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Robinhood is planning to expand its successful prediction markets platform, which allows users to trade on the outcomes of real-world events, into the United Kingdom and Europe after significant uptake in the US. The company's Prediction Markets Hub, which was introduced earlier this year and uses event contracts executed through the CFTC-regulated derivatives exchange Kalshi, has seen massive trading volume, with the CEO noting over 4 billion event contracts traded. The move overseas, however, faces a key hurdle in regulatory classification, as prediction markets are treated as futures products in the US but could fall under gambling laws in other jurisdictions. Robinhood is currently engaging with the UK's Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to determine the appropriate oversight and structure for offering these products, with executives noting strong demand for prediction markets in the UK and Europe.
While Robinhood's product is built on traditional financial rails, the prediction market sector as a whole has been surging, driven by decentralized platforms built on public blockchains. These decentralized markets use smart contracts to automate trades and payouts on various outcomes, offering greater transparency and accessibility, though they face their own challenges like regulatory uncertainty and volatility. The leading decentralized platform, Polymarket, has reported billions in monthly trading volume, with its accuracy during the US presidential election drawing significant attention, highlighting the potential of these markets to align financial incentives with truth-seeking behaviour. Source
Ripple's long-serving Chief Technology Officer, David Schwartz, is concluding his over 13-year tenure in the day-to-day CTO role at the end of the year, but will remain actively involved with the company and the XRP Ledger (XRPL) community. Schwartz, a co-creator of the XRPL, will transition to a CTO Emeritus role and join Ripple's board of directors, ensuring his long-term guidance for the company's vision. Following the transition, he plans to dedicate more time to hands-on coding for community projects, explore new use cases for XRP, and operate his own XRPL node, continuing his technical engagement.
In his new capacity, Schwartz will focus on key areas he believes are central to the XRPL's future, including stablecoin adoption, the tokenization of real-world assets, and further decentralization of the ledger. He expressed confidence in Ripple's next generation of leaders and reiterated a long-standing point that the XRP Ledger is not controlled by Ripple, but rather maintained by a global set of validators. His stepping back from daily duties is described as a personal inflection point after four decades in technology, though he assures the XRP community he will not be leaving. Source
Blockchain oracle provider Chainlink has announced a product stemming from its pilot with Swift, the global financial messaging network, and UBS Asset Management, which allows financial institutions to trigger on-chain transactions using their existing infrastructure. This integration uses Chainlink’s execution layer, the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE), with Swift messaging, enabling banks worldwide to connect to blockchains through familiar Swift rails. This development is part of the ongoing Project Guardian initiative, which successfully demonstrated how tokenized fund workflows could integrate with existing fiat payment systems, using Swift’s ISO 20022 messages to execute fund subscriptions and redemptions directly on-chain, thereby streamlining processes that currently rely on numerous traditional intermediaries.
This collaboration marks a significant step in the evolution of Swift’s engagement with blockchain technology, as the cooperative, owned by its member banks, has been working with Chainlink since 2023 on tests to provide banks with a single access point to multiple blockchains. Swift is also involved in other major blockchain initiatives, such as Project Agorá, which explores the co-existence of tokenized commercial bank deposits and wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) on a shared platform. By enabling last-mile connectivity familiar to financial institutions, this Chainlink-Swift integration demonstrates a practical way to bridge traditional finance with the efficiencies of blockchain technology. Source
The article reports that the United States government shutdown, which resulted from a failure to pass funding legislation and led to the furloughing of non-essential federal workers, has caused minimal movement in the cryptocurrency markets. Despite the halt in many federal services, crypto markets maintained resilience, with total market capitalization holding at the $4 trillion level it had recently reclaimed. Bitcoin saw only a marginal dip after tapping an intraday high of $114,700, and Ether prices remained relatively stable around the $4,140 to $4,200 range during Asian trading hours, with minor losses across most altcoins deemed unexceptional. This lack of reaction suggests greater maturity and resilience in the current crypto bull market compared to the "crypto winter" during the last shutdown in 2018.
