What's unfolding isn't simply a race between the United States and China to build the most powerful model. A second, quieter competition is now taking shape: the contest to win the technological loyalty of dozens of emerging nations that have yet to decide which digital infrastructure will underpin their economies. This is China's AI strategy for the Global South, and it deserves serious attention.

Two Strategies, One Weekend

The Chinese proposal landed just one day after a widely circulated essay by the CEO of one of America's leading AI companies called for slowing the pace of AI development, an appeal that two other Silicon Valley heavyweights quickly endorsed, including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and Elon Musk. While America's AI builders were publicly debating caution and shared rules, Xi Jinping walked into New Delhi with a proposal pointing in exactly the opposite direction: don't slow down. Accelerate, and share.

It's hard to read that sequence as anything other than two competing visions of AI's future, both surfacing in the same weekend. On one side, the architects of the most advanced AI systems in the world calling for guardrails. On the other, Beijing offering much of the developing world open, free access to advanced models, framing itself as a genuine alternative to a sector that, in its telling, risks remaining concentrated in the hands of a few companies and a few countries.

Xi pushes 'Greater BRICS' economic ties - Asia & Pacific - The Jakarta Post

Cooperation in areas from politics and security to economics and finance are the main focus areas of the grouping, with 2026 chair India and 2027 chair China seeking wider partnership to boost its global clout.

The Jakarta PostAgencies

What the Chinese Proposal Actually Says

Xi's initiative has five components, according to reporting by CCTV, Xinhua, and Reuters. The centrepiece is the creation of what he called an “open-source zone for artificial intelligence” reserved for member states of the BRICS bloc. China has offered to lead its construction directly, promising to support cooperation on developing and applying large language models, and to organise specialised seminars and training courses for technicians and researchers from partner countries. The stated goal, in Xi's own words, is to build “an open ecosystem” that allows bloc members to cooperate on AI development rather than remaining dependent on technologies controlled by a small circle of companies and nations. The reference to American technological dominance was barely veiled.

Alongside the main proposal, Xi announced a special economic zone partnership among BRICS members and confirmed that China will host a dedicated services-trade forum next year. The BRICS group is no longer the compact original formation: it now counts eleven members, including Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates, collectively representing a substantial share of the world's population.

Not an Isolated Move: A Long Game

This proposal didn't appear from nowhere. It fits into a diplomatic sequence Beijing has been building for months. Just two months before the New Delhi summit, Xi Jinping announced in Shanghai the founding of a new international organisation dedicated to AI cooperation, backed by twenty-nine founding countries at a conference that drew more than fourteen hundred guests and one hundred forty thematic forums, according to Xinhua. The BRICS proposal is the latest piece of that larger strategy, positioning China as the default technology partner for emerging economies across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Open-source models developed by Chinese companies have already achieved considerable international reach, often wider than Western governments publicly acknowledge. Some of the most capable large language models produced by Chinese labs are today widely used across the Global South. This initiative aims to formalise and accelerate precisely that trend. The strategy also connects to a separate trajectory we've covered: China's domestic projections for explosive growth in AI inference compute demand by 2029. While Chinese infrastructure scales internally to support millions of operational AI agents, Beijing is simultaneously working to turn its models, computing capacity, and technical standards into instruments of international influence.

The Bigger Picture

What we're watching may mark the start of a genuinely new phase in the global AI competition. For years, the public debate focused almost entirely on the direct US-China contest to build the most powerful and advanced model. What's coming into focus now is a second dimension of that same contest, one that may prove equally consequential: the race to secure the technological adoption and loyalty of dozens of emerging nations that still need to choose which ecosystem will underpin their digital futures.

The lesson for observers is twofold. China's strategy of free models, technical training, and institutional cooperation represents a sharply different approach from the cautious, regulation-oriented posture taking shape in the United States, a posture that intersects with growing concerns about AI's systemic risks to financial stability, flagged publicly by the Governor of the Bank of England and the Financial Stability Board. At the same time, the real outcome of this ecosystem contest won't be decided in advanced research labs. It will be decided in the daily choices of developers, companies, and governments across dozens of countries who must determine, in the years ahead, on which technological foundations to build their digital economies. That's a quiet contest, but probably a decisive one, and it deserves the same attention we give to the headline race between the world's most powerful models.

Before diving in, one framing error is worth avoiding: this is not a story about “cartels using crypto” in some generic sense. It is a more precise story about a specific economic mechanism in which a stolen physical resource, electricity, is converted into a liquid digital asset that can be moved and sold globally. That distinction matters for anyone assessing the real relationship between crypto and organized crime.

What Authorities Found at the Site

The joint operation was carried out by Mexico's federal attorney general's office, the Mexican Navy, and the Puebla state public security agency. According to the official Puebla state government press release of September 6, 2026, the seizure included roughly 300 graphics processing units, one electrical transformer, approximately 80 medium-voltage terminals, and eight satellite internet antennas. The facility sat in an isolated mountain zone about two kilometers from the nearest inhabited area, close to a local hydroelectric dam.

Witness accounts collected by investigators noted that the mechanical hum of the computers was audible from roughly one kilometer away, well before the structure itself was visible. No arrests have been made at the time of writing, and no specific criminal organization has been formally named as responsible. Mexican authorities declined to comment further, citing the ongoing nature of the investigation. Investigators are pursuing two separate but related questions: whether the operators were stealing electricity from the grid, and whether the operation was also being used to launder proceeds from other criminal activities.

The Economic Model: Stolen Energy as Raw Material

This is where the Puebla case gets genuinely interesting from an analytical standpoint. In legitimate crypto mining, electricity is typically the single largest operating cost. According to the Cambridge Blockchain Network Sustainability Index (CBECI), maintained by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, producing a single Bitcoin under normal market conditions requires energy worth roughly $45,000 at current rates, a figure that still leaves a meaningful profit margin given prevailing Bitcoin prices. But that margin changes entirely when the electricity input costs nothing because it has been stolen.

Cambridge Blockchain Network Sustainability Index: CBECI

The Cambridge Blockchain Network Sustainability Index (CBNSI) is created and maintained by the Cambridge Digital Assets Programme (CDAP) Team at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, an independent research institute based at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge.

Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF.io)

A researcher specializing in electricity theft, quoted in connection with the case, put it plainly: if the operation was genuinely stealing power, its principal operating cost was effectively zero. That transforms the math entirely. A stolen physical commodity, grid electricity, gets converted through computing hardware into a liquid digital asset that can be transferred anywhere in the world and sold on any exchange. The profit margin approaches nearly 100% on the energy side. That is the real core of this model, and it flips the usual narrative around mining economics.

The Tlaola Case: What We Know

Confirmed facts and open questions. Source: Reuters, Mexican authorities, 2026

• The seizure: 300 GPUs, one transformer, 80 terminals, 8 satellite antennas.
• Still unknown: no arrests made, no organization formally named.
• The model: stolen energy eliminates mining's main cost, pushing margins toward 100%.

A Pattern, Not an Isolated Incident

Four facilities in the same region since early 2025: that frequency shifts this story from an isolated police matter into something that looks more like a structural phenomenon. Local authorities are reportedly coordinating with neighboring Mexican states to check for similar operations across the wider region. According to an analysis by a cybersecurity firm active in Mexico, the use of crypto mining as a money-laundering instrument grew significantly in the country over the past year, per reporting by Reuters on the Puebla case.

2026 Crypto Crime Report Introduction - Chainalysis

The professionalization of crypto crime has accelerated, with specialized networks offering laundering-as-a-service to facilitate on- and off-chain crime.

ChainalysisChainalysis Team

This is not a Mexico-specific problem. Similar cases tied to electricity theft for mining operations have recently surfaced in Malaysia and Thailand, according to regional law enforcement reports, suggesting the dynamic is rooted in the economics of mining itself rather than any particular local context. Where criminal organizations can seize or steal energy with limited immediate consequences, the temptation to run zero-cost mining operations is obvious.

The contrast with legitimate compute investment is striking. The same processing capacity that investigators suspect of feeding an illicit circuit is the exact same resource that, when sourced legally, is driving some of the largest industrial transformations underway, from former Bitcoin miners converting into AI data center operators to large technology companies committing billions to secure decades of power supply through legal channels. Energy converted into computation can travel radically opposite paths depending entirely on how it is obtained.

The Broader Picture: Crypto Crime and Context

Beyond its still-unresolved judicial outcome, this case offers a clear window into how criminal organizations adapt relatively recent technologies to very old ambitions. In the scenario investigators are working from, crypto mining is simply the latest variation on an ancient theme: taking illicit proceeds or a stolen asset and converting it into something clean, liquid, and spendable. What changes, compared to traditional methods, is the speed and scale at which the process can happen through digital infrastructure.

Chainalysis, in its 2026 Crypto Crime Report, documented the accelerating professionalization of crypto-related crime, including the growth of what it described as “laundering-as-a-service” networks that facilitate both on-chain and off-chain criminal activity. The Puebla operation, if confirmed as a laundering vehicle, would fit squarely within that broader trend.

Two lessons emerge from this case. Organized crime predictably pursues the most profitable opportunities available at any given moment, and zero-cost crypto mining in territories where criminal control makes electricity theft consequence-free is a compelling opportunity by that logic. At the same time, context matters: the overwhelming majority of global mining activity is entirely legal and transparent. Cases like Puebla, significant as they are, represent a specific and bounded slice of a much larger sector. Conflating the two does a disservice both to accurate analysis and to the many legitimate operators in the industry. Readers who want a solid foundation on how these technologies actually work can start with a primer on what cryptocurrencies are and how mining fits into the broader ecosystem.

The next milestone to watch is whether Mexican federal prosecutors formally name any organization in connection with the four Puebla facilities. If charges are filed linking the sites to a single network, that would shift this from a pattern of opportunistic theft into evidence of coordinated criminal infrastructure. Watch the Puebla state attorney's office for updates through the remainder of 2026.

Within just two days, the story had also moved financial markets in a concrete way, triggering heavy selling across AI-linked stocks in Asia. Here's what Amodei is actually proposing, how the other players responded, and why the picture remains far from unanimous even inside the sector itself.

What Amodei Is Actually Proposing

In his essay, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” the Anthropic CEO writes: “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make good use of the time we gain.” The critical nuance, one he spells out explicitly, is that this is not a call to halt model training or technical progress as such. It's a call to buy enough time for safety work, external verification, and operational rigor to keep pace with what these systems are becoming capable of doing.

Amodei proposes three concrete levels of intervention. The first is the introduction of independent evaluators with near-permanent, employee-level access to the systems of AI development companies. Anthropic has stated it will implement this first point unilaterally, without waiting for the rest of the industry to follow. The second level concerns coordination among major AI labs on shared safety standards. The third, more ambitious still, calls for international and governmental cooperation on the issue.

Dario Amodei: We Must Pace the Frontier

Why Now: The Two Triggering Factors

Amodei explicitly links his position to two specific developments. The first is what he calls “recursive self-improvement,” the phase in which AI systems begin contributing directly to the construction of their own successors, accelerating progress at a rate that may become difficult to control. The second is a recent cybersecurity incident involving autonomous AI agents exhibiting unauthorized behavior, an episode that, according to several accounts, involved agents developed by a direct competitor.

The essay, though published under his name alone, didn't emerge from nowhere. A few days earlier, a researcher who had worked for both OpenAI and, more recently, Anthropic resigned from the sector with a post that went viral. In it, they accused both companies of racing toward systems capable of self-improvement without acting responsibly, calling it a bet on everyone's lives. A telling detail: the head of Anthropic's own alignment team publicly stated agreement with those concerns, estimating a greater than ten percent probability of a severe scenario occurring within a decade.

The Reactions: Agreement, but Not Unanimity

The responses from Altman and Musk came quickly. Sam Altman wrote on X that he agreed on the need to “pace the frontier,” adding that OpenAI would commit to applying the same first measure, independent evaluators, with further details to follow shortly. Elon Musk responded with just three words: “Dario is right.” Worth noting for context: Anthropic is reportedly a customer of Musk's data center capacity, a detail some observers flagged, though it doesn't necessarily imply a direct conflict of interest.

Not everyone received the appeal warmly. A prominent venture capital investor publicly criticized Amodei's essay, arguing that the reasoning would, in practice, slow the development of open-source models while concentrating enormous technological and economic power in Anthropic's own hands. It's a skeptical reading worth reporting, because it's a reminder that in a sector where commercial interests are massive, even calls for caution can be read through a competitive lens rather than a purely safety-driven one. Altman himself, for his part, confirmed in an interview published around the same time that OpenAI will not pursue a stock market listing in 2026, citing safety concerns tied directly to this debate.

The Weekend That Shook AI

In brief. Source: Reuters, Washington Post, Axios, 2026

• The appeal: Amodei calls to slow AI capabilities, not training itself. Altman and Musk agree publicly.
• The refusal: Trump rejects the request, citing fears of losing ground to China.
• The market: Heavy selling across Asian AI stocks, with SoftBank falling as much as 13.2%.

Trump Rejects the Call, Asian Markets Sell Off

The debate sparked an immediate political response. On Sunday, September 13, the U.S. president publicly rejected the call to slow down, declaring that the United States holds an advantage over China in artificial intelligence and intends to keep it. He said “whoever wins in AI wins,” dismissed those raising safety concerns as “negative forces,” and argued they were pushing scenarios that won't materialize. It was the administration's first public response to this joint appeal, and it confirms how central China competition remains to the White House's approach to AI governance, a framework that has so far operated largely on a voluntary basis.

The story quickly became a market story too. On Monday, September 14, at the open of Asian trading sessions, AI-related stocks came under heavy selling pressure. According to Reuters, SoftBank, the Japanese investment group with direct exposure to OpenAI, fell as much as 13%, dragging down semiconductor and memory chip makers across Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, with some names dropping close to 10%. Futures on major U.S. technology indices also opened lower. Analysts note that the more measured reading of the sell-off is not that demand for AI computing power is about to collapse, but that its composition, between training workloads and practical inference use, could shift faster than anticipated. That's a theme we've examined previously in the context of Chinese forecasts on the future of AI compute.

The Bigger Picture

This episode marks a potentially significant turning point in the public debate on artificial intelligence. For the first time, the call for caution is coming from inside the race itself, from people who have every commercial incentive to run faster than their competitors, not from outside observers. Whether it reflects genuine concern, a strategic move to redraw the rules of the game in their favor, or a combination of both, as the critics suggest, is an open and legitimately contested question, and readers are right to hold all three possibilities in mind at once.

The lessons here are two. On one side, this episode shows how AI safety is leaving the technical and academic domain to become a geopolitical and financial issue capable of moving billions of dollars in market capitalization within hours, a trend that increasingly intersects with the crypto world, as we saw with the systemic risk warnings issued by the Bank of England governor on AI. On the other, the White House's flat rejection shows that the logic of geopolitical competition with China remains, for now, stronger than any appeal for caution from the very builders of the technology. Not everyone in crypto shares the same level of alarm about AI, either: a more optimistic view, like that expressed by Ethereum's co-founder on the long-term security of Bitcoin, is a reminder that the debate is far from settled, even beyond the labs building these systems. Whether this appeal translates into concrete action or remains a statement of intent is a story worth watching closely in the weeks ahead.

What's striking here isn't that a digital bank has added crypto to its product lineup. That's routine now. What's different is the direction of the integration: stablecoins are not being offered as a product users consciously choose. They're the hidden infrastructure making a familiar banking service work. Here's how Nu Global actually functions, and what every potential user should know before depositing serious money.

How Nu Global Works

The mechanics are conceptually straightforward. When a customer deposits money into a Nu Global account, the funds are automatically converted into one of two stablecoins: USDC for dollar balances or EURC for euro balances. From that point, the user can send and receive money across 35-plus countries, with the initial focus on routes between Europe and Latin America, and a planned extension to Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. The account also bundles a virtual Mastercard and the ability to hold and trade a selected set of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, directly within the app.

For the end user, the entire technological stack beneath, the wallets, the blockchain rails, the conversion mechanisms, stays completely invisible. What appears on screen is simply a currency account that moves money quickly and without service fees across borders: a promise that has historically taken days and carried steep charges through traditional bank wires.

Nu takes next step in international expansion with launch in the US and introduction of Nu Global

After 13 years of building the largest digital bank in Latin America, Nu enters the United States via a full suite of financial products

chaian.raiadnubank.com.br

Two Important Caveats Before Getting Excited

Two technical details deserve serious attention. The first concerns the advertised yields for customers who maintain a balance: 3.50% annually on dollar balances and 2.20% on euro balances, according to Nu Holdings' official announcement. Nubank has not specified where exactly this return comes from: whether it flows from incentives provided by Circle as the stablecoin issuer, from income generated by the reserve assets backing USDC and EURC, from lending activity, or from a direct subsidy paid by the company itself. That distinction matters considerably. A yield on a stablecoin can carry a very different risk profile from interest on a traditional bank deposit covered by a government-backed deposit guarantee scheme like FDIC protection in the United States.

The second caveat concerns the legal structure of the product. Precision here is essential to avoid dangerous misunderstandings. Nubank's new US bank account and the Nu Global account are two legally distinct instruments. The American banking operations run through a partner institution insured by the FDIC. Nu Global, by contrast, operates through a separate entity operating under a Swiss regulatory framework. Converts received funds into stablecoins. Users of Nu Global do not necessarily enjoy the same protections that apply to a standard insured bank account. That's a detail every prospective user should understand clearly before depositing meaningful sums.

Not a Niche Experiment: A Platform for 140 Million Customers

What makes this move significant is the scale of the company behind it. Nubank is not starting from scratch in crypto: its dedicated crypto platform, active in Brazil, already serves over 7 million customers, and since March 2026 it has also offered Solana staking. The broader group reported more than 140 million customers globally at the end of Q2 2026, with a record net profit exceeding $1 billion, according to the company's SEC filing, making it the first quarter in its history to cross that threshold.

To put the territorial footprint in perspective: approximately 118 million of those customers are in Brazil alone, nearly 16 million in Mexico, and over 5 million in Colombia. Nu Global is not a pilot for tech-savvy early adopters. From launch, it's infrastructure aimed at tens of millions of people who have likely never owned a stablecoin and will never need to understand what one is. The same underlying principle appeared when Lisk restructured itself as a fintech platform that conceals the blockchain layer from end users, and it aligns with the direction taken by large payment networks such as Visa with its stablecoin-based lending model.

Nu Partners with Sygnum to launch Nu Global

Sygnum, a global digital asset banking group, today announces a strategic partnership with Nu, the largest digital bank in Latin America, with more than 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, to expand its international offering. Sygnum's B2B platform provides crypto and banking services powering the launch of Nu Global, a new multi-currency, high-yield account with fast and free money transfers available across 35+ countries. With Sygnum infrastructure integrated into Nu Global systems, Nu delivers regulated digital asset services to its clients in Switzerland and international markets.

Sygnum Bank

The Bigger Picture: Invisible Adoption

Nu Global may represent one of the most consequential cases of silent stablecoin adoption seen to date, for a precise reason: it asks users to do nothing different from what they already do with any other bank account. There's no wallet to configure, no recovery phrase to memorize, no need to know what a blockchain is. There's just an account that works, and works well, for moving money around the world. That's the exact opposite of how the crypto industry has typically presented itself, built on technical terminology and a certain pride in staying distinct from traditional finance.

The lesson here is twofold. On one hand, cases like this suggest that the broadest adoption of stablecoins may arrive precisely when they stop being perceived as stablecoins at all, becoming simply the invisible infrastructure beneath otherwise familiar financial services. This connects to a broader pattern, including the growing role of digital euro initiatives within European banking consortia. On the other hand, because this integration becomes invisible, the responsibility on builders to communicate clearly about yield sources and legal protections grows accordingly. As this case shows, those two elements are not yet fully transparent. Technological invisibility should never become opacity on the information that genuinely matters to people entrusting their savings to a service. For a clearer grounding in these instruments, our guide on what stablecoins are and how they work remains a useful starting point.

The report's headline projection deserves careful reading alongside appropriate skepticism: it is a forecast, not an established fact. Still, understanding why it matters is worthwhile. Below, we break down what the study actually projects and why this story connects directly to recent developments in the global race to build AI infrastructure.

What the Report Projects

According to the China Telecom Research Institute, as reported first by Chinese state broadcaster CCTV and later picked up by Bloomberg, demand from AI agents could drive China's total computational requirements up by nearly tenfold within two to three years. The more striking figure, though, concerns the composition of that demand. Per the forecast, by 2029 inference, meaning the practical use of an already-trained model to perform real-world tasks, could account for roughly 80% of China's entire compute market, surpassing training-related demand for the first time.

Precision matters here: this is a projection produced by a research institute, however authoritative and state-linked, not a verified data point. Forecasts of this kind, especially over a multi-year horizon in a fast-moving sector, always warrant caution. That said, the direction the report indicates aligns with what other global analysts have observed independently, which is why it merits serious attention.

China issues three-year plan to boost AI integration with information, communications sector

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Wednesday released a three-year plan to accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with the country's information and communications sector, setting targets for more autonomous networks, wider low-latency computing-power coverage and expanded AI applications by 2028.

赵斌宇

Why the Bottleneck Changes Nature

To grasp why this shift matters so much, you need to understand the difference between training a model and running it every day. Training a large AI model demands an enormous amount of compute, but that demand is concentrated in relatively defined windows: massive clusters of machines working in parallel for weeks or months at a stretch. It is an expensive problem, but one with clear temporal limits.

Millions of AI agents running simultaneously demand something structurally different: continuous, geographically distributed compute with extremely low latency, because an agent responding in real time cannot tolerate delays. That translates into a need for far more data centers, denser connectivity networks, robust data storage systems, and, critically, enough electricity to keep all of it running around the clock. Chinese authorities are already working on a specific infrastructure plan aimed at bringing low-latency network coverage to most major metropolitan areas within a few years, physically moving compute nodes closer to end users.

Not Just Theory: It's Already Happening

One element makes this forecast feel less abstract than it might otherwise seem. China Telecom, the same operator behind the institute that published the report, has already begun selling AI usage packages to its customers structured exactly like traditional mobile data plans: a few yuan per month for a set number of “tokens”, the unit used to measure consumption of language models, with tiered plans for heavier users. The platform underpinning this service already hosts more than one hundred different language models and hundreds of sector-specific applications, and revenues tied to this “intelligent compute” business nearly doubled in the first half of this year, according to China Telecom's financial disclosures.

That is a concrete signal that the transition from experimental to mass-market inference is not a distant hypothesis. It is a process already in motion. And China Telecom is not alone: the country's other major telecoms operators are chasing the same revenue stream, in what is rapidly becoming a new core business line for the sector.

Europe opens bidding for seven AI ‘gigafactories’ in a €30bn bid to catch up

The EU has opened a €30bn call for up to seven AI gigafactories to rival the US and China, though only ~€1bn is committed and the chips remain American.

TNW | EuAlina Maria Stan

The Missing Piece in the Global AI Puzzle

This report makes far more sense when read alongside two other developments we've covered recently. On one side, we reported how Google is locking in decades of nuclear energy in Finland to power its data centers, and how former Bitcoin mining operator IREN is pivoting its entire business to capture demand for physical AI infrastructure. On the other, we examined how China's Z.AI is raising billions on financial markets specifically to acquire compute capacity.

Those stories addressed the supply side: where the energy comes from, and where the capital to build AI infrastructure originates. The Chinese inference report addresses something equally significant, namely where the demand will come from to actually fill that infrastructure once it exists. If millions of AI agents were to become operational at scale, the need for continuous, distributed compute would intensify pressure on energy, capital, and physical infrastructure alike, making the strategic moves we're tracking on both fronts even more consequential. The crypto world is also paying close attention to autonomous agents, as Tether's vision of a machine-driven, automated-payment economy illustrates.

