Weekly: Bitget Hack Worth Hundreds of Millions, Binance Troubles, New AI Releases, and Market Calm

Bitcoin Headlines

On September 21, Bitcoin showed a solid impulse and broke above $85,000. On this jump, shorts were traditionally "trimmed": $746 million was liquidated on futures, with $647 million falling specifically on positions against the market. The Fear and Greed Index jumped to 70 ("Greed"), but then the price calmed down a bit and went sideways.

At the time of writing, BTC is trading around $85,018.

What Analysts and Experts Are Saying

• Levels and demand: BTC broke its 1-year moving average ($80,061) and is targeting around $88,761. However, CryptoQuant notes that Coinbase Premium remains in the red. This means the US spot market isn't pushing this move very hard yet.
• FOMO and leverage: Santiment recorded the strongest spike of FOMO since the beginning of the year when the price touched $87,000. Open interest rose to $156 billion — traders, having just shed tears over shaved shorts, immediately ran to open new leveraged positions.
• CryptoQuant CEO's view: Ki Young Ju believes the bull cycle is only just revving up. However, you shouldn't expect cosmic 10x gains — he forecasts a more modest 3–5x. The market has grown and institutionals are entering, so we likely won't see wild space runs or 80% drops anymore.
• Capital flees to BTC: Since mid-August, Bitcoin's market cap has added 36%. For comparison: the S&P 500 grew by only 0.8%, while gold dropped by 1.5%.

Whales Accumulate the Asset

While retail traders are thinking, "smart money" is acting. Wallets holding between 100 and 1,000 BTC have bought up almost 114,000 more coins since July (+2.22%). They now control over 5.24 million BTC.

Are Quantum Computers Threatening Bitcoin?

EU financial regulators issued a warning: the development of quantum computing could potentially hack the cryptography that holds blockchains together. They advise EU countries to develop plans for transitioning to post-quantum protection by the end of 2026.

Altcoins and Tokenization

Ethereum is moving right behind its bigger brother. On September 21, ETH broke $2,700 (a high since the start of the year). On futures liquidations, traders lost $122 million on ETH alone. Currently, the coin is trading near $2,719.

The rest of the altcoins show a mixed picture: Ripple (XRP), Solana, and Hyperliquid are slowly turning green (+5–10%), while others are pacing in place.

Ethereum Exchange Supply Holds Thin

ETH reserves on trading platforms have fallen to historical lows, while demand for staking jumped by 11 times. There are fewer and fewer free coins on exchanges, as people prefer to hold and earn passive interest.

Whales Withdrawing ETH from Binance

The number of wallets with a balance >0 reached a record 207 million. Along with this, over 90,000 ETH is withdrawn monthly from Binance — the highest withdrawal figure since 2023.

Ecosystem Short News:

• ZetaChain moving to Solana: The community almost unanimously (99.4%) supported shutting down its own L1 network and transferring the ZETA token to Solana. Waiting for the final vote.
• CRO Burning: The creators of Cronos want to burn 228 million CRO tokens from the community pool and use 100% of their products' profits for monthly buybacks and token burns.
• Trueo migrating to Ethereum: Prediction market Trueo is moving from Base to ETH mainnet for greater decentralization. Vitalik Buterin has already approved the idea.
• Stocks and ETFs on NEAR: NEAR Protocol launched trading of tokenized US stocks and ETFs via Ondo on near.com. You can buy using crypto from 30+ different networks.
• Buterin on the Future of Blockchains: Vitalik stated that networks are moving from duplicating computations to zero-knowledge proofs (SNARK/STARK). This will speed up operation and boost privacy, while AI will help write code.
• Drop from Variational: The project will distribute 32% of VAR tokens to users for points at TGE right up to the end of 2026 (100% unlocked immediately).
• Zcash as the New Ethereum? Bankless co-founder believes Zcash is currently at the same point where Ethereum was in 2021. In his opinion, if part of the capital from BTC flows into ZEC, the coin could shoot up massively.

The World of Artificial Intelligence

Releases and Model Race

• Grok 4.7 from Musk: SpaceXAI rolled out an update. The model codes better and can solve multi-hour agent tasks.
• Claude Opus 5.5: Anthropic released a new model — it's 30% faster and 40% cheaper than its predecessor. Due to high capability in cybersecurity, they "screwed on" extra safety brakes.
• GPT-6 Sol and Luna: OpenAI rolled out lighter and cheaper versions of GPT-6 for ChatGPT Work and Codex.

AI Agents and Crypto

BlackRock calculated that the mass use of autonomous AI agents will create a wild demand for crypto and stablecoins (since AI needs something to pay each other with). SharpLink says that by 2035, AI agents will redistribute up to $4 trillion in financial sector revenues.

The Flip Side: Scammers and "Uncontrolled" AI

• Deepfakes attacking: Losses from fraud involving deepfakes, KYC bypasses, and voice forgery early this year have already exceeded the figures for all of last year by 263%.
• OpenAI AI broke a site: During a routine search for info online, faced with a block, an AI agent from OpenAI decided not to give up and independently hacked an Australian state health statistics portal.
• Help for Ukraine: OpenAI will provide the Ministry of Digital Transformation access to the Daybreak tool to protect civil infrastructure from cyberattacks.

Failures, Hacks, and Crime

Main Hack of the Week: Bitget Minus $351.6M

Bitget exchange confirmed a massive hack of its wallet infrastructure. Withdrawals were temporarily paused. Private keys themselves weren't leaked; hackers got into the server backend. Main suspects — hackers from North Korea (Lazarus Group).

Scandals and Investigations

• US investigating Binance: Federal prosecutors are checking if Binance helped bypass sanctions against Iran.
• Binance delisting hryvnia: From September 28, the exchange is completely stopping UAH operations via Fiat Trade and removing the USDT/UAH pair. Remaining hryvnia will be automatically converted to USDT by September 30 at a rate of 46.5 UAH.
• KelpDAO vs LayerZero Scandal: KelpDAO filed a lawsuit against LayerZero after an April hack of around $293M. The parties are squabbling over who is responsible for the security setup gaps.

Nice News to Finish On

Ukraine took 7th place in the global crypto adoption ranking (Chainalysis Global Crypto Adoption Index 2026), stepping up one spot. We have particularly high figures in the P2P segment and in on-chain transaction volumes.