Daily Briefing

Open USD (OUSD), the stablecoin backed by founding partners Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, went live on Wednesday on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo. Open Standard CEO Zach Abrams said the "overwhelming majority" of the company's equity will be distributed over time to partners based on how much they help grow OUSD supply and transaction activity.

OUSD enters a stablecoin market worth more than $300 billion that is still dominated by Tether's USDT (about $143 billion in circulation) and Circle's USDC (roughly $74 billion), as competition shifts from simply issuing a digital dollar toward distribution, liquidity and the platforms where customers use it. The report says Open Standard's initial June announcement rattled competitor Circle.

Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa are Open Standard's first five founding partners and investors, each receiving an equal initial equity stake, with individual investment and stake sizes undisclosed. The partner network has grown from more than 140 to over 200 companies, with UBS, Japan's SBI Holdings and fintech Jeeves among the latest additions, and Abrams said he expects the founding group to eventually expand to roughly 10 to 12 companies along with a board of directors drawn from founders.

Kalshi is in advanced talks to raise roughly $1 billion at a valuation of about $40 billion, with existing investor Sequoia Capital and Wellington Management negotiating to co-lead the round and Tiger Global Management and Dragoneer Investment Group listed as potential participants, Reuters reported. The round is expected to close within weeks and would value the prediction market platform about 82% above its $22 billion valuation in May.

The reported round indicates continued institutional appetite for regulated, crypto-adjacent event trading, and would fund Kalshi's stated push beyond sports and election contracts toward a broader multi-asset trading platform that competes with CME and Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the NYSE.

The talks are not final: Kalshi and Tiger Global declined to comment, while Sequoia Capital, Wellington Management and Dragoneer had not responded, according to the report. People familiar with the matter also said Kalshi has held preliminary discussions about a potential IPO in the coming years, and that rival Polymarket is separately negotiating a $1 billion round.

BlackRock has brought investment portfolios onto the blockchain as digital tokens, extending tokenized real-world-asset products from the world's largest asset manager into mainstream investment offerings. According to reports on the launch, BlackRock builds the portfolios and Ondo Finance tokenizes them by issuing one token that tracks each portfolio, with three portfolios involved.

The move gives tokenized real-world assets a major mainstream endorsement from the world's largest asset manager, pushing on-chain portfolio products from niche pilots toward mainstream investment offerings.

The tokenized products are model portfolios — preset investing templates — with one token issued per portfolio to track its performance. Reporting on the launch ties the tokenization to Ondo Finance.

BAL holders have approved proposal BIP-928 for the orderly wind-down of the Balancer protocol, while BIP-929, which would have continued the Balancer technology under a new name, was rejected, Balancer announced on September 30. Existing pools will operate normally until October 30, and users can withdraw funds throughout the process.

The vote ends a long-running, widely used DeFi automated market maker and sets out a treasury distribution to BAL holders; Balancer said its contracts are non-custodial, so withdrawals do not depend on the project continuing to operate. Reports put support for BIP-928 at more than 99% of the roughly 17.2 million BAL cast, with BIP-929 failing at about 70% against.

Under the timetable, October 16 is the deadline for partners to apply to keep specific V3 pools running until November 30; on October 30 pools that can be paused move to withdrawals-only mode and the bug bounty program ends; on November 30 the V3 Vault pauses. BAL holders need not act now — from late May 2027 they can burn BAL for a pro-rata share of DAO treasury assets, with the exact opening date to be announced at least two weeks in advance.

At its HOOD Summit in Houston, Texas on Tuesday, Robinhood announced a set of products for active traders: tradable AI agents, crypto perpetual futures with up to 10x leverage, and weekend trading in select US stocks and ETFs. The platform also said it will extend options trading hours, raise intraday margin limits, and add corporate earnings event contracts.

The announcement would widen US retail access to leveraged crypto derivatives and to agentic trading if the products launch as described, extending Robinhood beyond its existing equities and spot crypto offering.

Crypto perpetual futures will be offered through Robinhood Derivatives and Bitstamp to eligible US users, with BTC and ETH contracts supporting up to 10x leverage and other supported assets initially at 3x. Robinhood Agents let users select OpenAI or Anthropic models within the app and grant them access to a segregated trading account; the platform requires user approval for each trade by default, users can turn that off, and margin lending is not supported at launch. Weekend trading will be provided through the alternative trading system Bruce ATS, covering select stocks and ETFs.