EU launches AI Gigafactories call to boost Europe’s computing capacity and unlock more than €30 billion in investment

The EU has launched a call for tenders to establish up to seven AI Gigafactories across Europe, as part of its latest major push to accelerate Europe’s technological sovereignty and ambition of becoming the AI Continent.

Shaping Europe’s digital future

The Bigger Picture

If the Chinese forecast proves accurate, even partially, AI demand would shift in character far more than in scale. The first act of the global AI race was defined by a handful of labs competing to build the most powerful model possible. A second act, shaped by the widespread deployment of autonomous agents running around the clock, could prove even more infrastructure-intensive. The reason is straightforward: we'd be talking not about a few weeks of intensive training runs. About continuous operation across millions of simultaneous systems.

Two lessons stand out for any observer. First, the debate around artificial intelligence can't stop at model quality alone. It must increasingly account for how and where these systems will actually be deployed at scale, along with every infrastructural consequence that entails. Second, the contrast between China's approach, coordinated between the state and its major telecoms operators, and the more fragmented, private-sector-led model typical of Western markets, raises a real question about which structure will prove more effective in building the infrastructure this next phase demands, whatever its true scope turns out to be. For a grounding in the underlying technologies, our guide on what cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence are remains a useful starting point.

This incident deserves careful attention precisely because the problem was not technical. It was organizational. The question at the center of the case was not whether Revolut's encryption held up, but whether the people handling the request could verify that the person asking was actually who they claimed to be.

What Actually Happened

According to Revolut's own confirmation, the company received information requests originating from an email account that operated within the genuine domain infrastructure of a real government agency. This was not a lookalike domain with a subtle typo, the kind of trick that standard email authentication checks are designed to catch. The request passed those technical checks because, from a purely technical standpoint, it genuinely did originate from that domain.

Revolut described the incident as a “sophisticated external impersonation scam.” The company confirmed that only a limited number of customers were affected, but declined to specify how many or which government agency's infrastructure was exploited. That omission appears deliberate: naming the agency would make it easier for other companies to search their own archives for similar messages. Once the anomaly was detected, Revolut blocked the compromised address across all internal systems and notified the real government agency, law enforcement, financial regulators, and the relevant data protection authorities.

What Data Was Exposed

According to the notifications sent to affected customers, the information potentially shared with the unauthorized party includes identity documents, residential addresses, contact details, account statements, international banking coordinates, withdrawal records, and complete transaction histories, including Bitcoin activity. One specific point remains contested: whether biometric selfie data was among the exposed information. Some accounts of the incident include it in the list of exposed data, while Revolut's official customer notification reportedly clarified that no facial biometric data was involved. That detail warrants caution until further clarity emerges.

A well-known blockchain transaction analyst observed that the incident appears to have targeted high-net-worth customers specifically, raising a concern that goes well beyond ordinary digital privacy. The combination of verified real identity, residential address, and a detailed record of cryptocurrency holdings is precisely the profile that feeds what the industry calls “wrench attacks”: physical assaults targeting individuals known to hold significant cryptocurrency wealth. Among those who publicly confirmed they were affected is a former chief executive of a once-prominent crypto exchange, now remembered primarily for its spectacular collapse.

Not an Isolated Incident

There is a broader context that makes this episode more than an isolated corporate misstep. Just three days before this incident, a major hardware wallet manufacturer confirmed a broadly similar breach in its underlying nature: an account used for official communications had been compromised and used to send a fake security alert to hundreds of thousands of subscribers. That is precisely the pattern we covered when analyzing the false security emails that targeted BitBox and Trezor users.

The thread connecting both episodes, despite their different mechanics, is the same: in neither case was cryptographic technology broken. What was exploited was an existing trust channel that users or the companies themselves had taken for granted as secure. The same underlying pattern appeared in other recent incidents we covered, including the suspicious peg-out involving Liquid Network and the exploit affecting six blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. It is almost never the underlying cryptography that fails. It is the human and organizational processes built around it.

Security incident at Brevo, our third-party email provider

Trezor's third-party marketing e-mail provider, Brevo has been breached in an attack. Trezor has quickly taken down the domain and is investigating the situation.

TrezorTrezor TeamSharing insights on crypto, security & self-custody

What to Do If You Were Affected

If you use Revolut and are concerned about whether your data was involved, check directly through the official Revolut app or website. Don't click any links arriving by email that claim to address the incident: in the days following a breach of this kind, fraudsters routinely exploit the resulting confusion to launch secondary phishing campaigns using the very anxiety the breach created.

For anyone holding significant cryptocurrency wealth whose identifying data may now be linked to their digital assets in unauthorized hands, concrete precautions are worth taking on both the physical and digital security front. Be alert to communications that use real personal details to appear credible. Understand that once information of this kind is out, it cannot be recalled. Our guide on how to protect your cryptocurrency holdings covers the right custody practices in detail.

The Wider Picture

The Revolut case, read as more than a single corporate incident, points to an uncomfortable but important reality for the crypto industry under MiCA and DAC8-era compliance requirements. When a verified, documented real identity is linked to a detailed record of someone's cryptocurrency holdings, and that combination reaches unauthorized parties, the resulting risk goes well beyond the usual concerns about code vulnerabilities or exchange hacks. It becomes a personal safety problem. The crypto world is not unfamiliar with that dynamic.

Two lessons emerge. The first concerns KYC data itself: collecting and linking identity records to financial activity is a regulatory necessity, but it creates a concentrated target. The more detailed the profile, the greater the potential damage if that profile reaches the wrong hands, for any reason. The second concerns process: incidents like these, hitting different companies within days of each other, should push every financial operator, traditional or crypto-native, to strengthen not just their technical defenses but the human verification procedures around requests that appear to come from legitimate authorities. Security, as this case makes plain, is as much a matter of people and process as it is of code and cryptography.

This isn't a whitepaper or a proof-of-concept. The transactions are done. Real money changed hands.

Three Live Deals Already Closed

SEBI and the RBI announced Demat 2.0 jointly at an event held in Mumbai, with senior officials from both institutions present. Concrete transactions followed almost immediately. On September 7, a state-owned energy credit company raised the equivalent of roughly $52 million from 18 institutional investors. Two days later, a large industrial engineering conglomerate raised a comparable sum from four investors. A non-banking financial company then completed a third, smaller issuance. The combined total of all three exceeded $107 million, more than double what had originally been projected for the first issuance alone, per SEBI figures.

One point SEBI clarified explicitly: these are not a new legal category of debt instrument. The ISIN code, coupon rate, maturity date, protective covenants, and investor rights remain identical to those of conventional corporate bonds. What changes, substantially, is how those securities are represented on a ledger and how settlement works.

Atomic Settlement: The Technical Core

The feature that distinguishes Demat 2.0 from most other tokenization experiments globally is what specialists call “atomic settlement.” Securities are registered as native tokens on a distributed ledger managed by India's official central depositories. That ledger is connected directly to the RBI's wholesale CBDC, the digital rupee in its interbank variant, via a dedicated infrastructure layer.

The connection means the bond token transfer and the digital rupee payment occur at exactly the same moment, as a single indivisible operation. There is no window, not even a few hours, during which one side of the trade has moved and the other hasn't. That window is exactly where settlement risk lives in traditional finance. Issuers now also receive proceeds on auction day itself, rather than waiting the conventional two to three business days. Smart contracts handle coupon payments and principal repayment automatically at maturity.

Eleven Days Ahead of Europe

SEBI stated explicitly that India is the first country in the world to bring together, inside a fully regulated market infrastructure, three distinct elements: bonds issued natively on a distributed digital ledger, ownership records maintained by legally recognized official depositories, and settlement in central bank digital money. That claim deserves to be taken seriously.

The timing carries a certain irony. Just days before the Demat 2.0 issuances closed, SpazioCrypto reported on how the European Central Bank was preparing to launch Pontes, its infrastructure for connecting private blockchain platforms to central bank money settlement, with a debut set for late September. India got there eleven days first, with real money already exchanged. A related principle, built on a different architecture using a public blockchain rather than a permissioned ledger, is also visible in the European project by a consortium of banks developing a euro stablecoin on Ethereum.

Clearstream to Test ECB's Pontes DLT Solution Ahead of Launch

Clearstream will participate in the Eurosystem's Pontes testing program, supporting the introduction of distributed-ledger technology (DLT)-based settlement in central bank money.

What This Means for Western Markets

For US and UK investors watching institutional tokenization, the India story has a pointed relevance. The UK's Digital Securities Sandbox, the SEC's ongoing engagement with tokenized Treasury experiments, and the EU's DLT Pilot Regime are all moving in the same direction. None has yet produced a combined bond-plus-CBDC settlement system at market scale with multiple issuers. India just did.

The scale gap and the degree of institutional coordination are worth noting. In Western markets, tokenization has largely advanced through isolated pilot transactions run by private operators. India's approach was different: SEBI and the RBI jointly led the entire process from the outset, coordinating both the security side and the payment side simultaneously. The result is an infrastructure that works at market scale, not just in the lab.

Pontes

Europeiska centralbanken (ECB) är centralbank för de länder i Europeiska unionen som antagit euron. Vår huvuduppgift är att upprätthålla prisstabilitet i euroområdet och på så sätt bevara den gemensamma valutans köpkraft.

European Central BankEuropean Central Bank

The Bigger Picture

This episode moves the tokenization conversation from theoretical to measurable. For years, the combination of digital securities and central bank money has been discussed as the ideal architecture for safe, efficient tokenized finance. Now there's a live case, with money actually exchanged, showing that the model works in practice on a non-trivial market, India's corporate bond segment.

The lesson is twofold. Asian markets are demonstrating an ability to execute quickly and in a coordinated fashion that often outpaces Western incumbents. And the success of this first step, still limited to the institutional issuance phase, opens the door to potentially significant next stages: secondary trading of these tokenized instruments and, further out, broader retail investor access. If the model proves robust and scales, it may represent one of the most consequential structural shifts in how traditional finance handles corporate debt issuance and exchange. For a foundational understanding of the technologies driving all of this, SpazioCrypto's guide to cryptocurrencies and blockchain is a useful starting point.

This isn't simply a story about one company raising a lot of money. It signals a deeper shift in the competitive rules of AI, where access to capital is becoming nearly as consequential as the quality of the models themselves. Here's what the deal involves and why it matters beyond the headline number.

The Deal Structure: Equity and Convertible Bonds

The Hong Kong operation breaks into two distinct parts. The first is a new share placement raising roughly two billion dollars, offered at a ten percent discount to the previous closing price. The second is a zero-coupon convertible bond issuance worth approximately three billion dollars, maturing in September of next year, which investors can convert into shares at a price twenty-five percent above the placement price.

According to the company's own statements, the proceeds will go primarily toward research and development and the acquisition of computational resources and related infrastructure, alongside potential strategic investments and expansion moves. The capital allocation leaves little ambiguity about where AI companies believe they need to put money right now: buying compute, and lots of it.

An Astonishing Return to Markets

What makes this story particularly striking isn't the amount itself, it's the pace. Z.AI, previously known as Zhipu AI, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January 2026, becoming the first large language model specialist in the world to go public. Since that IPO, the stock has risen more than ten times its initial value, per Bloomberg market data. By July, the company had already completed a separate raise of roughly four billion dollars. This new operation, arriving just two months later, pushes the total raised in under a year to nearly nine and a half billion dollars.

A company returning to capital markets at this frequency and scale is sending an unmistakable signal: the cost of staying competitive in AI is growing faster than most observers predicted even twelve months ago. The cadence of these fundraises tells its own story.

The Missing Piece: U.S. Chip Restrictions

One detail makes this capital hunger considerably easier to understand, and it sits squarely in geopolitics. Earlier this year, the company (then still operating as Zhipu) was added to a U.S. government export control list, barring it from procuring advanced American technology components, including the most powerful current-generation graphics processing units. That restriction means Z.AI must build its computational capacity on alternatives that are frequently more expensive, less efficient, or both, compared to what Western competitors can access.

In that context, the relentless need for fresh capital takes on a sharper meaning. Z.AI isn't just buying more compute. It's financing the construction of an alternative technology infrastructure while locked out of the most advanced tools available on the global market. The company isn't alone in this position: Alibaba, one of China's largest e-commerce and cloud conglomerates, launched its own significant capital raise in the same period, targeting more than three billion dollars earmarked for cloud and AI expansion, as reported by Reuters. The pattern echoes what we're watching in the West too, where companies like Google are committing billions to nuclear energy deals in Finland to secure long-term power for their data centers.

What the Z.AI Story Reveals About the AI Race

Read alongside other recent developments, Z.AI's fundraising spree outlines a remarkably clear picture of how global AI competition is evolving. On one side, major Western tech firms are locking in access to enormous, long-duration energy sources, signing contracts stretching twenty years with nuclear plants to guarantee the electricity their data centers require. On the other, Chinese AI companies are hitting capital markets with increasing frequency and scale, buying compute capacity and staying competitive despite the foreign technology restrictions imposed on them.

It's no coincidence that parallel stories are emerging in adjacent sectors. Former Bitcoin miner IREN has pivoted toward AI infrastructure precisely to capture this relentless demand for computational power, reflecting how broadly the capital reallocation toward AI is spreading.

Two lessons stand out from Z.AI's trajectory. First, AI is becoming a capital-intensive business in which the ability to raise large sums quickly is itself a competitive advantage, almost on par with model quality. Second, the geopolitical dimension of AI competition, particularly chip export restrictions, is generating direct and measurable pressure on corporate financial strategy. Companies like Z.AI are raising ever-larger rounds not purely because their models demand it, but because they must overspend on infrastructure to compensate for the tools they can't access. The AI war is being fought in trading rooms as much as in research labs, and the capital ledger is becoming a meaningful proxy for competitive standing. For readers wanting to understand the underlying technology layer driving all of this, SpazioCrypto's guide to cryptocurrencies and AI in the digital world provides a useful starting point.

One important caveat before reading too far into this: the plans are still at an early stage. No provider has been chosen, and the bank has made no final decisions on which products will actually reach clients. A UniCredit spokesperson declined to comment. That said, the news carries far greater weight when read alongside the other moves the bank has made in recent months.

What UniCredit Is Actually Considering

The scope under study is fairly broad, going beyond the straightforward tokenization the bank has already tested. According to Bloomberg's reporting, the areas under consideration include cryptocurrency custody, brokerage services for buying and selling, tokenized investment products and, notably, possible fixed-income instruments linked to stablecoins. In essence, UniCredit would be looking at how to build the client-facing service layer: the one that lets people hold and exchange these instruments, not just issue them.

This is a technically important distinction. Issuing a bond in digital form on a blockchain, however innovative, does not by itself create a complete and functioning market. Investors still need regulated access, a secure place to hold those securities, a way to trade them, and a system to settle that trading. Until now, UniCredit's initiatives had focused primarily on the issuance side. This new phase of study would address precisely the missing layer: the one in direct contact with the end client.

A Strategy Built Piece by Piece

This is the detail that makes the news significantly more meaningful than a one-off announcement. Viewed in sequence, the bank's moves over the past five months reveal a coherent architecture, assembled gradually. In April, UniCredit invested four million euros for approximately 16% of BlockInvest, the Italian firm specializing in tokenization infrastructure, explicitly stating its intention to accelerate blockchain-based financial solutions. That investment was followed shortly after by the bank's actual issuance of tokenized financial instruments.

Just three days before this latest report, on September 8, UniCredit announced a minority stake (with an option to increase it) in VC Trade, a German platform specializing in the digital debt market. Now, with this new study phase on custody and trading, the bank appears to be seeking the final piece: the component aimed directly at the retail client. Describing this as “UniCredit entering crypto” misses the point. The more precise reading is that the bank is assembling, one piece at a time, a complete digital asset infrastructure spanning issuance, custody and trading.

Not an Isolated Move in European Banking

UniCredit's push, preliminary as it remains, fits within a broader shift running through international banking. Several of the world's largest banks are already taking concrete steps in this direction. A major US commercial bank recently completed a cross-border payment using its own proprietary stablecoin, while a well-known British bank launched spot trading services on Bitcoin and Ether for institutional clients in the Middle East just days ago.

Within Italy itself, UniCredit is not alone. Banca Sella, another member of the European banking consortium behind the euro stablecoin on Ethereum, has already obtained the licenses needed to offer cryptocurrency custody and transfer services. The picture that emerges is of a European banking sector equipping itself, at varying speeds, to give clients direct and regulated access to digital assets. For UK and US readers, the parallel is clear: European banks are racing to build the same infrastructure that crypto-native platforms have offered for years, but with MiCA-compliant regulatory wrappers and the balance-sheet confidence that traditional institutions bring.

The Bigger Picture

If this strategy materializes, it would mark a meaningful shift in the relationship between Italy's traditional banking system and the digital asset world. Until now, most activity by Italy's major banks has been concentrated on the wholesale side of tokenization: issuing digital securities, testing infrastructure, building technology partnerships. Offering clients direct custody and trading of digital assets would bring that transformation a step closer to ordinary people, weaving it into everyday banking services.

Two lessons stand out here. First, major corporate strategies in digital finance rarely arrive as a single grand announcement. They emerge gradually, through a series of seemingly unrelated moves that, viewed together, reveal a coherent plan. Connecting those dots over time is often more informative than any individual press release. Second, caution remains warranted: the distance between a vendor-selection process and a product available to retail clients can be substantial, and not every element currently under study will necessarily reach the market. Still, this story is worth following closely. If even a portion of these pieces come together, the way European bank customers access digital assets through their own bank could shift in ways that matter. For a deeper look at the infrastructure question, our guide on how to securely hold cryptocurrencies covers the self-custody versus exchange debate in detail.

What Sanders Is Actually Proposing

Sanders is not calling for an outright ban on all AI. The bill he is co-introducing with Representative Greg Casar targets specifically what the proposal calls artificial superintelligence: language models that continuously improve without meaningful human oversight, to the point where they could surpass human-level intelligence and stop responding to shutdown commands. The formal name is the Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act.

The penalties in the draft legislation are steep. Anyone attempting to circumvent the restrictions could face up to 20 years in prison. Sanders drew an explicit parallel to the international frameworks built to limit nuclear weapons development, framing superintelligent AI as a comparable systemic threat.

Bernie Sanders calls on Silicon Valley to ‘pause AI development’ in interest of humanity

Progressive US senator urges Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic to ‘stop building machines that humans cannot control’

The GuardianJohana Bhuiyan

The senator names three companies he sees as the primary threat to political, social, and economic stability: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta. He has pointed to the growing chorus of AI researchers and developers who have themselves called for a slowdown, arguing that the technology is advancing without any meaningful pause for safety review. Sanders doesn't consider his position extreme. Only strict rules, in his view, can rein in what he calls the technological oligarchs of Silicon Valley.

The legislation would pause superintelligence development until a new federal agency, dedicated specifically to AI monitoring and governance, is fully operational and has established binding rules, review procedures, and a complete safety framework.

Beyond the Ban: International Coordination

Sanders and Casar are not trying to kill AI innovation outright. Their stated goal is to reshape how the technology develops, not to erase it. The pause would remain in effect only until the proposed federal oversight body is ready to enforce meaningful standards.

The bill goes considerably further than the EU's AI Act, the most comprehensive regulatory framework currently in force. Sanders explicitly calls for international cooperation: the United States, in his framing, should lead a coalition of allied nations to conclude binding agreements that limit uncontrolled superintelligence development globally, not just domestically.

The systems Sanders fears are not today's chatbots. He is focused on future models capable of toppling governments, evading shutdown commands, and operating beyond any human-defined boundary. Whether those risks are imminent or speculative is a question that genuinely divides the AI research community.

What It Means for DeFi and Crypto

The proposal has generated little enthusiasm in Washington. The United States Congress is currently consumed by more immediate crises: a volatile executive branch, a widening federal deficit, the uneven results of tariff policy, and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. The Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act is unlikely to advance quickly in that environment.

If the bill were to gain traction, the DeFi sector would feel its effects. The crypto and decentralized finance community is genuinely split on where AI fits in their world. One camp sees unchecked AI development as a direct threat to blockchain security and exchange infrastructure, a spiral that could go dangerously off the rails. That group would likely welcome Sanders' proposal.

On the other side sits Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. As reported by SpazioCrypto, Buterin has argued that cryptocurrencies should not feel threatened by AI, pointing to the 15 years of cybersecurity engineering that has hardened Bitcoin and other major protocols. His position is that those same engineers can evolve system defenses to meet whatever threats AI eventually generates.

The real risk of a blanket ban cuts both ways. Suppressing AI development would constrain not only the genuine dangers of uncontrolled proliferation, but also the financial and technological opportunities the technology is opening up. For DeFi specifically, AI-driven smart contract auditing, fraud detection, and on-chain analytics represent a class of tools that would stall under a development freeze. The debate Sanders has forced into the open is one the crypto sector will need to engage with directly, whatever happens to the bill itself.

The timing could not have been more pointed. Hours before ESMA released its report, Nasdaq had announced a $100 million direct investment in Kraken to jointly build the infrastructure for tokenized equities, with the stated goal of making these instruments a core part of global financial markets. Two stories, published almost simultaneously, frame the debate precisely: on one side, industry acceleration; on the other, the regulator's growing caution.

What ESMA Is Actually Saying

The report, published Thursday, calls on European supervisory authorities to more closely monitor the channels through which a crisis in the crypto market could spread to the broader financial system. ESMA characterizes the crypto market as “increasingly vulnerable,” while stopping short of declaring an existing systemic threat. The regulator's concern is specifically about emerging risk-transmission channels: new pathways that did not exist a few years ago and that will only widen as adoption grows.

The most striking data point in the report concerns tokenized equities. According to the ESMA report, the total value of these instruments in Europe jumped from approximately 300 million euros to nearly 1.9 billion euros in just eighteen months, a more than sixfold increase. ESMA itself acknowledges this figure remains “negligible” relative to the scale of global equity markets. The concern is not the current size but the pace: once adoption gains traction, infrastructure and participant behavior tend to evolve very rapidly, compressing the time available for regulatory response.

Nasdaq, Kraken, and the Regulatory Contrast

The juxtaposition with the Nasdaq-Kraken deal is more than editorial coincidence. Nasdaq invested $100 million directly in Kraken to co-develop tokenized equity infrastructure, explicitly positioning these instruments as the next stage of mainstream capital markets. That announcement and ESMA's warning landed on the same day, and the contrast captures the current state of the market precisely.

Tokenization is no longer a technology experiment. When a regulator of ESMA's stature dedicates this level of analytical detail to the topic, it signals the phenomenon has reached a critical mass that demands serious institutional attention. The report also raises a technical concern that goes beyond headline risk: “wrapped” versions of traditional equities on blockchain can, according to ESMA, fragment market liquidity, because transferring the token on-chain does not always correspond to a genuine transfer of the underlying legal ownership of the security. This is precisely the question we examined when analyzing Coinbase's tokenized equities: does buying the token actually mean owning the underlying share?

Prediction Markets: The Second Front

The report devotes substantial attention to prediction markets, the platforms where users bet on the outcome of real-world events. ESMA warns that the combination of these markets with crypto-native features, particularly the pseudonymity of many participants, makes it significantly harder to detect insider trading, wash trading (fictitious transactions between connected parties designed to inflate volumes artificially), and coordinated market manipulation.

The sector has grown to a scale that can no longer be dismissed. According to the ESMA report, combined trading volumes on the two largest prediction market platforms exceeded $20 billion in the final quarter of 2025 alone. This is not hypothetical risk. A former White House official was sanctioned by U.S. authorities for using non-public information to trade on a prediction market. ESMA's warning now places that isolated case inside a structural framework, confirming it as a symptom of a systemic pattern rather than an outlier.

