SEC & FINRA Probe Crypto Treasury Firms For Suspicious Trades

️ On today's Top Picks:

Crypto News

• Softbank & Ark Invest in talks to join Tether's funding round; Tether reportedly raising up to $20B at $500B valuation.

• ⭐️ Circle $CRCL reportedly exploring reversible $USDC transactions; mechanism could allow for refunds in cases of fraud or dispute.

• Plasma $XPL launches mainnet beta; recently announced Plasma One, a stablecoin-native neobank & card.

• Swift experiments with migrating its payment messaging system onchain using Linea $LINEA; project involves several banks, including BNP Paribas & BNY Mellon.

• Franklin, Fidelity, CoinShares, Bitwise, Grayscale, VanEck, & Canary file updated S-1s for spot Solana $SOL ETFs; US SEC expected to decide approvals within ~two weeks.

• ⭐️ Kraken reportedly raises $500M at $15B valuation; funds to support Kraken’s IPO plans which are expected to take place next year.

• ⭐️ Gate $GT launches Gate Layer, an Ethereum $ETH Layer 2 network; built on Optimism $OP Stack; to use use existing GateChain as settlement layer & GT token as gas token.

• Upbit to reportedly merge under Naver, a South Korean internet giant, via stock swap; Dunamu, Upbit's parent company, to be a subsidiary of Naver Financial.

• KuCoin appeals $14M million penalty from Canada FINTRAC; KuCoin says it “disagrees with” the regulator's findings of AML violations.

Alpha

• Binance Alpha to feature OpenEden $EDEN on September 30th; OpenEden to launch EDEN TGE & airdrop soon; OpenSeason campaign ongoing.

• Soneium launches Soneium Score Season 2; users with at least 80 points to be eligible for badge; ends on October 23rd.

• Nansen launches Nansen AI mobile app; available on iOS & soon Android; also launches Nansen Points Season 2.

• Jumper joins Nansen as launch partner for Nansen Points Season 2; earn a Jumper XP bonus based on your Nansen Points tier.

• Jumper joins Plasma $XPL as official bridge & swap partner; bridge at least $500 with Jumper into Plasma to earn 10 Jumper XP; ends September 27th.

• Cap to launch Epoch 3 of the Cap Frontier Program on October 13th; Epoch 2 ongoing, earn up to 20x Caps.

Airdrops

• Airdrops, Checkers, & Points by Olimpio.

• Mira launches $MIRA airdrop registration & claim; early ecosystem users, node delegators, & more are eligible; registration closes on October 2nd.

• Binance $BNB launches Mira $MIRA HODLer Airdrop; BNB Simple Earn and/or BNB On-Chain Yields subscribers from September 20th to September 22nd are eligible.

• Binance $BNB launches Falcon Finance $FF HODLer Airdrop; BNB Simple Earn and/or BNB On-Chain Yields subscribers from September 14th to September 16th are eligible.

• Rainbow to launch $RNBW TGE & airdrop in Q4 (October-December); points holders to be eligible; earn points by swapping, bridging, referring, & more.

Finance News

• US President Trump announces new tariffs set to go live on October 1st; 100% tariff on pharmaceuticals, 50% tariff on kitchen cabinets, 50% tariff on bathroom vanities, 30% tariff on upholstered furniture, & 25% tariff on heavy trucks.

• US White House reportedly considers Jill Sommers, former CFTC commissioner, and Kyle Hauptman, current NCUA Chair, for the role of CFTC Chair.

• Vanguard reportedly preparing to allow access to crypto ETFs on its brokerage platform; previously, Vanguard repeatedly said it would not offer access to crypto ETFs.

• ⭐️ US SEC & FINRA probe suspicious stock trades before crypto treasury announcements; reaches out to over 200 digital asset treasury companies.

• Nine EU Banks partner to launch MiCA-compliant Euro stablecoin; includes ING, Banca Sella, KBC, Danske Bank, DekaBank, UniCredit, SEB, CaixaBank, & Raiffeisen Bank International.

• SharpLink $SBET partners with Superstate to issue tokenized SBET shares on Ethereum $ETH; SharpLink currently holds ~830K ETH (~$3.3B).

• Cipher Mining $CIFR signs $3B AI hosting deal with Fluidstack; deal backed by $1.4B from Google $GOOG for 5.4% equity stake; CIFR to also raise $1.1B via convertible notes offering.

• ⭐️ Cloudflare $NET announces NET Dollar, a "US dollar-backed stablecoin that will enable instant, secure transactions for the agentic web."

• xAI sues OpenAI for allegedly poaching former xAI employees to steal trade secrets on Grok’s source code, business plans, & data center operations.

• Intel $INTC in talks with Apple $AAPL about potential investment & closer collaboration; talks follow Nvidia's $NVDA recently announced plans to invest $5B in INTC.

Security and Exploits

• Interpol seizes $97M worth of crypto in Operation HAECHI VI; operation was underway from April through August & encompassed 40 countries.

• Hypervault rugpulls ~$3.6M worth of crypto; funds bridged from Hyperliquid $HYPE to Ethereum $ETH & deposited into Tornado Cash $TORN; website inaccessible & X account deleted.

• US CISA issues Emergency Directive in response to the active exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco ASA.

• Microsoft $MSFT to launch new Edge security feature to detect & revoke malicious sideloaded extensions; currently, sideloaded extensions are not scanned for malware.

Token Unlocks

• Particle $PARTI / ~$27M / SEP 25th
• AltLayer $ALT / ~$7M / SEP 25th
• Sahara AI $SAHARA / ~$10M / SEP 26th
• Jupiter $JUP / ~$24M / SEP 28th
• Optimism $OP / ~$21M / SEP 30th
• Kamino $KMNO / ~$15M / SEP 30th
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• RedotPay raises $47M in Strategic funding from Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy, & Vertex Ventures.

• Divine raises $6.6M in Seed funding led by Paradigm.

• Share raises $5M in funding from several investors.

• Melee raises $3.5M in Pre-Seed funding from Variant & DBA.

• RockSolid Network raises $2.8M in Pre-Seed funding led by Castle Island Ventures.

• Crossmint raises an undisclosed amount in Strategic funding from Circle Ventures.

The Degen Farmer