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Blockchain

Celestia publishes $1.5 million plan to test sustainable revenue from cheap data availability

Celestia publishes $1.5 million plan to test sustainable revenue from cheap data availability

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 23, 2026·2 min read

Celestia’s TIA token jumped roughly 11% after the network published a $1.5 million phased plan testing whether cheap data-availability blockspace can also generate durable protocol revenue. The proposal has not been put to a binding vote, and its outcome will determine whether Celestia’s low-cost model can scale without collapsing margins the way Ethereum’s blob fees did in 2025.

  • TIA traded near $0.48 on September 23, 2026, up about 11% from the prior 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap.
  • The updated Sustainable Blob Economy package, published September 22, 2026, groups six proposals under a $1.5 million spending ceiling.
  • Celestia’s 30-day average DA cost of $0.0188 per MB undercuts Ethereum blobs at $0.0325 and EigenDA at $0.0363.
  • $0.48 TIA price September 23, up 11% in 24 hours
  • $1.5M total spending ceiling across six governance proposals
  • 55 networks now posting data to Celestia’s DA layer

Celestia’s TIA traded near $0.48 on Wednesday, September 23, 2026, up about 11% from the previous 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap data. The rally followed the network’s release a day earlier of an updated Sustainable Blob Economy governance package. The document asks a question bigger than price: can Celestia keep blockspace cheap enough to attract rollups while turning that usage into steady protocol income.

Celestia Sets $1.5 Million Ceiling For Three-Phase Blob Economy Plan

The forum package groups six proposals under a single $1.5 million expenditure ceiling, with $225,000 earmarked for a feasibility-and-design phase. That figure rises to $825,000 for an implementation-and-integration phase, followed by a $450,000 independent review and pilot-preparation stage. Each tranche functions as a spending cap rather than an automatic transfer, and every phase requires its own separate community approval before funds move.

The package limits what forum backing alone can achieve. Support in the forum sets direction, but it does not execute a community-pool transfer, approve unspecified software, or count as adoption of a formal Celestia Improvement Proposal.

Celestia’s DA Costs Undercut Ethereum by 42% and EigenDA by 48%

Usage data underpins the case for charging more without pricing rollups out. The Celestia Data dashboard, built on Numia’s infrastructure, shows 55 networks now posting to Celestia, with more than 4,100 GB submitted to date. Historical revenue sits near 437,000 TIA, including roughly 6,500 TIA earned over the past month alone.

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Kalshi Klear asks CFTC to permit margin on event contracts

Kalshi Klear asks CFTC to permit margin on event contracts

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Exchange NewsCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 22, 2026·3 min read

Kalshi has asked the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to let traders borrow money to open leveraged positions on its event contracts, a first for a regulated U.S. prediction market. The request, filed Tuesday (September 22) by Kalshi Klear, the exchange’s in-house clearinghouse, would extend Wall Street-style margin to a venue that currently requires full cash collateral on every trade.

  • Kalshi Klear submitted the filing on Tuesday, September 22, proposing a tiered margin system tied to a contract’s settlement date.
  • Kalshi’s annualized trading volume rose from $52 billion to $178 billion over the past six months, giving it more than 90% of U.S. prediction-market activity.
  • Margin would exclude sports contracts and “mention” markets, and would be limited to self-clearing members meeting set capital minimums.
  • 90%+ share of U.S. prediction-market volume Kalshi currently controls
  • $178B annualized trading volume, up from $52 billion six months earlier
  • $945M open interest tracked by DefiLlama across Kalshi’s markets

Right now, anyone holding a position on a regulated U.S. event-contract exchange must back it with cash covering the full trade value. Margin changes that math by letting a trader control a larger position than their own capital would otherwise allow, borrowing against it the way stock and derivatives traders routinely do.

Kalshi Klear Proposes Tiered Margin Tied to Settlement Dates

Kalshi’s pitch, laid out in the filing, is that the all-cash requirement keeps institutional money out of contracts that settle months out. The company argues borrowing capacity would make those longer-dated markets economically worthwhile for large trading firms.

The proposed structure requires leveraged traders to post more collateral as a contract nears its settlement date, tightening the buffer over time rather than fixing it upfront. Sports contracts and Kalshi’s “culture” and mention markets are excluded entirely, according to the company’s filing.