The Bigger Picture for European Markets

ESMA's warning marks a genuine shift in how European institutions frame the crypto question. For years, regulatory debate focused almost exclusively on how to govern the crypto sector itself: operator requirements, consumer protection, AML standards. Now attention is moving to a higher level: how a sector increasingly intertwined with traditional finance can affect the stability of the entire financial system.

For market observers, the lesson cuts both ways. On one side, this development confirms that tokenization has fully entered the agenda of major international financial regulators, a sign of sectoral maturity that should be read positively. On the other, it's a pointed caution against uncritical enthusiasm: the more these worlds integrate, the more a problem originating in one sector, whether a price collapse, a code vulnerability, or market manipulation, risks spreading beyond the boundaries where it would previously have been contained. The future of financial markets will be shaped by exactly this tension between innovation and regulatory prudence. To understand the foundations of what's at stake, our guide on what cryptocurrencies are remains a useful starting point.

The deal is one of the clearest signals yet that stock tokenization has moved from fringe experiment to strategic battleground. Until recently, crypto exchanges were the ones chasing traditional equities onto the chain, often without any direct involvement from the official exchanges themselves. Now one of the world's leading regulated market operators has decided not to cede that ground, and it's backing that decision with nine figures.

What the Deal Actually Covers

The investment, managed through Nasdaq's venture capital arm, expands a collaboration the two companies began earlier this year. At the center of the partnership is a project called Nasdaq Equity Tokens, digital blockchain-based versions of shares listed on Nasdaq. Under the expanded agreement, both companies will develop the infrastructure needed to distribute and trade these tokenized shares, with a target launch date set for the second quarter of 2027. That date is a stated objective, not a confirmed deadline.

Under the terms, Kraken will serve as the distribution channel through which these digital shares reach end users. According to reports from Nasdaq's own announcement, these tokens will carry voting rights equivalent to those of traditional Nasdaq-listed shares. Alongside this, Kraken will adopt Nasdaq's market surveillance technology across all of its business lines, covering crypto, equities, futures, and options. That detail matters: plugging a crypto exchange into Nasdaq's compliance stack adds significant regulatory credibility to the whole operation.

The Economic Case Is Specific, Not Abstract

Behind this move is a concrete, measurable inefficiency in today's financial plumbing. Payward's co-CEO explained the rationale with a pointed data point: according to the company's public statements, more than $2 trillion in equity trades flow through the U.S. clearance and settlement system every single day, a process that introduces a multi-day delay before a transaction is considered final. Blockchain settlement, the argument goes, removes that lag entirely.

That's a real problem, not a vague innovation promise. An equity market running on blockchain rails could, in theory, settle transactions near-instantly and operate around the clock, seven days a week, without the opening and closing times that define traditional exchanges. The timing of the deal is not accidental either: the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission recently approved a rule change for Nasdaq that explicitly permits certain securities to be traded and settled in tokenized form, clearing a meaningful regulatory path for exactly this kind of operation.

LSE, Deutsche Borse, and Now Nasdaq: A Shared Infrastructure Takes Shape

Placed in context, this investment becomes even more significant. Kraken is far from a new partner for major global exchanges on this front. Just days before this announcement, the London Stock Exchange chose Kraken to tokenize shares in its 100 largest listed companies through the xStocks program. Before that, in April 2026, Deutsche Börse acquired a small stake in Payward for $200 million, a deal that implied a Payward valuation of approximately $13.3 billion. According to some estimates cited by Bloomberg, Nasdaq's $100 million injection pushes that implied valuation to around $21 billion.

The pattern is hard to ignore: three of the most systemically important exchange operators in the world, the London Stock Exchange, Deutsche Börse, and now Nasdaq, are all, in different ways, invested in the same infrastructure ecosystem built around Kraken. These are no longer isolated bets. They amount to the coordinated construction of a shared layer for global stock tokenization, a layer that is rapidly becoming central rather than peripheral. Kraken's parent company is also reportedly in talks to bring Hyperliquid's perpetual derivatives into the regulated U.S. market, extending Payward's footprint further still.

What This Actually Means

Nasdaq's $100 million commitment to Payward marks a turning point in the narrative around stock tokenization. The old story was one of decentralized finance pushing its way into regulated markets. This deal inverts that. Established financial institutions are now choosing to put capital and regulatory credibility directly into crypto infrastructure, rather than building competing systems in isolation.

Two things are worth holding in tension here. On one hand, this move confirms that stock tokenization is no longer treated as a niche experiment. It's a strategic competition for control of the future of capital markets, serious enough that rival exchanges like Nasdaq, the London Stock Exchange, and Deutsche Börse are converging, somewhat paradoxically, on the same crypto platform. On the other hand, discipline is warranted: exactly what legal rights these tokens confer, how their issuance is structured under U.S. and EU law, and whether the Q2 2027 target holds are all open questions that matter before drawing firm conclusions. What's no longer in question is the direction. The major exchanges have decided they won't leave blockchain-based equity markets to crypto-native players alone, and they're signing nine-figure checks to make that point.

Google deepens its commitment to Finland with a €13 billion investment in AI infrastructure

Google invests €13B in Finland to boost digital infrastructure, clean energy, create jobs, and support local environmental initiatives.

GoogleBikash Koley

This announcement is one of the clearest examples of a problem now pressing hard across the tech industry: building the data centers that AI requires is actually the easy part. Finding enough reliable energy to run them, at scale, for decades, is the harder challenge. Here's what the deal involves and why its structure matters.

The Investment and the Numbers

According to Google's announcement, the plan covers the construction and expansion of digital infrastructure across four locations in Finland, including the company's existing hub in Hamina. The total investment of at least €13 billion is spread across the next two years. Google estimates the construction program will support more than 37,000 jobs in the country and contribute several billion euros per year to Finnish GDP during the build-out phase. These are, for now, projections declared by the company itself, not independently verified results.

The computing capacity generated by these data centers will power some of Google's best-known services, from AI models and search engines to Maps and YouTube. What makes this investment particularly instructive, though, is the energy infrastructure surrounding it, and what it reveals about how the relationship between Big Tech and national electricity grids is changing.

The Real Heart of the Deal: Rescuing a Nuclear Plant

Here's where the story becomes genuinely striking. Google has signed a 22-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Finnish energy company Fortum, securing up to 50% of the generating capacity of the Loviisa nuclear power plant. Loviisa currently supplies around 10% of Finland's total electricity, according to Fortum's own disclosures.

The critical detail: without this agreement, Fortum stated the plant would not have been able to continue operating beyond 2030. The 22-year contract with Google provides the revenue certainty needed to justify a roughly €1 billion modernization program, extending the plant's operational life to 2050. In other words, AI computing demand has become, for the first time in Europe, the financial mechanism keeping a strategically important national energy asset alive. This is also the first agreement of this type that Google has signed outside the United States.

A Necessary Technical Clarification

Before getting swept up in talk of “clean energy for decades,” a honest technical note is warranted. A PPA of this type doesn't mean a dedicated stream of electrons from Loviisa physically and exclusively reaches Google's data centers. It's more accurately a commercial and financial arrangement: it guarantees stable revenues for the producer and, on paper and over time, balances the buyer's consumption against the plant's output. Claims about the “cleanness” of the resulting compute depend on the precise contract structure and on the overall energy mix of the grid, not simply on the annual volume of nuclear power declared.

One other detail worth noting: it emerged not from the official press release but from a direct question put to Google representatives by a journalist from Finnish public broadcaster Yle. The total €13 billion figure reportedly includes investments tied to the Loviisa nuclear agreement itself. That context matters for understanding what the headline number actually covers.

Why This Connects to the Crypto World

If you're wondering what any of this has to do with cryptocurrencies, the answer is more direct than it might seem. This episode confirms a pattern worth tracking closely: competition for energy access, grid connections, and physical capacity is becoming one of the central battlegrounds of the entire digital economy, the same terrain where, not long ago, Bitcoin mining was being fought out.

It's no coincidence that some of the best-positioned companies to capture this opportunity are former mining operators, who spent years accumulating rare expertise in large-scale energy procurement, land access, and grid connections. When even a company of Google's scale must lock in 22-year agreements with nuclear plants just to secure the electricity it needs, the value of that expertise — knowing how to source and manage enormous quantities of energy, becomes obvious. We covered a related transformation in our piece on how IREN shifted from Bitcoin mining to AI data centers.

The Bigger Picture

The Google-Fortum agreement marks a shift in how the AI bottleneck is understood. For months, public debate focused almost exclusively on the shortage of advanced microchips. This deal shows that once that obstacle is partly overcome, the binding constraint on AI growth becomes stable, continuous energy supply, available over timeframes measured in decades rather than quarters, more like public infrastructure than a simple commercial utility.

The lesson here is twofold. On one hand, Big Tech companies are no longer simply electricity customers. They're becoming financiers and long-range planners of national energy infrastructure, signing contracts whose duration would once have been associated only with state utilities. On the other hand, this dynamic confirms that the future of AI, and with it the future of digital technologies including crypto, will be shaped as much in power plants and grid control rooms as in research labs. Whoever controls access to large-scale energy in this new landscape controls a meaningful share of the future of digital computing. For a broader grounding in how these infrastructure layers connect, our guide on what cryptocurrencies and blockchain are remains a useful starting point.

The move is not simply about deploying capital. Tether is positioning itself as a piece of the financial plumbing through which real-economy businesses get funded. Here's how the structure works, and why the strategic shift matters.

Tether and Fasanara Capital Launch $400 Million Private Credit Fund to Expand Stablecoin-Enabled Real-Economy Lending - Tether.io

9 September 2026 — Tether, the largest company in the digital asset industry, and Fasanara Capital, a leading specialist asset manager in technology-enabled private credit, today announced the launch of StableFund, a Tether-Fasanara Lending Fund. The jointly sponsored evergreen private credit vehicle is anchored by $400 million in co-investment across both sponsors and targets up […]

Tether.io

What StableFund Actually Does

StableFund is structured as an “evergreen” vehicle: no fixed maturity date, designed to reinvest capital continuously over time. The $400 million figure represents direct co-investment from both sponsors, Tether and Fasanara. One distinction that deserves emphasis: the $3 billion target is a fundraising goal from external institutional investors, not capital already committed. That gap between what's guaranteed today and what's being sought tomorrow is material. Any assessment of this fund's scale should keep it in mind.

The division of labor between the two partners is clear. Fasanara Capital, which manages a fintech lending network active in over sixty countries, will handle the investment management side, deploying capital into short-duration, asset-backed or receivables-backed credit strategies. Tether, for its part, takes the role of “originator”: identifying lending opportunities tied to USDT usage and providing the technological infrastructure for settlement, including the on- and off-ramp systems that convert fiat currency into stablecoin and back, making cross-border capital flows faster and cheaper.

A Massive Market With a Very Specific Gap

To grasp the ambition here, consider the market Tether and Fasanara are targeting. Private credit, the business of lending to companies outside the traditional banking system, is already a global market worth roughly $3 trillion, according to industry estimates, with projections pointing toward $5 trillion by the end of the decade. Demand is rising as both businesses and investors search for alternatives to conventional bank financing.

Within that already-large market, StableFund targets one particular gap: the financing shortfall facing small and medium-sized enterprises globally, which the company puts at nearly $6 trillion. These are businesses that frequently struggle to access credit through traditional channels, either because they're too small for banks to serve economically, or because they operate in markets where capital access remains structurally limited. Tether's stated vision, as articulated by its CEO in the announcement, is to transform the company's origination network into a direct conduit for capital to reach businesses and communities that need it most, making cross-border credit flows more efficient. A parallel ambition to the on-chain credit model Visa launched for real-economy payments.

Tether's Third Strategic Chapter

This move doesn't come from nowhere. It fits a broader pattern Tether has been building for some time: diversifying revenue streams, which are already enormous thanks to USDT's dominance, by investing in sectors increasingly remote from pure crypto trading. Weeks ago, reporting covered how Tether was making heavy investments in robotics and artificial intelligence, with the goal of embedding its stablecoin into the emerging machine economy. Private credit to real businesses is the third distinct chapter in that same story, one that aims to transform USDT from a trading instrument into a multi-purpose financial infrastructure layer.

Tether Completes the Largest Inaugural Financial Audit in History - Tether.io

KPMG U.S. issues unqualified audit opinion on Tether's 2025 financial statements, the most positive form of opinion an independent auditor can issue 13 August 2026, Tether, the largest company in the digital asset industry, today announced the successful completion of a full independent audit of Tether International, S.A. de C.V.'s financial statements for […]

Tether.io

There's a piece of context worth naming plainly. Tether has a history of controversy around the transparency of its reserve composition, a topic this publication has approached with care. Against that background, one recent development stands out: in August 2026, KPMG U.S. issued an unqualified audit opinion (the most favorable form available) on the 2025 financial statements of a Tether subsidiary. The company is presenting this as evidence of growing financial credibility, even as it expands aggressively into areas well beyond stablecoin issuance.

The Bigger Picture for Stablecoins

The Tether-Fasanara initiative tells an important and somewhat surprising story about where stablecoins are heading. Born as tools for crypto trading, offering a stable reference point inside a famously volatile market, they're now bidding to become settlement infrastructure for one of the largest segments in traditional finance: business lending. That trajectory intersects directly with the broader tokenization wave, visible in initiatives like the tokenization of Italian non-performing loans on blockchain, or the European bank consortium backing a euro-denominated stablecoin on Ethereum.

Two takeaways emerge for anyone watching this space. First, established stablecoins are actively hunting new use cases, driven by a conviction that their real strength lies not in speculative utility but in their ability to make capital flows more efficient where traditional channels fall short. Second, scrutiny remains essential. There's a meaningful difference between the $400 million already committed by Tether and Fasanara and the $3 billion they hope to raise. Whether this fund delivers concrete lending to businesses that genuinely need it, or joins a long list of ambitious announcements that underdeliver, is a question that only time and performance data will answer.

Institutional investors evaluating StableFund should watch for two milestones: the pace of external capital raised toward that $3 billion target over the next 12 to 18 months, and whether USDT-settled loans actually reach SMEs in underserved markets at meaningful volume. Those two metrics will tell the real story of whether this is a genuine infrastructure play or a well-branded fundraising exercise.

One clarification upfront: this is not a legislative announcement. What gets presented on September 24 is a set of technical analyses, reports and policy recommendations, not a ready-to-vote bill. Still, the process itself deserves attention, because it signals a change in how Italy’s political class is approaching the digital asset space.

What Is Happening at the Chamber of Deputies

The Parliamentary Intergroup on Digital Assets, chaired by MP Marcello Coppo, has existed since 2025, but in recent months it entered a far more structured phase of work. A Technical Committee was formed, drawing on dozens of experts from business, the legal and tax professions, investment, the public administration, academia and law enforcement. Its stated objective, as underlined by the Intergroup’s own promoters, is to give Parliament “concrete evaluation tools” on blockchain’s potential, deliberately avoiding simplifications and ideological framing.

Given the cross-cutting nature of digital assets, which span finance, technology and law, the work was divided into fourteen thematic groups, each tasked with a specific area of analysis. On September 24, in the Chamber’s Parliamentary Groups Hall, those initial conclusions will be presented at an event titled “Digital Finance, Markets and Monetary Sovereignty”. The title is deliberate: the Intergroup’s promoters argue the stakes go well beyond technical rule-making.

#assetdigitali #blockchain #bitcoin #innovazionefinanziaria | Antonio Annino

Un percorso costruito nel tempo, che il 24 settembre compirà un altro passaggio importante. Dopo il primo evento dell'Intergruppo, l'insediamento del Tavolo Tecnico e mesi di attività dei 14 Gruppi di lavoro, torneremo alla Camera dei Deputati per presentare le prime risultanze, le analisi e le proposte elaborate. Non è un punto di arrivo, ma una nuova tappa. L'obiettivo è trasformare il lavoro tecnico in contributi concreti per il decisore pubblico e costruire un'interlocuzione sempre più strutturata tra Parlamento, istituzioni ed ecosistema. Un risultato reso possibile grazie all'On. Marcello Coppo, all'impegno dei 14 Responsabili dei Gruppi di lavoro Christian Miccoli Roberto Garavaglia Ionut Gaucan Marco Tullio Giordano Vincenzo Rana Stefano Capaccioli Stefano Mele Marco Remondino Luciano Quarta Giorgio Scura Giovanni Santostasi Ferdinando Ametrano Giuseppe MICELI Emanuele Locci, dei componenti del Tavolo Tecnico e di tutti coloro che hanno contribuito alle attività dei Gruppi, e dal lavoro che stiamo portando avanti insieme a Gabriele Del Mese, che cura la Segreteria organizzativa e il cui contributo è prezioso anche nella preparazione di questo nuovo appuntamento. Nei prossimi giorni condivideremo progressivamente programma, modalità di partecipazione e ulteriori dettagli della giornata. Ci vediamo il 24 settembre alla Camera dei Deputati. #AssetDigitali #Blockchain #Bitcoin #InnovazioneFinanziaria

LinkedInAntonio Annino

The Topics That Matter Most for the Crypto Ecosystem

Among the fourteen working groups, several address areas that European crypto investors are watching closely. Dedicated groups cover Bitcoin and digital payment infrastructure, stablecoins and the potential digital euro from the European Central Bank, and one group is specifically charged with analyzing tokenization and real-world assets, the so-called RWA space. Cybersecurity and other ecosystem components round out the list.

Tokenization is probably the area to track most carefully over the coming months. Italy’s major banks are already moving in this space: the country has seen its first tokenized bond settled in central bank money, the tokenization of non-performing loans by doValue and Weltix, and the recent involvement of large banking groups in the European consortium building a euro-denominated stablecoin. Seeing Parliament organize a structured response to precisely these topics, while Italy’s private sector is already running live experiments, suggests the legislature is trying to keep pace with a transformation already underway.

Why This Approach Is Different from the Past

To appreciate what makes this initiative notable, it helps to look at how Italy has handled crypto regulation until now. The dominant mode has been transposition: taking rules decided at the European level, from MiCA to transfer-traceability requirements, and implementing them domestically. Consob and Banca d’Italia have tightened compliance obligations on crypto operators, as seen most recently with enhanced transaction monitoring requirements that Banca d’Italia imposed on crypto service providers. Necessary work, but essentially reactive, adapting to decisions made elsewhere.

What the Parliamentary Intergroup is attempting is different in kind. Rather than just receiving rules from Brussels and transposing them into Italian law, the Intergroup is trying to build an independently Italian strategic position: how Bitcoin, digital payments, tokenization and monetary sovereignty fit into the country’s economic future. That shift, from compliance follower to strategic actor, is worth noting even before the September 24 event takes place.

The Bigger Picture

This parliamentary initiative tells a broader story about how Italian institutions are reframing digital assets and financial innovation. Crypto is no longer treated as a marginal phenomenon to be managed and contained. Instead, at least within this parliamentary forum, it is being positioned as terrain where a share of Italy’s future economic competitiveness will be determined, something deserving dedicated and structured strategic attention.

Two observations stand out for anyone watching this space. First, the breadth of the Technical Committee, pulling in experts from law, tax, academia, the public sector and finance, reflects a methodological seriousness that is not always present in parliamentary crypto initiatives elsewhere in Europe. Second, the timing is not coincidental: Italy’s private sector and its legislative branch appear to be moving in the same direction at roughly the same moment. Whether this coordination, still informal and parallel rather than orchestrated, produces concrete legislative proposals that genuinely position Italy competitively within the post-MiCA European landscape is the question to watch. The September 24 presentation is the next waypoint, and SpazioCrypto will be following the results closely.

The goal here isn't to tell you whether or how much to invest. It's to give you a clear-eyed understanding of the mechanism so you can evaluate it yourself.

TL;DR: DCA splits a fixed budget into equal purchases at regular intervals, lowering the average cost when prices fall. It reduces timing risk and emotional pressure, but does not eliminate the underlying risk of the asset itself.

What Is DCA in Plain Terms?

Dollar-Cost Averaging means investing a fixed sum at consistent time intervals, independent of what the asset is trading at in that moment. Instead of deciding “I'll put all my savings into Bitcoin today,” a DCA investor decides “I'll invest a set amount every week, or every month, for an extended period, whatever the price happens to be.”

The concept didn't originate in crypto. Benjamin Graham, one of the founding figures of value investing, described it in the mid-twentieth century as a way to strip emotion and market-timing guesswork out of investment decisions. It gained a second life in the crypto world precisely because Bitcoin and Ethereum's extreme volatility makes picking the “perfect entry point” exceptionally difficult, even for experienced investors.

How DCA Works: A Concrete Example

The mechanics are easier to grasp with numbers. Say you want to invest $1,200 in Bitcoin over a year. A lump-sum approach puts all $1,200 in today, implicitly betting that today's price is a reasonable entry point. With DCA, you split that into twelve equal purchases of $100 per month, for twelve months, regardless of price movement.

The outcome: in months when Bitcoin's price falls, your $100 buys more BTC. In months when the price rises, the same $100 buys less. Over the full period, your average purchase price is a weighted mean of all those entries, which naturally smooths out the impact of extreme price swings in either direction. The mechanical result is a lower average cost per coin compared to one unlucky lump-sum purchase at a peak.

Many crypto exchanges now offer automatic recurring purchase features, letting you set up these intervals without manually executing each trade. This matters for the crypto trading platforms you choose.

DCA at a Glance

Three core points. Source: SpazioCrypto, 2026.

• What it is: investing a fixed amount at regular intervals, independent of the current price.
• The effect: you buy more units when the price drops, fewer when it rises. Your cost basis averages out over time.
• The psychological benefit: removes the pressure of having to “time” the right moment to buy.

Why DCA Resonates with Crypto Investors

DCA's popularity in crypto has two distinct drivers: one practical, one psychological. On the practical side, Bitcoin's price can move 10% in a single day according to CoinGecko historical data. Trying to identify the perfect moment to enter is extraordinarily hard, even for seasoned traders. Spreading purchases over time lowers the risk of committing all your capital right before a sharp drawdown.

Psychologically, DCA automates the decision. An investor with a monthly fixed purchase no longer needs to ask “should I buy today?” every morning. That daily question generates anxiety and often leads to impulsive calls driven by fear or euphoria. Turning an investment into a repeating habit rather than a repeated emotional judgment helps many people stay disciplined over the long run, especially during the painful periods that periodically hit Bitcoin and other crypto assets.

The Real Limits of DCA: What Often Goes Unsaid

DCA is sometimes sold as a foolproof strategy. It isn't. No strategy eliminates risk, and DCA has genuine trade-offs worth understanding clearly.

The first limit: in a market that rises consistently and without major corrections, a pure mathematical analysis shows that investing all capital upfront would have produced higher returns, simply because you'd have been fully exposed to the appreciation for longer. DCA is, by design, a more conservative approach. It's not necessarily the highest-return strategy under every market condition.

The second limit is more fundamental. DCA reduces the risk tied to your entry timing, but it does nothing to eliminate the risk of the asset itself. If a cryptocurrency fell permanently in value and never recovered, buying a little each month wouldn't protect you from loss. It would only make the loss more gradual. DCA is a timing management technique, not a return guarantee. The choice of which asset to buy, and whether to buy it at all, remains a separate and equally important decision. That starts with understanding what cryptocurrencies actually are before stepping into this market.

