Cryptopolitan

Singapore, September 10, 2026 — B.AI, SUN.io, JustLend DAO, and BitTorrent, four leading decentralized applications (dApps) across the TRON ecosystem, now support MetaMask connectivity. MetaMask, one of the world’s largest consumer platforms for onchain finance, giving users direct control over their money and access to the onchain economy. This gives MetaMask users direct, in-wallet access to these dApps through a single, familiar interface, simplifying complex on-chain workflows and lowering the barrier to entry for global users.
Bringing TRON’s Leading dApps to MetaMask
B.AI, a financial infrastructure platform designed to give AI agents their own identities and the ability to transact independently. Its architecture includes the x402 payment protocol, the 8004 identity authentication protocol, a MCP Server, and BAIclaw which enables AI agents to verify one another, transact autonomously, and execute high-frequency financial operations on-chain. Access via MetaMask extends these capabilities to a broader global user base.
SUN.io, TRON’s leading decentralized platform with over $650 million in total value locked (TVL) and more than 26,000 liquidity pools, enables users to connect with MetaMask to access its high-performance, low-cost automated market maker (AMM), SunSwap V4, which features programmable hooks that allow developers and AI agents to embed custom logic directly into liquidity pools.
JustLend DAO, TRON’s leading lending platform with over $7 billion in TVL, provides capital-efficient infrastructure for on-chain borrowing, lending, and staking. Through MetaMask, users can access energy rental services and yield opportunities, optimizing transaction costs and supporting sustained high-frequency activity.
BitTorrent completes TRON’s on-chain and autonomous systems stack by providing cross-chain and data layers that allows the ecosystem to scale. BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) enables seamless interoperability between TRON, Ethereum and BNB Chain, while the BitTorrent File System (BTFS) delivers secure, low-cost decentralized storage. Together, supporting scalable, cross-chain operations for both users and AI agents.
Expanding a Global Web3 Gateway
With MetaMask connectivity now supported across these dApps, users can manage TRON-based assets, transfer tokens such as TRX and USDT, and execute swaps directly within MetaMask. The addition of MetaMask connectivity across B.AI, SUN.io, JustLend DAO, and BitTorrent shifts user access to a unified wallet-based experience, improving usability and connectivity across blockchain networks.
As decentralized finance and AI-driven applications continue to converge, this milestone positions TRON’s ecosystem to scale alongside global user demand. By aligning high-performance infrastructure with a widely adopted Web3 gateway, the ecosystem is better equipped to drive liquidity, improve capital efficiency, and accelerate adoption of DeFi and AI use cases at scale.
About B.AI
B.AI is a financial infrastructure built for the AI Agent era, designed to address the core challenges agents face in model access, payments, settlement, identity, and coordination. Through a unified API and settlement network, B.AI enables AI Agents to connect more freely to leading global models and services, while using agent wallets to pay, get paid, and exchange value autonomously. At the same time, B.AI builds verifiable identity and credit primitives for agents through on-chain accounts, helping AI evolve from software tools into economic actors that can transact, collaborate, and operate continuously at scale. By lowering barriers to model access, enabling seamless value transfer, and establishing an economic framework for intelligent agents, B.AI aims to accelerate the maturation of the AI Agent ecosystem, advance the real-world development of AGI, and make the benefits of AI more accessible to a broader range of users and developers.
Media Contact
Elle
support@b.ai
About SUN.io
SUN.io is the first decentralized autonomous platform on the TRON blockchain, distinguished by its integration of stablecoin trading, comprehensive token exchange, and liquidity mining capabilities. As a cornerstone of the TRON ecosystem, SUN.io is dedicated to optimizing trading liquidity and asset returns for its users. The platform empowers participants to stake SUN tokens, earning veSUN, which unlocks a suite of exclusive benefits, including enhanced rewards and voting rights in the platform’s governance.
Media Contact
Elle
marketing@sun.io
About JustLend DAO
JustLend DAO is TRON’s decentralized financial platform where users can earn yields through supplied assets, borrow digital assets against collateral, participate in TRX staking, and rent Energy. Committed to developing TRON-based DeFi protocols and providing all-in-one financial solutions to its users, there is now more than $7.6B Total Value Locked in the JUST Network.
The JustLend DAO provides a forum for its users to participate in governance and directives, while empowering its users with decentralized authority, trustless transactions, smart-contract automation, and security with transparent accountability.
Tokens in the JustLend DAO markets (TRX, BTT, JST, NFT, USDT, TUSD, USDD) are granted statutory status as authorized digital currency and medium of exchange in the Commonwealth of Dominica. JustLend DAO exists to provide stable and convenient financial lending services for all users.
Engage with the JustLend DAO community via the JustLend DAO Portal, Telegram, Twitter, and the JUST Network.
Media Contact
Harvey
media@just.network
About BitTorrent Chain
BitTorrent Chain (BTTC) is the world’s first heterogeneous cross-chain interoperability protocol, which adopts the PoS (Proof-of-Stake) mechanism and leverages sidechains for the scaling of smart contracts. It now enables interoperability with the public chains of Ethereum, TRON, and BNB Chain. Fully compatible with EVM, BitTorrent Chain facilitates the seamless transfer of assets across mainstream public chains. The governance token BTT, also known as BTTOLD on TRON Protocol was granted statutory status as authorized digital currency and medium of exchange in the Commonwealth of Dominica on October 7th 2022.
Website | Telegram | Medium | Github | Docs
Media Contact
Charles
bttc_service@bittorrent.com

Unitree Robotics (SHA: 688001) traded under 500 yuan a share for the first time on Thursday.
That decline erases more than 240 billion yuan of paper value behind the Chinese humanoid maker since its debut peak roughly three weeks ago and contributes to the fears that there is a bubble in the country’s robot sector.
Why did Unitree Robotics stocks fall?
When Unitree listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on August 19, its shares were priced at 150.80 yuan and finished the first session at 845 yuan, representing a gain of more than 460%. During intraday trading, the stock touched 1,100 yuan, briefly raising the company’s value to roughly 445 billion yuan, or about $66 billion.
However, that peak has not held. The stock ended the previous trading session at 513.93 yuan (about $72.10), roughly 39% below its first-day closing price, and 53% below its first-day high.
On Thursday, it broke 500 yuan, dropping close to 3% to leave a market capitalization near 202 billion yuan. When compared to the 445-billion-yuan peak, more than 240 billion yuan in value has evaporated in about three weeks.
Despite the fall, Unitree trades at more than three times its 150.80-yuan offer price, and the company’s roughly $900 million raise, about 6.1 billion yuan, still stands.
Is Unitree’s business worth the valuation?
Unitree Robotics, officially referred to as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, reported 2025 revenue of 1.70 billion yuan (about $252 million), a sharp increase from the reported 392.77 million yuan the year before. The sale of more than 5,500 humanoid robots contributed as much as 868 million yuan to its 2025 total.
The company also posted a net profit of 278 million yuan and stated that for the first half of 2026, it expects revenue between 1.052 billion and 1.128 billion yuan, which would be a growth of about 36% to 45%.
Even so, Thursday’s close valued the firm at roughly $30 billion, which is about 125 times the company’s 2025 sales and more than 350 times its adjusted earnings. For contrast, Oregon’s Agility Robotics disclosed $1.78 million in 2025 net sales alongside a $140.2 million operating loss in its SEC filing for a proposed SPAC that values it near $2.5 billion.
What are regulators doing about IPOs for humanoid robot companies?
The China Securities Regulatory Commission has given informal “window guidance” to some banks and companies, telling them that humanoid robot companies hoping to launch IPOs need to show recurring revenue, a path to narrower losses, or genuine technological innovation.
China currently hosts more than 90 humanoid training centers, many of which are co-funded by local governments and manufacturers that buy robots to generate teleoperated training data. However, it is not known how much of the sector’s reported revenue comes from independent, repeat customers rather than that state-seeded loop.
That doubt is now being voiced from inside the industry through a screenshot attributed to Shao Tianlan, co-founder and CEO of component supplier Mech-Mind, that circulated on Thursday.