A company spokesperson said borrowing would be available only to self-clearing members that meet capital minimums through a direct relationship with Kalshi Klear.

Coindesk Analysis Finds Repeat-Sized Trades Behind Over Half of Crypto Perp Volume

Kalshi’s headline numbers look formidable on their surface. DefiLlama data puts open interest above $945 million and 30-day off-chain volume above $12.7 billion, on top of the jump from $52 billion to $178 billion in annualized activity.

But a Coindesk analysis of Kalshi’s public trade records found that a handful of repeating trade sizes drove more than half the value on its bitcoin and ether perpetual-futures markets.

Between September 17 and September 20, trades within $2 of $5,499 made up $7.7 million, or 57%, of sampled ether-perp volume, while recurring trades of roughly $2,500 and $5,000 accounted for 54% of sampled bitcoin activity.

The same analysis found recurring fixed-dollar clips in 43 of 46 one-hour samples dating back to June 19, a pattern consistent with automated programs firing predetermined amounts rather than organic institutional flow.

That concentration matters more once margin enters the picture, since leverage would amplify whatever is actually driving that volume, whether it is diversified trading interest or a small number of repeating bots.

Connecticut and Michigan Litigation Explains Why Sports Are Excluded

The margin filing lands amid an expansion that has already pushed Kalshi well beyond simple yes-or-no event bets. It offers leverage on perpetual futures that have done over $44 billion in notional volume since debuting in crypto in late May, and it cleared the CFTC this month to launch gold and silver perps, with filings pending for U.S. equities, copper and foreign currencies.

That buildout, alongside a new professional trading terminal, positions Kalshi as part of a broader push to route institutional capital into onchain and adjacent markets.

Sports contracts are conspicuously absent from the margin request, and the litigation explains why. Connecticut sued Kalshi in August over its labeling of sports contracts as federally protected derivatives rather than unlicensed betting, and a Michigan judge signed an order on September 1 threatening penalties of up to $500,000 a day if the exchange keeps offering sports markets in that state.

New Jersey has taken the jurisdictional question to the Supreme Court, seeking a final ruling on whether the CFTC or individual states govern these contracts.

Kalshi is not alone in courting institutional flow. Rival Polymarket moved in July to secure licenses it would need to eventually offer margin on U.S. event contracts, while Kalshi has expanded abroad through partnerships with Alpaca and Wealthsimple to reach users outside the U.S. and in Canada.

The CCS read. The margin filing matters less for what it grants traders than for what Kalshi is signaling about its own volume base. If a meaningful share of crypto-perp activity is repeating, fixed-size trades rather than diversified institutional flow, leverage would magnify that concentration risk before it attracts the deep-pocketed hedgers Kalshi says it wants.

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Centrifuge tokenizes New York Life’s high-yield bond strategy on Avalanche

Centrifuge tokenizes New York Life’s high-yield bond strategy on Avalanche

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DeFiCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 22, 2026·3 min read

New York Life Investment Management is moving a US high-yield corporate bond strategy onto Avalanche through a partnership with tokenization firm Centrifuge, restricting access to qualified institutional buyers who will subscribe and redeem using USDC. The deal extends blockchain-based fund infrastructure beyond the Treasury products that have dominated tokenization to date, pulling actively managed credit onto public rails from a manager overseeing more than $300 billion in assets.

  • NYLIM, which manages over $300 billion in assets, is tokenizing a high-yield corporate bond strategy with Centrifuge.
  • The product runs on Avalanche, with subscriptions and redemptions settled in USDC rather than traditional cash transfers.
  • Access is limited to qualified institutional buyers, not retail investors, under the terms of the September 17 announcement.
  • $300B NYLIM’s total assets under management behind the pilot
  • Sep 17 date the tokenization partnership was announced
  • USDC stablecoin used for fund subscriptions and redemptions

New York Life Investment Management is taking one of its fixed-income strategies onchain, partnering with Centrifuge to tokenize a US high-yield corporate bond product, according to a report by newsbtc.com. The firms confirmed the plan will run on Avalanche, with qualified institutional buyers able to move in and out of the fund using USDC instead of wire transfers.

This is not a retail crypto play. Centrifuge is supplying tokenization infrastructure around an institutional strategy that NYLIM already manages through traditional channels.