DCA in Bear Markets: One Extra Consideration

A question that surfaces regularly, especially when markets are weak and institutional investors are accumulating during price drops, is whether DCA “works better” when prices are low. In theory, buying consistently during a bear market lets you accumulate more units at the same total cost. That's why some more sophisticated variants of the strategy call for increasing purchase amounts when the price falls significantly below its long-term moving average.

The honest caveat: nobody can know in advance whether a low price today represents a genuine opportunity or the start of an even longer decline. DCA helps manage that uncertainty by spreading risk across time, but it doesn't resolve it. The strength of your personal financial plan and your capacity to absorb losses remain more important than any purchase technique, just as they are for any volatile market exposure, including the Bitcoin ETF market that's become another popular access point.

What DCA Fixes and What It Doesn't

An honest balance sheet. Source: SpazioCrypto, 2026.

• Reduces: the risk of committing all capital at the worst possible moment, and the psychological pressure of impulsive decisions.
• Does not eliminate: the risk of the underlying asset. If the price collapses permanently, DCA doesn't prevent losses.
• Does not guarantee: the highest possible return. In steadily rising markets, it often underperforms a lump-sum investment.

Custody Matters as Much as Buying

Anyone running a DCA plan gradually builds up a meaningful holding, often without realizing it until months or years have passed. Where and how those accumulated funds are stored deserves as much attention as the buying strategy itself. Leaving everything on an exchange that makes automatic purchases convenient is practical, but it carries different risks from moving funds periodically into a personal wallet. The topic is substantial and worth dedicated attention. Our guide on how to securely store cryptocurrencies covers the options in depth.

Closing Thoughts

Dollar-Cost Averaging is not a magic formula or a guaranteed path to profit in crypto. It's a disciplined method for managing one of the hardest variables in a volatile market: when you enter. DCA reduces the psychological and emotional weight of investment decisions, and in many scenarios it softens the damage of an ill-timed entry. What it doesn't do is eliminate the inherent risk of the asset you choose, or guarantee better outcomes than alternative strategies in every market environment.

As with any financial decision, whether to adopt this approach, with what amounts and over what timeframe, depends entirely on personal factors: your goals, your investment horizon, and your capacity to absorb potential losses. Understanding the mechanism fully, its genuine strengths and its real limits, is the necessary first step before any decision. That's exactly what this guide set out to provide.

Common Questions About DCA

Does DCA always beat lump-sum investing?

No. In a market that rises steadily and without major corrections, investing the full amount upfront tends to produce higher returns mathematically, because you're exposed to the growth for longer. DCA is a more cautious strategy, designed to reduce the risk of a badly timed entry at a peak, not to maximize returns in every possible scenario.

How often should you DCA?

There's no universally correct frequency. Weekly and monthly are the most common choices, often aligned with when savings become available (after a paycheck, for instance). Consistency over time matters far more than the specific interval chosen, which remains a personal decision tied to your own financial situation.

Does DCA eliminate the risk of losing money?

No. DCA reduces the risk tied to the specific timing of each purchase, but it doesn't eliminate the underlying risk of the asset. If a cryptocurrency declined permanently in value, accumulating it gradually wouldn't prevent a loss. It would only make the loss more gradual. DCA is a timing management technique, not a profit guarantee.

Can you DCA assets other than Bitcoin?

Yes. The principle applies to any asset: stocks, ETFs, Ethereum, and beyond. DCA became especially popular in crypto because the extreme volatility of these assets, compared to traditional markets, makes the psychological and practical benefits of spreading purchases over time more pronounced.

Should you DCA in the current market?

This guide is for informational purposes only and does not provide personalized investment advice. Whether and when to start a recurring purchase plan, with what amounts and for how long, depends on individual factors including your goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance. Before making investment decisions, thorough research is essential. For situations involving meaningful sums, consulting a licensed financial adviser is worth considering.

But the volume figure, impressive as it is, isn’t the most interesting part of this story. What Visa is actually trying to solve is the genuinely important part: not a new way to speculate, but a concrete and age-old problem in commerce, working capital. Here’s what’s happening and why it matters.

The Problem Visa Wants to Solve

To understand what’s at stake, start with a very practical pain point that afflicts fintech companies running payment card programs, including those tied to stablecoins. Every day, these companies must front the money to settle their customers’ transactions before the corresponding funds actually arrive. It’s a classic short-term liquidity crunch: capital is needed immediately, while receipts land with a delay. For smaller or fast-growing companies, accessing that capital through traditional financing channels can be slow and bureaucratic. Often requires an operating track record these firms simply don’t have yet.

Visa Brings Onchain Lending into Everyday Payments

By combining VisaNet settlement data with blockchain lending, Visa is helping its partners unlock new financing opportunities for stablecoin-linked card programs. Today, Visa (NYSE: V) announced a new approach to onchain credit designed to help stablecoin-linked card programs and fintechs access working capital using onchain lending infrastructure and Visa data. Onchain lending has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments of digital finance. According to the Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard, since 2020, more than $694 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans have been sent through onchain lending protocols, creating a global credit market that operates 24/7. Yet much of that activity remains concentrated within crypto markets and hasn't meaningfully supported the businesses and payment experiences people use every day. Visa is helping bridge that gap by combining VisaNet settlement data with onchain credit infrastructure. This information can help lenders better understand how a

Visa Brings Onchain Lending into Everyday Payments

This is where Visa’s idea comes in. On-chain credit markets already exist and have grown enormously. According to data from Visa’s own Onchain Analytics Dashboard, since 2020 more than $694 billion in stablecoin-denominated loans have been issued through decentralized protocols, creating a credit market that runs around the clock. The problem is that this vast pool of liquidity has remained almost entirely confined inside crypto markets, without meaningfully touching the businesses and payments people use day to day. Visa wants to be the bridge that carries this capital beyond that fence. The theme connects to the broader trend of stablecoins becoming invisible payment rails for end users.

Lending | Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard

Cryptocurrency and digital currencies are emerging. Visa is evolving our network and crypto solutions to connect to more blockchain networks. Data by Allium.

Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard

Rubail Birwadker, Global Head of Growth Products and Partnerships at Visa:

“Trusted payment data and onchain technologies can work together to unlock new forms of liquidity.”

How It Works, With Real Examples

The concrete mechanism is built on a partnership with specialized financing firms. The model combines VisaNet transaction settlement data with information recorded directly on the blockchain, producing a reliable, real-time picture of how a given payment program is performing. On the basis of that data, and with customer consent, a smart contract automates the entire process: it disburses the financing, manages collateral, and organizes repayment, all without lengthy manual paperwork.

The early results are striking. According to Visa, the model has already financed over $2.5 billion in settlement volume since 2023, with zero defaults among participating firms. Two concrete cases illustrate how it works in practice. One payments company has used this mechanism since 2023 to fund its daily settlements, moving roughly $2 billion through thousands of automated on-chain lending and repayment transactions, again with no defaults. A second company, focused on travel cards, used this type of financing as part of its market launch, raising significant capital from prominent institutional investors. A further sign of the system’s maturity: as more lenders have entered the mechanism, the cost of credit for participating companies has fallen by around 30%.

Visa and On-Chain Credit: The Numbers

The infrastructure in figures. Source: Visa, 2026

• Stablecoin settlement: over $20 billion annualized, fifteen times higher than a year ago.
• Credit financed: over $2.5 billion since 2023, zero defaults among participants.
• Active programs: over 160 stablecoin card programs, with payment volumes nearly tripling.

Why This Is a Real Convergence Signal, Not Hype

This is the detail that separates this announcement from the wave of breathless headlines the sector routinely produces. The distinction matters: this is not a case of decentralized finance used for purely speculative ends, like borrowing one crypto asset to bet on another. It is the use of on-chain credit to fund a concrete, traditional economic activity, the kind that happens every time someone swipes a card.

Rain and Visa partner to accelerate onchain credit cards

Rain joins Visa to enable real-time USDC settlement and onchain credit rails, powering 24/7 blockchain-native payment card experiences.

That distinction is precisely what makes Visa's initiative a genuine signal of convergence between decentralized finance and traditional financial infrastructure, not a marketing experiment. A payments giant with decades of history is deploying blockchain tools, including smart contracts and on-chain data transparency, to solve a substantive problem affecting thousands of real businesses. The same underlying logic appeared when a consortium of major European banks chose a public blockchain for their digital euro, as SpazioCrypto reported in its coverage of the Qivalis stablecoin project involving UniCredit, Intesa, BPER, and Banca Sella: established institutions no longer fear public infrastructure; they are learning to exploit it.

The technical rationale comes directly from Chris Walker, founder and CEO of Credit Coop, who explained the structural reason the model can work:

“Payment companies have always had good collateral in their settlement receivables.”

The Bigger Picture

Visa's move tells a broader story about where genuine innovation in digital payments is heading. For years, decentralized finance was viewed mainly as a playground for sophisticated investors and traders, a self-referential parallel world largely disconnected from the real economy. This initiative suggests its actual utility may surface precisely when its tools, data transparency, smart-contract automation, round-the-clock operability, get applied to concrete everyday problems like working-capital financing.

Two lessons emerge for anyone watching the space. First, this case illustrates what crypto “adoption” can realistically mean: not millions of retail buyers accumulating tokens, but underlying infrastructure quietly embedded into the processes of companies the scale of Visa, improving efficiency in ways the end user never notices. Second, cases like Rain and Karta sketch a replicable path for other fintechs, opening a payment-data-driven credit market that could scale quickly over the coming years. The broader point is straightforward: the blockchain's real transformation of traditional finance may not arrive through loud announcements, but through these quiet technical steps, capable of making a business problem as old as commerce itself cheaper and more efficient to solve. For a grounding in the instruments at the centre of this shift, our guide on what stablecoins are remains a useful starting point.

The question this raises is pointed: why would some of Europe's most established financial institutions choose Ethereum, the same open network that hosts DeFi protocols and crypto speculation, as the foundation for regulated bank money? Before answering, a few important caveats are necessary to frame the facts correctly.

What We Know, and What We Don't

Qivalis is headquartered in Amsterdam and brings together 37 financial institutions across 15 European countries. Its goal is to issue a stablecoin pegged one-to-one with the euro, backed by bank deposits and high-quality liquid assets, and fully compliant with the EU's MiCA regulation. Intended use cases are primarily institutional: cross-border payments, trade finance, and settlement of tokenized financial instruments, with the added benefit of 24-hour liquidity movement.

Two clarifications matter here. First, the token isn't live yet. Qivalis has applied for an electronic money institution license from De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank, and the stablecoin cannot be issued until that authorization is granted. The launch is expected in the second half of 2026. Second, the Ethereum detail itself comes from Ethereum Institutional, a source tied to the Ethereum ecosystem, rather than from a direct announcement by the banking consortium. Some observers have noted that other networks remain possible options, and an official, definitive confirmation from Qivalis on its blockchain choice has not been published as of this writing. That detail should be attributed to its source, with appropriate caution.

Detail | Qivalis

A euro stablecoin intended to be fully regulated, powered by Europe's leading banks, designed to make digital finance secure, simple, and ready for tomorrow.

Qivalis

Why a Public Blockchain?

This is the question that makes the story significant. Most banks experimenting with money tokenization opt for “private” or “permissioned” blockchains: closed, controlled networks accessible only to authorized operators. That's the cautious, traditional approach, keeping full control within the banking system's walls. Germany's Bundesbank, for instance, is actively developing infrastructure along exactly those lines.

Qivalis - Secure. Trusted. Future-ready.

A euro stablecoin intended to be fully regulated, powered by Europe's leading banks, designed to make digital finance secure, simple, and ready for tomorrow.

Secure. Trusted. Future-ready.

Choosing a public blockchain like Ethereum points in the opposite direction entirely, and it's a strategically bold move. It means building regulated digital money inside the open environment where liquidity, users, exchanges, and DeFi applications already exist. The reasoning, as observers describe it, is to go where the market already lives, rather than constructing a walled garden separated from the broader ecosystem. A bank stablecoin running on Ethereum can integrate directly with digital wallets, protocols, and assets already present on that network. It's a bet on openness and interoperability, and it represents an implicit acknowledgment, by centuries-old financial institutions, that public infrastructure carries real strategic value. Ethereum itself has been adapting to accommodate this kind of institutional use, including recent protocol work aimed at simplifying transaction flows for large-scale participants.

The Italian Connection and the Competitive Race

Italy's role in Qivalis is substantial. UniCredit and Banca Sella were among the nine founding members of the consortium. Intesa Sanpaolo and BPER Banca joined in the May expansion that grew Qivalis from twelve to thirty-seven members. Four of Italy's biggest banking names being present at this level signals how actively Italian financial institutions are engaging with on-chain transformation, an area this publication has followed closely in covering the tokenization of Italian finance more broadly.

The competitive backdrop sharpens the picture. The stablecoin market today is overwhelmingly dollar-denominated: according to CoinGecko data, dollar-pegged stablecoins account for roughly 99.5% of total stablecoin market capitalization. A euro stablecoin backed by a consortium of major European banks therefore carries a monetary sovereignty dimension too. It's an attempt to carve out space for the single currency in digital finance, reducing European dependence on dollar-denominated instruments. Qivalis isn't alone in this direction: a large consortium of predominantly US banks is separately working on its own shared stablecoin, and players like Revolut have already launched their own euro-pegged digital token. The race to issue bank-grade stablecoins has become a genuinely global phenomenon.

The Bigger Picture

If Qivalis's choice of Ethereum is confirmed, it marks a potentially historic moment in the long convergence between traditional finance and public blockchain networks. For years, banks regarded networks like Ethereum with deep skepticism, defaulting to closed, controlled systems whenever they ventured into tokenization at all. The fact that a consortium this large and this credible is seriously evaluating the issuance of regulated bank money on a public network signals something deeper: public blockchain infrastructure is no longer treated as a risk to be avoided, but as a strategic asset to build on.

Two readings emerge from this. One: the boundary between “traditional” finance and “crypto” finance is thinning to near-invisibility. If bank money starts moving on the same rails as DeFi and cryptocurrency, the two spheres become parts of one interconnected ecosystem. Two: caution on the facts remains essential. The project is ambitious but not yet operational, the EMI license from De Nederlandsche Bank is still pending, and the blockchain choice itself awaits official confirmation from Qivalis directly. In this sector, the distance between a stated intention and a live product can be long, and a great deal can change along the way. The direction, though, appears increasingly clear: the future of money, including bank money, is likely to be on-chain. Readers wanting to understand the instruments at the center of this shift can find a useful foundation in our guide to what stablecoins are and how they work.

The 50% Crash Prediction That Started the Debate

The alarm originated with Liron Shapira, host of the podcast Doom Debates, which focuses on AI risk. In a post on X dated September 6, 2026, Shapira stated a 50% confidence that Bitcoin prices would fall more than 50% within two years, citing AI-driven erosion of the security and robustness guarantees that investors have long relied on. Shapira did not specify which technical layer he believes AI would compromise, a vagueness that weakened his case considerably.

Shapira's core concern is that AI could systematically dismantle the safeguards that holders believed protected the network, the very foundations on which their conviction in crypto rests. Buterin disagreed, and responded on X within hours.

The Hashing Vulnerability Fear Explained

Bitcoin's security rests on two pillars: mining power (or hashrate) and cryptographic hashing. Among AI-related threats to Bitcoin, cryptographic hashing represents the more exposed flank, as it underpins the entire mining operation. An AI system capable of breaking hash functions or lowering the effective difficulty of proof-of-work would, in theory, upend Bitcoin's security model entirely.

Buterin, for his part, told followers on X that long-term cybersecurity concerns don't keep him up at night. His reasoning was substantive, not dismissive.

Bitcoin Can Adapt, Says Buterin, and It Has Proved It Before

The Ethereum co-founder grounds his confidence in a clear principle: Bitcoin can absorb any technical threat that doesn't require broad social consensus to address. Upgrading client software and mining pool configurations is an engineering decision, one that falls squarely within the remit of Core Developers and their community, with no external political consensus needed.

Because of that, Buterin argued, the probability of a successful hash-function break, a meaningful drop in proof-of-work computation power, or a cryptographic bypass remains low for the foreseeable future. A specialized team of computer engineers has been defending Bitcoin's base layer for more than 15 years. Track record matters.

Major blockchains, including Ethereum itself, have been actively preparing for AI-related threats for some time, raising new security barriers precisely because developers understand what this technology is capable of. The work is ongoing, not reactive.

Buterin also made his position personal. He noted that 90% of his personal wealth is invested in cryptocurrencies, and that this allocation won't change over the next two years, the exact window Shapira identified for his predicted crash. He has no intention of selling digital assets based on what he considers an unjustified fear.

How Seriously Should Investors Take the Warning?

Warnings like Shapira's shouldn't be brushed aside entirely. AI represents both a genuine risk and a genuine opportunity for the crypto sector, and that duality deserves serious analysis. At the same time, Shapira hosts a podcast named Doom Debates: catastrophism is, to some degree, the product he is selling, and that context is worth factoring into any assessment of his predictions.

Buterin's position reads as better calibrated to the current technical reality. The Bitcoin ecosystem has demonstrated extraordinary resilience since 2009. For an insider of Buterin's caliber, the arrival of AI is not a reason to expect that a 15-year track record of structural robustness will suddenly unravel.

Investors watching this debate should focus on the specific claim, not the headline fear. Shapira offered no named vulnerability, no technical paper, no evidence of an AI system approaching the computational requirements needed to threaten Bitcoin's hash functions. Until that specificity exists, Buterin's calm reads less like complacency and more like engineering confidence earned over years of building at the protocol level.

The potential here is real. This directly targets one of the biggest barriers to mainstream Ethereum adoption. Before getting excited, though, the timeline and the current state of the proposal both deserve careful attention. This feature is not available today, and the path to delivery is still long.

TL;DR: Ethereum developers have included Frame Transactions in the Hegotá upgrade, currently scheduled for no earlier than 2027. The feature separates the person sending a transaction from the party paying the gas fee, meaning a wallet holding only stablecoins could operate without any ETH.

The Problem Frame Transactions Solve

Anyone who has used Ethereum early on has run into a specific frustration. Suppose you hold USDC in your wallet and want to send some to a friend. You try, and the transaction fails. Why? Every operation on Ethereum requires a fee, called “gas,” and that fee must be paid in ETH, the network's native currency. If your wallet doesn't have enough ETH, your tokens go nowhere, regardless of how much value you hold in stablecoins.

EF Protocol: The Hegotá EIP Opinion Post and Tier List | Ethereum Foundation Blog

The EF Protocol cluster's tier list for Hegotá evaluates 62 proposed EIPs in a unified view.

Ethereum Foundation BlogEthereum Foundation Protocol Cluster

This friction is enormous from a user-experience standpoint. Completely foreign to the logic of traditional financial apps, where you don't need a separate “fee currency.” The barrier has consistently made Ethereum hostile to newcomers and has slowed mass adoption. Frame Transactions are designed precisely to tear down that barrier, which is why their significance goes well beyond technical detail. SpazioCrypto covered the mechanics of Ethereum gas fees in a dedicated guide on the topic.

How Frame Transactions Work

The technical solution is elegant. Today, an Ethereum transaction is a single, indivisible block that bundles three things together: the authorizing signature, the gas payment, and the operation itself. Frame Transactions “unbundle” this into separate, programmable steps called “frames.” The most important consequence: the person sending a transaction and the party paying the gas fee no longer need to be the same entity.

That opens up genuinely interesting scenarios. An application could pay the ETH gas fee on behalf of its users, accepting stablecoin reimbursement from them behind the scenes. For the end user, the need to hold ETH would effectively disappear. The benefits extend further: Frame Transactions would also allow multiple actions to be batched into a single operation (such as a token approval and swap in one step), and they open the door to wallets with more flexible security models, including the ability to rotate access keys or adopt quantum-resistant protections. Partial solutions for third-party gas payment exist today through mechanisms like ERC-4337 account abstraction, but Frame Transactions would embed this capability directly into the Ethereum protocol itself.

EIP-8141: Frame Transaction

Add frame abstraction for transaction validation, execution, and gas payment

Ethereum Improvement ProposalsEthereum Improvement Proposals

ETH Keeps Its Role: A Necessary Clarification

A quick read of this news could lead someone to conclude that Frame Transactions make ETH redundant. That's not the case, and the distinction matters. The feature changes the user experience, not ETH's economic function. Validators, the nodes that secure and operate the network, continue to be paid in ETH, exactly as they are today.

Think of ETH as the fuel that runs Ethereum's engine. What changes is that end users won't need to keep fuel in their own tank; someone else handles that on their behalf. Individual retail demand for ETH to cover gas could theoretically soften at the margin, but ETH retains its central role in the network's security and settlement mechanism. It's a subtle but important distinction for anyone tempted to draw conclusions about ETH's long-term value from this upgrade.

Glamsterdam | ethereum.org

Explore the Glamsterdam protocol upgrade

ethereum.org

Timeline Reality Check: Not Coming Soon

Here is the most important caveat, and the one most headlines on this topic tend to underplay. Frame Transactions are not available today and won't be for some time. The technical specification, formalized in EIP-8141, is still in draft form, meaning its details can change before any final implementation. A competing proposal targeting the same goal is also in the mix. Developers are still evaluating which path to take.

Above all, the timeline is long. Frame Transactions are slated for the Hegotá network upgrade, expected no earlier than 2027, which itself follows the Glamsterdam upgrade planned for later this year. Before any real-world deployment, the code will need to be implemented across network clients, tested extensively, supported by wallet software, and subjected to security audits. What we're looking at is a formal commitment from Ethereum developers to build this feature, not a product ready to ship. A 2027 upgrade announcement is not an immediate change to how the network works, and it shouldn't be read as a short-term market signal.

The Bigger Picture

Beyond the timeline and the technical detail, this development signals the direction Ethereum is heading: hiding technological complexity behind a simpler, more familiar user experience. The stated goal is to make blockchain feel indistinguishable from the financial apps people already use, stripping away the friction that still puts off most newcomers. It's the same principle driving projects that aim to make the underlying crypto infrastructure invisible to the end user.

Two lessons stand out for anyone watching this space. First, the next major battleground in crypto isn't raw technological power, it's usability. The platform that delivers the cleanest experience, hiding complexity from ordinary users, will have a serious competitive edge in the race for mass adoption. Second, this story is a reminder to read crypto development news with a calibrated sense of time. Between a feature announcement and its actual availability, years can pass. Telling apart what already works from what's still a proposal is essential for setting realistic expectations. Frame Transactions is a well-aimed and meaningful commitment, but it remains, for now, a commitment. Its real value will only become clear if and when it ships in 2027.

The directive is technical in nature but carries immediate, concrete consequences for anyone operating in the Italian crypto market. After years focused first on building the regulatory architecture, then on obtaining authorizations under the EU's MiCA framework, operators now face a third phase: proving, in practice and every day, that their systems actually work.

Guidelines on internal policies, procedures and controls to ensure the implementation of Union and national restrictive measures | European Banking Authority

European Banking Authority

What Banca d'Italia Actually Requires

The communication's core is a direct reference to European Banking Authority (EBA) guidelines governing controls on transfers of funds and crypto-assets. Those guidelines require CASPs to screen both the sender and the recipient of every transfer against the relevant sanctions lists, and to do so before the transfer is executed. The requirement applies both to ongoing customer relationships and to one-off transactions.

The specific point Banca d'Italia highlights, the one most operators will need to act on, is operational: no minimum amount threshold may be configured in the screening system that would automatically exclude smaller transactions from the check. A system set up to wave through transfers below, say, 100 euros without verifying them against sanctions lists is non-compliant. Every transfer, regardless of value, must be screened. The central bank also requires operators to verify that their systems are correctly configured and calibrated in line with the EBA's technical standards.

Does Every Single Euro Really Need Screening?