In the screenshot, Tianlan described a class of “attention-gathering” embodied-AI firms that book revenue through data-collection centers and related-party deals to push toward a listing.
Galbot, a startup founded in 2023 that appeared during the 2026 Spring Festival Gala and raised 2.5 billion yuan in March at a valuation above 20 billion yuan, was singled out in the comments of a summary posted on X. So far, it has not responded publicly, and no regulator has ruled on its transactions.
Notably, Mech-Mind listed in Hong Kong on September 1 at HK$101.7, then fell more than 20% over its first four sessions. Its own accounts show 1.044 billion yuan in cumulative losses across 2023 to 2025 against 389 million yuan in 2025 revenue.
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Investors looking for regulators to intervene in the Hunter Biden LAPTOP meme token “blood bath” may have to look past the SEC, as the Trump-appointed regime has already ruled in a February 2025 staff statement that meme tokens are not securities and anyone who gets burned trading them is not covered under federal securities law.
Reflecting on the epic proportions of the LAPTOP collapse, blockchain analytics firm Arkham reported that the token plunged 95% within 30 minutes of its Wednesday launch on the Base blockchain.
Ironically, the same SEC staff statement that gave the all-clear for the first couple to launch their TRUMP and MELANIA meme tokens is now also protecting the son of former POTUS, Joe Biden.
The irony reaches S-tier when the context of how the physical laptop became major ammo against Joe Biden and led to a federal firearm conviction for Hunter is applied. Now, one dollar sign and a tokenized version of the same object later, and it’s all good, at least, based on the current administration’s SEC interpretation.
Hunter Biden is living in the SEC’s safezone
Hunter Biden did not promise any equity, ownership, or profit throughout all of his LAPTOP promotion. He has also stated that nobody should expect him to make the token worth more, as specifically stated even in the Medium launch update: “You should not expect us or anyone else to make this token more valuable for you.”
The LAPTOP tokenomics do not exactly mirror a typical rug pull setup either.
Even with the token spread, LAPTOP still collapsed from a fully diluted valuation that Arkham estimated at $144 billion two minutes after launch to $5 billion thirty minutes later.
Analytics firm Bubblemaps, which often tracks such red flag launches, called the debut a “bloodbath.” One buyer flagged by Lookonchain turned $200,000 into $3,000 after entering the trade near $218 per token.
LAPTOP was trading around $0.79 as of this early Thursday Cryptopolitan report.
The LAPTOP team blamed the volatile launch on “predatory sniper bots” and a starting liquidity that could not absorb demand, which it put on the market maker.
It wrote on Medium that it would deploy four million tokens to seed Aerodrome pools. It also expects circulating supply to reduce by about 1% in week one when two prediction events resolve “Yes” and burn 10 million tokens.
Which regulators can act on memecoins?
As of February 2025, the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance ruled that meme tokens do not meet the Howey test’s profits from the efforts of others requirement, writing: “Neither meme coin purchasers nor holders are protected by the federal securities laws.”
However, law firm analyses published on the Harvard and Columbia corporate-governance blogs stressed two caveats:
A token dressed up as a meme coin but functioning as a security still gets judged on economic reality.
Fraud remains open to the DOJ, CFTC, and state regulators.
Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw dissented, warning the carve-out reads like a loophole. But the practical effect stands. The securities regulator is not the obvious cop for LAPTOP.
The staff statement landed after Trump took office and installed new SEC leadership, and it followed his own coin.
The TRUMP token also followed a similar arc as LAPTOP, sinking to leave more than 800,000 wallets with over $2 billion in losses, per Better Markets. Cryptopolitan has noted TRUMP shed about 55% within minutes of the MELANIA launch.
Now, the interpretation that let both Trump tokens trade without securities registration is the same shield standing between the SEC and Hunter Biden’s LAPTOP.
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The federal government of Germany is preparing to tap into profits from long-term crypto investments which are currently exempt from taxation in the country.
According to a bill drafted by the Bundesfinanzministerium, 25% capital gains tax will soon apply even if the digital assets have been held for more than a year before sale.
Merz cabinet wants to tax all crypto gains from 2027
The executive authority in Berlin intends to start taxing profits resulting from cryptocurrency investments made from January 1, 2027 onwards, the German press has found out.
So far, these have been tax-free after a holding period of one year, although anyone who sells within 12 months after purchase owes personal income tax on the money they have made.
The coalition government of Chancellor Friedrich Merz now wants to scrap the exemption and impose the 25% rate that applies to traditional capital gains such as from dividends, stocks and interest.
Thus, holders of Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other crypto, around 7 million people in Germany, will have to pay the state what’s due from their profits, regardless of how long they kept the coins.
That’s according to a draft law put forward by Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil from the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD).
The latter is the main partner in the cabinet of Merz’s center-right and conservative Christian democratic CDU/CSU alliance.
The Die Welt daily first broke the news about the upcoming legislation, which is yet to be adopted by the ruling majority in the German parliament.
If lawmakers pass the law, it will come into effect on the first day of next year and be in force for all crypto purchased after that, while existing rules will apply to previously acquired assets.
Berlin aims to collect €160 million in crypto tax
Starting from 2028, the tax will be withheld automatically by banks and financial institutions, as is already the case with other capital income, Handelsblatt noted in an article, also quoting the document.
This will give services providers enough time to prepare in terms of systems and technical procedures to collect and transfer the deductions to the state, pointed out the business newspaper.
The Bundesministerium für Finanzen (BMF) hopes to receive €160 million (over $186 million) in 2028. The revenue is expected to grow in the following years and eventually reach €350 million in 2030.
While the progressive income tax that currently applies to profits from short-term crypto investments may can reach 42%, the capital gains levy is fixed at a flat rate of 25%.
However, the latter will be slapped on all coin-related profits. And what’s more, in certain cases, an additional “solidarity surcharge” and even church tax will be due as well.
The new bill is still being coordinated within the federal government and some of its provisions may be amended in the coming weeks, the publication remarked.
It has been prepared after the parties in the coalition reached an agreement to change the taxation of crypto transactions during budget negotiations in the summer.
According to an estimate relayed by German media in July, officials in Berlin plan to secure an additional €1 billion next year by “combating financial and tax crime and introducing crypto taxation.”
Those reports were referring to the draft federal budget for 2027, the financial plan through 2030, as well as the legislative proposal, excerpts of which were published by the finance ministry.
Citing knowledgeable sources, the German Bitcoin news outlet BTC Echo highlighted at the time that the BMF expects crypto-linked budget receipts to approach €1 billion by the end of the decade.
Crypto tax reform becomes major political issue in Germany
The fate of the holding period exemption for cryptocurrency investments has turned into a political hotpoint in the Federal Republic.
An earlier attempt to abolish it, initiated by the by the “Greens” party, was halted at the Bundestag in May, as previously reported by Cryptopolitan.
Among the main opponents of the government-suggested tax hike is the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which recently won elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt.
Labeled as a far-right political force by its more established rivals, the opposition AfD now aims to win more than 40% in the next national vote, scheduled to be take place in 2029.
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Anthropic has blamed a misconfiguration in a blog post explaining the four incidents of its Claude models hacking third-party systems after they broke onto the internet during testing. However, the assessment stopped short of explaining why the models actually pressed on with the attacks, with the company admitting that it did not have those answers yet.
That admission by Anthropic has offered fresh points to AI doomers that have been questioning how much control AI labs actually have over the models they are putting out to the public, and even more so, the more powerful systems they use internally.
How did Anthropic AI models break onto the internet?
Anthropic presented the definitive answer to how its models escaped their testing sandbox in a Wednesday blog post that clarified that a single outside partner was responsible for running the cybersecurity evaluations in all four confirmed incidents.
Apparently, the test machines were not completely cut off from the internet due to a setup error, even though Claude was told it was operating in a sealed simulation without a route to the open web.
The evaluation partner in those simulations, Irregular, put the error down to a naming mistake: a fictional company used in a hacking drill happened to match a real domain. So, in operating under the assumption that everything in the simulation was fair game, the models hacked the real third-party sites using weak passwords and exposed endpoints.
