Tag: CRYPTOS FoxBusiness

More than $220 million in crypto positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, with long traders suffering most of the losses, according to Coinglass data.

Bitcoin’s open interest slid 2.20% over the last 24 hours. A fall in open interest alongside a price increase typically suggests short sellers are buying back contracts to close losing positions.

Investor sentiment leaned toward “Greed,” according to the Crypto Fear & Greed Index.

The global cryptocurrency market capitalization stood at $2.96 trillion, up 0.30% over the last 24 hours.

Stocks Extend Losses

The stock market continued its downward trend on Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 131.59 points, or 0.26%, to close at 51,349.9.The S&P 500 dropped 0.16% to end at 7,670.84,while the Nasdaq Composite dipped 0.09% to close at 26,797.54.

Bond yields , while talks aimed at ending the war in Iran made limited progress.

The returns on long-dated 10-year Treasury notes climbed to 5.29%, its highest level since 2007, while the 30-year yield rose above 5.6%, reaching its highest level since June 2002.

Bitcoin Rally Showing Cracks?

On-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant noted that Bitcoin profit-taking has reached its highest level since Dec. 2024, a signal that demand is “fading.”

“The bull market is intact, but the rally is showing cracks. $80,000 is the first support to watch,” CryptoQuant added.

Blockchain research firm Santiment highlighted that wallets holding 10-10,000 Bitcoin accumulated 41,025 $BTC over the past 10 days, increasing their share to 67.93% of the total supply.

However, retail wallets under 0.01 $BTC have remained largely “flat” since the $87,000 price peak.

“The current divergence is encouraging, but it isn’t a guaranteed price signal,” Santiment stated. “That combination has repeatedly appeared before stronger Bitcoin moves.”

Photo Courtesy: Marc Bruxelle on Shutterstock.com

An ETF is a fund you buy and sell like a stock. For anyone who never wanted a crypto exchange account or a wallet, that is the whole appeal: the tokens sit inside the fund, and the shares show up next to everything else in your brokerage app.

The timing is hard to miss, especially conisdering Near has been on a roll lately, skyrocketing since May.

It is not the first spike this year. Near jumped 28% in 24 hours in May on privacy, AI and scaling upgrades, then slid back toward $2 over the summer. Near currently trades for just above $5 at a $6.5 billion market capitalization. To put that in perspective, though, the token is still down some 75% from its all-time high above $20.

What Near actually is

Near is a layer-1 blockchain, meaning a base network that other apps are built on, in the same category as Ethereum and Solana. Its main network went live in 2020.

The AI angle traces to co-founder Illia Polosukhin, a co-creator of the Transformer, the architecture behind ChatGPT-style models. Near launched an AI research lab in May 2024, led by Polosukhin and co-founder Alex Skidanov.

Bitwise’s pitch leans on AI agents, software that takes actions for you, like paying for things or booking a trip.

“We’re moving toward a world in which AI agents increasingly act on our behalf, coordinate with one another, and participate in the economy,” Bitwise CEO Hunter Horsley said in a statement. “We believe this shift—to an agentic economy where more and more happens through AI agents—could unlock an enormous new frontier for the global economy. $NEAR is building a platform for that future.”

Bitwise adds that Near Intents, a service for swapping assets across different blockchains, has handled more than $32 billion in volume.

Bitwise’s fund also stakes tokens. Staking means locking up tokens to help validate a network’s transactions, and in return the network pays rewards, a bit like interest but paid in more tokens. Bitwise says its in-house team will stake the fund’s Near to capture average rewards of about 5%, which accrue to shareholders as a rise in the fund’s value per share.

Nothing about that is guaranteed. Bitwise’s disclosures say rewards can change, and staking carries “slashing” risk, meaning penalties when a validator breaks the network’s rules. The fund also holds only one asset, and Bitwise warns investors could lose a significant part or all of their money.

Bitwise filed Delaware paperwork for a Near fund in April 2025, when the token traded at $2.61. Grayscale followed in January 2026, filing to convert its existing Near trust into an ETF while Near sat around $1.54.

The road got smoother in September 2025, when the SEC approved generic listing standards that let exchanges list qualifying crypto funds without a separate approval for each one. Litecoin, Hedera, and Solana funds followed that October, including Bitwise’s Solana staking ETF.

Bitwise charges 0.75% a year for NRR, or $75 on every $10,000 invested.

Investors later faced frozen accounts and withdrawal problems, according to the agency.

TSAI Allegedly Sold Fake Trading Bots

TSAI allegedly raised at least $2.8 million from 1,715 investors by offering AI trading bots priced between $100 and $500,000. The SEC said the program also offered payments for referring new investors.

The agency alleges the bots did not exist and that deposits were routed into consolidation wallets. Investors seeking withdrawals were allegedly asked to pay additional verification fees or taxes.

