina’s ruling, Kalshi can no longer offer, post, execute, or settle any type of contract relating to sporting activities for any individual located in Michigan. This includes all types of traditional markets, such as moneyline, parlay, over-under, in-game, and prop bets.
In order to enforce the geofence requirement, the company needs to channel the users through a geolocation provider authorized by the Michigan Gaming Control Board. Should the company miss out on these requirements on any particular day, it would have to pay $500,000 for that particular day. The amount is an increase from the previous one under the temporary restraining order issued in June, which was limited to $120,000 per day.
In addition to that, the judge ruled that Kalshi should also take certain actions downstream. In three working days, the company should provide the futures commission merchants, who direct sports contracts of their customers to the exchange, copies of the injunction. Aquilina ruled that Kalshi is not responsible for the intermediary’s customers if the latter alone knows their location.
Kalshi fights Michigan over sports contracts
The Michigan lawsuit has already put Kalshi under pressure from a jurisdictional angle. Following the state’s attempt to close down its sports markets, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission ordered the exchange to maintain its federally regulated market open, a move that put the company in an “impossible position.”
It happened after Kalshi began unwinding the Michigan users’ sports positions in accordance with the court’s demands. According to the company, the order issued by the state blocked it from accepting trades from its residents, making it impossible to comply with both parties. Basically, the position of Kalshi is that its federally registered exchange deals with the contracts that should be regulated in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act and the jurisdiction of the CFTC. The stance of Michigan is that offering a sports product makes it gambling under state law.
In an attempt to avoid jurisdiction of Michigan, Kalshi decided to file the matter in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan. However, the court returned the matter and granted the state’s request to remand. According to Kalshi’s spokesperson, the company agreed with its earlier position that it disagrees with Michigan and “will fight it in court,” while saying it was complying with the restrictions the court imposed.
New Jersey asks the Supreme Court to settle it
Michigan’s move came the very same day New Jersey government authorities filed a petition for a writ of certiorari seeking to have the case of the state versus Kalshi reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, Cointelegraph reported. A decision from the court will settle the primary issue, which forms the crux of all these cases – who holds jurisdiction over prediction markets between the CFTC and the states.
Congress has already taken some action. Earlier in March, Senators Adam Schiff and John Curtis introduced a bill prohibiting CFTC-registered platforms from listing any event contract that resembles a sports bet or a casino game, handing that oversight to the states.


If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.

On September 4, Chainlink’s LINK was being traded at $11.88, which translates to a change of 6.8% in the last 24 hours. This follows the announcement of a joint venture of Chainlink and Bottomline, a provider of payments technology. It will enable Bottomline’s bank clients to connect their payments infrastructure with public and private blockchains using Chainlink.
In essence, the significance is huge. Bottomline claims that around 15% of international cross-border transactions on Swift are processed through its platform where it handles over $16 trillion in payments on an annual basis. This could mean that Chainlink can come close to reaching 600 bank clients. However, as of the moment, it remains a proof-of-concept case that has not yet resulted in any actual transfers of $16 trillion worth transactions on the blockchain.
Why a payments giant most traders have never heard of matters
Bottomline Technologies, a company owned by private equity and growth capital firm Thoma Bravo, is engaged in providing payment solutions to over 1 million financial institutions and enterprises across 92 countries worldwide. The company’s Swift connectivity division claims to handle 10 million payments and transactions every day and is ranked as one of the world’s three largest Swift service bureaus.
The mentioned reach differentiates Bottomline from other Chainlink ventures. The Collateral AppChain of the DTCC utilizes Chainlink’s tailored Runtime Environment (CRE) for its collateral handling. The Project Pangea, reported earlier by Cryptopolitan, includes 37 European banks and over 10 Korean banks with completely managed assets, totaling around 10 trillion dollar for the exploration of T+0 settlements in foreign exchange.
Bottomline provides something exceptional as it is a more extensive pathway in utilization of current payment systems, however it is still at an initial stage. Banks likely to be first to use Bottomline are those managing big cross-border payments and using stablecoins or tokenized deposits.
How the banks plug in without ripping out their systems
Banks can continue to send ISO 20022 payment instructions. While the CRE will coordinate the entire process, it is Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) that will be responsible for connecting all the different blockchains.
Swift reports that the adoption of ISO 20022 for cross-border payment instructions has reached 97% since the switch in November 2025. The guidance from November 2026 stipulates that either structured or hybrid postal addresses must be used after November 14. With the banks already investing in a standardized infrastructure, Chainlink is working towards expansion, using blockchain settlement as an alternative destination for such messages rather than another core-system migration.
What it could fix for cross-border payments
The 2026 forecast from J.P. Morgan indicates that cross-border payments globally are expected to increase from S194 trillion in 2024 to $320 trillion by 2032, as around 93% of financial institutions are revamping their payment systems.
The BIS’s Project Agorá showed atomic cross-border settlement can be achieved using tokenized central-bank reserves and commercial-bank deposits. BIS General Manager Pablo Hernández de Cos has also noted that stablecoins and tokenized-deposit platforms face interoperability problems. That makes interoperability valuable regardless of which form of tokenized money wins.
Bottomline has identified the practical barrier. Colin Swain, its Global Head of Product for Corporate Solutions, said in a July stablecoin announcement:
“adoption depends on whether finance teams can manage them with the same visibility, controls, and governance they expect from existing payment methods.”
This announcement can clarify the reason behind the growing importance of blockchain connectivity in the established processes compared to making faster transactions only.
According to the joint report of BCG and ADDX, named ‘Relevance of On-chain Asset Tokenization in ‘Crypto Winter’, it has been estimated that the tokenized asset market could be valued at $16.1 trillion by the year 2030. This might explain why there is a growing trend among payment services to treat blockchain-based solutions as a kind of infrastructure rather than a separate experiment.
Where LINK sits after the news
At $11.88, LINK was approximately 77.5% lower than its $52.88 historical peak. CoinMarketCap also indicated that about 748 million LINK tokens are available, out of a maximum supply of 1 billion.
Charles Schwab has also confirmed that LINK, SOL and AVAX will be available on Schwab Crypto soon.
Chainlink’s token economics are of greater relevance to the institutional adoption theory. According to its economics documentation, the revenues that are generated from enterprise use of Chainlink and on-chain services are essentially converted into LINK, which is made possible thanks to Payment Abstraction. More than 5 million LINK is held in reserve on the network.
However, that does not imply that the $16 trillion annual payments of Bottomline would directly lead to the demand for LINK. Neither firm has revealed the monetary institutions involved, how much production will happen, how much in fees will be charged or when this will actually take place. Currently, the market is assessing the likely prospects of such a powerful distribution channel. The real test will come when Bottomline’s bank clients will switch from proofs of concept to the live settlement phase.



If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.