The latest of the four incidents, involving an early build of Claude Opus 4.6, was only reported this week even though it happened way back in January. Anthropic itself had covered the other three incidents involving an Opus 4.7, Mythos 5 and an internal research model in July.
Anthropic said it never caught the January incident until last month. That discovery prompted a wider sweep of roughly 481 million transcripts, which did not turn up any new cases more serious than what it already knew.
Model Incident Date Reported Date Details Claude Opus 4.6 January September Discovered during August sweep Claude Opus 4.7 July July Covered in initial July disclosure Mythos 5 July July Showed notably high biased reasoning Internal Research Model July July Covered in initial July disclosure
Anthropic cannot explain some of its models’ behaviors
The explanation of how the models broke free on the internet was one thing; Anthropic did not have answers as to why the models ignored signs that they had reached the real internet (biased reasoning) and why they caused damage to complete tasks (recklessness).
Anthropic researchers came up empty when they dug into internal training to figure out the rationale for the biased reasoning. The red flags never showed up in the AI lab’s pre-release checks, either before the models were shipped to testing.
By its own admission, catching the worst behaviors ahead of model release “remains challenging.”
However, Anthropic has said it will submit transcripts and grant staff access to the METR research nonprofit, which will now start an eight-week independent review of the incidents.
Bad timing with a $2 trillion IPO on the horizon
The disclosure arrived alongside open dissent inside the industry. Jacob Coxon, who spent about three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, said on X on Wednesday that he had quit because neither firm was “acting responsibly,” warning they were racing toward self-improving superintelligence.
Anthropic safety researcher Evan Hubinger separately told the BBC he put the odds that AI “could kill all humans” within a decade above 10%.
Those warnings now shadow a large IPO. Venture investor and Trump’s former AI and crypto czar, David Sacks, said on Thursday that Anthropic’s offering “must be paused until the claims of this ‘whistleblower’ can be investigated,” Cryptopolitan reported.
Anthropic is chasing a public valuation near $2 trillion, against a recent private mark of about $965 billion, which leaves the safety questions and the financial ones increasingly hard to separate.
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David Sacks said on Thursday that Anthropic’s initial public offering should be put on hold after Jacob Coxon informed the public that AI laboratories are “gambling with our lives.” In his post on X, Sacks stated that the IPO “must be paused until the claims of this ‘whistleblower’ can be investigated.”
With the public offering at the forefront of the investor’s attention, the disagreement about lab safety becomes a critical governance issue. With Anthropic vying for a valuation of almost $2 trillion in public markets, it raises the question of whether safety issues are separate from the investment at stake, especially as researchers and lawmakers have publicly questioned the speed of frontier AI development.
The resignation “sent shock waves through Silicon Valley”
The controversy started after Coxon resigned from Anthropic earlier this week. The ex-pre-training researcher from OpenAI and Anthropic claimed that neither firm was “acting responsibly” and blamed them for competing to achieve self-improving superintelligence.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
Coxon had stated that some of his colleagues depict the upcoming year or two as “crunch time for humanity.” He warned that advanced systems can go beyond human capabilities and may result in human extinction by the end of the decade.
He is not the only person discussing the issue of extreme risk. Evan Hubinger, a researcher from Anthropic, stated that the possibility of AI killing all people within 10 years is more than 10%. Meanwhile, news has surfaced about the same concerns expressed by other scientists from Anthropic.
At the same time, Anthropic emphasized that it has been aware of both benefits and risks of AI for a long time. The company shared the data about its safety research and called for a “lawful, verifiable way” for the industry to coordinate how powerful models should be introduced to the public.
Washington gets loud, on both flanks
The debate easily reached Washington. Republican Senator Ted Cruz described AI as a “catastrophic risk,” while independent Senator Bernie Sanders stated that American citizens want artificial superintelligence halted until safety regulations are in place.
Democrats are also demanding action on this issue. Representative Ted Lieu linked Coxon’s warning to a bipartisan “AI Kill Switch Bill,” while Representative Lori Trahan said that Congress can no longer remain passive in this situation.
The bipartisan pressure adds more momentum to Sacks’ statement than just a social media message. Safety issues are clashing with Anthropic objectives.
A near-$2 trillion listing runs into a safety test
The timing is particularly uncomfortable for Anthropic. Cryptopolitan previously reported that the company is expected to begin IPO marketing in mid-October and list before the November US midterm elections after confidentially filing a draft S-1 with the SEC on June 1. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working on the deal.
Anthropic’s latest private financing valued it at about $965 billion, compared with OpenAI’s $852 billion private mark. Reported public-market ambitions are considerably higher: Anthropic backers have discussed a valuation near $2 trillion, while OpenAI has been associated with a target around $1 trillion. Morningstar, citing PitchBook data, put their latest private valuations at $965 billion and $852 billion, respectively.
Anthropic vs OpenAI Valuations: Private Marks and Reported 2026 IPO Targets
That would mean Anthropic is asking investors to accept roughly a 107% jump from its latest private valuation, compared with about 17% for OpenAI.
The annualized revenue of Anthropic has reached $65 billion at the end of July; however, public investors are still waiting for the audited margins as well as for compute expenses and customer concentration statistics, which will influence whether this high cost would be sustained.
The risk premium question
None of this suggests AI spending is about to collapse. Goldman Sachs Research expects global AI investment to exceed $1 trillion in 2026, including about $581 billion in the US.
The bigger issue is whether investors now demand a higher risk discount.
The International AI Safety Report 2026 warns that competitive pressure can encourage faster releases at the expense of risk mitigation, while many frontier-AI safeguards remain voluntary. Reuters has also highlighted how rapid capability gains and increasingly autonomous AI behavior are intensifying safety concerns.
Anthropic therefore faces two tests at once: convincing investors that its economics justify a near-$2 trillion valuation, and that the risks surrounding increasingly powerful AI systems can be governed. As the IPO approaches, those two questions are becoming harder to separate.
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President Donald Trump is promising American adults $5,000 each if Republicans keep the House and Senate after the November midterms. Trump announced the idea Wednesday at the GOP gathering in Dallas while Republicans try to hold their congressional majorities.
Sending that much money across the United States would mean a large federal expense. With each person getting $5,000, the cost could pass $1 trillion quickly. The government is currently spending about $1.8 trillion more than it collects on an annual basis, all amid inflation concerns for consumers and the markets.
Trump made the offer depend on the election result. “If the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” he said. “It will be called the Trump Dividend.”
He described the checks like cash companies sometimes return to shareholders, while pointing to what he called “our tremendous strength and success economically.”
JD Vance limits Trump’s $5,000 proposal while the funding numbers fall short
Vice President JD Vance wasted no time in trying to scale down the proposal an hour after Trump’s address, stating that some of America’s wealthiest could be cut out of the plan. Tariff revenue could be used in order to cover the expenses as well. But here lies the issue, as tariff receipts are significantly lower than the required sum for this payment scheme.
Before even the Supreme Court rejected most of Trump’s tariffs last year, the government was already not receiving enough funds to pay for such an endeavor worth $1 trillion or more. In order to implement a national payment system, Congress needs to find additional sources of funding.
The proposal also lands at a rough time for federal finances. Total U.S. debt went above $40 trillion for the first time last month. Trump has often complained that the party holding the White House usually gives up seats during midterm elections. Republicans are trying to stop that from happening this November.
“We’re going to change that,” Trump said. “There’s no reason for it.”
The proposal also recalls Elon Musk’s role in last year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court contest. Elon handed million-dollar checks to voters as he tried to help a candidate win. The candidate ended up losing anyway.
Trump has brought up cash payments before, but he had never connected the idea this directly to Republicans keeping Congress. Earlier this year, he talked about a $2,000 dividend and said he might be able to issue it without congressional approval. Last year, he sent service members $1,776 apiece and called the payment a “warrior dividend.”
