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Variant Fund investment partner Alana Levin stated in her market thoughts for Q4 2026 that the bottom of the crypto market likely occurred at some point in July. She wrote in early July that the bottom seemed close, with Bitcoin at $59,000, Ethereum at $1,600, and ZEC at $420. She mentioned that the question has shifted to whether the bull market is genuinely starting or if it's a false rally, and which projects will benefit the most in the early bull market, assuming the market is in the early stages of a new crypto bull market.Levin indicated that the increasingly formed consensus is that marginal funds are most likely to flow into value storage protocols as currency and protocols that can generate income. She believes Bitcoin is the dominant asset for digital value storage currently, while other competing assets may be valued based on their market capitalization relative to Bitcoin's market cap and its changes. For income-generating protocols, she expects investors to examine whether the income comes from crypto-native activities (like Pump) or traditional financial activities (like Hyperliquid), whether it persists during market downturns, and profit margins; projects with exposure to real-world assets and stablecoin growth, which are expected to attract institutional users and are still led by founders after surviving a bear market, are more likely to achieve higher multiples.She also categorized on-chain projects that can benchmark against non-crypto businesses as a third category, believing that most belong to narrative trading rather than long-term investment. Themes include routing, reasoning, computing power, data collection, and interface-related directions in artificial intelligence, and she is skeptical about whether most scenarios require blockchain; if such projects significantly outperform, she would view it as a signal of nearing the top.

Zcash founder Zooko posted that Zcash has issued over 8 million dollars in retroactive grants this round, with millions of dollars awarded to those who contributed to protecting all users during this year's AI vulnerability crisis.The more significant meaning of this funding is that Zcash once again proves that its self-funding and self-governance system is sustainable, resistant to capture, and capable of continuous evolution. Zcash will conduct multiple rounds of similar funding every year in the future while continuously improving the mechanism.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong posted on the X platform that Coinbase is building financial accounts for superintelligence, covering services such as trading, payments, and lending.These accounts can help users accumulate wealth and manage personal finances, and can also provide independent accounts for AI Agent teams, allowing them to handle more tasks on behalf of users.

According to official news, the Gate event contract "Winning Streak Challenge" will officially start on October 1 at 08:00 (UTC+8) and will last until October 11 at 08:00 (UTC+8).This challenge covers 5-minute cycle events for BTC and all stock event contracts. Users can participate after completing the activity registration. The event sets a total reward of 20,000 USDT, covering multiple gameplay options such as winning streak ladder, win rate leaderboard, trading volume sprint, and new user first order gift.Among them, users who achieve a maximum winning streak of 15 can receive 100 USDT, with a total winning streak prize pool of 6,000 USDT; the win rate leaderboard has a prize pool of 3,500 USDT, and users who meet the criteria of cumulative valid matches ≥ 100, single net purchase ≥ 20 USDT, and win rate ≥ 40% can participate in the ranking, with the first place receiving 1,200 USDT.Users whose cumulative event contract trading volume reaches 20,000 USDT can also share a prize pool of 5,000 USDT based on their trading volume proportion, with a maximum of 500 USDT per user. In addition, during the event, the first 1,000 new users who complete their first transaction in the event contract and have a first net purchase value ≥ 20 USDT can receive a 5.5 USDT event contract experience voucher.Currently, the Gate event contract has covered two major sectors: cryptocurrency assets and stocks. Users can participate in price direction predictions around different assets and time windows, looking for trading opportunities that suit their own judgment in the short-cycle market changes.

According to official news, WasabiCard has launched various AI subscription cards, catering to the global AI tool subscription and payment needs of enterprises and teams, supporting subscription payment scenarios for mainstream AI applications such as OpenAI and Claude. Through card-based payment solutions, companies can handle the procurement and expense management of AI services for different teams, projects, or business lines more flexibly.In addition to AI subscription payments, WasabiCard also supports bulk card issuance for enterprises, fund budget management, and multi-currency account setup, as well as various scenarios such as advertising, business travel, payroll, and e-commerce subscriptions. It helps companies configure payment permissions and budget limits by department, employee, or specific purpose, enhancing the management efficiency of AI-related expenditures and the transparency of fund usage.As AI tools gradually enter daily workflows in research and development, content production, customer service, and operations, cross-border subscription payments and expense management are becoming important infrastructure for global operations of enterprises. It is important to note that currently, WasabiCard-related products are not open for application to enterprises and individual users in mainland China.