The government shut down officially at 12:01 am Wednesday after both Republican and Democratic funding proposals failed in the Senate due to disagreements over changes to Medicaid cuts and healthcare tax credits. The political standoff, the 21st since 1977, could lead to a data blackout of fresh labor or inflation reports, potentially leaving the Federal Reserve with incomplete information. While the US dollar slumped to near a one-week low and the price of gold, a typical safe haven asset, reached a new all-time high of $3,870 an ounce, crypto markets generally disregarded the political drama. Some researchers speculate that while a shutdown could cause a temporary spike in volatility for high-beta assets like Bitcoin and altcoins, it could also eventually lift sentiment if it pushes the Fed toward a softer monetary policy stance. Source
Global payments firm Stripe has introduced a new tool called "Open Issuance," which is designed to allow any business to easily launch, manage, and customize their own stablecoins with minimal code. This service, one of more than 40 new offerings from Stripe, enables businesses to freely mint and burn coins, customize their reserves—choosing the ratio between cash and treasuries—and select their preferred partners. The infrastructure for Open Issuance is backed by Bridge, a stablecoin company Stripe acquired, with treasuries managed by major asset management firms like BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, and Superstate, reflecting the growing institutional interest in the stablecoin market. The company claims this solution is a less risky alternative to building in-house, which often creates challenges with liquidity, reserve management, and compliance, and is seeking a federal banking charter and a New York trust licence to meet US stablecoin requirements.
Stripe states that companies can launch their stablecoins within days using the Open Issuance service, allowing them to create rewards and use the earnings to incentivize their customers, thus flowing the benefits of the technology directly to users and businesses. This "crypto-as-a-service" offering from Stripe follows a growing trend in the industry, with competitors like Binance and Coinbase having recently launched similar white-label solutions to help traditional financial companies easily integrate crypto services without having to build the necessary infrastructure from scratch. Stripe sees further potential for its stablecoin services by linking them to its new Agentic Commerce Protocol, an AI-powered commerce solution developed with OpenAI, aiming to enable merchants to sell via AI agents and aligning with the broader industry view that AI agents will become significant users of on-chain e-commerce applications. Source
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued a "no-action" letter, signalling that its Division of Investment Management will not recommend enforcement action against registered investment advisors, crypto fund issuers, and other entities for using state-chartered trust companies as custodians for digital assets. This clarification serves as an updated guidance that creates a significant potential opening for a broader range of organizations, including affiliates of major crypto-focused firms like Coinbase and Ripple, to act as qualified custodians. The SEC's stance is a shift from the stricter approach under former Chair Gary Gensler, and aligns with the current Chair Paul Adkins' "Project Crypto" initiative, which aims to reduce regulatory burdens and accelerate the integration of digital assets into the traditional U.S. economy.
The letter, issued in response to a query from financial advisors, states that the Division would not recommend enforcement action for treating a State Trust Company as a "bank" for the placement and maintenance of crypto assets and related funds, provided certain criteria are met. Though the letter is not a formal rule and has no legal force, it places the responsibility on advisors to ensure the trust is authorized by banking authorities for crypto custody, has written policies for asset protection, and maintains segregated client assets, addressing issues such as private key management. This move has been widely praised by industry observers as a positive step toward increasing regulatory clarity in the digital asset space. Source
The article highlights how the Security Alliance (SEAL) nonprofit's Safe Harbor Agreement is providing the necessary legal clarity and protection for ethical hackers, or "white hats," to intervene during active crypto exploits, an action many previously hesitated on due to fear of legal repercussions, such as during the 2022 Nomad bridge hack. Launched in 2024, the framework eliminates legal uncertainty by providing clear protection and prescribed steps for white hats to follow, enabling them to steal funds temporarily for safekeeping and defend user assets against malicious "black hat" attackers. The framework outlines that recovered funds must be returned within 72 hours, with the bounty for the white hat set at 10% of the recovered amount, capped at $1 million, and requires white hats to complete KYC and OFAC checks for accountability.
SEAL recently recognized 29 companies, including Uniswap, a16z Crypto, and Immunefi, as its first Safe Harbor Champions for adopting and supporting the initiative, signaling a coordinated defense strategy within the industry. Companies like Immunefi have credited their adoption of the framework with helping its security researchers save billions of dollars in customer funds and become millionaires, facilitating over $120 million in payouts. The agreement reflects a move toward a more mature ecosystem capable of collective action, with some nominees enforcing the agreement on-chain and publishing recovery addresses. This organization of the community serves as a clear warning to attackers, making exploits riskier and less profitable, although the total amount of crypto lost to hacks continues to rise, exceeding $3.1 billion in the first half of 2025. Source
Markethive's supergroups are presented as dynamic, fully customizable e-commerce solutions that serve as a central hub for entrepreneurs' marketing campaigns and lead nurturing efforts, effectively turning a social gathering into an online storefront. These supergroups seamlessly integrate with advanced marketing campaign tools, which support a wide range of promotional activities, including targeted email sequences, social media campaigns, and lead generation funnels, creating a "force multiplier" for business growth. The infrastructure includes integrated broadcasting capabilities for administrators to instantly share updates with the entire group's social network, alongside a blogging platform that streamlines team collaboration and provides comprehensive management reports detailing team activities, traffic generation via a group rotator, and cooperative mechanisms for funding shared advertising campaigns.
