US stock market opening: Optical module and storage sectors saw mixed performance, while crypto-related stocks generally declined.

Bitwise has released a report showing that after conducting in-depth interviews with 15 investment professionals at large global institutions responsible for crypto asset allocation, none of the surveyed firms cut their crypto allocations even as the crypto market dropped roughly 50% between Q4 2025 and Q2 2026—with some institutions even increasing their holdings. The report notes all surveyed institutions holding crypto own Bitcoin (BTC). For most, BTC is their first allocated crypto asset, their largest holding, and the one they’ve held the longest. It is generally viewed as a store of value and often used alongside gold as a hedge against fiat currency devaluation. In contrast, allocations to Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) are smaller, with shorter holding periods, and come with exit conditions tied to the underlying tokens’ value capture. Some institutions said they would consider selling these assets if meaningful adoption and use cases do not emerge in the coming years. In terms of allocation scale, crypto assets account for 0.5% to 13% of surveyed institutions’ investable assets, with most concentrated between 1% and 2%. Investment methods include spot ETFs, direct holdings, venture capital, and hedge funds. Additionally, Bitwise states that spot ETFs are transforming how institutions access crypto markets. Almost all surveyed institutions already use or plan to use spot ETFs, primarily due to their lower overall costs, reduced operational burden, and closer alignment with traditional investment products in back-office operations.

According to Coinglass data, as Bitcoin pulled back below $85,000, it fell 1.58% over the past hour, triggering $180 million in total liquidations across the network during the same period. Of the total, $174 million came from long position liquidations, while short position liquidations reached $6.36 million.

According to market data, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to 5.04%, hitting its highest level since 2007. Meanwhile, the U.S. Dollar Index (DXY) climbed to 101, marking its first such level since July 30, with a 0.47% gain on the day.

Fed Governor Barr said further interest rate hikes may be needed to ensure a timely return to the 2% inflation target. The Federal Reserve is in a challenging position but has made adjustments in the right direction. The Fed’s dot plot also reinforced its hawkish message: 16 of the 18 officials expect at least one additional rate hike in 2026, while 4 project two such hikes.

Stablecoin giant Tether’s Tether AI Research today launched QVAC Genesis III, a synthetic training dataset for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, boasting 191.43 billion tokens and covering 159.6 million documents. Tether aims to leverage the dataset to enhance the reasoning and teaching capabilities of small AI models, enabling more AI assistants to run directly on laptops, mobile devices and local servers, thus reducing ongoing reliance on large cloud-based models. Genesis III continues the data trajectory of Genesis I and II, spanning 19 curricula-related domains including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, medicine, electrical engineering and machine learning, with applications targeting high school, university and professional use cases. Tether states the dataset prioritizes training models to explain problem-solving processes, spot flawed reasoning and offer corrections, rather than merely outputting final answers. According to Tether’s disclosed test results, a 1.7-billion-parameter model trained on Genesis III’s option-level data posted a 99.45% valid response rate in relevant benchmarks. Compared with models trained on similarly-sized Cosmopedia-v2, Genesis III delivered score improvements of 28.57, 21.35 and 15.03 percentage points on the ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge and MMLU STEM benchmarks respectively.

Per TradingBeats’ monitoring, a whale address (0xdb09) on Hyperliquid steadily added long positions in SNDK during the token’s late-July price dip. Between July 29 and 30, it purchased 989.8 units at an average of ~$1,013.53, totaling ~$1 million in transaction volume. As of 19:03 on September 23, SNDK has rebounded to ~$1,876.8, an 85% gain from the average entry price of that batch. The address added ~$748,600 worth of SNDK at an average of ~$1,024.51 on July 29, then another ~$254,600 at ~$982.55 the next day—its lowest fill hit $975.53. Including buys from July 27-28, its four-day total new long position in SNDK reached ~$3.63 million, lifting holdings from ~3,124.79 units to 6,353.32 units. On August 4, it cut ~26.55% of its SNDK position at an average of ~$1,287.15. Since the sell price remained below its average holding cost, this reduction resulted in a ~$132,800 loss. The remaining 4,666.55 long units have been held since, with an average entry of ~$1,365.88, a position value of ~$8.76 million, and ~$2.38 million in unrealized profit. Beyond SNDK, the address also holds long positions in SKHY (SK Hynix) and MU (Micron): SKHY’s average holding is ~$148.29, position value ~$8.15 million, unrealized profit ~$1.82 million; MU’s average holding is ~$829.03, position value ~$7.99 million, unrealized profit ~$1.92 million. Combined, the three semiconductor storage contract positions total ~$24.91 million, with aggregate unrealized profit of ~$6.12 million.