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According to FT, cryptocurrency projects have spent nearly $640 million repurchasing their own tokens this year. Amid a prolonged market slump, they are emulating common practices in the stock market, attempting to boost token prices.Data from blockchain analytics firm Allium Labs shows that the repurchase amount this year is $638 million, compared to $545 million during the same period last year, with only $366,000 for the entire year of 2024. The repurchase amounts from Hyperliquid and pump.fun account for nearly 90% of the total repurchase amount.

The Taiwanese prosecutors stated that they are investigating the global leading chip substrate and printed circuit board manufacturer, Unimicron Technology Corporation, which is a key supplier for NVIDIA, Intel, Google, and Amazon. The investigation targets the company for allegedly mislabeling parts made in China as being produced in Taiwan, which may violate laws prohibiting the laundering of origin.Unimicron Technology Corporation is one of the world's top printed circuit board manufacturers, and this investigation occurs against the backdrop of the United States cracking down on transshipment.

According to Caixin, Ant Group CEO and Alipay Chairman Han Xinyi elaborated on systematic insights regarding the global exploration path of AI payments at the China Payment and Clearing Forum. He stated that AI payments have essentially formed four exploration paths:The first category is represented by payment technology and infrastructure platforms like Stripe. The second category is represented by cryptocurrency companies such as Circle and Coinbase, which mainly rely on stablecoins and their wallet systems, using cryptocurrencies as a payment medium to directly support automated payment scenarios between machines. The third category is represented by traditional payment networks like the two major card organizations (Visa, Mastercard). The fourth category consists of AI platform companies such as Google and OpenAI.

According to Mobile Payment Network, Lu Lei, a member of the Party Committee and Vice President of the People's Bank of China, stated at the 15th China Payment Clearing Forum that intelligent agent payments must not blur the boundaries of responsibility between consumers, operating institutions, and algorithm systems. Lu Lei believes that the essence of payment is the transfer of fund ownership, which objectively requires that the results of transactions are predictable, responsibilities are definable, and traces are traceable. Large models and autonomous intelligent agents have characteristics such as output randomness and insufficient transparency of logic. If transaction decision-making authority is blindly or excessively granted to intelligent agents, it will affect the trust foundation of fund transactions. The current governance rules of the payment industry and dispute resolution mechanisms are built around "humans as the final decision-makers in transactions." The new model of intelligent agents automatically initiating and assisting in transactions easily blurs the boundaries of responsibility, and the existing governance rules need to be optimized and improved.Regarding the issue of insufficient compatibility of protocol standards in the field of intelligent agent payments, Lu Lei emphasized that the dispute over protocols is essentially a dispute over business rules and technical standards, as well as a struggle for dominance in the era of artificial intelligence. The People's Bank of China continues to strengthen its tracking research on technological innovation, especially intelligent agent payments, guiding the Payment Clearing Association to leverage its advantages in industry self-regulation. Based on extensive soliciting of opinions, they will formulate and publish the "Self-Regulatory Convention for Intelligent Agent Payment Applications," and will continue to work on coordinating protocols and standards, as well as innovating risk governance. Lu Lei proposed three hopes to market institutions: actively respond to and implement the industry self-regulatory convention, with payment security and risk prevention as the bottom line, and consumer rights protection as the focal point; continuously track the trends of cutting-edge technologies such as large models and intelligent agents both domestically and internationally, and build technical reserves and application capabilities; adhere to the principle of rules and standards first, strengthen coordination and compatibility among different protocols and standards, and cooperate with regulatory authorities to promote the construction of a foundational protocol and technical standard system for intelligent agent payments.

According to Bitcoin.com News, the National Cryptocurrency Association of the United States has launched an interactive map estimating the distribution of 67 million cryptocurrency holders across states and congressional districts. The data shows that California has about 9.5 million holders, ranking first in the nation, followed by Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois. The related data is a model estimate and not verified actual numbers.Additionally, according to research commissioned by the association, the cryptocurrency industry supports approximately 231,800 jobs in the United States, generating $55.4 billion in economic activity and $30.8 billion in labor income.

