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StarkWare stated in an update on September 23 that the estimated GPU computing cost for preparing a quantum secure Bitcoin (QSB) transaction has dropped to below $67, a decrease of about 79% compared to the approximately $320 computing expenditure for the first similar mainnet transaction in August. According to StarkWare, the first QSB transaction was packaged and confirmed on August 26, with the engineering work completed by Tomer Giladi, and submitted directly through MARA's Slipstream service. The preparation process consumed about 3100 GPU hours, utilized around 100 GPUs, and incurred a computing cost of approximately $320, excluding Bitcoin network transaction fees.This cost reduction resulted from the quantum secure Bitcoin optimization challenge initiated on September 16 by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs. The challenge invited developers, researchers, and AI agents to optimize transaction construction software, ultimately resulting in 62 adopted improvements across two computational tasks required to prepare a QSB transaction, with benchmark tests showing an estimated computing cost reduction of about 79%. The relevant dashboard currently indicates that the estimated cost has further decreased to $66.The QSB proposal was released by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy in April, introducing hash-based quantum attack protection for transactions without altering Bitcoin's consensus rules. Due to limited cost, complexity, and applicability, he described it at the time as an emergency measure while continuing to advocate for adjustments at the protocol level.

According to Coinglass data, the total contract open interest for BTC has decreased by 7.56% in the past 24 hours, with the current total open interest at 57.131 billion USD. Among them, the open interest for Binance is 11.313 billion USD, OKX is 3.153 billion USD, Bybit is 5.781 billion USD, and Gate is 5.032 billion USD.

According to Coinglass data, the total contract open interest for BTC has decreased by 5.32% in the past 24 hours, with the current total open interest at 58.446 billion USD. Among them, Binance has an open interest of 11.681 billion USD, OKX has an open interest of 3.267 billion USD, Bybit has an open interest of 5.761 billion USD, and Gate has an open interest of 5.216 billion USD.

According to The Block, based on the seventh annual Geographies report by blockchain analysis company Chainalysis, during the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, the scale of global cryptocurrency economic activity shrank by only 1.6%, from $9.5 trillion to $9.4 trillion. During the same period, the total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency market fell by about 50%, shrinking by $2.1 trillion, marking the most severe cryptocurrency bear market since 2022. The report states that the decline in economic activity is much smaller than the decline in market capitalization.Capital flows showed divergence. Funds flowing into exchanges, DeFi protocols, and other cryptocurrency services decreased by 4.3% to $8.9 trillion; domestic P2P transfers surged by 302.9% to $228.7 billion; cross-border stablecoin flows grew by 77.5%, rising from $124.2 billion to $220.3 billion. Chainalysis noted that its cross-border statistics are somewhat conservative, as they exclude transfers where the sending and receiving countries cannot be confirmed, and pointed out that this growth comes from payments averaging about $3,000, which are far from institutional levels and more aligned with everyday use cases such as personal payments to vendors, cross-border remittances, or transferring savings.Stablecoins demonstrated better value retention during the market capitalization decline compared to other cryptocurrency assets, with global on-chain balances dropping from $860 billion in September 2025 to $440 billion in June 2026, while stablecoin balances remained between $98 billion and $109 billion during this period.

Glassnode stated that over time, it seems increasingly unlikely that a decline of the same depth as in past cycles will occur again in the later stages of this market. The "four-year cycle" pattern that the market previously relied on has not been reflected in this bear market.Data shows that the drawdowns in the past three cycles exceeded twice that of this cycle, and there are still several weeks until the cycle low point; in contrast, this time BTC has only fallen about 30% from its historical high, and the price is currently rising.

The artificial intelligence research organization Epoch AI posted on X: AI is becoming cheaper at a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history. The cost has decreased by approximately 47% each quarter since 2023 at a given performance level.This speed is 4 times faster than DNA sequencing, 6 times faster than computing, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and 54 times faster than electricity (as of 1973).

According to data from Dune, the network transaction fees on the sixth day since the launch of Circle's Arc mainnet dropped to approximately $9,218, a decrease of 96.7% compared to the first day of launch.During the same period, the daily transaction fees for Robinhood Chain, Base, Arbitrum, and Sui were approximately $312,000, $139,000, $22,300, and $11,500, respectively.

Cryptocurrency analyst @AxelAdlerJr posted that after August 19, the number of bitcoins held by long-term holders has decreased for 5 consecutive weeks, but the pace of reduction in the last 30 days has significantly slowed from 105,900 BTC on August 30 to 21,700 BTC on September 20 (nearly five times slower).In addition, the amount of bitcoins held by long-term holders decreased by 47,800 BTC last week. LTH SOPR data shows that most of them were sold at a loss.

J.P. Morgan analyst Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou's team stated in a report on Wednesday that if ETF hedging demand decreases, Bitcoin may receive more support compared to gold. The report mentioned that after the Federal Reserve's meeting at the end of July, "devaluation trades" returned, with both Bitcoin and gold ETFs experiencing inflows.The gold ETF has recovered all outflows from earlier in 2026, while the Bitcoin ETF has recovered about half. BlackRock iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) short positions remain close to year-to-date highs, while SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD) short positions are below historical averages, and the put/call ratio for IBIT is also higher than that for GLD.Analysts stated: From a positioning perspective, the higher short positions of IBIT relative to GLD may provide more support for Bitcoin compared to gold if hedging demand decreases.

