Good morning everybody.
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Tuesday, September 29th, 2026. My name is Matt.
And once again, we’re going sideways.
Bitcoin is trading around $84,000, and the question remains the same:
Can we hold?
Because there are a lot of headwinds right now.
The 2-year Treasury is around 5%. The 5-year is around 5.07%. The 10-year is around 5.2%. The 30-year is pushing roughly 5.55%.
Meanwhile, Brent crude is around $106 to $107 a barrel.
Nothing weird going on here.
Markets are also putting roughly a 70% chance on another Fed rate hike in October.
So the bullish case hasn’t changed. Bitcoin holds the $80K to $82K breakout area as its new floor, and we still have upside.
The cautious case is that yields continue climbing, oil stays elevated and jobs data comes in hot enough to give the Fed another reason to raise rates.
For now, Bitcoin is taking all of this surprisingly well.
Strategy Keeps Buying Bitcoin While BitMine Crosses 6 Million ETH
Strategy bought another 1,665 Bitcoin for approximately $142.7 million, paying an average price of about $85,681 per Bitcoin.
That brings Strategy’s total holdings to 847,666 BTC.
But the interesting part isn’t just that Strategy bought more Bitcoin.
The company also repurchased approximately $151.7 million of STRC preferred stock during the same period.
So Strategy is simultaneously issuing common stock, accumulating Bitcoin and repurchasing preferred shares.
It also still has roughly $6 billion in combined dollar cash and reserve assets.
That’s becoming a much more complicated capital structure than simply “Michael Saylor buys Bitcoin.”
Meanwhile, Tom Lee’s BitMine has officially crossed 6 million ETH.
BitMine added another 17,362 ETH, bringing its total to just over 6 million ETH, or nearly 5% of Ethereum’s circulating supply.
So even while crypto prices are going sideways, these corporate treasury strategies continue accumulating enormous positions.
Senate Report Says USDT Is Heavily Used in Iran’s Shadow Financial System
A new report from Democratic investigators on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations examined 846 cryptocurrency wallets sanctioned or targeted for seizure because of alleged connections to Iran and affiliated groups.
The investigators found that 84% had transacted exclusively or nearly exclusively in USDT.
The report argues that USDT has become an important component of Iran’s shadow financial system, including activity involving sanctioned entities and proxy organizations.
Tether disputes the suggestion that it provides a safe haven for sanctioned or criminal actors and says it has cooperated with U.S. authorities. The company says it has helped freeze approximately $550 million in Iran-linked USDT during 2026.
And this gets directly into one of the fundamental tensions with crypto.
No, crypto wasn’t invented for terrorist financing.
But crypto absolutely was built around the idea of giving people greater sovereignty over their money and allowing value to move across public blockchain networks without relying entirely on the traditional financial system.
That becomes a problem when the person trying to move money is somebody the United States government doesn’t want moving money.
You can’t talk seriously about censorship resistance without acknowledging that censorship resistance also applies to people and organizations you don’t like.
That’s always been one of the difficult trade-offs.
Prediction Markets Are Running Into State Gambling Laws
The legal fight around prediction markets continues getting bigger.
Kalshi has argued that its event contracts are federally regulated derivatives under the Commodity Exchange Act and therefore primarily fall under the CFTC’s jurisdiction.
States have argued that many of these products are functionally gambling and remain subject to state gambling laws.
And the courts have not uniformly accepted Kalshi’s argument.
Most recently, the Sixth Circuit ruled against Kalshi in litigation involving Ohio and Tennessee, finding that sports wagers offered on the platform don’t qualify as swaps that would displace state gambling regulation.
Other cases involving prediction markets and tribal gaming are also moving through the courts, making eventual Supreme Court review increasingly plausible, although that doesn’t mean the Supreme Court has agreed to decide the broader issue.
My personal view?
It’s gambling.
One hundred percent.
But my problem with some of these regulatory fights is that I’m not convinced they necessarily protect consumers from gambling.
If states ultimately require companies like Kalshi to comply with state gambling regulations, these companies have the money and lawyers to build compliant systems.
