institution

Verona announced the launch of verUSD on X, positioning it as the first stablecoin aimed at AI agents. The project claims that verUSD has secured over $100 million in institutional launch commitments.Participating institutions include Animoca Ventures, Figment Capital, Sfermion, Pentos Ventures, ArkStream, and others. Verona is a company providing on-chain payment and settlement infrastructure for AI agents, and verUSD is intended to serve as a stablecoin tool for value transfer and settlement between AI agents.

The lending agreement indicates that Spark has allocated $210 million in loans to institutions collateralized by Bitcoin, with the related Bitcoin held by the digital asset custodian Anchorage Digital. Institutions can borrow USDC while the pledged assets remain with a qualified custodian.Spark provides the loan funds, and Anchorage Digital manages the collateral through the Atlas platform. Atlas is its automated network that offers round-the-clock margin monitoring, settlement, and third-party services within a regulated custody framework.

BNB Chain announced the appointment of Thomas Chen as Chief Business Officer. This appointment will drive BNB Chain to further focus on institutional, capital, and chain listing market activities.Thomas has deep experience in traditional finance and digital assets, with 15 years of industry experience, including over 7 years focused on team building in the digital asset infrastructure sector, possessing extensive experience in capital markets, custody, trading, and business growth.After joining BNB Chain, he will focus on bringing institutions and capital on-chain, deepening liquidity, increasing trading volume, and enhancing the long-term value of the ecosystem.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Citigroup has reached a partnership with Coinbase, allowing Citigroup's institutional clients (including large multinational corporations) to accept customer stablecoin payments through Citigroup's merchant acquiring services. Coinbase will provide the stablecoin payment channel and underlying blockchain technology, automatically converting stablecoins into fiat currency, with Citigroup acting as the custodian bank to complete the funds settlement.At the same time, Coinbase's payment clients can leverage Citigroup's banking capabilities to receive, hold, and make payments using tools similar to bank accounts. The cash received will automatically be converted into stablecoins and stored in Coinbase, currently earning an annualized reward of 3.75% in interest-like benefits.

Galaxy Digital, a Nasdaq-listed digital asset company, has incorporated $100 million in Sky Protocol interest-bearing savings tokens sUSDS into its corporate treasury and included them in the collateral range for institutional business facing over 1,600 counterparties. Galaxy also purchased an undisclosed amount of SKY.Galaxy clients can use sUSDS as collateral for loans and continue to earn Sky Savings Rate yields during the loan term. The average loan size in Galaxy's institutional lending business is approximately $1.4 billion; the Sky ecosystem's Prime Agent Grove had previously provided a $500 million warehouse loan limit to it.

The cryptocurrency exchange Bitget has migrated institutional client collateral to the over-the-counter custody solution Sygnum Protect of the Swiss crypto bank Sygnum. Client collateral is stored in Sygnum's segregated accounts and is simultaneously mapped back to Bitget for trading, reducing counterparty risk.Sygnum is a digital asset bank holding a Swiss FINMA banking license, and its Sygnum Protect service allows clients to trade on mainstream crypto exchanges while storing collateral off-chain in a bankruptcy-remote manner, supporting the selection of stable, yield-generating collateral. Bitget is the fourth trading platform to access Sygnum Protect, following Binance, Deribit, and Bybit.

According to The Block, the Solana Foundation announced the appointment of Rachel Conlan as Chief Strategy Officer and Jamal Raees as General Manager of Payment Business to expand institutional adoption and payment operations. Conlan previously worked at Binance for three years and held senior management positions at companies such as OKX; Raees comes from Polygon Labs and will be responsible for collaborating with payment companies, enterprises, and ecosystem partners to promote Solana as a global payment infrastructure.The Solana Foundation stated that this year, Solana's stablecoin trading volume has exceeded $50 trillion, the on-chain real-world assets (RWA) scale has surpassed $4.5 billion, and the supply of tokenized stocks has exceeded $620 million.

Bitwise released its first report on "Institutional Adoption of Crypto Assets," based on interviews with investment professionals responsible for crypto asset allocation at 15 large institutions. The report states that during the period from the fourth quarter of 2025 to the second quarter of 2026, the overall crypto market will retract by about 50%, but none of the interviewed institutions reduced their crypto asset allocation, and some institutions even increased their holdings.All interviewed institutions holding crypto assets possess Bitcoin, with most viewing it as a store of value and ranking it alongside gold as a hedge against fiat currency depreciation. The report also shows that the allocation of crypto assets by the interviewed institutions ranges from 0.5% to 13% of their investable assets, with most concentrated between 1% and 2%.

The report believes that if the privacy sector can capture 5% of the offshore wealth market (valued at approximately 11 to 16 trillion dollars), the market capitalization of this sector will reach 550 billion to 800 billion dollars, representing a growth potential of 18 to 27 times compared to the current approximately 30 billion dollars.Ethereum and Solana have both incorporated privacy features into their roadmaps, and a16z has also listed privacy as the most important competitive advantage for 2026.

On September 18, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) granted preliminary conditional approval for the establishment of Catena Trust Bank, N.A. (under construction), a financial institution aimed at AI agents.Once full approval is obtained, the bank will provide custodial digital asset custody, investment management, and trust services under OCC supervision.

