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Polymarket announced the hiring of former Zora CEO Jacob Horne to lead product efforts, focusing on its DeFi business. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan acknowledged that as the company scales, the performance of its on-chain products has "declined," with some long-term users believing that Polymarket has shifted its focus to the U.S. market. Coplan stated that the company is working to unify its products but did not disclose a specific launch timeline, nor did he mention adjustments regarding fees, liquidity, or routing.Polymarket plans to hold a DeFi community meeting "soon" to gather feedback and announce a roadmap; in the meantime, users can provide feedback directly to Horne or Coplan. This appointment gives Horne broad product responsibilities rather than a specific engineering role. An earlier diagnosis came from Polymarket DeFi Engineering Vice President Josh Stevens, who noted on August 31 that the existing Central Limit Order Book (CLOB) is "full of technical debt." Although the team has scaled it tenfold and increased speed threefold, the underlying architecture still has flaws, and fixing one issue may trigger another.Stevens stated that the existing codebase is "unsalvageable in the long run," and the matching engine is being rewritten from scratch in Rust, with the goal of completing it in the latter half of the fourth quarter. Early benchmarks show that the new system's p99 latency is 10 to 20 times faster than the current system, capable of processing 200,000 orders per second, approximately 15 times the existing capacity.

According to Ember Monitoring, a certain whale closed a long position of 10,160 ZEC at a price of $1,458, realizing a profit of $8.29 million.This whale opened the position on August 20 at a price of $630, with an initial position value of approximately $6.4 million, holding the position for over a month.

According to PeckShieldAlert, the lending market of Nostra on Starknet was manipulated due to the NSTR oracle price, with a single account borrowing approximately 3.5 million dollars worth of ETH, STRK, USDC, USDT, WBTC, and DAI using NSTR as collateral.The attacker has since cross-chained approximately 1.92 million dollars worth of assets to Ethereum, including 234.57 ETH and 1.3 million DAI.

The cross-chain bridge protocol Across Protocol officially announced that Across Protocol has been transferred to a new company, Across, Inc. (AcrossCo), and the ACX token will gradually be phased out. After January 8, 2027, all ACX tokens will be rendered obsolete and will no longer have governance, utility, or economic functions. Risk Labs and AcrossCo will also no longer bear related obligations.Holders can exchange through the portal at exchange.across.to at a valuation of $0.04375 per token before that date: first, for a 1:1 exchange for equity in AcrossCo (first come, first served, minimum 250,000 ACX, lower amounts subject to allocation, KYC required, U.S. applicants must be accredited investors); second, for an equivalent amount of USDC (sanctions screening required). After the deadline, equivalent exchange conditions cannot be guaranteed.

The first federally chartered crypto bank in the United States, Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., began offering xU3O8 custody services for institutional clients on September 16, 2026. This token is backed by physical uranium concentrate yellowcake, with the related uranium materials stored at Cameco facilities and held in beneficial ownership by a UK trust structure.xU3O8 is issued by Uranium.io, with the UK regulator Archax acting as the trustee, and the underlying assets are mapped through the Etherlink network. Cameco is responsible for storing physical uranium in certified facilities and regularly publishes the results of reserve proof audits. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) regulates Anchorage Digital Bank N.A., allowing its clients to include xU3O8 in isolation and bankruptcy-remote accounts similar to those for Bitcoin and cash equivalents. Currently, the unit price of xU3O8 is approximately $5.66, with a total market capitalization of about $9 million.

The Bank of England has maintained the policy interest rate at 3.75% for the sixth consecutive meeting and announced the cancellation of the long-term government bond sale plan.Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Ltd. plans to invest 1.4 billion yuan to build a new lithium carbonate project in Ya'an with an annual production capacity of 40,000 tons, while Huawei simultaneously released a new computing architecture.

Bitcoin News posted on the X platform that Bitcoin Core developer Niklas Gögge warned that recent AI-driven vulnerability scanning is changing the security landscape of Bitcoin. Large language models have significantly reduced the cost of discovering vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to potentially find catastrophic vulnerabilities for just a few hundred dollars in computing costs.For Bitcoin Core, Project Loupe, the Bitcoin Red Team, and individual contributors have generated over 1,000 reports, but so far no high-risk or severe vulnerabilities have been found. Gögge stated that relying on stronger models to discover vulnerabilities before attackers is not a sustainable security strategy. Developers should build testing infrastructure that can proactively prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities through automated testing, fuzz testing, and property-based testing. Key components of Bitcoin Core have accumulated over 100 years of CPU fuzz testing and have undergone decades of Bitcoin node network simulation.

OpenAI stated to The New York Times that since announcing progress on the Navier-Stokes equations on September 8, it has made "substantial progress" on one of the Millennium Prize Problems, but did not disclose which specific problem it is or provide a timeline for disclosure. The Millennium Prize Problems are seven mathematical problems established by the Clay Mathematics Institute since 2000, each with a reward of one million dollars.Speculation suggests that the problem may be the Hodge Conjecture, a 76-year-old problem regarding how to calculate the number of "holes" in complex geometric shapes. OpenAI has not confirmed this speculation and has not responded to rumors that its underlying model is a version of Aeon specifically designed for long-duration tasks. Previously, on September 8, OpenAI announced that its unreleased internal model generated a proof verified by Lean, indicating that the Navier-Stokes equations could "blow up" to physically impossible infinite speeds, involving about 10,000 coordinated AI agents and taking approximately 88 hours.However, this statement has sparked controversy. New York University mathematician Tristan Buckmaster stated that he and Anthropic researcher Levent Alpöge had been working on the related proof for nearly a year prior and completed it on August 22, while OpenAI's Sébastien Bubeck published his findings first upon learning of it. OpenAI stated that it is not pursuing the one million dollar prize, but rather using these problems as a public benchmark to measure the speed of model progress. The review of the Navier-Stokes proof by the Clay Mathematics Institute is still ongoing, and verification of past Millennium Prize Problems typically takes several years.