NYLIM Brings $300 Billion in Assets to an Onchain Test

NYLIM oversees more than $300 billion in assets, a scale that puts this pilot well beyond the boutique asset managers that have driven most tokenization experiments to date. Using Avalanche gives the fund a blockchain settlement and ownership layer, while USDC acts as the digital-dollar rail for subscriptions and redemptions.

For institutions, that combination can compress the operational lag between committing cash and holding fund interests, particularly as tokenized products are increasingly designed to settle outside conventional market hours. The structure mirrors the mechanics behind tokenized Treasury funds, but applies them to a materially different asset class, according to the announcement from Centrifuge and NYLIM.

Access Stays Limited to Qualified Institutional Buyers

The product is not open to the public. Eligibility is restricted to qualified institutional buyers, a limitation that matters when gauging how far this tokenization effort actually reaches.

What stands out is the asset type moving onchain rather than the distribution model. Tokenized Treasury products have already become the clearest proof point for institutional blockchain adoption.

High-yield corporate bonds carry a different risk and return profile than government debt, and bringing them onto the same rails signals that tokenization is extending into actively managed credit rather than staying confined to cash-like instruments.

Efforts to route mainstream fund yield through blockchain infrastructure point to a broader pattern of asset managers testing where blockchain settlement adds value without changing who can buy in.

Centrifuge Adds a Major Manager to Its Credit Tokenization Roster

The September 17 announcement adds NYLIM to the group of established asset managers testing how conventional investment products can be issued and serviced on public blockchain rails. Centrifuge has built its business around structuring exactly this kind of institutional-grade tokenization, positioning itself as infrastructure rather than a consumer-facing product.

No timeline for launch, minimum investment size, or target fund capacity has been disclosed publicly beyond the partnership announcement itself. That leaves open how quickly qualified institutional buyers will actually deploy capital into the tokenized structure once it goes live.

The CCS read. The real signal here is not the blockchain plumbing but NYLIM’s willingness to let a $300 billion manager’s credit strategy touch public rails at all. If a high-yield fund settles cleanly in USDC on Avalanche, expect other credit managers to treat tokenized Treasuries as the warm-up act rather than the endpoint.

Neither NYLIM nor Centrifuge has disclosed a launch date, minimum ticket size, or expected fund capacity beyond the September 17 announcement, leaving the pace of institutional uptake as the open question heading into the product’s rollout.

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Spaces launches Trust Anchor for blockchain-verified Bitcoin identities without intermediaries

Spaces launches Trust Anchor for blockchain-verified Bitcoin identities without intermediaries

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BitcoinCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 22, 2026·1 min read

Spaces has launched Trust Anchor, letting wallets and apps confirm human-readable Bitcoin identities such as alice@bitcoin directly against the blockchain instead of through a company-run resolver. Separately, Spaces released version 0.4.2 on September 16, 2026, which puts the protocol’s off-chain issuance system on Bitcoin’s mainnet for the first time, with the handle @bitcoin as its first production operator.

  • The Trust ID credential stays valid for 14 days before a wallet needs to rescan it to add contacts or catch a rotated key.
  • Spaces sells @bitcoin handles at a flat $25 on a first-come, first-served basis, with no revocation, rerouting or recovery once issued.
  • A Princeton study of the earlier Namecoin system found only 28 of roughly 120,000 registered names avoided being squatted.
  • $25 flat @bitcoin handle price, sold first-come
  • 14 days Trust ID validity window before wallets must rescan it
  • $979B Q1 2026 global retail crypto volume, down 11% year over year

Spaces, a protocol that attaches human-readable names to B

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Attacker uses single wallet to steal $1.55M in FET and mint 408.5M NTX tokens

Attacker uses single wallet to steal $1.55M in FET and mint 408.5M NTX tokens

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·4 min read

A single wallet has been tied to both the $1.55 million theft of FET tokens from a SingularityNET-linked bridge and a subsequent mint of 408.5 million NTX tokens, according to an on-chain forensic report. The pairing indicates two separate compromised credentials were exploited in a coordinated operation rather than two unrelated incidents, a distinction that matters for any institution holding exposure to Fetch.ai, SingularityNET or NuNet infrastructure.

