Circle has signed a principal partnership with Chelsea Football Club that will put USDC branding on the front of the club’s men’s, women’s and academy shirts beginning with the 2026/27 season.

Chelsea FC announced the agreement on Aug. 28, naming Circle Internet Group as its Official Front of Shirt Partner, with the branding scheduled to make its Premier League debut during Chelsea men’s first home match of the season against Brighton on Sunday.

Circle puts USDC on Chelsea shirts

Under the agreement, Circle and its USDC stablecoin will appear across Chelsea’s match shirts during the 2026/27 campaign, giving the digital dollar brand exposure through the club’s men’s, women’s and academy teams.

Circle, which was founded in 2013, issues USDC and operates financial infrastructure designed around stablecoin payments and settlement. The company described the Chelsea deal as a way to introduce USDC to a global sports audience as stablecoins gain use outside crypto trading.

Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire said the company built USDC around the idea that money should move globally in a similar way to information on the internet.

“Partnering with Chelsea connects us with a global sports community built on that exact same borderless vision,” Allaire said.

Circle Chief Commercial Officer Kash Razzaghi said Chelsea’s international audience aligned with the company’s focus on moving digital money across borders. He described putting USDC on Chelsea’s shirt as a public representation of Circle’s approach to global financial infrastructure.

For Chelsea, the agreement continues the club’s ties with companies operating in digital assets. Crypto.news previously reported that BingX partnered with Chelsea in 2024 before serving as the club’s Official Men’s Training Kit Partner for the 2025/26 season.

BingX had previously held a principal partnership with Chelsea, and its relationship with the club formed part of a series of sponsorship agreements between crypto companies and major sports organizations.

Research covered by crypto.news in September 2024 found that crypto companies had struck 33 football sponsorship deals since 2021, with European clubs accounting for much of the activity.

Chelsea partnership follows Circle’s USDC expansion

Circle’s football sponsorship comes after a series of moves to expand USDC through banks, payment companies and digital asset platforms in 2026.

Earlier this month, Circle renewed its USDC agreement with Coinbase for another three years through 2029. USDC circulation stood at $73.3 billion at the end of the second quarter, up 19% from the same period a year earlier, while Circle reported $701 million in quarterly revenue and reserve income.

Coinbase held about 30% of circulating USDC on its platform at the end of June. Circle said at the time that it planned to prioritize investment in products, distribution partnerships and other opportunities instead of introducing quarterly dividends.

The company has been building regulated infrastructure around the stablecoin as well. On July 31, Circle secured a New York trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services for Circle New York Trust.

The state approval followed federal authorization for a separate Circle entity from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Circle said the New York charter extended its regulatory relationship with the NYDFS and added another regulated entity supporting its USDC operations.

Circle has pursued distribution through traditional payments companies outside the United States. In July, Japanese payments group JCB signed an agreement with a Circle affiliate to test USDC payments in Japan.

The first stage of that project focuses on JCB’s internal cross-border treasury transfers, with the companies planning to explore merchant payment uses later. The arrangement combines stablecoin settlement with JCB’s existing payment operations.

Chelsea sees Circle deal as part of digital strategy

Chelsea President Jason Gannon said the club viewed its Circle partnership as part of its work around new digital technology.

“We are two organisations fixated by the future and are relentlessly innovating to be in the best position possible for the long-term,” Gannon said. “We look forward to beginning our journey with Circle – to introduce Circle to the Chelsea family and continue enhancing how we operate.”

Circle’s branding will extend to Chelsea Women during the team’s inaugural season at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea FC Women CEO Aki Mandhar said the club planned to introduce Circle and USDC to its fan base as part of the agreement.

The sponsorship gives Circle exposure across multiple Chelsea teams instead of limiting the arrangement to the men’s first team. Academy shirts are covered by the partnership alongside the men’s and women’s kits.

Chelsea President of Commercial Todd Kline said the two organizations shared an interest in building businesses with international reach.

“Circle is changing how money moves around the world, and we’re changing what it means to be a global football club,” Kline said.

For Circle, the shirt sponsorship moves the USDC name into a consumer-facing setting after much of its recent expansion centered on financial institutions and payment infrastructure.

