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A California man, Adam Iza, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for taking part in a 2024 Bitcoin-related kidnapping case, Cointelegraph reported. Iza, his brother and six men from Florida were accused of conspiring to kidnap the parents of a cryptocurrency investor to extort money, then stealing the victim’s Lamborghini and assaulting and detaining the victim. The U.S. Department of Justice said Iza used mobile phones and encrypted messaging apps to coordinate and finance the crime. Iza’s brother and the six other alleged participants also pleaded guilty and are awaiting trial.

Solana-based memecoin issuance platform Pump.fun now supports stock tokens as pairing assets for token launches. It had previously supported only SOL and USDC. The new pairing asset options include stock- and index-based tokenized assets tied to Tesla, Nvidia, Circle, Nasdaq, the S&P 500, Micron Technology and SK Hynix.

According to CoinNess market monitoring, BTC has fallen below $78,000. BTC is trading at $77,945.29 on the Binance USDT market.

The three major U.S. stock indices closed lower today. - S&P 500: -0.48% - Nasdaq: -0.64% - Dow Jones: -0.77%

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged the Senate to move quickly on the Clarity Act. In a post on X, Bessent strongly urged all senators to stay at the negotiating table after returning from recess, reach common ground, and agree to begin floor debate so the legislative process can continue. Bessent warned that failing to do so could send a troubling signal to both U.S. allies and adversaries that the United States lacks the will to lead the future of digital assets and may forgo an opportunity to strengthen national security tools aimed at preventing the misuse of digital assets.

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.