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According to CoinDesk, Franklin Templeton has expanded its "Over-the-Counter Collateral Program" to Bybit, allowing users of the exchange to use their tokenized money market fund shares for cryptocurrency trading. Users can use the shares as collateral to borrow stablecoins USDT or USDC, while the underlying assets continue to generate returns. The relevant shares represent approximately $686 million in net assets.The underlying assets will not be transferred to Bybit but will be held off-chain by the regulated custody platform ByCustody, with their value mirrored in the Bybit trading environment, thereby generating returns while releasing trading liquidity. The shares are issued through the Benji technology platform, which is Franklin Templeton's proprietary blockchain-integrated record-keeping and transfer agency infrastructure, currently paying an annualized return of 3.7% based on the latest 7-day interest rate.This is not Franklin Templeton's first foray into over-the-counter collateral partnerships, as it has previously offered tokenized money market funds to Binance and OKX clients. Sandy Kaul, Head of Digital Assets and Innovation at Franklin Templeton, stated that investors can now use collateral more efficiently across major exchanges and earn returns from it, which is crucial for ecosystem growth. This expansion also reflects industry trends, with platforms like Crypto.com and Deribit allowing qualified users to use BlackRock's BUIDL fund as trading collateral.

NVIDIA (NVDA.O) announced an increase in the stock repurchase authorization scale by $150 billion.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, stating that he attempted to briefly explain the true meaning of the plans for Ethereum that forked after Hegota. Ethereum is no longer just a blockchain; it is a hybrid architecture that combines blockchain with modern cryptography, enabling more powerful features.Related plans include FOCIL, EIP-8288, streamlined consensus, state management, formal verification, memory pool improvements with privacy features, and long-term obfuscation techniques.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, over 90% of the funds exchanged across chains through THORChain are from illicit sources. Yu Jin stated that most of the stolen funds from Bybit last year were transferred via THORChain, which collected nearly 10 million dollars in fees within 10 days; recently, part of the stolen funds from Bitget has also been transferred through THORChain, with its fee income reaching 1 million dollars.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Division of Corporation Finance updated its frequently asked questions document on cryptocurrency assets on Friday, clarifying that token buybacks, network upgrades, and marketing promotions do not automatically make cryptocurrency assets securities. The division stated that announcing a buyback plan for an already functioning cryptocurrency network does not, by itself, make the associated tokens constitute an investment contract; however, for networks that are not yet operational, if the issuer promotes the buyback as a source of returns for holders, this conclusion may not necessarily apply.Regarding the ongoing development issues of cryptocurrency projects after their launch, the document pointed out that once a cryptocurrency system is operational, services used to protect, maintain, improve, or enhance that system and its functions, or to promote network effects, do not fall under the managerial efforts referred to in the Howey test. The existing uses of marketing networks generally do not create profit expectations, and statements regarding future functionalities are similarly true, provided that profit potential is not promoted. The document reiterated that specific judgments still heavily depend on the actual circumstances of each case.This document is based on the interpretive guidance issued by the SEC in March of this year regarding the application of securities laws to cryptocurrency assets, released just weeks after the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate, with regulators continuing to operate under existing laws. Additionally, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission updated its cryptocurrency FAQs on Thursday, stating that futures companies and clearinghouses may invest customer funds in tokenized versions of previously permitted assets, provided that investment and custody requirements are met; regulated companies may use blockchain for record-keeping but must be able to provide relevant records when the blockchain or its block explorer is not operational.

Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou stated that the Bybit team is ready to assist in various ways regarding the recent hacking incident involving Bitget. Previously, when Bybit faced a hacking attack, Bitget provided support.Ben Zhou mentioned that Bybit is currently updating the LazarusBounty platform to assist Bitget in tracking the relevant flow of funds.On February 21, 2025, Bybit experienced the largest hacking attack in cryptocurrency history at that time (approximately $1.46 billion to $1.5 billion worth of Ethereum was stolen, later attributed to the North Korean Lazarus group). After the attack, Bitget quickly transferred 40,000 ETH (approximately $10.5 million to $10.6 million at that time) to Bybit, with the funds coming from Bitget's own reserves, not user assets. This support was an interest-free, unsecured loan with no fixed repayment deadline, aimed at helping Bybit cope with withdrawal runs and replenish liquidity.

On-chain derivatives protocol Derive announced on X that a new governance proposal has been launched on the Derive forum, aiming to increase the proportion of protocol revenue allocated to DRV buybacks to 50%.Derive stated that community members can review the proposal and share their opinions, and the relevant discussion is now open. DRV is the protocol token of Derive, and this proposal involves the allocation ratio of protocol revenue used for token buybacks.