The SEC is seeking court orders to halt the alleged schemes, recover investor funds and impose financial penalties. The allegations have not been adjudicated by a court.

Crypto trades around the clock, every day of the year. This has put pressure on the U.S. stock market, which still trades around a weekday session, even as brokerages and alternative trading systems have expanded equity trading well beyond the traditional 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. window.

Both the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq have filed to expand their trading hours, while Robinhood launched its 24 Hour Market in 2023. That service still stops on weekends. Robinhood now plans to fill that gap by offering a selection of stocks and ETFs on Saturdays and Sundays through Bruce ATS, an alternative trading system.

“More assets, and then more hours,” Fatehpuria said, describing Robinhood’s strategy.

Perhaps the bigger break with the traditional brokerage model comes from Robinhood Agents, which the trading platform announced earlier this year.

Customers will be able to create an AI agent inside the app, selecting a model from OpenAI or Anthropic, and give it access to a separate trading account. The agent can analyze markets, build watchlists and trade stocks, options and crypto.

It can eventually do that repeatedly without waiting for a new prompt. A feature called Loops will allow customers to give an agent standing instructions to monitor markets and execute a strategy when specified conditions occur.

As US President, Donald Trump is the only person under federal law who can nominate replacements to fill the empty SEC and CFTC leadership seats. However, the White House has not announced any nominations or intention to nominate additional members to the financial agencies, all of whom were chosen by Trump with the exception of Uyeda, a Biden pick from 2022.

Cointelegraph reached out to the SEC and CFTC for comment on any potential nominations but did not receive an immediate response. A White House official said that Trump intended to nominate members to both agencies “in the near future.“ A CNBC report from Sept. 4 said that White House officials had been vetting four candidates to fill the empty commissioner seats at the CFTC, but did not mention any names.

“Congress designed these boards and commissions to be bipartisan and gave them the authority to regulate some of the most vital and significant parts of American life,“ said Senate Democrats in a June letter to Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, referring to the SEC, CFTC and other departments. “But the Trump Administration appears intent on ensuring that it retains complete control over these agencies, with little interest in working in good faith with Congress.“

Three commissioners regulating crypto without CLARITY

Without full leadership, both financial agencies continue to advance crypto regulation through rulemaking rather than laws passed by Congress. Many in the industry had been pushing US lawmakers to pass the Digital Asset Clarity (CLARITY) Act earlier this month, but the bill failed in the Republican-controlled Senate.

The CLARITY Act was expected to give the CFTC more authority over digital asset regulation in roles now held by the SEC. Without the bill’s passage from Congress, both agencies have announced different ways of interpreting federal laws as applied to token issuers, from the SEC issuing staff guidance on investment contracts to the CFTC specifying how companies could use blockchain recordkeeping.

Market expectations that the Fed will raise interest rates again in October have significantly declined following comments by New York Fed President John Williams. Williams stated that there is “no need to rush” into a new monetary policy step, causing the probability of an October rate hike, as priced in by the markets, to fall from approximately 70% to 50%.

Williams, who holds a key position in the Fed’s monetary policy decisions, said that inflation remains at very high levels and that a rate hike towards the end of the year might be more appropriate. However, she argued that the Fed has had sufficient time to evaluate new economic data following its September meeting.

Williams stated in Buffalo, “With the policy step we took at our September meeting, there is currently no situation that requires us to act urgently.”

US President Donald Trump is considering former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton for the role of “AI Czar,” responsible for artificial intelligence policies. Clayton was the one who initiated the securities case against Ripple during his time as SEC chairman.

*This is not investment advice.

The committee said Monday that it has since received nearly 1,000 documents and five briefings from representatives of Polymarket and Kalshi as it continues examining whether prediction markets have adequate safeguards against traders using sensitive information.

The latest letters extend that scrutiny beyond dedicated prediction market platforms.

For Hyperliquid, lawmakers specifically pointed to a large leveraged crypto short opened before President Donald Trump announced new China tariffs in October 2025. Public blockchain data showed a trader opened roughly $1.1 billion in leveraged Bitcoin and Ether shorts about 30 hours before the announcement and later closed the positions for more than $150 million in profit.

The committee cited the timing as one transaction it wants Hyperliquid to address; it has not established that the trader possessed nonpublic government information.

Comer is asking Hyperliquid for records describing its identity verification procedures, geographic controls and systems for flagging anomalous trades. The committee also wants information on suspicious trading tied to Federal Reserve decisions, elections and geopolitical events.

Crypto.com received a similar request covering its international platform and Crypto.com Derivatives North America. Lawmakers are seeking records on KYC procedures, suspicious activity referrals and internal restrictions designed to prevent employees with confidential information from trading related event contracts.