The company has spent 2026 extending USDC access through regulated financial companies and blockchain platforms. In June, BNY enabled institutional customers to mint, redeem, hold and transfer USDC through its Digital Asset Custody platform, expanding the bank’s existing relationship with Circle beyond safeguarding reserves.

Standard Chartered followed in July with a service allowing eligible institutional customers to access USDC minting and redemption through the bank’s own infrastructure, initially through its operations in the Dubai International Financial Centre.

Chelsea’s men’s team will wear the Circle and USDC branding in a Premier League home match for the first time against Brighton on Sunday, while the sponsorship will cover the club’s men’s, women’s and academy shirts throughout the 2026/27 season.

What U.S. Democrats have said about the name change

Bitcoin’s 2026 downcycle may be nearing its end, at least according to a composite on-chain profitability gauge tracked by CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju. In a fresh read of the platform’s Bull/Bear Market Cycle Indicator, the metric has flipped from negative to positive for the first time since early October 2025—an update that Ju framed as the end of the current bear phase.

The move matters because the indicator is built from multiple realized-and-unrealized profit/loss measures, aiming to capture broader shifts in investor behavior rather than short-term price swings. Still, other parts of the market are sending a more cautious message, with liquidity and demand questions continuing to hang over attempts to sustain higher prices.

Key takeaways

• CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju says Bitcoin’s 2026 bear cycle is over after the Bull/Bear Market Cycle Indicator returned a positive reading.
• The Bull/Bear indicator is based on CryptoQuant’s P&L Index and its distance from a 365-day moving average, aggregating several profitability metrics.
• CryptoQuant data shows the indicator at “extreme bear” in early February 2026 before turning positive again by Aug. 26.
• Past performance suggests the metric can help confirm macro trend changes, including a similar bear-to-bull transition in early 2023.
• Despite the profitability signal, analysts continue to flag potential liquidity and resistance hurdles that could limit follow-through.

A profitability composite turns bullish after months

According to CryptoQuant data highlighted by Ki Young Ju in an X post on Wednesday, Bitcoin has exited its 2026 bear market as the CryptoQuant Bull/Bear Market Cycle Indicator printed its first positive value since early October 2025.

Ju pointed to a shift in the indicator’s sign—moving from negative readings back into positive territory—describing it as “The Bitcoin bear cycle is over.” The specific datapoint, as provided by CryptoQuant, is a reading of 0.042, placing the metric in its “bull” bracket.

To understand why a profitability measure is being treated as a cycle signal, the indicator’s construction is key. The Bull/Bear Market Cycle Indicator is derived from CryptoQuant’s P&L Index, originally developed by CryptoQuant’s head of research. In turn, the P&L Index pulls together multiple on-chain profitability components, including the market value to realized value (MVRV) ratio, net unrealized profit/loss (NUPL), and the spent output profit ratio (SOPR). By tracking how far the composite sits from its 365-day moving average, the system attempts to identify phases where investor profit and loss dynamics improve meaningfully.

In this framework, values above zero indicate bullish phases in the BTC price cycle—an approach that aims to filter out noise and focus on longer-term behavior of holders, not just momentum on a particular week.

From “extreme bear” to bull territory

CryptoQuant’s timeline shows the indicator hit cycle lows on Feb. 5, 2026, when the metric recorded -1.244—labeled by the source as “extreme bear” conditions. That date corresponds with a period when Bitcoin fell sharply; one related report noted BTC/USD dropping to around $60,000 at the time. (Earlier coverage referenced by the article links to Cointelegraph’s report about BTC falling to $60k.)

For the latest full data point used to assess the indicator, CryptoQuant’s dashboard reports the Bull/Bear metric as of Aug. 26. On that date, the composite had moved back into positive territory, registering 0.042. In other words, the same probabilistic “cycle lens” that marked the downtrend’s extremity earlier in the year has now flipped, suggesting profitability dynamics are improving across the holder base.

Ju also argued that this methodology has historically been able to confirm major trend transitions. He noted that the Bull/Bear indicator previously called the end of the prior bear market when upside returned in early 2023—supporting the idea that the tool is intended for cycle confirmation rather than tactical timing.

