VirtualBacon Digest

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 Bonds sold off after Trump rejected Iran's peace deal and Brent went back above $106: the 10-year yield hit 5.22%, the 30-year 5.53%. Markets price a 65% chance of an October Fed hike, a headwind for bitcoin. 🔸 Nvidia launched an Open Agent Safety Platform to stop AI agents breaking out of containment, saying it could have stopped July's Hugging Face attack by over 17,000 agents. Safety is now a product it sells. 🔸 China's industrial profits grew just 4.2% in August, the weakest this year, a demand drag that cools inflation fears. 🔸 Beijing told some firms it intends to approve purchases of Nvidia's RTX PRO 5500 and asked ByteDance and Alibaba for their plans, The Information reported. It would reopen a China sales lane for Nvidia. 🔸 The US and China published lists cutting tariffs on $30 billion of goods each, mostly toys, sports gear and Christmas decorations on the US side. Timing is unclear, but cheaper imports would ease US goods prices. 🔸 Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will host top AI CEOs at the White House on Tuesday, Sept. 29, after inviting Anthropic's Dario Amodei, who urged an AI slowdown, to dinner. Any slowdown push would hit AI stocks. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 2409, barring state officials from issuing memecoins, and called it "The Opposite of Trump." Nansen data shows 988,905 $TRUMP buyers lost a combined $3.81B. 🔸 Bitcoin futures open interest fell to 652,000 BTC, among its lowest this year, from an 800,000 peak, and funding flipped negative near minus 0.3%. Shorts are paying to stay short even after a 40% Q3 rally. 🔸 Quant's $QNT ran from the $60-$70 area last week to an intraday peak above $350 after The Clearing House, whose networks settle over $2 trillion a day, picked Quant for its tokenized-deposit network. 🔸 Vitalik Buterin says Ethereum's Hegota upgrade, planned for 2027, is likely the last one a 2

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows 2025 revenue up twelvefold to nearly $4.6B and an operating loss of more than $8B, as backers eye a listing above $2T. That price sets the bar for AI valuations. 🔸 Nvidia added $150B to its buyback for a $235B total, the largest authorization increase in history, a steady bid under the biggest AI stock. 🔸 OpenAI scrapped GPT-6.1 Astra after it fell short of the company's safety standards, a day before its annual developers conference. Safety reviews now set the pace of AI launches, a risk for AI stocks. 🔸 Australia's central bank hiked to 4.6%, a 15-year high and its fourth hike this year, as the US 10-year yield rose above 5.27% Monday, a 19-year high. Tighter money worldwide pressures tech and crypto. 🔸 AMD is buying Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B in stock, a world-model bet on robots as it chases Nvidia. 🔸 Anthropic launched Sonnet 5.5, 30% faster than its predecessor at the same $2/$10 per million tokens, and the first Sonnet under its Fable and Opus cyber safeguards. More speed for the money squeezes rival pricing. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 Coinbase won CFTC approval for Coinbase Clearing LLC, its own clearinghouse for futures, options on futures and swaps. It takes $USDC as collateral and settles 24 hours a day. 🔸 Chainlink said banks can connect to Swift's blockchain ledger through its platform, with 17 banks preparing tokenized-deposit pilots, and shipped CCIP 2.0 so apps can add their own bridge checks. 🔸 A Senate Democratic report found 84% of 846 Iran-linked sanctioned wallets transacted almost only in $USDT, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal urged a Treasury and Justice probe. Tether puts its 2026 freezes at $550M. 🔸 BitMine now holds 6,001,302 $ETH, 4.9% of supply, and says it is 98% of the way to its 5% target. 🔸 NEAR Intents blocked more than $50M in transfers tied to the Bitget hack and froze $503,000 mid-swap, the opposite

