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According to the Citi Research podcast, Citi's Global Macro Strategy Head Dirk Willer and the Head of Quantitative Global Macro and Asset Allocation Team Alex Saunders engaged in an in-depth discussion about recent market dynamics. The two strategists pointed out that most central banks currently maintain a hawkish stance, but the Bank of Japan unexpectedly released dovish signals, which have a key impact on the USDJPY trend.Meanwhile, Bitcoin has shown a significant rebound recently, which may indicate a new round of changes in digital asset investment strategies in 2026, as institutional investors' interest in the crypto market continues to rise.

Market news indicates that Powerlaw is considering a strategic sale of part of its SpaceX shares to raise funds for dividends, tax distributions, and new private market investments.

Due to the strengthening of the US dollar and hawkish remarks from Federal Reserve officials, market expectations for tightening monetary policy have increased, causing gold prices to decline within a range. The dollar has risen to a two-month high, making gold priced in dollars more expensive. Richmond Fed President Barkin stated that the threat of interest rate hikes and further increases in the future could suppress corporate inflation expectations.

The cryptocurrency derivatives platform BitMEX has ceased trading, deposits, and opening new positions, retaining only the withdrawal function. The platform announced on social media platform X that as of this Tuesday at 04:00 UTC, the aforementioned services will no longer be available. Users can still log in and withdraw their balances through the official website, but deposits have been confirmed as impossible. BitMEX was co-founded by Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo, and Samuel Reed in 2014, known for promoting perpetual contracts as mainstream trading tools in the cryptocurrency derivatives market.BitMEX urges customers to withdraw their funds as soon as possible and states that account fees will be charged to users with completed KYC certification who still have a balance, billed monthly, at a standard of 1% annualized on assets or a minimum equivalent of $50, whichever is higher. The company emphasizes that this shutdown does not freeze customer assets, and the withdrawal channel remains open during the liquidation process.BitMEX announced its closure in July this year, following a strategic assessment by its parent company HDR Global Trading, as the exchange's market share in the perpetual contract market it helped create continued to decline. According to research data from CoinDesk, the monthly trading volume of centralized cryptocurrency exchange derivatives reached $3.4 trillion in August, with an annual scale potentially reaching $50 trillion. Previously, BitMart also announced its shutdown in July after nine years of operation due to market conditions.

According to disclosures from cryptocurrency practitioner Jordy and local police reports, former Hack VC partner and platform head Hsin-Ju was found dead near the Interstate 15 exit in the Mojave Desert, California, on August 24, at the age of 37. The time of death was the day after she claimed she would expose Hack VC. Investigative agencies stated that the cause of death is still under investigation, and it is currently unclear whether it was due to high temperatures, sudden illness, mechanical failure, or other reasons.On August 23 local time, Hsin-Ju tweeted that she had rejected Hack VC's settlement proposal and would publicly disclose relevant evidence from her time at Hack VC on August 26. She previously stated that she was required to continue working despite a medical emergency during her tenure and was threatened by the company that if she resigned before the completion of an event, she would be blacklisted in the industry; after leaving, she accused the company of issues with handling health insurance and continued to face pressure during legal negotiations. She has since fired her lawyer and stated that she would rather not receive a settlement than keep this matter private.

The web data infrastructure company Firecrawl announced on platform X that it has completed a $75 million Series B financing round, led by Smash Capital, and launched a knowledge base for AI agents called Alexandria, aimed at providing agents with unified access to real-time web, official data providers, and professional indexes.According to the official page, Alexandria currently integrates 82 data providers, 471 data capabilities, and over 113 million papers, READMEs, Issues, and technical documents, covering 28 categories including finance, government, code, shopping, and real estate, and supports access via MCP, CLI, and API. Firecrawl claims that its internal testing shows that Alexandria's answer quality on approximately 1,000 directory-type questions is 21% higher than that of built-in web tools.

The TCG card drawing and trading platform Pull.Fun, aimed at Pokémon card collectors worldwide, announced that its mascot token $TAKO has launched on the Robinhood Chain.According to GMGN data, its token market value briefly surpassed 4 million USD, with a current market value of 2.3 million USD.