According to Coinglass data, the total contract open interest for ETH has decreased by 5.53% in the past 24 hours, with the current total open interest at 31.353 billion USD. Among them, Binance's open interest is 8.65 billion USD, OKX's open interest is 1.668 billion USD, Bybit's open interest is 2.091 billion USD, and Gate's open interest is 2.909 billion USD.

Filecoin's official statement says that once the allocations of Protocol Labs and the Filecoin Foundation end in October this year, the new supply of FIL is expected to decrease by 75%. After that, block rewards will become the only new supply source, and burn and staking locks will determine the subsequent situation.

According to the 8-K document submitted by Strategy to the SEC, the company did not sell any shares through the ATM plan from September 8 to 13, 2026, nor did it buy or sell Bitcoin, maintaining a position of 845,050 coins, with a total holding cost of approximately 6.373 billion USD and an average price of about 75,412 USD.During the same period, the company repurchased 1.4205 million shares of STRC preferred stock for 139.3 million USD, funded by USD Cash, with a remaining quota of approximately 1.05 billion USD for the preferred stock repurchase plan. As of September 13, the USD Reserve balance was 5.1 billion USD, and the USD Cash balance was 1.3 billion USD, a decrease of approximately 139.3 million USD compared to the previous week.

According to the data panel on the ChainCatcher official website, regarding BTC wallet balances, in the past 7 days, Bybit had the largest increase among the top 10 exchanges, reaching 1.50%; Bitget had the largest decrease, dropping by 2.98%.In terms of exchange asset transparency proof, in the past 7 days, the top three net outflows were Bybit (-436 million USD), Binance (-156 million USD), and Bitget (-128 million USD); the top three net inflows were Deribit (+241 million USD), Bitfinex (+119 million USD), and MEXC (+102 million USD).

Santiment posted that the open interest in BTC has decreased from 321,497 contracts on September 3 to 278,151 contracts on September 11, a reduction of 43,346 contracts, representing a decline of 13.5%. During the same period, the price of BTC dropped by about 5%, so the decrease in open interest was not caused by the drop in coin price.In this regard, Santiment stated that the current market open interest is about 20% lower than the level before the rise in mid-August. The open interest stopped declining on September 11 and has slightly rebounded for two consecutive trading days, indicating that the market's risk-off operations mainly occurred before the announcement of important events this week, rather than during the events themselves.

Anza announced that the second phase of the Solana account rent reduction proposal SIMD-0437 has been launched on the mainnet beta. In epoch 1033, the per-byte parameter used to calculate the minimum balance for rent-exempt accounts has been reduced from 6333 lamports to 5080 lamports, a cumulative decrease of about 27% from the initial level, lowering the SOL balance required to maintain rent-exempt status.Anza also shared instructions for reclaiming excess SOL: users with the appropriate permissions can use the WithdrawExcessLamports instruction to withdraw SOL from token accounts, token mint accounts, etc., that exceed the minimum balance for rent exemption, without needing to close the accounts, and it does not affect the token balance. There is no fixed timeline for subsequent phases; the third phase will only be activated after confirming that the on-chain status growth is within a safe range; adjustments can be made in reverse through SIMD-0438 if necessary.

According to Coinglass data, the total contract open interest for ETH has decreased by 6.42% in the past 24 hours, with the current total open interest at 32.317 billion USD. Among them, the open interest for Binance is 9.186 billion USD, for OKX is 1.827 billion USD, for Bybit is 2.251 billion USD, and for Gate is 3.109 billion USD.

According to on-chain analyst Axel Adler Jr., in the past 24 hours, Bitcoin's open interest (OI) has decreased by approximately 13,600 BTC, while the BTC price has remained relatively unchanged during the same period.He stated that the decline in open interest size, despite no significant drop in price, indicates that the market is actively deleveraging, which helps reduce the risk of concentrated liquidations of high-leverage positions and triggering a chain liquidation.

CoinDesk reported that Robinhood Chain's daily revenue dropped 87% from its peak on September 4, to $1.06 million. The decline was not due to a decrease in activity, but rather higher capacity reduced congestion fees.During the same period, DEX trading volume approached $2 billion, and active addresses increased by 16.5%.

According to Coinglass data, the total contract open interest for ETH has decreased by 5% in the past 24 hours, with the current total open interest at 32.118 billion USD. Among them, Binance has an open interest of 9.266 billion USD, OKX has an open interest of 1.8 billion USD, Bybit has an open interest of 2.315 billion USD, and Gate has an open interest of 3.039 billion USD.

According to CoinDesk, the latest paper released by researchers from institutions such as Theta Labs, the Ethereum Foundation, and StarkWare shows that the resources required for potential quantum attacks on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have decreased by more than 50% compared to the estimates previously published by Google's quantum artificial intelligence team.The quantum circuit design proposed in the study requires only about 1,151 logical qubits and uses approximately 1.3 million Toffoli gate operations to complete the relevant calculations, with a comprehensive score of about 1.5 billion, lower than the approximately 3 billion level previously published by Google.The research primarily optimized the point addition calculation in Shor's algorithm, which theoretically can use sufficiently powerful quantum computers to derive private keys from public keys. Jieyi Long, one of the main authors of the paper and CTO of Theta Labs, stated that quantum attacks are not imminent at the moment, but transitioning to quantum resistance will take years, and remediation cannot be done after an attack occurs.