7 in 10 people worldwide are wary of trusting anyone whose values or information sources differ from theirs. Most think this distrust runs deep enough for people to work against one another. This is also very evident in the comment section of any tweet about controversial topics or opinions.

Those findings come from the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which polled nearly 34,000 people in 28 countries. The wariness held across age groups, income levels, and both developed and developing markets.

The same distrust shows up on the platforms people now use most for news. Social and video networks are now the most widely used way to reach online news, the Reuters Institute found. Yet, only 22% of people trust the news they find on social media. 

Geo, the knowledge network founded by The Graph co-founder Yaniv Tal, launched Geo Debates on September 22. The app puts two people who disagree on screen together, in the same short vertical format that those feeds run on.

Geo Debates Hands Each Side a Clock and Mutes the Other Mic

Each debate centers on one claim, and users must go on record with their stance before Geo will match them. The app then pairs each person only with someone who took the opposite side.

The two argue on video in timed, alternating turns. While one person speaks, the other’s microphone stays off, so neither can talk over the other.

Geo then stitches both recordings into one subtitled split-screen clip and publishes it to a vertical feed. Viewers vote on who made the stronger case and can open each claim to see what supports it. Claims are tagged as factual or opinion, but the platform does not rule on which ones are true.

The short-video format matches how audiences already take in information. Reuters Institute data shows 77% of people now watch online news videos every week. On TikTok, news viewing skews toward clips under two minutes.

Early debates cover crypto, markets, AI, politics, and culture, including whether Bitcoin (BTC) beats gold as a store of value. Tal ties the format to the democratic and scientific traditions of debate.

“In order to get closer to the truth, we have to be able to examine issues from different sides. Democracies have a rich tradition of debate, as does the scientific community. Any institution that seeks to find truth or alignment requires healthy debate, and I think we need to bring this into the internet age,” said Yaniv Tal.

Geo Files Each Claim in a Knowledge Graph With Web3 Roots

When a debate ends, Geo extracts each speaker’s claims and logs them under that person’s name. Other users can then pick up any of those claims and challenge them in turn.

Geo describes its network as knowledge for people and AI, with sources kept visible. Much of that sourcing depends on users, as Geo’s site asks visitors to add sources and context in their roles as curators.

The knowledge graph is also where Geo’s crypto roots show. The Graph’s blog describes Geo as a core developer on the protocol. Its earlier app, Geo Genesis, used The Graph’s GRC-20 standard for shared knowledge graphs to publish data onchain. Geo has not said whether debate claims are written onchain the same way.

Tal traces the project to misinformation around the 2016 US election and the clouded public debate over COVID.

A Crowd Vote Can Crown the Better Performer

The vote reflects who viewers think made the stronger case. That leaves room for a confident speaker to win on weaker evidence.

Reuters Institute data shows audiences already separate appeal from trust when judging news creators. Audiences rate them as more entertaining and relatable than traditional outlets, but less trustworthy and less impartial. A vote on the stronger case may reward the first set of traits over the second.

Recent research suggests the format matters. A 2024 study matched 582 UK Labour and Conservative voters for 10-minute unmoderated chats. 

Sympathy for the other side rose afterward, but mainly when pairs agreed or found common ground. Where they only disagreed, sympathy did not rise. Across the sample, the chats did not shift opinions.

Geo matches only people who disagree, the condition where that effect was weakest. Still, willingness to talk across party lines rose even among pairs who disagreed, and lasted two to three weeks.

Meanwhile, X’s Community Notes handles crowd judgment differently. A note appears publicly only after enough contributors from different points of view rate it helpful. Geo has not said whether its votes account for where viewers already stand.

Each debate also needs two people willing to argue on camera, and the record needs curators to add sources. That runs against a shift the Reuters Institute flagged, as fewer people post on social platforms and more simply scroll.

A split-screen clip could also be cut down to one side once it spreads beyond Geo. Tal built the app so arguments outlast the feed. First, Geo has to get enough people to stop scrolling and step in front of the camera.

