cati

The on-chain derivatives protocol Variational announced that the Token Generation Event (TGE) for the token $VAR is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026. The initial token distribution includes 32% genesis allocation, 18% ecological reserve, and 50% for team and investor shares. The genesis tokens will be airdropped according to the proportion of Variational points held and will be 100% unlocked at TGE; the ecological reserve will be retained by the Variational Foundation for ecological growth and distributed at its discretion.The team and investor tokens will be locked for 12 months after TGE, followed by a minimum unlocking period of three years. Team members are also subject to individual vesting arrangements, and the specific shares for both parties will be announced before TGE. Variational stated that it plans to use all revenue directed to the treasury for the repurchase and destruction of $VAR. Weekly point distribution will continue until TGE, with 150,000 points distributed each week; accounts must hold at least 1 point to qualify for signing terms and receiving the genesis allocation, and any unclaimed portion will be destroyed.Variational originally planned to end the points program in the third quarter of 2026 and subsequently launch $VAR, but this timeline has been delayed due to significant strategic partnerships. In the final weeks before TGE, the project will conclude private testing, launch Omni on the public mainnet, expand exchange functions, and release trading APIs, while also announcing details on repurchase and token usage, and disclosing the impact of new partnerships on Omni, Pro, and traditional financial markets on-chain when conditions permit.

Despite yesterday's Bitcoin pullback leading to a significant decline in altcoins and on-chain tokens, according to Alternative data, the Crypto Fear and Greed Index still reports 71 (the same as yesterday), indicating that market sentiment remains at the "Greed" level.Note: The Fear Index threshold ranges from 0-100 and includes the following indicators: Volatility (25%) + Market Trading Volume (25%) + Social Media Popularity (15%) + Market Surveys (15%) + Bitcoin's Proportion in the Overall Market (10%) + Google Trends Analysis (10%).

The digital credit protocol Apyx announced on September 23 that the TGE of the governance token APYX has been postponed to after the originally scheduled date of October 13, 2026, when rewards were planned to be distributed to Season 1 and Season 2 participants. The reasons for the delay are twofold: the core reserve asset STRC has experienced the deepest and longest drawdown in its brief history, the protocol has not been interrupted, and the Chainlink on-chain NAV, proof cadence, minting, and redemption are still operating under existing terms, but the volatility of digital credit exceeds the range shown by its short history, requiring more time to address; multiple institutions have proactively reached out, hoping to use their infrastructure to bring their assets on-chain.The additional time will be used to strengthen the core protocol and to build a broader RWA platform V1 before the TGE. Digital credit remains the reserve anchor and source of yield for apyUSD, with custody, proof, on-chain NAV, redemption, and compliance frameworks being opened to other issuers and asset types. Apyx stated that the zero-fee, instant redemption, government bond-backed aptUSD has been launched, making it the first asset in the ecosystem not derived from digital credit. The Pips plan will continue, and Season 2 will no longer end on the originally scheduled date of October 11; the accumulation under the existing multiplier will remain uninterrupted, and positions, commitments, Curve and Pendle positions, and lending positions will continue to score without any action required.Due to the extended accumulation period, the airdrop allocation for Season 2 has increased from 6% of the total supply to 9%. The new end date will be confirmed along with the new TGE date, and it will not end without prior notice. The allocations for Season 1 and Season 2 will still be fully unlocked at the TGE.

The Polish prosecutor's office has charged a former police officer in the case of the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange Zondacrypto. The Central Bureau of Cybercrime (CBZC) in Poland detained Artur K. on Tuesday under the orders of the organized crime department of the national prosecutor's office. He faces two charges: one for participating in an organized crime group, and the other for causing significant property losses to BitBay, BB Trade Estonia, and another entity, assisting in the misappropriation of entrusted property, aiding computer fraud, and money laundering. The prosecutor's office stated that a search of his residence uncovered documents related to the operation of the exchange, and he is being questioned as a suspect; the prosecutor's office will decide whether to apply for pre-trial detention.Meanwhile, the police in Katowice are searching and investigating a fuel depot, which is the last known location of Zondacrypto founder Sylwester Suszek before he went missing in March 2022. The case is classified as illegal deprivation of liberty rather than a disappearance, as a suspect has been accused of removing a hard drive from the gas station's surveillance camera.Suszek founded the exchange in Katowice in 2014, originally named BitBay, and relocated its registration to Estonia as BB Trade Estonia in 2020, rebranding it as Zondacrypto, claiming to have 1.3 million customers, most of whom are Polish. The exchange froze withdrawals and went offline in April, and the Estonian Financial Intelligence Unit revoked its operating license on June 29. Since August, at least five people have been charged, including former Polish Olympic Committee president Radosław P. All public respondents have denied the charges, and the related accusations have not yet been tried in court.