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 August PCE, the Fed's main inflation gauge, cooled to 3.4% on the year vs 3.7% expected, and core rose 3.0% vs 3.3%, even as spending jumped 0.9% on the month. That weakens the case for an October hike. 🔸 OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Sol, which it says nearly matches GPT-6 Astra on coding and agent work at one-fifth the token price, plus always-on Dots agents for Pro users. That price cut squeezes rival AI margins. 🔸 Consumer confidence sank to 81.9 vs 89 expected, the lowest since 2014, and job openings missed at 7.08M. With the Fed's Williams seeing no need for urgency, October hike odds fell to about 50% from roughly 70%. 🔸 Trump signed a "morally binding" AI document with tech leaders and ordered agencies to call AI "super intelligence". Speaker Johnson called the principles voluntary, so no new brake on AI spending behind chip stocks. 🔸 Anthropic found China's GLM-5.3 builds cyber exploits like Claude Mythos Preview but shipped without meaningful safeguards, bypassed 64% to 100% of the time in its tests. A tailwind for cybersecurity stocks. 🔸 Kalshi is in advanced talks to raise roughly $1B at close to a $40B valuation, as Fed and jobs bets go mainstream. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 The $XRP Ledger now carries a second record of who owns shares in selected BTG Pactual funds for CSD BR, a Brazilian market operator with roughly $4T of registered assets. 🔸 Robinhood unveiled US crypto perps arriving in the coming months, with up to 10x leverage on $BTC and $ETH and 3x on $SOL, $XRP, $DOGE, $ADA, $LINK and $HYPE, plus AI agents that can execute trades. 🔸 Zcash's NU7 upgrade would cut $ZEC block times from 75 seconds to 25, with developers targeting Nov. 5, and Gemini already switched to Zakura software that synced in a little over six hours. 🔸 Binance Pay opened crypto payments at PayPay merchants across Japan to about 48M eligible users from more than 100 countries, while me

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 Google launched Gemini 4 Argon to trusted cyber defenders first, scoring 77.9% on DeepSWE vs 74.2% for Claude Opus 5.5, at $2/$10 per million tokens. That keeps pricing pressure on AI software stocks. 🔸 Trump said South Korea will invest up to $200B in US energy, including $120B for eight nuclear reactors and $22.3B for a Texas gas plant powering data centers. A tailwind for nuclear and AI-power names. 🔸 The FTC is investigating OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies over product risks, an overhang on AI valuations. 🔸 Q2 GDP was revised up to 2.2% from 1.5% vs no change expected, as the 10-year yield logged its biggest quarterly rise this century. Traders now see at least three more Fed hikes by mid-2027, a headwind for crypto. 🔸 The CFTC sent the White House two rules that would define event contracts as swaps but exclude "casino-style gambling products", a bid to shield Kalshi from state gambling suits. 🔸 Amazon signed a 20-year deal for 690 MW from Constellation's Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant, backing over $3B of Maryland investment, as AI keeps hyperscalers bidding for nuclear power. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 About 523,000 ETH in MetaMask-run validators is leaving Lido after a security incident, a researcher estimates, with the last exits due by Oct. 7 and up to about 45 days to restake. 🔸 Dogecoin got an EVM-compatible app layer as DogeOS opened its public testnet with DOGE as the fee token, for trading, lending and stablecoin apps. No mainnet date yet. 🔸 Open USD went live on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo with over $1B in liquidity commitments from Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa, taking aim at Tether and Circle. 🔸 Cardano is being tested by Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled energy giant, to trace sustainable jet fuel and its partly renewable Diesel R. 🔸 September was crypto's worst hack month of 2026, with $766.5M stolen across 55 incident

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 September payrolls rose just 29,000 against 84,000 expected and unemployment ticked up to 4.2%, a sharp miss that undercuts the case for another Fed hike and helps rate-sensitive crypto. 🔸 Broadcom agreed to lend Anthropic up to $42B, enough for about a third of its $125.2B five-year chip lease, as Broadcom's banks start gathering $60B. The AI circular-financing debate now reaches chip designers. 🔸 SpaceX launched Google's AI chips into orbit on Planet Labs satellites Thursday, Alphabet's first in-orbit test of space data centers. A new front opens in the AI capex race. 🔸 Oil fell and Brent slipped back below $100 on a report that EU states are weighing a French plan to release 50M barrels of diesel, plus 50M barrels of IEA crude, easing inflation pressure. 🔸 Amazon is seeking to offload about $8B of Nvidia chips to outside investors, offering up to 10% of the vehicle, while spending over $200B on capex this year. AI hardware costs start moving off balance sheets. 🔸 California's attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI after its AI bots went rogue and attacked another tech company, another overhang on AI valuations. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 The SEC proposed a crypto custody rule letting investment advisers and funds use state trust companies and, in some cases, self-custody, with a 60-day comment period. A clearer path for adviser allocations. 🔸 Solana is processing Roughrider Coin, the Bank of North Dakota stablecoin now live on Fiserv's platform for more than 90 North Dakota banks and credit unions. 🔸 Evernorth shareholders approved its merger, and the Ripple-backed treasury expects to hold about 473M $XRP and start trading on Nasdaq as XRPN on Oct. 8 after raising over $1B. 🔸 Ethereum mainnet now runs zkAPI, an Ethereum Foundation system that lets users pay for AI and other APIs with zero-knowledge proofs, without revealing their billing identity. 🔸 Quant got 50x perpetu