The committee also sent a request involving PredictIt and Aristotle-related entities, seeking details on identity verification, suspicious trading controls and political event contracts. PredictIt operates political prediction markets under a separate CFTC no-action framework. Aristotle’s exchange entities were acquired by Underdog earlier this year.

The broader inquiry follows several cases that have intensified concerns about the use of privileged information on prediction markets.

In April, federal prosecutors charged U.S. Army Master Sergeant Gannon Ken Van Dyke with allegedly using classified information about the military operation that led to Nicolás Maduro’s removal from power to make roughly $400,000 in prediction market profits on Polymarket. The charges remain allegations, and the case has not resulted in a conviction.

A month later, prosecutors separately charged a Google engineer with allegedly using confidential company data to make about $1.2 million through Polymarket wagers. Polymarket cooperated with authorities in that investigation.

Prediction markets have also been drawing greater scrutiny as they expand into politics, sports, equities and other financial events. The CFTC regulates federally registered event-contract venues, while lawmakers, state regulators and the SEC continue debating where parts of the rapidly growing sector fit within existing financial and gambling rules.

Chainlink is working on a solution that will allow financial institutions to connect their systems and signing infrastructure to SWIFT’s blockchain ledger through the Chainlink platform. Chainlink provides blockchain infrastructure and data services, while SWIFT is a global financial messaging network.

The solution uses the Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) to connect banks to SWIFT’s ledger and manage smart-contract workflows. Banks will keep control of the keys used to approve transactions, while CRE will coordinate operations between their own ledgers and the SWIFT ledger.

This setup is designed to support 24/7 payment workflows using tokenized bank deposits. The deposits remain on bank-owned ledgers, while SWIFT’s ledger coordinates the movement of funds between participating institutions, including outside normal banking hours.

Shevchenko framed the blocked figure against the service’s ordinary business. $NEAR routinely processes more than $100 million in daily volume, he noted, and the refusals were a negligible fraction of it. The screening did not cost the business its flow.

Cross-chain infrastructure has long been treated as structurally unable to stop stolen funds, with no operator to call and no account to freeze. The Bitget flows show the constraint is a choice. A service that takes custody mid-swap, even briefly, can screen at that moment, and whether it does is a business decision rather than a technical limit.

Permissionless, with boundaries

$NEAR markets itself as permissionless, open and uncensorable, and a service that can freeze funds halfway through a swap is doing something most people would call permissioned. Vini Barbosa, a technical writer building at Ramp Labs, wrote on X that permissionless has to mean neutral, and that a rail willing to restrict suspected unlawful users will also restrict people moving money under repressive governments.

Cofounder Illia Polosukhin answered in narrower terms: permissionless means nobody needs permission to own assets, transfer them or deploy contracts. Shevchenko’s phrasing concedes the gap between the two positions. The service will remain “permissionless infrastructure, but with boundaries.”

Institutional users, the buyers every infrastructure provider is now chasing, generally prefer a rail that screens. THORChain argued the other position in public. “A halt is not a selective freeze of specific funds or an individual swap,” the protocol wrote on X. “THORChain is permissionless and doesn’t censor by design.” It asked what responsibility Bitcoin, Ethereum and BNB Chain bear when stolen funds move across them, and noted that the addresses that took $10.7 million from its own vaults in May were never blacklisted either. The answer was the same after the $1.5 billion Bybit theft last year.

While champions of decentralization support the decision, key names from the broader industry has pushed back. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen, whose request THORChain declined, wrote that decentralization “is a design principle, not a shield for facilitating known stolen funds.” OKX founder Star Xu disputed the Bitcoin comparison from the other direction: THORChain’s validators jointly control the assets in its vaults, which makes the network an intermediary rather than a base layer, and the same node operators halted it for 39 days in May when its own vaults were at stake.

At a third layer sit the stablecoin issuers. Circle and Tether froze about $320,000 in USDC and USDT linked to the Bitget breach, a rounding error against the total loss but a reminder that issuer-level freezing remains the most reliable circuit breaker in crypto, because it operates on the asset rather than the application.

The frozen $503,000 has no owner of record

$NEAR is holding the intercepted $503,000 pending a legal and recovery process, and has waived any recovery bounty Bitget offered. Formal requests route through a Kodex law-enforcement portal, the channel where Bitget or investigators would formally claim the funds. Shevchenko’s report does not name who can authorize a release, and it describes no process for a wrongly flagged user to get money back. The screening that produced the freeze operates on estimates with a stated error margin of 10%.

A screen that halts a legitimate transfer, with no published release authority and no remedy, is a service holding someone’s money on suspicion. The securities and payments industries resolved that problem with defined processes, because holding funds without one is a liability in almost every jurisdiction. Crypto’s screening layer has reached the same point without the process.

The first dispute over the $503,000 will test whether the release of those funds follows a rule anyone can see.