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Crypto trader Ali Martinez said BTC could face downward pressure after the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3. Martinez said BTC fell 72%, 65%, 52%, and 27% after the 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022 midterm elections, respectively. Martinez added this did not mean the elections caused the declines, but described it as a notable pattern. If the historical pattern repeats, Martinez said $73K, the average cost basis for short-term holders, could serve as a key support level. Martinez added the price zone has acted as support during major pullbacks in bull markets.

James Comer, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has expanded a congressional investigation into insider trading allegations involving prediction market platforms Polymarket and Kalshi, CNBC reported. Comer had launched the probe in May, requesting materials from Polymarket and Kalshi related to user identity verification, enforcement of geographic restrictions, and the detection of unusual trading activity.

U.S. SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said he wants to push for an on-chain transition of the stock market, former Bitcoin Magazine editor Pete Rizzo said, citing Atkins’ appearance on CNBC.

Aptos (APT) is broadening its use cases beyond financial assets into the real economy, including commerce and payments. As one example, Daehong Communications, an affiliate of South Korea’s Lotte Group, recently launched L.Ticket, a commerce platform offering various event tickets, and adopted Aptos as its blockchain infrastructure. Use cases are also increasing in payments and finance. Dollar-based stablecoin OpenUSD selected Aptos, along with Solana and Polygon, as a founding blockchain partner for OUSD. In the RWA sector, BlackRock’s tokenized fund BUIDL, Franklin Templeton’s money market fund BENJI, and Apollo’s tokenized private credit fund ACRED are also being operated on Aptos, according to the report.

Coinbase Ventures and CMCC Global have made a strategic investment in Raven, a trading firm focused on crypto and prediction markets, CNBC reported. The investment amount was not disclosed, and the company was valued at $90 million before the funding round. Raven provides liquidity on prediction markets including Kalshi and Polymarket by continuously placing buy and sell orders, and has quoted prices on more than 3,000 contracts across sports, crypto, macroeconomics and entertainment.

Strategy founder Michael Saylor said the company plans to grow its BTC-based digital credit business by positioning common stock MSTR as offering greater upside and downside sensitivity to Bitcoin prices, while perpetual preferred stock STRC offers relatively lower volatility and U.S. dollar income. In a post on X, Saylor said Strategy issues and redeems STRC, adjusts its dividend rate, and manages U.S. dollar reserves depending on market conditions. The ultimate goal, Saylor said, is to create financial products that pay dividends using BTC as the capital base. Saylor added that STRC, a perpetual preferred stock with no maturity, does not guarantee principal or dividends.

Bitwise Head of Research André Dragosch assessed Bitcoin’s fair value at $197,000 and analyzed a future shift in Federal Reserve policy as a key catalyst for a full-fledged BTC bull market. Dragosch said recent moves in the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield show the speed of the rise matters more than the level itself. As an empirical risk signal, Dragosch said an increase of around 0.8 percentage point in the 10-year yield over 20 trading sessions is a threshold worth watching. A sharp rise in Treasury yields over a short period could increase downward pressure on risk assets such as stocks, while a deeper stock-market correction could become a trigger for the Fed to change its current policy stance. If a stock-market correction is followed by a Fed policy pivot, the final key condition for a sustained BTC bull market could be met, Dragosch said.

Veteran trader Peter Brandt said Bitcoin may have already passed its cycle low and entered a new uptrend. Brandt said he had initially expected the bear market to end around Oct. 4, but Bitcoin’s roughly $58,000 level in June may have marked the bottom for this cycle. In the short term, Brandt said BTC could retrace to $65,000-$66,000 in early October. As market participants rapidly expanded long positions during the recent rebound on expectations of a bottom, the market could go through a pullback that clears out excessive leverage, he said. Brandt raised his next cycle peak target to $300,000-$600,000 from his previous $250,000-$300,000 range. He said the cycle could peak in late 2029 and that Bitcoin could still reach $500,000 in the current bull market, based on the view that a new bull cycle has begun and that past BTC cycle patterns are broadly repeating.

Nasdaq-listed Ethereum treasury company SharpLink (SBET) said on X it received 406 ETH in staking rewards this week, bringing its cumulative ETH staking rewards to 28,351 ETH.