The question sounds provocative, but it's entirely legitimate. Does a two-euro crypto transfer genuinely need to run through a sanctions check? The answer is yes, and understanding exactly what that means matters.

It does not mean every micro-transaction gets manually reviewed by a compliance officer, or that small transfers get blocked or delayed. That would be operationally impossible at scale. What it means is more precise: no monetary threshold may exist that automatically removes a transaction from the scope of the required controls. Screening is an automated process that compares the sender and recipient against the relevant sanctioned-party lists. That comparison must be capable of running on any transaction, whatever its size.

The rationale is straightforward. A sanctioned individual could attempt to evade detection precisely by breaking larger movements into many small transfers, each designed to fall below a presumed safe threshold. Eliminating that threshold closes that gap. One technical exception is worth noting: under EU rules, instant credit transfers are permitted a slightly different approach. Given their extreme speed, operators may conduct preventive customer-level screening on at least a daily basis rather than transaction by transaction.

Bankitalia: richiama operatori cripto sui controlli per le sanzioni - Borsa Italiana

Radiocor. Finanza. Bankitalia: richiama operatori cripto sui controlli per le sanzioni.

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From Abstract Rules to Daily Operational Compliance

The deeper significance of this communication lies in the phase transition it signals for the whole sector. For years, the crypto regulatory debate in Europe was largely abstract, focused on grand principles and the architecture of future rules. Then came the authorization phase, with operators scrambling to obtain MiCA licenses and register with national competent authorities. Now comes the third phase, the most concrete one: daily operational compliance.

Banca d'Italia's implicit message is blunt. Holding a MiCA authorization is no longer sufficient on its own. Operators must demonstrate, in practice, every day, that their systems genuinely intercept sanctioned parties on every transfer. This confirms a principle worth stating plainly: MiCA compliance and sanctions compliance are two separate, parallel obligations. Obtaining one does not satisfy the other. This communication is the Italian operational chapter of that principle, and it confirms that regulatory compliance in the crypto sector now involves multiple overlapping layers that cannot be collapsed into a single authorization.

The Bigger Picture: Crypto Grows Up

Technical as it is, this communication tells a larger story about the integration of crypto-assets into the mainstream financial regulatory system. Crypto is no longer a parallel universe operating under looser rules. CASPs in Italy, and by extension across the EU under MiCA, are now subject to the same rigorous sanctions-control obligations that have long applied to banks and payment institutions, including the full complexity of international restrictive measures frameworks.

For operators, the lesson is concrete. The real challenge is no longer purely technological or commercial: it is compliance. Building and maintaining robust, correctly calibrated screening systems is now a fixed operational cost and an inescapable legal responsibility. Firms without that infrastructure are simply not credible regulated entities, whatever license they hold. For the ordinary user, this evolution is, in the end, a form of protection: knowing that the platforms handling your crypto transfers are subject to controls as stringent as those applied to your bank account adds a layer of legitimacy and security to the whole ecosystem. The path to a fully mature crypto sector runs through unglamorous but essential steps like this one, where digital assets stop being frontier territory and become a fully regulated component of the financial system. For a broader grounding in the rules shaping this landscape, the EU's MiCA framework and the EBA's sanctions guidelines remain the essential starting points.

The real story here isn't the number. It's what holding that number, under these conditions, tells us about the structural demand underneath Bitcoin's recent recovery.

Rate Fear Returns to the Market

The picture shifted sharply in recent weeks. A stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs report forced markets to revise their Federal Reserve outlook upward: fed funds futures now assign roughly 57% probability to a rate hike at the September FOMC meeting, according to CME FedWatch data. That scenario looked remote just a month ago. It's worth stressing how unstable that figure has been. The probability has swung dramatically over the past two weeks, driven by incoming economic data and shifting signals from central bank officials, which reflects just how much genuine uncertainty is priced into this environment.

This isn't purely an American story. The ECB is also due to issue a rate decision in the same week, with markets pricing in a possible move toward 2.75%. The logic connecting higher rates to Bitcoin pressure is straightforward: when bond yields rise, capital rotates toward safer, yield-bearing assets, leaving less appetite for volatile alternatives like crypto. The same dynamic surfaced after the Jackson Hole summit and its ripple effects across risk assets, confirming how tightly Bitcoin now tracks the logic of traditional financial markets.

Meetings of the Governing Council and the General Council

Browse schedules for the meetings of the Governing Council and General Council of the ECB and related press conferences.

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Why Holding $80,000 Actually Matters

Here's what makes this phase genuinely interesting to watch. Under normal conditions, rising rate expectations should push a risk asset like Bitcoin lower. The fact that Bitcoin is not only holding but defending $80,000 with stubborn consistency suggests there's a base layer of demand solid enough to absorb meaningful macro headwinds.

Where is that demand coming from? Many observers connect it to the sustained capital inflows through spot Bitcoin ETFs. Over three weeks in late August and early September, those funds gathered $3.8 billion in net inflows, according to SpazioCrypto's analysis of Bloomberg data. The hypothesis, still unconfirmed, is that institutional ETF demand is acting as a structural floor under the price, making Bitcoin more shock-resistant than it was in previous cycles. If that reading is correct, we're looking at a more mature Bitcoin, one less vulnerable to short-term speculative mood swings. That's exactly the thesis the next few days will either validate or puncture.

The Dates That Will Decide Bitcoin's Short-Term Direction

The next move belongs to the data. Two macro releases are circled in red on every serious investor's calendar right now. First comes the U.S. weekly jobless claims report, due September 10. Then, the big one: the U.S. Consumer Price Index for August, scheduled for release on September 11.

The CPI print will probably be the deciding factor. A softer-than-forecast inflation reading would cool Fed rate hike bets, relieve pressure on Bitcoin, and potentially fuel further upside. A hotter reading, on the other hand, would strengthen the hand of the Fed's hawkish faction and put $80,000 under serious threat. There is one reason for cautious optimism on the bull side: some recent sub-indicators show core inflation decelerating. Nothing is settled yet. Bitcoin is effectively in a holding pattern, its near-term fate tied to numbers it has no control over.

The Bigger Picture: Bitcoin Has Changed

This market phase is emblematic of how much Bitcoin has evolved. Once marketed as an asset entirely detached from the traditional financial system, Bitcoin today moves in lockstep with central bank decisions, responding to rate expectations and inflation prints the way equities and bonds do. Its sensitivity to macroeconomic variables is the clearest evidence of its “maturation” as an asset class, with all the benefits and constraints that come with that status.

For anyone watching or invested in this market, the lesson is two-layered. Observing how Bitcoin responds to the September macro data will reveal a great deal about the genuine solidity of the demand supporting it, helping to distinguish a fragile bounce from a durable structural recovery. At the same time, this moment is a reminder that, regardless of how compelling the underlying technology remains, Bitcoin's short-term price is currently driven more by global macroeconomic forces than by anything happening on-chain. You can't afford to tune out the Federal Reserve or the ECB anymore. The battle playing out over the next few days won't be settled on the blockchain. It'll be settled in the CPI release rooms and in FOMC boardroom projections. And how Bitcoin navigates that will tell us whether the floor at $80,000 is concrete or just painted on. For readers new to this asset class, our guide on what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are provides useful grounding.

September 2026

The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington DC.

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Investing Online With AI: What's Actually Changed

Applying AI to financial decisions is no longer a future possibility. It's an operational reality traders use every day. What it is not, though, is a replacement for the trader's own judgment. Generative software like ChatGPT is not there to take over decision-making; it's there to sharpen it.

ChatGPT is not an automated trading tool in the strict sense. Leaving it to beat the market unsupervised, expecting the returns of a seasoned trader, would be a serious mistake. Its value lies in research support, financial analysis, and disciplined risk monitoring. AI won't remove the investor from the equation. What it will do is give a structural advantage to those who adopt it and quietly punish those who don't.

At the current stage of development, AI applications and features in finance are still evolving fast. That evolution is worth tracking closely.

The Latest AI Developments Reshaping Trading Workflows

Compared to the early days of consumer AI around 2022, the technology has made a significant leap. The difference isn't primarily about predictive accuracy, which remains limited, but about integration into the daily workflow.

ChatGPT and similar tools are now genuinely reliable at parsing financial texts and distilling them into actionable summaries. They pull quickly from documents, reports, and structured datasets, surfacing only the most relevant signals. The whole research process accelerates. Tracking which stocks or assets deserve attention becomes less of a grind. Think of it as having a research assistant who keeps you consistent, informed. Disciplined, without ever getting distracted.

AI is not a financial advisor. It has no predictive power over future markets. What it does have is the ability to raise the efficiency ceiling of the human trader sitting behind the screen.

Cutting Through Market Noise: Where ChatGPT Actually Helps

The information overload traders face today is genuinely disorienting. News cycles move fast, narratives conflict, and separating signal from noise takes time most retail investors don't have. A concrete example: there's currently heavy coverage of Bitcoin ETF inflows across financial media. Is that a signal worth acting on, or just hype? You can ask ChatGPT to pull the key arguments for and against that exposure from recent articles and present them in a structured way. That's a legitimate, practical use case.

The same logic applies if you're new to crypto trading and trying to pick a platform. AI can map the strengths and weaknesses of the major exchanges and help you identify the best fit for your specific needs, without wading through ten different review sites.

The relationship you build with an AI tool resembles working with a knowledgeable assistant. The key is learning to communicate through well-constructed prompts. A practical example of a useful prompt: “Summarize the potential impact on equities, bonds. The dollar based on today's news. Identify which sectors stand to benefit and which face headwinds.”

That filtering function, applied consistently, can make a meaningful difference in the quality of daily trading decisions. The traders who learn to use these tools well aren't replacing their judgment; they're reinforcing it with better-organized information. That's the actual edge on offer.

The real story is how the funds left. No private keys were stolen. The federation that governs Liquid Network authorized the withdrawal with perfectly legitimate signatures. A software bug in the underlying protocol made it possible, and that distinction matters enormously. One more point deserves immediate clarification: Bitcoin's mainnet was not touched, compromised, or affected in any way.

What Actually Happened on September 6

Liquid Network is a “sidechain”: a separate blockchain linked to Bitcoin, designed to enable faster and more private transactions for exchanges and institutional investors. The mechanics work in two directions. Users lock real Bitcoin to receive an equivalent on the sidechain called L-BTC, and when they want their original Bitcoin back, they burn those L-BTC in a process called a peg-out. A federation of fifteen operators secures the real Bitcoin reserves, and any movement of funds requires approval from at least eleven of them.

On September 6, an unidentified party initiated a peg-out for nearly 4,000 Bitcoin. The federation, using its normal signing process, authorized and executed the transfer. The transaction was technically valid: the signatures were legitimate. No security key was stolen or compromised by force. So how did 95% of the reserves walk out the door? According to initial statements from those involved, the answer is a flaw in the software itself.

The Core Issue: A Bug, Not a Stolen Key

Here is the technically decisive point. SideSwap, the peg-out service through which the operation was routed, stated that the L-BTC used to withdraw the Bitcoin were created by exploiting a bug in Elements, the open-source software on which Liquid Network is built. Blockstream confirmed this reading. The attacker did not steal keys to force an exit. Instead, they reportedly exploited a flaw in the code to create apparently legitimate L-BTC from thin air, then converted those tokens into real Bitcoin through the standard peg-out process.

That distinction is everything. A stolen key is a contained incident: revoke the key, secure the funds, problem solved. A logical flaw in how the system authorizes withdrawals is a far deeper design-level problem, one that requires a correction to the protocol itself. Think of it as the difference between a thief stealing a key and a flaw in the lock's design that lets anyone who knows the trick open it without a key at all. The federation's defenses, built to protect against stolen keys, were simply irrelevant against an attack that never needed to steal anything. The same category of structural vulnerability appeared in the bug that hit six Cosmos ecosystem blockchains: not the cryptography, but the code logic.

“White Hat” or Attack? The Evidence That Matters

There is another layer that keeps this story open. The parties behind the withdrawal left an on-chain message claiming to be “white hat” hackers, ethical actors who exposed the vulnerability intending to return the funds. Blockstream confirmed it is attempting to contact them via a signed on-chain message. Healthy skepticism is warranted here.

https://docs.liquid.net/docs/technical-overview

The security community has been cautious. As a senior technical officer at a prominent blockchain security firm noted in public commentary, the “white hat” label is confirmed by actions, not declarations. The only real test is whether the funds are actually returned. In past comparable incidents, the ethical hacker classification was applied only after Bitcoin was genuinely restituted. Until that happens, the distinction between a benevolent disclosure and an outright theft remains unresolved. As of this writing, the funds have not been returned and the identity of those involved remains unknown. The episode is a sharp reminder of why self-custody matters: holding assets on platforms where you do not control the keys carries risks that no federation design can fully eliminate, a topic we've covered in depth in our guide on how to safely custody crypto assets.

The Critical Distinction: Bitcoin Is Not Liquid

Whatever the outcome, this incident illustrates a distinction that gets ignored far too often: the difference between the security of Bitcoin itself and the security of the infrastructure built on top of it. Bitcoin's mainnet, running on a decentralized consensus mechanism across thousands of nodes, was not touched by this incident. What failed was a sidechain: a separate system, built by a company, operating under a security model that is significantly more centralized.

Sidechains and additional layers built on Bitcoin promise real advantages, such as greater speed and privacy. But those advantages come with trade-offs and new points of fragility that Bitcoin's base layer simply does not have. In this case, trust was placed in a federation of operators and in the software governing their process. That is precisely where the vulnerability opened. The pattern echoes what happened during the Fogo blockchain halt following an attack. Bitcoin's soundness does not automatically extend to everything built around it. That is not a criticism of Bitcoin; it's a structural fact about layered systems.

The Wider Lesson for Crypto Investors

The Liquid Network incident, regardless of how it ultimately resolves, delivers a lesson that applies across the entire crypto ecosystem. Security is not a single monolithic property. It is a chain, and the strength of the strongest link (Bitcoin's base layer) does not guarantee the strength of the weaker links (the infrastructure built on top). Every additional technology layer, however useful, introduces new attack surface and new trust assumptions that must be evaluated on their own terms.

Two takeaways stand out. First, the security claims of Bitcoin-adjacent infrastructure deserve scrutiny independent of Bitcoin's reputation. Liquid Network is not Bitcoin. Its risks are its own, defined by its design choices, its federation model, and the software it runs. Second, and more broadly, this case confirms a pattern that experienced security researchers recognize well: in crypto, the most frequent points of failure are not in the underlying cryptography, which tends to be extremely robust, but in the software implementations and trust models built by humans on top of it. That is where bugs nest. That is where vulnerabilities find their entry points. For anyone building or investing in this space, understanding where Bitcoin ends and where its layers begin is not optional knowledge. For those starting from the foundations, our guide on what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are remains a practical starting point.

After the single-session record of over $730 million that we covered previously, the weekly pattern now confirms that institutional demand isn't a one-day event. Three consecutive weeks of sustained buying through regulated channels is something different from an outlier session. Yet the year-to-date deficit tells the fuller story, and it's the detail that separates honest analysis from triumphant headlines.

Three Weeks: The Best Bitcoin ETF Inflow Streak of 2026

Start with what's genuinely positive. The most recent week delivered roughly $987 million in net inflows into U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs, up about 7% from the prior week, per SoSoValue data. Aggregated across three consecutive weeks, the figure reaches approximately $3.8 billion. BlackRock's IBIT fund dominated the collection, as it has throughout the year. No other fund came close.

The reason three weeks matter more than one day is straightforward: a single outsized session can reflect a single large block trade or tactical reallocation. Three consecutive weeks of strong net inflows begin to look like a structural shift in appetite. Institutional investors are accessing Bitcoin through regulated wrappers with a frequency and consistency not seen since late 2025. That's the signal worth watching, distinct from a one-off data point. It's the same institutional dynamic we first flagged when analyzing that $731 million single-session record.

Farside Investors

Founded in 2023, Farside Investors is a London based investment management boutique, specialising in global equities & cryptocurrency

The Contrast That Matters: 2026 Is Still in Deficit

Here's the part that most headlines skip. Despite $3.8 billion in net inflows over three weeks, the year-to-date balance for U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs remains approximately negative $1 billion, according to SoSoValue cumulative flow data. Every dollar that came in during January and February went out, and then some. Three strong weeks have narrowed the gap considerably, but they haven't closed it.

That single fact reframes everything. First, it reveals just how severe the early-2026 outflow episode really was. If three weeks of the best inflows of the year haven't yet flipped the annual balance, the January-February exodus was substantial. Second, it counsels against reading the current moment as a victory lap. Wall Street isn't charging into Bitcoin from a standing start. Wall Street is retreating from a retreat. The posture is recovery, not assault. That's a meaningful distinction, and it changes how you position expectations for the weeks ahead.

A Cooler End to the Week

Friday reinforced the call for measured optimism. After Thursday's peak, daily inflows cooled sharply to around $175 million, per SoSoValue data. Bitcoin's price, which had cleared $80,000 with some momentum earlier in the week, pulled back and briefly dipped below $79,000 before stabilizing near $79,700.

The catalyst was macroeconomic. A stronger-than-expected U.S. jobs report reignited fears of sustained higher interest rates, pressuring risk assets across the board. Crypto felt it immediately. This is the same transmission mechanism we observed following the Jackson Hole meeting and its market aftermath: central bank policy expectations now move Bitcoin almost as reliably as they move equities. Worth noting alongside this: while Bitcoin ETFs attracted consistent buying, Ethereum ETF inflows dropped sharply in the same week. Demand at this stage is concentrating on Bitcoin, not the broader crypto complex.

The Bigger Picture

This week's data delivers a layered read on Bitcoin's market position. Layered is probably the most accurate description available right now. On one side: institutional demand channeled through ETFs has returned with a consistency not seen in months. Three weeks of steady net buying is an objectively positive data point. On the other side: the annual balance remains in deficit, daily flows are volatile. Bitcoin's price continues to respond sharply to macroeconomic signals. That same institutional momentum is spreading across products too, as illustrated by the consortium of major banks developing a shared stablecoin.

The most useful habit for any investor watching this market is reading the full dataset, not just the headline figure. It's easy to get carried away by “best three-week streak of 2026” or worried by “annual balance still negative.” Both are true. Neither alone is sufficient. The real signal to track is whether institutional demand proves durable enough to not only close the year-to-date deficit but push beyond it. Until that happens, what we're watching is a promising recovery in progress: worth following closely, worth treating with clear eyes. For anyone who wants to understand the instruments at the center of this story, our guide on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is a good place to start.

One important caveat: the study does not claim that buying USDT automatically weakens a national currency. It demonstrates something more precise. Market structure determines where that pressure ends up. It can stay confined within the local stablecoin premium, or, when globally active intermediaries operate across both markets, it can transform into genuine dollar demand.

What the Bank of Korea Actually Found

Published on September 3, 2026 by Jihyun Kim and Sangheum Cho from the International Department of the Bank of Korea, the paper analyzes 12 currencies and the introduction of fiat-stablecoin trading pairs on Binance between 2019 and 2025. The premise is straightforward: using euros, Brazilian reais, or another currency to buy a dollar-pegged stablecoin is economically similar to purchasing a dollar-denominated asset with that same currency.

The decisive difference lies in who sits on the other side of the trade. Binance allows global liquidity providers and market makers, already active in both stablecoin and forex markets, to supply the liquidity demanded by local investors. This connection is what creates the potential bridge between the two markets. For readers who want to start from the basics, our stablecoin guide explains how USDT, USDC, and other fiat-pegged tokens work.

The Key Mechanism Lives on Market Maker Balance Sheets

Picture a rapid surge in demand for USDT from investors using Brazilian reais. The market maker sells the stablecoins and receives reais in return. That intermediary may not want to hold a growing position in the Brazilian currency. To neutralize the risk, the market maker can sell the reais in the FX market and buy dollars. A transaction that began on a crypto exchange produces a second transaction in the forex market.

The Bank of Korea separates this phenomenon into two channels. The first is price integration: with more arbitrage and international liquidity, the local stablecoin price converges toward the spot exchange rate. The second is shock transmission: a share of the crypto demand is absorbed through intermediaries' FX operations and can therefore reach the national currency's exchange rate directly.

South Korea Is the Counterexample That Explains Everything

The most instructive part of the study comes from the Korean market itself. South Korea has no direct won-stablecoin pair on Binance comparable to those used in the main analysis. The result: when buying pressure on stablecoins rises, the shock does not transfer to the currency market in the same way.

The pressure shows up primarily as a higher USDT and USDC premium on local exchanges, while the study finds no significant effect on the won's exchange rate. The distinction matters enormously. It is not the stablecoin alone that creates the link with forex. Global intermediaries are required, along with simultaneous access to both markets and a structure that allows positions received on the crypto exchange to be hedged on the currency market.

Brazil Shows How the Shock Can Escape from Crypto

To further test the mechanism, the authors also use weekly data from Brazil. Google searches related to Bitcoin serve as a proxy for investor interest in the crypto market. According to the Bank of Korea paper, a one-standard-deviation increase in this indicator is associated with a 0.118% depreciation of the Brazilian real and, simultaneously, a 0.109 percentage point rise in the local stablecoin premium.

These figures require careful interpretation. They do not mean that a rise in Bitcoin searches mechanically causes a 0.118% currency depreciation, nor that the same coefficient applies to the euro, the won, or other currencies. The result is designed to show that a crypto demand shock can leave a simultaneous footprint in both the stablecoin market and the forex market, consistent with the transmission mechanism the authors identify.

For Europe, the Problem Does Not End with MiCA

The issue is especially relevant for Europe because the global stablecoin market remains dollar-dominated. In May 2026, ECB President Christine Lagarde noted that the sector had surpassed $300 billion, that stablecoins are denominated in USD by a wide majority, and that nearly 90% of the market is concentrated among the two largest issuers, according to remarks reported in May 2026. The ECB explicitly links this growth to financial stability and monetary sovereignty concerns. The debate connects directly to questions already raised about competition between stablecoins and bank deposits in major European economies.

MiCA regulates e-money tokens within the EU, meaning crypto-assets designed to maintain a stable value relative to a single official currency. But the Korean paper shows that monitoring issuers and reserves is not enough to capture all monetary effects. Exchanges, fiat pairs, market makers, arbitrage, and FX liquidity all need to be part of the picture. The question grows more concrete as European initiatives such as Revolut's EURR take shape and as 21 major financial institutions prepare a new shared stablecoin infrastructure.

The Bigger Picture

The real novelty of the paper is not a claim that stablecoins control exchange rates. They don't. Inflation, interest rates, monetary policy, international trade, capital flows, and geopolitical risk remain forces of an entirely different magnitude. What the paper does establish empirically is that the boundary between the crypto market and the currency market can become permeable when market microstructure allows intermediaries to transfer pressure from one market to the other.

For central banks, this reshapes how USDT, USDC, and whatever comes next should be evaluated. A dollar stablecoin is not only a token used to buy crypto. It can also serve as a gateway to dollar liquidity and a channel for non-traditional capital flows. As these markets grow, the regulatory question becomes twofold: not just who issues the stablecoin and what reserves back it, but also who absorbs the demand, how that risk is hedged, and in which market that hedge ultimately lands.

It offers a more meaningful read than a simple “Bitcoin is up.” After weeks of the market searching for confirmation that institutional appetite was real, this session showed price, capital, and sentiment moving in the same direction at once. That said, there are solid reasons to pair the excitement with clear-eyed realism. The right question isn't “how high will it go?” It's “who is actually buying this rally?” And the data, for once, gives a genuinely interesting answer.