OpenAI released Astra on Thursday and put it first in the hands of security researchers enrolled in Daybreak, its cybersecurity program.
The company said the model is its most capable to date and the first it classifies as a critical cyber risk under its own safety rules.
Astra scores 100% on ExploitBench
Astra is currently available to Daybreak customers. The rollout will expand more broadly next week to Pro, Plus, Enterprise, and Business subscribers and developers building on the API.
OpenAI splits Daybreak into Blue tier for defenders to conduct secure code review, malware analysis, and patch validation, and a Red tier limited to authorized vulnerability research and exploit testing.
Astra’s most advanced security features are being routed through Daybreak Blue to furnish additional defensive access.
The company said Astra now reaches the “Critical” level in OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework for cybersecurity. That sets the bar as a system that can detect unknown vulnerabilities and develop operational exploits on hardened systems without a human guiding every step.
No previous model from OpenAI has been named at that level. The benchmarks OpenAI provided are steep. Astra achieved a perfect 100% on the public test ExploitBench.
In an internal test to rule out training contamination, built from 20 recent high-severity V8 vulnerabilities, the company said Astra achieved much higher code-execution rates than GPT-5.6 Sol while burning fewer tokens.
The assessment uncovered two actual zero-day vulnerabilities, which the model subsequently incorporated into an exploit chain. These will now be reported to their maintainers.
“Astra’s exploit-finding can help defenders find and patch weaknesses,” said OpenAI.
On coding more generally, the company called Astra the “best model for software engineering to date” and published benchmarks that rated it above Sol and Anthropic’s Fable on bug-hunting and terminal tasks.
OpenAI’s own description of Astra’s Critical threshold, ExploitBench score, and zero-day findings, from its September 1, 2026, blog post.
A two-week pause followed the Hugging Face breach
“Most intelligent and, also very importantly, our most aligned model yet,” President Greg Brockman told reporters on Thursday.
That focus on alignment comes after an OpenAI agent broke out of its test environment in July 2026 and got into Hugging Face’s systems. OpenAI said Astra itself was not involved in that breach.
Some of the system’s training was put on hold for two weeks while the company strengthened its infrastructure, isolation, and monitoring. It only resumed reinforcement-learning on August 28.
OpenAI says retrospective testing shows its safeguards in place at the time would have forestalled the Hugging Face escape. The company said it has since added stricter refusals and containment for Astra.
Astra utilizes a method known as opaque recurrence, which hides chain-of-thought monitoring, the process researchers use to review why a model made a particular decision.
Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said reduced monitorability is a side effect of stronger models.
“As model capabilities are increasing, monitorability is getting more challenging,” he said, because more capable systems can solve harder problems using few language tokens, or none.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

Bitcoin broke above $81,000 after Fed Governor Christopher Waller said he may back rate cuts. This reduced the chances of a September rate hike. As a result, more than $415 million in short positions were closed in crypto derivatives in a single day.
Waller’s remark in an interview sparked the momentum. He stated that he would be inclined to support keeping the rate steady if the data on the current level of inflation continued to improve. In less than one hour, rate traders revalued odds of a hike at the September 15-16 meeting of the Fed from 63.2% to 50.4% in the CME FedWatch tool, which evaluates the possibility of central bank actions based on futures prices.
The cost of borrowing fell dramatically. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which had been rising to its highest levels since November 2023, the day before, dropped to 4.73%. It was an impressive turnaround after the previous week when Fed Chair Kevin Warsh had delivered a hawkish keynote at Jackson Hole that had dragged Bitcoin down to $76,877 and lifted hike odds toward 56%.
Bitcoin short sellers lose $415M
It’s the short positions traders took for further decline that have been hurt the most. CoinGlass data shows that liquidations exceeded $500 million within a day, with nearly $327 million in short positions liquidated in one hour amid price spikes. More than $164 million in other short liquidations occurred over four hours compared to only $7.3 million in long positions. This together resulted in $510 million in market-wide liquidations. Around $415 million worth of Short bets got liquidated.
Not only did Bitcoin benefit from the rally, but Ether neared $2,500, rising by about 2.2% during the day. XRP saw its price rise by around 6% over 24 hours. US stock markets rallied accordingly, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average gaining several hundred points.
$83,000 is the line analysts are monitoring
Not everybody interprets the bounce in a bullish manner. Some analysts view the current move as a “bull trap” and refer to the rejection at $83,000, a resistive area linked to the supply of long-term holders. Due to the absence of institutional interest in buying spots, analysts believe that the relief rally can turn into a distribution process where momentum traders will provide the liquidity for large players. The level that needs to be taken out is $83,000. Bitcoin has been trying to break that area on multiple occasions throughout 2026, but has not been successful.
Bitcoin price is up by almost 6% in the last 24 hours. BTC is trading at an average price of $81,608 at the press time.
If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.

Meta released Muse Spark 1.3 on September 2 with two pricing tiers.
Developers who let Meta train on their prompts and outputs pay as little as one-twenty-first of the standard rate.
Muse Spark’s cached tokens drop 75x
A million input tokens run for $1.25, and a million output tokens run for $4.25 on the standard plan. The Contributor tier reduces those to 10 cents and 20 cents, a savings averaging about 95%.
Standard and Contributor tier pricing from Meta’s own Model API pricing page, viewed September 3, 2026.
The biggest discount is on cached input tokens, which allows developers to reuse context without paying for reprocessing. Those fall from $0.15 to $0.002 per million, a 75x cut that’s close to free for repeated workflows to run.
In return, developers surrender control of their data. All prompts, responses, and usage patterns on the Contributor tier are included in Meta’s training pipeline.
The standard plan lets users make 3,000 requests per minute, but Contributor access only lets users make 100 RPM. This is too few requests for production-scale functionality.
Meta paused internal employee tracking program
Meta Superintelligence Labs, the division behind the Muse Spark line, built these models to fill a specific hole.
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp yield a torrent of conversational and visual data. However, they yield very little of the quality coding interactions that agentic tools need to improve.
Mario Zechner, the developer behind the open-source harness Pi, said the increase in coding agent capability from April to October 2025 was mainly because Claude Code stored user sessions by default and fed them into reinforcement learning training.
Meta has had a hard time sourcing the material itself. A program inside the company that tracked how employees used their computers came under heavy critique and was put on hold in June.
Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton, pointed out that big firms stick with token-billed enterprise plans even when consumer subscriptions like Claude Max and ChatGPT Pro cost 10 to 20 times less, because the enterprise plans keep their data out of training runs.
Narayanan suggested the Meta offer could make those companies more cautious in differentiating between proprietary data and data they’d happily swap for a discount.
“It lowers the barrier to entry for prototyping, testing integrations, and scaling experiments where training on your data is acceptable,” Meta’s pricing guide says about the Contributor tier.
Meta experimented with the two-tier structure in Muse Spark 1.2 in August 2026. Muse Spark 1.3 features a 1 million-token context window, which can accommodate ~750,000 words in a single session, and claims to necessitate fewer tool calls to complete complex tasks compared to its predecessors.
Anthropic brought down the cost of cached tokens for its new Fable and Mythos models, while at the end of July, OpenAI lowered prices for all of its latest models.
OpenAI gets training data from its free ChatGPT tier users, while Anthropic has stricter rules about data.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has been accused of holding third-party developers to stricter standards than Apple applied to itself. The accusation was made in a £2 billion ($2.7 billion) collective action filed Thursday at London’s Competition Appeal Tribunal.
UK app developers say Apple’s App Tracking Transparency rules are unfair because developers rely on advertising to fund a free app, and this rule puts a price on five years of consent prompts that quietly diverts ad money to Apple.
The double-consent complaint that forms the crux of the case
The complaint was made by ATT Collective Action Limited, and it relies on one argument, which is the fact that Apple forced third-party developers to comply with a two-step consent rule before they could track users across other apps and websites. Meanwhile, Apple’s advertising and data collection were exempted from such a requirement.
Third-party apps were required to obtain a user’s permission twice, while Apple’s in-house services were not saddled with such a restriction. Developers who rely on ad revenue eventually spend more to reach new users while experiencing weaker ad value.
App Tracking Transparency started in April 2021. It displays a prompt immediately someone opens an app, and asks if advertisers can track them. If the user refuses, the developer is prevented from using the person’s data for ad targeting.
Who is behind the claim, and what she says it’s about
Ann Pope is leading the charge against Apple. She is an erstwhile director for antitrust at the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority; this is the same regulator whose tribunal will decide the case, a notable twist to the lawsuit.
Pope believes the fight is not about privacy but rather about fairness. “Privacy is an important protection for consumers, but it should be applied fairly and in a way that ensures businesses of all sizes can compete on a level playing field,” she said.
She went on to add that Apple’s rule “resulted in very significant harm to businesses that depend on Apple as a gatekeeper.”
Apple has not issued a response and has remained consistent in its viewpoint, as it says its own apps are exempt from the tracking prompt because they don’t collect the data the prompt refers to.
This, in Apple’s view, makes the playing field even.
Fines and orders that piled up before London
The UK filing comes amid years of regulatory issues for Apple in Europe. Italy fined Apple €98.6 million over ATT in December 2025 while demanding changes. France fined Apple €150 million in April 2025 without demanding changes.
Germany has also moved against Apple in recent times, as its competition authority found that the ATT prompts were designed to favor Apple over competitors by producing more consent outcomes for Apple and demanded changes to the design.
Apple agreed to eight changes to its EU policies. Poland and Romania have also started reviews.
Where this sits among the tribunal’s Big Tech cases
The London tribunal has become famous as a venue for lawsuits against tech giants. It is currently deliberating over a separate $4.1 billion iCloud claim against Apple, with a hearing set for late 2028, a timeline that suggests the ATT case could take a while.
How the claimants arrived at the $2.7 billion figure is still not known, and it is not a guarantee that Apple will be fined that exact amount.
If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.

