Phantom Announces $CASH; US Government Shuts Down

️ On today's Top Picks:

Crypto News

• ⭐️ Phantom announces Phantom Cash, an all-in-one money account; powered by $CASH, a USD-backed stablecoin built by Stripe & Bridge; join waitlist via Phantom app or website.

• Tether to launch new $USAT stablecoin through Rumble $RUM; Tether holds a 48% stake in RUM following a $775M investment in 2024.

• Ripple $XRP CTO David Schwartz to step down at the end of this year; to join Ripple's Board of Directors; Schwartz was one of three engineers who architected the XRP Ledger.

• $BNB Chain lowers minimum gas price to 0.05 Gwei ( ~$0.005); wallets, CEXs, & trading platforms to adopt the new gas price.

• Plasma $XPL Founder & CEO Paul Faecks addresses rumors; says no team members have sold XPL, only 3 team members have worked at Blast/Blur, & they have not engaged with Wintermute.

• EigenCloud $EIGEN launches EigenCompute & EigenAI; brings verifiable AI inference & compute to developers with crypto-economic security guarantees.

• Tornado Cash $TORN developer Roman Storm files motion requesting acquittal; Strom was convicted in August of conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

• FTX Recovery Trust distributes ~$1.6B to creditors; third distribution to holders of allowed claims in the Plan’s Convenience and Non-Convenience Classes.

Alpha

• ⭐️ Lighter launches public mainnet; launch follows 8 months of private beta; also launches Lighter Points Season 2 as Season 1 ends; Season 2 runs through the end of 2025.

• Intern teasingly posts "Monad will launch this quarter" on X; to potentially launch mainnet, TGE, & airdrop soon.

• MetaMask teasingly posts "FOXTOBER" on X; to potentially launch $MASK soon; CEO of Consensys Joseph Lubin said "($MASK)...may arrive sooner than you would expect" in recent interview.

• Rainbow launches King of the Hill, a daily trading game that rewards points; earn points to convert to $RNBW; to launch RNBW in Q4.

• Farcaster launches Referral Rewards; earn 20% of referral's trading fees; referee's receive 20% trading fee discount.

Airdrops

• ⭐️ OpenEden launches $EDEN airdrop claim; Bills points holders are eligible.

• Meteora to launch $MET TGE & airdrop on October 23rd; Meteora Points holders, Jupiter $JUP stakers, & more to be eligible.

• Binance $BNB launches DoubleZero $2Z HODLer Airdrop; BNB Simple Earn and/or BNB On-Chain Yields subscribers from September 26th to September 28th are eligible.

• ICYMI Binance $BNB launches OpenEden $EDEN HODLer Airdrop; BNB Simple Earn and/or BNB On-Chain Yields subscribers from September 23rd to September 25th are eligible.

• ICYMI Hyperliquid $HYPE launches Hypurr NFTs; airdropped to eligible Genesis Event participants; total of 4,600 NFTs in the collection.

Finance News

• ⭐️ US Government officially shuts down; first time since December 2018; average length of a shutdown is ~8 days.

• US SEC reportedly moving to allow stocks to trade onchain; reportedly plans to launch this change quickly.

• US White House withdraws Brian Quintenz’s nomination for CFTC Chair; withdrawal follows backlash from the Winklevoss twins & Kalshi espionage claims.

• Robinhood $HOOD in discussions to launch its prediction markets business outside the US; held talks with the UK’s FCA.

• Metaplanet $3350.T buys an additional 5268 Bitcoin $BTC for ~$615.67M at ~$116,870 per BTC; now holds 30,823 BTC (~$3.7B) acquired for ~$3.33B at ~$107,912 per BTC.

• Circle $CRCL partners with Deutsche Börse Group; to bring $USDC & $EURC within Deutsche Börse Group's financial market infrastructure.

• Bridge announces Open Issuance, a new platform that enables any business to launch their own stablecoin; powers newly announced Phantom $CASH.

• VisionSys AI $VSA partners with Marinade Finance to launch up to $2B Solana $SOL treasury initiative; to acquire & stake $500M in SOL within next six months.

• Elon Musk $TSLA becomes first person in history to reach a net worth of $500B.

• Intel $INTC & AMD in early talks of a chip manufacturing deal; Nvidia's $NVDA recently announced plans to invest $5B in INTC.

Security and Exploits

• ⭐️ Alpine Formula 1 Team partners with investment scam Blockdag; Blackdag has been running a presale for 1.5+ years & advertises fake fundraising numbers.

• SBI Crypto, a subsidiary of SBI Group $8473.T, drained for $21M in crypto by suspected DPRK hackers; funds were transferred to five instant exchanges and deposited to Tornado Cash.

• $BNB Chain recovers X account after compromise; hacker posted several phishing links resulting in ~$8K stolen; victims to be compensated.

• Pendle $PENDLE denies being hacked; explains an unknown compromised wallet was minting & dumping principal tokens (PT) & yield tokens (YT).

• Red Hat suffers security breach; extortion group Crimson Collective claims to have stolen 570GB of compressed data across 28,000 internal projects.

• Google $GOOG releases AI-powered security feature for Google Drive desktop; automatically pauses file syncing when it detects a ransomware attack.

• Western Digital releases security update for My Cloud NAS devices; patches severe OS command injection vulnerability.

Token Unlocks

• Optimism $OP / ~$21M / SEP 30th
• Kamino $KMNO / ~$16M / SEP 30th
• Sui $SUI / ~$144M / OCT 01st
• ZetaChain $ZETA / ~$7M / OCT 01st
• Ethena $ENA / ~$23M / OCT 02nd
• Immutable $IMX / ~$18M / OCT 03rd
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• Ethena $ENA raises $30M in Strategic funding from MEXC Ventures.

• xMoney $XMN raises $21.5M in Strategic funding led by the Sui $SUI Foundation.

• Lava raises $17.5M in funding from several investors.

• KGeN raises $13.5M in Strategic funding led by Jump Crypto.

• BaseVol raises $3M in Pre-Seed & Seed funding led by Neoclassic Capital & Altos Ventures.

• Drake raises $1M in Seed funding led by CMS Holdings.

• Cheeze raises an undisclosed amount in Seed funding from several investors.

• Memory raises an undisclosed amount in funding from several investors.

The Degen Farmer