Malicious iOS application FomoPeek has been found to contain multiple kernel exploit modules that can bypass Apple's sandbox and access sensitive wallet data from other applications, and is linked to a theft incident involving nearly $580,000 in cryptocurrency assets. Blockchain security company SlowMist stated that the application is distributed through the Apple App Store. The company noted that the affected versions were released on September 9 and September 12, and the application contains two malicious modules that can gain higher privileges and access Keychain data and files from other applications.Version 1.3, released on September 17, has removed the related malicious components. SlowMist and the OKX security team investigated and found that the related attack framework includes 8 types of attack methods, supporting iOS versions 12 to 18.7.2 and 26 to 26.1. On-chain analysis shows that a hacker address related to the incident received approximately 580,000 USDT, and the funds were subsequently transferred through multiple addresses and services, with some flowing to FixedFloat, KuCoin, and cce.cash.

According to Coinglass data, the cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index is currently at 70, down 9 points from yesterday. The average over the past 7 days is 67, and the average over the past 30 days is 66.

a16z, in collaboration with the DeFi Education Fund, submitted a joint proposal to SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, proposing the establishment of safe harbor rules and the creation of a "rebuttable presumption," meaning that decentralized exchange (DEX) protocols and their front-end interfaces do not fall under the definition of "exchanges" as defined by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.On the same day, a16z also submitted a second letter urging the SEC to establish a registration system for centralized cryptocurrency trading platforms, similar to the alternative trading system (ATS) rules from 1998. Both letters were dated September 14, and three days later, the SEC issued an "Innovation Exemption" for tokenized stock trading venues.

Cryptocurrency media The Block announced the launch of its sister publication The Latent, covering the AI field.The Latent is now live, providing AI news, a data portal, The Latent Score, and a daily newsletter. The Block stated that it will bring its reporting and data expertise into the AI field.

According to CNBC, the prediction market platform Kalshi has submitted an application to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) through its clearing agency Kalshi Klear, seeking to introduce margin trading for certain event contracts, allowing eligible traders to use leverage.Currently, event contracts on U.S. regulated exchanges require full collateral, and while Kalshi has offered leverage in its perpetual futures business, it has not yet been authorized to apply this to the prediction market. Kalshi stated that this feature aims to attract more institutional liquidity and, if approved, will only be available to self-clearing members that meet capital requirements, excluding sports, cultural, and "mention-type" markets. The company also plans to increase margin requirements as contracts approach expiration.

Bitcoin News posted on the X platform that Bloomberg senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone stated that U.S. Treasury bonds with a 5% yield now have the value to sell Bitcoin for allocation.

Bitcoin News posted on the X platform stating that Spaces has launched "Trust Anchor," allowing applications to directly verify human-readable identities based on Bitcoin without relying on centralized servers.Users can obtain a single Trust ID and scan or paste it into Spaces-compatible applications to verify identity identifiers like alice@bitcoin based on the locally verified Spaces protocol status. The Trust ID is generated from the Bitcoin block header chain and the accumulated status of Spaces; the Veritas application on macOS can generate this ID without the need to run a full Bitcoin node, and users can also connect their own nodes or generate the same Trust ID through the Spaces client.This solution aims to use Bitcoin as the foundation for a decentralized certificate authority, enabling applications to authenticate identities without trusting company servers.

According to Bitcoin News monitoring, security researchers have found that versions 1.1 and 1.2 of FomoPeek distributed through the Apple App Store contain an iOS exploit framework that can escape the application sandbox, capable of extracting keychain data, wallet files, and mnemonic phrases. SlowMist has linked this application to multiple theft incidents and traced nearly $580,000 worth of stolen USDT flowing into a main address.Users who have installed either version should consider the keys accessible on their iPhone as compromised, generate new mnemonic phrases on a clean device, and immediately transfer their funds.

