Good morning everybody.
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. My name is Matt, and I hope you’re having a great day.
Bitcoin is still going sideways.
And honestly, we’re okay with that.
Bitcoin is sitting around $83,700 this morning. The 10-year Treasury yield topped out around 5.29% yesterday and is sitting around 5.26% this morning. The 30-year is pushing toward 5.6%, and the 2-year is very close to 5%.
Oil is finally giving us a little relief. Brent crude was above $100, but this morning it’s back around $97.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin ETF demand remains positive. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded another $66.2 million in net inflows Tuesday, extending the streak to nine consecutive trading sessions. BlackRock’s IBIT accounted for $51.1 million, while ARKB added about $33.2 million and Bitwise had roughly $18.1 million in outflows.
So the basic Bitcoin setup hasn’t changed.
We’re sitting in this roughly $82K to $84K range right now. If we keep holding the $80K to $82K breakout area, there’s still a path back toward $87K and eventually $90K.
But I don’t see much in the macro environment that’s going to make that easy.
Yields are high.
Oil remains volatile.
Inflation remains elevated.
And we’re about to get another major inflation number.
Everything Is Waiting for PCE
The big macro event today happens at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, after I’m recording this show.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis releases August personal income and spending data, including the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the PCE price index.
Economists are expecting headline PCE inflation around 0.4% month over month and 3.7% year over year, with core PCE around 0.3% monthly and 3.3% annually.
That’s the number I’m watching today.
If inflation comes in hotter than expected, it gives the Fed another reason to remain aggressive and could push Treasury yields even higher.
If it comes in softer, maybe we finally get a little relief in the bond market.
Bitcoin has been remarkably resilient considering what’s happening with yields. But there’s a point where rising yields start creating a real opportunity-cost problem for risk assets.
We’re not trading in a vacuum.
Bitcoin is competing for capital with stocks, bonds, private markets, commodities and everything else.
So watch PCE.
Robinhood Is Building an AI Trader, Coinbase Becomes a Clearinghouse and Blockchain.com Wants to Go Public
This is probably the most interesting institutional section we’ve had in a while.
Robinhood is rolling out Robinhood Agents, allowing users to build AI agents that can research markets, develop strategies and automatically execute trades.
And yes, you can turn off the requirement that you manually approve every trade.
Think about that for a second.
We’re moving toward AI agents that can operate around the clock and make financial transactions on behalf of humans.
Robinhood is also rolling out perpetual futures on select crypto products with leverage of up to 10X, while planning to expand stock trading toward a true 24/7 model.
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about AI agents eventually becoming economic actors.
Well, we’re getting there.
The AI doesn’t need to simply tell you what stock it likes anymore.
It can potentially make the trade.
That’s a pretty significant change.
Then there’s Coinbase.
Coinbase Clearing LLC is now a registered Derivatives Clearing Organization with the CFTC.
That allows Coinbase’s clearing operation to clear fully collateralized futures, options on futures and swaps through its own regulated infrastructure.
This is another step in Coinbase becoming something much larger than a place where people buy Bitcoin.
They’re building financial infrastructure.
And Blockchain.com could be heading to the stock market.
The company is reportedly preparing for an IPO that could raise approximately $500 million at a valuation between $4 billion and $6 billion.
Blockchain.com confidentially filed with the SEC earlier this year, and now it’s reportedly talking with prospective investors about going public before the end of 2026.
That’s actually a pretty interesting valuation.
Blockchain.com was valued at roughly $14 billion during the last crypto cycle, so a $4 billion to $6 billion IPO valuation would be substantially below that peak.
And finally, Bitwise launched the first U.S. spot NEAR ETF yesterday.
The ticker is NRR, it trades on the NYSE Arca and charges a 0.75% management fee. Bitwise also intends to stake the fund’s NEAR holdings, allowing the fund to participate in staking rewards.
NEAR has been absolutely ripping lately, so the timing certainly doesn’t hurt.
Washington Is Looking Harder at Crypto Trading While Private Markets Could Open Up
Washington is also asking tougher questions about what’s happening inside crypto and prediction markets.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer has requested information from Crypto.com, Hyperliquid and PredictIt about identity verification, trading surveillance and suspicious activity.
The committee is specifically looking at how platforms identify trades that may involve nonpublic information, including potential trading by employees and government insiders.
This is going to become a bigger issue.
Prediction markets are moving closer to mainstream finance.
Crypto perpetuals are becoming more accessible.
Platforms operate around the clock.
And we’re increasingly creating financial markets around events where some participants may actually possess information that everybody else doesn’t have.
At the same time, the SEC is preparing proposals that could broaden retail access to private equity, venture capital and other private-market investments.
I’m interested in this because I’ve always found it weird that you’re considered sophisticated enough to walk into a casino and put your paycheck on black, but you may not be considered sophisticated enough to invest your own money in a private company.
There are real risks in private markets.
Valuations can be opaque.
Liquidity can suck.
Fees can be complicated.
You can lose everything.
But I think there’s a legitimate conversation to have about whether wealth alone should determine who gets access to certain investments.
We’ll see where the SEC ultimately lands.
The Bitget Hack Has Turned Into a Real Test of Crypto’s Ideology
Yesterday we talked about the approximately $388 million Bitget hack and what happened when the attackers tried to route more than $50 million through NEAR Intents.
NEAR Intents intervened.
Its monitoring systems blocked suspicious transfers and froze roughly $500,000, while about $166,000 reportedly made it through.
Now we have the opposite example.
THORChain refused Bitget’s request to blacklist addresses connected to the attacker.