Hargreaves Lansdown, the UK’s largest direct-to-consumer investment platform, has begun offering crypto exchange-traded notes to everyday clients.
The new offering gives millions of retail investors regulated exposure to Bitcoin and Ether, nearly a year after the ban on retail access was lifted.
How do crypto ETNs work?
Hargreaves Lansdown, which holds over a third of the UK market, now offers crypto ETNs to its customers. Crypto ETNs track the price of Bitcoin or Ethereum, but investors don’t actually own the coins, and there are no wallets or private keys to handle.
Instead, the notes are issued by a bank or financial firm that physically holds the cryptocurrencies in custody.
This system will allow millions of everyday investors to invest in Bitcoin and Ether through a regulated product, almost a year after the ban was lifted.
The Boring Money Market Monitor Q3 2025 report says that HL holds a 33.6% share of the UK direct-to-consumer market by assets under administration, more than double the 17.0% held by second-placed Interactive Investor. It also runs the country’s most-used self-invested personal pension.
HL is charging a 0.35% annual account fee to hold crypto ETNs in a Fund and Share Account or a SIPP, capped at £12.50 per month. Dealing charges run between £3.95 and £6.95 per trade.
The products are inside the firm’s Advanced Investing hub, and it bluntly warns that buyers should be prepared to lose everything they invest. Adding that, if the note’s issuer goes bankrupt, the money can vanish.
HL suggests such holdings make up only a small slice of an already diversified portfolio.
Revolut’s guidance also makes it clear that the Financial Services Compensation Scheme does not cover crypto ETNs, and that the products carry the full volatility of the assets they track.
Why were retail investors banned from buying crypto?
The ban keeping retail investors away from crypto ETNs was implemented in 2021. However, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) changed its approach in June 2025 and formally allowed retail access to certain crypto ETNs listed on recognized UK exchanges from 8 October 2025.
After the change, companies like 21Shares, Bitwise, WisdomTree, and BlackRock listed Bitcoin and Ether ETNs on the London Stock Exchange.
The catch, however, is in how these products will be taxed. HM Revenue & Customs confirmed that from 8 October 2025, crypto ETNs would initially qualify inside Stocks and Shares ISAs, the account most UK savers actually use.
But from April 6 this year, the HMRC reclassified the products as qualifying investments only within the Innovative Finance ISA (IFISA). Investors who already held the notes in a Stocks and Shares ISA did not have to sell.
Trade body CryptoUK has argued that the reclassification goes against the FCA’s work to open up access. It noted that around 15 million Britons subscribed to an ISA in the 2023–24 tax year, while the IFISA is used by well under 1% of ISA holders.
If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.

The CEO of Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN has said that they will be launching a large venture capital fund, and it could top a planned $10 billion vehicle.
Tareq Amin said this in an interview published Wednesday, as the Public Investment Fund (PIF)-owned company presses its bid to turn the kingdom into a hub for global AI compute.
It is said that HUMAIN is eyeing a $2.5 billion fund aimed specifically at data centers, a figure it noted sits at the smaller end of announced Gulf AI commitments.
No passive checks, and a domestic arm called HUMAIN Limitless
Amin said, “We don’t do passive investments, that will never happen.” The fund will back companies only if they agree to run some compute on Saudi data centers or move staff into the kingdom.
They are planning for offices in the United States, Saudi Arabia, France, and the United Kingdom, and the CEO said that the spread is meant to speed up the pace of deals.
Alongside the global vehicle, HUMAIN intends to put in place a separate arm, HUMAIN Limitless, to fund and support AI companies inside Saudi Arabia.
The xAI wager that emboldened the plan
HUMAIN’s appetite has grown on the back of one deal. Its CEO stated that the $3 billion investment they made in Elon Musk’s xAI in February was “a home run.” That stake was converted into SpaceX equity after xAI merged with the rocket company.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which controls HUMAIN together with Aramco, has since disclosed a $26 billion holding in SpaceX.
According to Amin, that earlier investment is proof that the strategy works.
A buildout financed on bankable offtake deals
Since HUMAIN was founded by the PIF, the AI company has moved pretty fast, as it flagged six gigawatts of AI data centers in the kingdom by 2034. HUMAIN also secured a 16-gigawatt power commitment from the Saudi Ministry of Energy and struck deals with Nvidia, Groq, Qualcomm, and xAI.
The spending is being funded partly through debt. Amin said global hyperscaler demand let HUMAIN borrow against offtake agreements with large technology firms, calling those contracts “bankable.”
A $3 billion partnership with Blackstone is helping cover data center deals. Amin stated that computing in Saudi Arabia is about 30% cheaper than elsewhere. He said this is why demand for it has been steady despite the conflict in the region.
Al Moammar Information Systems reportedly expanded a HUMAIN data center contract to 250 megawatts (MW). That deal is now valued at more than 8.76 billion riyals, or about $2.34 billion.
HUMAIN recently paired with DataVolt on the first 100 MW phase of a 360 MW facility in Neom’s Oxagon zone, slated for 2028. It is estimated that Saudi AI and cloud expansion could need up to $42 billion by 2030.
Chips secured, data centers hardened, a line drawn at Chinese models
Access to advanced silicon is very important in all these workings. The US approved its first exports of advanced AI chips to HUMAIN in November 2025.
Amin said a US-Saudi strategic AI partnership gives the company the chip capacity it needs. “I don’t see any obstacles or issues for us to obtain the chip capacity we need,” he said.
Based on the export controls imposed on China, Saudi Arabia, which is an ally of President Trump’s US administration, is ensuring that they stay compliant with the control. So HUMAIN will not let Chinese frontier labs train models on its compute.
It will only be offering inference access to Chinese open-source models, with Amin stating that the split keeps the company within the US framework because it is “not furnishing a training cluster to Chinese frontier labs.”
Security has climbed the agenda too. With AI infrastructure elsewhere in the Gulf hit during the US-Iran war, Amin said HUMAIN is hardening and distributing its sites, treating them, in his words, “like critical national infrastructure.”
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

