Flash News

TREE NEWS update: A former client manager at China Construction Bank (Asia), Lam Chun-yin, pleaded guilty to conspiring with a fintech company employee and an accomplice to accept more than US$470,000 in Tether (USDT) for certifying multiple false documents without bank authorization, backing insurance-related investment deals. CCB Asia’s internal investigation uncovered the case and led to an ICAC corruption complaint. Judge Lin Kam-hung adjourned sentencing to September 18; the defendant remains in Correctional Services custody.

TREE NEWS update: The XRP Ledger’s Batch V1.1 amendment is one vote away from activation, with 27 of 35 trusted validators — about 77% — in support as of September 15. Activation requires 80% backing sustained for 14 days. The upgrade lets users bundle up to eight related transactions into one, such as simultaneous token swaps. RippleX said Monday it fixed 11 additional vulnerabilities involving signing, authorization checks and potential server crashes.

TREE NEWS reports: Crude oil’s rise pushed CL into Hyperliquid’s 24-hour trading volume top three, behind only BTC and ETH. Address 0x10e…4f4bd opened a 3x long on 90,000 CL contracts at $84.36 on Aug. 3, at one point sitting on an $842,000 unrealized loss, and is now up $1.258 million — the highest unrealized profit of any Hyperliquid account in CL.

TREE NEWS reports: BlackRock’s IBIT accumulated $1.08 billion worth of bitcoin over the past 20 days, with inflows recorded on seven of those days. Over the same period, Grayscale’s GBTC sold a net $254.7 million worth of bitcoin.

TREE NEWS update: Roughly 4,000 BTC — about $320 million at the time — left the Liquid Network federation wallet on Sept. 6 after an attacker exploited a range-proof cache flaw in the Elements node software, minting 3,996 unsupported L-BTC. Eleven of 15 federation signers approved the peg-out, which was processed via SideSwap. The attacker returned 3,400 BTC on Sept. 7 and kept 598.5 BTC; Blockstream publicly refused to pay a ransom for the rest.

TREE NEWS update: An unidentified user’s Safe multisig wallet on Ethereum was attacked, resulting in roughly $7.73 million in rsETH losses. The attacker used a public keeper multicall to introduce a custom Uni V4 LP Safe module into a hook-enabled pool they created; the hook then unwrapped aEthrsETH into rsETH, with Yoink MEV extracting the funds within the same block. Two transactions confirmed the loss.

TREE NEWS reports: Odds of the CLARITY Act passing have fallen to 16% as key Democrats resist the GOP’s “final” offer. Banking groups said the Republican text leaves stablecoin reward loopholes, while tribal gaming interests warned its prediction market provisions threaten tribal sovereignty.

TREE NEWS update: Balancer has proposed winding down the protocol and distributing its treasury to BAL holders, six months after corporate entity Balancer Labs shut down operations. The shutdown followed a 2025 exploit that drained $128 million from the platform.

TREE NEWS update: Meme coin launchpad Pools said on X that it has partnered with Arc to become the chain’s first launchpad, a post reshared by Arc’s product lead. The announcement comes a day before Arc’s mainnet launch on September 16, which Circle has said will be validated by financial firms including BlackRock and DTCC.

TREE NEWS update: Changpeng Zhao said the recent shutdowns during this bear market have allowed users to withdraw their assets, in contrast to the “QuadrigaCX-style” approach seen in previous cycles. His comment came after CoinEx announced it is ceasing operations and entering an orderly liquidation.

TREE NEWS reports: The Lazarus Group sold 911 ETH for about $2.28 million over a two-hour window at an average price of $2,499. The North Korea-linked hacking group’s latest transfer moved the tokens out of wallets tracked by the analytics firm.

TREE NEWS reports: A trader using the handle @2007sng spent about $8,300 on ANSEM in late June through 12 identical $723 purchases, when the token’s market cap was $1.5 million. With ANSEM now valued at $147.8 million, the trader has cashed out $88,500 and still holds $119,800, for a profit of $199,900 — roughly a 25x return.

TREE NEWS reports: Coinbase Markets said roughly $16.6 billion in bitcoin and ether options positions are set to expire in the third quarter of 2026. Bitcoin accounts for about $14.73 billion across 186,000 open contracts, with a put-to-call ratio of 0.52, a max pain of $72,000 and the largest call concentration near $70,000. Ether accounts for about $1.92 billion across 756,100 contracts, with a put-to-call ratio of 0.57, max pain at $2,200 and the biggest call cluster at $30,000.

TREE NEWS reports: Ether dropped 3% intraday to $2,492.69, extending a session decline for the second-largest cryptocurrency. The move marks a fresh intraday low for ETH as selling pressure persists across major digital assets.

TREE NEWS update: Changpeng Zhao said on September 15 that it would be “really cool” to see someone create an “immortal fruit fly” on BNB Chain. The former Binance CEO made the remark in a public post, without detailing any specific project, funding or technical plan behind the idea. The comment follows Google’s open-sourcing of a fruit fly brain model that has since been used to play games and trade crypto.

TREE NEWS update: Talks to align two Ethereum account abstraction proposals, EIP-8130 and EIP-8141, have ended without a shared standard after the two sides diverged on priorities. The effort, involving developers working across Ethereum and Base, failed to produce a unified approach to account abstraction. No timeline for a joint standard was given.

TREE NEWS update: CoinEx said it will shut down after nine years, citing falling trading volumes and liquidity, along with rising regulatory and compliance costs that it said had exceeded “reasonable boundaries.” Withdrawals will remain open until Dec. 22, the exchange said, without giving a date for the full cessation of operations.

TREE NEWS update: The US Department of Justice is seeking about $61 million in cryptocurrency proceeds tied to illicit Iranian oil sales laundered through Binance, prosecutors said. Two Chinese companies allegedly used the exchange to move the funds to Iran and its proxies. The filing marks a fresh enforcement action over sanctions evasion routed through crypto.