According to a report from the Public Security Bureau of Linwu County, Hunan Province, on August 19, 2026, the Public Security Bureau of Linwu County, Chenzhou City, Hunan Province discovered fraud clues during routine inspections and successfully cracked a virtual currency investment fraud case, arresting two criminal suspects.Upon investigation, on May 1, 2026, the suspect Li met the victim, Ms. Yue, through private messages on a social platform, falsely claiming to teach virtual currency investment skills with guaranteed profits. He induced her to download a certain app to purchase Tether (USDT) and then exchange it for a newly issued virtual currency manipulated by his "superior." Li, in collusion with his "superior," created the illusion of rising prices to lure the victim into increasing her investment; once the funds were in place, they quickly crashed the market, causing the virtual currency's value to drop to zero. Ms. Yue lost approximately 30,000 yuan, while Li illegally profited tens of thousands of yuan, which was collected by his friend Lei and squandered.On August 19, the investigating police arrested Li; on September 17, Lei, who was suspected of collecting the stolen funds, was also apprehended. Both have been criminally detained according to the law. The police remind: virtual currency is not legal tender, and there are no "guaranteed profit" projects. Recommendations for high returns made through private messages online are all fraud traps. Do not easily trust investment recommendations from strangers or transfer money to unfamiliar platforms.

According to SoSoValue data, the U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) saw a net inflow of $998.95 million on Monday, marking the largest single-day inflow since October 6, 2025 (the day Bitcoin reached its historical high of approximately $126,200), and the ninth-largest single-day inflow since the ETF began trading on January 11, 2024.Among them, BlackRock's IBIT led with $381.37 million, while Ark's ARKB and Fidelity's FBTC saw inflows of $289.12 million and $238.84 million, respectively. This inflow is the first consecutive three-day net inflow in two weeks, occurring against the backdrop of the Senate's failed vote to end the debate on the "Clarity Act" and the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike, seen as a reflection of institutional confidence.As of Monday, the total net inflow for this month has reached $1.31 billion, compared to a net inflow of $3.52 billion in August. Bitcoin has risen 44% this quarter to $85,000, outperforming all major assets, including gold. However, despite the strong recent inflows, the spot ETF has still seen a net outflow of $450 million year-to-date.

According to The Information, citing informed sources, DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng listed training large models with domestic chips such as those from Huawei as one of the company's biggest bets at the latest closed-door investor meeting, stating that this must succeed. DeepSeek expects to receive a new batch of Huawei chips for training as early as the fourth quarter of this year, although the specific models and quantities have not been disclosed.Liang Wenfeng believes that Huawei chips are expected to catch up with Nvidia in just a few years and hopes that DeepSeek will adapt to hardware beyond Nvidia in advance. DeepSeek is still using Nvidia chips to train models. In May of this year, Liang Wenfeng estimated that training the top-tier large models would require about 50,000 Nvidia GB300 chips, while switching to Huawei Ascend 950 would require about 200,000 chips, with the biggest issue at that time being insufficient supply from Huawei.

According to data from DefiLlama, Gate had a net inflow of $353 million in the past month, ranking fourth among global centralized exchanges.

A family in the northern French town of Vendin-le-Vieil was invaded and taken hostage by four masked men early Sunday morning. According to BFMTV, the suspects entered the house around 4 AM, binding the couple and their two children with tape, and held them for over three hours. The 40-year-old father, an IT expert in the local cryptocurrency industry, was taken to another room, beaten, and forced to give up access codes, resulting in approximately 40,000 euros (about 46,000 dollars) worth of cryptocurrency being transferred away.According to the Béthune prosecutor's office, the four suspects fled the scene by car and are still at large. The 12-year-old daughter was struck in the face with a car key during the incident, and the victims are in a state of shock; they have been sent for forensic examination and are receiving support from the victims' assistance association. The case has been filed under organized gang kidnapping and extortion and is being jointly investigated by the regional judicial police and the French Cybercrime Office.France is the country most severely affected by such "ransom attacks" globally. Records from the national prosecutor's office for organized crime show that over 70 kidnapping and illegal detention incidents related to cryptocurrency have occurred in the first eight months of 2026, with 88 people already prosecuted in earlier crackdowns this year. Previous similar cases often targeted wealthy individuals, including the father of a cryptocurrency millionaire, the wife of a co-founder of The Sandbox, and the CEO of Binance France, while the victim in this case is merely an ordinary IT professional. Chainalysis reported that global ransom attacks in 2026 resulted in approximately 30 million dollars in losses, while CertiK stated that losses over six months reached 124 million dollars, a 12-fold increase.

Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya released an in-depth research report stating that open-source weight models are about four months away from matching the best closed-source frontier models in public evaluations, with increasing fluctuations in the gap. If open-source models allow companies more control over data, infrastructure, and customization while approaching frontier performance, the value corresponding to companies still paying for frontier laboratories becomes a business issue. Openness exists on a spectrum, from fully open-source models that can be downloaded and freely modified to open-source weight models with various restrictions, while closed-source models keep weights proprietary.Palantir CEO Alex Karp warned that companies might hand over differentiated proprietary knowledge and processes to frontier model providers. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated that companies are effectively paying for intelligence twice: once in money and again in the more valuable proprietary knowledge that must be disclosed to make the intelligence useful. Despite concerns, companies are still willing to pay for frontier performance, even if the best open-source weight models are only months behind, with frontier laboratory revenues continuing to accelerate.Leading companies use both types of models, leveraging open-source models for control and customization while utilizing closed-source frontier models for maximum capability, with some cases reporting up to 12 times engineering efficiency and over 20 times cost savings. Some vendors adopt a dual-track approach, with Google offering both Gemini and Gemma, and Meta providing both Muse Spark and Llama. The 99-page report also discusses the costs of maintaining a lead for frontier laboratories, five factors of model competition, model operating locations, and investments in open-source weights by NVIDIA and Samsung.

According to the Financial Times, Saudi Arabia has withdrawn from the digital currency project led by Beijing, which is part of China's efforts to develop an alternative cross-border payment system to the US dollar.The mBridge platform has sparked controversy in the United States, with concerns that participants may use it to bypass traditional dollar-dominated payment systems like Swift. The platform is set to be commercially launched, utilizing blockchain technology to enable central banks to directly transact using their respective digital currencies, reducing foreign exchange transaction times and costs, and diminishing the role of the dollar as an intermediary currency.

Argentinian cryptocurrency exchange Lemon announced that it will cease operations in Brazil due to excessively high regulatory capital requirements. The platform will stop Lemon Card services on September 30 and will automatically close all Brazilian accounts on October 16. Lemon stated that applying for the cryptocurrency business license required by the Brazilian central bank necessitates locking in a large amount of capital, which is disproportionate to its local business scale, and therefore decided to withdraw.

The White House announced that Trump has signed the Russia sanctions bill, making it official law.

NASA awarded SpaceX three crewed missions to the International Space Station.

CoinShares pointed out in its latest research report that the Federal Reserve's hawkish policy shift and the stalled CLARITY Act are the two major short-term pressures facing the current cryptocurrency market. The report states that the Federal Reserve believes inflation is still too high, and the latest interest rate forecasts no longer indicate any room for rate cuts before 2027, which has supported the dollar and short-term U.S. Treasury yields. Coupled with the Iran conflict driving up energy prices, the possibility of another rate hike within the year has increased.CoinShares believes that if the inflation outlook does not improve significantly or if there is no major shift in monetary policy expectations, it may be difficult for Bitcoin to effectively break through $80,000 before the end of the year. In terms of regulation, the main disagreements regarding the CLARITY Act still focus on ethical provisions, with a revised version possibly being pushed forward as early as next year. Due to Bitcoin's relatively clear regulatory status, the stalled act has limited impact on it, while Ethereum and other altcoins face greater regulatory uncertainty.

According to NBC News, the U.S. Pentagon is considering withdrawing nearly one-third of American troops from Europe.

Huawei's rotating chairman Wang Tao stated at the Huawei Connect Conference 2026 that the Ascend 960 chip is ready ahead of schedule, achieving a doubling of performance. Among them, the Ascend 960DT will be released in Q1 2027, three quarters earlier than originally planned; the Ascend 960PR will be released in Q3 2027, one quarter earlier than originally planned.Wang Tao mentioned that they will adhere to an annual evolution pace, with the Ascend 970 planned for release in 2028 and the Ascend 980 planned for release in 2029.