  • The attacker drained 8,721,530 FET, worth about $1.55 million at the time, from SingularityNET’s Ethereum-side bridge contract on Saturday (September 19).
  • Twenty-nine minutes later, a NuNet minter key dormant since March 2023 created 408,532,878 NTX, roughly 42% of NuNet’s documented token supply, and sent it to the same wallet.
  • Bitvavo suspended WMTX deposits and withdrawals on Sunday (September 20) and later halted trading, though the forensic evidence does not establish WMTX was compromised through the same mechanism.
  • $1.55M value of FET drained from the bridge contract in one transaction
  • 408.5M NTX minted, equal to about 42% of NuNet’s supply
  • 547.89 ETH attacker’s holdings by 1:10 UTC Sept. 20, worth roughly $1.44 million

The attack emptied TokenConversionManagerV3, the legitimate Ethereum-side lock-and-release component of SingularityNET’s bridge, according to an on-chain forensic report prepared by Athena and first detailed by CryptoSlate. Fetch.ai subsequently paused its AGIX-to-FET conversion service and Ethereum-side bridge contract as a precaution.

Fetch.ai said the affected infrastructure belonged to SingularityNET, primarily its Ethereum-Cardano bridge. The company’s own contracts and standard FET transfers kept operating throughout.

NuNet Minter Sends 408.5 Million NTX to the Same Wallet That Received Stolen FET

Investigators found that the FET loss traced to a compromised backend authorization key rather than a flaw allowing an attacker to bypass the bridge contract itself. The withdrawal transaction carried a valid signature from the address the contract was configured to trust, letting its conversionIn function release the full FET balance to an attacker-controlled wallet.

The NuNet activity supplied the strongest link tying the two thefts to one operation. At 20:50 UTC, 29 minutes after the FET withdrawal, the dormant minter key created 408,532,878 NTX and sent the entire batch to the wallet that had just received the stolen FET.

A later forensic pass pushed the timeline earlier still. At 19:36 UTC, 45 minutes before the FET drain, the NuNet minter sent 0.3667 ETH directly to the eventual receiving wallet, while a separate attacker-linked account moved 24.3 million NTX into it, and NTX sales through MetaMask’s swap infrastructure had already begun.

Uncapped Conversion Function Let Attacker Withdraw 8.72 Million FET in One Transaction

The contract’s own design amplified the damage once the key was compromised. Its 1 million FET transaction cap applied only to tokens moving out of Ethereum and was never enforced on conversionIn, letting the attacker withdraw all 8.72 million FET at once instead of in capped increments.

The signed authorization message also failed to bind a specific recipient, meaning a valid signature could redirect funds to any address the caller chose.

Liquidity constraints then shaped how much value the attacker could extract.

The stolen FET was swapped largely into Ethereum, while more than 217 million of the newly minted NTX was sold through decentralized venues before pools thinned; four later sales of 38.55 million NTX combined added only about 0.30 ETH, and a 10 million NTX transaction routed through Mayan Protocol produced roughly 940 USDT.

Bitvavo Halts WMTX Trading While Credentials Remain Unrotated

Bitvavo suspended WMTX deposits and withdrawals on Sunday (September 20) citing an active security incident, then temporarily halted trading, while telling customers their balances remained safe. Historical SingularityNET material shows WMTX shares infrastructure with FET and NTX through the Ethereum-Cardano bridge ecosystem, but the forensic report examined only the FET and NTX activity in detail.

Roughly five hours after the attack, the report’s first tracking window found the compromised FET bridge authorizer and NuNet minter credentials had still not been rotated or revoked. By then the FET bridge itself was empty and inactive.

That leaves a narrow but consequential window open. Refilling the FET conversion contract while the same authorizer stays trusted risks exposing fresh liquidity to another signed withdrawal, and NuNet faces a parallel risk as long as the compromised wallet retains minting authority.

The CCS read. The real exposure here sits with anyone treating AI-agent token bridges as fungible custody infrastructure rather than distinct trust boundaries. NTX holders absorbed dilution equal to nearly half the prior supply before any exchange froze trading, while WMTX got caught by association rather than evidence. Institutions building positions across the Fetch.ai, SingularityNET and NuNet complex should be pricing each bridge’s key-management practices separately, not as a single ASI Alliance risk.

Fetch.ai has not said when AGIX-to-FET conversions or its Ethereum-side bridge will resume, and Bitvavo has said WMTX trading and transfers stay restricted until it completes its own assessment. Whether either team has rotated the compromised authorizer and minter keys since the report’s five-hour snapshot remains the next verifiable marker for institutions tracking the affected infrastructure.

