S&P Global announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin, which was founded in 2015 and whose open-source code libraries have underpinned more than $37 trillion in value transferred through stablecoins, tokenized funds, and DeFi protocols. Financial terms were not disclosed, and S&P Global said the deal is not expected to materially affect its financial results.

A traditional ratings and market-data giant absorbing a core piece of blockchain security infrastructure signals that onchain technical risk is being folded into mainstream financial due diligence, which matters for banks and asset managers now pushing tokenized products. It also gives S&P Global a direct role in setting security assessments and benchmarks for code that sits beneath tokenized financial products.

OpenZeppelin will keep operating under its own name as a separate S&P Global business unit, with co-founder and CEO Demian Brener remaining in charge and reporting to S&P Global Ratings president Yann Le Pallec. The acquisition extends S&P Global's digital assets push, which already includes the S&P Digital Markets 50 Index and an earlier market-data investment in Kaiko.

Circle's USDC-focused layer-1 blockchain, Arc, opened to the public on September 16, 2026, following a public testnet that launched in October 2025 and processed more than 700 million transactions in under a year. More than 100 institutional and ecosystem partners were on the network on its first day of public operation, and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire called it "the single most significant launch in Circle's history since USDC itself."

This is the first time a major stablecoin issuer has launched its own base-layer settlement network, moving Circle from token issuer toward controlling the infrastructure where its stablecoin is used. If institutions adopt Arc for payments and settlement, it could shift a portion of stablecoin transaction flow away from general-purpose chains such as Ethereum and Solana and toward purpose-built, compliance-oriented rails.

Arc uses USDC as native gas and can also accept other stablecoins via a paymaster system, with a fee model built on Ethereum's EIP-1559 architecture but replacing block-level adjustments with a weighted moving average of network demand, with fees directed to an on-chain Arc Treasury. Consensus runs on Malachite, a Tendermint-based Byzantine Fault Tolerant engine with a permissioned validator set under proof of authority, and Circle says a possible transition to Proof-of-Stake could come in 2027; USDC had roughly $74 billion in circulation in September 2026.

A group calling itself "iamnotavillain" has publicly demanded $3 million in Monero (XMR) from fintech Revolut, threatening to sell stolen customer data to other criminals if it is not paid. The ransom site launched this week, but Reuters reports Revolut has so far had no contact with or demands from the attackers, and negotiations have not begun.

It marks one of the most prominent ransomware-style extortion attempts against a major digital bank, and the choice of Monero underscores how privacy coins remain the preferred settlement channel for extortion. The breach also highlights the growing social-engineering risk facing crypto-adjacent financial platforms, where a single spoofed government email can expose customer records.

Attackers reportedly gained access by using a legitimate Italian government email domain to impersonate law enforcement and bypass Revolut's security checks; Reuters cites a source saying roughly 680 customers were affected and that Revolut's core infrastructure, databases and customer accounts were not impacted. Earlier reports from Coin Bureau claimed a 10,000 BTC demand (worth over $760 million at current prices), and it is unclear whether that claim involved the same group.

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade continued confirming blocks on its Devnet-11 test network under new block-building rules, and Nethermind's execution client passed all 2,302 performance tests, processing 570.7 billion gas in three minutes and 15 seconds (roughly 2.9 billion gas per second). About an hour after going live on the testnet, the block gas limit was raised from 60 million to 200 million, ahead of a proposed October 6 deployment on the Sepolia public test network.

Glamsterdam introduces block-level access lists that let clients fetch data and check unrelated transactions in parallel instead of sequentially, which could let Ethereum fit far more payments, token swaps and other activity into each block and soften fee spikes when the chain is congested. It also moves the builder-validator handoff and its payments into Ethereum's own protocol rules, reducing dependence on external relay services.

