Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Blockstream said it will not pay a ransom to recover 598.5 BTC, worth about $47 million, stolen in a hack of its Liquid network, calling the demand “theft.” The company said it will turn to law enforcement if the funds are not returned. The bitcoin remains outstanding.

TREE NEWS reports: Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness has resumed buying options, paying several hundred million dollars in premiums in late last week and early this week, CNBC’s David Faber said, citing unnamed sources. The positions include names familiar to his prior portfolio, such as SK Hynix, SanDisk, Advanced Micro, Bloom Energy and CoreWeave. It remains unclear whether Aschenbrenner raised new capital for public-market investments.

TREE NEWS update: Leopold Aschenbrenner’s ‘Situational Awareness’ has resumed buying options, paying hundreds of millions of dollars in premiums late last week and early this week, CNBC’s David Faber reported, citing unnamed sources. The positions include familiar names from his previous portfolio, such as SK Hynix, SanDisk, Advanced Micro, Bloom Energy, and CoreWeave. It remains unclear whether Aschenbrenner has raised new capital for public-market investments.

TREE NEWS update: Metaplanet will cut 131.3 million potential shares from its Series 10 stock acquisition rights, a 41% reduction, and set up a $1 million Hong Kong subsidiary to trade Bitcoin, equities and credit products. The Japanese Bitcoin treasury company disclosed both moves as it reshapes its equity and trading operations.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin ETF investors withdrew $449 million over three days, with ARK 21Shares accounting for $164 million of Thursday’s redemptions. Ether and Solana funds also recorded net outflows, extending the pullback across major crypto ETF products.

TREE NEWS reports: AI agents have reduced a Bitcoin quantum attack benchmark by 86%. The item flags crypto majors trading shakily ahead of this morning’s CPI print while on-chain activity builds toward another potentially big weekend. No further figures, actors or dates were provided in the material.

TREE NEWS update: The European Securities and Markets Authority said prediction markets are “rife with inside trading” and questioned why Kalshi and Polymarket block access in some EU countries but not others, noting that VPNs are used to circumvent those blocks. The regulator’s remarks put the two platforms’ EU access policies under scrutiny.

TREE NEWS reports: Robinhood’s crypto trading volume rose 61% in August from the prior month but remained 38% below a year earlier. Bitstamp accounted for $10.1 billion of the month’s volume, while trading on the Robinhood app itself fell 46% year over year.

TREE NEWS reports: Uniswap’s protocol fee mechanism, activated in late December 2025 under the UNIfication overhaul, generated $28.2 million in protocol revenue from January to July 2026, equal to about 9.5% of the $297.9 million in total trading fees over the period, Token Terminal data show. Trading volume reached $357.6 billion across the seven months. Captured fees accumulate in the TokenJar contract and drive UNI burns via Firepit; a one-time treasury burn of 100 million UNI was also executed.

TREE NEWS update: Blockstream has refused a ransom demand for the remaining 600 BTC tied to the Liquid exploit and said it will not pay. Liquid has resumed transactions, but peg-outs remain disabled as recovery work continues. The identity of the attacker and the amount of the ransom demand were not disclosed.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin HODL waves data showed an unusually muted reaction to the cryptocurrency’s drop below $58,000, raising questions over whether that level can hold as a bear-market floor. The onchain anomaly suggests holders did not respond to the move the way they have at prior lows, leaving the July floor in doubt.

TREE NEWS update: Blockstream said it will not pay a ransom for bitcoin still missing from its Liquid sidechain, calling the withheld coins theft rather than white-hat work. Liquid has restarted block production, but peg operations remain frozen. The company disclosed the position as it confirmed the network is producing blocks again while the missing BTC has yet to be returned.

TREE NEWS update: Sam Bankman-Fried has petitioned the US Supreme Court to overturn his fraud conviction and $11 billion forfeiture, seeking a new trial. The FTX founder argues jurors heard testimony about customer losses while his defense lawyers were barred from showing the assets existed to repay them.

TREE NEWS reports: A crowdsourced challenge involving more than 100 researchers and AI agents cut the estimated quantum cost of a key step in attacking Bitcoin and Ethereum by more than half, driving a quantum benchmark down 86% over two months. The figure now sits well below Google’s March estimate.

TREE NEWS reports: Standard Chartered forecasts the Sky token will reach $0.325 by 2028, a fivefold increase from current levels, as USDS adoption and borrowing capacity continue to expand. The bank expects Sky to pass five times as much value to token holders by that year.

TREE NEWS reports: A new launchpad on Robinhood Chain, Commodity Market Exchange, has pushed its native $CME token above a $15 million market cap with daily volume near $10 million. The platform lets memecoins pair against 94 synthetic ERC-20 commodity tokens — gold, crude, corn, milk, even Big Macs and Pokémon cards — priced via oracle reference feeds. It routes 40% of fees to holders as commodity tokens and 30% to permanent $CME buybacks and burns.

TREE NEWS update: Albuquerque has banned Bitcoin ATMs and given operators 45 days to remove the machines from the city. A city councilor said 90% of crypto kiosk transactions in Albuquerque are tied to fraud, calling the machines a conduit for crime. The removal deadline applies to operators of the kiosks currently deployed in the city.

TREE NEWS update: The European Securities and Markets Authority said major prediction platforms are operating in the EU without authorization, and questioned the geographic restrictions used by Polymarket and Kalshi. The regulator’s findings put the two prediction markets’ partial geo-blocking arrangements under scrutiny as EU licensing requirements apply.

TREE NEWS update: Space Pioneer held a fault closure review meeting on September 10 for the Tianlong-3 Y1 launch vehicle’s flight test mission, which has now formally passed closure. The review panel concluded that the problem was accurately located, the mechanism was clear, fault reproduction was completed, corrective measures were effective, and lessons were generalized, allowing the case to be closed.