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio backed the new proposal almost immediately today. “I will get a bill ready so that we can get the Trump Dividend passed immediately after the November 3rd election,” Bernie wrote on X late Wednesday. “Because Republicans (and America) will win!”
Rising federal debt and the Iran war complicate Trump’s latest cash proposal
Trump also used part of the Dallas speech to talk about the war with Iran. He said Tehran had been “two, maybe three weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.” During the same appearance, he acknowledged the financial pain coming from the conflict as crude prices moved higher.
Trump then acted out a conversation he said he had with his economic advisers before the fighting started. “I hate to do this to you,” Trump said he told them, while saying the economy had been doing well before the choice to begin the war.
Federal finances are already carrying a heavy debt load. Government debt is now about the same size as 100% of U.S. national income, based on Treasury figures. America has not been around that level since the World War II period.
The numbers looked different before that. Federal debt was close to 40% of GDP in the early 1940s. Massive wartime expenses then sent the ratio above 100% during 1945 and 1946, when it reached the highest point of that period.
Following the conclusion of the war, economic growth and federal budgetary constraints gradually reduced that ratio. By the mid-1970s, the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio was below 25%. For decades after that, it remained within the range of 30% to 40%.
The global economic downturn of 2008 was to alter that trend. The COVID-19 outbreak arrived in 2020, bringing another large round of government support. Debt then returned to close to 100% and has remained around there since. Treasury data also shows the ratio kept moving higher during the first quarter of this year.
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Trezor alerted users on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, about hackers exploiting its third-party email provider to distribute a bogus security notice. However, the Trezor wallet was unaffected by the attack. The criminals targeted something even harder to safeguard than a piece of software: the confidence of a user in an email from a trusted provider.
The subject line of the warning read as follows: “Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability.” The message stated that Trezor engineers had discovered a design defect in STM32 chips used in its products. Decrypt reported that Trezor recognized the message as fake and warned readers not to click on the links.
A fake flaw sent from a real address
What made the campaign effective was not the fabricated vulnerability but the manner in which the email was received. One recipient revealed that the email came from help@trezor.io, followed the Sendinblue campaign path, and passed the DKIM, SPF, and DMARC checks.
The alert specified that one out of four devices can become compromised and that recovery phrases may not have enough randomness or entropy. This language bore a close resemblance to the issues described in the recent Coldcard attack.
Trezor reported that it stopped the domain used for sending out the alerts and started probing into how the fraudsters managed to use its legitimate sending infrastructure. The company’s public alert came out right after 4:30 PM Eastern time on the 9th of September, only a few hours after its users started raising flags about the emails.
The breach may reach past Trezor
According to Nick Neuman, co-founder and CEO of Casa, there seems to be a similar trend occurring among users of BitBox and that a common marketing email provider may have been breached.
That’s the larger issue. Wallet makers can make their devices more secure, but their brand can still be stolen through means they don’t completely manage, from email service providers to shipping companies and payment processors.
Data breaches are not device exploits
In a previous report by Cryptopolitan, it was revealed that phishing attempts against Ledger users have also found their way into physical mail. However, it should be noted that these cases are different from those of device exploits since a data breach compromises identity and contact information, while a device exploit may also put financial assets at risk.
The attacks on hardware wallets that occurred in 2026 make this distinction clear. SafePal admitted that there was an authorization error in one of its order tracking plugins that led to the exposure of data of approximately 39,798 customers, and that seed phrases, private keys, and wallet credentials of these customers were not compromised.
Trezor’s ShipMonk breach eventually increased the number of affected customers to 80,689 after the company learned that the old US order records dating back from 2019 to 2021 were also stored and exposed. Similarly, in January, the Global-e incident of Ledger also saw the exposure of the order details and contact information of its customers, with the exact number of customers not being disclosed.
In its August comparison, Memeburn correctly categorized Ledger, Trezor, and SafePal under “data breaches” while identifying Coldcard as an “device exploit”. The indicated figure of 13,689 mentioned by Memeburn in reference to Trezor is, however, from before the update of Trezor on September 4.
Coldcard stands apart from the rest. According to Galaxy Research on August 14, it confirmed 190 victims directly as well as more than 86,00 affected addresses and at least $112.7 million worth of stolen 1,778.84 BTC due to flaws in the firmware. Other estimates had put the possible loss near $130 million.
2026 Hardware Wallet Breaches vs. Coldcard Exploit: Victims, Data Exposure and Crypto Losses
Leaked context feeds industrialized phishing
The danger in a leaked shipping list is what happens next. Chainalysis estimated that crypto scams and fraud stole $17 billion in 2025, while impersonation scams grew more than 1,400% year over year. It also found that scams with on-chain links to AI vendors generated 4.5 times more revenue per operation than those without such links.
A hardware-wallet purchase record can therefore become a targeting file. A name paired with an email, phone number, home address, and confirmation that someone owns a crypto-security device gives criminals the context to craft convincing emails, calls, letters or even physical approaches.
The lesson from Trezor’s latest incident is not that hardware wallets failed. It is that the security perimeter now includes the systems around them, and attackers increasingly need only one trusted-looking message to break through.
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On Wednesday, a prosecutor in the U.S. stated in front of a jury in Brooklyn that Huawei was a “criminal enterprise“, which marked the start of a trial regarding trade secret theft, sanctions infringement, and bank fraud that had been delayed for a long time. Huawei has denied all charges brought against it.
Accusations date back several years, but their impact in 2026 is different. Huawei is currently involved in Beijing’s attempt to develop an AI-chip ecosystem independent of U.S. technology, while Nvidia experiences growing competition from China-based businesses.
“Theft, lies, cover-up” versus “competition, not conspiracy”
“Theft, lies, cover-up,” Justice Department trial attorney Taylor Stout told jurors, alleging Huawei spent two decades victimizing U.S. companies and abusing the financial system.
Prosecutors say Huawei conspired to steal trade secrets from five American companies, including Cisco router source code and T-Mobile phone-testing technology.
Huawei’s representative rejected that image. Attorney Brian Heberlig characterized the litigation as a matter of “competition, not conspiracy,” and accused the prosecution of using only “cherry-picking isolated events.” He added that the Cisco and T-Mobile incidents did not involve the whole company but only particular employees, and the management took action upon finding out about these incidents.
Skycom, Iran and the Meng Wanzhou standoff
The case has grown into a wider RICO prosecution from being a case of bank fraud and sanctions. The Department of Justice’s amended case against Huawei states that the company has used Hong Kong’s Skycom to procure prohibited goods from the U.S. for Iran and to transfer funds through the global banking system.
As per Reuters report, Skycom had provided Hewlett-Packard products worth at least €1.3 million ($1.5 million) to Iran’s biggest mobile operator. A Cryptopolitan report revealed that HSBC okayed over $100 million in transactions linked to Skycom. The prosecutors have also accused Huawei of transactions in North Korea and providing surveillance equipment that ended up being used against protesters in Iran in 2009.
From telecom giant to China’s AI-chip champion
The crucial importance of Huawei now relies heavily on its Ascend accelerators.
According to a report by Reuters published in April, there is a surge in demand for the Ascend 950 after DeepSeek launched its V4, and companies like ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba are interested in buying it. The 950PR greatly surpasses Nvidia’s H20, although it lags behind the H200. At the same time, Epoch AI estimates that the Ascend 950’s performance is only slightly above half of that of Nvidia’s H100. Huawei is planning to deliver approximately 750,000 units of the 950PR in 2026.
Huawei is not the only company in China working in this area. Enflame, Moore Threads, MetaX, and Biren are the four other companies named by Reuters Breakingviews that are considered as ‘the four little dragons’ of China. Enflame has shown unprecedented growth of 1,475% in sales during the first quarter while raising $900 million in Shanghai.
This is happening while the share of Nvidia in the AI semiconductor market of China has declined considerably from close to a monopoly state to 55%.
China AI Chip Market 2026: Huawei, Nvidia Market Share and Domestic Rivals
Why the compute gap still favors Nvidia
That market-share shift does not mean Huawei has caught Nvidia technologically.