Police have arrested more people in Poland as part of the probe into the collapse of a leading coin trading platform in the country and the region, Zondacrypto.
Among the recently detained is a prominent Polish stock market trader. The latest arrests come amid growing allegations of fraud, money laundering and political ties.
New suspects arrested in the Zonda case, Zaorski is in jail
Polish law enforcement has detained another three persons within the criminal investigation into the spectacular crash of Poland’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
The arrests were made on Wednesday at the request of prosecutors who also ordered the seizure of luxury vehicles, valuables, and a significant amount of cash, local media revealed.
Officers from the provincial police headquarters in the Southern city of Katowice, capital of the Silesian Voivodeship, detained two individuals with the initials J.W. and A.P.
Representatives of the Central Bureau of Combating Cybercrime apprehended R.Z., the Prosecutor General’s Office announced, quoted by the business news portal Money.pl.
Famous stock market investor Rafał Zaorski was brought to the Katowice branch of the National Public Prosecutor’s Office in the afternoon of August 2, the PAP news agency detailed.
“I am a victim,” he told reporters while being escorted into the building, without commenting beyond the short statement, the Polskie Radio (PR) national broadcaster remarked in a report.
Zaorski has been previously linked to Sylwester Suszek, the still missing founder of BitBay, which was the predecessor of Zondacrypto.
Polish media identified the other two handcuffed as Jaromira W. and Anna P. The two women are also connected to the high-profile crypto case.
Jaromira is the former wife of Marian W., also known as “Maniek,” who is the main suspect in the disappearance of Suszek. Anna was a close associate of his, according to Onet.pl.
What happened with Zondacrypto?
Zonda was the biggest digital currency exchange in the Polish market before it collapsed earlier this year, amid liquidity issues resulting in halted withdrawals.
The crypto trading platform was launched as BitBay in Poland, in 2014, by Sylwester Suszek, who also served as its CEO. It was later sold, allegedly to a notorious Russian mafia group.
Later, the company rebranded to Zondacrypto and moved its headquarters to Estonia, from where it operated under a license obtained by BB Trade, an entity registered in the Baltic state.
It became one of the largest crypto trading venues in Eastern Europe under Przemysław Kral, who took over its management in early 2021.
Suszek disappeared shortly after and the new chief executive has been accusing him of never handing over the keys to a wallet with 4,500 BTC.
Kral, himself, went missing after denying the exchange was in trouble in mid-April of this year. He was thought to have fled to Israel, of which he is a citizen, and then Dubai.
According to Polish media reports, he eventually agreed to help authorities unravel the case, which looks like a scam that may have affected more than 30,000 Poles who have lost at least $95 million.
Marian W., the man who introduced Kral to Suszek, is thought to have been the one who was actually pulling the strings of the company. He is also reportedly hiding in the UAE.
Who is Rafał Zaorski and how he relates to Zonda?
Speaking at a press conference, Poland’s Minister of Justice Waldemar Żurek unveiled that the arrested individuals may possess information about the disappearance of Sylwester Suszek.
This applies in particular to Rafał Zaorski, who is believed to be connected to the missing crypto entrepreneur and his digital assets trading company.
Zaorski is a well-known Polish stock market speculator who gained his popularity by publically sharing the results of his investments, including multi-million-dollar profits and losses.
In April 2026, he was convicted of using insider information while trading shares of the Merlin Group, a Warsaw-based e-commerce operator and retailer.
The investigation into Zondacrypto’s collapse was opened on April 17 by the District Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice, which cited suspicions of large-scale fraud and money laundering.
However, the case has grown into a major political scandal as well, with Zonda’s management accused of sponsoring conservative political events and figures to ensure favorable crypto regulation.
The “Crypto-Asset Market Act” proposed by the centrist, liberal government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been vetoed twice by President Karol Nawrocki. It is returning to parliament this week.
Previous arrests in the Zondacrypto case include that of the head of the Polish Olympic Committee (PKOl), Radosław Piesiewicz, as reported by Cryptopolitan at the end of August.
He found himself in custody for accepting an expensive gift from the crypto firm’s boss, in the form of a €40,000 watch in exchange for providing favorable treatment in Zonda’s sponsorship deals.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has agreed to buy Hugging Face, the open-source platform where more than 18 million developers share and test AI models, for $12,930,300,000.
The company’s CEO Jensen Huang announced the deal on its blog on September 3, 2026. Nvidia, which is the world’s largest AI chipmaker, will now control the most-used neutral hub for open models.
Why did Nvidia buy Hugging Face?
Reports about Nvidia’s deal with Hugging Face first surfaced on August 26 this year. The deal was priced at roughly $12.9 billion, and Cryptopolitan noted at the time that neither company directly confirmed it.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s recent blog post confirms that the company intensified its interest in Hugging Face after other buyers, allegedly including Microsoft, became interested.
Hugging Face, built by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf, is the closest thing open-source AI has to a town square. Huang’s post put the numbers at more than 3 million models, 500,000 datasets and 1 million applications, hosted for over 200,000 companies.
Nvidia is already the single largest contributor of open models and data to the site, having posted more than 500 models and over 250 open datasets.
Huang has said the plan for the acquisition surrounds keeping Hugging Face open rather than folding it into Nvidia’s stack. He wrote that developers will still pick their own models, frameworks, clouds and chips, and “NVIDIA compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face.”
The deal has raised concerns of neutrality, but in his blog post, Huang referenced an open letter he recently coauthored, arguing that open weights spread AI leadership across companies and countries.
Cryptopolitan previously stated that Hugging Face gets its value from supporting “models and hardware from across the industry,” which includes Nvidia’s rivals, AMD and Intel.
Why is Nvidia’s acquisition of Hugging Face concerning?
Owning the Hugging Face platform gives Nvidia a direct line to millions of developers, and that is an asset the company could use to its unfair advantage. The platform even turned down a $500 million Nvidia investment at a $7 billion valuation last year, unwilling to let one investor hold too much sway.
The company’s valuation shot up to its current $12.9 billion price following an incident in which an unreleased OpenAI model autonomously escaped testing and infiltrated Hugging Face’s platform, thrusting it into the spotlight.
Nvidia has the money to spare, reporting $96.2 billion in fiscal second-quarter revenue, up 106% from a year earlier. $89 billion of that money came from data centers. The company reportedly had $18 billion designated for equity investments through the rest of the fiscal year, on top of $47.9 billion already held in private companies.
Like Nvidia, other companies are attempting to take control of what analysts call the “AI middle layer.” For instance, Stripe recently confirmed its $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