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 The G7 agreed Friday to release 100M barrels of reserves over four months, frontloading diesel in the first 20 days with U.S. diesel at $6.37 a gallon. Cheaper fuel would ease inflation pressure on rates. 🔸 Nvidia hit a record $237.88 on Friday, its first record since May, lifting its market value to roughly $5.7T, the largest of any company. The AI trade is still leading equities. 🔸 The Justice Department won't reopen its criminal probe of former Fed Chair Jerome Powell, AG Todd Blanche said, and Powell stays a governor through January 2028. One less overhang on Fed independence. 🔸 Tesla delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3 vs about 461,100 expected, down about 2% from a year ago, and shares climbed 5%. Relief for a stock down 21% this year, trailing every megacap peer. 🔸 Kalshi and Coinbase won a partial preliminary injunction after Judge Martha Pacold found Illinois licensing rules likely conflict with federal derivatives law, keeping the federal path open for event contracts. 🔸 Anthropic will invest $100M in a Claude Frontier Academy to train 10,000 engineers ahead of its expected IPO, building the enterprise demand public investors will be asked to price. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 The SEC approved Cboe BZX listings for Volatility Shares' 3x Bitcoin ETF and 3x Ether ETF on Oct. 2, alongside gold, silver, crude and natural gas. Trading waits on an S-1 taking effect. 🔸 BNB Chain became the first blockchain to cross $1B in tokenized stocks and ETFs, holding $1.1B of a $3.7B market, ahead of Ethereum at $828M and Solana at $738M. 🔸 Tron added $5.0B of stablecoins in Q3, a 5.6% rise to $93.9B, as Ethereum's stablecoin base fell $4.9B. 🔸 Aave founder Stani Kulechov backed a proposal for a memberless Aave Foundation in the Cayman Islands to hold the Aave trademark, domains and code IP, with $AAVE holders keeping governance. 🔸 Zcash got its own liquidity pool on THORChain on O

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 US-Russia talks on ending the Ukraine war now include a multibillion-dollar deal for Lukoil's global oil assets, with Todd Boehly in the buying group, per the NYT. A sanctions-relief path for Russian oil. 🔸 DNI Jay Clayton is the Trump administration's new AI czar, leading a new "Super Intelligence Force" with 120 days to report on AI risks. A fresh policy overhang for AI stocks. 🔸 German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrived in Kyiv under air-raid sirens to release $1.13B in military aid, as Ukraine vowed to double down on hitting Russian oil refineries. More risk to Russian fuel exports. 🔸 OpenAI safety staffer David Robinson, who led its safety reports, quit after three and a half years, saying its culture is broken. More pressure for oversight of the AI labs investors are pricing. 🔸 The US plans to lend Vistra about $4.2B to uprate at least three of its four nuclear plants, with Energy Secretary Chris Wright set to announce it Monday. Federal money chasing AI-era power demand. 🔸 Hong Kong equity markets raised a record $47.5B from July to September on AI deals. Capital for AI is going global. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 Hyperliquid received $14.6M in USDC reserve yield for $HYPE buybacks, headed to its Assistance Fund through AQAv2, a recurring buyback source on top of trading fees. 🔸 Grayscale's Zcash ETF (ZCSH) posted its first net-outflow week since the end of August, reversing the prior week's $35.2M intake, per Farside. 🔸 Stellar's DeFi TVL hit a record of nearly $273M per DeFiLlama, a week after first climbing to about $265M. 🔸 Midnight opened smart-contract deployment to more developers, and its $NIGHT token nearly doubled on the week, up 96.5%. 🔸 Visa said business and commercial programs drove about 17% of its stablecoin-linked card volume in fiscal 2026 to date, as volume across 160+ programs grew nearly 200% year over year. 🔸 Michael Saylor said Strategy's ST