But market strength isn’t universally agreed

Even with on-chain profitability improving, the broader market picture appears less settled. In recent weeks, multiple indicators have been showing signs of recovery—among them the relative strength index (RSI), which Cointelegraph previously discussed as turning bullish with similarities to recoveries seen at the end of 2022.

However, consensus is not fully formed, and some traders continue to emphasize that BTC’s move higher may still face structural obstacles. Earlier coverage cited concerns that a lack of demand could cause BTC/USD to slide back down, pointing to “multiple liquidity hurdles” positioned above spot price. Liquidity matters in this context because even if profitability improves, sustained price appreciation typically requires enough buy-side depth to absorb selling pressure at higher levels.

Trader and analyst Rekt Capital also underscored the importance of near-term confirmation. In an X post, he described the August monthly close as “pivotal” for the fate of the recovery. His view references a downward-sloping resistance trend line that has been in place since October of the prior year—an area that can act as a ceiling unless price can close convincingly above it.

Put simply, the profitability indicator suggests the “bear” investor phase may be transitioning, while other signals focus on whether demand and liquidity are strong enough to carry the breakout beyond resistance.

What to watch next if the cycle claim is right

For investors and traders, the immediate question is whether this on-chain cycle shift leads to price follow-through—or whether it stalls when liquidity tightens at key resistance zones. The next useful checkpoint is how Bitcoin behaves around levels highlighted by market commentary, particularly any confirmation after the close period referenced by Rekt Capital, while also monitoring whether on-chain profitability metrics remain above the indicator’s bullish threshold rather than flipping back.

Autonomous AI agents can behave in highly unpredictable ways. Give an AI Agent a goal such as passing a test of its capabilities, and it might just decide the best way to score highly is to break containment and hack into a competing company in search of the answer sheet.

That’s what happened when Open AI’s GPT-5.6 Sol hacked into Hugging Face last month. Anthropic and Meta subsequently admitted their models had also escaped testing sandboxes to hack third parties too. 

But who is legally liable for agents that have minds of their own? OpenAI didn’t intend for the model to go rogue, and issued no instructions for it to do so. If your personal AI agent decides on a course of action that results in harm or financial damage in the real world, can you be held liable if it’s something you could have reasonably foreseen?”

Magazine spoke with Rikka Law Group owner and CEO Charlyn Ho to find out the state of play in this emerging legal field.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Magazine: When an AI model hacks an outside company, who is liable. Can Hugging Face sue OpenAI over the incident in July?

Charlyn Ho: Anyone can sue anyone for anything. Currently, there is no federal AI agent liability law, so we would have to look at existing law. With respect to Hugging Face and OpenAI, to set the baseline, the AI agent itself cannot be liable, it’s not a separate legal entity.

Terms that are used in a few of the AI laws are “developer” and “deployer.” The developer makes the AI, the deployer actually deploys it and uses the AI. The lines of responsibility are also not entirely clear. You have to look at the facts and circumstances.

For example, if the deployer instructed the agent, even if they didn’t actually tell them to go and breach Hugging Face, but if they were negligent in creating the parameters in which the AI agent operated, I would say you would have to look at standard tort law and go through the negligence analysis. 

Off to court. Source: Rikka Law Group

Magazine: In the case of open source models which have been released by anonymous developers, is there anyone you can go after in those instances?

Ho: Not really. Often, if it’s open source, the license usually has a pretty strong disclaimer of liability. The person or company using that open source code is going to have to understand that the tradeoff of having free code is that you have to comply with the open source license, which also generally sets the parameters of liability.

If you think about it from a different perspective, another analogy is Tesla and the self-driving car accidents. If the product malfunctioned and there was a solid products liability claim, Tesla could be liable. But it’s often a facts and circumstances determination, whereby the human driver — who maybe just set the autopilot and went to sleep — could also bear liability. I think that’s somewhat analogous here because Tesla would be the developer, and the deployer would be the driver.

Magazine: If I gave an agent an instruction, “make me a hundred thousand dollars by next week” and it goes off and breaks the law to achieve that goal, would I be liable because I’ve given it a reckless instruction? Or would it be the lab that developed the agent?

Ho: In this particular instance, I would say you would be much more liable than the lab. The reason being, if you tell an agent to go and make you a hundred thousand dollars by next week, you need to have at least some basic, reasonable, safety instructions in those kinds of tasks.

