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StarkWare stated in an update on September 23 that the estimated GPU computing cost for preparing a quantum secure Bitcoin (QSB) transaction has dropped to below $67, a decrease of about 79% compared to the approximately $320 computing expenditure for the first similar mainnet transaction in August. According to StarkWare, the first QSB transaction was packaged and confirmed on August 26, with the engineering work completed by Tomer Giladi, and submitted directly through MARA's Slipstream service. The preparation process consumed about 3100 GPU hours, utilized around 100 GPUs, and incurred a computing cost of approximately $320, excluding Bitcoin network transaction fees.This cost reduction resulted from the quantum secure Bitcoin optimization challenge initiated on September 16 by StarkWare, Yukon Research, and Eigen Labs. The challenge invited developers, researchers, and AI agents to optimize transaction construction software, ultimately resulting in 62 adopted improvements across two computational tasks required to prepare a QSB transaction, with benchmark tests showing an estimated computing cost reduction of about 79%. The relevant dashboard currently indicates that the estimated cost has further decreased to $66.The QSB proposal was released by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy in April, introducing hash-based quantum attack protection for transactions without altering Bitcoin's consensus rules. Due to limited cost, complexity, and applicability, he described it at the time as an emergency measure while continuing to advocate for adjustments at the protocol level.

The artificial intelligence research organization Epoch AI posted on X: AI is becoming cheaper at a faster rate than any other transformative technology in history. The cost has decreased by approximately 47% each quarter since 2023 at a given performance level.This speed is 4 times faster than DNA sequencing, 6 times faster than computing, 18 times faster than lithium batteries, and 54 times faster than electricity (as of 1973).

According to CriptoNoticias, a court in Costa Rica sentenced two men to 12 years in prison each for money laundering. The case involves the kidnapping and murder of American businessman William Shawn Crichton Kopko in 2018, for which his family paid a ransom of approximately 148 bitcoins, valued at around 1 million dollars.The court found that the two defendants received part of the ransom and deposited it into wallets under their control to conceal the source of the related assets.

A Bitcoin wallet created on November 2, 2011, transferred 100 BTC at a block height of 967732, valued at over 8 million dollars based on the price at that time. The wallet purchased Bitcoin at a price of 3.24 dollars, with a cost of approximately 324 dollars for 100 BTC, resulting in an unrealized return of about 2,469%.On the same day, four wallets created between February and March 2013 transferred 25 BTC each, totaling 100 BTC, into the cryptocurrency custody company BitGo wallet. On-chain characteristics indicate that this batch of Bitcoin originally came from block rewards in March 2013; the miner has been continuously transferring similar amounts of BTC to BitGo in batches since August 2025. The two transfers totaled 200 BTC, currently valued at over 16 million dollars.The new address of the 2011 wallet is a P2WPKH address, which has not been marked by major block explorers as an over-the-counter trader or centralized exchange address; whether the funds transferred by the 2013 miner to BitGo have been sold cannot be confirmed by on-chain information.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost stated that Bitcoin is currently operating above the "active supply cost basis" of $71,300, which represents the average cost of BTC actually circulating in the market and may form significant support.On the other hand, the "capital input cost basis" of $79,800 constitutes resistance, as BTC has previously faced obstacles at this level, with some loss-making positions choosing to exit after approaching breakeven.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) stated that the Trump administration spent approximately $38 billion in the 5 months leading up to the war with Iran. The CBO predicts that the war will drive up inflation levels in the United States, with inflation indicators in early 2027 expected to be 0.5 percentage points higher than previously forecasted.The ammunition stockpiles consumed by the war may take over 5 years to replenish, affecting the United States' ability to respond to other conflicts.

According to data from the London Baltic Exchange, due to the war in Iran leading to a shortage of tankers willing to cross the Strait of Hormuz to load cargo, the tanker leasing costs for the oil industry's benchmark routes have exceeded $1 million per day for the first time.