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Fairshake deploys $30 million to oust Sherrod Brown over CLARITY Act stall

Fairshake deploys $30 million to oust Sherrod Brown over CLARITY Act stall

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Legal & CrimeCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·3 min read

Fairshake, the crypto industry’s largest political action committee, has earmarked $30 million to defeat Sherrod Brown’s bid to reclaim his Ohio Senate seat, tying the spending directly to the CLARITY Act’s failed cloture vote. For institutional investors, the move signals that U.S. market structure legislation now rides on midterm election results rather than a lame-duck Congress, with Fairshake still holding roughly $130 million to enforce that outcome.

  • Fairshake has committed $30 million against Brown, a plan first reported by the New York Times and confirmed by journalist Eleanor Terrett.
  • Crypto interests spent more than $40 million against Brown in Ohio during the 2024 cycle, four times any other Senate race that year, per the Associated Press.
  • Fairshake opened 2026 with about $193 million and still held roughly $130 million as of August, funded almost entirely by Coinbase, Ripple and Andreessen Horowitz.
  • $30M Fairshake’s new earmark against Brown versus its $130M reserve
  • $517M crypto, AI and betting corporate spending this cycle versus $461M in all of 2024
  • 60 votes needed for CLARITY Act cloture, which the bill failed to reach

Fairshake is preparing its most aggressive campaign yet against a sitting or former lawmaker, according to a report from Cryptopolitan. The PAC confirmed the $30 million figure to Terrett, citing a Fairshake spokesperson, and the effort has been described as a “revenge spend.” The trigger is Democrats’ role in stalling the CLARITY Act, the industry’s top legislative priority for digital asset market structure.

Brown’s Return Threatens the Senate Banking Committee Gavel

A Brown win would go beyond an Ohio seat. It could restore his seniority and put him back in line for the gavel of the Senate Banking Committee, a post he held from 2021 to 2025.

During that tenure Brown slowed crypto-related legislation to a pace that frustrated industry lobbyists, a record Fairshake is now campaigning against directly. Politico reported in May that Brown lacks a direct path back to that seniority, since Senate Democratic rules tie standing to a member’s current entry into the party conference.

Restoring it would require the caucus to carve out an exception.

Brown is running against Republican Sen. Jon Husted, who took the seat when JD Vance became vice president. Husted faces his own headwinds, as anti-data center lobbyists ramp up spending tying him to unpopular AI infrastructure sites.

Bernie Moreno’s 2024 Win Set the Template for Ohio Spending

This is a rematch. Crypto interests poured more than $40 million into Ohio during the 2024 cycle, a sum the Associated Press said was four times what the industry spent in any other Senate race that year. Republican Bernie Moreno won with more than $230 million in outside backing against $154 million for Brown, and Brown lost 46% to 50%.

Senate GOP campaign arm chair Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina credited the industry directly for the result at a blockchain event, per the Associated Press.

Thank you to all of y’all for getting rid of Sherrod Brown. Literally, the industry put Bernie Moreno in the Senate.

Sen. Tim Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee

Brown has since softened his rhetoric. Campaign manager Patrick Eisenhauer told Politico that Brown “recognizes that cryptocurrency is a part of America’s economy” and would “keep an open mind.”

The shift has not moved advocacy group Stand With Crypto, which still ranks Brown “strongly against crypto.”

Corporate Political Spending Tops $517M Ahead of November 3

Fairshake’s war chest sits inside a broader surge. Crypto, AI and online betting firms account for at least $517 million in corporate election spending this cycle, according to Public Citizen data cited by Cryptopolitan, already surpassing the $461 million corporations spent across all of the 2024 cycle.

President Donald Trump has said he will deploy his $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC to protect vulnerable Republicans, adding a third major funding stream to the midterms.

The stakes trace back to September 15, when the CLARITY Act’s cloture vote failed to reach the 60 votes needed to advance, a setback we covered in The CLARITY Act’s Window Is Closing. That failure, following the bill’s earlier progress detailed in our committee-passage coverage, is what converted a policy fight into an election-spending campaign.

The CCS read. Fairshake’s spending pattern tells institutional allocators more than any Washington vote count. A PAC willing to commit a quarter of its reserves to one Senate race, after already outspending every other 2024 contest fourfold in the same state, is betting that Congress, not the SEC or CFTC, will end up writing crypto’s rulebook. That bet is now the clearest signal of where regulatory clarity actually gets decided.