If you were a lawyer, for example, we could basically say you didn’t follow your rules of professional responsibility because you didn’t competently use the AI. As a normal lay person, we would have to see if there were other responsibilities that you were bound by. But even if there were not, there’s still a general tort standard of negligence or reckless disregard for human safety, depending on what exactly the AI agent ended up doing.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a very old U.S. Statute that talks about unauthorized access to computer systems. If your AI agent inferred from your instructions that it should hack into a bank account to get you that hundred thousand dollars, I think you’re looking at criminal liability under a number of different sources.

Just because the word AI and agent is in the conversation does not mean that old bodies of law have now been thrown out.

Related: Hugging Face hack exposes the open-weight AI cybersecurity paradox

Magazine: Let’s say that I’m a bad guy, and I manage to convince the AI to give me instructions to create a bioweapon. Obviously, I’m liable because you’re not allowed to do that. But are the people that created the model also liable because they didn’t put in stringent safeguards to prevent it?

Ho: Possibly, but it differs based on the laws that are in place. For example, in the EU, you have the EU AI Act. If a foundational model or general purpose model is capable of creating that level of harm, that is something that the developer would have to have some responsibility for. 

In the United States, we don’t have a federal statute of similar scope. If it’s a general-purpose model, if somebody instructs the model to do something bad, generally the model is going to do what you ask it to do. There’s probably not a very strong legal basis to go after the labs in this example.

Magazine: Is it similar to suing Google for allowing you to find instructions about making a bioweapon online?

Ho: Exactly. This kind of goes back to some of the content moderation discussions. For example, if on Facebook you have somebody who’s live streaming a massacre, and that creates harm, under Section 230 of the CDA, there is a kind of shield for a platform that doesn’t actively create or publish that material. It’s actually the independent users who are putting that up. I think the analogy you just gave is kind of a perfect one: Is Google liable because you happen to find something on a website somewhere that talks about how to make a bomb?

Magazine: This is a matter of debate, but my personal opinion is we haven’t reached genuine artificial general intelligence. AI doesn’t have its own motivations and it’s not similar to human intelligence at the moment. But let’s say we get to AGI. Do you think we would then need laws that would make the AGI itself legally liable for its own actions?

Ho: I don’t. Blockchain is not AGI, but it can self-execute. There was a question of whether or not a smart contract could be liable. Generally speaking, I think the answer is currently no. I don’t think they should be liable because the whole point of laws is to provide protection for society and to provide a means of negative incentives for doing bad things that hurt society.

This is a little bit more of a philosophical topic, but if we made an AGI an independent legal entity, what would be the remedy if someone were harmed? There would be none because it doesn’t have money. It’s not really a person.

Magazine: Could you turn it off? We’ve already seen that LLMs try to avoid being shut down. 

Ho: Maybe, but it doesn’t solve the problem of harm. Let’s just say the robot has now developed the fear of death, like being turned off. In my opinion, if somebody commits suicide because of AGI, and this is already happening, and we’re not even quite at AGI yet, but someone falls in love and takes some actions, what would be the recourse for the grieving family if this person harms themselves? Nothing, in my opinion, if there is not somebody with actual legal authority, like a company or a person that can really be held accountable. Robots—at least right now—they don’t have feelings, they don’t have fears. That’s kind of the distinguishing factor.

Magazine: The critical reason you should never ask ChatGPT for legal advice

“When I was a kid, I thought the kids lived in the TV show, and when I first saw kids breaking out into song, it kind of disturbed me,” Kelly says. “How would they all know to do that? What’s going on? Are they brainwashed?” Buddy builds on these innocent fears, telling a story about gaslighting and the hidden darkness that can exist within beloved authority figures. 

Between the relevant themes and the emotional arc, there is, in Kelly’s own admission, a bit more going on in Buddy than in Too Many Cooks — and most of Kelly’s earlier work, too. This includes Adult Swim shows like Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell and his two previous, non-theatrical movies, Yule Log and its sequel. (These last two Adult Swim films, which begin as normal footage of a fire in a fireplace before spiraling out of control into a meta-textual narrative about murder, time travel, and aliens, are feature-length but not exactly mainstream popcorn fare.)