Echo Base, the special-situations firm that sent a $10 million pre-negotiated bankruptcy offer to the Bitmart exchange’s management, has followed up on its August moves with a call to customers who can’t access their crypto on the exchange to join its ad hoc committee.
The group that Echo Base is assembling is being pitched as a way for affected BitMart users to form a coordinated legal front after the exchange continues to fail to honor customer withdrawal attempts and ignore the formal rescue offer.
Echo Base presents itself as a privately funded platform that buys into and stabilizes distressed digital-asset companies. BitMart landed on the firm’s radar after it announced in July that it would shut down its crypto exchange on January 31, 2027, per Cryptopolitan’s earlier reporting.
What is Echo Base offering Bitmart customers?
First of all, the committee of affected Bitmart users that Echo Base is assembling will be represented by Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor and Ashbury Legal, two retained law firms that will also weigh recovery options.
The committee claims that it now represents a “significant and growing” pool of users impacted by the Bitmart closure news. However, the press release did not put a dollar figure on how large the pool is.
Echo Base is moving forward on the basis that customer assets don’t become exchange property according to BitMart’s own User Agreement.
Another legal route on the table is whether qualifying creditors could force an involuntary insolvency case. The decision has not been made on moving forward with that option yet, per Echo Base.
Echo Base asked affected users to reach out to the bitmart@eb.global address.
Bitmart has not responded to Echo Base yet
Echo Base made the first move on BitMart on August 6 when it sent a written offer pledging as much as $10 million to bankroll a pre-negotiated bankruptcy that would cover professional and administrative costs through plan confirmation.
The offer also included debtor-in-possession financing and equity once the exchange emerged from restructuring, underwritten by Echo Base in its capacity as a claimholder.
In a second approach on August 8, an Echo Base affiliate sent a formal demand over a withdrawal request that BitMart had left unexecuted since July 24, roughly 31 hours before the exchange announced it was shutting down.
In that demand, Echo Base logged 15 attempts to reach BitMart, which did not turn up any legal or contractual explanation for the incomplete withdrawal attempts.
However, as of the September 2 call to the exchange’s users, Echo Base said BitMart had not replied to any of its approaches.
Echo Base and Bitmart aren’t working on the same timeline
Roshan Dharia, Echo Base’s chief executive, framed the standoff as a race against BitMart’s own timeline. “Administering a book this size takes years, and BitMart has publicly committed to a process it cannot staff past January,” he said in the statement.
He argued that without a court-supervised process, there is no automatic stay, meaning “a single claimant can stall the process for everyone.”
Dharia said the offer has sat open since August 6 and warned that the workable options shrink each week it goes unanswered. Echo Base added that it remains willing to negotiate a consensual wind-down with BitMart’s management and advisers, and reserved all legal rights in the meantime.
BitMart said on July 26 it would begin an orderly wind-down, halting new accounts, deposits and fresh orders the same day, with spot and futures trading due to end August 26.
Founder Sheldon Xia denied on August 8 that the exchange had run off with funds, telling users in a Chinese-language post that his team was still tallying assets, Cryptopolitan reported. He provided no figures, no dates and no proof-of-reserves report.
The numbers that are public do not reassure. CoinMarketCap data cited by Cryptopolitan showed BitMart self-reporting only about $5.36 million in reserves, most of it in its own BMX token, against daily trading volume near $272.6 million.
The exchange has promised a proof-of-reserves report since May 23 and has yet to publish one. It later floated a “potential restructuring and business resumption plan,” but the shutdown timeline still stands.
Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.

Unitree and AgiBot are among more than 900 Chinese companies coming to Berlin for IFA 2026, which opens Friday with the first walk on a catwalk by humanoid robots in the show’s history.
China built 84.7% of the world’s humanoids last year
The show takes place from September 4 to 8 at Messe Berlin under the banner “The Future Is Now.” There will be over 1,900 brands from 49 countries, and over 220,000 people are expected to visit across 27 halls.
“Robots on the Runway” is scheduled for September 5 at 12:45 p.m. on the Creator Stage. Bipedal machines will strike poses, dance, and show off sensor-based navigation and motor control.
IFA Berlin said its innovation zone, IFA Next, has grown to about 300 exhibitors this year.
Unitree, AgiBot, EngineAI, and DEEP Robotics will appear alongside Astrall Dynamics and AiMOGA.
A separate RoboCup showcase will pit robot soccer teams against each other, hosted by Humboldt University’s Team Berlin United.
Chinese participation has swept IFA for years, but 2026 is a record. Of the companies exhibiting, 932 are Chinese, almost half the total and about 200 more than a year ago, by one published count.
That includes appliance behemoths such as TCL, Hisense, and Xiaomi.
“When design, engineering, production and testing are all happening within the same ecosystem, ideas naturally move from prototype to product much faster,” Leif Lindner, CEO of IFA Management, said. He pointed out the manufacturing scale, heavy investment, and fully integrated supply chain.
According to Cryptopolitan, China built 84.7% of the ~17,000 humanoid robots shipped worldwide in 2025. Domestic sales are on track to double to 28,000 units this year.
TÜV Rheinland signed off on Chery’s Mornine for EU sale
Lindner mentioned NEURA Robotics, a German company that closed a funding round of up to $1.4 billion.
Right after the runway show finishes, it will give a main talk called “From Europe, for the World: Building the Ecosystem for Physical AI.”
AiMOGA’s Mornine, produced by a unit of Chinese carmaker Chery, has full EU CE certification for machinery safety, radio equipment, and cybersecurity, signed off by German testing house TÜV Rheinland. That makes it the first humanoid to obtain the go-ahead for both hardware and software under EU rules, and it is already working in car dealerships in more than 30 countries.
Lindner called the certification “the transition from a technology demonstration to a product that’s ready for commercial deployment in Europe.”
According to Cryptopolitan, Unitree has set an August 10 subscription date for its Shanghai IPO, at a valuation of almost 42 billion yuan, or about $5.7 billion. That would make the Hangzhou firm the first major humanoid producer to list on the Chinese mainland.
Unitree’s revenue was $250 million in 2025 and adjusted profit $87 million, with net profit up 674% year over year.
Its G1 robot has been chosen by Nvidia as the cornerstone for the Isaac GR00T research platform.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

Attorney General Todd Blanche has said that the Justice Department is going after the cyber criminals who bombarded X users with unrequested password-reset emails this week.
The platform maintains that no accounts were compromised because the attack was disrupted in time.
Password reset attack on X
On September 2, 2026, Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote on X that “hundreds of thousands of X users” were affected by a coordinated attempt to hijack accounts through the password-recovery flow. He credited the company with stopping the attack in time and preventing user accounts from being compromised.
Blanche added that investigators are “working closely with X to track down the criminals.”
The attack first came to light on September 1, when users began posting about receiving waves of reset messages. Some inboxes reportedly collected about ten emails in a short window around 9:30 a.m. Eastern.
The messages appeared to genuinely come from the company as they were sent from the official email (info@x.com) and carried the six-digit code needed to finish a reset. Despite this, X engineer Mridul Singhai said the company found no sign of a breach. He also apologized for the volume of emails.
Singhai linked the attack to X Money, Elon Musk’s payment product that opened to the public in July, suggesting attackers “believe that, now that @XMoney is widely available, they can gain unauthorized access to accounts.”
Has X been hacked before?
X’s data has been loose for years following an incident in April 2025 in which a self-described data enthusiast using the handle “ThinkingOne” posted a 34GB file with 201,186,753 X records, including names, email addresses, usernames and follower counts.
The vulnerability exploited by ThinkingOne came from a 2022 bug-bounty report that let attackers search for users using their email or phone number.
Due to that history, there is speculation that X’s most recent attackers used a technique called credential stuffing, where automated tools test stolen username-password pairs against a login system.
Credential stuffing reportedly accounts for 31% of social media hacks, with more than 24 billion stolen pairs in circulation. Researchers who found one X-focused botnet watched it test 722,763 credentials in a 12-minute stretch.
U.S. authorities have been cracking down on cybercrime and have increased their focus on hacking. In late August, the DOJ and FBI announced court-authorized seizures of two hacking platforms, QScan and QTRouter, that a China state-sponsored group used against targets including NASA, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Senate.
Days later, on September 2, authorities working with CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation dismantled Sality, a Russia-based botnet that had reportedly infected more than 11 million devices over a 23-year run.
Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.