A hacker-linked wallet subsequently swapped approximately 2,390 ETH worth about $6.3 million into 75.2 Bitcointhrough THORChain.
And THORChain’s position is basically that selective censorship undermines the entire premise of the network.
This is exactly what we were talking about yesterday.
You’ve got two philosophies.
One says:
We’re permissionless and censorship-resistant, but if we identify stolen or sanctioned funds, we have mechanisms to intervene.
The other says:
We built the network. The network works. We’re not deciding which transactions are morally acceptable.
And I understand both arguments.
If somebody steals my money, I’m going to want every fucking exchange, bridge, protocol and blockchain developer on Earth to help me stop them.
Give me my money back.
But if you’re selling your network as uncensorable, then somebody having the ability to decide which transactions are allowed creates an obvious contradiction.
THORChain is taking the harder ideological position.
The question is how well that position survives once governments start looking at a network that knowingly allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in stolen assets to move through it.
That’s going to be interesting.
Privacy Is Becoming a Major Crypto Technology Story Again
Zcash developers are working toward an extremely ambitious goal.
More than 50,000 private payments per second.
Developers have started moving pieces of Project Tachyon into the software used to generate and verify private transactions.
Earlier improvements already reduced some private transaction proof-generation times from more than three seconds to under 200 milliseconds.
The longer-term goal is massive scalability for private transactions.
And Zcash isn’t alone.
zk.money is back.
Aztec Labs has relaunched its privacy wallet roughly three years after shutting down the original version.
The new zk.money operates on Aztec Network, a privacy-focused Ethereum Layer 2.
Balances, transaction amounts, counterparties and transaction histories inside the network don’t need to be published publicly.
Deposits into the system from Ethereum remain visible, but subsequent activity can remain private.
I think this is going to become a much bigger issue as traditional finance moves onchain.
We’ve spent the last several weeks talking about tokenized stocks, tokenized money-market funds, stablecoins, tokenized deposits and traditional financial infrastructure moving onto blockchains.
Great.
But do you really want your bank account publicly visible?
Do you want your salary publicly visible?
Do you want everybody to see what you bought?
Do you want your customers seeing your corporate treasury movements?
Probably not.
If we’re serious about moving large portions of finance onto blockchain infrastructure, privacy isn’t some niche feature for people trying to hide shit.
It’s a basic financial requirement.
And we’re seeing developers increasingly build toward that reality.
Cboe and S&P Dow Jones Indices are also extending their partnership through 2051, with the agreement specifically opening the door to future products such as tokenized options contracts.
Again, this is where everything seems to be heading.
Tokenized stocks.
Tokenized funds.
Tokenized deposits.
Tokenized collateral.
Tokenized options.
Crypto is increasingly becoming infrastructure underneath conventional financial products.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $83,700, basically flat on the day.
Ethereum is approximately $2,686, down around 1%.
USDT remains number three.
BNB is around $768, up roughly 0.6%.
XRP is approximately $1.51, basically flat.
USDC remains number six.
Solana is around $119, also basically flat.
TRON is approximately $0.339, up around 1.3%.
Zcash is around $1,424.
Hyperliquid is approximately $86.81, down around 1.6%.
NEAR continues to be one of the stronger movers following the launch of its ETF.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.87 trillion, basically flat.
Fear & Greed: around 68 to 71 depending on the index, still Greed.
My Take
I’m okay with Bitcoin doing absolutely nothing right now.
Seriously.
Look at the environment.
The 10-year Treasury is around 5.26%.
The 30-year is approaching 5.6%.
Oil has been bouncing around $100.
Inflation remains elevated.
We’re waiting on PCE.
And Bitcoin is sitting around $83,700.
Fine.
Just sit there.
The $80K to $82K area is still what matters to me.
If that holds, then the breakout structure remains intact.
Then I want to see Bitcoin get through $87K.
If $87K eventually becomes the new floor instead of resistance, then we can start seriously talking about $90K and what comes after it.
I’m also fascinated by what Robinhood is doing with AI.
We keep talking about autonomous AI agents eventually interacting with crypto because crypto gives software-native entities a way to hold and transfer value.
Now Robinhood is letting AI agents actually trade for people.
That’s another step.
And the privacy story is becoming increasingly important to me too.
If we’re really moving traditional finance onchain, we can’t have everybody’s financial life sitting completely exposed on a public blockchain.
That’s not going to work.
Privacy can’t just mean hiding criminal activity.
Privacy means I don’t want you seeing my bank account.
I don’t want you seeing my salary.
I don’t want you seeing every payment I make.
That’s normal.
So watching Zcash push toward dramatically faster private payments while Aztec brings zk.money back at the same time traditional finance experiments with tokenized assets makes a lot of sense.
And then there’s BNB.
CZ posted a cryptic “soon” yesterday alongside an image of himself waking up to a giant green candle.
I have no fucking idea what that means.
Maybe it’s just hype.
But BNB Chain itself is excellent. I’ve said that multiple times. It’s cheap, fast, heavily used and has an enormous existing user base.
BNB’s market cap is around $100 billion. Ethereum is several times larger.
So could BNB theoretically triple from here and approach Ethereum’s current market capitalization? Mathematically, sure. That would put BNB somewhere around the $2,400 range if everything else stayed roughly equal.
That’s not me predicting BNB is going to $2,400.
I’m saying the size comparison is interesting.
For now, though, Bitcoin is sideways, PCE is coming, yields remain high and we wait.
Sometimes doing nothing is the story.
I’ll see everybody tomorrow.