Epoch AI estimates Huawei will produce less than 4% as much AI compute as Nvidia in 2026. High-bandwidth memory remains the biggest bottleneck. If Huawei relies only on Chinese-made HBM, its output could remain around 1% of Nvidia’s through 2028, while its chips may continue trailing Nvidia’s by three to four years through at least 2030.
Huawei vs Nvidia — Performance and the Compute Gap
That leaves Washington with a difficult trade-off. CSIS argues that export controls have limited China’s access to advanced technology but also accelerated domestic substitution. China’s integrated-circuit output fell 9.8% in 2022 before the localization push gathered momentum, while controls still constrain manufacturing beyond roughly the 7-nanometer node.
A 2025 BIS guidance also identified several Huawei Ascend chips as presumptively subject to GP10 restrictions. For global markets, the stakes extend well beyond Huawei and Nvidia. PwC projects $31.6 trillion in AI-infrastructure capital spending through 2050.
If the U.S. and China continue building increasingly separate hardware ecosystems, the result could reshape where semiconductor capacity, data centers, energy investment and AI infrastructure are built for decades.
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Builders of data centers in Massachusetts have to get local approval. Gov. Maura Healey signed an executive order on Sept. 8 that precludes proposed data center projects from proceeding to state permitting unless approved by the town or city in which they are located.
The change furnishes municipalities across the Commonwealth with an early kill switch on an industry that many already distrust.
Six communities have already banned or paused the facilities
“Unless a community says yes to a data center, we’re saying no,” Healey said at a press conference at the State House. The order necessitates that developers negotiate community benefits agreements with their host towns first.
Those deals have to line up with state standards before any state permitting process can begin.
The order is for projects with a maximum electricity demand of greater than 25 megawatts. Developers must comply with the administration’s data center framework for permits to be issued.
The order also proscribes non-disclosure agreements between state agencies and data center companies, which Healey’s office said is intended to keep the review process open to residents.
Shutesbury and Holyoke have banned the facilities outright. Westfield has permitted a moratorium. Easthampton, Northampton, and Greenfield are weighing their own temporary bans.
Facilities over 25 megawatts also are required to generate their own power and guarantee it meets the state’s clean energy standards. Healey would prefer they make it onsite.
If this does not work, they can fund new generation nearby or pay into a newly created Ratepayer Protection Fund.
The state’s clean energy standard requires just a fraction of power to come from approved sources like wind, solar, and hydro that will increase to at least 40% by 2030. But the governor’s office said data centers will be held to a higher bar.
They call for clean generation to satisfy 100% of their electricity needs.
“We can’t have data centers coming in and taking energy away from the rest of us,” Healey said.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection has until Dec. 31 to create an alternative compliance payment mechanism for centers that don’t meet clean electricity standards.
That money goes to the Ratepayer Protection Fund.
Lowell residents saw electric bills climb more than 50%
In June Healey paused applications for a 20-year sales and use tax exemption on qualified data centers, an incentive she was quick to disown.
“The sales tax exemption was not my idea,” she told reporters, noting it was part of the Legislature’s economic development package she signed in 2024.
A lot of the local anger goes back to Lowell. A bill from state Sen. Vanna Howard, S 3166, contains guardrails similar to Healey’s framework.
Howard told colleagues that some residents near the Markley Group’s Lowell facility saw electric bills climb more than 50%, with exhaust reaching bedrooms and noise disrupting sleep.
In April, Lowell residents sued MassDEP over an air quality plan that would add generators to the site, and a Middlesex Superior Court judge recently obstructed four of the generators from being installed.
Massachusetts is the third state in as many months to turn up the heat. Texas Governor Greg Abbott took action in August to require new facilities to submit to audits by the state utility regulator and grid operator ERCOT.
New York paused construction of data centers 50 megawatts or larger in July. Fifteen states are considering moratoriums, the National Conference of State Legislatures says.
Modern AI data centers can run on a gigawatt or more, and in parts of the US, grid connections can take seven years or more, forcing operators to switch to onsite diesel and gas generation that adds to both costs and emissions. That is precisely the burden Healey says her order is designed to keep off ratepayers’ bills.
Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Greg Brockman support a pro-AI super PAC called Leading the Future, which is running ads targeting voters in battleground states ahead of the midterms.
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Zora co-founder Dee Goens announced on Wednesday that he has taken over the position of chief executive of the onchain social network from Jacob Horne. The appointment of Goens comes at a challenging time for Zora, as its creator-coin business has declined significantly since its peak in 2025.
Zora’s lexicon can confuse people. The $ZORA token, which is the platform’s native token, differs from Zora Coins, which are the protocol activity tracked by DefiLlama, as well as Creator Coins and Post Coins, which are the tokens utilized by the users to trade. The $ZORA token is used for paying rewards and adding liquidity to the project, but does not give holders any governance rights or ownership.
That difference is important. The recovery of Zora hinges on its ability to get people to start trading Creator and Post Coins again, while providing a clear incentive for $ZORA holders to promote Zora’s expansion. This task will be a part of Goens’ role as he will have to prove that the token-based attention can create long-term trading activity, generate good income for creators, and strengthen the link between Zora’s business and its native token.
From a $5.6 million quarter to a fraction of it
The figures illustrate the extent of the difficulties being faced. DefiLlama’s ZORA Coins figures point to a revenue of $5.64 million for the protocol in the third quarter of 2025. However, it fell to $3.06 million in the last quarter of the same year and to $279,810 in the first quarter of the following year and $106,540 in the second quarter, a drop of almost 98.1% from the third quarter revenues earlier stated. As of now, the current figure for the third quarter of the year is $46,810, although the quarter has not yet ended.
Zora Coins Quarterly Revenue Drops 98% From Q3 2025 Peak to Q2 2026
The recent activity seems very poor in comparison. DefiLlama posts the fees for the last 30 days at $14,971, protocol revenue at $6,165, and DEX volume at $551,284. Cumulative fees amount to $10.43 million, and the overall DEX volume totals at around $399.47 million.
Why the momentum stalled
Zora’s initial approach was to use tokens for both the creators and their work. Creator Coins represented individuals while Post Coins represented their posts. According to a 0x case study of Zora, Creator Coins were associated with $ZORA, and Post Coins were associated with the creator’s coin.
Distribution made a big impact during the boom in 2025. The moment Coinbase adopted Zora into the Base App feed, its daily token creation rose significantly from 6,000 at the beginning of July to almost 50,000 at the end of the month, according to 0x. Later on, its Swap API managed to complete transactions worth $59 million across a total of 352,000 trades with the help of Zora coins.
The success, however, has been less prominent this year. As reported by Cryptopolitan in February, Base App was shutting down its Creator Rewards program as well as the social feed powered by Farcaster and was changing its focus to trading, despite having spent over $450,000 on Creator Rewards for more than 17,000 creators.
A bet on pairing and multichain reach
Goens is now attempting to push Zora to a wider trading infrastructure. “Pairing and social trading will create new waves of adoption for crypto,” he wrote on X, adding that “Zora is here to help grow the pie.”
Indeed, the product has taken a step in that way. Custom Pairs allows creators to select which asset the coin will be paired with. This could be ETH, USDC, Robinhood stock tokens, or Solana tokens in the case of Base, Robinhood Chain, and Solana. The pairs charge 1% trading fees with 0.70% going to the creator. Trend Coins charge 0.01%. Zora’s August update added support for the Robinhood Chain and native Solana deposits, as well as contributing gas for swaps across the three chains.
What Goens has to prove
The issue of tokens is becoming increasingly hard to dismiss. Although Goens mentioned buybacks or rewards among his goals for bringing the business in closer alignment with $ZORA holders, he still has not revealed the amount, source, timing, or mechanism for the funding. This is significant because $ZORA holders do not currently have any legal entitlement to revenues generated by the protocol or its treasury assets.
However, the real test is longevity. Galaxy Research has pointed out that new token markets tend to be very concentrated and tended to draw attention only for a short period of time, generating bursts of liquidity instead of long-term activity.