According to a research report released by Geoff Kendrick, the Global Head of Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered Bank, Standard Chartered has officially launched coverage research on Ethena (ENA), predicting that the ENA token will rise to $2 by the end of 2028.The report points out that Ethena is currently the fourth largest stablecoin issuer in the world (after Tether, Circle, and Sky), and its stablecoin USDe quickly became the fastest stablecoin to surpass a market capitalization of $10 billion after its launch at the end of 2023. Currently, yield-bearing stablecoins account for about 5% of the overall stablecoin market, and this proportion is expected to continue to expand as user demand for yield grows.In terms of sources of yield, USDe has gradually diversified from its early reliance on crypto basis trading (which once provided over 20% annualized yield) to include real-world assets (RWA) and stock perpetual contract basis. Standard Chartered predicts that the on-chain RWA scale will grow from the current approximately $40 billion to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, providing support for ENA's buyback plan and price increase.

The voting results of the Zcash third quarter token holder directed retroactive funding program show that both bounty proposals for Orchard fake currency vulnerability discoverer Taylor Hornby have been approved.One is for the $750,000 vulnerability bounty he applied for, and the other is a $750,000 additional bonus nominated by community members, totaling $1.5 million. The funded recipients will still need to complete the KYC and fund disbursement process.

The artificial intelligence company DeepSeek has officially open-sourced infrastructure components for the Huawei Ascend computing platform, covering the TileLang high-level language compilation tool, computing libraries, and distributed communication libraries, corresponding to the previously open-sourced components for the NVIDIA platform. TileLang aims to provide a general-purpose, simpler programming language that can achieve the hardware performance limits, improving development efficiency and simplifying logic compared to CUDA, while its programming model can also leverage chip features.The TileLang route was first validated on the NVIDIA platform and has already supported the implementation of most operators in the training of the DeepSeek V4 series models. The open-sourced Ascend version encapsulates the underlying instructions of the Ascend C, providing a high-level programming approach without sacrificing hardware performance. Currently, every TileLang operator used in DeepSeek's training has a corresponding high-performance implementation on Ascend.The components open-sourced at the same time also include DeepGEMM, DeepEP, TileKernels, FlashMLA, and DeepSelect, which are used for general matrix operations, large-scale cross-device communication, conventional vector calculations and memory access, long-context sparse attention, and data filtering, respectively. DeepSeek claims that in multiple key tests, the related computing and communication performance has approached hardware limits; during the R&D process, the Huawei team provided support, and both parties collaborated to advance the 128-card supernode solution based on Ascend 950, with deep optimizations made for computing and communication.

Binance Co-CEO Richard Teng posted on X, stating: The macro environment still faces challenges, with U.S. yields remaining high and continuing to pressure risk assets; however, there are signs of improvement in investor demand.Richard Teng also mentioned: The spot Bitcoin ETF attracted a net inflow of $999 million, and technical indicators are beginning to show early signs of recovery.

Pantera Capital released the latest "Tokenization Status" report, stating that the tokenization market size it tracked reached 332 billion dollars, covering 671 assets.The report pointed out that JPMorgan, HSBC, and Fidelity launched on-chain products this quarter; BlackRock's BUIDL fund saw on-chain transfers reach 441 million dollars in June, and it has a redemption arrangement of 1 billion dollars per day, which is currently accepted as collateral.In addition, Robinhood Chain's weekly trading volume of real-world assets (RWA) reached 888 million dollars in August.