Ondo announced that, starting today, approved institutions can mint Ondo Stocks using their existing shares through Alpaca's Instant Tokenization Network. This feature provides institutions with a direct path from existing stock inventories to the on-chain market and is currently live on Ethereum and BNB Chain.Institutions can mint Ondo Stocks using the underlying shares and can also redeem the tokens to reclaim the shares. This physical conversion is built on the Ondo Stocks instant liquidity model, serving as a new pathway beyond cash transactions.

According to CoinDesk, Ripple stated that asset management companies and other commercial projects are preparing to use the Batch V1.1 feature of the XRP Ledger. This feature allows up to eight transactions to be combined into a single operation and ensures that all transactions either succeed or fail in an all-or-nothing manner, avoiding situations where one party completes settlement while the other fails.This upgrade is expected to support Delivery Versus Payment (DVP) transactions, allowing asset transfers and payments to be completed simultaneously, while also enabling exchanges, wallets, and market platforms to directly attach service fees to customer transactions for processing.RippleX Engineering Director Ayo Akinyele mentioned that some projects are already being developed around Batch, and once activated, it will bring related work closer to a production environment. Specific partners and launch times will be announced once plans are finalized. The amendment has received support from 30 of the 35 tracked validators on the XRP Ledger, exceeding the 28 votes required to enter the activation countdown. The countdown began on September 15, and if the validator support rate remains above 80% within 14 days, Batch V1.1 is expected to be activated shortly after September 29.Previously, researchers discovered serious flaws in the Batch V1 signature verification process in February, which could prematurely stop checking signatures under certain conditions, allowing attackers to unauthorizedly include transactions from other accounts. The developers subsequently withdrew the original version. Since the amendment had not yet been activated at that time, the vulnerability code did not run on the live ledger, and no funds were exposed.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin's monitoring, a certain whale/institution that has held ETH for 3 years has taken partial profits, accumulating a profit of 66.45 million dollars, with a return rate of 29%. Three years ago, this whale/institution withdrew and hoarded 112,100 ETH from Bitfinex, which was worth 227 million dollars at that time, with the ETH price around 2030 dollars.As ETH broke through 2600 dollars, it transferred 21,200 ETH from one of its addresses to Bitfinex 2 hours ago, worth 55.93 million dollars.

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas stated that Bitcoin ETFs have advantages over gold ETFs, including the fact that the Bitcoin investor demographic is younger; as the market matures, volatility decreases, and correlation with other assets stabilizes, Bitcoin will attract more large institutional adoption.In addition, Bitcoin ETFs have stronger market enthusiasm and sales resources, with dozens of wholesalers familiar with both the crypto market and traditional investors currently promoting and educating the market, while gold ETFs lack similar promotional strength.

According to relevant statements, the U.S. Department of the Treasury convened global financial institutions to advance economic isolation actions.

According to Bloomberg, Deutsche Bank has announced the launch of a digital asset custody service, planning to provide secure custody and transfer functions for Bitcoin, Ether, and some stablecoins for institutional and corporate clients, with plans to expand to tokenized financial instruments in the future. The service is initially aimed at German clients and is pending regulatory approval.Deutsche Bank is primarily targeting asset management companies, hedge funds, custodians, brokerages, sovereign institutions, and corporate clients, while also viewing digital asset companies as a third target customer group. The report noted that European banks such as UniCredit are also evaluating the expansion of digital asset custody and brokerage services.

Cointelegraph reported that among 22 major institutions on Wall Street, 19 expect an interest rate hike in September, with most predicting a 50 basis point increase.

Bitget celebrates its 8th anniversary, and CEO Gracy has released an anniversary open letter. She candidly stated that a year ago, when Bitget proposed the panoramic exchange UEX strategy, there were many doubts from the outside world, but the team chose to respond with product implementation. She mentioned that the starting point of UEX is to solve the fragmentation of assets, accounts, time, and geography, allowing users to trade high-quality global assets in one stop. Now, more and more leading exchanges are beginning to layout traditional financial trading, and Gracy referred to 2025 to 2026 as the "Year of Multi-Asset Trading."In her letter, Gracy wrote that over the past year, Bitget has transitioned from a "follower" to a "leader in product innovation," successively launching products such as stock perpetual contracts, Pre-IPO, cross-asset unified accounts, rToken, and Hong Kong stock Quanto contracts. Data shows that the peak trading volume of non-crypto assets has accounted for 40% of the platform's total trading volume, with daily trading volumes of TradFi contracts and CFDs both exceeding $10 billion, and the cumulative number of rToken transactions surpassing 3 million.Regarding the next phase, institutional business will become the core direction of Bitget. By the second quarter of 2026, the net asset scale of Bitget's institutional clients is expected to grow by 45% compared to the third quarter of 2025, with the number of core active market makers increasing from 90 to 248. In the future, the platform will continue to optimize trading execution, asset security, and institutional service links. Gracy concluded her open letter by stating, "The pursuit of trading excellence is never complete; it is always in progress. The era of multi-asset trading has just begun."