The 200 million gas limit is a test setting only and is not yet a commitment for Ethereum's main network, and Devnet-11 was designed as a controlled rehearsal without deliberate attacks; the October 6 Sepolia date still requires formal confirmation. Glamsterdam also extends the window for spreading block data across the network from about two seconds to nine seconds, giving validators more time to receive and check the larger blocks it is designed to support, while the Nethermind benchmark measured client execution speed rather than the performance of the full network.

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, is preparing to offer onchain perpetual futures to US traders through Bitnomial Exchange, its CFTC-regulated venue, pending regulatory approval. The offering would bring a fully onchain perpetuals product into the US regulated derivatives framework for the first time at this scale.

US traders have long been largely restricted to offshore venues for perpetual futures, so a CFTC-regulated onchain perps product could pull a portion of that demand onshore and intensify competition with existing US-listed derivatives, including Coinbase Derivatives' perpetual-style futures and CME crypto contracts. It also signals that regulated, institution-grade onchain derivatives infrastructure is becoming viable rather than experimental.

Onchain perpetuals are cash-settled contracts with no expiry date in which order placement, matching, settlement, collateral custody and liquidation all occur on a blockchain, which changes the custody and transparency profile relative to centralized offshore venues. The launch is described as pending approval, so the exact timing, contract specifications, available collateral assets and leverage limits have not been finalized.

Chainalysis reported a 420% year-over-year rise in the number of times attackers wrote malware instructions or infrastructure data onto public blockchains, with state-linked actors accounting for roughly two-thirds of new activity each quarter. The firm attributed previously unattributed activity across Tron, Aptos and BNB Smart Chain to UNC5342, a North Korea-linked group tracked by Google Threat Intelligence, and identified suspected Iran-linked actors writing command-and-control routing data into Bitcoin transactions.

Using public blockchains as malware infrastructure gives campaigns a durability that conventional domain takedowns and server seizures cannot easily disrupt, because the pointers remain readable on an immutable ledger. It also drags major public chains into a security and compliance spotlight, raising questions for exchanges, analytics vendors and regulators about how abuse of these networks is monitored.

Chainalysis recorded a 440% increase in malicious blockchain writes since July 2025, a date it links to high-capacity open-source Chinese AI models becoming capable of producing malicious code with limited safeguards, though research lead Eric Jardine described this as a "clear point-in-time association" rather than proof of causation. The Iran assessment relied on malware family, decoding method, timing and server infrastructure tied to previously reported Iranian operations, and in that campaign attacker-controlled wallets sent small payments to a well-known Bitcoin address with historical ties to Satoshi Nakamoto that had no connection to the attackers and served only as a permanent public location for updated directions.

GalaChain disclosed in a Sept. 14 postmortem that an attacker used 74 replayable signatures harvested from failed transactions — some dating back 55 days — to drain roughly 2 billion GALA (about $3 million) plus dozens of other tokens from nine wallets on Aug. 18. The chain paused its bridge during the attack and has since patched both the signature-scope-confusion flaw and the replay-key rollback weakness.

The attack shows that a cryptographically valid signature is not the same as an authorized economic action, and that audits reviewing signature verification, replay protection, and execution separately can miss flaws that only appear when those systems interact. It also raises a governance question for chain operators: whether human-triggered emergency controls and valid-signature-based systems can react fast enough once exploitation is automated.

GalaChain's verifier previously accepted EIP-712 type definitions supplied with the request instead of deriving them from the invoked operation, so a signature covering one field set could be presented while a different method executed — one on-chain example shows a TransferToken call moving about 1.64 billion GALA while the supplied EIP-712 structure described an AddLiquidity operation. Because unique transaction keys could roll back when a transaction failed, the signature stayed visible on the public ledger while its replay key remained available; 57 of the 60 historical source transactions linked to the exploit contained at least one failed inner operation, and investigators reported no evidence that private keys, seed phrases, or passwords were compromised.

Anthropic published a framework of measurements intended to capture the pace of AI development inside frontier labs, covering areas such as AI-led R&D, agent oversight, and how compute is allocated to safety work. Rather than another public benchmark, the proposal focuses on instrumentation inside the labs that actually train frontier models.