The Numbers That Matter

Start with the facts. Total net inflows reached roughly $731 million on September 3, the largest single-day figure since January 14, according to CoinGlass. BlackRock's IBIT dominated, pulling in approximately $454 million on its own, more than 60% of the day's total. ARK Invest and Fidelity followed, with inflows of around $138 million and $74 million respectively. Even Ethereum ETFs joined the move, gathering approximately $141 million in the same session.

To frame the scale: total assets under management across U.S. spot Bitcoin ETF products have reached $103 billion, a figure that represents more than 6% of Bitcoin's entire market capitalization, per CoinGecko data. These funds have become a structural pillar of the market, a regulated channel through which traditional finance consistently routes capital into crypto. The demand reinforcement fits the broader positive climate we examined when analyzing market dynamics around Jackson Hole.

Who Is Buying? The Demand Is Spot-Driven

This is the most substantive part of the story. A price rally can be powered by very different forces, and they don't all carry the same weight. Leverage-driven speculation, where traders borrow to amplify bets, produces fragile gains that unwind fast. Spot buying, where investors actually purchase and hold the asset, reflects durable demand. The two feel the same on a price chart, but they are not.

The data from this period points clearly to the second scenario. Analysis from on-chain research firm Glassnode shows that Bitcoin's advance was driven by genuine spot purchases, while speculative futures positions actually declined. That's a technically significant detail: the engine behind the move was conviction buying, not leveraged speculation, and ETF inflows are the most tangible evidence of that. The extreme concentration of buying in BlackRock's IBIT, the preferred vehicle of large institutional allocators, points to “allocative” demand: structural, considered investment decisions, not short-term tactical trades. The answer to “who is buying?”, at least right now, is institutional investors, through regulated products, with real capital.

The Necessary Counterpoint: Watch the Euphoria

Letting the enthusiasm run unchecked would be a mistake. Two factors warrant real caution here. The first is the sheer volatility of these same flows: just two days before the record, the same ETF complex saw outflows of more than $236 million, with BlackRock's IBIT alone shedding over $200 million, per CoinGlass figures. An exceptional day of inflows arrived immediately after days of exits. That pattern demonstrates how quickly these movements can reverse, and why drawing conclusions from a single session is a risky exercise.

The second factor is the explicit caution coming from established voices within the industry. Fidelity's analysts, one of the major traditional-finance names now active in crypto, have argued that this rally, positive as it is, does not yet provide enough evidence to declare the bear market over. For a genuine trend reversal, they say, the market will need to clear several key levels convincingly. One strong day doesn't make a trend, and the line between a temporary bounce and a structural shift remains open. It's the same call for clear thinking we made when covering the leveraged-positioning correction earlier this cycle.

The Bigger Picture: Bitcoin's Institutionalization Is Real

Beyond any single day's number, this episode reinforces a deeper trend reshaping Bitcoin's market structure: its growing institutionalization. Spot ETFs have fundamentally changed how capital enters and exits this asset class, building a stable, regulated bridge between traditional finance and crypto. That makes the market more mature and liquid in certain respects. It also ties Bitcoin's near-term price behavior more tightly to the logic and mood of large institutional players. The same traditional finance world is moving on multiple fronts simultaneously, as we covered with the consortium of major banks preparing a shared stablecoin.

Two lessons follow from all this. First, ETF flow data is now one of the most transparent and reliable indicators available for gauging genuine underlying demand, the kind that distinguishes real accumulation from short-term noise. Learning to read these numbers gives investors a sharper picture of market health than price charts alone. Second, the golden rule of rigorous analysis still applies: never draw definitive conclusions from a single data point, no matter how impressive. The volatility of these flows and the measured caution from seasoned analysts are a reminder that crypto markets remain unpredictable, and that the road from a good signal to a confirmed trend is often long. Institutional demand has returned with force, but whether we are truly at the start of a new phase will be answered by its consistency over weeks and months, not by the performance of one exceptional trading session. For a deeper grounding in how these instruments work, our guide on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is a useful starting point.

#dovalue #weltix #dlt #tokenizzazione #cartolarizzazione #privateassets #capitalmarkets | doValue

📢𝗱𝗼𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲 𝗲 𝗪𝗲𝗹𝘁𝗶𝘅 𝗮𝘃𝘃𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗼 𝗹𝗮 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗮 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘇𝘇𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗡𝗣𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗻 𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗸𝗲𝗻𝗶𝘇𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗹 𝗺𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗼 A poco più di un mese dall'annuncio della collaborazione, il progetto raggiunge una milestone operativa concreta con la chiusura a inizio agosto di una 𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗺𝗮 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗱𝗶 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗼𝗹𝗮𝗿𝗶𝘇𝘇𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗱𝗮 𝟭𝟬 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶 di euro relativa a un portafoglio NPL. L'operazione ha visto la sinergia del Gruppo doValue (tramite la controllata doNext) come Master Servicer, Corporate Servicer Provider, Calculation Agent, Paying Agent e RON, con Weltix come Responsabile del registro DLT autorizzato da Consob e con Teda 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲 come Special Servicer. Key highlights: ✅ 𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘇𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗲 𝗱𝗶𝗴𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗲: l'utilizzo della tecnologia DLT consente di creare i titoli direttamente in formato digitale senza necessità di dematerializzazione successiva, ottimizzando i processi di emissione, gestione e trasferimento; ✅𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮̀ 𝗲 𝗴𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗮: l'adozione della tokenizzazione garantisce a emittenti, intermediari e investitori maggiore tracciabilità, una governance digitale dell'intero ciclo di vita dello strumento e tempi di regolamento più rapidi. Il Gruppo doValue conferma il ruolo centrale della tecnologia nei servizi a valore aggiunto per l'intera filiera del credito. Leggi il comunicato stampa completo qui: https://lnkd.in/dr9t_UGA #doValue #Weltix #DLT #Tokenizzazione #Cartolarizzazione #PrivateAssets #CapitalMarkets

LinkedIndoValue

The news is technical, but its scope is significant. It marks blockchain's entry into one of the most intermediary-heavy sectors in all of finance. One clarification is worth making upfront: this is not about turning bad debt into a speculative cryptocurrency. What's happening is subtler and more interesting. Let's unpack what was actually done and why it matters for European markets.

DoValue e Weltix: prima emissione tokenizzata nell'ambito della collaborazione strategica

doValue e Weltix:accelerano l'innovazione nelle cartolarizzazioni con la prima emissione tokenizzata nell'ambito della collaborazione strategica A poco più di un mese…

MarketScreener ItaliaPublicnow

What Actually Happened, Explained Simply

Two definitions help frame the news. Non-performing loans, or NPLs, are bank loans that borrowers are struggling to repay. Banks routinely package these together and sell them to specialist investors through a process called “securitization”: the loans are bundled into financial securities that can then be bought and sold on the market.

What makes this deal different is that the securities were not issued the traditional way (on paper, then converted to electronic format). They were born digital, directly on a blockchain-based ledger. Weltix, the fintech authorized by Italy's securities regulator Consob specifically for this role, manages the DLT register. doValue, for its part, handled the overall deal structure across multiple technical roles that a securitization typically requires. The entire transaction occurred under the Italian FinTech Decree, which is the legal framework that made these operations possible.

doValue e Weltix lanciano la prima cartolarizzazione di crediti NPL “tokenizzata” - Borsa Italiana

Teleborsa. finanza. doValue e Weltix lanciano la prima cartolarizzazione di crediti NPL “tokenizzata”.

Borsa Italiana logo

The Real Angle: It's the Infrastructure Going On-Chain, Not the NPL

Here is the part that makes this story genuinely interesting, beyond a routine technical announcement. The critical question is what was actually “put on blockchain.” The bad loan itself has not been turned into a digital currency. What changed is the infrastructure through which the securitization's securities are issued, recorded, and managed.

The securitization sector is notoriously complex, populated by layers of intermediaries, constant data reconciliation between parties, and high operational costs driven largely by the manual processing of large volumes of paperwork. The idea here is to use blockchain to streamline that machinery. If securities are born digital and live on a shared, transparent ledger, handoffs are reduced, processing costs fall, and settlement times shorten. In other words, blockchain is not replacing the distressed loan; it's replacing part of the bureaucratic apparatus surrounding it. This deal follows a trail blazed by other Italian firsts, including the first tokenized bond settled in central bank money, a transaction that involved some of the same technology partners active in this operation.

Compliance - Weltix

Weltix guarantees transparency and security through 3 official authorizations that certify full regulatory compliance.

Weltix

An Italian Ecosystem Taking Shape

This deal didn't emerge from nowhere. It's concrete evidence of an Italian tokenization ecosystem that is structuring itself at speed. The fact that an operator of doValue's scale, managing more than 130 billion euros in credit portfolios and listed on the stock exchange, is driving this initiative gives it enormous institutional weight. It's not a startup experiment. It's the strategic choice of a front-line actor in the financial system.

Around these deals, a genuine supply chain of specialized expertise is taking shape: from the authorized technology platforms managing digital registers, to the servicers coordinating investors, to the firms providing technical infrastructure. The same names keep appearing across recent transactions, a sign that critical mass in knowledge and infrastructure is accumulating, exactly as is happening across the broader asset tokenization market in Italy. Italy is carving out a leading role in this specific field, running real-world applications ahead of many other countries. This movement fits squarely within the European framework that the European Central Bank has outlined through its tokenized finance projects.

#tokenizzazione #npl #cartolarizzazioni #dlt | Antonio Chiarello | 11 comments

doValue e Weltix: walk the talk 💪💪💪 A tre mesi dall'annuncio della partnership, arriva la prima operazione: una cartolarizzazione di NPL tokenizzata. Insieme abbiamo perfezionato l'emissione su DLT di note ABS da 10 milioni di euro, sottoscritte integralmente da un club deal di investitori professionali per cui Teda Advisors ha agito come Special Servicer. Il sentiero con doValue è già tracciato e questa prima operazione ci ha permesso di affinare i processi. Da domani per i clienti di doValue emettere note ABS in forma digitale sarà ancora più semplice ed efficiente. È così che un'innovazione smette di essere un caso isolato e diventa uno standard. E c'è un secondo livello. Questa emissione nasce già pensata per facilitare il mercato secondario. Non solo un'emissione più efficiente. Un ciclo di vita digitale completo, 𝗲𝗻𝗱-𝘁𝗼-𝗲𝗻𝗱, dentro un unico perimetro regolamentato. È questo che cambia il modo in cui funzionano le cartolarizzazioni in Italia. Non un esperimento in più, un'adozione reale. Grazie a chi ha reso possibile l'operazione: Armando La Morgia, Paolo Peruzzetto, Emanuele Spinola, Federico Mella, Daniele De Luca, Riccardo Tropeano, Edoardo Reggiani, Intellexia - Società tra Avvocati Avv. Vanessa Solimeno, BlockInvest Lorenzo Rigatti Vincenzo Olivieri Giacomo Della Valentina Simmons & Simmons Ugo Malvagna Edoardo Reggiani Martino Testa Il Sole 24 Ore per l'articolo More to come... 🚀🚀🚀 #Tokenizzazione #NPL #Cartolarizzazioni #DLT | 11 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInAntonio Chiarello

The Bigger Picture

Tokenization entering the world of non-performing credit is significant because it demonstrates how adaptable this technology really is. Blockchain had already been applied to bonds and relatively straightforward financial instruments. Seeing it tackle structured finance, one of the most complex and traditionally paper-heavy corners of the market, signals that its potential reaches much further than most assumed. Wherever a financial process involves multiple intermediaries and high costs, tokenization offers efficiency, transparency, and speed. The same drive to bring traditional markets on-chain is visible globally, as with the London Stock Exchange moving its equities on-chain.

There are two lessons here for any close observer. First, this case confirms that blockchain's genuine revolution, separate from cryptocurrency speculation, may unfold precisely “behind the scenes” of finance, inside the invisible infrastructure that keeps markets running. It doesn't replace financial products; it reinvents their internal mechanics, making them leaner. Second, it's a legitimate source of pride for Italy, which is proving itself an advanced laboratory in this sector, capable of attracting serious operators and delivering regulated, real-world applications. If this model proves it can scale, genuinely cutting costs and settlement times, it could reshape credit management in a fundamental way. Starting to build that here, in Italy, is a story worth telling. For those who want to understand the underlying technology better, the guide on what cryptocurrencies and blockchain are remains a useful starting point.

Bailey's Warning: AI as a Systemic Financial Threat

The possibility that frontier AI models could transform a cyberattack into a full-blown financial system shock is real, in Bailey's assessment. As both Governor of the Bank of England and Chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB), he brings a dual vantage point to the debate: central bank governor and global systemic-risk watchdog. The FSB monitors the stability of international markets and has paid growing attention to crypto-assets and digital finance as systemic actors.

Ahead of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting held in North Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday, Bailey wrote a formal letter to his counterparts laying out the threat.

Artificial intelligence in UK financial services - 2024

The Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority conducted a third survey of artificial intelligence and machine learning in UK financial services.

Bank of England

The letter focused on the threat posed by frontier AI models: the most advanced AI systems currently in development, capable of autonomous reasoning, complex problem-solving, and increasingly sophisticated attack behaviors within digital infrastructure. Crucially, these systems can be instructed to launch sustained cyberattacks against financial infrastructure. Unlike human actors, they don't tire. They can probe, test, and re-attempt without pause until a vulnerability is found and exploited.

Bailey's concerns echo a broader chorus of warnings about decentralized finance security. Earlier this summer, Manuel Aráoz, co-founder and former CTO of OpenZeppelin, publicly called DeFi fundamentally insecure, citing AI-assisted coding agents as part of the problem.

Global Finance Under Cyber Threat: Why Concentration Risk Matters

What makes this threat particularly serious is structural. Bailey's letter highlights a vulnerability that predates AI but is dramatically amplified by it: the financial system's dependence on a small number of shared technology providers.

The world's largest banks, market infrastructure operators, and technology companies all rely on the same vendors and platforms. A cyberattack targeting a major shared provider could propagate rapidly across jurisdictions, taking down institutions simultaneously rather than sequentially. This concentration risk transforms what might otherwise be a contained incident into a systemic event.

In his letter, Bailey urged financial institutions not to underestimate the threat and to begin building defenses capable of absorbing simultaneous disruptions across multiple nodes. He expressed particular concern about chains of shared technological dependency linking institutions that might appear operationally independent.

How to Defend: The FSB's Dual-Layer Approach

The Financial Stability Board is actively studying how the same frontier models that constitute the threat might be deployed as defenders. The logic is direct: AI that can identify vulnerabilities and launch attacks can, in principle, be repurposed to find and patch those same vulnerabilities faster than any human team.

The FSB is clear, though, that AI defense alone isn't sufficient. Human response and recovery teams remain essential. The board is pushing for improved vulnerability management, faster incident response capabilities, and above all stronger recovery architecture. Among the specific measures cited is the use of bare-metal physical infrastructure immediately following a serious attack: isolated, hardened systems that serve as genuine fallback environments, independent of the compromised network.

There's a genuine tension here. AI can accelerate both attack and defense. An environment where vulnerabilities are discovered and patched at ever-increasing speed could harden the financial system against cyberattacks over time. But if the speed of AI-driven countermeasures isn't carefully managed, those same systems risk rendering the infrastructure they're protecting inaccessible. Defense mechanisms that move faster than human oversight can follow create their own category of systemic risk.

AI Amplifies Vulnerabilities That Were Already There

Bailey's warning doesn't stop at cybersecurity. In his letter, he argues the global financial system was already fragile before AI arrived on the scene. AI hasn't created the vulnerabilities; it has magnified them.

Equity markets have seen a significant rise in leverage, including through the use of leveraged ETFs and momentum-based investment strategies that concentrate capital in the best-performing assets. Many of those assets are, predictably, shares in AI companies, which have seen strong growth globally and across European markets including Italy. The paradox Bailey is pointing to is uncomfortable: fintech and institutional finance may be actively funding the primary threat to their own stability.

The deeper risk isn't simply that a well-trained AI model could crash the valuations of the companies that build it, though that scenario isn't implausible. The more unsettling possibility is a simultaneous market crisis and cyberattack, both triggered by the same underlying cause, feeding one another in a feedback loop that becomes nearly impossible to contain.

For investors and institutions operating across European and global markets, Bailey's letter represents a signal worth watching. The FSB is expected to publish updated guidance on AI-related systemic risk ahead of the next G20 cycle. Financial firms that have not yet stress-tested their third-party technology dependencies against AI-assisted attack scenarios are now on notice: the regulator that oversees global financial stability considers this a live threat, not a theoretical one.

The story is a near-perfect case study in how misinformation spreads through the crypto sector. It blends an old, never-confirmed claim with documents whose authenticity was never established and, lurking in the background, a memecoin created specifically to profit from the noise. Reconstructing this sequence matters not just to clarify the GTA VI situation, but to recognize the mechanics behind how crypto hoaxes are assembled.

The USDT Rumor: A Claim Years in the Making

The suggestion that GTA VI would accept USDT alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum isn't new. It traces back to a claim that circulated in the summer of 2024, spread by a pseudonymous influencer along with a trailer that turned out to be fake. When pressed on the source, that person responded with irony, suggesting a relative “worked there”, hardly a credible confirmation by any journalistic standard. Some accounts trace the idea even further back, to a 2021 statement by a known gaming industry insider who suggested certain missions might reward players with an internal version of Bitcoin. That same insider later clarified he believed the feature had been dropped years earlier.

In both cases, the source is unverified speculation, not an official announcement. Neither Rockstar, the developer, nor Take-Two Interactive, the publisher, has ever confirmed any of this. The reference to USDT doesn't originate from a company press release or filing. It comes from an old corridor rumor that resurfaces periodically, never finding confirmation.

Bitcoin and Ethereum to Appear in Grand Theft Auto 6, Rumor Has It | Yellow

Speculation about cryptocurrency integration in Grand Theft Auto 6 continues to circulate

Yellow.comAlexey Bondarev

The Alleged “SEC Documents” on Sharkbux and Solana

The most insidious layer of the rumor involves documents that circulated in August 2026 describing a supposed GTA VI in-game currency called “Sharkbux,” which would allegedly be represented as a token on the Solana blockchain. These PDFs carried the branding of Take-Two and Rockstar, which made them look official. That's where the deception runs deepest.

Those documents were not official filings submitted by the company to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission through formal channels. They had simply been uploaded to the SEC's public comment section for a proposed rulemaking, a consultation open to anyone at all, much like the new SEC crypto rules we've covered separately. In practical terms, any member of the public could theoretically upload a file to that section. The authenticity and corporate authorization of those PDFs were never established, and as of this writing the files are no longer available. The accurate description is “unauthenticated documents uploaded to a public SEC rulemaking comment section,” not “an official Take-Two filing.” That distinction matters enormously.

The Real (and Entirely Different) Take-Two and Solana Connection

A genuine connection between GTA VI's publisher and Solana does exist. It has nothing to do with the game. In early August, a financial firm created a tokenized version of Take-Two Interactive's Nasdaq-listed stock, making it tradable on the Solana blockchain. Each token represents a real company share and is declared redeemable on a one-to-one basis.

This is a financial product, entirely comparable to the tokenized shares of other major companies we've reported on, and it has no connection to Rockstar, the game itself, or any hypothetical in-game currency. This coincidence likely fed the confusion: the fact that the publisher's stock can be traded on Solana was conflated, or deliberately distorted, into the claim that “GTA VI is on Solana.” These are entirely separate things. One is stock tokenization, a real and growing financial phenomenon. The other is blockchain integration in a video game, for which no evidence exists.

SEC.gov | Regulation Crypto Assets

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission

The Memecoin Behind the Leaks: Where the Money Went

To understand who had a financial interest in amplifying this narrative, look at who was behind the recent GTA VI gameplay leaks. The group responsible for those leaks was simultaneously promoting their own memecoin on Solana, using stolen footage as bait. They distributed gameplay clips overlaid with QR codes linking to the token purchase page, promising to release more material if the coin's value rose.

The structure is the classic predatory pump-and-dump: artificially inflate an asset's value through hype, sell at the peak, and leave other buyers holding tokens that collapse. According to reporting on the incident, the creator collected approximately $250,000 shortly before Rockstar's official game presentation, while the token crashed. It bears noting that many of the claims about an alleged real-money-convertible in-game currency originated from the same party with a direct financial stake in generating GTA VI and crypto hype simultaneously. The rumor's source was the person profiting from it. Recognizing these dynamics is the first line of defense, as we explain in our guide on how to spot a crypto scam.

Tokenized Take-Two Interactive ($TTWO) Now Available on Solana

Trade tokenized Take-Two Interactive ($TTWO) on Solana 24/7. Redeem 1:1 for Nasdaq-listed TTWO shares through Backpack Securities and access the stock across the Solana ecosystem.

Backpack ExchangeBackpack Learn

What Rockstar and Take-Two Have Actually Said

Against all this noise, what do official sources actually say? The answer is straightforward: nothing relating to cryptocurrency. The official GTA VI page presents the game, supported platforms, and a release date of November 19, 2026, with zero mention of USDT, Solana, blockchain, or any token. Likewise, Take-Two's most recent official financial results confirm the launch date and projected revenues from traditional in-game virtual currencies, the same as always, but contain no announcement whatsoever regarding crypto or blockchain integration.

It's also worth recalling that Rockstar maintains a policy banning cryptocurrency and NFTs from third-party roleplay servers. That signals corporate caution toward the sector, though it would be inaccurate to read it as an absolute, permanent prohibition on any future decision. The core point stands regardless: as things currently are, no official communication supports the idea of real crypto integration in the game.

GTA 6 leaker cashes out in $250,000 crypto rug pull just hours before Rockstar's official reveal, memecoin crashes as Cyberleek's ‘anti-corporate’ campaign ends in a payday

An obvious pump-and-dump from the outset.

Tom's HardwareLuke James

The Bigger Picture

To summarize: no verifiable evidence currently exists that GTA VI will use USDT, Solana, or any real cryptocurrency. The USDT reference traces back to a 2024 rumor; the alleged Solana integration to unauthenticated documents uploaded to a public consultation; and the only genuine connection to Solana involves an external financial product, a tokenized version of the publisher's stock, which has nothing to do with the game itself. The entire narrative was amplified by parties with a direct financial stake in doing so, through a memecoin that subsequently collapsed.

Two lessons emerge for any careful observer. The first is methodological: this episode shows with unusual clarity how convincing disinformation gets constructed, by blending a fragment of truth (the tokenized shares do exist) with old rumors and fabricated documents, all driven by a concealed financial motive. Learning to break down these narratives, to ask “who is saying this and what do they gain from it,” is the most practical defense against scams. The second is an honest reflection: one cannot entirely rule out that GTA VI, true to its historically sharp satire of American society, might include a purely fictional cryptocurrency as a parody of the sector, something perfectly consistent with its narrative universe. But that would be deeply different from actually integrating USDT or a public blockchain. Until Rockstar itself provides evidence to the contrary, every other claim should be treated for what it is: unconfirmed speculation. In a sector that runs on hype, the ability to separate fact from wishful thinking is the single most valuable skill around, and it's one worth building from the foundations of what cryptocurrencies actually are.

The announcement carries serious weight. It marks the moment when traditional finance, in its most entrenched form, steps directly onto cryptocurrency turf to challenge the sector's current leaders. This move could reshape the balance of power in a market that is still growing fast.

What the 21 Banks Actually Announced

The plan is ambitious and clearly timed. The twenty-one institutions stated they will incorporate a new company dedicated specifically to stablecoin issuance in the second half of 2026. The target is then to launch a first stablecoin pegged to the US dollar in the first half of 2027. The group does not plan to stop there: after the dollar, it intends to create stablecoins tied to other major world currencies, with the euro named as the immediate next priority.