OpenAI announced that it is opening its AI vulnerability detection tool Daybreak to Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation to locate and fix software vulnerabilities before they are discovered by Russian hackers. The news was announced on Wednesday during the United Nations General Assembly by Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine's Consul General in San Francisco, and Sasha Baker, OpenAI's National Security Policy Lead.Daybreak is based on OpenAI's flagship large model GPT-5.6 Sol and can scan outdated systems for weaknesses, verify whether suspected vulnerabilities can be exploited, and confirm whether patches actually close the vulnerabilities before they are released. OpenAI has previously opened the model to cybersecurity agencies in France, Germany, and Poland, where Poland's CERT Polska discovered six vulnerabilities in commercial router software, all of which have been fixed by the vendors.Ukraine's CERT-UA handled nearly 6,000 cyberattacks in 2025, a 37% increase from 2024, with local governments and government agencies being the hardest hit. This opening follows OpenAI's commitment to a $1 billion subsidy program announced on September 3, which is said to expand to "partner countries" in the coming weeks. Jamie MacColl, a researcher at the Royal United Services Institute, told the BBC that Western companies can also gain valuable intelligence from active conflict zones.

According to The Information, citing informed sources, China's National Internet Information Office has launched an investigation into AI companies DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, triggered by Anthropic's allegations that the two companies secretly routed sensitive user data to their servers. Reports indicate that regulators visited the offices of both companies, interviewing executives and employees, focusing on whether sensitive data related to law enforcement, military, and state-owned enterprises has flowed into U.S. servers.The trigger for this investigation was Anthropic's fourth threat intelligence report released on September 10. This 154-page document accuses seven Chinese labs—Alibaba, Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, Z.ai, MiniMax, SenseTime, and Xiaomi—of engaging in what it calls "illegal distillation," which involves using the outputs of large models to train smaller models. Anthropic states that distillation itself is a legitimate practice, but it opposes its implementation through fraudulent accounts. The National Internet Information Office initially summoned all seven companies named in the report, but later narrowed the investigation to DeepSeek and Moonshot AI. Anthropic claims that Moonshot AI routed over 23 million interactions to Claude through 5,380 fraudulent accounts, while DeepSeek generated over 12.1 million interactions within a 14-day window in July.The timing of the investigation is quite delicate for both companies.

According to Chainwire, the crypto travel booking platform Travala and AVA Foundation announced a matching buyback arrangement. Travala will fund the buyback independently and in addition to the existing rewards supplementary buyback from AVA Foundation, increasing the monthly open market buyback amount from 1 times the member rewards to 2 times. The matched AVA purchased will be transferred to a new Travala AVA strategic reserve wallet, which is multi-sig custodial, and Travala commits that the AVA in it will never be sold or transferred out.Under the existing mechanism, AVA Foundation repurchases an amount of AVA each month equivalent to the amount of AVA distributed to AVA Smart members in the previous month and transfers it back to the ecological incentive wallet, with a historical total of 4,824,722 AVA repurchased. The first matched buyback has been completed: the Foundation repurchased 369,881.04 AVA in September, corresponding to the member rewards in August; Travala independently matched and purchased another 369,881.04 AVA, totaling 739,762.08 AVA. The Travala portion has been transferred to address 0x7bed1889c21d9eb3560463c14cd74fe29f2d03b6, and both buybacks can be verified on-chain separately.The AVA transferred to this wallet is permanently locked, with the monthly portion removed from the circulating supply and excluded from the official circulating supply through the AVA circulating supply interface. Travala will submit the reserve wallet address to CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko, and both parties will publicly report the numbers of the two buybacks each month.

ChainCatcher and Nonce jointly hosted the Nonce × GWDC 2026 Innovation Forum. This forum will be held on September 29, 2026, at AT CENTER in Seoul, South Korea, focusing on stock tokenization, Web3 finance, and AI applications.Cyber Prophet, as a co-organizer, will bring AI predictions, event trading, and on-chain finance topics to the live event in Seoul. Cyber Prophet is an AI-driven global prediction market platform built on Polygon, covering probability trading for events in politics, economics, crypto assets, sports, technology, and more, while providing AI decision support, liquidity collaboration, and multi-chain prediction market experiences.The GWDC Korea event is expected to attract 5,000 participants, with guests and institutions such as Sun Yuchen, Microsoft, Bithumb, and Animoca Brands also in attendance. For Cyber Prophet, this live event is beneficial for clarifying the use cases of prediction markets and AI decision-making.