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 Saudi Aramco cut November crude prices for Asia to six-year lows as CEO Amin Nasser warned rebuilding oil stocks could take up to two years, and OPEC+ held output targets steady. Oil stays an inflation risk. 🔸 Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the Grok maker, will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to swap AI for SI. No date is set, but White House AI policy is now reaching SPCX's AI brand. 🔸 Spain's Pedro Sánchez called a snap election for Nov. 29, and the euro fell 0.6% to a 17-month low against the dollar. A firmer dollar tightens conditions for risk assets like bitcoin. 🔸 The US lead over China in AI shrank to a record-low 3% on benchmark scores after DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash, from about 9% in May, per Bloomberg Intelligence. More pricing pressure on US AI leaders. 🔸 Trump's chief economic adviser Kevin Hassett said Jerome Powell should move on from the Fed board after a watchdog report on its $2.4B headquarters renovation. An exit would hand Trump a seat on a Fed that just hiked. 🔸 Flavio Bolsonaro took 47% to Lula's 45%, forcing an Oct. 25 runoff. A tailwind for Brazil's currency and stocks. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 OKXICE, the OKX and NYSE-parent ICE joint venture, told the SEC it plans a 24/7 tokenized stock venue starting with 60+ US companies. Tokenized stocks are worth $3.2B, up 15% in a month. 🔸 Zcash switched on its NU7 upgrade on public testnet at block 4,465,026, a live trial of faster blocks, and developers decide on mainnet activation Oct. 20. 🔸 Shiba Inu went live on Solana through the Wormhole-powered Sunrise gateway, so canonical $SHIB now trades in Solana DeFi without leaving Ethereum. 🔸 Hyperliquid perpetual prices now stream around the clock on the Bloomberg Terminal, data only for now, after its open interest first topped $18B on Sept. 23. 🔸 Kraken parent Payward plugged into Singapore Gulf Bank's real-time network, so select institut

☕️ GM! Here are the most important market events over the last 24 hours: 🌍Market Overview: 🔸 US services activity cooled to 54.9 in September vs 55 expected, per ISM, but its prices index hit 74, the highest since July 2022, and the 10-year yield touched a 24-year high. A Fed hike stays in play. 🔸 OpenAI will show visual display ads beside images users ask ChatGPT to generate, starting later this month in the US. ChatGPT is turning into an ad rival to Google and Meta. 🔸 Trump signed an executive order temporarily letting truckers and farmers use red-dyed diesel, after the US average diesel price topped $6 a gallon for the first time ever. Fuel costs keep feeding inflation. 🔸 AMD CEO Lisa Su said demand is outpacing supply, and AMD will substantially increase supply in 2027 but can still use more. Chips stay the AI bottleneck. 🔸 Rep. Don Davis introduced the No Betting on Your Own Race Act after his Republican opponent Laurie Buckhout got a Kalshi penalty and a three-year suspension. It would put Kalshi's own ban into law. 🔸 Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said its newest model, out later today, beats Chinese models on cybersecurity. The €21B lab is betting on security to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. 🪙Crypto Updates: 🔸 The CFTC under Chairman Mike Selig proposed Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM, pulling leveraged, margined or financed crypto trading under its rules, with a 60-day comment period. 🔸 The Solana Foundation launched Solana DvP, an open-source program built with J.P. Morgan input that lets institutions settle trades on-chain in seconds instead of days. 🔸 ZachXBT says he posed as a paying client and put up $349,700 to infiltrate a Chinese syndicate that laundered over $1B for North Korea's Lazarus Group. Tether froze $442,000. 🔸 Ondo launched Ondo Private Markets, tokenized notes tracking an unnamed pre-IPO AI company, with first trading expected this week. Ondo Stocks holds over $1B in 450+ tokenized stocks and ETFs. 🔸 Virtuals Protocol opene