This Friday, the United States will release non-farm payroll data, which will serve as an important reference for the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision. Prior to this, CME's "FedWatch" shows that traders are betting on a probability of over 50% for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates twice this year.

According to Coinglass data, the current whale holdings on the Hyperliquid platform amount to $7.06 billion, with long positions totaling $3.386 billion, accounting for 47.95% of the holdings, and short positions totaling $3.674 billion, accounting for 52.05%. The profit and loss for long positions is $295 million, while the profit and loss for short positions is -$322 million.Among them, the whale address 0x92ea..e9 has taken a 3x leveraged long position on BTC at a price of $77,089.9, currently showing an unrealized profit and loss of $1.0762 million.

According to The Verge, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, seeking damages for "tens of thousands" of copyrighted works. They accuse Anthropic of illegally downloading, scraping, and distributing copyrighted works on a large scale to develop and train the Claude series of AI models. The plaintiffs are seeking up to $150,000 in damages for each work and an additional claim of up to $25,000 for each instance of removing identifiable copyright data.In addition to suing Anthropic, the lawsuit also names co-founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann as individual defendants. The lawsuit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over 5 million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror. The complaint also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from websites such as MusixMatch and LyricFind. Recently, Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement with the publishing industry over another lawsuit, while also facing multiple lawsuits from Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, as well as lawsuits filed by BMG and Round Hill Music.

OpenAI has purchased tens of thousands of Macs for reinforcement learning training, while Anthropic uses a rental approach for Macs. Both companies have incorporated Apple computers into their AI research and development processes.It is reported that NVIDIA has regarded Apple as the number one competitor in the local AI field, as Macs are gaining increasing attention among the AI developer community. Official data from Apple shows that in the third quarter of fiscal year 2026, Mac revenue grew by 29% year-on-year, making it the fastest-growing product category.

The total open interest for Bitcoin futures is 695,020 contracts, valued at $54.82 billion, down 0.26% in the past hour, down 0.38% in the past four hours, but still up 1.15% in the past 24 hours. Binance holds 142,500 Bitcoins, valued at $11.24 billion, accounting for 20.5%.In Deribit Bitcoin options open interest, call options hold 288,409.93 Bitcoins, accounting for 60.89%; put options hold 185,234.42 Bitcoins, accounting for 39.11%. In the past 24 hours, the trading volume of put options accounted for 54.49%, with 12,380.77 contracts traded, higher than the 10,339.78 contracts of call options. Data from Deribit, Binance, and OKX shows that the maximum pain point for options on September 25 is close to the range of $70,000 to $73,000. The spot price of Bitcoin is $78,425, and futures positions remain high.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced on Friday that former White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez has agreed to pay $172,000 to settle allegations of insider trading in the prediction market by using advance knowledge of presidential speeches.Perez was able to access the content before the speeches were released due to his job, allowing him to bet on known outcomes. From December 2025 to February 2026, he profited over $107,500 from this. Under the settlement agreement, he must forfeit $107,539.02 in illegal gains, pay a civil penalty of $65,000, accept a three-year trading ban, and cease further violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.The CFTC noted that the fine was significantly discounted under the new cooperation policy and praised Perez for providing exemplary assistance during the investigation, while also thanking exchange operator Kalshi for their cooperation in the case. This case highlights the insider trading risks associated with the growing popularity of prediction markets. Previously, a U.S. soldier was charged with insider trading related to military operations in Venezuela on Polymarket, and a MrBeast video editor was also fired during the Kalshi insider trading investigation.

