What happened in crypto in the past 2 weeks? Yes, two weeks as I was once again quite busy lately. Bitcoin went as up as $86K. The bear market may be over, many voices affirmed. Ethereum is going up through the roof, and altcoins are traded a bit more again. AI is on the spot too. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: An interesting deviation, at least 35 EH/S of computing power is leaving Bitcoin mining, locked into AI contracts for up to 15 years or more. AI generates roughly $1.5M profit per megawatt, compared with only $0.5M for Bitcoin. Deutsche Bank is getting a license to custody for Bitcoin in Europe (while ETH and stablecoins may also be added to the mix). Grayscale told its clients that Bitcoin at $58K in June 30 was the bottom, and advised them to add crypto exposure. Strive doubled its BTC holdings since March, reaching 27.462 BTC. Wall Street built a leveraged ETF around a Bitcoin treasury firm. Not dodgy at all! Good luck with it! Strategy bought 950 BTC between September 14 and 20, reaching 846.000 BTC, just 1363 coins short of its all time record from June 22. Then bought another 1665 BTC the following week, raising the bar. On September 21, Bitcoin blew through $85K and wiped out $647M shorts. Closing above the 50-week EMA for the first time in 45 weeks, this could be the signal for the end of bear market. Is 90K next? Bitcoin ETFs turned positive for the year. Saylor outlined a five-right framework at a Washington policy summit, arguing that companies and individuals should be free to create, issue, custody, transfer, and use digital assets like Bitcoin. Researchers proposed a ZCash style privacy for Bitcoin. Still, there are some like CryptoQuant saying that BTC bull market is showing fatigue.
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• Ethereum: Vitalik discussed a bit about AI and ETH. He said that AI could make software fundamentally harder to break by applying formal verification. ETH plans full-program verification covering databases, networking, and caching layers in the years ahead. On September 27, he published an essay describing ETH future after the Hegota fork as a cryptographic world computer, combining blockchain with recursive STARKs, automated formal verification, and quantum safe cryptography at the base layer. Block finality may drop from 200 sec today to 8-32 sec. Citi raised its BTC and ETH targets to $113K and $3028 in the next 12 months.
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Altcoin volume is now four times the Bitcoin one. Kucoin Exchange got some interesting mining campaigns, with reasonable rewards and decent profits. Check it out here! Standard Chartered set a $10 target for ARB by end-2030, with Robinhood Chain's licensing fees playing a major role into it. ZCash holders voted to make the network three times faster. Grayscale filed for a 3 to 1 forward share split on its ZCash ETF on September 19, after a 2800% climb in a year. Apple and Google are both hiring for stablecoin roles. Neither listing announced an active product. As BTC and ETH stall, AI crypto tokens are rallying up. BlackRock said that AI agents are the next big stablecoin driver. Bitcoin Cash went a decent 30% up, after futures contracts were announced to be launched on October 19. Bitwise bet on NEAR becoming an AI payment network. The first US spot NEAR ETF launched on September 29 with staking. Chainlink released CCIP 2.0 on September 28, letting token issuers add their own verification layers, set custom confirmation thresholds and apply KYC and sanctions checks to cross chain settlements. Dogecoin got its first smart contract testnet. Open Standard launched OUSD, a new stablecoin backed by Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard, across Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo. Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Ethena's goverance token ENA on September 30 with a target price of $2 by end of 2028. Trump's memecoin is hosting another exclusive holder dinner, with the four highest-ranked VIP receiving 18-karat gold Trump watches.
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• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands Escalation - the latest mini-set from the Conclave Arcana collection is now closed. I have this Space action game - Stellarch - that I play on Hive blockchain lately, you know me, I like to try them. It is kind of addicting. Space chess!

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• Good news: Tom Lee declared that we are at the start of another crypto bull market. The UK just opened its full crypto licensing gateway on September 30. Firms must apply by February 28, 2027 to continue to keep operating legally. The UAE migrated their digital identity system to Avalanche blockchain. Single stock futures on crypto platforms just got SEC clearance. Coinbase, Robinhood, and Circle are positioned to win tokenized stocks. Visa is shitting down the meme coin credit card loophole that classified meme coins as digital media transactions. 21Shares listed ZCash and ETHFI ETPs in Europe. Binance purchased a $100M stake in Circle shares at a discount on September 17, as part of a five year deal. NYSE and Blockchain.com are bringing round the clock stock trading to crypto users. MoonPay bought a SEC-registered securities firm, Noth Capital, which included a broker-dealer, an alternative trading system, a transfer agent, and an investment adviser. IBM connected its banking platform, Digital Asset Haven, to Swift's blockchain-based shared ledger on beta on September 25. Solana just hired the former Binance's top marketing executive. Ondo and Kakaopay partnered on Korean Stock tokenization. Digital asset funds pulled in $3.5B last week, the largest weekly inflow of 2026. Hyperliquid asked the EU to regulate perpetuals under MiFID.
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• Bad news: Clarity Act just failed in the Senate with 49-50 votes. What will this bring? First, capital may move to jurisdictions with statutory frameworks already in place. Was this a clever market manipulation? A day after, the Congress passed a crypto tax bill, setting a minimum of $10 threshhold for small crypto transactions and classifying mining and staking income as ordinary income. The SEC and CTFC are now moving aggressivelly on crypto rulemaking covering token classification, DEFI developer protections, equity tokenization exemptions and single stock perpetual futures. Stablecoin yields are unrestricted for now, as the yield ban only existed inside the bill. In Europe, the central banks also want to ban stablecoin yields. Coinex Exchange will cease operations and wind down the company, citing poor market conditions. Perpetual market Cascade (formerly Perennial) also shuts down after five years of operations. Bernstein said that prediction markets may reach $10 trillion by 2035. At least the crypto economy barely flinched during a $2 trillion market wipeout this year. As exposed by public members, it seems that Kalshi is wash-trading on their own perps exchange, generating artificial volume to falsify metrics. Go Beni! New York Attoerney General sued Polymarket on September 25, and wants it shut down. Ronald Spektor, 23, was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison after convincing nearly 100 people to hand crypto to what they believed was a secure Coinbase wallet. Bitget lost $351M to a hack on its hot and warm wallets, the cold wallets were untouched. Near Intents got hacked, has halted services and got packed in hours, losing $3.8M in a drain hack.
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• Joke of the week: Anchorage Digital Bank extended its institutional custody to Etherlink on September 16, adding seven assets including a token representing physical Uranium with a $9M market cap. I wonder if the token is backed by the physical resource. Iran may want to buy some, right? Nothing about Donald? Of course not, he just announced an AI Force modelled after Space Force and an AI czar to oversee US AI development. On an unrelated occasion, US 10 year Treasury Yields touched its highest level since 2007 on last Monday, 5.25%.

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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) (Stellarch - a Play2Earn space 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.