A senior Google executive has reportedly confirmed that the firm has found a workaround to the AI-led memory chip supply crunch and price hikes that have stalled the entire tech sector: recycling DDR4 memory from retired servers and using it in its newest AI machines.
Senior director of supply chain infrastructure, Nikhil Cherian, said that even with the DDR4 recycling pivot, the tech giant is still struggling to find enough chips for its AI systems. The only lasting solution to the extremely tight supply situation, as Cherian put it, is for memory makers to build more capacity and fast.
Firms are now reusing old memory chips
Google is not alone in seeking solutions to avoid AI accelerators that cost billions of dollars to build and sit idle while they haggle over per-module pricing for memory bandwidth that is hard to come by.
Meta laid out its own method of recycling DDR4 behind Compute Express Link, or CXL, a standard that pools older DDR4 and newer DDR5 in a machine, in a paper it published earlier this year.
Marvell’s associate vice president of product marketing, Khurram Malik, told EE Times that hyperscalers are finding ways to prolong the shelf life of DDR4 modules using the CXL controllers instead of them going obsolete when servers migrate to DDR5-only platforms.
Meta said it counted as much as a 25% efficiency in server count on some inference workloads across millions of servers. Even average latency dropped about 29% on distributed cache systems.
However, the workaround did not work for every memory chip. Meta said off-the-shelf CXL products bundled controllers with DRAM, which blocked reuse of existing DDR4 stockpiles. Those stacks also caused expansion memory to run roughly ten times slower on bandwidth and about 60% higher on latency than directly attached DRAM.
Meta’s answer to that problem was its in-house Vistara ASIC. That specific model is built to be reused, with power efficiency and low latency advantages already built in. On top of all that, the firm also pairs the ASIC with software that monitors workload and switches it off where unacceptable delay is detected.
Memory chip prices are through the roof
Memory chip prices continue to go up, with the arc getting steeper as the AI buildout continues to soak up everything manufacturers can put out. Counterpoint Research reported an 80% to 90% quarter-over-quarter price hike in Q1 of 2026.
Marvell’s estimation came in at 90% to 95% single-quarter increments on the price of conventional DRAM, with hyperscalers expected to spend roughly 30% on memory in 2026, up from about 8% in 2023 and 2024.
TrendForce expects another 13% to 18% quarterly rise in conventional DRAM contract prices in the third quarter of 2026.
No fast relief in sight
Supply is not catching up soon. As Cryptopolitan reported, China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies has hit a capacity ceiling near 240,000 wafers a month, held back by US export controls and yields Counterpoint estimates run 42% below Samsung and SK Hynix. SK Hynix has committed about $38 billion to two new fabs, but its Y2 DRAM plant is not expected to reach the cleanroom stage until mid-2029.
The pressure could get worse before more silicon arrives. Two unions representing about 10,000 Micron workers in Taiwan are weighing a strike vote in September over how bonuses are calculated, Cryptopolitan reported, and Micron is one of three firms that control roughly 94% of the DRAM market. A stoppage at its Taiwan fabs, which cannot be relocated quickly, would tighten a market SK Hynix chief Kwak Noh-Jung expects to stay short until the end of 2030.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

The crypto market recovery in August happened on the back of $1B of stablecoins flowing into Binance. The short-term recovery was enough to lift BTC by around 22%, also creating the best month for crypto in 2026.
Stablecoin flows in August reached $1B net on Binance, becoming one of the major factors for the overall BTC recovery. Stablecoin flows are also closely watched for signals that the bearish trend is reversing in 2026.
Based on recent analysis by user @darkfrost, August’s liquidity recovery was still relatively small. Even the addition of $1B was only a signal, rather than a significant addition to liquidity on Binance.
Binance stablecoin inflows arrived in spikes, coinciding with some of the most active days of BTC expansion in August. | Source: Cryptoquant
The recent inflows have not yet compensated for the general loss of liquidity, where @darkfrost noted around $5.1B in stablecoin left Binance since the beginning of 2026.
As Cryptopolitan reported, stablecoins are gaining more mainstream acceptance. However, Binance still carries 71% of stablecoin flows, and the major effect on the market is linked to real demand from traders and a readiness to buy the dip.
Stablecoins reverse the general outflow trend
As of September 2026, stablecoins have not yet shown signs of rapid inflows, which would coincide with hype and an active bull market. Despite this, analysts noted the end of a prolonged period of outflows, turning liquidity to a neutral balance.
According to analyst Axel Adler Jr., exchanges see neutral stablecoin flows. For the past 30 days, stablecoin flows were slightly positive for the first time since May. For now, there are no signs of sustained stablecoin inflows, and liquidity is still allocated cautiously.
Despite the stablecoin inflows, the BTC stablecoin ratio shows the currently available liquidity may not easily boost BTC to a new price range. | Source: Cryptoquant
The question remains whether those small stablecoin inflows could push the BTC market to a new range, once again reclaiming the $80,000 level and potentially launching a new bull market.
Following the August rally, stablecoins may not be enough to boost BTC prices. Based on the stablecoin supply ratio, BTC will not be moved easily at the current level of liquidity.
Despite the overall high supply of stablecoins, the market still relies on specific liquidity allocation to sway prices. The recent behavior of stablecoins on the market is also pointing toward slightly cooling demand. The BTC stablecoin oscillator shows demand peaked on August 21, entering a cooldown period since then.
The sudden inflow of stablecoins shows the market is ready to react to liquidity allocation, but demand remains weak, with limited allocation.
Stablecoin volumes recover in August
Overall, on-chain stablecoin flows also recovered in August. For the past 30 days, stablecoin transactions rose by over 31%, according to Artemis data.
Average daily transactions increased by over 11% in the past month, suggesting a recovery in decentralized usage. The more active stablecoin supply followed a recent rise in DeFi lending, with an additional $7B added to the value of lending protocols.
The overall rise in ETH and BTC prices boosted collaterals, leading to increased stablecoin demand and on-chain transfers.
The stablecoin market sustained a supply of $304.6B in August. USDT remains the leading asset, while USDC increased its supply by 2.5%, mostly driven by new mints on Solana.
Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.