They’ll comply.
They’ll pay whatever taxes and licensing costs are required.
And people will continue gambling on event contracts.
That’s why I question how much of this ultimately changes for the consumer versus simply determining which regulator gets jurisdiction and which government gets paid.
There are legitimate consumer-protection questions around gambling and prediction markets. But that’s different from pretending regulation automatically makes the underlying behavior disappear.
The Bitget Hack Creates a Big Question for “Permissionless” DeFi
Here’s something I find genuinely interesting.
The attackers behind the approximately $388 million Bitget hack attempted to move more than $50 million through NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service that describes itself as permissionless, open and uncensorable.
NEAR Intents’ security system identified transactions associated with the stolen funds and blocked them.
Most of those rejected funds subsequently moved elsewhere, while roughly $503,000 was actually frozen during the process and about $166,000 made it through the service.
And here’s my question:
Can you call something permissionless and uncensorable if somebody has the ability to stop transactions?
I’m not even saying which approach I prefer.
If somebody steals $388 million from you, obviously you want every exchange, bridge and protocol on Earth to stop the money.
I’d want my shit back too.
But that’s different from claiming that nobody can censor the system.
If somebody has the technical or administrative ability to decide that a transaction is illegitimate and prevent it from going through, then there is a permissioned component somewhere in that architecture.
That doesn’t necessarily make the product bad.
Maybe that’s exactly what institutional finance needs.
But let’s describe these systems accurately.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
This is the philosophical problem crypto keeps running into as it becomes more integrated with traditional finance.
Everybody loves censorship resistance until the money being moved is their stolen money.
The Bitget Hacker Apparently Did a Test Transaction First
We also learned something else about the Bitget attack that is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen says the attacker made a small test transfer before executing the main theft.
Which is exactly what all of us do.
You want to move half an ETH or an ETH to another wallet and you’re staring at that address thinking, “I’m not sending $2,500 into the fucking abyss.”
So you send a couple bucks.
It arrives.
Cool.
Then you send the rest.
Apparently the attacker basically did the same thing.
“Does this shit work?”
Yep.
“Okay, take $388 million.”
Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. Stealing hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t awesome.
But the fact that the attacker apparently tested the exploit before going big is pretty wild.
Anthropic’s IPO Is Already Trading in Crypto Before the Stock Exists
This is another one of those stories that shows how weird financial markets are becoming.
Anthropic is preparing for a potential IPO that could value the AI company at more than $2 trillion.
Its disclosed infrastructure ambitions are enormous. Anthropic is planning more than $500 billion in future cloud and infrastructure commitments over the coming years.
But Anthropic isn’t publicly traded yet.
That hasn’t stopped crypto markets.
Crypto venues are already offering synthetic pre-IPO perpetual contracts tied to Anthropic’s implied valuation.
These aren’t Anthropic shares.
You don’t own equity in Anthropic.
They’re synthetic contracts allowing traders to speculate on what Anthropic might eventually be worth.
And this is wild to me.
We’re now trading leveraged derivatives on the implied future valuation of a private company before the actual shares even exist on the public market.
If you want an example of crypto moving faster than traditional market infrastructure, there you go.
AI Spending Is Becoming a Bond-Market Story, and That Matters for Bitcoin
The Anthropic numbers connect to a much larger story.
The AI boom requires an unbelievable amount of capital.
Data centers.
GPUs.
Power generation.
Networking equipment.
Cooling.
Cloud infrastructure.
Land.
And companies increasingly have to finance that spending.
Tech-sector bond issuance has already surpassed $200 billion in 2026.
That means the AI boom isn’t just an Nvidia story anymore.
It’s becoming a fixed-income story.
And there’s a potential Bitcoin connection.
If technology companies issue hundreds of billions of dollars in debt to finance AI infrastructure while the U.S. government simultaneously issues enormous amounts of Treasury debt, they’re competing for capital in the same broader bond market.
More debt supply can contribute to upward pressure on yields if investor demand doesn’t keep pace.
So the chain looks something like this:
AI capex → more corporate borrowing → more bond supply → potentially higher yields → tighter financial conditions → more pressure on Bitcoin and other risk assets.
