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A survey by the Democratic Party of the U.S. Senate claims that the stablecoin USDT issued by Tether has become a major payment method for Iran. The survey shows that among over 800 sanctioned cryptocurrency wallets, about 84% primarily or exclusively use USDT.The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had previously stated that its review of blockchain records, sanctions lists, and asset seizure notices found that the sanctioned wallets are mainly distributed across the Tron and Ethereum networks and have conducted USDT transactions.

According to official news, OKEx Lite will launch the "Tether USDT Staking Earn Coin" event from September 29, 2026, 15:00 to October 4, 15:00 (UTC+8). During the event, users who purchase ETH can share a total airdrop reward of 400,000 USDT, with a minimum purchase amount of 0.01 ETH.Users can pre-purchase starting from September 28, 18:00 (UTC+8). During the pre-purchase period, users can still earn simple staking interest, while the USDT airdrop rewards will start counting after the event officially begins. Rewards are calculated hourly, and users can redeem their funds at any time; after the event ends, ETH that has not been actively redeemed will continue to participate in the simple staking products.

Israel will implement a "complete blockade" on the West Bank until next Saturday.

According to CoinDesk, Kraken's parent company Payward has invested billions of dollars over the past two years, expanding into futures and derivatives, tokenized stocks, and banking through acquisitions and self-built businesses, aiming to integrate trading, payments, asset management, and institutional services into a unified financial infrastructure.Payward's co-CEO Arjun Sethi stated that the company is not a holding company, but "a set of platforms, a balance sheet, a regulatory framework," with the core being to facilitate the flow of funds and assets between different businesses through "a single ledger."Payward has currently enhanced the U.S. futures and derivatives infrastructure through acquisitions such as NinjaTrader and Bitnomial, and plans to acquire a bank in Europe; its B2B infrastructure division Payward Services currently has at least 25 companies using its API, including Hyperliquid. In the second quarter of 2026, Payward's adjusted revenue was $508 million, a year-on-year increase of 17%.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that synchronizing an Ethereum node now takes only half a day at the fastest, with aggressive settings allowing disk space usage to be below 0.5 TB.EIP-4444 and the client teams' optimizations for snapshot synchronization have significantly improved the synchronization situation. Glamsterdam will further enhance node synchronization, for example, the new synchronization protocol of Nimbus will adopt relevant improvements.

According to official news, Gate has launched the world's first stock event contract, expanding the underlying coverage from crypto assets to traditional stocks, supporting bullish or bearish trades in short cycles such as 5 minutes and 15 minutes.As a flexible and efficient short-term trading tool, the Gate event contract has four core advantages: in terms of risk control, the product features zero leverage and low risk, with no forced liquidation or margin call mechanism, and the maximum loss is limited to the initial invested principal; in terms of rules and mechanisms, the criteria for price rise and fall, settlement standards, and transaction fees are all open and transparent throughout the process; in terms of trading flexibility, it supports closing positions at any time, allowing users to control the pace, lock in profits, or stop losses in a timely manner; in terms of participation threshold, it only requires an investment of 5 USDT to start, helping investors quickly implement short-term strategies.Currently, the official incentive program has been launched simultaneously. The second phase of the Gate event contract limited-time trading competition officially started on September 21 at 16:00 (UTC+8) and will continue until October 1 at 08:00 (UTC+8). The event includes rewards for first trades and consecutive trades for new users, daily trading volume tiered rebates for all participants, and a grand prize for cumulative trading volume leaderboard, with participating users having the chance to win a prize pool of up to 12,500 USDT.

B.AI announced that Xiaomi's latest MiMo-V2.6 series will launch exclusive discounts on September 25 at 15:00 (SGT): MiMo-V2.6-Flash will enjoy a 90% discount, and MiMo-V2.6-Pro will enjoy a 50% launch discount.This series supports 1M ultra-long context and multimodal understanding, covering high-frequency agents and complex reasoning scenarios, helping developers run API calls at a low cost.

According to The Information, although American venture capital investment in Chinese startups has significantly decreased in recent years, some American VCs are still continuing to travel to China to meet with technology founders.Last month, three partners from Founders Fund, which is led by Peter Thiel, visited technology companies in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen: Sean Liu, John Luttig, and Joey Krug.

