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Kristin Smith, head of the Solana Policy Institute, said in an interview with Crypto in America that Smith remains positive about the chances of the Clarity Act passing, although confidence has eased somewhat from this spring. Smith added the crypto industry tends to think it can control the process, but that is not actually the case.

World, a Solana-based prediction market project, saw its XYZ website go down after launch as traffic overwhelmed the site, Crypto Briefing reported. World XYZ opened on Sept. 9 and within hours temporarily blocked user access. World said "All funds are safe and the platform itself is operating normally. This outage was a simple traffic issue, not a security problem." Earlier, World had announced plans to migrate to Robinhood Chain, but World XYZ is still operating on Solana.

Former Ripple CTO David Schwartz said XRP could eventually surpass Bitcoin by market capitalization, CoinGape reported. During an X Spaces discussion, Schwartz said such an outcome would come not from a decline in Bitcoin’s value but from XRP rising faster than Bitcoin. Schwartz added that XRP’s price could surge if the XRP Ledger continues to gain popularity, as the network may post stronger technological growth and users may prefer features Bitcoin cannot support.

U.S. fast-food chain Steak 'n Shake said franchise store sales rose 19% this quarter after it introduced Bitcoin payments in May. In a post on X, the company said, "이번 분기 프랜차이즈 매장 매출이 19% 증가했다," and added the decision helped drive the company’s growth.

Crypto-related stocks have risen alongside Bitcoin since the bull market began, but Bitcoin mining companies have posted relatively weak returns, The Block reported. Since Aug. 17, according to The Block, Bitcoin has gained about 22%, while crypto exchange-related stocks including Bullish, Coinbase and Robinhood, as well as stablecoin-related names such as Circle and Figure, posted similar gains. Among Bitcoin miners, only Canaan outperformed Bitcoin over the period. The median return for other mining-related stocks, including Hut 8, Riot, Marathon and Hive, was about 1.8%, indicating muted performance. Core Scientific and TeraWulf, in particular, underperformed Bitcoin by 27 percentage points and 24 percentage points, respectively.

Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC account for about 85% of the total stablecoin market and are nearing a record high level, according to Crypto Briefing. Their combined circulating supply stands at about $257.7 billion, equal to 85% of the total market capitalization of roughly $302.9 billion. Of that total, USDT has a supply of about $183.4 billion and a 60.5% share of the stablecoin market, maintaining a dominant lead. USDC stands at about $74.3 billion, giving it a 24.5% market share.

Hyperliquid Policy Center accused CME Group of undermining innovation and urged a court to dismiss CME’s lawsuit against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to The Block. The center filed an amicus brief backing the CFTC in federal district court in Washington on Sept. 9, local time, after CME sued the CFTC in June over U.S. approval of perpetual futures trading. HPC warned the case could have broader implications and said CME, once a giant of innovation, is now advancing a legal theory under which exchanges are harmed whenever regulators approve new products that incumbent venues chose not to offer. If CME prevails, HPC said, every product approved by the CFTC would invite lawsuits from established players favoring the status quo, slowing the development of the U.S. futures market to an extreme degree.

Bitcoin is moving sideways ahead of a strong resistance zone at $83,000-$86,000, while selling pressure has dropped sharply from August levels, on-chain analytics firm Glassnode said. Glassnode said the market is now trading in a range where lower support has recovered, while upper resistance has yet to be seriously tested. Compared with August, selling pressure has fallen significantly, with sell-side activity down to less than half of its earlier level and long-term holders also slowing sales, according to the firm. At the same time, supply clustered at higher price levels has grown thicker, making a break above $86,000 a key variable for the market's next direction. Glassnode added a close above $86,000 could signal the market has absorbed selling supply, while a renewed rise in selling pressure or a breakdown of support in the $62,000-$65,000 range could undermine the current positive market mood.

Arbitrum’s oversight committee has asked ARB holders to permanently bar three DeFi projects found to have misused grants received under a past DAO incentives program from all future Arbitrum DAO programs, The Defiant reported. According to a proposal posted on the Arbitrum governance forum, the measure would expand the DAO’s response to grant misuse from fund recovery to exclusion from participation. The targeted projects include some that have already left Arbitrum.

Decentralized prediction market Kalshi plans to launch perpetual futures contracts tied to gold and silver, CoinGape reported. The move would expand Kalshi’s perpetual futures offering beyond cryptocurrencies into precious metals.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has proposed EIP-8288 for the planned I-Star upgrade, introducing a mempool designed to hierarchically aggregate STARK proofs. I-Star is the upgrade scheduled to follow Hegota. The proposal uses a structure that aggregates dependency relationships among transactions in the mempool and processes them as proofs. The main goal is to reduce the cost of quantum-safe signatures and privacy transactions, while supporting new signature and proof methods without separately modifying the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

Glassnode said recent gains in altcoins have still lagged Bitcoin’s advance. The report said altcoin market capitalization rose 21% over the past month, but altcoins are not eroding Bitcoin’s market share the way they did at previous peaks. Glassnode added that strong altcoin gains alone do not mean the market has entered a late-stage overheating phase for altcoins. It said the outsized rotation typically seen at past market tops, when capital flows into higher-risk altcoins far faster than Bitcoin’s market capitalization grows, has not started yet. Instead of a market-top rotation from Bitcoin into altcoins, the current rally looks closer to a broad-based rise across the crypto market centered on large-cap coins.