According to Cryptopolitan, over 100 researchers, using AI coding agents, have reduced the quantum attack resource score for the Bitcoin secp256k1 elliptic curve point addition subroutine by 86.1% (from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion). This optimization only targets a single step in Shor's algorithm and does not break any private keys or transfer funds; a complete attack still requires fault-tolerant quantum hardware that does not yet exist. However, each efficiency improvement compresses the time window for quantum migration after blockchain completion.According to Glassnode data, approximately 6.04 million BTC (30.2% of the circulating supply) face potential quantum risks due to exposed public keys on-chain. Ethereum plans to achieve full quantum resistance by December 2029, while the Bitcoin community faces greater challenges at the governance level, including how to handle approximately 1.7 million suspected dormant P2PK address coins held by Satoshi, which remains unresolved.

Castle Labs released a research report on September 10, comparing the execution costs of the swaps products launched by Variational with traditional perpetual contracts. The report shows that for most trading volumes, Variational is currently the lowest-cost venue among listed assets, with the cost of a $1 million trade in the US100 market being only $47.The report points out that the trading volume of RWA perpetual contracts has grown from less than $1 billion in October 2025 to over $12 billion in August 2026, currently accounting for about 12% to 13% of on-chain perpetual contract trading volume, with a peak in July reaching 20%. As of the report's release, the total open interest of RWA perpetual contracts was $4.9 billion, with TradeXYZ and Variational accounting for nearly 90%.Variational's swaps utilize RFQ execution and the proprietary liquidity provider Omni, with liquidity coming directly from traditional financial partners, and the fees being a holding cost charged once at the daily close, rather than relying on market supply and demand funding rates. Since the launch of the US100, US500, XAU, XAG, and USOIL markets at the beginning of the month, a total trading volume of $3.8 billion has been accumulated, with a peak open interest of $245 million. Currently, swaps have contributed over 50% of Variational's daily trading volume and more than $220 million in open interest.

According to CoinDesk, the latest paper released by researchers from institutions such as Theta Labs, the Ethereum Foundation, and StarkWare shows that the resources required for potential quantum attacks on Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) have decreased by more than 50% compared to the estimates previously published by Google's quantum artificial intelligence team.The quantum circuit design proposed in the study requires only about 1,151 logical qubits and uses approximately 1.3 million Toffoli gate operations to complete the relevant calculations, with a comprehensive score of about 1.5 billion, lower than the approximately 3 billion level previously published by Google.The research primarily optimized the point addition calculation in Shor's algorithm, which theoretically can use sufficiently powerful quantum computers to derive private keys from public keys. Jieyi Long, one of the main authors of the paper and CTO of Theta Labs, stated that quantum attacks are not imminent at the moment, but transitioning to quantum resistance will take years, and remediation cannot be done after an attack occurs.

This week's upcoming release of the U.S. Producer Price Index (PPI) has become a key point for judging whether inflation is re-accelerating. Bitget CFD Chief Analyst Lewis Huang pointed out in a live broadcast that, against the backdrop of 162,000 new non-farm jobs and an unemployment rate holding steady at 4.1%, the demand side in the U.S. remains resilient. If core PPI and service prices continue to stay high, companies may pass costs onto consumers, driving up subsequent CPI and prompting the market to reprice the Federal Reserve's policy path of "maintaining high interest rates for a longer period."Lewis Huang further analyzed two scenarios: if PPI exceeds expectations but CPI remains moderate, it indicates that companies lack pricing power and can only compress profit margins to absorb costs; if both PPI and CPI exceed expectations, it signifies that the inflation transmission chain has reopened, potentially serving as a catalyst for a stronger dollar and U.S. Treasury yields. From a trading perspective, if PPI exceeds expectations and drives the dollar up, gold and high-valuation tech indices like the Nasdaq 100 may come under pressure; conversely, if PPI falls short of expectations and the dollar retreats, it would support a rebound in gold and growth stock indices.Lewis Huang reminded traders that they should not only focus on the first wave of market movements following the data release but also observe whether PPI is confirmed by CPI, the dollar, and U.S. Treasury yields. If the rise in PPI is merely a short-term cost shock, the market impact will be limited; if costs continue to be transmitted to consumers, the market narrative may shift back to "recurring inflation and the continuation of high interest rates."