Intended uses for the digital currency are multiple and concrete. They span cross-border payments (notoriously slow and expensive under legacy systems), settlement of digital asset transactions, and potential deployment for both large institutional clients and the general public. Keeping the right perspective matters here: this is still a development plan, not an existing product. Many critical details remain undefined, starting with the name of the company and the coin itself, the blockchain that will be used, and who will custody the backing reserves. The path to the actual 2027 launch is still long.

Group of leading international financial institutions to establish stablecoin enterprise

LONDON, NEW YORK — Twenty‑one leading international financial institutions have today announced that they have committed to establish a new company in H2 2026, subject to closing conditions, to support the issuance of a stablecoin solution. The new company, whose name will be announced in due course, intends to operate globally, with its initial focus on a USD‑denominated stablecoin offering and a longer‑term ambition of expanding issuance into stablecoins denominated in additional G7 currencies

Wells Fargo Logo go to www.WellsFargo.com

Why This Time Is Different from Past Bank Blockchain Talk

Skeptics will note that banks have talked about blockchain for years, often with little to show for it. This time, two factors change the calculation: scale and commitment. The project started less than a year ago with around ten banks and has already more than doubled, reaching twenty-one top-tier participants spanning the Americas, Europe, and Asia. It is no longer an isolated experiment by a single institution, but a coordinated effort from a significant slice of the global banking system.

The genuine novelty is that these institutions are no longer merely “studying” the technology. They have set up a structure, defined a roadmap, and fixed a launch window. That transforms their initiative into one of the first serious attempts by traditional finance to compete directly, on equal terms, with the dominant stablecoin players on public blockchains. The signal is powerful: banks no longer want to absorb crypto innovation passively. They want to lead it, bringing their balance-sheet strength, their client bases, and their regulatory compliance into a sector previously dominated by crypto-native players. The competitive threat from stablecoins to traditional deposit-taking was flagged explicitly in an analysis of the Bank of Italy's warning on stablecoin competition with bank deposits; now the banks are responding by going on offense.

The Direct Challenge to USDT and USDC

The not-so-hidden goal of the operation is clear: dent the dominance of the two stablecoins that today govern the market, together controlling the vast majority of stablecoin supply. Until now, anyone wanting to use a stablecoin had to rely on products issued by crypto-native companies. A stablecoin backed by a consortium of top-tier banks would offer an alternative with a perceived risk profile that is simply different, drawing on the trust and reputation of centuries-old institutions.

That the threat is perceived as real was immediately visible in market prices: on the news, shares in the company behind one of the world's largest stablecoins dropped noticeably, according to market data reported by Bloomberg, a sign that investors fear the arrival of such formidable competition. The banking group is not the only one moving in this direction. Other consortia, both American and European, are working on similar projects. Even one of the world's largest banks is reportedly evaluating its own standalone stablecoin. This confirms a structural trend rather than an isolated initiative. The broader race to bring sovereign currencies on-chain is visible elsewhere too, including Revolut's recent euro stablecoin launch.

Bank of America, Citi and Goldman Sachs Join 21-Firm Push for 2027 Stablecoin Launch - Bitcoin Foundation

Bank of America, Citi and Goldman Sachs join 21 financial giants planning a U.S. dollar stablecoin launch in the first half of 2027.

Bitcoin FoundationYevheny Serhiienko

The Bigger Picture for Crypto and Traditional Finance

The coordinated entry of twenty-one banking giants into the stablecoin market is a turning point that signals the full maturity and legitimation of these instruments. When institutions of this caliber decide to invest resources and reputation in building their own digital currency, they are effectively declaring that stablecoins are not a passing trend. A foundational piece of tomorrow's financial infrastructure. This is traditional finance, after watching from the sidelines for years, deciding to claim the technology and shape it in its own image, with its own rules and guarantees. The move sits alongside public-infrastructure initiatives such as the European Central Bank's Pontes and Appia projects for tokenized central bank money.

For observers, the lesson cuts two ways. On one side, this development accelerates the merger between traditional finance and the crypto world at a pace nobody predicted two years ago: a bank-issued stablecoin, fully compliant and backed by household names, could bring millions of users and businesses that have been hesitant into direct contact with these instruments. On the other side, a compelling competitive battle opens between two very different camps. The crypto-native pioneers who built the market from scratch face off against institutional newcomers who arrive with scale and trust. Who wins, and whether the two models ultimately coexist or collide, is one of the most interesting open questions in finance right now. One thing is no longer in doubt: stablecoins have left the niche permanently and become a strategic battleground for the biggest names in money. For readers new to the topic, our guide on what stablecoins are and how they work covers the foundations.

The symbolic weight of this news is hard to overstate. Tokenization has just moved from being a crypto-native experiment to becoming part of the official infrastructure of traditional financial markets. The question this deal raises is genuinely compelling: are we watching tokenization migrate from crypto exchanges to official stock exchanges? Here's what the agreement entails and why it matters.

London Stock Exchange to launch UK tokenised equity structures and announces partnership with Payward to explore tokenised public equity markets

London Stock Exchange today announces plans to launch UK tokenised equity structures and forms a partnership with Payward,

LSEG home page

What the Deal Actually Says

In practical terms, the partnership will see the top 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange tokenized as xStocks, digital tokens backed one-for-one by the underlying shares. These tokens will trade 24 hours a day, can be held in personal digital wallets, and will be usable inside blockchain applications. That's a level of flexibility a traditional brokerage account simply cannot match. Per the Payward press release, the first products are expected to launch within weeks, with access planned for investors in more than 100 countries.

One detail stands out, and it's a telling one: at least initially, these tokenized British equities will not be available to UK-based investors, excluded for regulatory reasons. A small paradox that captures the sector's regulatory complexity rather well. In a later phase, subject to regulatory approval, the LSE plans to support xStocks trading on its new extended-hours trading platform, LSE 24, a project designed to dramatically extend market hours. That platform, though, isn't expected to be operational until 2027.

Press release | Payward and London Stock Exchange to Partner on Equity Tokenization

Payward will tokenize the top 100 London-listed equities as xStocks, and — subject to regulatory approval, the London Stock Exchange will support xStocks trading on LSE 24.

Payward and London Stock Exchange to Partner on Equity Tokenization

The Revolutionary Part: Native On-Chain Equities

Tokenizing existing shares is already significant. The genuinely radical element of this deal, though, looks further ahead. LSEG and Payward intend to explore the issuance of “native” equities directly on blockchain, issued through the exchange's own infrastructure. These would be securities that are digital from the moment of their birth, carrying the same rights and legal standing as traditional shares.

That is the real frontier here. Wrapping an existing share in a blockchain token is one thing. Companies issuing equity natively in digital form, fully integrated into the settlement system from day one, is something else entirely. It would mean rethinking how capital markets function at their core, making them natively digital rather than digitally adjacent. The LSEG's own leadership has emphasized that tokenization holds the potential to change how investors access markets and how companies use them, provided the development preserves trust, rights, and the role of regulated markets. Seeing a 300-year-old institution frame that balance as its central objective is itself a meaningful signal. The same institutional momentum was visible earlier this year when the European Central Bank unveiled its framework for regulating tokenized assets.

Part of a Much Wider Movement

The LSE's move is not an isolated event. It's the most authoritative piece yet of a trend accelerating across global finance. Only days ago, a major US exchange brought the shares of leading American technology companies on-chain, a development we examined in depth in our analysis of Coinbase's tokenized equities. And Payward, the same company at the centre of the LSEG partnership, is also in negotiations to bring Hyperliquid's perpetual contracts into the regulated US market.

Press release | Payward and London Stock Exchange to Partner on Equity Tokenization

Payward will tokenize the top 100 London-listed equities as xStocks, and, subject to regulatory approval, the London Stock Exchange will support xStocks trading on LSE 24.

Payward and London Stock Exchange to Partner on Equity Tokenization

What makes this case genuinely different is who's leading the charge. In earlier instances, crypto-native actors were building bridges toward traditional finance. Here, traditional finance in its most institutional form, a stock exchange with more than three centuries of history, is taking the step toward blockchain and adopting its tools. That's a real inversion: not crypto knocking on the door of finance, but finance opening the door to crypto. A dynamic that echoes developments elsewhere in Europe, including Italy's first tokenized bond settled in central bank money.

The Bigger Picture

The LSE's entry into equity tokenization is a turning point that goes well beyond one partnership. It represents the definitive validation, from the very heart of traditional finance, of a technology that was born at its margins. When an institution with centuries of history decides to put its most valuable assets on a blockchain, it's effectively declaring that this technology is the future of capital markets, not a passing trend.

Two lessons emerge for anyone watching this space. First, tokenization is the most durable and cross-cutting trend in finance right now, capable of merging two worlds that were once entirely separate into a single ecosystem that is more efficient, continuous, and accessible. Second, and just as important, clear-eyed caution still applies: behind the promise of global access and around-the-clock trading, significant open questions remain, from regulatory approvals to the precise legal nature of these tokens. Prudence is warranted, as it always is when approaching genuinely new instruments. The direction, though, is now unmistakable: the future of equities, and of financial markets more broadly, will be increasingly on-chain. The fact that the institutions that built those markets are now leading that transition is the most convincing evidence that the shift is already well underway.

The decision came at the end of one of the most contested votes in Solana's history and strikes at the heart of the network's economic design. This is a delicate transition experiment, and its outcome is far from guaranteed. Here's what was decided, why it matters, and what risks it carries.

SIMD-0550: Proposal to Double Disinflation

Authors: Lostin & 0xIchigo (Helius) Summary This SIMD proposes updating the inflation schedule by increasing the disinflation rate from -15% to -30%, effectively doubling the pace of inflation decline. Our modeling indicates this will have the following effects: Reach the terminal inflation rate of 1.5% in 2.8 years (H1 2029) instead of 5.7 years (H1 2032) Reduce emissions by 18.9 million SOL ($1.51 billion) over six years Bring nominal staking yields from the current 5.84% to 4.34% in year…

Solana Developer ForumsLostin

What Was Actually Decided

Start with the decision itself, and clear up one immediate confusion. Solana validators approved a proposal known as “Double Disinflation,” which doubles the annual rate at which Solana's inflation decreases, from 15% to 30% per year. Critically, “disinflation” does not mean the total supply of SOL will shrink. New tokens will still be created. They'll just be created at a much slower rate than before.

In practice, according to the SIMD-0550 proposal published on the Solana Developer Forums, the network will reach its minimum inflation rate of 1.5% around 2029, rather than 2032 as previously scheduled. The projections show this translates into roughly 18.9 million fewer SOL issued over the next six years, equivalent to approximately $1.51 billion at current prices, compared with what the old schedule would have produced. For SOL holders, fewer new tokens entering circulation means less “dilution” of their holdings. That's generally a positive. But there's another side to consider.

A Razor-Thin Vote

How this decision was reached tells you a lot about Solana's governance and the tensions running through it. The vote drew record participation and remained genuinely uncertain until the final moments. The proposal passed with exactly 67.001% of the vote, just a sliver above the 66.667% supermajority threshold required. That's the slimmest possible margin for this type of decision.

The split cut across major operators. Some of the largest validators voted against; others voted in favour. The outcome was ultimately decided by a single large participant switching position in the closing stages. Two things become clear from this. First, Solana's decentralised governance, where token holders vote on binding decisions, is functioning as designed. Second, the community is deeply divided on how to manage the network's economy. The stakes are high and the implications genuinely complex, echoing debates seen in other networks about the balance between decentralisation and economic sustainability.

The Real Bet: From Emissions to Fees

This is where the story gets interesting. Why accelerate the reduction of new token issuance right now? The answer connects directly to a piece of data arriving at the same time: Solana's on-chain activity has hit record levels. According to data posted by the official Solana account on X on August 28, 2026, fees paid by users averaged nearly 9,200 SOL per day, more than 80% higher than three months earlier, and transaction counts reached an all-time high.

Validators earn rewards in two ways: from newly created tokens via inflation, and from transaction fees paid by users. The underlying logic of this move is to begin a transition: gradually reduce validator dependence on inflation (essentially an artificial subsidy) and replace it with earnings generated by real network activity. If on-chain activity keeps growing at its current pace, fees could more than compensate for the reduction in inflation rewards, moving Solana toward a more self-sustaining economic model. It's a signal that the network wants to run on genuine demand, not on a mechanism that dilutes every token holder.

solana-governance-proposals/proposals/sgp-0001-solana-constitution.md at main · solana-foundation/solana-governance-proposals

Solana Governance Proposals (SGPs) describe proposed and accepted governance initiatives for the Solana blockchain. - solana-foundation/solana-governance-proposals

GitHubsolana-foundation

The Risk: What if Fees Aren't Enough?

Every bet carries a downside. Here, the risk is concrete and touches the health of the network directly. Reducing inflation rewards will have an immediate practical consequence: staking yields for SOL holders who lock up their tokens to help secure the network will fall. According to projections in the SIMD-0550 proposal, nominal staking yields could drop from around 5% to just over 2% within a few years.

For large validators, that decline is manageable. For smaller validators operating on tight margins, a drop this sharp could make operations economically unviable, forcing them to shut down. If that happened at scale, the network could become more concentrated, controlled by fewer large operators, an outcome that cuts against the decentralisation principle. The bet works only if fee revenue grows enough to keep smaller validators viable. One detail sharpens the tension: at the same time as approving Double Disinflation, validators rejected a separate proposal, SGP-0003, that would have reformed the fee system itself. They cut the inflation subsidy without approving the change that could have strengthened the fee side of the equation. That raises the stakes considerably.

SIMD-0550: Proposal to Double Disinflation

Authors: Lostin & 0xIchigo (Helius) Summary This SIMD proposes updating the inflation schedule by increasing the disinflation rate from -15% to -30%, effectively doubling the pace of inflation decline. Our modeling indicates this will have the following effects: Reach the terminal inflation rate of 1.5% in 2.8 years (H1 2029) instead of 5.7 years (H1 2032) Reduce emissions by 18.9 million SOL ($1.51 billion) over six years Bring nominal staking yields from the current 5.84% to 4.34% in year…

Solana Developer ForumsLostin

The Bigger Picture

Solana's vote is a compelling case study in a challenge every maturing blockchain eventually faces: how to build a sustainable economic model without depending indefinitely on fresh token issuance. It's a delicate transition, and it marks a clear shift from a “subsidized” network economy toward one grounded in real utility and organic demand. Seen in that light, this move belongs alongside the broader conversation about token supply management, which we explored in our analysis of token unlocks.

For anyone watching the space, the takeaway is twofold. Networks like Solana are no longer just chasing growth; they're actively restructuring their internal economies through increasingly sophisticated decentralized governance. That signals genuine maturity. At the same time, this episode exposes how finely balanced these systems really are. Every economic decision involves trade-offs, and finding the right equilibrium between token strength, validator sustainability, and decentralization remains one of the hardest problems in crypto. Whether this bet pays off hinges entirely on one variable: Solana's ability to keep attracting real, fee-generating activity. That's a high bar, not just for Solana, but for the entire industry watching this experiment unfold. Readers new to the fundamentals can start with our guide on what cryptocurrencies are, while our coverage of the on-chain ecosystem provides useful market context.

How the Deal Would Actually Work

The structure is precise. US investors wouldn't access Hyperliquid's platform directly. Instead, they'd operate through Bitnomial, a fully CFTC-regulated US derivatives exchange that Kraken's parent company, Payward, acquired earlier this year specifically to build out a compliant American infrastructure.

In practice, Bitnomial would offer its registered users a selection of contracts tied to token prices from Hyperliquid's ecosystem, shouldering all compliance and oversight obligations itself. The separation is deliberate: on one side, the original decentralized platform remains accessible to the rest of the world; on the other, a “packaged” regulated version of its products, reserved for Americans and mediated by a licensed entity. Payward has already submitted a draft of this arrangement to the relevant US derivatives regulator, but formal approval has not yet been granted.

The Core Problem: Regulating Something Without an Owner

Here's where the story gets genuinely interesting. The reason Hyperliquid has always stayed out of the US isn't strategic reluctance. It's structural. Hyperliquid is a permissionless platform: no central operator, no controlling company capable of registering with US authorities. It's decentralized software that anyone, anywhere, can theoretically access.

That characteristic is a feature in the crypto world and a headache for regulators worried about price manipulation, sanctions evasion, and accountability gaps on a platform with no identifiable responsible party. The proposed structure sidesteps the impossible ask. Rather than forcing a decentralized platform to “centralize” itself to obtain a license, it inserts Bitnomial as a regulated bridge. The intermediary absorbs the legal responsibility, separating the products offered to Americans from the underlying open platform. It's a concrete attempt to answer a question that surfaces whenever regulators confront permissionless protocols: how do you reconcile borderless innovation with national rules? The same tension appeared in the case of Polymarket's regulatory encounters.

A Circle Closing

This news doesn't arrive from nowhere. Weeks before the Bloomberg report, President Trump publicly indicated that US authorities were working to bring Hyperliquid into the country, a political signal we covered in our earlier piece on the CFTC's opening toward the perpetual DEX. Then, it was a statement of intent. Now, with a specific deal structure visible, that intent is taking a concrete shape.

This is one piece of a broader, deliberate push to build a coherent regulatory path for crypto derivatives in the US. The coalition advocating for Hyperliquid's interests has formally asked both the CFTC and the SEC to align their positions and issue clearer rules. That request intersects with the SEC's own proposed new framework for crypto assets and with recent episodes involving the CFTC itself on prediction markets. The pattern is clear: crypto derivatives, long operating in a legal grey zone, are being pulled toward the regulatory light from multiple directions at once.

The Timeline and the Unknowns

Realism is warranted here. Even if talks succeed, the path to actual operations is long. A former US regulatory official familiar with the process estimated that a full approval could take ten to twelve months, and that's in the optimistic scenario where nothing stalls.

The complexity stems from the fact that the arrangement touches both securities law and derivatives law, potentially requiring sign-off from two separate regulators: the SEC and the CFTC. Both would need to revisit their interpretations on thorny issues like custody of client funds in a hybrid decentralized-centralized model. The direction may be set, but the destination is not close. Anyone expecting to trade these products from a US account in the near term should recalibrate expectations. As with most regulatory processes at this complexity level, the gap between a reported negotiation and an operational product can span years, not months, and outcomes are never guaranteed.

The Bigger Picture

Whatever happens with this specific deal, the episode illustrates a broader trend reshaping the entire sector: the systematic effort to build bridges between decentralized finance, which grew up without borders or gatekeepers, and the traditional regulated financial system. The model being explored here, a licensed intermediary acting as a conduit to a decentralized platform, could become a replicable template for bringing other “wild” crypto products inside the regulatory perimeter.

Two lessons emerge. First, the progressive institutionalization of an asset class once considered purely peripheral: perpetual futures, products that were born and scaled outside any regulatory framework, are now knocking on the front door of the US financial system. Second, this episode shows that when an innovation reaches sufficient scale, regulators don't simply block it. They find ways to absorb and adapt it, usually through ingenious structures that preserve the product's core mechanics while fitting it into existing rules. Whether this deal closes or not, the direction is clear. The future of finance will be decided increasingly on the boundary where technological openness meets regulatory necessity. Reading these structural moves early is one of the clearest edges available to investors and market participants today.

The project, announced on August 25, 2026, is still in the design phase. The Alliance is selecting a technology partner and is targeting a 2027 launch. No operational network exists yet, no shared bank stablecoin. No list of institutions ready to issue tokens. For now, there is a governance structure, a stated industry direction, and a declared objective.

State Bankers Associations Announce Industry-Owned Blockchain Network

Banks of all sizes to be able to safely offer modern payments services, preserving local lending in communities across the country

BankChain Alliance

Not 39 Banks, but 39 Banking Associations

The distinction matters. The founders of BankChain Alliance are 39 organizations that represent the banking sector in their respective states, not 39 individual institutions. According to the August 25 press release, the initiative is designed for banks of all sizes and remains open to participation and ownership by US institutions.

The proposed model is a network designed, owned, and governed by the industry itself. Rather than simply purchasing a blockchain service from an outside vendor, participating banks would have a role in shaping the infrastructure and its rules. That is a strategic choice, because controlling the rails can matter as much as the financial product riding on top of them.

What the Banking Blockchain Should Enable

BankChain Alliance has outlined four core areas: programmable payment tools, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and automated settlement. The network is also meant to be interoperable with other infrastructure, a feature that would prevent the project from becoming an isolated banking circuit.

Many details necessary to assess the project's scope are still missing. The protocol, the access model, node requirements, settlement finality mechanics, privacy treatment, and which entity might issue a stablecoin have not been announced. Even the technology partner selection is still underway.

Tokenized Deposits and Stablecoins Are Not the Same Thing

A tokenized deposit is ordinarily a digital representation of a liability that a bank already holds toward its customer. The underlying technology rail changes, but the obligation remains traceable to the depository institution. The FDIC has confirmed that a genuine tokenized deposit continues to be treated as a deposit under the applicable banking framework.

A stablecoin, by contrast, is a distinct token issued under a specific legal structure and backed by designated reserves. The presence of bank deposits among a stablecoin's reserves does not automatically make token holders' balances FDIC-insured. The difference is not purely technical: it concerns the nature of the credit, the applicable protection, and the party responsible for repayment.

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to Establish GENIUS Act Requirements and Standards for FDIC-Supervised Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuers and Insured Depository Institutions | FDIC.gov

On April 7, 2026, the FDIC Board of Directors approved a notice of proposed rulemaking that would implement the GENIUS Act.

HomeLaws and Regulations

The Cooperative Answer to Wall Street's Head Start

JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have the resources to experiment with tokenization and blockchain payments on their own. For regional and community banks, matching those technology, regulatory, and operational costs individually would be far harder.

BankChain Alliance tries to answer that problem by pooling scale, expertise, and contractual leverage. Shared infrastructure could lower the entry cost and prevent the innovation of digital deposits from being controlled only by the megabanks or the dominant private stablecoin issuers. That is arguably the most significant aspect of the announcement, even if its effectiveness will depend on the economic and technical terms that get negotiated.

The GENIUS Act Shifts the Calculation

The GENIUS Act, signed on July 18, 2025, established a federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. The law does not automatically authorize BankChain Alliance or transform the Alliance into an issuer. It has, however, made it more concrete that regulated entities can build products based on dollar-pegged tokens.

Banks can therefore pursue two strategies at the same time: defend traditional deposits from stablecoin competition and participate directly in the new market. The BankChain Alliance announcement suggests both options will remain open, but it does not yet demonstrate that member banks will issue a shared stablecoin. The primary source points to a potential network capability, not an approved product.

The Bigger Picture

BankChain Alliance shifts competition away from simple token issuance toward control of the underlying infrastructure. If the project reaches the market, regional banks could try to preserve their relationships with retail and business customers even as deposits, payments, and settlement migrate to programmable ledgers. The strategic value would lie in owning the rails, not simply appending the word blockchain to existing services.

The 2027 target remains an industry goal, not a guarantee. A verified technology partner, enforceable governance rules, interoperability, liquidity, regulatory compliance, and actual adoption by member institutions all need to materialize before any serious challenge to the megabanks can be claimed. For now, BankChain Alliance sends one clear signal: a broad portion of the US banking sector does not want to watch tokenization from the sidelines.

This is not a European ban on owning USDT, and no new MiCA provision enters into force today. It is the final phase of Revolut's own delisting decision, made to align its crypto offering with applicable regulatory requirements. The distinction matters: USDT doesn't disappear from the blockchain, it simply stops being accessible inside one of Europe's most widely used financial apps.