The U.S. State Department has approved the sale of F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters to Saudi Arabia, with an expected transaction amount of $24.3 billion.

According to Axios, U.S. President Trump stated that the Iran war is approaching a critical juncture, and he needs to decide whether to resume large-scale military operations to push for an end to the conflict.

On September 17, 2026, the Market Participants Division of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it has issued a no-action position to passive software providers, similar to Staff Letter 26-09, which is now broadly applicable to such providers.The letter states that, subject to several specified conditions, the Division will not recommend that the Commission take enforcement action against any such provider or its related persons for failing to register as a introducing broker or an introducing broker affiliate. This position only applies to those who provide and market software to users for trading with registered futures commission merchants, introducing brokers, and designated contract markets.This announcement came just hours after the sister agency, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), issued an innovation exemption.

Uniswap founder Hayden Adams retweeted a comment letter from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce supporting autonomous decentralized systems, pointing out that the most favorable news for automated market makers (AMM) today is Hester Peirce's view that truly decentralized systems driven by autonomous software do not need to obtain exemptions, which corresponds to the permissionless nature of Uniswap.Adams stated that the SEC's innovative exemption applies to permissioned liquidity pools on Uniswap v4, providing a pathway for assets and users with relevant compliance needs to conduct transactions in the U.S., which is expected to promote the adoption of AMM. Uniswap will submit a comment letter with suggestions for improvements.

According to Solid Intel, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated that the Pentagon is advancing several confidential projects related to BTC and cryptocurrencies, having previously agreed that the U.S. should seek a strategic advantage in the BTC field.

According to Bloomberg, within months of launching its new semiconductor industry policy, India has secured approximately $12 billion in investment commitments from global and domestic companies, involving supply chain enterprises related to chip equipment, materials, and chemicals.This interest stems from India's announcement in July of an additional $13.4 billion semiconductor fund, which complements a previous $10 billion subsidy program to support companies, including Tata Group and Micron, in establishing wafer fabs and assembly and testing facilities locally. India's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, stated that the related investments will materialize in the next 2 to 3 years, with some projects already in production and capacity largely locked in. Tata Electronics also signed multiple cooperation agreements with Nexperia, Fujifilm, and others at the conference, covering wafer manufacturing, assembly and testing, and localization of key materials.

According to Ethlabs, the Ethereum community is advancing the "Quick Slots" proposal (EIP-8198), which plans to remove the assumption of a fixed 12-second block time by restructuring once and first reducing the L1 block time from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, with further gradual reductions depending on network conditions.Ethlabs states that project teams such as DefiLlama, Doppler, Derive, Ondo, Railgun, Lido, Ethena, and infrastructure teams like Flashbots and Titan Builder generally believe that shorter slots will enhance DEX pricing efficiency, improve LP yields and user interaction experience, and strengthen transaction inclusion and censorship resistance when paired with FOCIL, while not significantly undermining geographic decentralization of nodes and the participation threshold for validators.

The Tesla team arrived in Ningbo on September 16 and launched a new round of mass production audit for the robotics business on September 17. This audit aims to review the exclusivity and consistency of the mass production of the Optimus robot, with plans to roll out approximately 50,000 Optimus robots by 2026.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) stated that tokenization is expected to reduce costs in market infrastructure aspects such as issuance, trading, transfer, settlement, and ownership records, while enhancing transparency and liquidity. The SEC approved a temporary, conditional "Innovation Exemption," allowing tokenized NMS stocks to be traded in a limited manner on certain on-chain venues—tokenized securities trading venues (TSVs).It is reported that TSVs meeting the exemption conditions can conduct approved trading through automated market makers and liquidity pools, but must meet requirements for public disclosure, trading transparency, circuit breaker coordination, record keeping, and technical safeguards, while also being subject to limits on the number of stock codes and trading volume.The SEC indicated that this move aims to observe the operation of on-chain trading venues and market participants, providing data for the formulation of long-term regulatory rules in the future.

According to Cointelegraph, CoinShares crypto researcher Luke Nolan stated on the Chain Reaction program that cryptocurrency adoption in Germany is making "very good progress" through family offices, wealth management institutions, and younger investors, while the UK is "still very behind," mainly due to regulatory lag. Nolan pointed out that the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) only lifted the ban on crypto exchange-traded products less than a year ago, and its digital asset market is still in the "nascent" stage.In terms of relevant data, Germany currently has 89 licensed crypto asset service providers, accounting for 25.5% of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) MiCA registered companies; in June this year, Germany also ranked first in the EU with 57 authorized crypto companies.Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank stated on Wednesday that it is awaiting regulatory approval to launch crypto custody services for institutional clients in Europe, expecting to obtain a license in October; Landesbank Baden-Württemberg is also set to provide crypto custody services in April 2024 through a partnership with Bitpanda.In contrast, the FCA released final guidance on Wednesday clarifying when crypto activities need to be authorized and plans to open license applications on September 30, with the new system set to take effect on October 25, 2027.Additionally, the FCA issued stop notices on Thursday to three London locations suspected of assisting illegal peer-to-peer crypto trading; the UK Parliament approved regulations in February to bring digital assets under FCA regulation and finalized a package of rules in June.

According to on-chain data monitoring, the address labeled Hyperliquid transferred 300,000 tokens to the Gate exchange address (0x85FA...C35c). Based on the on-chain price at that time, the value of this asset is approximately 23.97 million USD.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a certain whale opened a long position of 3,380 ZEC with 10x leverage on Hyperliquid, worth approximately 4.56 million USD, with a liquidation price of 1,275 USD.