Bitwise’s spot NEAR ETF is set to begin trading on NYSE Arca today under the ticker NRR, according to the company. The global crypto asset manager said the fund carries a 0.75% management fee and plans to directly stake the NEAR it holds so staking rewards can also be reflected in ETF returns.

Nasdaq-listed Lite Strategy, formerly MEI Pharma, said it held 832,716 LTC worth $57.22 million as of June 30, the end of its fiscal 2026 year. The company said it had purchased more than 900,000 LTC in total with a $100 million investment after adopting LTC as its primary reserve asset in August last year. Lite Strategy added that its end-June holdings accounted for more than 1% of all LTC mined to date. It also said it has run a covered-call program alongside share repurchases using its LTC holdings, and had bought back 6.4 million shares, equal to about 17% of outstanding shares, as of Sept. 22. Since launching the covered-call program, options premium income totaled about $930,000 through Sept. 22. The company said it plans to focus on increasing LTC holdings per share through further buybacks and additional yield-generation strategies.

The South Korean won is the second-most active fiat currency in the digital-asset market after the U.S. dollar, accounting for about 30% of global spot trading volume, Pinboard reported, citing a joint report by RedStone and Kaia. The report said the institutional conditions needed to use South Korea’s deep won liquidity for on-chain lending or as collateral in decentralized finance remain insufficient. It added that net stablecoin outflows from South Korea’s five major won-based exchanges have stayed negative for 18 straight months, with cumulative net outflows reaching 14.92 trillion won ($10.4 billion). The report attributed that trend to delays in establishing a legal framework for won-denominated stablecoins, and said that if they are brought into the regulatory fold, their use could expand beyond payments to DeFi collateral and settlement assets for tokenized securities.

Japan’s National Tax Agency launched its next-generation integrated tax management system, KSK2, on Sept. 24, a move expected to tighten scrutiny of tax reporting tied to cryptocurrency transactions, CoinPost reported. KSK2 integrates individual and corporate data based on My Number personal IDs and corporate numbers, and uses AI to detect improper filings. In that context, tax firm Progo said crypto transactions are increasingly becoming a key focus of AI-based reviews based on annual trading reports from cryptocurrency exchanges, bank deposit and withdrawal records, and CRS data shared with overseas tax authorities. Progo added social media posts about crypto profits could also be checked against actual tax filings.

a16z crypto said blockchain can lower barriers to entry in traditional financial markets by enabling permissionless issuance and global distribution, easing hurdles such as listing reviews, legal frameworks and regional market fragmentation. The firm said perpetual futures, spot decentralized exchanges, prediction markets, lending, memecoins, NFTs and real-world asset tokenization are among the main markets that have grown by leveraging those features. It added that perpetual futures stand out in particular, noting that annualized on-chain RWA perpetual futures trading volume reached $1.4 trillion in July, accounting for about half of Hyperliquid's total volume. Looking ahead, a16z crypto said mechanisms such as HIP-3 and HIP-4, which lower the threshold for launching new markets, could help expand on-chain markets beyond commodities, foreign exchange, indices and 24-hour stock exposure into areas that have been difficult to commoditize in traditional finance, including CPI, computing power, music, social trends and sports.

Bitcoin and gold’s 90-day correlation has approached a record high, but BTC has risen over the past month while gold has fallen, Coinbase Institutional said in an analysis. In a post on X, the firm said similar correlation does not mean similar returns and added it believes fresh buying interest is moving into BTC rather than gold despite interest-rate pressure.

Matt Cole, CEO of Strive (ASST), said the most important variable determining the overall returns of a BTC treasury strategy is the amplification ratio. In a post on X, Cole said an analysis of the company’s internal model showed the amplification ratio explained more than 99% of changes in total returns, while the effect of capital costs was far more limited than the market assumes. Cole said Strive aims to deliver higher returns for common shareholders than holding BTC directly and plans to raise the amplification ratio to more than 60% by year-end. Cole added that doing so would require large-scale fundraising capacity, sufficient liquidity, and sustained investor confidence, while higher BTC prices could raise the amount of capital needed to reach the target and make it harder to achieve. The amplification ratio measures how much preferred stock and debt a company uses relative to the value of its BTC holdings.