The post Can This TikTok-Style Debate App Fix the Internet’s Trust Problem? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Hyperliquid (HYPE) has gained 88% in roughly two months and is sitting just below $100, and Hyperliquid’s open interest just printed a record $8.8 billion. Those two facts are related, but not in the simple way the rally’s biggest fans want to believe.

The move toward the all-time high is backed by real revenue growth and an accelerating buyback program, not pure speculation. But record open interest also means a crowded derivatives book, and a crowded book cuts both ways if HYPE fails to hold above resistance.

Hyperliquid Recovery Meets Reality: Why the $100 Test Is Arriving Now

The timing isn’t random. Bitcoin recovered above $85,000 for the first time since January, and that shift in risk appetite pulled speculative capital back into perpetual markets broadly. Hyperliquid, as the dominant venue for that flow, absorbed a disproportionate share of it.

HYPE printed a September all-time high of $96 on the back of that inflow, extending its two-month gain to 88%. If the uptrend holds, the immediate technical targets sit at $102 and $118 – levels that would confirm a clean breakout rather than a rejection at the psychological ceiling

(Source – TradingView, HYPE USDT)

The macro backdrop matters here, too. Crude oil slipping below $90 would ease inflation pressure and could deepen the broader risk-on trade that’s already lifting crypto – a conditional tailwind, not a guarantee, but one worth watching alongside Bitcoin’s own resistance tests, where leverage has repeatedly amplified moves in both directions.

Hyperliquid Revenue and Buybacks Are Fueling the Rally

Hyperliquid directs most of its generated revenue into HYPE buybacks, the mechanism that actually connects protocol activity to the token price. That mechanism has been running hot.

Average daily revenue rose from about $1.5 million in Q2 to $3 million in Q3 – a straightforward doubling, not the more dramatic multiple sometimes attached to the quarter as a whole.

(Source – TokenTerminal, Hyperliquid Revenue)

The sharper move came mid-August, when daily revenue exceeded $5 million. That spike coincided with weekly buyback spending through the assistance fund jumping from roughly $5 million to $20 million – nearly a fourfold increase in a matter of weeks.

HYPE crossed $80 for the first time during that exact window. The sequencing is the tell: trading activity rose, revenue followed, buyback spending quadrupled, and price broke to a new level shortly after. That’s a demand-and-supply-reduction story, not just a momentum chase

Access Up to 200x Leverage on Bitcoin and Ethereum CFDs on PrimeXBT

Why Record Open Interest Raises the Downside Risk

Open interest measures the notional value of outstanding derivatives positions – not order-book depth, and not a dollar figure that translates one-to-one into potential losses.

At $8.8 billion, Hyperliquid’s OI has now surpassed the level seen at the previous bull-market peak last October, suggesting positioning is more aggressive today than it was at the last major top.

(Source – Coinalyze, Hyperliquid OI)

That matters because a heavily leveraged book amplifies moves in both directions. A breakout above $100 with rising open interest would suggest fresh conviction entering the market. A rejection at resistance, with the same open interest sitting on the books, sets up forced unwinds, where longs get liquidated into a falling market, accelerating the drop.

The $85-$88 range is a potential pullback area if the rally cools from here. That’s not a prediction of collapse – it’s the specific level where the bullish thesis would need to hold if $100 rejects on the first attempt.

What HYPE Needs to Prove Next

The evidence supports two things simultaneously: a genuine activity-driven rally and an elevated derivatives book that raises the stakes of the next move. Both are true. Neither cancels the other out.

Three things will determine which path plays out. Does HYPE clear and hold $100 on volume, or does it stall and roll over? Does open interest keep climbing alongside price, confirming fresh conviction, or does it plateau while price pushes higher, a divergence that often precedes a squeeze? And does the revenue base supporting Hyperliquid’s buyback program stay above the mid-August run rate, or does it fade back toward Q3 averages?

A failure at resistance would put the $85-$88 zone in play, and a crowded $8.8 billion open interest book means that move could happen fast if forced liquidations kick in. That’s a real conditional risk. It is not, based on what’s currently on the table, a confirmed crash – it’s a specific scenario with specific triggers, and traders watching the tape over the next few sessions will know which one they’re in well before the headlines catch up.