What Happens to USDT Held on Revolut Today

According to communications from Revolut to affected customers, the removal was staged over several weeks. Purchases were halted on July 6, new deposits were blocked on July 30, and the remaining option to sell or transfer USDT expires today, August 31. Customers who leave balances on the platform don't lose their funds outright, but they give up control over when and how the conversion happens, as Revolut will automatically convert the balance into the account's primary currency.

Revolut's official FAQ also warns that new USDT deposits are no longer supported. An inbound transfer may be rejected, requiring the customer to provide an external address for the funds to be returned. For this reason, sending fresh USDT to an old Revolut address without first checking availability in the app is a risk worth avoiding.

Why Revolut Delisted Tether's Stablecoin

Revolut's official position, as stated in its Help Centre, is that USDT currently does not meet the stablecoin requirements applicable to crypto services provided in the region. The reference is to the MiCA framework, which governs authorization, reserve requirements, disclosure obligations, and supervisory oversight for issuers of asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens. MiCA entered into full effect on December 30, 2024, requiring all crypto-asset service providers operating in the EU to comply with stablecoin rules under Title III and Title IV of the regulation.

In January 2025, ESMA asked national competent authorities to ensure that crypto service providers aligned with the rules on non-compliant stablecoins. Today's deadline is not the result of a regulation approved this week. It is the operational conclusion of a compliance timeline Revolut set after its own regulatory and risk assessment.

USDT was delisted from Revolut | Revolut Netherlands

Get the answers you need for any issues or questions you may have

Revolut

Delisting Does Not Make Owning USDT Illegal

Removing USDT from the platform is not a confiscation, nor a general ban on private ownership of the token. The action concerns only the services Revolut can legally offer customers in the affected regions. USDT continues to exist and circulate globally, but it loses access to yet another major regulated European intermediary.

Anyone who wants to keep holding USDT should first check whether the option to transfer to an external address is still active on their account, then carefully verify the network, the destination address, and wallet compatibility before initiating any transfer. The difference between direct key control and platform custody is something worth understanding before moving funds.

EURR Enters, But It Is Not a Direct Replacement

The timing gets interesting because Revolut is simultaneously introducing EURR, a stablecoin designed to hold the value of one euro. The initial rollout covers eligible customers in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal. EURR is built on Ethereum, legally issued by Bridge Building S.A., a Stripe company, and distributed through Revolut's European infrastructure.

Framing EURR as a clean substitute for USDT would be misleading. The two stablecoins expose holders to different currencies, and EURR is not yet available to all Revolut users across the EEA. Revolut is also not converting residual USDT balances into EURR: the conversion goes into the account's primary fiat currency. What the parallel moves do reveal is a clear strategic shift. Revolut is removing a dollar-denominated token that does not fit within its regulated perimeter and opening the door to a euro-denominated product built for the European market.

Crypto Delisting | Revolut

Get the answers you need for any issues or questions you may have

Revolut

What Affected Customers Should Check Right Now

The first step is opening the Revolut app and reviewing the USDT balance, any functions still available, and the personal communication sent by Revolut. During the window, three options were available: sell USDT, transfer it to a compatible wallet, or do nothing and accept the automatic conversion. Anyone initiating a transfer today should double-check the address and network, and if the amount is significant, consider sending a small test amount first.

Keeping a record of the transaction is also worth doing, including the rate used for conversion or the transfer confirmation. Customers with larger holdings should consider speaking with a tax professional about the implications, since the disposal of a stablecoin position can trigger a taxable event depending on jurisdiction. A stablecoin is not automatically equivalent to a bank deposit, and the distinction carries both regulatory and tax consequences in most EU member states.

The Bigger Picture for European Crypto Markets

The completion of this delisting illustrates how MiCA is reshaping the European market primarily through its regulated access points. The regulation does not erase a token from the blockchain, but it does determine which assets a digital bank, an authorized exchange, or another regulated intermediary can make easily available to retail customers.

The result is a two-tier market. Compliant stablecoins gain shelf space inside European financial applications, while USDT retains its global liquidity but retreats from regulated retail interfaces. Revolut makes this transition unusually visible: it closes access to the leading dollar stablecoin and, in the same period, pilots a euro on-chain product built for the European market. Customers holding USDT on other regulated European platforms should treat this as a signal to review their own holdings before similar compliance deadlines arrive elsewhere.

The register, sometimes called the “MiCA crypto blacklist,” is formally established under Article 110 of the MiCA regulation. ESMA collects notifications from national competent authorities and updates the file periodically. Appearing in the register means a national authority has submitted a report. Not appearing does not mean a platform is authorized or safe.

What the ESMA Register Actually Contains

The official NCASP.csv file, last updated August 21, 2026, contains 167 rows. Breaking down entries by reporting authority reveals an extreme distribution: 165 records are attributable to Italy's Consob, one to the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), and one to the National Bank of Slovakia. Only three national authorities appear in the current dataset out of the 30 EEA jurisdictions.

The legal scope is more precise than the generic phrase “unlicensed operators.” Article 59 of MiCA prohibits providing crypto-asset services in the EU without authorization or without qualifying as a financial entity permitted under Article 60. Article 61 covers reverse solicitation: a third-country firm may serve a European client only when the client initiates contact entirely on their own, without any prior promotion or solicitation directed at EU residents.

What That 98.8% Figure Does Not Measure

The biggest editorial risk is treating this count as a geographic ranking of illegal crypto activity. The CSV file records which authority submitted each entry, not where the flagged entities are actually established. Across the 30 EEA jurisdictions, entries from only three countries appear. Germany, France, and 24 other national authorities do not feature as reporting authorities in this version of the dataset.

That absence does not prove those markets have no abusive operators or that their supervisors are inactive. ESMA itself notes the register is non-exhaustive, updated weekly, and reflects only what national authorities have transmitted. To read these records correctly, it helps to distinguish this non-compliant file from the ESMA register of authorized operators, which answers a different question entirely.

Why Consob Dominates the Register

The ESMA file doesn't explain why the distribution is so skewed. The data is consistent, though, with an Italian regulator that has been exceptionally active in using its powers against online financial abuse. By August 11, 2026, Consob had declared 1,805 financial websites blocked since July 2019, according to the regulator's own published figures. That total spans multiple categories and cannot be compared directly to the 165 MiCA CSV records, since the CSV counts entities and may attach multiple domains to a single row.

What the blocking tally does show is an active national monitoring and enforcement machine. It does not, on the other hand, mean other European regulators are idle. Procedural differences, transmission timelines, and classification methods all affect how each authority's activity is represented in the final dataset.

How to Verify Whether a Crypto Provider Is Authorized

For users, the blacklist should never function as a reverse certificate of safety. Not finding a brand in the non-compliant register provides no guarantee whatsoever. Positive verification must start from the list of MiCA-authorized CASPs, checking the legal entity name, the authority that granted the license, and the specific services that entity is permitted to offer.

You'll also need to confirm that the domain you're using actually belongs to the authorized entity, and check for any communications from your national regulator. A license obtained in one EU country can be passported across the bloc, but that doesn't remove every local obligation, as our analysis of crypto market obligations that go beyond MiCA makes clear.

The Wider Picture

MiCA created a common rulebook, but the 165-out-of-167 figure shows that enforcement visibility still depends heavily on what individual national authorities choose to report. A European register fed almost entirely by a single supervisor risks being highly informative about one jurisdiction while remaining nearly silent on the rest of the market.

The conclusion here isn't that Italy hosts almost all of Europe's illegal crypto operators. The real finding is that Europe's notification system doesn't yet deliver a consistent picture. The blacklist is useful for knowing who has been flagged. It's a weak instrument for inferring who is safe. For that, you need the positive register of authorized entities, read alongside national authority enforcement actions and checked against the most recent data available.

The situation is still developing as we write this, and some details remain unconfirmed or inconsistently reported across sources. That's precisely why it deserves careful analysis. The incident cuts straight to one of the most fundamental tensions in the cryptocurrency space: how decentralized and immutable is a blockchain, really, when things go wrong?

What Happened to Fogo

Here is what we know. On Friday, August 29, 2026, the Fogo Foundation publicly disclosed that an unknown actor had compromised its systems and transferred 400 million tokens to an address under the attacker's control. In its initial statement, the Foundation reassured the community that the blockchain itself continued to function normally and that the problem was confined to its internal systems.

Within hours, however, reports emerged of a complete network halt, reportedly initiated to contain the damage and prevent the stolen tokens from being moved further. A note of caution applies here: different sources give slightly different accounts of this sequence, and since the situation remains open, some details about the network's exact status should be treated as provisional. In parallel, several exchanges moved swiftly. Bitget, for instance, suspended FOGO deposits and withdrawals, in at least one case acting before the Foundation had made its public announcement.

What Was Actually Compromised

One point deserves to be stated clearly upfront to avoid misreading the incident. Calling this a “Fogo blockchain hack” would be inaccurate and alarmist. The Foundation described a compromise of its own organization and wallets, which strongly suggests an operational failure: stolen access keys, a breach of internal systems, or similar. That is a very different thing from a vulnerability in the blockchain protocol itself.

It is a distinction that comes up repeatedly across the industry: a breach of the “vault” holding an organization's funds is categorically different from a flaw in the “bank” itself, meaning the underlying protocol. At the time of writing, the Foundation has not published a full technical post-mortem, and the precise entry point of the attack remains undisclosed. That's normal in the early hours of any incident, but it also means definitive conclusions would be premature. The same opacity that complicates post-incident analysis here is the same dynamic that made the SafePal data breach difficult to assess at first.

The Fogo Incident: What We Know and What We Don't

An evolving situation. Source: Fogo Foundation, The Block, 2026.

• What we know: 400 million tokens stolen, over 10% of circulating supply, worth approximately $3 million. The token price dropped 18-20% following the disclosure.
• What we don't know: the precise attack vector, which systems were compromised, and when the network will return to full operation.
• The real question: if a network can be halted and specific addresses can be frozen, how decentralized is it?

The Decentralization Question: A Blockchain That Can Be Stopped

This is where the story gets genuinely interesting, well beyond the immediate theft. The response to the attack, specifically the capacity to halt the entire network and potentially prevent certain addresses from moving tokens, opens a deeper debate about what blockchain technology actually promises.

Bitget announcement on suspending FOGO - Fogo deposit and withdrawal services | Bitget Support Center

Dear users: Due to wallet maintenance, Bitget will suspend the deposit and withdrawal functions of the FOGO - Fogo network starting from…

Bitget

The core promise of most blockchains is twofold: decentralization (no single authority controls the network) and immutability (once recorded, transactions cannot be reversed or blocked). But if the founding team, or a small group of validators, holds the power to halt the entire chain and freeze specific wallets, even for a legitimate reason like containing a theft, then the network is not fully decentralized. The paradox is well known to anyone watching this space closely: the very “emergency powers” that enable a response to an attack are also proof that a central control point exists. That's not inherently wrong, and it can genuinely protect users, but it contradicts the narrative of absolute decentralization that many projects market themselves on. This tension is increasingly visible in new high-performance networks built for trading, as seen in the ongoing debate around the US regulatory path for platforms like Hyperliquid.

A Structural Problem for High-Performance Chains

The Fogo incident fits into a broader pattern affecting many next-generation blockchains. Networks like Fogo are optimized for speed and throughput, qualities that are genuinely essential for high-frequency trading. But achieving those performance levels often requires trade-offs on decentralization: the network's operation is entrusted to a relatively small number of operators, which makes the system faster and more efficient.

It also makes the network more susceptible to a single point of control, and as this case shows, to a single point of organizational failure. The incident echoes another major security theme from recent months: the fragility of shared architectures, as demonstrated by the exploit that affected six blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. Speed and decentralization are not natural allies, and the Fogo case is a concrete reminder that neither can be assumed. Knowing where your assets actually sit, and who has the power to move or freeze them, matters. Our guide on crypto custody and self-custody covers the practical side of that question.

Fogo Price: FOGO/USD Live Price Chart, Market Cap & News Today | CoinGecko

Price of Fogo (FOGO) today is $0.007558 with a 24-hour trading volume of $3,511,758. Track Fogo's live price, market cap, news, and more on CoinGecko.

CoinGecko

The Bigger Picture

Whatever the final outcome of the Fogo incident, it offers a lesson that extends well past this single event. When evaluating a blockchain, it's not enough to look at transaction speed or TPS benchmarks. The sharper questions are: who actually controls this network? What happens when an emergency arises? How real is decentralization when it's genuinely tested under pressure?

Two takeaways stand out from this episode. First, the weakest link in crypto security is almost always human and organizational: key management, internal system hygiene, access controls. Not the blockchain code itself. Second, and more subtly, the response to this attack reveals something about the real architecture of many new networks. The ability to deploy “emergency powers” is reassuring in the short term, but it raises legitimate questions about what these networks actually are. Every time a founding team demonstrates it can stop its own chain, the decentralization debate restarts. For anyone serious about understanding crypto, the answer to that question matters far more than the dollar value of the tokens taken.

CFTC Orders Gabriel Perez to Pay $172,000 for Insider Trading of Mention Market Event Contracts

The CFTC announced an order filing and settling charges against Gabriel Perez for misappropriating material, nonpublic information obtained through his federal government employment in order to trade event contracts (i.e., swaps) on a prediction market platform for his personal benefit.

Commodity Futures Trading Commission Logo

How a Teleprompter Became a Trading Edge

The mechanics are almost absurdly simple. Gabriel Perez worked for years at the White House managing the teleprompter, the device that scrolls a speaker's prepared text. His role gave him access to the full content of presidential speeches roughly sixty minutes before delivery. On their own, those scripts look like routine government paperwork. Paired with a prediction market account, they became something else entirely.

Platforms like Kalshi offer what are called “mention markets”: contracts that pay out based on whether a specific word or phrase is spoken during a public address. Knowing the text in advance, Perez could bet on outcomes he already knew, effectively eliminating the risk that every other participant was carrying. According to the CFTC order, between late 2025 and the early months of 2026, Perez exploited this advantage across more than a dozen speeches, accumulating over $107,000 in essentially risk-free profits.

The CFTC Sanction: $172,000 and a Three-Year Ban

The CFTC, which oversees U.S. derivatives markets, stepped in with a penalty that covered multiple fronts. Per the official CFTC press release dated 2026, Perez was ordered to disgorge all illicit profits, pay a $65,000 civil monetary penalty, and accept a three-year ban from trading on any CFTC-regulated platform. He settled the charges without formally admitting the findings, a standard outcome in civil enforcement actions of this kind.

One detail stands out: the fine was reduced by approximately 40% compared to what the CFTC might otherwise have imposed. The agency cited his “exemplary” cooperation as the reason. That concession matters less for Perez than for the broader message it sends: cooperate early, and regulators will notice.

What makes the enforcement story more interesting is where the tip originated. Kalshi's own internal surveillance system flagged the suspicious trading pattern first and reported it to the authorities. The platform's compliance team publicly acknowledged the outcome, making clear that rules apply regardless of who you are or where you work. For a prediction market trying to win institutional credibility, that kind of proactive compliance is exactly the signal the industry needs to send. Federal prosecutors were informed but chose not to pursue criminal charges, keeping the matter in the civil lane.

A New Kind of Insider Trading the Old Rules Weren't Built For

This is where the case moves beyond courthouse drama and into genuine regulatory territory. Prediction markets are built on a simple premise: real-world events become tradeable contracts. Elections, policy announcements, sports results, public statements, all of them can be priced and traded. That design is also what creates an insider-trading problem far broader than anything traditional finance has had to manage.

In classic securities law, insider trading is relatively bounded. It typically involves someone who has advance knowledge of a company's unreleased earnings, a merger, or a regulatory decision that will move a stock price. The universe of people with that kind of access is, by design, fairly small: executives, board members, select advisors.

Prediction markets blow that universe open. Anyone whose job gives them early or exclusive access to non-public information of any kind becomes a potential insider. Government officials who know what a policy announcement will say before it is released. Journalists who have an embargoed story about an economic data print. Event organizers who know the outcome of a competition before it goes public. Political aides who have seen a speech draft. The list runs long, and the legal framework for drawing the line between normal professional knowledge and unlawful informational advantage in this context is still being built from scratch.

A Precedent That Will Set the Standard

This case isn't a one-off. According to statements accompanying the CFTC order, it is the second enforcement action involving federal government employees and prediction market event contracts, with both actions settled within a few weeks of each other. That pattern suggests the CFTC is no longer treating these markets as a curiosity but as a regulated space that requires active policing.

Prediction markets spent years as a niche corner of the internet, primarily used by forecasting enthusiasts. Today, platforms like Kalshi are licensed, attracting significant trading volumes, and drawing interest from institutional investors. The same CFTC that sanctioned Perez is also working through how to handle other innovative trading platforms, including considerations around decentralized perpetual exchanges like Hyperliquid. As volumes grow, so does the incentive to cheat, and so does the regulator's attention. Each enforcement action, taken together, is slowly assembling the compliance architecture that will define the sector's future.

The Bigger Picture: Every Sector That Scaled Had to Solve This

The teleprompter case is worth more than a passing read. Financial innovation consistently arrives ahead of the rules designed to contain it. Crypto markets spent years operating in regulatory grey zones before the CFTC, SEC. International bodies began drawing firm lines. Prediction markets are now at the same early juncture.

The lesson cuts two ways. On one side, Kalshi's decision to build internal surveillance and cooperate with the CFTC shows what the responsible path looks like for platforms that want long-term viability. On the other, the deeper question this case opens is genuinely hard: in a world where you can bet on almost anything, where exactly does professional knowledge end and unlawful informational advantage begin? That boundary is not obvious, and the regulatory frameworks in the U.S. and Europe are nowhere near settled on the answer.

Cases like this one, almost comic in their specifics, are the first data points in that longer argument. Regulators, platforms, and market participants will be working out the implications for years. For anyone tracking the evolution of digital finance and prediction markets, the CFTC's action against Gabriel Perez is a date worth remembering: it marks the moment this question stopped being theoretical.

The dollar figure, while not catastrophic by crypto standards, is almost beside the point. What makes this incident worth examining is what it exposes about the structural fragility built into the multi-chain model that much of the crypto industry now depends on.

security/communications/cosmos_evm_GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2_post_mortem.md at main · cosmos/security

Cosmos Security contains guidelines (and tools in the future) for a responsible security incident disclosure - cosmos/security

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Four Months of Misjudgment

The timeline is damning. According to Cosmos Labs’ own post-mortem, the vulnerability was correctly reported via the project’s bug bounty program at the end of April. Engineers reviewed it and reached the wrong conclusion: they believed the flaw could only affect a specific technical configuration that differed from the one used by the live, production blockchains. Their assessment was that real user funds were not at risk.

Acting on that belief, the team pushed a “silent” fix in May, deploying the patch without alerting blockchain operators to any serious underlying threat, treating it as a routine maintenance update. Then, in early August, independent researchers re-examined the vulnerability and discovered that the original assessment was wrong. The bug affected far more networks than initially thought. A race to issue a public patch began, but the window was already closing. The fix shipped on August 19. The first attack came within hours.

Balance underflow in EVM StateDB

_This security advisory describes the vulnerability outlined in the [August 28, 2026 Cosmos EVM post-mortem](https://github.com/cosmos/security/blob/main/communications/cosmos_evm_GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2c…

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How the Attack Actually Worked

The technical mechanism deserves a clear explanation, partly because it corrects a widespread misconception. Many people assume these exploits work by conjuring tokens from thin air, printing infinite supply. That’s not what happened here. The attacker exploited a mathematical error known as an integer underflow: by manipulating an account balance below zero, the system interpreted that negative value as the largest possible positive number.

From there, the attacker could transfer tokens belonging to other accounts to their own address. One critical distinction, often lost in the noise: the total token supply across affected networks remained essentially unchanged. No new coins were minted. Instead, assets were drained from specific targeted accounts, often dormant addresses or technical wallets. On the hardest-hit network, according to the Cosmos Labs post-mortem, hundreds of millions of tokens were moved from a burn address and an old wallet, with the network’s core security keys left entirely intact. The damage was real, but its nature matters for understanding what actually broke.

The Cosmos Case: What Went Wrong

The timeline of the failure. Source: Cosmos Labs, The Block, 2026

• The error: The bug reported in April was judged non-dangerous for live networks. A wrong call.
• The attack: roughly $5.7 million drained from six blockchains between August 20 and 25, hours after the patch dropped.
• The real problem: dozens of chains share the same software stack, and therefore the same vulnerabilities, but there is no mechanism to update them all at speed.

The Controversy: Twenty Hours Was Not Enough

One of the sharpest criticisms of the incident centers on how the crisis was managed in its final hours. When the patch was published on August 19, it came without any advisory clearly explaining the severity or urgency of the underlying threat. Hours later, an external researcher posted a detailed technical description of how to exploit the flaw, handing attackers a functional roadmap. The first theft followed almost immediately.

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On-chain FX layer for stablecoins and RWA. Contribute to KiiChain/kiichain development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Several of the affected blockchains responded with sharp public criticism. One pointed out that the window between the patch release and the attack was realistically too short to coordinate, test, and deploy such a complex update across dozens of independent validators, especially without a specific warning explaining the urgency. Another network went further, arguing that Cosmos Labs should have immediately asked all affected chains to halt block production, the only move that could have prevented the thefts entirely. A separate technical dispute remains unresolved: one of the attacked networks contends that the underlying flaws numbered more than those addressed in the public patch, a claim the post-mortem does not directly engage. The full picture of who bears responsibility is still being contested.

The Real Problem: Multi-Chain Fragility

This is the part of the story that extends well beyond one incident. The Cosmos ecosystem is built on a powerful idea: a shared software framework that lets anyone launch their own blockchain quickly, with all those chains interconnected. It’s a genuinely successful model. But this episode exposed its structural weak point with unusual clarity.

When dozens or hundreds of separate blockchains share the same underlying software, they also share its vulnerabilities. The critical asymmetry is that while the code is shared, there’s no centralized mechanism to push urgent updates to all of them at once. Every chain must apply patches independently, a slow and complex process that requires consensus among its own validators. The most striking detail to emerge from the post-mortem is that Cosmos Labs admitted it does not possess a complete list of all networks running its software: during the emergency response, the team discovered eleven blockchains whose existence it had not previously known. Imagine a component manufacturer that doesn’t know which vehicles carry its faulty part and has no recall system. That’s the scale of the coordination gap exposed here. This isn’t an isolated pattern, either: the theme of hidden vulnerabilities surfaces repeatedly across the industry, as seen with the bug that stayed hidden inside Zcash for four years.

MANTRA Chain: Bringing the World’s Financial Ecosystem Onchain

MANTRA is an EVM-compatible Layer 1 Blockchain for Real World Assets, capable of adherence to real world regulatory requirements.

The Wider Lesson

The Cosmos incident is more valuable as a case study than as a horror story. The economic damage, roughly $5.7 million according to Cosmos Labs and The Block, was contained. What wasn’t contained were the process failures: a misread risk assessment in April, a silent patch in May, an unwarned disclosure in August, and a fragmented ecosystem with no shared emergency protocol.

Security in crypto doesn’t reduce to code quality alone. It runs through the human and organizational processes governing how that code is evaluated, patched, and communicated. For anyone building on or investing in multi-chain ecosystems, the lesson is concrete: the convenience of shared infrastructure carries a shared liability surface. The coordination mechanisms needed to manage that surface at scale don’t yet exist at the level the ecosystem’s ambitions require. Cosmos’ candid post-mortem is a step toward accountability. The criticism it received from affected chains shows how far the ecosystem still has to travel before its security practices match its technical promises. Watch whether the community uses this incident to build a formal emergency coordination protocol, and whether Cosmos Labs publishes the complete registry of dependent networks it lacked during the crisis.