Supergroups are designed to revolutionize lead generation and conversion by offering a highly streamlined pathway to guide potential customers into a dedicated, branded environment centered on the business's offerings. The process begins with strategic campaigns that direct prospects to a Markethive portal and then seamlessly into the supergroup via a dedicated capture page, which then integrates them into the group's ecosystem, newsfeed, and a fully functional e-commerce shopping cart for direct monetization. This strong lead nurturing system is enhanced by the group's capture pages providing verified prospect information, a sign-up bonus of 500 Markethive Tokens (MHV), and customizable Vanity Promo Codes for incentives. Furthermore, the Supergroup referral system accurately credits sign-ups to the group owner, individual members via a permalink, or equitably distributes them through a group rotator link, while also offering automatic member addition and a personalized landing page on login to foster community engagement. Source
Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan posits that Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, has the potential to become the most profitable company globally if emerging markets increasingly adopt USDT as their primary currency. Hougan notes in a recent blog post that Tether already dominates the stablecoin market in many non-Western nations, giving it a near-total market share in those regions. He suggests that a widespread shift in emerging markets from their national currencies to USDT could result in Tether managing trillions of dollars and collecting all the associated interest earnings, vastly expanding its revenue stream beyond its current scope as a digital money market fund.
Hougan projects that if Tether manages to reach $3 trillion in assets, which represents only about 3% of the global money supply, its annual profits could exceed the record-breaking $120 billion earned by Saudi Aramco in 2024. This level of profitability would position Tether as the most profitable company in history, eclipsing the performance of traditional corporate giants. Despite being a digital money market fund, Tether is reportedly seeking a valuation of $500 billion, aligning it with other highly valued startups like SpaceX and OpenAI, which highlights the immense scale of the market Tether is aiming to capture. Source
Dragonfly General Partner Rob Hadick believes that the move to tokenized equities, while significantly benefiting traditional finance (TradFi), may offer only unclear benefits to the broader crypto ecosystem. He acknowledged at the TOKEN 2049 conference that institutions are driven by the desire for 24/7 trading and better economics, which is being facilitated by the SEC reportedly developing a plan to allow blockchain versions of stocks to trade on crypto exchanges. However, Hadick's skepticism stems from the observation that major financial institutions, such as Robinhood and Stripe, are opting to build their own private blockchains rather than utilizing public, general-purpose chains like Ethereum.
Hadick argues that institutions prefer their own private layer-1 or layer-2 environments to maintain control over economics, privacy, validator sets, and execution. This preference for permissioned or hybrid chains prevents them from sharing block space with less-controlled elements like memecoins. He refers to this trend of institutions building their own networks as "leakage," suggesting that the value and activity associated with tokenized stocks may not flow back to Ethereum or the wider public crypto ecosystem as much as others have predicted. This outlook directly contradicts the narrative promoted by figures like Fundstrat's Tom Lee and Consensys founder Joseph Lubin, who anticipate massive benefits for Ethereum and the overall market from Wall Street's move on-chain. Source
CoinShares, a leading digital asset research manager, reports that institutional investors are significantly investing in altcoin exchange-traded products, particularly anticipating the potential approval of XRP and Solana (SOL) exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The latest Digital Asset Fund Flows Weekly Report indicates a shift in focus, as Bitcoin (BTC) experienced outflows last week, while certain altcoins saw substantial inflows, prompting discussions about the possibility of an "altcoin season." Solana and XRP were the primary beneficiaries, attracting considerable inflows of $311 million and $189 million, respectively, with SUI also seeing $8 million; however, inflows quickly decreased for other altcoins, and some, like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, even saw minor outflows.
