Tether Seeks $500B Valuation

️ On today's Top Picks:

Crypto News

• ⭐️ Tether in talks to raise $20B at $500B valuation for ~3% of the company; Cantor Fitzgerald is advising the potential deal.

• CZ, Binance $BNB co-founder, denies claims of YZi Labs raising outside capital; also denies any communication with SEC Chair Paul Atkins.

• Coinbase $COIN lists Australian dollar $AUDD & Singapore dollar $XSGD stablecoins; AUDD is issued by AUDC Pty Ltd & XSGD is issued by StraitsX.

• ⭐️ Native Markets launches $USDH on Hyperliquid $HYPE; phased rollout of USDH expected over the coming months with HyperEVM integrations currently underway.

• EigenCloud $EIGEN partners with NTT Digital, Japan's largest telecom; joins EigenCloud ecosystem to operate EigenDA as a validator & to accelerate the growth of the restaking ecosystem.

• FTX Recovery Trust sues Genesis Digital for $1.15B; alleges Sam Bankman-Fried, former FTX CEO, used customer funds to invest in the company.

• ⭐️ Sam Bankman-Fried's X account posts "gm" followed by "No, SBF is not posting himself from prison. I'm a friend posting on his behalf"; SBF is currently in prison at FCI Terminal Island.

• US SEC pushes for 'innovation exemption' by year's end; would allow firms to quickly “bring on-chain products and services to market.”

Alpha

• Airdrops, Checkers, & Points by Olimpio.

• ⭐️ Plasma $XPL to launch mainnet beta on September 25th; to airdrop 25M XPL to public sale participants & 2.5M XPL to various contributors.

• Soneium Score Season 1 to end on September 25th; users with at least 80 points to be eligible for badge.

• Nansen posts "Power in the palm of your hands. Tomorrow" on X; to potentially launch Nansen mobile app tomorrow.

• Makina to launch Pre-Launch Machines (vaults) & Season 0 on September 29th; earn points for $MAK & eligibility for future NFT drop.

• ICYMI MegaETH teases "Mainnet launches in ______" on X; to potentially launch mainnet soon.

Airdrops

• Morph launches $BGB airdrop eligibility & allocation checker; Morph Zoo point holders, Zootosis participants, & more are eligible; claim on September 25th.

• Binance launches Plasma $XPL HODLer Airdrop; BNB Simple Earn and/or BNB On-Chain Yields subscribers from September 10th to September 13th are eligible.

• Binance launches Hemi $HEMI HODLer Airdrop; BNB Simple Earn and/or BNB On-Chain Yields subscribers from September 17th to September 19th are eligible.

• Camp to close $CAMP Season 1 airdrop claim on September 26th; Summit Series participants & Camp TrailHeads NFT holders were eligible to register.

• ICYMI Rainbow to launch $RNBW TGE & airdrop in Q4 (October-December); points holders to be eligible.

Finance News

• China's Huawei announces three-year plan to overtake Nvidia $NVDA in AI chips; Huawei was sanctioned by the US Department of Commerce in 2019.

• US CFTC announces initiative to let stablecoins be used as tokenized collateral in US derivatives markets; seeking public feedback until October 20th on valuation, custody, settlement, & rule changes needed.

• ⭐️ Coinbase $COIN & Cloudflare $NET launch x402 Foundation, an initiative designed to establish x402 as the universal standard for AI-driven payments.

• CleanSpark $CLSK increases its Bitcoin $BTC backed credit facility with Coinbase $COIN Prime by $100M; to use additional funding to expand energy portfolio, scale mining operations, & invest in HPC capabilities.

• Fold $FLD to launch Fold Bitcoin $BTC Credit Card; powered by Stripe & Visa $V; offers up to 3.5% back on every purchase.

• DeFi Dev Corp $DFDV expands stock repurchase program from $1M to $100M; currently holds 2,095,748 Solana $SOL (~$445M).

• Sol Strategies $STKE to raise $30M CAD via private placement to buy more Solana $SOL; currently holds 435,064 SOL (~$923M).

Security and Exploits

• Tether freezes $4.35M of $USDT across 25 addresses.

• Bubblemaps $BMT launches Intel Desk, a "public platform where investigations are permanent, ranked by impact, and driven by the community."

• OnePlus devices affected by unpatched zero-day allowing SMS theft; vulnerability remains unpatched & OnePlus has not responded to multiple coordinated disclosure attempts.

• Cloudflare $NET mitigates record-breaking 22.2 Tbps & 10.6 Bpps DDoS attack; previous record was 11.5 Tbps & 5.1 Bpps.

• Proton VPN passes fourth annual no-logs audit; confirms that it does not collect or store user activity data or metadata on its VPN infrastructure.

Token Unlocks

• Nillion $NIL / ~$20M / SEP 24th
• Particle $PARTI / ~$27M / SEP 25th
• AltLayer $ALT / ~$7M / SEP 25th
• Sahara AI $SAHARA / ~$11M / SEP 26th
• Jupiter $JUP / ~$25M / SEP 28th
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• Fnality raises $136M in Series C funding led by WisdomTree, Bank of America, Citi, KBC Group, Temasek, & Tradeweb.

• Zerohash raises $104M in Extended Series D funding led by Interactive Brokers.

• Archetype raises $100M for Archetype III Fund.

• Bastion raises $14.6M in Strategic funding led by Coinbase Ventures.

• Raiku raises $13.5M in Seed funding led by Pantera Capital.

• Bulk raises $8M in Seed funding led by Robot Ventures & 6th Man Ventures.

• Cloudburst raises $7M in Series A funding led by Borderless Capital.

• Belfort raises $6M in Seed funding led by Vsquared Ventures.

• Elliptic raises an undisclosed amount in Strategic funding from HSBC.

The Degen Farmer