Ohio voters decide the race on November 3, and the outcome will determine whether the CLARITY Act gets revived in the next Congress or whether the SEC and CFTC write digital asset rules through enforcement instead.

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NEAR@3.33 ($NEAR) thumbnail

NEAR’s Confidential Intents hits $70M TVL, triggering NEAR@3.33 reward program

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·3 min read

NEAR’s privacy-focused swap product, Confidential Intents, crossed $70 million in total value locked on September 17, automatically triggering the first reward snapshot of a new token incentive program called NEAR@3.33, according to a NEAR-issued release distributed via PR Newswire.

  • Eligibility requires a confidential balance over $100 and an active swap history on near.com
  • A 2% per-wallet cap is built in to prevent any single holder from concentrating the reward pool
  • Conversion is locked until NEAR’s three-day volume-weighted average price reaches $3.33 or higher, tying the payout to sustained price performance rather than the TVL milestone alone
  • $70M Confidential Intents TVL that triggered the snapshot
  • 333,333 milestone tokens unlocked in Drop 1
  • $3.33 three-day VWAP required before tokens convert to NEAR

The milestone unlocks 333,333 tokens for eligible participants, but those tokens do not convert into spendable NEAR right away. NEAR is currently trading above the $3.33 threshold, though the program requires that level to hold as a three-day average, not just a momentary spot price.

A Reward Gated on Both Usage and Price

The structure is unusual in that it stacks two separate conditions. Reaching the milestone required genuine product usage, real deposits into Confidential Intents crossing the $70 million line, while the payout itself is withheld until the token clears a specific price bar for three consecutive days. That design ties the reward closer to durable price strength than to a single trigger, though it also means eligible users who already qualify for Drop 1 have no guaranteed timeline for when, or whether, their tokens convert.

Alex Shevchenko, GM of NEAR Intents, framed the milestone as part of a broader industry shift: “Confidentiality is quickly becoming a core requirement for the industry, and NEAR is becoming the rail to make it the new default.”

Part of NEAR’s Broader Privacy and Payments Push

NEAR@3.33 follows NEAR AI’s general availability launch of Confidential Intents’ underlying confidential execution infrastructure earlier this year, and comes days after NEAR Foundation joined the x402 Foundation to help build open payment standards for AI agents. Together, the moves point to a 2026 strategy centered on privacy-preserving infrastructure as NEAR Protocol’s core institutional pitch, rather than throughput or fees alone.

The CCS read: Gating token conversion on a sustained price average rather than the TVL trigger alone is a deliberate anti-dump design, but it also means Drop 1 recipients are effectively speculating on NEAR holding $3.33 for three straight days before they see anything spendable.

Watch NEAR’s three-day VWAP over the coming sessions. NEAR has not disclosed how many wallets currently qualify for Drop 1, or whether additional TVL milestones and drops are planned beyond this first one.

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NEAR joins x402 Foundation to help build payment rails for AI agents

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·3 min read

NEAR Foundation has joined the x402 Foundation, the Linux Foundation body building open infrastructure for how autonomous AI agents pay for goods and services, placing NEAR alongside AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and Visa.

  • NEAR joins x402 Foundation members that already include AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and Visa
  • NEAR’s stated role is not the payments layer itself but the infrastructure around it: cross-chain liquidity, confidential execution, private inference, and agent discovery and coordination
  • NEAR Intents already settles liquidity across more than 30 chains and 180 assets; NEAR AI runs private inference across more than 40 frontier models
  • 30+ chains reachable through NEAR Intents
  • 180+ assets supported for cross-chain liquidity
  • 40+ frontier models available through NEAR AI’s private inference

x402 gives agents a shared, open way to pay across blockchains and existing payment rails, according to a post on NEAR’s official blog. NEAR’s stated role is the infrastructure around that payments layer rather than the payments rail itself.

Why Standards Set Now Tend to Stick

NEAR’s announcement frames the timing as deliberate. The blog post argues that the rails governing how agents move value and prove their work are being decided in this early cycle, and draws a comparison to how the internet’s early architecture was chosen once and lived with for decades.

NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin said the alliance is meant to help “make agent-native payments a shared standard,” while bringing NEAR AI’s infrastructure to the x402 ecosystem.

Part of a Broader AI Infrastructure Push

The x402 membership is one piece of a wider 2026 push from NEAR’s AI arm. NEAR AI has also shipped Confidential Intents, its confidential execution infrastructure, and launched IronClaw 1.0, an AI agent harness the company positions as its own internal assistant architecture, both detailed on NEAR’s blogs this year.

The CCS read: A seat at the x402 table alongside AWS, Stripe and Visa is a real credibility signal for NEAR’s AI infrastructure pitch, even though the announcement stops short of committing to a specific product integration or timeline.

Watch for NEAR AI to publish integration details or a reference implementation showing how x402 payments actually route through NEAR Intents, which would move this from membership to functioning infrastructure. None of NEAR’s announcement discloses financial terms of the x402 membership.

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ACINQ patches three Eclair flaws that let peers drain entire channel balances

ACINQ patches three Eclair flaws that let peers drain entire channel balances

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BitcoinCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·3 min read

ACINQ has patched three peer-triggered flaws in its Eclair Lightning Network software that could have let malicious counterparties siphon a node operator’s entire local channel balance straight into a Bitcoin transaction fee. The bugs, fixed in Eclair 0.14.3 on September 14, matter to institutional Lightning operators because they show fund-loss risk can hide in routine channel operations, not just in exotic attack scenarios.

  • ACINQ released Eclair 0.14.3 on September 14, 2026, patching three separate peer-triggered vulnerabilities.
  • The worst flaw let an adversarial peer propose a closing fee larger than the victim’s local balance, sending the entire balance to miners.
  • Eclair now caps automatically estimated channel-opening and splice fees at 50 satoshis per vByte by default.
  • 0.14.3 Eclair release version that patched all three flaws
  • 3 distinct peer-triggered vulnerabilities fixed in one update
  • 50 sat/vB new default ceiling on automatically estimated fees

ACINQ, the Bitcoin technology firm behind Eclair and the Phoenix Wallet, said the vulnerabilities could be exploited by malicious nodes during channel closures, splicing and on-the-fly funding, and it strongly recommended operators upgrade, according to reporting from CryptoSlate. The most severe of the three centered on cooperative channel closures, where Eclair was responsible for setting the closing fee.

Malicious Peer Could Route an Entire Balance to Miners

In the flawed version, an adversarial peer could propose a closing fee larger than the victim’s actual local channel balance. Eclair’s fallback fee-negotiation logic could accept that proposal, wiping out the operator’s output entirely and effectively converting the whole balance into a transaction fee collected by Bitcoin miners rather than returned to the node.

The patch closes that gap by rejecting any closing-fee proposal that exceeds an operator’s own configured maximum. Bitcoin Optech flagged 0.14.3 as a security release addressing closing, splicing and on-the-fly funding issues.

Splicing and On-the-Fly Funding Carried Separate Fund-Loss Paths

A second flaw could strand funds mid-splice, the process of resizing a channel’s underlying funding transaction without closing it. If Eclair signed its half of a splice first and the peer withheld its own signature, the node’s latest channel state could depend on a transaction the victim had no way to publish.

That same gap opened a route to losses on payments still in flight: an attacker could let the incoming leg of a relayed payment expire, then publish an older channel state and use the payment secret to collect the outgoing leg for itself. Eclair now force-closes using the newest state that is backed by a fully signed funding transaction, closing that timing window.

The third bug hit on-the-fly funding, a feature that opens a channel while forwarding a payment. A malicious wallet could time payment expiries so it collected the outgoing payment on-chain while the incoming leg expired, leaving the relay operator to eat the loss; Eclair now checks relay fees and expiry buffers before committing funds.

BTCPay Server Reports Separate Bots Probing Exposed LND Nodes

The Eclair fixes land as operators of Bitcoin’s other major Lightning implementation face a distinct threat. Payment processor BTCPay Server said earlier in September that it observed bots repeatedly probing servers where administrators had manually re-enabled external access to LND.

The attackers targeted an unauthenticated password-change endpoint during the brief window when an LND wallet sits locked, and a successful hit would let them replace the wallet password and request an administrator macaroon controlling the node.

BTCPay responded by issuing unique passwords per LND wallet and blocking unauthenticated wallet-management routes at its network edge, while advising operators against manually exposing the LND API at all.