Lido (LDO) captured just 5.7% of net growth in Ethereum staking in the first half of this year, CryptoSlate reported. Although the staking market is expanding, turning that growth into actual revenue and securing funding for automatic LDO buybacks has emerged as a key challenge. CryptoSlate said Lido’s sluggish growth was reflected in Nest, its automatic buyback system. As of 3:00 p.m. UTC on Sept. 8, the cumulative budget in the contract that allocates buyback funds showed a deficit of about $517,024, leaving no buyback allocation available at that time.

About 80% of traders in Hunter Biden-themed memecoin LAPTOP are at a loss, according to Bubblemaps’ analysis of trader profit and loss data. Bubblemaps said 100 traders had posted losses of more than $10,000, 700 had lost more than $1,000, and about 11,000 other traders had also suffered smaller losses.

a16z crypto has unveiled Lattice Jolt, an open-source zero-knowledge virtual machine, or zkEVM, designed to withstand quantum computing attacks. The key feature is its use of lattice-based cryptography instead of conventional elliptic curve-based cryptography. This gives it resistance to quantum attacks while improving proof generation and verification speeds by two to three times from previous levels. It also kept proof data size under 100 kilobytes.

Circle said its Arc mainnet, a USDC-optimized layer-one blockchain, will officially launch on Sept. 16. Through a live launch broadcast, the company plans to unveil Arc and the Circle Agent Stack, while introducing the onchain infrastructure it built to support programmable money, agent-based workflows and global financial applications.

Major U.S. digital asset industry groups have asked a court for a preliminary injunction to block Illinois from enforcing a 0.2% cryptocurrency transaction tax scheduled to take effect next year, CoinGape reported. Crypto lobbying groups the Crypto Council for Innovation and the Blockchain Association filed a joint motion seeking a temporary halt to enforcement, arguing the law could cause irreparable harm to the industry. The Digital Chamber had earlier also sued Illinois to stop the same law from taking effect.

Kraken layer-2 Ink has launched the Charter Foundation, a new support framework aimed at lowering the cost of launching crypto tokens. The launch comes amid a slowdown in token issuance and token-linked venture investment, as rising barriers to token-related deals have pushed many digital-asset investors toward equity-focused structures instead. Crypto market maker GSR and audit firm ChainSecurity are among the Charter Foundation’s partners.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said companies cannot control every financial product created on the basis of their publicly traded shares amid controversy over the company’s stock token business, according to a CNBC interview. Tenev explained, "tokenization" is a way to represent the value of various assets, including listed securities and real-world assets, in digital form on a blockchain. He added holding an asset token does not confer direct ownership of the underlying asset itself. Once a company’s shares are listed, shareholders own transferable property, and other financial institutions should be able to create products referencing those shares without the issuer’s permission, Tenev said. While stock issuers can determine the rights and obligations attached to the shares they issue, they cannot control whether third parties create separate securities based on those shares, he added.

Whale Alert reported that 268,000,000 USDC has been transferred from Coinbase Institutional to Coinbase. The transaction is valued at about $268 million.

The U.S. Department of Justice seized $52 million worth of cryptocurrency in a crackdown on Xinbi Guarantee, a China-linked money laundering network. According to BlockBeats, the DOJ said Xinbi Guarantee operated an illicit scam-services platform through Telegram, providing fraud groups with customized investment scam websites and money laundering services, while also taking part in recruiting trafficking victims in Southeast Asia. Law enforcement also seized Xinbi’s Telegram channel and two crypto wallets holding about $12 million, while imposing usage restrictions on 47 wallets linked to the group. Separately, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the platform as a transnational criminal organization. Earlier, Tether froze about 39.3 million USDT across 10 Tron (TRX) addresses tied to Xinbi Guarantee.

Cosmos has launched a partner network with 17 companies, including BitGo, to support financial institutions adopting tokenization and cryptocurrency infrastructure, Crypto Briefing reported. The network is designed to let banks access the systems needed to build crypto services through a single integrated environment. Rather than adopting custody, compliance, payments and settlement, and know-your-customer services separately, banks can use pre-integrated infrastructure to reduce deployment time and complexity. Cosmos provides its own tokenization suite and digital ledger technology.

Most major holders of Hunter Biden-themed memecoin LAPTOP are newly created wallets, and 60% of them have no prior on-chain activity history, Bubblemaps reported.

Coinbase has expanded support for USDC onchain use for users in Brazil. Brazilian users can now deposit USDC directly through the Coinbase app to earn rewards.

U.S. Bancorp has completed a pilot of its USBDC stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain, testing the full transaction cycle for stablecoins including issuance, redemption and settlement, Crypto Briefing reported. The bank also verified how the token could be integrated with its existing digital infrastructure. USBDC marks the first case of a bank-issued stablecoin being deployed on a public network.