According to the report "Explosive Growth of Stock Derivatives in 2026: The Landscape of Cryptocurrency Exchanges and Key Trends" released by RootData, the stock derivatives sector has transitioned from "marginal experimentation" to the "explosive growth" phase, with a cumulative trading volume of approximately $17.5 trillion from January to August.In terms of cumulative transaction volume, the concentration effect among the top exchanges remains significant. Among the four exchanges, Binance ranks first with $853.58 billion and a 61.3% market share; Bitget follows in second place with $270.85 billion and a 19.5% market share; OKX comes in third with $234.39 billion and a 16.8% market share; Bybit ranks fourth with $33.41 billion and a 2.4% market share.Regarding liquidity, in the ±2% weighted order book depth indicator, Binance and Bitget together account for over 70% of the stock derivatives order book liquidity. Among them, Binance has an average daily order book depth of approximately $10.1 million, followed closely by Bitget at $4.82 million, with OKX and Bybit at $3.87 million and $1.16 million, respectively.In terms of trading costs, in the recent comparison of weighted spreads for more than a dozen representative popular assets, Bitget ranks first with 0.0144%, followed closely by Binance at 0.0145%, with both essentially at the same level; OKX is at 0.0154%, and Bybit is at 0.0237%.

Vitalik posted on the X platform, expressing the hope to include the recursive STARK memory pool proposal EIP-8288 in the Ethereum I-star upgrade, stating that it can be seen as the next step after Frames.This proposal allows quantum-safe signature data to be placed off-chain, reducing the cost of signatures; the fuel cost for quantum-safe privacy transactions is also expected to drop from about 10 million to tens of thousands. The proposal relies on frames and recursive STARK aggregated transaction dependencies, with nodes sending a STARK of about 100 to 300KB each time period; the on-chain overhead is one STARK and 96 bytes for each statement to be proven.

According to The Block, the Ink Foundation, an Ethereum L2 network under Kraken, has jointly established the Charter Foundation with crypto market maker GSR, law firms Carey Olsen, Renno & Co, Cooley, Fenwick, and auditing firms ChainSecurity, Zellic, among others. The aim is to provide a standardized shared legal framework for crypto projects to reduce token issuance costs. A spokesperson for the Ink Foundation stated that the organization is unrelated to Kraken.Currently, crypto projects typically need to independently establish a "three-entity structure" that includes a research and development entity (Labs), a Cayman Islands foundation, and a British Virgin Islands (BVI) subsidiary for issuance. The setup and independent director fees before the Token Generation Event (TGE) often exceed $100,000.The Charter Foundation aims to reduce the initial legal framework costs for token issuance by more than half by establishing a dedicated Cayman Islands exempt company as the launch structure for each project, with governance involving professional offshore compliance experts. Once the token is successfully issued, the Cayman entity will convert into an independent foundation and separate from Charter, ensuring the project's long-term independence.

According to statistics from The Information, Anthropic has signed at least 14.8GW of computing power in the past 11 months, which can be gradually utilized in the coming years. Based on currently public contracts, the potential total cost could reach up to $517 billion, with most expenditures occurring over the next decade. In addition to the 1-2GW already secured before October last year, the total computing power signed by Anthropic is approximately 16GW.This round of expansion is primarily driven by the demand for Claude. This year, the growth of Claude Code and Cowork has exceeded Anthropic's expectations, prompting the company to focus on acquiring computing power. The new agreement with Amazon provides up to 5GW, while Google and Broadcom offer another 5GW, and Microsoft and NVIDIA provide approximately 1GW. Anthropic has also rented all computing power from SpaceX's Colossus 1, acquiring over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including H100, H200, and GB200.Anthropic has secured about 16GW, with many contracts extending beyond 2030. OpenAI has set a target for investors to reach 30GW by 2030, expecting to invest approximately $750 billion in computing power by that year. The $517 billion figure is the potential maximum cost estimated by The Information based on existing cloud services, chip, and data center contracts, with some computing power potentially being delayed or unused, and some contracts allowing for early cancellation.