Overall, the digital assets investment products market recorded $1.9 billion in inflows last week, marking the fifteenth consecutive week of positive flows, pushing the month-to-date inflows to a record $11.2 billion. The US dominated the regional breakdown with $2 billion in inflows, followed by Germany, while Hong Kong, Canada, and Brazil experienced outflows. Notably, Ethereum (ETH) led all inflows last week with $1.59 billion, bringing its year-to-date inflows to $7.79 billion, surpassing its total for the entirety of the previous year. Source
The cryptocurrency market is set to conclude September in the green, with an average monthly gain of 2.7%, largely driven by Bitcoin's rally to over $114,400, though the overall market is experiencing modest daily losses. The global crypto market cap stands at $4 trillion, with Ethereum also climbing to around $4,200. However, altcoins such as Cardano (ADA) and Dogecoin (DOGE) are performing poorly, with the Altcoin Season Index plunging from 77 to 58 points, signaling a rotation of capital to the relative safety of Bitcoin. The crypto market's behavior is increasingly mirroring traditional risk assets, with Bitcoin acting like a digital gold during stress, and its strength, unlike the altcoins, is backed by bullish long-term technicals like the "golden cross" formation, though short-term indicators suggest a "cooling phase" and a lack of strong conviction, keeping it range-bound between $108K and $118K.
In contrast to Bitcoin's relative resilience, altcoins are struggling with short-term bearish momentum. Cardano (ADA) is trading around $0.80, with its long-term structure still bullish, but short-term indicators point to possible weakness and a range-bound market between $0.75 and $0.85. Dogecoin (DOGE) is also testing critical support at the lower boundary of a rising channel, trading around $0.227. Like ADA, DOGE's technicals show a neutral-to-bearish stance with a lack of a clear trend, favoring range tactics. Despite this, the prospect of a potential Dogecoin ETF by year-end has improved its fundamental outlook, which could attract institutional capital, similar to the effect ETFs have had on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Source
Crypto wallet provider Phantom has launched its own US dollar-pegged stablecoin called CASH, developed in partnership with Stripe and Bridge, which will serve as the foundation for its new consumer financial platform, Phantom Cash. This move positions Phantom to compete with more established financial platforms by expanding beyond its core wallet function. The stablecoin, built using Bridge's Open Issuance platform, is initially deployed on Solana but is planned for expansion to other blockchains. A key distinction for CASH is that businesses using it retain 100% of the net revenues, according to the company.
Phantom Cash is set to offer a suite of new financial features, including instant bank funding, peer-to-peer payments, a Visa debit card, and rewards on users' unspent stablecoins. This expansion is designed to create a more comprehensive consumer financial platform. The platform is currently available in a limited early-access stage with a broader rollout anticipated soon. Phantom, which supports multiple popular blockchains and had 15 million monthly active users at the start of the year, secured a $150 million Series C funding round in January, valuing the firm at $3 billion. Source
Coinbase’s head of institutional strategy, John D’Agostino, argues that for Artificial Intelligence agents to operate effectively in the financial markets, they require the infrastructure of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, as the traditional finance system is outdated and slow. He states that asking scalable AI intelligence to work on "100-year-old financial rails" is analogous to attempting to stream a movie using a dial-up modem, emphasizing that AI agents need "infinitely fast and scalable money rails" that blockchain provides for real-time, machine-to-machine transactions. Furthermore, he noted that blockchain acts as an "infinitely scalable source of truth," which is essential for agents operating on behalf of people.
D’Agostino also commented on market trends, dismissing the comparison of Bitcoin to gold by highlighting Bitcoin's distinct features such as programmability, digital nature, ease of movement, and yield production. He expressed bullishness on Bitcoin, anticipating that as U.S. interest rates eventually drop, a portion of the trillions currently parked in money markets will flow into assets like Bitcoin. Regarding institutional adoption, D’Agostino cautioned against the idea of an immediate "institutional wave," describing major investors like pensions and sovereign wealth funds as cautious, thoughtful entities who do not invest in sudden, large shifts. Source
Binance co-founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao issued an urgent public warning regarding the official BNB Chain X account, stating that it "may have been compromised" and urging users not to click on any recently posted links. The alert was prompted after the account posted a fraudulent link promoting a fake rewards program. The deceptive post invited users to vote on an "upcoming $BSC rewards date," falsely promising early rewards to those who participated within the first 24 hours.
This type of incident is a common phishing attempt in the crypto industry, where malicious actors use fraudulent links and deceptive tactics to steal users' digital assets and personal information. CZ made the public announcement via his own X account on a Wednesday, confirming the breach shortly after his initial concern. The incident underscores the continued prominence of phishing as a major security threat within the crypto ecosystem. Source
Disclaimer: These articles are provided for informational purposes only. They are not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or any other advice.
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