Samsung Electronics hired former Director of the Foreign Exchange System Division of the Ministry of Finance and Economy, Lee Hee-kun, for its IR team as an executive last month. Lee Hee-kun has held positions such as Director of the Foreign Exchange System Division and Director of the Capital Market Policy Division, responsible for foreign exchange systems and overseas investment responses. In April this year, he participated in the work of including South Korea in the World Government Bond Index and received special recognition. He is expected to be responsible for responding to overseas investors and the global capital market.SK Hynix hired former Director of the Strategic Economic Division of the Ministry of Finance and Economy, Jeong Yu-jin, as the Vice President under the Communications Division last month. Jeong Yu-jin has served as the Director of the Climate and Environment Budget Division, Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs, Director of the Foreign Exchange System Division, and Director of the Foreign Exchange Fund Division. Both companies are advancing production investments in the United States, with Samsung Electronics planning to invest $37 billion to build a foundry in Taylor, Texas, and SK Hynix planning to invest $4 billion to build an advanced packaging factory in Indiana.

On September 17, 2026, the Market Participants Division of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it has issued a no-action position to passive software providers, similar to Staff Letter 26-09, which is now broadly applicable to such providers.The letter states that, subject to several specified conditions, the Division will not recommend that the Commission take enforcement action against any such provider or its related persons for failing to register as a introducing broker or an introducing broker affiliate. This position only applies to those who provide and market software to users for trading with registered futures commission merchants, introducing brokers, and designated contract markets.This announcement came just hours after the sister agency, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), issued an innovation exemption.

On September 17, WEEX Exchange announced an exclusive partnership with Junsheng Academy community, making WEEX the first exchange partner of Junsheng Academy. Both parties will collaborate on investor education in the crypto community, market information exchange, and user services, jointly promoting community ecosystem development. Junsheng Academy (bilibili account: @JunshengTheoryCoin) is a learning and communication community focused on digital asset trading, dedicated to providing community members with market analysis, practical strategies, trading ideas, and technical exchanges, helping traders enhance their market understanding and trading capabilities.

The GLM team disclosed the first engineering practice of recursive self-improvement, completed by the Infra Agent powered by GLM-5.3, which designed, debugged, and optimized the GLM-5.3-Flash inference infrastructure.This practice was completed on a domestic cluster with a capacity of one hundred thousand cards, and the team referred to it as the first recursive self-improvement practice for large models in the country.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin stated that he disagrees with the common view that "AI hackers mean cybersecurity is doomed to fail." He believes that once people clarify their thoughts, cybersecurity naturally leans towards the defensive side, and anyone who continues to hold cryptocurrencies (including himself, with about 90% of his net worth) is implicitly betting on this point.Vitalik stated: If AI can prove the Navier-Stokes equations and Fermat's Last Theorem, it can also prove "this program is secure" as a mathematical theorem, even if the program is very complex. He used the encrypted communication application Signal as an example to illustrate that the definition of "security" is extremely complex, covering forged messages, active interference, server breaches, key leaks, hardware side channels, and more. The definition is smaller and more composable than the attack surface, and verifying whether the definition is sufficient is more feasible than directly scanning the code.He pointed out that historically, failures often occur because only the self-identified critical parts of security are verified while neglecting the rest of the code. Today, the entire program must be verified, including the database, network, and cache layers, which modern AI can achieve. This is not a competition to see who discovers vulnerabilities first, but rather to make the code itself more resilient. Vitalik stated that this is the direction for Ethereum in the coming years; without this step, especially for blockchains with scalability and privacy, there is no future. It is necessary to make the software truly secure, and significant progress has already been made.

U.S. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins stated that decisive action will be taken to provide regulatory clarity for American investors and entrepreneurs, regardless of legislation, and said "stay tuned."Previously, the CLARITY Act faced obstacles in advancing in the U.S. Senate, and CFTC Chairman Michael S. Selig also stated that existing statutory authority will be used to continue advancing the formulation of cryptocurrency asset regulatory rules.

According to the official announcement, Gate announced that it will fully integrate with the Arc public chain on September 16, covering core Web3 scenarios such as Trenches, Gate Wallet, and on-chain market data. Gate's Trenches will exclusively offer 0 Gas transactions, allowing users to view popular and newly issued tokens on the Arc chain, access market data, and participate in trading directly without incurring additional Gas fees. Currently, Trenches supports limited-time Gas-free transactions for on-chain assets on Robinhood Chain, and with the addition of Arc, the 0 Gas coverage scenarios will further expand.Arc is an open Layer 1 network created by Circle for the financial market. This integration allows Gate users to access related assets and liquidity through Web3, wallets, and on-chain trading products, expanding coverage of emerging public chains.