Co-founder of Arbitrum Steven Goldfeder and co-founder of Solana Toly engaged in a debate over on-chain transaction fees, MEV protection, and the single sequencer model.Steven stated that one cannot simply compare surface-level fees. Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain actively prevent front-running and most harmful MEV, while some chains that claim lower fees have higher MEV costs, including front-running against retail investors. He expressed a preference for paying clear fees upfront rather than incurring hidden losses from front-running, sandwich attacks, and other issues for the sake of lower fees.Toly countered that Arbitrum currently has a less favorable bid-ask spread and higher fees. The 10% cut taken from transaction fees alone translates to a cost in basis points that exceeds the loss rate from sandwich attacks, which he estimates to be about 10 times that of the latter, not accounting for the impact of the spread. He emphasized, "A single sequencer that pursues shareholder value maximization can never outperform permissionless competition."

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin stated that the Poseidon hash function series, developed over many years, has generated significant practical value in Ethereum and other fields, and will continue to play a role in the coming years.Modern privacy protocols can quickly generate SNARK proofs on the client side, and Poseidon is one of the important reasons for this. Vitalik pointed out that today's general-purpose STARK has achieved extremely high performance, with the proof overhead for almost any batch computation reduced to three-digit levels, and it is expected to further drop to two-digit levels or even lower in the future, a development that has even exceeded expectations from the early 2020s.

On September 3 local time, Tesla held a Cybercab launch event in Austin, Texas, USA. This vehicle is a mass-produced model designed for autonomous driving scenarios, eliminating the steering wheel, pedals, and traditional rearview mirrors, and adopting a two-seat layout, with driving entirely controlled by Tesla's autonomous driving software. The Cybercab was unveiled as a concept car at the "We, Robot" event in October 2024, with the first mass-produced vehicle rolling off the line at the Texas Gigafactory in February this year, and mass production starting in April, taking about 18 months from concept to mass production.The vehicle relies on 8 high-definition cameras to perceive the environment and makes driving decisions through an end-to-end neural network, without relying on lidar and high-precision maps. According to Tesla's data, as of September 2026, the global fleet's cumulative assisted driving mileage has exceeded 22.5 billion kilometers. In terms of energy efficiency, it is expected to travel 9.8 kilometers per kilowatt-hour, with an energy consumption of about 10.2 kilowatt-hours per 100 kilometers. The curb weight is 1412 kilograms, equipped with a 47.6 kilowatt-hour battery pack and a 163-kilowatt motor, with a laboratory range of 673 kilometers. After scaling up ride-hailing operations, the cost per mile can be reduced to $0.2, equivalent to about 0.84 yuan per kilometer.The Cybercab will be showcased in multiple cities such as Beijing and Shanghai starting in mid-September. This exhibition does not involve the sale of the vehicle in China, nor does it represent that Tesla will conduct autonomous ride-hailing commercial operations domestically.

According to the Guangzhou Daily New Flower City report, a man in Guangzhou lent 1 virtual currency to a friend, agreeing to return it two days later. After the other party failed to return it on time, he was sued, with the plaintiff requesting the return of the virtual currency or compensation at market price.The Guangzhou Intermediate People's Court ruled that the relevant virtual currency lending agreement was invalid and did not support the return of the virtual currency or compensation at market price. Virtual currency belongs to online virtual property, and the borrower should still compensate the lender for property losses, ultimately ruling to compensate 199,600 yuan based on the cost price at which the lender purchased the virtual currency.