The post HYPE’s Rally Has Real Fuel but $100 Is a Critical Test appeared first on Cryptonews.

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Big Tech’s AI spending boom is carrying an ever-larger share of the US growth story. So far in 2026, investments tied to the AI build-out have been responsible for roughly one-fifth of US economic growth.

This year alone, the four leading “hyperscalers” — Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Microsoft (MSFT) — are expected to spend roughly $800 billion in capital expenditures, or 10 times their spend in 2019, only seven years ago, per Goldman Sachs.

Sustaining that investment, however, will require an equally historic expansion in the cash generated by the companies footing the bill, says Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk. (Disclosure: Yahoo is a portfolio company of funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management.)

Over the past year, the financing for the AI spending race has come increasingly from the debt market, where the hyperscalers are expected to issue $250 billion in global investment-grade debt by the end of 2026.

Pushing the hyperscalers toward the debt market is a shortage of cash. While these companies have long been known as cash juggernauts, the intense spending requirements of AI infrastructure have pushed Big Tech toward increasingly tighter cash flow. In July, Alphabet reported its first quarter of negative free cash flow since going public as Google in 2004.

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Allowing this to happen, argues Sløk, are expectations that the companies that have been deploying cash are set to begin making it back in spades. Consensus estimates on Wall Street now expect operating cash flow to grow from $600 billion in 2025 to roughly $2 trillion in 2030 — more than tripling within five years, per data compiled by Apollo Global.

If that cash flow doesn’t emerge, Sløk wrote to clients, the economics underpinning the dominant driver of the US stock market could quickly shift.

“If this doesn’t happen, then the risk is that the AI trade weakens, with credit spreads widening, capex plans getting cut and ultimately US GDP growth slowing,” Sløk wrote to clients.

The concentration risk of the US market’s reliance on the AI trade played out on Monday. Spurred by gains in hyperscaler Meta and semiconductor leaders Arm and Intel, the Nasdaq Composite index surged by 2.3% to close at an all-time high, while the S&P 500 gained 1.5%.

Yet under the hood, the breadth of that strength was highly concentrated. Thirty S&P 500 stocks touched 52-week lows on Monday, versus only seven that reached a 52-week high — a sharp divergence beneath the index rally.

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Outlook for AI capex is strong, Morgan Stanley analysts led by chief equity strategist Michael Wilson wrote to clients on Monday. The analysts cite robust demand for compute, AI adopters seeing evidence of the benefits of their spending, rising computer lease rates, and the potential for “material benefits to human welfare.”

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Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), an Austrian banking group with operations across Central and Eastern Europe, is expanding its cryptocurrency push through a group-wide partnership with Bitpanda.

Bitpanda Enterprise will provide the digital asset infrastructure that RBI’s network banks can use to introduce crypto services, potentially reaching about 18 million customers, according to a joint announcement on Wednesday. Individual banks will determine their offerings and rollout based on local market and regulatory requirements, the companies said.

RBI CEO Michael Höllerer said the bank is seeing growing demand for crypto assets across its markets and is addressing it with Bitpanda.

“As a customer-centric bank, we are committed to meeting our customers’ needs in the best possible way,” he said.

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A spokesperson for Bitpanda told Cointelegraph that the rollout remains at an early stage and will proceed gradually based on local market and regulatory requirements, with further details to come as individual markets are confirmed.

The partnership builds on a crypto integration launched with Austria’s Raiffeisenlandesbank Niederösterreich-Wien in 2024.

Bitpanda, which is authorized under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), told Cointelegraph it is regularly in discussions with banks and financial institutions exploring crypto brokerage services but declined to comment on active or confidential talks.

Related: Banks double on EU MiCA crypto provider list as share hits 23%

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A worker is seen on a container truck at the Port of Ningbo-Zhoushan in Ningbo, in China’s eastern Zhejiang Province on September 22, 2026.