Capability progress at frontier labs is largely invisible from the outside, so a shared measurement vocabulary could give policymakers, auditors, and rival labs a common basis for judging whether development is accelerating or slowing. It feeds directly into ongoing AI safety and governance debates about whether labs can credibly self-report the pace of their own progress.

The proposed measurements are internal signals rather than public benchmark scores — for example the degree to which research and development is itself AI-led, how much oversight work is delegated to AI agents, and how compute is split between capability work and safety work. Such metrics are harder to game than static test scores, but they also depend on labs voluntarily disclosing data that competitors would not see.

OpenAI announced Astra for Law, a legal-focused offering built on its most advanced model (described in launch materials as GPT-6 Astra) that bundles custom firm workflows, connected legal data sources, and legal-grade controls for confidential client work. It will also be available via API to legal-tech customers including Harvey and Legora, which can build the capability into their own products.

This marks OpenAI moving beyond general-purpose models into vertically packaged, domain-specific products aimed at the AmLaw 200 and the broader legal-tech ecosystem, a segment where incumbents such as Harvey and Legora already compete. It signals that frontier labs may increasingly build the industry-specific layer themselves rather than leaving all verticalization to application vendors.

Coverage indicates the offering is built on OpenAI's most advanced and most expensive model and is targeted at the 200 largest US law firms. The launch emphasizes legal-grade controls for confidential client work, and OpenAI says it will keep advancing the model, settings, tools and instructions based on rigorous evaluations and feedback from lawyers and legal technology partners.

On Sept. 16, Dr. Lani Clinton — half-sister of the late Ondo Finance founder Nathan Allman — and Ondo investor David Chen petitioned a Hawaiian court for a limited conservatorship over their 77-year-old mother Kathleen Allman's share of the founder's estate, alleging cognitive impairment, alcoholism and reckless financial spending. Kathleen Allman denies the claims and accuses the petitioners of forum-shopping after failing to remove her from Ondo's board, arguing that Chen is funding the Hawaii petition, shares counsel with acting CEO Ian De Bode, and relied on sealed materials from the Delaware case.

The disputed estate includes a "controlling equity interest in Ondo Finance" plus a "very large holding of ONDO tokens," so the outcome of this family litigation determines who effectively controls one of the largest real-world-asset tokenization protocols and its governance token. The conservatorship fight also runs parallel to Kathleen Allman's suit accusing acting CEO Ian De Bode of a "brazen usurpation of corporate control" and of plotting an approximately $11 million compensation package within a week of the founder's death.

According to the litigation, De Bode's package comprised a $900,000 annual salary and bonus, a $1 million signing bonus, 26 million restricted token units valued at more than $9 million, and awards covering 846,000 shares that would have raised his stake from 0.33% to 8% — roughly a 24-fold increase — with vesting set to begin May 25, the day after Allman died. Kathleen Allman had appointed herself and her other child, Tahnee Towill, to Ondo's board and named herself chair and interim CEO, but De Bode remains acting CEO and a board member under a Sept. 3 court order, and a Delaware court has already rejected his argument that Kathy and Towill were unfit to serve as directors.

Bybit announced the launch of perpetual options (calls and puts) on NVIDIA and SpaceX, tradable 24/7. The contracts support fractional lots, are powered by the Bybit Unified Trading Account (UTA) with portfolio margin, and support full multi-leg strategy construction, with more tickers promised soon.

This pushes crypto-native derivatives design — perpetual, expiry-less contracts traded around the clock — onto non-crypto underlyings, including a private company that has no publicly listed shares. It widens the competitive overlap between offshore crypto exchanges and traditional brokerages, and gives traders continuous exposure to names that normally trade only during equity market hours.

Perpetual options have no expiry or exercise date, so the position can be held indefinitely rather than rolled or settled at a fixed maturity. Fractional lots lower the minimum ticket size, while portfolio margin is a risk-based margining method that assesses total portfolio risk instead of margining each leg separately, which can reduce margin requirements on hedged structures.