According to a joint alert issued by the Japanese National Police Agency, FBI, ASD/ACSC, BND, and BfV, the North Korean-backed cyber attack organization "WaterPlum" (also known as Contagious Interview) targets job seekers by disguising itself as an AI, cryptocurrency, and NFT company to post fake job listings. This lures job seekers into downloading NPM packages containing malware such as BeaverTail, InvisibleFerret, and OtterCookie, which then steal cryptocurrency wallet information and confidential data.As of July 2026, the organization has infected over 30,000 devices in more than 100 countries and regions worldwide, stealing information from over 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets, with the wallets under its control receiving at least approximately 1.7 billion yen (about 10.71 million USD) in cryptocurrency. The Japanese National Police Agency has discovered and dismantled a "notebook farm" established by local "supporters" for the first time in the country, where North Korean IT laborers remotely control PCs within the supporters' residences to conduct business, with the related amount involved reaching several hundred million yen.The police and FBI assess that WaterPlum and some North Korean IT laborers are under the unified command of the 313 Bureau of the Ministry of Military Industry of the Workers' Party of Korea, with the profits directly flowing into North Korea's national funding pool. The police remind IT technicians and corporate issuers to remain vigilant and avoid executing third-party code in unverified environments.

Strategy is leveraging large-scale buybacks to push the price of perpetual preferred stock STRC back to around the $100 par value, in order to restore its Bitcoin financing capability. From July 20 to September 13, Strategy repurchased a total of 9.96 million shares of STRC, costing approximately $950 million, accounting for about 18% of the trading volume during the same period.Of this, approximately $765 million can be traced back to the sale of MSTR common stock, while about $161 million came from Bitcoin reductions. STRC had previously fallen to around $70 but has recently risen to about $99. Analysts believe that only when the price of STRC approaches or exceeds the $100 par value can Strategy effectively reissue the security and use the raised funds to purchase Bitcoin. However, after Strategy reduced its buybacks, whether STRC can continue to stay near the par value remains uncertain.

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.

According to CoinDesk, documents from the asset seizure order released by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) show that the military branch of Hamas, the Al-Qassam Brigades, suggested in a letter to potential donors not to use Binance for transferring funds, but instead recommended platforms such as Bybit, OKX, Kast, and Redotpay. The letter advised using Tether's USDT stablecoin and the TRC-20 network, which is used to create and manage fungible tokens on the Tron blockchain.The Al-Qassam Brigades stated in the letter: "It is best not to use the 'Binance' platform for transferring support, and do not input any data indicating our official name, to avoid your wallet being blocked, and for your safety (inputting any fictitious data as the recipient); you can transfer through applications like Trust Wallet, RedotPay, OKX, Kast, BYBIT, etc." The organization claimed that Binance "can only be used to purchase currency, and then another application is needed to complete the transfer process."Binance's Chief Compliance Officer Noah Perlman responded that the terrorist organization's suggestion for people to avoid Binance indicates that its control measures are working. OKX stated that the wallet address mentioned in the February 10, 2025 communication is unrelated to them and has been identified by their internal controls as being associated with illegal activities, and related transfers will be flagged and blocked. Kast stated that it has a dedicated financial crime compliance department. The U.S. Treasury noted in its 2026 Terrorism Financing Risk Assessment that organizations such as Hamas and ISIS continue to use digital assets for donations and transfers.

The on-chain trading platform GMX has released a governance proposal to allocate $10 million from the treasury to establish a GMX token market-making fund in the first phase. The fund will use the total chain merged open interest as a reference indicator. When the circulating market value of GMX is below the merged open interest, the focus will be on repurchases; when the circulating market value is not less than the merged open interest, it will shift to providing liquidity.The proposal also discloses the subsequent roadmap, including cross-collateral and cross-margin models, market segmentation, net open interest, RFQ, permissionless markets, Robinhood integration, and a new USDG LP product line, among others. In addition, GMX will initiate GT repurchases and distribute GT airdrops to GMX stakers, with specific details to be announced in future proposals.

User MaxForAI stated that the National Internet Information Office recently reported a case of illegal API relay station. On September 15, the Internet Administration of China announced a batch of internet law enforcement cases, where two websites operated by a technology company in Jiangsu used an API relay station to call multiple large model product interfaces, providing services such as dialogue and Q&A without conducting safety assessments as required, posing content safety risks, and violating the "Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services" and other regulations.The local internet information office ordered rectification, imposed strict penalties on those responsible, and issued a warning. The user mentioned that the above description aligns with the details of the large model relay platform "Zhixin Token" launched by Jiangsu Biying Technology under Suning.com in July this year, which aggregated multiple mainstream large models to provide a unified API service through two service domain names.

Rome-based Physical AI cybersecurity company Exein announced the completion of a new funding round of 234 million euros (approximately 270 million dollars), with a valuation of 1.4 billion euros (approximately 1.7 billion dollars), making it the highest-valued cybersecurity startup in Europe.This funding round was led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, the European Investment Bank Group, KfW Capital, and T.Capital, while J.P. Morgan simultaneously expanded its revolving credit facility.