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What happened in crypto in the past 2 weeks? Yes, two weeks as I had a week of holiday far away, with no laptop or desktop on sight. Last week is about how Bitcoin is still going up and down with each Iran war update. Hekota upgrade came on ETH. Betting and prediction market are having the fun lately, being under everyone scrutiny. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Beginning of September Saylor posted 'We're back' on X, as Strategy bought last time on June 22, and since then paused, raised equity, and build a $5.1B dollar reserve. They bought 4603 BTC, first purchase in ten weeks. With four years of dividend coverage secured, new capital is more likely to flow toward BTC. Strive just became the 5th largest corporate BTC holder, after they purchased 1800 BTC at the end of August. To hold the name Rektember true, Bitcoin went down lately, being $76.601 at the moment of writing. Adam Back, CEO of Blockstream, backed a French Bitcoin treasury company called Capital B, the Europe second-largest public company Bitcoin treasury. Funny enough, Bitcoin ETFs had their best three-week run on the year, with $986M pulled in on the week ending with September 5. Some other good signs, Pineapple Financial, a NYSE-listed mortgage lender, moved mortgage records worth over $1B onto Injective, a layer 1 blockchain build for financial applications, and four Bitcoin dormant wallets moved a combined 202 BTC worth $15M to the exchanges, after a decade of non-activity. The deal with Bitcoin it seems to be that is trading below $80K because of the FED setting its ceiling, investors are not leaving crypto, but positioning around the rate path. Although, Bitcoin's realized cap turned positive after three month, it is facing now a new macro threat from oil price rise and the Japanese Yen. Yet, the Coinbase CEO is optimistic, saying that the BTC bottomed and $400K is coming next. Let is be! Bitcoin Suisse is cutting half of its swiss workforce to expand to Bratislava and Vietnam.
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• Ethereum: Bitmine added 53501 ETH in its 65th consecutive week of buying, hodling now 5.9M ETH (4.9% of the ETHs circulating supply), and carries $5.1B in unrealized losses. Another 28K ETH on September 7, being now at 97% of its target of 5%. The thing is, Bitmine's 86% of the ETH is staked making roughly $335M annually in revenues. Ethereum is fixing the problem on needing ETH to use ETH, with the confirmed EIP-8141 introducing Frame Transaction on the Hekota upgrade on August 27, letting a wallet holding only stablecoins to transact without ever buying ETH. We are also informed about censorship resistance and native account avstraction, with a priority for quantum resistance by 2029, following Ethereum Foundation release about Hekota upgrade. Metamask and Consensys are now two separate companies, after splitting.
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Kucoin Exchange got some interesting mining campaigns, with reasonable rewards and decent profits. Check it out here ! Europe has now two competing digital Euro visions, and competition is good for us (ECB digital euro and Revolut's own EURR, both competing on speed, usability, and trust within the same European Market). Japan is also pushing to make stablecoins easier to use daily. On the other side, Ireland excluded crypto from a new tax-advantaged personal investment scheme launcing in 2027, covering $175B in household deposits, with the scheme allowing stocks, bonds, ETF, and mutual funds, but explicitly bars crypto, derivatives, and interest-bearing cash. Ethena launched a neobank app in 48 countries on the APP store and Android, offering 5%-6% APY on USDe balances and cashback on AVAX on card spending. A regulated stablecoin called USDG launched natively on Mantle, first stablecoin issued directly rather than bridged in. Singapore's MAS proposes stablecoin rules in alignment with the US and EU, with 100% reserves and a ban on yields on stablecoins. ZEC entered the top 10 for the first time since 2018. There it was, Hunter Biden's memecoin called Laptop, the fastest failing experiment this year, launched on Base on September 9. Circle spent $400M acquiring Tazapay, a Singapore based cross-border payments company, to build USDC payment rails globally. USDT countered the move, launching Stablefund on September 9, to deploy $400M into short duration, asset-backed lending for small bussinesses across more than 60 countries. Solana minted more than 263K new tokens on September 10, an ATH that is much more than the previous 40K daily. OpenAI ruled out going public this year.
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• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands Escalation - the latest mini-set from the Conclave Arcana collection is now closed. Axie seems to get some cool upgrades, but they are still not convincing me.