Polygon Labs disclosed that it has fixed a batch of security vulnerabilities in its proof-of-stake network through two hard forks, with the related fixes privately deployed before public disclosure. According to a forum post released on Wednesday, the team packaged the fixes into the Austin hard fork of the Bor client and the Kyoto hard fork of the Heimdall client, both of which followed the standard process for fixing issues that affect consensus: first validated on the Amoy testnet, and then publicly disclosed once the mainnet was activated and the network was secure.The Austin fork fixed two denial-of-service paths in block processing, including a vulnerability where malicious block producers could crash peer nodes by filling them with oversized field data. The Kyoto fork addressed a broader range of consensus hardening issues, with the most severe vulnerability allowing an attacker to force the entire validator set to perform costly and coordinated work with just one crafted transaction—the cost of constructing the transaction is low, but the network processing cost is high. Polygon emphasized that none of the vulnerabilities were observed to be exploited on the mainnet and have been proactively addressed. The two upgrades are now mandatory for node operators and have taken effect without the need for state migration or resynchronization.This disclosure comes at a critical transformation period for Polygon, which has completed the migration of the traditional MATIC token to POL as part of a comprehensive overhaul of its network architecture. The news did not boost the price of POL; according to CoinGecko data, POL traded at approximately $0.09983 on Sunday, down 2.3% in 24 hours, down about 6.8% over the past week, and down about 60.8% over the past year, with a market capitalization of approximately $1.07 billion.

According to Front Office Sports, the prediction market platform Kalshi has signed an exclusive agreement with the United States Tennis Association (USTA) to become the exclusive prediction market platform partner for the US Open. The agreement is effective immediately and was finalized only after the qualification rounds ended last week, with the report not disclosing financial terms. Kalshi has not yet been listed among the official partners of the US Open, and a blog post analyzing the women's singles events released earlier by the company included a statement saying that the company "is not affiliated with the US Open or WTA."According to sources, as part of the agreement, the USTA is preventing other prediction market platforms from advertising at US Open venues and on television, including ESPN's broadcasts of the events, which is an unusual aspect of the agreement. Kalshi declined to comment, and representatives from USTA and ESPN did not respond immediately. The US Open is owned and operated by the USTA, and its CEO Craig Tiley took office on July 20 of this year, playing a significant role in facilitating this year's event agreement.Both Kalshi and Polymarket are official partners of the NHL, and Kalshi has recently partnered with several MLB teams. According to data from The Block, since August, the total trading volume for Kalshi, Polymarket, and Polymarket US has reached $41.2 billion, with Kalshi accounting for $33.7 billion.

The European digital currency market is forming a pattern of parallel development between the central bank digital euro and private euro stablecoins. Revolut has previously launched phased testing of EURR in Denmark, Poland, and Portugal. This euro stablecoin operates on Ethereum and is issued by Bridge Building, a subsidiary of Stripe.The ECB emphasizes that the digital euro will adopt a highly private design, with offline payment information only held by the transacting parties, and online transactions cannot be directly linked to individuals by the Eurosystem. Europe is advancing its digital payment system through public digital currencies and private stablecoins to reduce reliance on dollar stablecoins and non-European payment infrastructures.

Blockchain analysis company Chainalysis has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Federal Claims Court, accusing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of illegally awarding a $94.6 million exclusive contract to competitor TRM Labs. This contract provides forensic software and support services for investigations by the Department of Homeland Security's task force, with a performance period from July 1, 2026, to June 30, 2027. Chainalysis claims this is the largest blockchain analysis contract awarded by the U.S. government to date.In the complaint, Chainalysis pointed out that ICE issued a Request for Information (RFI) on May 28, which included 18 questions regarding capabilities such as a proprietary fraud victim database, AI agent data retrieval, automatic notifications for virtual asset service providers (VASP) to execute voluntary freezes, and collaboration with stablecoin issuers. However, many of the RFI requests did not appear in the final Statement of Need released less than two weeks later, while ICE's market research determined that Chainalysis could not meet the needs based on RFI standards. Chainalysis also noted that "sexual extortion," which was not mentioned in the RFI, became one of the three main task areas in the Statement of Need, and some requirements closely matched TRM's proprietary product architecture.Chainalysis claims it was the only company to submit a capability statement, but ICE completed its market research the next day, determining that TRM was the only vendor capable of meeting all the requirements, and did not pose any follow-up questions to it.