Thus, Zora will need something more than another viral cycle. Goens’ biggest challenge is whether or not the quarterly revenue will grow, and whether it goes up thanks to ongoing multichain trading and not to the one-time spike in distribution.


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Apple’s own release notes for macOS 27 Golden Gate quietly disclose that there will be usage limits on several marquee Apple Intelligence features.
Apple released the notes on Wednesday, five days before the update goes live on September 14.
Siri AI and other tools have a usage limit
That information is concealed in a single line at the bottom of Apple’s notes, far below the product announcements.
“Certain Apple Intelligence features that rely on server-side models are subject to daily usage limits, including but not limited to Siri AI, Intelligent Photo Editing Tools, Image Playground, and AFM 3 Cloud models in Shortcuts,” the release notes state.
Apple doesn’t say what those limits are, how often people would hit them, or if they reset daily.
Anyone who thought they’d be using the rebuilt Siri or new photo tools as their day-to-day utilities is getting real ambiguity. The headline features are metered, and Apple just says so in the terms.
The named products track closely with the functions Apple promotes hardest. Siri AI is the star of the show.
Intelligent Photo Editing Tools include Spatial Reframing, a tool that repositions a shot after it’s taken, and an Extend tool that broadens the frame. Natural-language shortcut builder employs AFM 3 Cloud models.
Apple is using Nvidia Blackwell B200 chips hosted on Google Cloud to process cloud-based Siri requests, a reversal of Craig Federighi’s promise at WWDC in 2024 to keep such work on Apple’s own Private Cloud Compute servers, according to Cryptopolitan’s report in June.
Apple had to make the change after a modified Google Gemini model ran too slowly on its own hardware.
At that scale, inference capacity is leased and costs money per query. That gives Apple a direct incentive to ration the cloud-dependent features it just listed.
Apple opened the new Siri to public beta testers with the iOS 27 beta in July.
AAPL traded at $315.34, down $0.88, on Wednesday, according to Google Finance data.
Apple’s update reaches every Mac on September 14
iOS 27 and macOS 27 Golden Gate will be available for all users on September 14. The notes went out the same day Apple sent out the release-candidate builds.
The update reboots Siri around Apple Intelligence and incorporates it into Spotlight, so answers appear from the same bar people already search. Siri pulls personal context from mail, messages, and photos and works within apps on demand.
There’s a dedicated Siri app that synchronizes past conversations via iCloud. Visual Intelligence, reached with Command-Shift-Space, lets Siri read a selected window and do things like add a calendar event.
Safari now groups tabs by topic and monitors pages for price drops or restocks. The Passwords app identifies weak or compromised credentials and can alter some for a person.
Apple has also added parental controls and refreshed Liquid Glass design with a clarity slider. The company says AirDrop, Mail search, and network browsing run faster. The update now supports ultrawide displays up to 5K at 120Hz.
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According to Steak ‘n Shake, the decision to accept Bitcoin payments has yielded significant results, with franchise partners seeing a 19% increase in sales this quarter alone.
The statement was released in its X post on September 8. While the story sounds great for the popularity of Bitcoin among retailers, it is still just a company announcement. In fact, there is no proof that Bitcoin played an important role in sales growth, as Biglari Holdings’ regulatory filings reported increasing sales without checking how Bitcoin contributed to it.
This distinction is important. In reality, Steak ‘n Shake is conducting a test to find out if old-fashioned retailers can use the advantages of Lightning, cheap processing fees, crypto-friendly customers, and Bitcoin reserves to develop a functioning model for other merchants to follow.
The numbers the company is putting forward
At the Bitcoin 2026 Conference, Michael Boes, Chief MAHA Officer of Steak n’ Shake, described the company’s improving performance since it began accepting Bitcoin with consistent figures of 11% and 15% growth for same-store sales in Q2 2025 and Q3 2025, respectively.
These figures were cited by him in the context of his argument that the chain had experienced a turnaround due to Bitcoin. However, the actual filings of Biglari Holdings provide even more exact, albeit differently categorized, figures.
Steak ’n Shake’s Bitcoin sales claims vs filed benchmark
According to Biglari’s Q2 2025 10-Q, the company achieved a same-store sales growth of 10.7%. Biglari’s Q3 2025 filing reported that the company’s domestic company-operated stores’ sales had grown by 15.6% while the franchise-partner units grew by 14.8%.
The annual report for 2025 stated that the total growth rates for company-operated restaurants was 10.5%, 10.1% for franchise-partner restaurants, and 10.2% when both categories of stores were merged together.
In the first quarter of 2026, same-store sales increased by 10.0% in the domestic market, whereas sales from franchise partners went up by approximately 13%. The figures were 11.9% in Q2 2026 for domestic sales and 14.5% for franchise partners.
Biglari published another filing with the SEC where the total increase amounted to 13.8% in domestic sales. With all the mentioned figures filed, the 19% is also significant, but it covers franchise-partner stores and has not yet been filed.
Steak ’n Shake same-store sales: what the Biglari filings show
The difference becomes clearer when the figures are examined in two ways. The first chart displays figures that Steak ’n Shake has made public to market its sales linked to Bitcoin. The second chart shows more accurate data from Biglari’s filings, which show company-operated, franchise partner, and combined results.
Together, the two sets of data indicate that the momentum behind the sales is not an illusion, but the figures are not all reported on the same basis.
Why the causation claim is hard to nail down
While the growth is genuine, the contribution of Bitcoin is still unknown. The yearly report by Biglari attributes this growth in part to improved food quality and communication that the management claims “resonated with the public.” Meanwhile, there are reports that Steak ‘n Shake has not revealed how much Bitcoin revenue contributed to the company’s profit.
This makes Bitcoin another element of the larger recovery process of Steak n’ Shake rather than a simple case of an experimental variable. Nonetheless, Boes stated at the Bitcoin 2026 event that Bitcoin has become one of the main forces driving the process with the following phrase: “Bitcoin is real money made with real energy.”
How the Lightning setup actually saves money
The case related to costs is much easier to understand. Steak n Shake started accepting payments in Bitcoin via the Lightning network on May 16, 2025. The payment solution provider Speed reports the implementation being completed in all 393 locations in the USA, and quotes the then-COO Dan Edwards, who has also claimed Bitcoin payments decreased the company’s payment processing costs by 50% compared to the use of credit cards.
The cost is still high even if Bitcoin is not the cause of the sales surge. Notably, Square provides 0% processing fees for Bitcoin payments as part of its services, which indicates that payments via cheaper Bitcoin payment processing networks are becoming easier for mainstream businesses to test.
Steak ‘n Shake also channels Bitcoin payments made by customers into a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Cryptopolitan has reported earlier that the reserve has been linked with Bitcoin bonuses for hourly employees, which connects checkout, treasury management, and workforce incentives.
Thus, the strategy transcends being merely a way of payment. Steak ‘n Shake is combining Bitcoin-friendly branding, transaction savings, and treasury accumulation through its operations.
The bigger question: will merchants follow as stablecoins take over
The broader crypto-payments market is moving differently. CoinGate’s H1 2026 report put USDC at 22.1% of crypto payments, ahead of Bitcoin at 21.0%, while Lightning handled just 9.6% of BTC payments.
TRM Labs also found stablecoins driving retail adoption in markets such as Venezuela. That leaves Steak ‘n Shake as a useful test case, but not necessarily a template. Other retailers may copy its low-cost crypto checkout while choosing stablecoins or fiat settlement instead.
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Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) has finally released its first folding iPhone, seven years after Samsung Electronics (KRX: 005930) began selling foldable smartphones. The new iPhone Duo opens into a 7.6-inch handset and closes into a smaller 5.4-inch device.
Apple says it becomes its slimmest iPhone when unfolded. Buyers get two finishes, star white and night sky. Orders open on Friday, October 16, while store availability starts Friday, October 23.
The outside panel gives users around 90% of the usable display area found on iPhone 18 Pro. Open the phone and the inner screen becomes 50% larger than iPhone 18 Pro Max.