A newly reported model, GPT-6 "Astra", was connected to a Unitree G1 humanoid robot and completed a kitchen cleanup task by invoking robot skills as callable tools, according to a media report. The demonstration treats each robot capability as a tool that the language model can call to carry out physical actions.

The demo is an example of LLM-based embodied control, in which a frontier model orchestrates physical robot skills through the same tool-calling interface it uses for software.

The task shown was cleaning up a kitchen with the Unitree G1. The demonstration has so far appeared only in media coverage, with no independent performance benchmarks or success-rate figures released.

Swift CEO Javier Pérez-Tasso said at the opening of Sibos 2026 in Miami that Swift's blockchain-based ledger is now live and in use by some large global financial institutions. By the end of this year, at least 19 banks will use the ledger across 5 major currencies to support 24/7 payments using tokenized deposits.

The announcement marks a shift from pilot planning to production use of blockchain-based settlement infrastructure at the interbank messaging network that most cross-border payments already rely on. It also places bank-issued tokenized deposits, rather than stablecoins, at the centre of efforts to make institutional payments always available.

Pérez-Tasso gave the figure during his Sibos 2026 opening remarks, framing the ledger as supporting 24/7 payment availability through tokenized deposits. Swift's own press materials describe the blockchain ledger as an additional shared ledger that records and validates interbank payment commitments, rather than a replacement for its existing messaging layer.

Ostium's recovery portal, opening Wednesday, will fully repay the 3,321 wallets that lost $1,000 or less. The remaining 345 wallets, which carry at least 86% of the $23.8 million total loss, must choose between a $1,000 payment and a pro-rata claim on funds Ostium has not yet recovered.

The plan resolves the small-loss majority outright while leaving the largest losses unresolved, meaning most affected users are made whole and the most exposed wallets must accept a capped payout or wait on unrecovered funds.

The 345 wallets hold at least 86% of the $23.8 million in total losses. Their alternative to the $1,000 payment is a pro-rata claim, i.e. a payout proportional to their share of losses, on funds Ostium has not yet recovered.

A leaked Anthropic IPO prospectus shows the Claude maker preparing a November listing at a $2 trillion valuation — roughly double the $965 billion post-money valuation of its Series H round four months earlier. The filing leans on unaudited "run-rate" figures that annualize May 2026 revenue to $47 billion, against audited 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion.

At the stated $100 billion raise and $2 trillion valuation, the offering would be the largest IPO on record, topping SpaceX’s $85.7 billion haul at a $1.77 trillion valuation. The prospectus is less bullish than the bankers lining it up: roughly 80 of its 261 pages are dedicated to risk factors.

Anthropic’s $4.6 billion of 2025 revenue came alongside a $42 billion net loss, driven by AI infrastructure costs, according to the leaked document. It says the company is seeking $100 billion, and that Nvidia has floated a $10 billion anchor stake; at $2 trillion the valuation is about 435 times trailing 2025 revenue, versus roughly 210 times at the Series H price.

Edison Design Group has released its long-commercially-licensed C++ compiler front-end as open source under the SPDX license Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception. The release includes an emulation mode that mimics Microsoft Visual C++ and GNU/GCC behavior, with source code at github.com/edgcpp/compiler and documentation at edgcpp.org/doc.

The EDG front-end has been used by Intel C++ Compiler Classic, NVIDIA CUDA NVCC and Microsoft Visual Studio for IntelliSense, so a codebase previously gated behind commercial licensing is now available under a permissive license to compiler and tooling developers. Commenters on Hacker News called the release significant for C++ and singled out the MSVC/GCC emulation mode as useful for porting code and building tools that must replicate another compiler's behavior.

The license is Apache-2.0 WITH LLVM-exception, which permits use, modification and redistribution without royalties. According to EDG documentation, the front-end can be built to accept GNU extensions — with a compatibility mode covering GCC 3.2–7.3 and good enough to compile the Linux kernel — and also extensively emulates Microsoft Visual C++, with a --microsoft_version option to select a specific MSVC version.

Chainlink has launched Chainlink Fulcrum, an institutional financing and collateral-management solution that supports cross-chain repo and other collateralized funding transactions between public and private blockchains. According to Chainlink's blog, counterparties can use a single entry point to select eligible assets, set financing terms and coordinate settlement on any supported chain, with 24/7 operational support.