Several Bitcoin-related ventures linked to Blockstream CEO Adam Back have been hit by a string of setbacks, including a hack, legal disputes and a collapsed merger, Bloomberg reported. Bloomberg said plans to list BSTR Holdings, a $4 billion Bitcoin treasury company promoted by Back, had fallen through. BSTR had been pursuing a merger with a special purpose acquisition company tied to Cantor Fitzgerald, but the deal was scrapped after the original terms were withdrawn. Cantor said in August that BSTR owed the SPAC $15 million. Exacore, a partner of Blockstream Mining, which was spun off from Blockstream about two years ago, is also facing multiple legal disputes. According to court records and other documents, Exacore has been sued by several companies over mining equipment purchase contracts, electricity bills and construction payments. Liquid Network, the Bitcoin-linked blockchain launched by Blockstream in 2018, recently suffered a security breach in which 4,000 BTC, worth about $320 million, was stolen. The attackers claimed it was a white hat action meant to disclose a security vulnerability and later returned 3,400 BTC, but BTC worth about $47 million has not been returned.

A wallet linked to crypto options trading platform BIT, formerly Matrixport, deposited 1,000 BTC to Binance an hour ago, Lookonchain reported, citing Arkham data. Exchange deposits are typically interpreted as a sign of intent to sell.

Nasdaq-listed CEA Industries, which is focused on investing in BNB, said it will change its name to BNB Standard Corporation effective Sept. 29. The company’s stock ticker BNC and warrant tickers BNCWW and BNCWZ will remain unchanged. The company had earlier held a public vote on X covering four candidate names, and BNB Standard received about 47% of 5,799 total votes. The board approved the new name after reviewing the voting results and community feedback.

The European Central Bank is seeking fintech companies, payment firms and other participants to explore the use of AI agents in digital euro payments, Cointelegraph reported. The experiment will run from January through June 2027, with participating organizations set to develop functions including electronic receipts, multilateral transactions and conditional payments. Workshops planned for the first half of 2027 will cover AI-based payments, micropayments and machine-to-machine interactions. Separately, the ECB is preparing a digital euro pilot project that will run for 12 months starting in the second half of 2027. For that effort, it has already selected 36 banks and payment companies, including Revolut, Stripe and Deutsche Bank. However, issuing a digital euro would still require EU legislation and a final decision by the ECB.

Cboe and S&P Dow Jones Indices said they are exploring cooperation on new products, including tokenized options, as they agreed to extend their exclusive licensing deal for S&P 500 index options by 25 years through 2051. The two companies said on Sept. 29 that the extended agreement could support collaboration beyond existing index derivatives and into new product development. Under the extension, Cboe will retain exclusive rights to offer trading in S&P 500 index options.

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government said it had priced about HK$20 billion worth of digital green bonds under its Government Sustainable Bond Programme. The bonds were issued in four currencies: the Hong Kong dollar, yuan, U.S. dollar and euro. For this sale, the government newly introduced deposit tokens into the primary issuance settlement process for Hong Kong dollar-denominated bonds, alongside traditional settlement methods and a previously introduced tokenized central bank money settlement method.

An anonymous whale deposited 20,000 ETH, worth about $54.66 million, into Bitget, according to Onchain Lens. Exchange deposits are typically interpreted as intended for selling. According to Onchain Lens, the ETH came from swapping 20,040 stETH held by the address through 1inch (1INCH).

Cryptocurrency analyst Benjamin Cowen said on X that Bitcoin closing above its May high is a technically positive sign for the bullish trend. Cowen said BTC rose 20% to 30% within one to two weeks after moving above its 50-week moving average in 2019 and 2023, but the gain has been relatively smaller this time. He said seasonal weakness concerns and rising bond yields are weighing on long-duration assets, including cryptocurrencies. Cowen added that while he had expected BTC to turn weak as the fourth quarter began, it has so far been more resilient than expected, prompting him to revisit that outlook. He said past fourth-quarter weakness was preceded by signs of decline before the quarter began, but no clear signal has emerged this time, and the outlook may need to be adjusted flexibly depending on market conditions.

BTC-denominated open interest has fallen about 20% to its lowest level since March even as Bitcoin has risen 35% from its August low, according to a CoinNess analysis of Glassnode data. Glassnode said Bitcoin is climbing with less leverage in the market, which could relatively reduce the risk of a sharp drop driven by large-scale leveraged liquidations.