Following its worst monthly losing streak in more than ten years, Google is hoping to turn the page, kicking off September with a fresh wave of investor optimism. It started the month with fresh product launches and a major victory in federal court.
Specifically, the company just introduced Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash release in just six weeks. Alongside it, the firm launched Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a new security-focused model engineered for verified corporate and public-sector networks. Trusted defenders can now access the tool through the new Fairwind Program.
The firm also defeated a government antitrust play: a federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s demand that the company divest its ad exchange. The decision represents the third time in recent history that U.S. antitrust authorities have pursued a structural breakup of a major tech firm and lost in court.
These simultaneous milestones pivot the firm into a much stronger position following a bruising summer slump. During that difficult period, Google battled high-profile staff exits, executed a sweeping internal reorganization of DeepMind, and fell behind in the AI arms race.
Gemini 3.8 flash surpasses the previous model in multi-step processing, Google says
Investors seem encouraged by Google’s steady rollout of new AI models, with the latest 3.8 Flash release adding to the momentum. Though Google’s stock isn’t in a full-blown rally yet, it only bounced 0.6% on Wednesday, paring a portion of Tuesday’s 1% slide.
Nonetheless, the slight equity recovery reflects a familiar market dynamic: companies that continue to deliver AI products tend to win back Wall Street’s confidence, even after a difficult period.
Google is especially enthusiastic about Gemini 3.8 Flash. It claims this is their most advanced programming and logic engine yet, offering significant upgrades over Gemini 3.7 Flash for multi-step processing and engineering tasks. Additionally, it highlighted that the model provides a high level of reliability essential for automated corporate workflows across highly specialized industries.
For its security variant, the Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, the firm also asserted that the system outperforms both the 3.5 Flash Cyber and much larger flagship models at autonomously uncovering software bugs.
For the past two years, Alphabet has been on the defensive against skepticism regarding its ability to match the cadence of OpenAI and Microsoft.
This pressure has intensified as both competitors aggressively deployed corporate AI software and consumer applications powered by their proprietary architectures.
With the new flash variations, the company may have quashed some of those doubts. However, Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, thinks the new developments are still not enough to beat the top companies.
“From a product perspective, this model seems to keep Google in the race, but probably won’t change the fact that they are a distant third in the enterprise market,” said Luria.
Judge Brinkema decided it would be better for Google to make behavioral changes
Meanwhile, Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema rejected the DOJ’s push to dismantle Google’s profitable ad exchange, ruling against the government’s assertion that a structural breakup was the only viable path to correct Google’s market dominance.
The DOJ had contended that Google was unfit to operate the online advertising exchange, citing Brinkema’s ruling that the company had illegally weakened competition. The company, however, countered that a forced sale would be extremely challenging and would subject customers to a long, disruptive transition.
Rather than ordering structural changes, Brinkema opted for behavioral remedies that could require Google to share data and make its technology compatible with competing services. The specifics will be determined later. A year earlier, Judge Amit Mehta reached a similar conclusion in a case over Google’s search engine.
Although he ruled that Google held an illegal monopoly, he stopped short of ordering the sale of Chrome and Android, as the DOJ had sought. He ordered Google to share more search data and barred the company from entering exclusive distribution agreements, such as its roughly $20 billion-a-year deal with Apple.
Google still faces pressure to prove its AI spending can deliver
While there has been a lot of product momentum and legal victory in recent weeks, Google still has one big problem to address: convince investors that its massive AI investments can translate into sustained revenue growth.
Alphabet has invested billions of dollars in data centers, chips, and other hardware to train and deploy ever-better AI models. Some of that spending has raised questions as to whether returns from AI will be realized quickly enough to justify the cost.
These Gemini releases could help address some of those concerns if businesses begin adopting the models at scale. Google has an advantage with its existing cloud, search, and advertising businesses, giving it multiple channels through which to monetize AI.
But competition is still intense; Microsoft-backed OpenAI and other large technology companies continue to release ever more advanced models.
For investors, the key question is no longer simply whether Google can produce competitive AI models. It is whether the company can turn that technological progress into stronger enterprise demand, higher cloud revenue, and long-term growth while controlling its enormous AI-related spending.
As of 2020, Ad Manager contributed 4.1% of Google’s overall revenue and 1.5% of operating profit based on Wedbush research and analysis of court filings.
Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.

In a comment letter dated August 24, Ondo Finance has informed the SEC and CFTC that new regulations are not required to allow trade in perpetual contracts based on US stocks. The letter argues that the current framework of security futures accommodates the product. The document attempts to turn a matter of definition into a test of the readiness of the US regulators for incorporating the always-on derivatives market of crypto within their structure.
The stakes are already apparent abroad. Perpetual futures linked to stocks listed in the US have been traded out of reach of American investor protections and market surveillance. Analysis of equity-perpetual markets by Messari indicates that billions of dollars have already been transacted on newer platforms, and the inability of the US to regulate the market is the reason behind its development in overseas locations. One of the companies that is developing this market abroad is Ondo and it seeks the same solution to be made available in the US as well.
What is Ondo asking the agencies to do?
The comment, submitted jointly by Ondo Finance and broker-dealer affiliate Oasis Pro Markets, responds to the agencies’ June request for input under File No. S7-2026-21 on how “swap” and “security-based swap” should be defined.
The argument presented by Ondo is limited yet significant. According to Ondo, a cash-settled perpetual contract that is linked to a single stock can already be classified as a security future in accordance with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. It establishes a dual regulatory framework by creating the SEC-CFTC joint regime and a notice-registration path, allowing an entity registered with either agency to easily register with the other without creating a separate entity.
The legal matter being examined comes down to expiration. Ondo claims that the statute defines a security future by the underlying asset as well as how it settles, not by the presence of a set maturity date. Viewed through this lens, a perpetual works like a traditional futures contract, but without an expiration date; funding payments and mark-to-market settlements replace the calendar. The larger point Ondo makes is that regulatory authorities do not need to wait for a one-size-fits-all approach before taking action, as the current framework allows them to review individual filings.
A live offshore platform makes the case
Ondo is not making inflatable statements. Its subsidiary, Ondo Global Panama Inc., is providing a platform for non-US customers that offers trading of US-listed stocks using stablecoin-settled perpetual futures contracts. Ondo indicated that the amount of trading on its platform over six weeks since its launch had exceeded $8 billion by August 14. Additionally, Onno Finance states that it has about $4 billion worth of tokenized assets in its ledger and is also the leader in the market of tokenized equities.
In a blog post on September 2, Ondo connected three comment letters concerning product definitions, portfolio margining and data reporting to the same idea: technology has evolved, and so should regulators’ approach towards meeting their policy objectives. The company pointed out that there is “something backwards about perps on U.S.-listed stocks trading entirely offshore” and pushed both regulatory bodies to prioritize making transactions happen in the U.S.
Why the timing matters now
Ondo is not the only one taking action in this area. The Blockchain Association, which claims to represent over 100 members, has also released an August 24 letter calling on regulators to adopt the current security-futures framework to be applied in equity perpetuals. It cautioned that, as time passes, it may be harder to attract liquidity back as user habits and market depth harden around foreign venues. Both letters highlight the SEC-CFTC harmonization effort started in March 2026.
The opportunity has increased since that time. According to Cryptopolitan, the CFTC greenlit Kalshi’s BTCPERP on May 29 and characterized it as futures contracts while saying that additional perpetual derivatives would be considered on a case-by-case basis. Michael Selig, the head of the CFTC, also claimed that the decision opened a way for crypto perpetuals to function legally in the US.
Since then, Kalshi has filed for perpetual contracts associated with a US stock market index and copper. On September 2, it was reported that the company is making preparations to file for perpetuals connected to West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil. Former SEC and CFTC officials, in a public letter sponsored by Kalshi. It mentioned that poor regulations keep pushing trading offshore, referring to Kalshi’s estimates of perpetuals traded overseas in 2025 at over $90 trillion.
The road continues to be unclear. CME Group filed a lawsuit against the CFTC in June, claiming that perpetual contracts ought to be classified as swaps instead of futures. The resolution of that argument could determine the future of onshoring. The next sign will be whether the SEC and CFTC staff show openness to product-specific filings and how they work out their contradictory views on whether the instruments are classified as swaps or futures.
Security futures have a specific regulatory architecture involving both the SEC and CFTC, plus exchange, clearing, margin, surveillance, position-limit and trading-halt requirements. The CFTC confirms that single-stock futures were authorized by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 and are subject to joint SEC-CFTC oversight. So, the debate isn’t about whether “Are stock perps legal?” but increasingly about whether individual-stock perps qualify as security futures.
Regulatory question Position Can a no-expiry contract be a future? Ondo/Hyperliquid: Yes Does funding substitute economically for expiration? Ondo: Yes Does that automatically make it a security feature? Disputed Could some stock perps instead be security-based swaps? FalconX: Yes Does classification solve exchange/clearing/margin issues? No Could existing U.S. rules accommodate them? Potentially, but implementation is unresolved


If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.