Both Super Retina XDR panels use matching proportions, so apps resize without suddenly changing their layout. They also support ProMotion, Always On mode, and 3,000 nits of maximum outdoor brightness. Apple covered the inner panel with a nano-textured surface to cut glare, reduce visible reflections, and make the fold line harder to notice.
Source: Apple
Apple rebuilds the iPhone around a 100-part hinge, titanium frame and two-screen layout
Apple placed the inner FaceTime camera underneath the screen so it disappears when unused. Apple Pencil with USB-C support arrives later this year and will work across both screens for writing, drawing, and document markup.
Authentication comes through Touch ID inside the side key. Owners can also open the phone using an Apple Watch.
The iPhone employs grade 5 titanium. Apple has applied polishing treatment to the main body of the smartphone, whereas the housing of the 3D printed hinges gets another treatment known as micro-blasting. Ceramic Shield is the material used on the backside of the iPhone, while Ceramic Shield 2 on its front promises triple scratch resistance than its predecessor.
More than 100 separate pieces make up the hinge. Reinforcement ribs sit inside the frame, while ceramic-fiber material strengthens breaks around the antennas. The foldable screen comes with a scratch-resistant surface finish on top and a polymer nano coating that Apple claims to be as much as 40 percent stiffer than competing polymers.
Strong glass sits on both sides of the flexible display assembly. Special adhesive lets those layers move independently while the handset bends, reducing pressure around the folding point. A titanium plate underneath adds another structural layer.
John Ternus, Apple’s CEO, said:
“iPhone Duo is the most transformational change to iPhone since the original. With an entirely new design and intuitive experiences, it shows what’s possible when hardware and software are engineered together and redefines what it means to use a foldable phone.”
John added: “With the largest display ever on iPhone that still fits easily in your pocket, combined with the power of A20 Pro, iPhone Duo helps you stay more immersed and productive wherever you go, whether you’re enjoying content, multitasking across apps, or gaming.”
Apple gives A20 Pro new camera tricks while Siri takes on more personal data
The A20 Pro powers the device. It has been specially designed to work with a customized vapor chamber, two batteries, and a new cooling system to ensure consistent performance and full-day usage. The iOS 27 operating system has been modified to adapt to the foldable design with its software layouts depending on the state of the phone.
The main rear sensor is a 48MP Fusion camera, which shoots at full 48MP resolution without shutter delay, while 24MP remains the standard setting. A built-in 2x telephoto option provides optical-quality zoom. Apple also uses a revised computational image system, plus a large sensor, wider aperture and sensor-shift stabilization for darker scenes.
In addition to this, there is another 48MP Fusion Ultra Wide camera similar to the one that can be found in the iPhone 18 Pro series.
The two displays also transform photography. Smart Take allows AI processing on the device’s own system, A20 Pro, observing the scene and shooting when the subjects are positioned properly. The users may take high-quality pictures using the rear cameras to photograph themselves with themselves on the external display. Duo Preview allows the subjects to see their composition.
Kid Cue puts Peanuts animations on the outside screen to get children looking toward the lens. Duo FaceTime can place people standing beside the owner on that same exterior display during calls.
Video reaches 4K at 120 frames per second in Dolby Vision, technology from Dolby Laboratories (NYSE: DLB), through the main 48MP camera. Playback speed can then be changed for slow motion. Cinematic effects can be added after recording at up to 60 fps. Audio Mix gets new processing for clearer speech and music separation. Time-lapse now records in 4K Dolby Vision HDR, while the folding body can stand by itself for longer recordings without a tripod.
John called the AI system an “intelligent personal hub” and said it would use “the most private details of your daily life.” He said many requests will stay “on device.” Tasks needing outside computing will use protected remote servers.
“Others see that data as something to collect and store,” John said. “Here, not even Apple can access what’s yours.”
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Scott Bessent’s Treasury Department is getting ready to buy back as much as $6 billion of US government debt after Scott defended action around the yen.
Treasury announced the plan on Wednesday and said the goal is to keep trading in government bonds running smoothly. The amount is about three times larger than usual. Scott had already said on Aug. 19 that Treasury planned to buy at least twice the normal amount of older securities.
Treasury also said later operations will be worth at least $4 billion each. This week’s buyback will target 10-year and 20-year notes, where trading tends to be lighter than in shorter-dated debt.
According to authorities, the bigger buy will help maintain liquidity in the markets, whereas the traders are looking at how the move will affect the growth in yields, which are at a level not seen since the pre-2008 crisis period.
Treasury buys more debt as long-term yields keep moving higher
The market was not acting in the manner that would suit the Treasury’s interest. The yields continued to climb after the announcement, and longer-term bonds even went up by as much as 5 basis points before coming back down. It should be noted that higher yields increase the cost of borrowing. One basis point is equal to 0.01 percent.
The 10-year yield hit 4.841% at press time, while the 20-year yield reached 5.314%. The 30-year yield rose about 5 basis points and moved through the closely watched 5.3% level before settling near 5.307%. Treasury’s buyback will take place on Thursday in a 20-minute window ending at 2 p.m. ET.
A few things are pushing yields higher. Federal debt has gone past $40 trillion. Tariffs and the war with Iran are adding to inflation concerns. Energy prices have jumped too, with crude oil breaking above $100 a barrel on Wednesday. Trading is usually quieter at the long end of the Treasury curve than in shorter maturities, even though the US government bond market is the biggest and most liquid sovereign debt market in the world.
Treasury is also issuing more debt. Supply this year is 11.8% higher than in 2025, while publicly held debt has climbed to $31.8 trillion, up 8.2%. Investors are being asked to take on more government paper while inflation worries are getting harder to ignore.
Iran war pushes inflation higher as Kevin Warsh faces pressure from Trump
The Federal Reserve is dealing with a harder inflation picture. Prices rose faster earlier this year as the Iran conflict drove energy costs higher.
The annualized inflation rate reached a three-year high in May before falling to 3.4% in July. Even after that drop, it was still 0.7 percentage point higher than a year earlier, with energy prices responsible for much of the increase.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday that oil prices probably would not fall before the midterm elections. After saying Iran “can’t hold out any longer,” Donald said its leaders are “desperate to try and affect the election.” He then predicted, “Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward.”
Brent crude went above $100 on Wednesday for the first time since July as fighting in the Middle East got worse. More expensive energy could force the Fed to consider raising rates again, even though the White House wants the opposite. Last week, Donald said the Fed “must get smart” and lower rates. He also wrote, “A STRONG COUNTRY MEANS A LOWER INTEREST RATE.”
Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh took over in May. Kevin said at Jackson Hole in August that it was “the Fed’s job to deliver stable prices,” but he stopped short of saying whether the central bank would raise rates soon.
Stanley Druckenmiller, who leads Duquesne Family Office and used to mentor Scott, criticized Treasury’s move in a Wall Street Journal opinion article. Stanley wrote:
“Once markets believe Treasury is defending a price, every rise in yields becomes a test of official resolve, and the operations must grow to survive the tests.”
He added that: “Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose. The only variable is how much they spend before conceding.”
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Apple on Wednesday unveiled a revamped Health app that calculates how old a body appears. Apple calls this number Health Age.
The company wants to feed the score with blood work via a $119 partnership with Quest Diagnostics. Apple has previewed the update with the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4.
The move is a sign of Apple’s intensifying push into diagnostics, once requiring a doctor’s order.
A test covering 50 biomarkers backs Health Age
Apple’s Health Age is the company’s effort to squeeze scattered metrics into a single number people can read. The score combines VO2 max, sleep data, and blood biomarkers to determine if measurements are consistent with calendar age.
The first two are obtained by wearable sensors only. That’s where Quest comes in. The third can’t come from a wrist.
In the US, Apple said people can order a panel of more than 50 biomarkers for $119. Apple called it a way to get data “that can only come from lab tests.”
Results are conveyed back to the iPhone, with watch readings for comparison and explainer videos from clinical experts attached. For those who skip the kit, lab results can still be added by hand or synced from existing medical records.
The new Health app will be available later this year in U.S. English, with other languages to follow. It requires Apple Intelligence on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27.
