The US cash bond market will be closed next Monday, while US stock markets and US Treasury futures will trade as normal.

Co-founder of darknet marketplace Empire Market, Raheim Hamilton, has been sentenced to 40 years in federal prison and agreed to forfeit 1,230 bitcoin (BTC) worth approximately $101 million. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, the 30-year-old Virginia man also agreed to forfeit 24.4 ether (ETH) valued at around $60,000, plus three real estate properties. A federal judge in Chicago simultaneously imposed a $5 million fine on him. Prosecutors stated that Hamilton and his accomplice Thomas Pavey operated Empire Market from 2018 to 2020, facilitating over 4 million transactions totaling more than $430 million, including nearly $375 million in drug sales. The pair also sold stolen account credentials, personal data, counterfeit currency, and hacking tools, requiring customers to use cryptocurrency and encouraging the use of mixing services to obscure fund flows. Pavey pleaded guilty to federal drug conspiracy charges last year, and has forfeited 1,584 BTC, as well as interests in gold, three vehicles, and two properties; he is scheduled to be sentenced later this month.

According to Lookonchain’s monitoring, well-known leveraged trader AguilaTrades was liquidated 10 minutes ago, suffering losses on both long and short positions. He first incurred a $331,000 loss from his long Bitcoin (BTC) position, then reversed to a short position only to be liquidated again.

AguilaTrades(@AguilaTrades) got liquidated 10 minutes ago! AguilaTrades got wrecked on both sides! He lost $331K going long on $BTC, then flipped to short and got liquidated.

Flash News from Beating AI: Tesla’s official AI account on X has been renamed Tesla Super Intelligence, with its username changed from @Tesla_AI to @TeslaSI. Earlier, on September 29, U.S. President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to replace "artificial intelligence" (AI) with "superintelligence" (SI), though the mandate does not apply to private enterprises. Musk later publicly stated: "It’s better to call it SI instead of AI." When a X user asked if he would rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, he replied: "It will be changed." Now, Tesla’s account has officially followed suit with this naming convention.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has published an article calling for more small-scale governance experiments at the federal level or the establishment of an innovation sandbox. He argues that putting every reform up for nationwide debate would unnecessarily increase the cost of learning and trial-and-error and slow down the process. Armstrong stated: "Competition is the best consumer protection mechanism ever devised, while government is the only sector structurally exempt from competition." He proposes piloting faster permit approvals, relaxed regulations or different rules in specific areas—such as a 10-square-mile federal land parcel—then measuring the outcomes before scaling successful practices.

Beating AI News Insight: Spanish AI startup Speridlabs has tested a novel AI image generation method. Most current AI image models first generate content from compressed image data before reconstructing the final image, a process that can cause detail loss. Speridlabs sought to determine if skipping this step to generate pixels directly would deliver better results. The team trained an open-source model, Iris-3B, and adapted another existing model to generate pixels directly. They evaluated these models on tasks including low-resolution image restoration and judging object distance in photos, comparing their performance with existing approaches. The results did not show the expected consistent improvement; some metrics were even slightly worse. The direct pixel-generating models also exhibited minor grid artifacts in some test outputs. However, the research confirmed the feasibility of direct pixel generation. Iris-3B scored 0.540 in an image generation benchmark, nearly matching Qwen-Image’s 0.539. Simply removing the image compression step did not give it a clear edge in detail-intensive tasks.