According to the official announcement, the Bitcoin sidechain Liquid Network developed by Blockstream has initiated an independent external security audit for Elements v23.3.4, providing additional security verification for the recovery of Peg-out operations.Meanwhile, the Liquid Federation is coordinating an update to the PAK list, including replacing existing key entries and ensuring that all Peg-out keys are securely stored in cold wallets. The official statement indicates that progress on the recovery will be announced later.

Ari Paul, founder and chief investment officer of the cryptocurrency asset management company BlockTower Capital, posted on X that Coinbase "lost" $25 million of its company's funds years ago, and it was later discovered that the other party was actually covering up large-scale and repeated hacking attacks, and the relevant funds have still not been returned.Ari Paul stated that his team has tracked at least a dozen other affected institutions, with the concealed amount exceeding $1 billion. He mentioned that currently, they can only disclose this information because multiple legal proceedings are still ongoing.

According to The Block, the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has obtained a court order requiring two individuals involved in a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment scheme to jointly repay £851,402, with plans to return the funds to the victims.At least 65 investors have collectively lost £1.54 million, and the amount being recovered is approximately half of that.

CITIC Securities has initiated coverage on SpaceX (SPCX.O), giving it a "Buy" rating with a target price of $250.

According to Ark Invest Tracker, Ark Invest states that AI hacking attacks are affecting everything. The risks go far beyond Bitcoin, as AI makes software vulnerabilities easier to discover and exploit.Bitcoin and hardware wallets may be the first to be impacted, but social media, tax, and banking websites may also face the same threats. Trusting a big brand still means trusting that the company will not make mistakes as AI becomes increasingly powerful. ARK expects that large custodial institutions will also become targets, with AI potentially discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities at an unprecedented speed.

JPMorgan analysts stated that the recent pullback in global AI trading has improved investors' positions, making valuations more attractive, which may drive investors to reposition, especially in the semiconductor stock sector. JPMorgan pointed out that sustained strong earnings performance and evidence of AI commercialization will support investors' renewed focus on this sector.

In today's community live broadcast, Bitget CEO Gracy responded to recent security incidents and the platform's financial status. She candidly stated that this is the first security incident encountered since Bitget was established 8 years ago. After a complete trace, it was found that hackers exploited vulnerabilities in third-party security products to steal internal network access credentials, forged withdrawal commands to the wallet system, and deceived the wallet into executing abnormal transfers that bypassed risk checks. Gracy emphasized that no private keys were leaked, and cold wallets were unaffected; specific technical details will be disclosed in the formally released security report.Gracy pointed out that the verified losses from this incident are within the coverage of the protection fund, and user funds are not affected. The platform's own funds exceed $1.4 billion, which includes approximately $464 million in the user protection fund. The platform will continue to uphold the security commitments made when the protection fund was established in 2022, planning to replenish the fund to the baseline of $300 million within a week."The protection fund is not just a slogan, but an important mechanism that provides tangible security for users in the event of extreme security incidents," Gracy stated. In the face of sudden security challenges, the platform's comprehensive strength and its ability to take responsibility are important criteria for measuring its risk response capability and long-term credibility. Bitget will continue to uphold its long-term commitment to prioritize user interests.

The government of Kazakhstan is promoting the use of associated gas to power cryptocurrency mining, in order to restore the mining industry affected by power restrictions. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a decree in July requiring the establishment of mechanisms for enterprises to conduct digital mining using associated gas.Daniyar Mubarakov, head of the Blockchain and Digital Mining Association, stated that the total amount of associated gas in Kazakhstan can be converted into 1.2 to 1.3 terawatt-hours of electricity, sufficient to support medium or large data centers or Bitcoin mines in some oil fields. The Ministry of Energy of Kazakhstan estimates that there are up to 60 oil fields in the country producing associated gas. Oil companies can sell waste gas to miners, reducing disposal costs by millions of dollars, while miners can lock in electricity prices for years, reducing dependence on grid power.The government of Kazakhstan is developing a relevant legal framework to clarify the operational rules for enterprises and regulate the market. Gizzat Baitursynov, Deputy Minister of AI and Digital Development of Kazakhstan, stated that this mechanism will increase government tax revenue and improve the environment.