Hector Retamal | Afp | Getty Images

BEIJING — The trade deficit that escalated tensions between China and the U.S. in recent years has yet to shrink significantly, and the world’s second-largest economy faces deep challenges. But China’s efforts to build up self-sufficiency have reduced the threat to its domestic market from global trade developments.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet this week for their second in-person summit of the year. U.S. concerns about artificial intelligence have gained prominence in the days ahead of the meeting.

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But the best that businesses are hoping for is an extension of a trade truce reached last fall. Even then, tariffs have done little to dent America’s appetite for Chinese goods.

While an escalation in trade tensions last April briefly sent the U.S. trade deficit with China to its lowest level since 2017, surging demand for AI-related parts have helped send it higher again so far this year, according to China Customs data accessed through Wind Information.

And even as the U.S. has diversified away from China, it’s hard for the world to shake its dependence on the Asian country.

Reliance on China

Asia still accounts for more than 60% of U.S. imports, the same as before “Liberation Day,” pointed out Jens Eskelund, president of the European Chamber of Commerce in China.

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He estimated between half and three-quarters of container traffic from China to Southeast Asia subsequently heads on to other destinations.

That’s all sped up the pace at which the world relies on China-made goods.

Eskelund said he previously expected China to account for 40% of global container exports in the year 2030 — but the milestone was reached this summer.

How did the world get here?

“Probably the China shock only really started in 2022, because I think everything was distorted by the pandemic,” Eskelund said. “China was first in the pandemic, and first out of the pandemic, and for that reason China actually could allow its exchange rate to rise, and export prices to rise.

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“China could do that because China was the only game in town,” he said.

China’s real estate market began its downturn in 2022, dragging down domestic demand. Chinese companies ramped up global expansion, and exports.

“There is a direct, perfect correlation between the drop in export prices and the acceleration in export in volume terms,” Eskelund said.

U.S. tech companies’ buildout of data centers to power AI has supported demand for Chinese goods.

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But think tank CF40 estimated that for the first time this year, AI-related exports fell significantly in August from a year ago.

Macquarie’s chief China economist Larry Hu last week also pointed out that the recent performance of the PHLX Semiconductor Index — which he said tends to be predictive of how China’s high-tech exports will grow in the next six months — “does not bode well for China’s export outlook over the next year.”

Still, economists don’t expect China’s policymakers to do much.

Within tech-related manufacturing, industrial robot output rose by 34.6% year-on-year in August, while smartphone output fell by 22.3%.

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“Because there are always high-flying subsectors for the government to point to, policymakers do not appear to feel much urgency to introduce additional easing measures, absent a sharp deterioration in the labor market,” Goldman Sachs’ chief China economist Hui Shan said in a Sept. 20 report.

She pointed out house prices have already seen a 30% decline over a six-year timeline, typical of historical large-scale property downturns in other parts of the world. “Weak labor markets and still-falling rents are likely to prolong the downturn in many parts of China,” she added.

The number of loss-making companies is also on the rise, accounting for 24% of industrial firms in China in 2025.

Fierce competition

The economic slowdown has only pushed companies in China to compete even more fiercely with each other, and their foreign rivals.

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The American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said this month that three-quarters of members responding to a survey saw Chinese rivals as more advanced, and that the perceived gap in product quality narrowed by 6 percentage points from last year.

For the first time since 2022, domestic competition has surpassed geopolitical tensions as the top challenge for members, the chamber said.

It’s all spilling over internationally, as European Union officials are starting to follow the U.S. in scrutiny of China-origin exports. EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, who urged “tangible results” from China on trade by October, is expected to travel to Beijing next month.

The European Union has the largest trade deficit with China of any economy, Eskelund pointed out.

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In addition to competing through lower-cost goods, Chinese companies have also come to dominate global supply chains for critical minerals. This also supports Beijing’s self-sufficiency goals.

“There’s no sense in which China’s strategy seems to be at all dependent on actions that the rest of the world might take,” said Chad Bown, senior fellow at the U.S.-based Peterson Institute for International Economics.

It’s “this strategy of a one-way dependence of the rest of the world on China that it’s going to weaponize.”

—CNBC’s Anniek Bao contributed to this report.

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