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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.

Consensys will separate MetaMask into an independent company, Crypto Briefing reported. The existing entity will keep the Consensys name and focus its business on protocols, developer tools, and blockchain services for institutional clients. The move was led by Consensys Chairman and CEO Joseph Lubin. No plans for a MetaMask IPO or native token issuance have been announced.

PayPal has launched PYUSDx, a developer platform for custom stablecoins, as it expands its blockchain-based stablecoin business. According to CoinDesk, the platform was built with support from fiat-backed token specialist M0 and crypto payments firm MoonPay, and provides infrastructure for issuing custom stablecoins based on PYUSD.

Stablecoin payments infrastructure firm Latitude has completed a $35 million Series A round led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from NEA, Coinbase, Lightspeed Faction and OpenFX. Latitude, co-founded by former executives from Stripe, Uber, Coinbase and Meta, is building infrastructure that helps businesses send fiat in local currencies to users in emerging markets using stablecoins. The company has secured licenses across 45 U.S. markets and plans to expand related licensing into Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Latitude, which currently has 15 employees, said it will use the funding to expand its compliance, engineering and sales teams and accelerate the buildout of its global payments network.

Wintermute, known as the market maker for Hunter Biden’s meme coin LAPTOP, has been selling the token on-chain after receiving 2.5 million LAPTOP tokens, according to Lookonchain monitoring. So far, Wintermute has sold 466,255 LAPTOP at an average price of $4.47, worth about $2.08 million.

The three major U.S. stock indices opened lower today. - S&P 500: -0.28% - Nasdaq: -0.33% - Dow Jones: -0.64%

Ledger is consolidating oversight of its internal IT and security teams as cryptocurrency attacks using artificial intelligence increase, Bloomberg reported. The hardware wallet company appointed former Fireblocks executive Oded Blatman as chief information officer and chief security officer, and Blatman will oversee security, IT operations and enterprise risk management. Blatman said hackers can now use AI to identify vulnerabilities faster and at lower cost, while attacks are becoming more sophisticated and are being carried out at greater scale, making faster security responses necessary.

Kyrgyzstan’s investigative authorities are probing 90 criminal cases linked to the use of cryptocurrencies this year, local media outlet Akchabar reported. Interior Minister Ulan Niyazbekov said cryptocurrencies are being used in cyber fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and the concealment and transfer of criminal proceeds, while funds are difficult to trace as they pass through multiple wallets and mixers. Niyazbekov added that during an investigation last year into an online fraud ring, authorities found information on a Tron (TRX) wallet holding assets worth more than $3 million. The Interior Ministry is also pushing to revise the criminal procedure code so authorities can track the flow of criminal proceeds while pursuing suspects.