Together the two incidents point to attackers systematically probing Lightning software for weaknesses that let them seize or redirect funds. As more builders ship Bitcoin-adjacent code quickly, the burden of catching these edge cases before deployment falls increasingly on protocol maintainers rather than automated tooling.

The CCS read. For institutions running or custodying Lightning liquidity, the lesson is operational, not speculative: patch cadence and default fee ceilings now function as risk controls comparable to key management. Firms that let node software drift unpatched are effectively underwriting counterparty risk against every peer they route through, a cost that belongs on the same ledger as custody and slippage.

ACINQ has not disclosed whether any operator lost funds to the closing-fee exploit before the September 14 patch, leaving that question open for node operators reviewing their own historical channel closures against the fixed logic in Eclair 0.14.3.

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Visa closes meme coin rewards loophole ahead of merchant code deadline

Visa closes meme coin rewards loophole ahead of merchant code deadline

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·3 min read

Visa has ordered payment processors to stop routing meme coin credit card purchases through a merchant code meant for digital media, closing a rewards loophole that a grace period was set to end this week. The move follows an investigation showing customers used Apple Pay and Google Pay to buy tokens on Visa and Mastercard credit cards with no separate identity check.

  • Crossmint checkouts classified token purchases under merchant category code 5815, meant for e-books, streaming and music.
  • Chase disputed one charge with Visa, saying it was miscoded and should not have earned rewards.
  • New York Attorney General Letitia James’s office confirmed it is aware of and reviewing the matter.
  • 5815 digital-media code used instead of crypto’s required 6012 or 6051
  • 90% share of on-chain card payments Visa processes, per a May report
  • Feb 2025 SEC staff statement Crossmint cites to defend the coding

Visa’s directive targets a workaround built into checkouts run by Crossmint, a crypto payments firm whose technology powers card-based token buying on the Fomo and Robinhood Wallet apps. Processors including Checkout.com were told the code would no longer be accepted for those transactions, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Block Found No Identity Check on Card-Funded Token Buys

An investigation by The Block found that customers could buy tokens with Visa and Mastercard credit cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay without any separate verification step. Because the charges ran under code 5815, they were never flagged as crypto and drew ordinary points and cash back instead.

Visa’s own rules call for codes 6012 or 6051 plus a quasi-cash signal on crypto purchases. Chase’s rewards terms treat those transactions like cash, with no points.

Chase Disputes a Charge as Letitia James’s Office Reviews

Chase told Visa that one charge tied to the workaround was miscoded, was never flagged as a cryptocurrency purchase, and should not have generated rewards. The bank opened a formal case with Visa disputing the classification.

A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James said her office is aware of and reviewing the matter. Visa told at least one industry participant that meme coin purchases simply do not fit the digital-goods code.

Crossmint Cites a February 2025 SEC Statement, Law Professor Disagrees

Crossmint defended its coding by pointing to a February 27, 2025, staff statement from the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, which described typical meme coins as “akin to collectibles” rather than securities offerings. The company said the 5815 classification was cleared with partners during onboarding and that its handling of digital goods has not changed.

Vanderbilt Law School professor Yesha Yadav pushed back on that framing, calling SEC guidance and card-network rules two separate regimes.

SEC guidance and card-network rules two different regimes.

Yesha Yadav, Vanderbilt Law School professor

After questions were raised about how Crossmint categorized the GENIUS and DEGEN tokens, both became unavailable through Apple Pay and Google Pay on Fomo and Robinhood Wallet. Meme coin buying continued on both apps, with the Crossmint checkout still live as of Saturday.

The CCS read. This closes one narrow rewards loophole, not the broader card-crypto integration that Robinhood Wallet, Fomo and issuers like the ones behind Brave’s Rewards Card are still building around. Expect processors to route future token purchases through proper quasi-cash codes rather than exit the business, since Visa’s own 90% share of on-chain card payments gives it more leverage over compliance than any single issuer dispute.

Chase’s dispute with Visa over the miscoded charge remains unresolved, and Letitia James’s office has not said whether its review will extend beyond the single transaction it confirmed examining. Rewards on meme coin purchases are expected to disappear once those transactions run under standard crypto codes, but whether Crossmint applies the same fix to tokens beyond GENIUS and DEGEN is still an open question.

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