I’m watching this closely because everybody talks about AI spending as though it exists in isolation.
It doesn’t.
Somebody has to finance all of this shit.
And we’re trying to finance an AI infrastructure boom at the same time the U.S. government is issuing massive amounts of debt.
That’s potentially important for Bitcoin.
Vitalik’s Ethereum for 2030 Looks Very Different
Vitalik Buterin is continuing to lay out what Ethereum could look like by 2030.
And increasingly, it doesn’t look like a conventional blockchain where every node does everything.
His roadmap relies much more heavily on recursive STARKs, formal verification, quantum-resistant cryptography, offchain signature aggregation and data availability sampling.
The broader idea is that Ethereum doesn’t need every node to download and independently execute everything forever.
Instead, more work can happen elsewhere while cryptographic proofs allow the network to verify that the work was performed correctly.
Vitalik has suggested Ethereum could eventually reach roughly 4-to-8-second slots with finality in approximately 8 to 32 seconds by 2030.
And after the planned Hegotá upgrade, the transformation toward this proof-heavy architecture could become one of Ethereum’s primary development stories.
This is where blockchain technology starts getting really interesting to me.
We’re moving away from the original simplistic idea that decentralization means every computer needs to do the exact same thing.
Cryptography increasingly allows you to separate doing the computation from proving that the computation was done correctly.
That’s potentially a huge architectural change.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $84,205, up approximately 1% over 24 hours.
Ethereum is around $2,740, up roughly 2.1%.
USDT remains number three.
BNB is around $764, basically flat.
XRP is approximately $1.51.
USDC remains number six.
Solana is around $120.
TRON is approximately $0.335.
Zcash is having a rough day, down around 9% to approximately $1,441.
Hyperliquid is around $88.43, down approximately 1.6%.
Avalanche is one of the stronger movers, up almost 13% to roughly $11.78.
Litecoin is around $68.79, down almost 5% over 24 hours but still up roughly 15% on the week.
There are also some massive weekly movers farther down the rankings, including QNT, SKY and Algorand.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.89 trillion, up around 1%.
Fear & Greed: 69, Greed.
My Take
I’m actually impressed Bitcoin is still sitting at $84,000.
Look at the environment.
Brent crude is around $106 to $107.
The 10-year Treasury is around 5.2%.
The 30-year is around 5.55%.
Markets are assigning significant odds to another Fed hike.
AI companies are issuing and committing to enormous amounts of infrastructure spending.
The federal government continues competing for capital in the Treasury market.
Those aren’t particularly friendly conditions for speculative assets.
And Bitcoin is just sitting there.
That’s why my levels haven’t changed.
$80K to $82K is the floor I want to hold.
Lose $82K and I start watching more closely.
Lose $80K and we’re talking about a different market structure.
But if Bitcoin can absorb oil above $100, Treasury yields above 5%, another possible Fed hike and all of this bond-market pressure without breaking down, that’s meaningful.
The other story I’m increasingly interested in is the contradiction between crypto’s original ideology and what crypto is becoming.
We want permissionless systems.
Until somebody steals our money.
We want censorship resistance.
Until sanctioned governments or criminal organizations use it.
We want decentralized markets.
But we also want institutional capital, consumer protections, regulated tokenized assets and the ability to recover stolen funds.
There aren’t easy answers to those contradictions.
That’s why the NEAR Intents story is interesting.
Maybe the future isn’t completely permissionless or completely permissioned.
Maybe different systems make different trade-offs.
That’s fine.
Just tell me what the trade-offs actually are.
And please let me know what you think. Hit me up in the Spotify comments, leave a rating, or email me at Matt@dailycryptonews.net.
Also, shout out to Sergio Smith for leaving me a five-star Apple Podcasts review. Apparently I have “the best mouth words.”
I’ll take it.
We’re still rebuilding the audience after I decided to stop the show, got cranky for three months and then came back. So if you enjoy Daily Crypto News, pass it along to somebody who might like it.
I’ll see you tomorrow.