The design separates the venue where financing agreements are managed from the networks where cash and collateral settle, which could allow institutions to keep assets on their existing ledgers while coordinating cross-chain transactions. Chainlink said it had previously demonstrated the cross-chain institutional financing workflow with DTCC at Sibos 2026.

Chainlink Fulcrum integrates Chainlink's CRE, CCIP and Data Streams, and Chainlink states it does not custody assets, act as a counterparty, or operate a trading venue.

Anthropic's IPO prospectus discloses annual losses in the tens of billions of dollars alongside rapid growth, and carries a formal warning that its own AI models could pose an existential risk to humanity. Anthropic declined to comment on the filing, which was reported on September 28-29, 2026.

A public prospectus from a frontier AI lab puts audited-scale financials and an explicit existential-risk statement into the public record at the same time. The offering itself could raise tens of billions of dollars for the cash-hungry company.

The Financial Times reported that Anthropic told investors it recorded an operating loss of more than $8bn last year as it increased spending on computing power. Other coverage cited figures of roughly $42bn in losses and more than half a trillion dollars in cloud commitments.

The White House published a presidential executive order titled "Inaugurating The Era Of Super Intelligence" on its Presidential Actions page, dated September 2026. The text released so far contains Section 1 (Purpose), which states that America "stands at the forefront of a new technological revolution in intelligence" and notes that the modern field of artificial intelligence was born in the United States.

As an executive order signed by the President under constitutional and statutory authority, it sets federal policy direction directly without requiring congressional approval. Framing AI development as a "superintelligence" era places frontier AI at the center of the instrument's stated purpose.

Only Section 1 (Purpose), preceded by the standard vesting clause, is included in the released text; the operative sections that would set out specific obligations and agency responsibilities are not part of the published excerpt.

AMD has acquired Fei-Fei Li's world-model startup in a deal reported at about 55 billion yuan (roughly $7.7 billion), described as the largest transaction in the world-model space to date. Li will join AMD as chief scientist.

The transaction would bring a leading spatial-intelligence research lab inside a major chipmaker, with its founder taking a chief scientist role — pointing to closer alignment between world-model research and AI hardware strategy.

The headline figure of 550亿元 yuan is equivalent to roughly $7.7 billion. Li's role after the deal is stated as chief scientist at AMD.

Avalanche said in a post that Goldman Sachs is bringing its roughly $100 billion treasury fund FTIXX onto Lynq, a private permissioned L1 deployed on Avalanche. Trading of the fund will be handled by licensed broker tZERO Securities and is initially open only to eligible US clients, who must complete onboarding with both Lynq and tZERO.

It extends the tokenization of traditional fixed-income products by a top-tier bank onto a permissioned chain that Avalanche says is already connected to more than 30 institutional participants.

Lynq is described as a private permissioned L1 deployed on Avalanche, with B2C2, Wintermute, Galaxy, FalconX and Fireblocks among the more than 30 institutions already onboarded. Access to FTIXX on Lynq is limited to eligible US clients and requires onboarding with both Lynq and tZERO.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said she is "not very optimistic" about freezing or recovering the funds lost in the exchange's $388 million security breach, speaking on Cointelegraph's Chain Reaction released Tuesday. She pointed to the February 2025 Bybit hack as a "good reference point," noting that roughly a year later only about 3.5% of Bybit's stolen funds had been frozen.

The on-record assessment signals that most of the $388 million taken from Bitget is unlikely to be frozen or returned to affected users, framing recovery expectations well below the full loss. Chen distinguished freezing from recovery, saying the 3.5% figure for Bybit "is only the freezing. It's not about recovery yet."

Bitget launched a bounty program offering 5% of funds frozen and 5% of funds recovered; NEAR Intents said Monday it blocked more than $50 million in assets tied to the attack and froze about $500,000, while Chen confirmed Tether and Circle blacklisted an exploit-linked wallet, freezing $318,013 in USDT and USDC. Withdrawals have resumed in stages, starting with Bitcoin on Monday and ETH on Tuesday, and Chen said Bitget had not "totally ruled out" an inside job while describing the investigation as preliminary.

Bitwise Asset Management said its Bitwise NEAR ETF (ticker NRR) began trading on NYSE Arca on September 29, 2026, making it the first US spot exchange-traded product for NEAR. The fund holds NEAR directly and charges a 0.75% management fee.