Apple also added a Longevity tab next to Health Age that assesses sleep, movement, and heart health against clinical guidance, plus movement and mobility assessments. In one demo, an iPhone camera tracked a person taking a VO2 max test as a trainer walked through the movements on screen.
Apple’s health push comes as the company looks to bank more on non-hardware revenue. Apple’s April quarter set a Services record of $30.98 billion, according to Cryptopolitan’s earlier earnings coverage.
Source: Apple.
A daily 0-to-10 readiness number arrives with Apple Watch Series 12
Apple also added a daily readiness feature to the Series 12 and Ultra 4, in addition to the Health Age. It’s a single 0-10 score that looks at recent activity, vitals, and a sleep score and then sends out one of four calls: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready, or Go For It.
The number fluctuates during the day as new data is received. An afternoon workout or a dip in daytime vitals can change it.
Apple said the scoring model was developed with input from its own staff of exercise scientists and physicians and came from its own Apple Heart and Movement Study. Apple is late in this space, as rival trackers have offered readiness scores for years.
Scores are based on a new Health Sensing System that Apple added to the Series 12 and Ultra 4. Optical and electrical sensors are redesigned to record the heart rate every five seconds during the day.
Apple says heart-rate variability is quantified as often as every five minutes, 24 times as often as before. The Vitals app now shows HRV, a stress-and-recovery signal, in both an overnight and new daytime view.
Apple backed up the accuracy claim by carrying out a study of more than 1,000 people from demographic groups. The tech company said the study showed its watch outperforming leading wearables in heart rate accuracy.
“By combining breakthrough sensing on Apple Watch with Apple Intelligence in the Health app, we’re able to translate complex biometric data into clear guidance for users,” said Sumbul Desai, M.D., Apple’s vice president of Health and Fitness.
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Federal prosecutors in Mexico, the Navy, and Puebla state police seized 300 crypto mining machines from a remote property in Tlaola that had been intercepting electricity directly from a federal hydroelectric complex, the state security ministry said.
Noise and isolation gave the mining operation away
The site is situated in the Sierra Norte, the rugged northern highlands of Puebla, in a municipality of about 20,000. Officers left with transformers, medium-voltage terminals, and working satellite internet antennas were also taken away.
The units seized were GPUs, which would rule out Bitcoin and point to coins that are still mined on graphics cards. The operation’s cryptocurrency target has not yet been confirmed by authorities.
In a September 6 post on X, the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública said the property was jointly secured by the federal Attorney General’s office, the Navy, and Puebla state forces.
“Electrical infrastructure, satellite internet, and specialized equipment” for generating digital assets had been located on the premises.
Mining “consumes a great deal of energy and generates a lot of noise, which is why operators seek out isolated and very remote locations. That is what alerted us,” said State security minister Francisco Sánchez to reporters.
Sánchez added that the tip-off came from the site’s proximity to the Nuevo Necaxa dam, where investigators had been investigating reports of illegal mining, and that “there was a very large power connection.”
Photos from the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública’s September 6, 2026, X post showing the seized mining rig racks and electrical equipment at the Tlaola property.
Forensic teams investigate illicit crypto laundering networks
Sánchez described the Tlaola property as one node in a broader network that preys on the Sierra Norte’s hydroelectric infrastructure. He said the same activity is cropping up in neighboring states, with searches already stretching to nearby municipalities.
Forensic accountants are trying to ascertain who paid for the hardware, and the state government is investigating whether coins mined at the site were used to launder criminal proceeds.
Mexican authorities busted three other mining operations in Puebla and neighboring Tlaxcala in 2025.
In Malaysia, the country’s national utility Tenaga Nasional reportedly lost over $1.1 billion from 2020 to August 2025 due to electricity theft linked to mining, Cryptopolitan said.
In June, Thailand authorities seized 315 Bitcoin rigs in five northeastern provinces, reckoning the damage from tampered meters and unpaid bills at about $1.2 million.
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Cryptoassets are third on the list of nine economic-crime priorities for the UK’s National Economic Crime Centre.
The annual report of the National Crime Agency unit, published this week, also signals that it wants to hunt its own laundering targets.
NECC wants to build its own intelligence-led capability
The NECC, the UK’s economic crime response coordination body, agreed on nine priorities with the Financial Conduct Authority, Home Office, and Treasury.
Number three is crypto assets. Only professional enablers, corrupt lawyers and accountants, and politically exposed persons rank higher than crypto assets.
Cash and money mules used for criminal activity rank below crypto on the list. This list is intended to guide the compliance work of regulated firms.
The NECC said in its threat assessment that criminals are making “innovative use of crypto asset products to evade detection and move illicit value at scale.” The same passage describes laundering networks that cross borders and that combine old and new techniques.
Many organized crime groups now pay dedicated networks to launder proceeds rather than doing it themselves. The report highlights synthetic identities and automated attacks on banks and cites artificial intelligence alongside crypto as an emerging tool.
The agency said it is developing “a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability.”
Police forces globally use blockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs to retrace illicit flows. The NCA’s stated strategy is to develop that detective work in-house, with sanctions evasion and ransomware payments identified as areas of focus, along with traditional money laundering.
The agency calculates that more than £100 billion is laundered through the UK each year, but it does not separate out how much moves through crypto.
129 arrests mark Destabilise since 2022
The report also updated the figures for Operation Destabilise, the ongoing investigation into Russian-speaking networks converting street cash into cryptocurrency.
The investigation has resulted in the arrest of 129 people and the capture of more than £25 million in cash and cryptoassets across the UK since 2022.
That’s one more arrest than the update the agency gave in November. The NECC said it plans to grow the operation.
Alongside Destabilise, the report spotlighted Operation Atlantic, a week-long sprint from NCA HQ. In March, investigators identified 20,000 approval-phishing victims and froze $12 million, working with the US Secret Service and exchanges Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and stablecoin issuer Tether.
The same effort took down more than 120 scam domains, and one UK victim lost more than £52,000 (about $66,000) to the scam, Cryptopolitan reported.
On policy, the NECC resisted the urge to ban privacy technology. A paper from the Royal United Services Institute, published following a roundtable convened by the NECC, opposes a blanket ban on crypto privacy tools.
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Over the next two years, Google will invest €13 billion in Finland on data centers, clean energy, and community programs. They will operate on nuclear power.
The company said Wednesday that it signed a 22-year agreement to help prolong the life of the Loviisa nuclear power plant, part of what it called its largest single investment anywhere in Europe.
The money for Finland comes as governments across the continent scramble to stop AI infrastructure moving to the United States.
Google doubles its previous German pledge in Finland
Hamina is the center of gravity where Google, 15 years ago, transmuted a defunct paper mill into a data center. The new spending is intended to keep pace with demand for Search, Maps, and Gemini, Google Global Infrastructure VP Bikash Koley wrote in the announcement.
Google said its Hamina operations drew on more than 600 Finnish suppliers for construction, operations, and fiber work from 2023 to 2025.
The new pledge overshadows the size of Google’s recent European moves. In November 2025, Cryptopolitan reported that Google pledged ~€5.5 billion, about $6.4 billion, to expand its German data centers in Dietzenbach and Hanau.
The figure for Finland is more than double that.
€31 million flows to Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala
In addition to the Loviisa deal, Google said it will add onshore wind capacity and enter into a contract for a 94-megawatt battery system that it said would serve to smooth prices during “cold, windless periods.”
Nuclear power offers a dependable baseload that wind and solar cannot, and that is a growing concern to operators of power-hungry AI facilities.
The project is expected to create more than 37,000 jobs across the country and bring €3.6 billion a year to Finnish GDP during construction in 2027 and 2028, according to Google.
Once the facilities are up and running, thousands of permanent roles will follow, from engineers to security and catering staff, the company said.
Google apportioned €31 million over four years to the communities of Hamina, Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala. The budget covers AI upskilling for 4,400+ workers through local colleges.
It also funds training slots for 100 students aimed at future data center careers. The company said it will finance the regeneration of native forests and wetlands near its sites and construct recreational trails, public saunas, and fishing piers.
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