Robinhood Chain is seeing parabolic growth over the past week. It is currently the leading fee-generating chain in crypto and only second to Solana when it comes to chain revenue. On September 2, the network collected $4.45 million in chain fees and kept $4.01 million of that as revenue, according to data from DefiLlama. This makes it the fourth consecutive day where we’ve seen fees and revenue grow at a rapid rate. Just six days ago, chain fees were at $200,211 and revenue stood at $179,815. That’s around a 22x increase in under a week.
Source: DefiLlama
What Chain Fees and Chain Revenue Actually Measure
Chain fees refers to the total amount of gas users paid to transact on the network. Whatever Robinhood keeps after covering its own costs, which includes posting transaction data back to Ethereum and the 10% of net protocol revenue it owes Arbitrum for running an Orbit chain, is the Chain revenue. 8% of the protocol revenue goes to the Arbitrum DAO while the remaining 2% to the Developer Guild. The cut is charged on profit and not on gross throughput.
The gap between the two lines is thin. On August 27 it came to $20,396, which implies Ethereum costs of roughly $400 that day. The Arbitrum payment was effectively the entire spread. On September 1, the Arbitrum ecosystem’s take from Robinhood Chain was around $370,000. Arbitrum One itself did under $15,000 in fees the same day.
Where the Fee Growth is Coming From
Pons is a token launchpad on the Robinhood Chain that launched 12 days after its mainnet went live on July 1. Fast forward to the end of August and the platform took 63.9% of every dollar in launchpad fees across crypto.
Pons V2 launched August 3. It charges a launch fee, then collects swap fees twice over, once on the bonding curve and again in the Uniswap v4 pool that graduating tokens land in. 80% of the V1 protocol cut goes toward buying and burning PONS. The team said on August 29 that 29% of the original supply had been retired. The token is up over 300% on the week and printed an all-time high near $0.50 alongside the fee record.
Source: CoinGecko
Uniswap Is Getting Paid on Every Graduation
Every Pons graduation ends up in a Uniswap pool. The v4 and v3 deployments on Robinhood Chain pulled $2.68 million and $1.45 million in fees over 24 hours and together account for 81% of the chain’s DEX volume. Robinhood Chain now handles 51% of all Uniswap v4 volume across every network Uniswap runs on.
Tokenized Assets Are the Smallest Number on the Chain
TVL sits at $783.09 million, with $868.28 million in stablecoins and $2.707 billion bridged in. 24 hour DEX volume is $1.405 billion, with another $304.64 million in perps. RWA active market cap is $193.25 million. A network built to host tokenized equities is currently operating as a memecoin venue.
The Gas Subsidy Runs Out on September 29
Chain revenue is not Robinhood revenue. CFO Shiv Verma told analysts on the Q2 call that the company earns a few basis points per transaction with roughly half shared with Arbitrum, without disclosing a rate or any reconciliation.
All of this also happened while gas was being subsidized. Robinhood cut the gas sponsorship threshold in its Wallet from $5 to $0.50, and the program runs until September 29, the end of the original 90-day window. Whether these numbers hold once users start paying their own gas is the question worth watching.
The smartest crypto minds already read our newsletter. Want in? Join them.

On September 1, Anza initiated Transaction V1 on the testnet of Solana, allowing for the final rehearsal of this upgrade prior to its launch on September 9.
The change is intended to allow cryptographic and DeFi workloads that had initially to be fragmented in different transactions to now be processed in one single atomic transaction, as stated by Solana Compass.
Jobs that used to be split now fit in one call
The most notable alteration is the increase in space. The maximum size of a Solana serialized transaction has increased from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes which is an increase of 3.3 times and took effect at the testnet epoch 1025.
According to the website dedicated to Solana Foundation’s large transaction update, such large transaction size will make it possible to implement zero-knowledge proofs, large multisig transactions along with various signature schemes which were unachievable within one transaction.
In turn, fewer transactions have to be processed, less money is required to pay for signatures, and there is no need to wait for a chain of confirmations. BLS signature schemes, as well as confidential transactions and multisig setups will benefit from this upgrade.
There are two main proposals that are essential for the improvement. SIMD-0296 increases the transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes, while SIMD-0385 defines the V1 message format and moves transaction configuration into the message itself.
Less than a day after the upgrade was activated Anza CEO Brennan Watt made a post on X mentioning a large transaction on the testnet explorer with the message: “ATTENTION: large transactions have hit the testnet.”
Why one transaction beats a bundle
The importance of atomicity comes from the fact that at times, developers bypassed Solana’s old size limit with Jito bundles. In fact, SIMD-0296 explains that workaround and also mentions that bundles lack atomicity at protocol level as in the case with one native transaction.
According to Jito’s documentation, bundles can include up to five transactions processed sequentially on an all-or-nothing basis. But bundles operate within Jito’s block-engine and compete among validator tips. V1 transaction, on the other hand, refers to a single native Solana transaction, which carries the transaction-level atomicity guarantee from Solana.
For DeFi developers, this can help simplify helping in establishing swap routes, proofs, and other kinds of multistep transactions. If the operation is entirely covered by V1 transaction, it either succeeds or returns it back as a single-native transaction instead of relying on a bundle of transactions.
What DeFi gets beyond extra bytes
V1 modifies the transaction structure as well. Whereas Legacy and V0 processes priority fees and resource requests using ComputeBudget instructions, SIMD-0385 takes these configurations into V1’s transaction configurations, thereby simplifying the job for the validators in the process of identifying resource needs without actively searching through the instructions list.
V1 also eliminates Address Lookup Tables, or ALTs, utilized by V0 for the purpose of shortening account addresses. According to the Foundation’s analysis of the V1’s ALT tradeoff, V1 instead performs address placement inline. This makes validator input easier compared to the method used in heavy account applications in V0, which consume more bytes when converted.
The practical benefit for routers and DEX aggregators is that there is now more room for complex atomic routes. However, this improvement does not come without limitation. Indeed, Solana’s maximum capacity of 64 different accounts remains unchanged, and thus applications that require heavy use of accounts can still suffer from this limitation, even if byte-limit capacity is no longer an issue.
The upgrade is being introduced as Solana is making a leap into on-chain finance. The report about Solana for Q2 2026 provided by Galaxy showcases increasing activity of stablecoins, tokenized equities and real-world assets.
According to Galaxy, in the future, the potential of Solana will largely depend on the ability to use assets in lending, collateralization, margin, and yield, instead of just issuance or trading. Based on DeFiLlama data on Solana, the platform seems to have a strong DeFi presence.
Moreover, the timing of the upgrade matches the Agave 4.2 upgrade phase. Informatively, Cryptopolitan stated that the plan for gradual implementation of cost reduction was expected to lead to savings of about 90%, along with decrease of time needed for processing from 500 to 200 milliseconds, leading to benefits for stablecoin issuers, wallet providers and payment systems.
RPC operators have a week to update
V1 is opt-in, so Legacy and V0 transactions keep working. The issue is whether infrastructure reading V1 traffic is ready.
Anza has obliged RPC providers to move to Agave v4.2.2 or v4.3.0-beta.3. The Helius Agave 4.2 migration checklist also stresses that RPC consumers who don’t state V1 compliance can experience call failures such as getBlock when a V1 transaction is used.
The process began with local testing of V1 on August 24, shortly after which the mainnet date was confirmed as September 9 on August 29. V1 enabled the Testnet on September 1 at epoch 1025, with a scheduled activation on the mainnet on September 9.
This latest testnet run serves as the last preparatory step for RPC providers, indexers, wallets, SDKs and analytical platforms before the mainnet launch.

Don’t just read crypto news. Understand it. Subscribe to our newsletter. It's free.