NRR is the first US spot ETP giving brokerage-based exposure to NEAR, and it adds an in-fund staking component through which Bitwise intends to stake the fund's tokens.

Bitwise plans to stake the fund's NEAR holdings to earn roughly 5% average staking rewards, and said it has worked on a US NEAR ETF since launching a European NEAR ETP in June 2025. NRR joins Bitwise's US single-asset lineup tracking Bitcoin (BITB), Ether (ETHW), Solana (BSOL), XRP (XRP) and Hyperliquid (BHYP).

According to a Bloomberg report cited on September 29, the merger between Adam Back-backed bitcoin treasury company BSTR Holdings and a Cantor Fitzgerald-affiliated SPAC was terminated, with BSTR required to pay a $15 million breakup fee. The same report points to multiple lawsuits against Blockstream Mining — the mining business Back helped found and in which he holds a minority stake — filed with partner Exacore over alleged unpaid equipment bills, electricity charges and customer deposits tied to roughly $2 billion in financing.

The setbacks land on Blockstream, described as one of the crypto ecosystem's oldest infrastructure companies, and on a public-market bitcoin treasury vehicle promoted by a figure long treated as a foundational name in Bitcoin. The report frames them as signs of mounting pressure across businesses tied to Back as the industry undergoes another major reshuffle.

The attack on Blockstream's bitcoin sidechain Liquid Network involved roughly 4,000 BTC stolen (about $320 million), of which 3,400 BTC has been returned while the attacker still holds bitcoin worth about $47 million. A separate $6.7 million lawsuit was filed in San Francisco federal court on September 11 against a company still carrying the Blockstream name, according to a report addressing confusion between similarly named entities.

Bloomberg reported Monday that London-based crypto services company Blockchain.com is aiming to go public by the end of 2026, seeking to raise about $500 million at a valuation of $4 billion to $6 billion in discussions with prospective investors. Blockchain.com filed confidentially for an IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.

The reported listing would follow a quiet year for crypto IPOs, after a weak market in early 2026 prompted some companies to delay their plans.

The confidential filing lets Blockchain.com begin the SEC review process before publicly disclosing financial details of the listing; no terms have been finalized, the report is based on people familiar with the matter, and Blockchain.com did not respond to CoinDesk's request for comment.

BlockTower Capital claims a $25 million hack loss tied to Coinbase, according to a report by The Cryptonomist, which says the claim renews questions about security vulnerabilities at the exchange. Crypto Briefing reported that BlockTower co-founder Ari Paul alleges Coinbase lost $25 million of BlockTower funds and covered it up.

The claim revives scrutiny of Coinbase's security practices and of how the exchange handles institutional client assets, based on the reports' framing of renewed questions about exchange security.

The allegation is attributed to BlockTower co-founder Ari Paul and includes a claim of a cover-up; the reporting is headline-level and does not detail the incident mechanics, and no acknowledgment from Coinbase is cited.

Coinbase said on Sept. 28 that Citi institutional clients can accept stablecoin payments through Spring by Citi, Citi's merchant platform, using Coinbase's payments infrastructure. Coinbase also said its Virtual Accounts can automatically convert incoming fiat into stablecoins, with Citi's Virtual Account Wallet providing the underlying banking infrastructure.

A major global bank enabling institutional clients to receive stablecoin payments, with the exchange handling the crypto leg behind the scenes, extends stablecoin acceptance into regulated banking rails. The two named services give the companies' earlier digital asset payments partnership defined, customer-facing uses.

Coinbase describes the capability as available now, but neither company disclosed customers, transaction volumes, pricing, eligible currencies or supported stablecoins, so the practical scale remains unverified. The two paths serve different customers — Citi institutional payment clients on one side, Coinbase Virtual Account customers on the other — and the announcement does not establish that a single customer can use both.

Bybit announced it will accept Franklin Templeton fund shares, including the asset manager's tokenized money market fund, as collateral on its platform. A separate report described the move as a strategic collaboration between the two firms aimed at expanding access to tokenized investing.

The arrangement broadens the set of institutional-grade collateral available for crypto trading by linking a traditional asset manager's fund products to an exchange's margin system.

The announcement covers Franklin Templeton fund shares, with the tokenized money market fund specifically named as eligible collateral. Bybit is the platform extending the collateral option; no launch date or eligibility criteria were specified in the available material.