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• Good news: Tokenized stock volume surged more that 400% over the last 30 days, as active addresses rose 209% to 1.3M users. Hyperliquid is finally coming to US through Kraken. Twenty one banks, such as Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and others, announced a joint stablecoin venture forming a company to issue stablecoins for payments and settlement. Binance added stock options for over a thousand equities. Japan's Remixpoint completed the sale of its entire ETH, SOL, XRP, and DOGE holdings, booking a $737K combined gain. Dubai signed a deal with BlackRock's tokenization partner, Securitize, to develop regulated tokenized markets in the emirate. Standard Chartered launched spot crypto trading in UAE on September 3 also. Ripple secured a multi-year deal with University of Florida to place their logo on the playing surface at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. It follows a similar deal earlier in 2026 with the University of Kansas, where the logo appear on basketbal jerseys. DBS and Citi completed the first cross-border USD payment using tokenized deposits on Swift's digital ledger on September 5. RobinHood bought equity stakes in Crypto.com and OG.com. Circular economy anyone? VISA connected its settlement network to blockchain lending in a pilot with Credit Coop. Nasdaq's venture arm invested $100M in Payward, Kraken's parent company. Senate Republicans dropped a revised crypto bill, adding a new registration framework for non-DEFI trading protocols, and White House said that Trump personally approved the ethics deal. Seventeen states sent a letter urging the Senate to vote against the Clarity Act.
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• Bad news: IMF Managing Director said that dollar-backed stablecoins could accelerate currency substitution on emerging markets, weaken monetary policy, and make capital control harder to enforce. Sure, do not use the evil freedom-bearing stablecoin, use our high interest loans so we can keep stealing your resources, you damn third-world countries! The SEC proposed a 421 page overhaul of its transfer agent rules on September 1, adding requirements for blockchain recordkeeping, tokenized securities, AI oversight, and cybersecurity standards for first time since the late 1970s. The single largest liquidation day in crypto history wiped $19.16B, triggered by tariff wars, and bot by a hack. Donald, you did it again! Oops! Ondo is asking the US regulators to bring stock perps onshore. Thailand's SEC required exchanges to collect sender and recipient information, verify the ownership of self-custodial wallets, and retain all transaction records for at least five years, giving the operators six months to comply. New Jersey court took Kalshi to Supreme Court over sport betting contracts on prediction market platforms. Yet, the CFTC filed a motion on September 2 to dismiss CME Group's lawsuit against its approval of Kalshi's Bitcoin perpetual futures, quoting "much ado about nothing". Hyperliquid backed CFTC against CME in court. Australian crypto firms have up to September 30 left to get licensed. Ledger is being sued in a class action lawsuit regarding its 2023 data breach, where 270k customers' data were leaked. Revolut leaked passports and BTC transactions to a fraudster this September. So, what can I say? Be more careful on any data if you did BTC on Revolut, right? Cronos-based money market, Tectonic, was exploited for $75M, with Cronos Market temporarily halted to minimize the damage. Bank of Korea found that listing fiat stablecoin pairs on global exchanges put measurable downward pressure on local currencies, for example in Brazil, a rise in crypto demand was linked with a 0.118% depreciation of the Real. On September 9, Germany proposed a 25% flat tax on crypto gains, ending the current rule that exempt long-term holdings form tax entirely. Harmony will shut down their L1. Should you worry that North Korea is paying people from Iran and Lebanon to pass jobs interviews at US tech firms for $500 per month in crypto, then handing positions for DPRK operatives? The scheme was peorted on September 12 by NBC.
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• Joke of the week: Russia's biggest bank, Sber, plans to accept USDT and ETH as loan collateral once the Bank of Russia formally approves them for regulated trading, joining the already accepted BTC. They are also working on the digital ruble, which nobody may date to touch as it looks like a loose cannon. Other than that, a close second came with the Coinbase Wallet getting his name back, after the Base App created a lot of confusion around in the past 14 months.

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands- a Hearthstone-like card game) (Golem Overlord - a Play2Earn game on Hive) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game)and ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog. I am also writing for crypto on Hive. I am spending some time trading on Kucoin Exchange lately.