U.S. Senate Banking Committee Democrats demand public hearing on prediction markets

South Korean brokerage KB Securities has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Securitize and Optimism to advance tokenized securities for South Korean institutional investors, with plans to use OP Mainnet as the on-chain infrastructure. KB Securities will be responsible for product initiation, issuance and distribution, while Securitize will provide tokenization, fund management and transfer infrastructure, and Optimism will handle on-chain technical support. Securitize reported that its tokenized asset volume exceeded $50 billion as of July 2026. (The Defiant)

Hut 8 has won the bidding for Pyote and Tarbush data centers owned by bankrupt crypto mining firm Poolin in Texas for $140 million, a bid nearly triple the initial base offer of $52 million. The deal still requires approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for New Jersey, with a related hearing scheduled for September 29. Poolin holds roughly $173 million in liabilities, of which approximately $163.7 million is unsecured debt owed to Poolin wallet users. This acquisition will further expand Hut 8’s artificial intelligence infrastructure footprint.

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire posted on X, citing Arc Chain’s official tweet, that just one week after Arc Chain’s launch, its on-chain assets (USDC and cirCTC) have surged from zero to $700 million, while USDC trading volume has topped $7 billion.

Beating AI Express (Dongcha) reports: Google has launched Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS, two text-to-speech models now available on Gemini API and Google AI Studio. Flash TTS focuses on audio quality, character performance, and long-text stability, while Flash-Lite TTS is tailored for high throughput, low latency, and low cost. Both models allow users to design new voice lines directly from text, or replicate personal or authorized voices using a roughly 30-second reference audio clip. Users can control emotion, rhythm, and accent on a sentence-by-sentence basis, and insert sounds such as laughter, sighs, or coughs. They can also generate two-person dialogues directly from a single script. Flash TTS supports 130 languages, while Flash-Lite TTS supports 101. Pricing is lower than the previous generation: through December 31, 2026, Flash TTS audio output costs $9 per million tokens, and Flash-Lite TTS costs $6; the prior Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Preview was priced at $20 per million tokens. Starting January 1, 2027, the standard prices for the two models will rise to $18 and $12 per million tokens respectively.

Japan’s 10-year government bond yield rose by 8 basis points to 3.055%, hitting its highest level since September 1996.

CME Group plans to launch Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Uniswap (UNI) futures on October 19. The standard BCH contract will have a size of 250 BCH, with its micro contract set at 25 BCH. For Uniswap, the standard contract size is 10,000 UNI, and the micro contract is 1,000 UNI.