Zhao Changpeng appeared on the podcast "Meanders" and discussed the pressures, adaptability, and lifelong motivation in the cryptocurrency field. When talking about pressure, Zhao Changpeng stated, "I generally do not set goals; I just do my best. This year the market is not good, so the company's performance may decline, but I have tried my best, I did not slack off, and I did not make any major mistakes. I handle problems in the same way.""No matter how difficult the problem is, I just try my best to deal with it. I also believe in simulation theory; I believe this world is simulated, so it’s like a game. It is simulated, but that does not mean this game is unimportant. However, in this game, I just need to do my best; you try your best to handle it, and after handling it, you can only wait, just lie back and win."Zhao Changpeng mentioned the industry, saying, "As for blockchain itself, I think the improvement in performance is still too slow. But because Bitcoin upgrades slowly, it is particularly stable, which is also an advantage. So there are advantages and disadvantages. Many of the ideas we had in the early days had many implementations, many that were not implemented, and many unexpected things happened."Regarding RWA, he said, "Even a year and a half ago, I would have doubted whether RWA could succeed, but now it is growing very fast. To be honest, I might have had some doubts about stablecoins five years ago, wondering how long they could last; at that time, I did not fully understand them. Stablecoins have their own uses. So these things are all things we did not think of before."

Michael Saylor, the founder and executive chairman of Bitcoin Strategy, once again released information related to the Bitcoin Tracker and wrote, "We're ₿ack."According to previous patterns, Strategy usually discloses Bitcoin holding changes the day after relevant news is released.It is worth noting that the last time Strategy disclosed an increase in Bitcoin holdings was on June 22, 2026, and there has been no information related to the Bitcoin Tracker released in the past two weeks.

Zhao Changpeng appeared on the podcast "Meanders." Zhao Changpeng stated that if he were to redo a global cryptocurrency trading platform in 2017, the first principle would be to avoid U.S. users. Their definition of centralized financial platforms is: if you have U.S. users, you need to be subject to U.S. regulation and obtain a license in the U.S. This is not 100% enforced in the U.S., but they have the right and the ability to do so.Additionally, contracts might be developed a bit earlier. Even some other financial products could potentially be developed a bit earlier, and financial products would be more comprehensive. Communication with regulators might be more thorough. Binance is currently the trading platform that communicates the most with regulators, but the coverage is still somewhat lacking. Moreover, if you really want to do this, the cost is very high. It's not just a matter of money; you need to hire good people, spend a lot of time, and invest a lot of time managing this matter.

Nick Timiraos, the "Fed Whisperer," stated that Fed Chair Waller has quelled some concerns about his strategy to combat inflation, but has also laid the groundwork for a larger test that may come in three weeks. If the Fed raises interest rates, it could anger the White House just weeks before the midterm elections. If they hold steady, it may reignite the doubts that Waller's remarks have calmed.Two points from Waller's speech on Friday particularly suggest that the Fed may raise rates next month. The first point is that Waller finds it difficult to describe the current financial conditions as restrictive. The second point is that the relatively positive inflation data over the summer has not convinced him that the underlying trend is improving. The Fed's default choice before Friday was to hold steady unless the data was strong enough to warrant action.Former Fed Vice Chair Cohen stated that Waller's remarks have reversed this logic. "He has changed the original assumption; it is now that they will raise rates unless the data shows it is unnecessary." This means that the final decision will depend on changes in the situation before the September meeting, especially the August CPI released on September 11. Cohen stated that if the data indicates that action is unnecessary, the Fed should not raise rates; if the data is strong, it could weaken the argument that inflation is moving back toward the Fed's 2% target.