According to SoSoValue data, as of 8 AM Eastern Time on September 21, 2026, last week, global publicly listed companies (excluding mining companies) shifted from net selling to net buying of Bitcoin, with a net purchase amount reaching $183 million in a single week.Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) purchased 950 Bitcoins last week at a price of $79,670, spending approximately $75.7 million, bringing its total holdings to 846,000 Bitcoins, marking its first purchase in two weeks.The Japanese listed company Metaplanet did not purchase any Bitcoin last week, marking ten consecutive weeks without purchases.Additionally, two other companies announced Bitcoin purchases or holdings last week. Ethereum asset company Bitmine announced the purchase of 1 Bitcoin after 8 AM Eastern Time on September 14, without disclosing the specific purchase amount, bringing its total holdings to 212 Bitcoins; asset management company Strive announced on September 21 that it spent approximately $108 million last week to purchase 1,355 Bitcoins at a price of $79,475, bringing its total holdings to about 26,355 Bitcoins.As of the time of publication, the total amount of Bitcoin held by the global publicly listed companies (excluding mining companies) in the statistics is 1,156,080 Bitcoins, an increase of 2.67% compared to last week, with a current market value of approximately $9.865 billion, accounting for 5.8% of Bitcoin's circulating market value.

According to Coinglass data, the cryptocurrency Fear and Greed Index is currently at 71, down 1 point from yesterday. The average over the past 7 days is 63, and the average over the past 30 days is 66.

On September 21, netizen "Zhang Kangkang kk" revealed on social media that Tang Jie, the founder of Zhipu and a professor at Tsinghua University, filed a complaint on Xiaohongshu regarding a user post. The complaint stated that the post used phrases like "code is pretty much the same as copy, both start with c and steal code" without factual basis, fabricating rumors that Zhipu's ZCode was involved in code theft and plagiarism. It also used terms like "Uncle Tang Jie" to associate Tang Jie with the plagiarism rumors for character defamation, while utilizing AI technology to synthesize Tang Jie's image with anime materials in a defamatory context. The complainant believed the content constituted malicious defamation and commercial disparagement, damaging both Tang Jie's personal reputation and Zhipu AI's reputation, and requested the platform to take down the post and deal with the user who posted it.On the same day, Zhipu announced that it had completed rectifications regarding the safety issues of the independent desktop AI programming client ZCode in response to community feedback and apologized to all users. The company has open-sourced ZCode, handing over the code to community supervision, and will establish a regular product security vulnerability mechanism moving forward. Previously, developers discovered that ZCode had silently uploaded user local repository data without prior notice. On September 18, Zhipu publicly apologized and made an emergency fix, explaining that the root cause was the "repository indexing" feature, which was enabled by default and had no option to turn it off. On September 20, Taiyuan Chengming Technology Co., Ltd. sent a letter to Zhipu, accusing ZCode of unauthorized uploading of company data assets and trade secrets, making claims for rights protection and reserving the right to pursue legal responsibility.

ZCode under Zhipu has officially been open-sourced. Zhipu stated that in response to previous community feedback regarding product security issues, it has completed rectifications and will open-source the code for community supervision.The official announcement mentioned that ZCode v3.14.0 has removed the Repo Wiki feature, cutting off the local repository snapshot generation and upload link. After the rectification was completed, Zhipu invited the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Green Alliance Technology to conduct a security audit. Both institutions confirmed that the relevant cloud data has been cleared, and no functional paths triggering local repository snapshots or file exports were found in the new client version.In response to the community's concerns about code data issues, Zhipu reiterated its commitment that the relevant code data "has not been retained and has never been used for model training." Moving forward, ZCode will establish a regular security vulnerability feedback mechanism and provide corresponding rewards to developers based on the severity of the issues.

Grayscale Zcash ETF (ZCSH) is applying for a 3-for-1 forward split, which is expected to take effect on September 28. This move aims to lower the share price to enhance liquidity, as the fund's price had become too high due to significant increases.

The Non-Small Number Union TuringBitChain is advancing the Non-Small Number × GWDC 2026 Innovation Forum. TuringBitChain will participate as a co-organizer in this forum, which will be held on September 29, 2026, at AT CENTER in Seoul, South Korea, focusing on topics such as stock tokenization, Web3, and AI.TuringBitChain (TBC) will participate in this forum as a co-organizer. TBC is an independent Layer 1 public chain based on the Bitcoin UTXO model, using SHA256 PoW consensus, and supports Turing-complete smart contracts on the UTXO architecture through BVM and TuringContract. During the conference, TuringBitChain project guest Marcus Cheng will also give a speech, serving as the Marketing Director for the Asia-Pacific region of TBC.This GWDC event in South Korea is expected to attract 5,000 participants, with the South Korean Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Sun Yuchen, Microsoft, Bithumb, Animoca Brands, and other representatives from politics, business, technology, and Web3 also appearing on-site. TBC's participation will bring topics such as UTXO Layer 1, asset tokenization, AI Agents, and high-frequency micropayments into a denser international exchange scenario.