Crypto Corner

Friday, 2026-09-25 · covering the last 24h

Market signal

Bitcoin and ether claw back part of Thursday's rate-hike-driven slide. Bitcoin opened Friday at $84,378 and firmed to roughly $85,200 by mid-morning US trade; ether opened at $2,687 (up 0.1% from Thursday) and climbed to about $2,738. The bounce comes a day after both coins posted their worst session in weeks on rebuilding Fed hike odds, with CME FedWatch still pricing a roughly 75% chance of an October move. Yahoo Finance · Fortune

Markets & flows — ETFs, stablecoins & on-chain

Spot bitcoin ETFs post a sixth straight inflow day at $191m; ether funds extend to a fifth at $66m. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in roughly $191m net on Thursday, September 24, led by BlackRock's IBIT at $163m and Fidelity's FBTC at $12.9m, extending a six-day run to about $2.8bn; spot ether ETFs added $66.01m the same day — ETHA $26.8m, FETH $21.5m, Grayscale's ETH mini trust $17.8m — a fifth consecutive positive session. KuCoin · KuCoin

Strategy resumes bitcoin buying while leaning harder into STRC buybacks. An 8-K covering September 14–20 shows Strategy bought 950 BTC for $75.7m (average $79,670), lifting total holdings to 846,000 BTC acquired at an aggregate $63.80bn (average $75,416); the same week it repurchased $174.0m of its STRC preferred stock, more than double the bitcoin spend, with $875.1m left under that buyback program and $1.0bn under the MSTR one. SEC 8-K · Investing.com

Ether's headline staking and L2 numbers overstate fresh demand, CryptoSlate data show. A September 21 snapshot put staked ETH at roughly $120bn and average daily L2 TVL at $40.4bn; the two are sometimes added together to suggest a wall of new capital, but they measure different things — ETH locked for network security versus assets already sitting on L2s — so the combined figure doesn't capture actual new investor demand. CryptoSlate

The industry — exchanges, miners & infrastructure

Update: Bitget hack traced to North Korea, pushing Pyongyang's 2026 crypto haul past $1bn. Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said Friday that Thursday's $351.6m Bitget breach (reported here yesterday) bears the laundering hallmarks of North Korea-linked hackers, with some stolen funds tracing to addresses tied to last year's $1.5bn Bybit exploit, making it the largest single DPRK-attributed crypto theft of 2026 and pushing the year's total past $1bn. CoinDesk separately reports Bitget CEO Gracy Chen now says the breach ran through spoofed transfer authorizations rather than compromised private keys. Bloomberg (paywall) · CoinDesk

Policy & regulation

No material new policy actions in the last 24 hours.

The Chatter

Arthur Hayes (Medium, "Safety First," Sep 22): argues that a slowdown in AI capital spending — which he reads as a sign of weak underlying AI economics rather than pure safety caution — would eventually force governments to backstop credit stress with fresh liquidity, and that liquidity finds its way into bitcoin regardless of which "road" (an AI bust or an AI boom) plays out. Arthur Hayes on Medium

Rekt Capital (X): argues bitcoin remains stuck below its multi-month macro downtrend resistance, still tracing a pattern of lower highs even after reclaiming its 50-week EMA, with daily bearish divergences suggesting the upside so far has kept getting cancelled out rather than confirming a break higher. Rekt Capital on X