Bernstein: Bitcoin's push toward $80,000 is liquidity-driven, with ETF fund flows rebounding.

According to an official announcement, Bitget has launched U-denominated STONK perpetual contracts, supporting a maximum leverage of 10x, with contract trading bots also launching simultaneously.

According to an official announcement, Bitget has launched six stock perpetual contracts: SDGR (Schr?dinger), PATH (UiPath), AGPU (Axe Compute), GNRC (Generac), HUT (Hut 8), and CYPH (Cypherpunk Technologies). The contracts are settled in USDT, support up to 20x leverage, and enable 24/7 trading. As of now, Bitget supports a total of 319 stock contract underlyings.

A former banking official in Hong Kong, China was sentenced to four years in prison for falsifying over $1.6 billion in letters of credit and accepting approximately $470,000 in cryptocurrency bribes, and has been ordered to return all the bribe funds. Defendant Lam Chun-yin, 32, was a client relations manager at China Construction Bank (Asia) at the time of the offense and had pleaded guilty earlier in the District Court. Judge Ernest Lin Kam-hung stated that even first-time offenders require deterrent sentences, especially considering the crime’s severity and social impact. The judge noted that Hong Kong’s banking and insurance sectors are pillars of its economy, and the scheme undermined Hong Kong’s status as a global financial hub. The Hong Kong Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has obtained arrest warrants for other suspects in the case. Separately, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) previously rolled out a framework to assess banks’ preparedness for quantum computing threats, aligning with Hong Kong’s expansion of tokenized deposits, digital assets, and blockchain settlement applications, with the goal of achieving full industry readiness by 2030.

Vietnam plans to issue its first batch of crypto asset service provider licenses in 2026 under a pilot legal framework to advance the modernization of its financial market. Deputy Minister of Vietnam’s Ministry of Finance Nguyen Duc Chi met with Mariana Kuhnel, executive director of Austria’s Financial Market Authority (FMA), in Vienna on September 15 to discuss bilateral cooperation and exchanges on financial regulatory experience. The Vietnam Securities Commission announced the meeting. Vietnam is refining financial regulations to adapt to new asset classes and technological developments, and expects to approve the first batch of digital asset platform operations under the pilot framework in 2026. Vu Thi Chan Phuong, chair of the Vietnam Securities Commission, noted that Vietnam is drawing on recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and regulatory models from EU institutions to design its oversight mechanisms, with a focus on risk management, investor asset protection, and anti-money laundering. Additionally, Vietnam is considering restructuring its stock trading segments, including the SME board, to enhance transparency, improve the quality of listed products, and prevent market and price manipulation. SMEs make up around 99% of Vietnam’s operating enterprises, and the country is updating support policies to boost their governance, compliance, and digital transformation, thereby improving their access to credit and capital markets. The FMA proposed holding expert online technical workshops and strengthening coordination through the International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO), a proposal Vietnam welcomed.

Beating AI News (from Dongcha): Inco AI has open-sourced its local inference engine Splash, which runs Qwen3.8-27B on an M5 Max MacBook Pro at up to 144 tokens per second. LM Studio has since integrated Splash, and version 0.4.25 is available for direct use. Inco’s earlier DFlash technology has been adopted by SGLang, vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and llama.cpp. Companies including Meta, NVIDIA, Xiaomi, and Poolside have also integrated DFlash to accelerate their small models. DFlash works by first having a small model predict multiple tokens in parallel, then submitting them to a large model for batch validation, reducing the computation required for token-by-token generation. Splash extends this optimization to its entire local inference engine. It currently only supports Qwen3.8-27B and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with each model having dedicated GPU kernels, memory configurations, and DFlash 2 small models. While its model coverage is limited, it delivers aggressive performance optimizations. The 144 tokens per second is the peak demo performance on the M5 Max. On the 48GB M5 Pro used by Inco for cross-device testing, Qwen3.8-27B hits 74 tokens per second for a single short-context run; with 4 concurrent runs, total throughput reaches 170 tokens per second, 3.9 times that of the second-place alternative. This is why Splash is particularly well-suited for agent use cases. When an agent launches multiple subtasks simultaneously, total concurrent throughput is often more critical than the speed of a single conversation. Splash is open-source and not tied exclusively to LM Studio. It currently requires an M3 or newer Mac, macOS 26.4 or later, and at least 36GB of unified memory.

EmberCN reported that Garrett Jin, the agent of the so-called "BTC OG insider whale" entity, was able to absorb tens of millions of dollars in unrealized losses from the ZEC airdrop thanks to its massive early BTC holdings. The entity accumulated 100,784 BTC between May and June 2018 at an average price of roughly $7,242; by the same period last year, this position was worth over $10 billion, and funds for subsequent investments primarily came from BTC sales. Over the past year, the entity has engaged in frequent large-scale crypto asset transactions: starting in August 2025, it sold approximately 89,000 BTC and purchased around 900,000 ETH at an average cost exceeding $3,500 per ETH, with these ETH subsequently transferred to Binance in the first half of 2026. In December 2025, the entity went long ETH on Hyperliquid; in early February 2026, as ETH fell from $3,000 to $1,800, its long position of 213,000 ETH (valued at roughly $670 million) was liquidated, resulting in a loss of about $230 million in margin. During the same period, the entity— which had multiple large fund flows with Trend Research addresses— is believed to have provided partial funding to Trend Research; one of Trend Research’s leveraged long positions of 651,500 ETH was ultimately stopped out, incurring a loss of around $734 million. Additionally, from February to June this year, the entity accumulated a total of approximately 289.6 million "Binance Life" tokens via Binance withdrawals and on-chain purchases, worth roughly $150 million, accounting for 28.9% of the token’s total supply. In March, it suffered extreme slippage when converting 50.43 million aEthUSDT to aEthAAVE, receiving only 327.2 AAVE in exchange and losing about $50.39 million. Since July, the entity has been shorting ZEC on Hyperliquid, with current unrealized losses of around $34 million. Compared to its early $10-billion-level BTC holdings, this loss is just one part of its multiple high-value transactions.