Vitalik Sells DHN, FML, and Other Meme Coins, Receives 71.69 ETH

Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure firm Hut 8’s stock rose on Monday, surging more than 14% at one point during the session, after the company announced a 15-year AI data center lease agreement worth $9.8 billion with an investment-grade tenant. The agreement covers the second phase of construction of Hut 8’s Beacon Point AI data center campus in Texas, U.S., adding 352MW of AI computing capacity based on NVIDIA’s data center architecture, bringing the campus’s total leased capacity to 704MW and enabling full commercialization of its 1GW power capacity. Hut 8 said the lease lifts the base contract value of the Beacon Point campus’s initial leasing period to $19.6 billion. Boosted by the news, high-performance computing (HPC)-related stocks rose in tandem: IREN gained around 15% intraday, Cipher Mining rose 11%, TeraWulf climbed 6.4%, and Bitcoin mining ETF (WGMI) jumped 9.3%. Earlier, the AI infrastructure sector had come under pressure amid market concerns over the sustainability of data center investment growth. Recent developments including Chinese firms launching open-source AI models with lower computing power requirements and Meta’s consideration of rolling out an AI computing cloud service have sparked market worries about future computing power oversupply. Hut 8’s long-term lease is viewed by the market as a key signal of sustained growth in AI computing demand, driving a rebound in sentiment for the related sector.

Crypto wallet firm Exodus Movement (EXOD) announced it will lay off roughly 25% of its global workforce to cut operating costs and pivot its business toward stablecoin payments and card payment infrastructure. In a regulatory filing, Exodus stated the restructuring is part of its strategy to build a full-stack payments platform. The company has recently been integrating its acquired entities—e-money institution Monavate and crypto payments firm Baanx—to expand its payment capabilities and global business footprint. Exodus projects the layoffs will generate pre-tax restructuring costs of $2.5 million to $3.5 million, primarily for employee severance and related expenses. Affected staff will receive severance pay, extended benefits, and transition support. The company expects annual cash operating expenses to decrease by $10 million to $13 million once the restructuring is complete, with full savings realized in 2027. On the market front, EXOD rose roughly 2.2% in pre-market trading on Monday, though it remains down nearly 85% over the past year. This adjustment reflects crypto firms accelerating their shift toward stablecoin payments, financial infrastructure, and other business segments.

Prediction market agent platform insiders.bot has officially announced its Token Generation Event (TGE) on the Robinhood Chain. Its token will be named $IN. Insiders.bot is one of Polymarket’s officially authorized trading platforms, and was previously backed by HackQuest and Solana. In addition, the platform has announced partnerships with prediction market-related projects including APRO Oracle and Billioin Live Streaming Platform, and its official roadmap will be launched on the 21st. Official information indicates that insiders.bot is expected to soon complete integrations with prediction market platforms such as Kalshi, World.xyz, Predict.fun, and Limitless.

Renowned trader and chart analyst Peter Brandt has predicted Bitcoin will bottom out on October 4, 2026, in its current market cycle, arguing that investing in the leading cryptocurrency now could yield better returns over the next two to three years than AI stocks. In an interview, Brandt said while precisely timing a market bottom is extremely challenging, he has long stood by this assessment. He believes Bitcoin’s price could still decline further, even dropping below $50,000 to the mid-to-high $40,000 range. Brandt noted all major Bitcoin bear markets in history have seen drawdowns of over 80%. Calculating from the current cycle’s peak of roughly $120,000, in an extreme scenario, Bitcoin could fall to $50,000 or lower. He pushes back against the market’s current view that a bottom has formed around $60,000, explaining that market bottoms typically do not occur during periods of neutral sentiment, but rather when investors panic, trading volume surges, and confidence collapses. On investment choices, Brandt argues AI stocks carry significant valuation risks and may fail to deliver satisfactory returns over the next two to three years. If he had $10,000 to allocate today, he would split it equally: 50% in Bitcoin and 50% in precious metals. Brandt projects Bitcoin’s next cycle peak will hit in 2029, with a target price range of $250,000 to $300,000. He has previously stated Bitcoin could eventually reach $1 million, though the timeline may extend to around 2030.

Cross-chain bridge protocol Allbridge has suspended its Core protocol following a flash loan attack, with the attacker stealing approximately $1.65 million in assets from Solana stablecoin liquidity pools. According to analysis from blockchain security firms PeckShield and CertiK, the attacker borrowed $1.12 million in flash loan funds via Solana lending protocol Kamino, then manipulated the price mechanism in Allbridge’s pools through multiple stablecoin swaps to convert assets at a discounted rate before bridging the funds to an Ethereum address. During the attack, the attacker used thousands of dollars in USDT to obtain around $2.24 million in USDC, then bridged the funds to Ethereum and further dispersed them. It remains unclear whether any of the stolen funds can still be recovered. Allbridge said its team suspended the Core protocol for security reasons and is asking affected liquidity providers to withdraw their funds immediately. The attack caused liquidity pool imbalances, allowing some traders to profit from arbitrage opportunities. Allbridge is calling on these users to return their gains, noting the funds will be used to compensate affected LPs. The team added that user funds face no further risk at present, and will release a detailed incident analysis after completing its investigation, while planning to relaunch the Core protocol with liquidity pools removed. This is Allbridge’s second similar flash loan attack. In April 2023, the protocol’s BNB Chain liquidity pool lost approximately $573,000 due to a similar vulnerability; the project later stated it had recovered most of the funds and adjusted its liquidity calculation mechanism.

HTX Research Head and Lead Analyst Andy Liu recently guested at Huobi’s Expert Lecture Hall, delivering a presentation themed “Q3 2026 Outlook: The New Order of the Crypto Market Amid Global Liquidity Repricing”. He noted that BTC is no longer merely a native crypto asset, but a proxy for global U.S. dollar liquidity. The three core variables driving BTC’s performance in Q3 are: liquidity for direction, ETFs for elasticity, and the U.S. dollar for risk. On Ethereum, Andy Liu highlighted that the current issue facing Ethereum is not whether its ecosystem is growing, but whether that growth can translate into value for ETH. In the medium to long term, Ethereum remains one of the most critical settlement and application infrastructures in crypto. However, in the short term, ETH must re-prove that ecosystem growth can be converted into ETH value. Thus, the core assessment for ETH in Q3 is: regulation for direction, DeFi for elasticity, and fees and burns for confirmation.