Crypto
Crypto Long & Short: Inside the chain settling $150 billion of stablecoins a week
Tron uses a delegated proof-of-stake (DPoS) consensus mechanism. Under this system, TRX holders stake their tokens to gain voting power and use that power to elect 27 Super Representatives, the validators responsible for producing blocks and maintaining the network. Because block production is concentrated among a limited, elected set of validators rather than distributed across a broad network of participants, Tron can achieve fast confirmation times and low computational overhead.
Stablecoins and the payments use case
The single most important development in Tron’s evolution has been its emergence as the leading settlement network for stablecoins. A substantial share of global USDT circulation now resides on Tron, and this characteristic separates Tron from many of its layer-1 peers: rather than competing primarily on DeFi innovation or consumer applications, Tron has positioned itself as digital payment rails for dollars.
That positioning shows up clearly in the network’s usage data. According to Tron’s blockchain explorer, weekly transaction counts on Tron have climbed to record highs, recently approaching 100 million transactions per week, even as the average onchain transaction fee has fallen to around seven cents, a multiyear low.
Weekly active addresses, a measure of unique wallets transacting on the network over a seven-day period, have also been climbing toward record levels, reflecting broad and sustained usage rather than a narrow base of activity. Stablecoin transfer volume on Tron has grown alongside this activity, recently running at roughly $150 billion to $190 billion per week.
XRP price hovers under $1.49 after three consecutive daily declines left the token losing the $1.50 support, even as a modest bounce pulled it off session lows. CoinGlass data showed the long-to-short ratio at 0.975, meaning short positions marginally outnumbered longs, while the funding rate sat at a positive 0.008%, the reading that determines whether long or short traders pay a periodic fee to hold perpetual futures.
XRP Long Short Ratio, Coinglass
That combination is the crux of the problem. Traders are still paying to stay long, yet the spot price has not moved in a way that rewards the bet, and the disconnect between heavy spot selling and futures demand is the setup that tends to unwind fast once a key level gives way.
A 0.975 long-to-short ratio is not a bearish signal in any decisive sense. It sits close enough to 1.0 that it reads as near-balanced positioning rather than a market leaning hard in either direction.
XRP Funding Rate, Coinglass
Funding tells a more interesting story on its own. A positive rate means demand for long exposure in crypto derivatives is real enough that longs are compensating shorts to hold the position, which typically signals conviction that price moves higher.
However, it cuts both ways: if price falls further, those same leveraged longs become forced sellers, and a positive funding regime built on thin spot demand can flip into a liquidation cascade faster than one built on genuine accumulation.
CryptoQuant’s summary data flagged overheating conditions across both XRP’s spot and futures markets, alongside sell-side dominance in futures, meaning sellers have retained the upper hand in derivatives even as funding stays positive. That is the missing piece: positive funding shows traders are willing to hold bullish exposure, but it has not yet translated into enough buying pressure to absorb the futures selling and push through resistance.
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XRP Price and the $1.37 Support
The daily chart still leans bullish on a longer timeframe. XRP held above its 50-day price exponential moving average near $1.365 and its 200-day EMA near $1.369 through the three-day slide, with the 100-day EMA sitting lower at $1.307 as a secondary reference.
Momentum has cooled rather than reversed. The RSI sat near 55, close to neutral, and the MACD flattened around zero, a pattern consistent with consolidation after an earlier advance rather than an active breakdown.
The level that matters most sits at $1.37, where the 50-day and 200-day EMAs converge into a single support band. A clean break below that zone opens the $1.30 area, and a deeper slide would eventually put the $1.00 psychological level in play, though XRP would need to fall substantially before that becomes the immediate focus. On the upside, reclaiming the $1.574 resistance level is the trigger that would strengthen the case for a move toward $1.90.
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What Happens Next for XRP?
Two scenarios frame the near-term path. If XRP holds the $1.37 zone, the market stays in a consolidation phase where positive funding continues to reflect trader appetite for long exposure, but that alone won’t confirm a breakout without a corresponding rise in open interest and spot volume.
If XRP price instead reclaims $1.574, the technical case for a run toward $1.90 gets meaningfully stronger, and that move would likely force shorts to cover into strength. The alternative is a sustained break below $1.37, which shifts focus to $1.30 as the next line of defense, with $1.00 as the deeper level only if that support also fails.
Either way, the current setup leaves no room for complacency on either side of the trade. Near-balanced positioning combined with positive funding and futures sell-side dominance is a fragile mix, and the next move in spot price will do more to settle the argument than another shift in the long-short ratio.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post XRP Price in Danger: Positive Funding Masks a Fragile Setup appeared first on Cryptonews.
Bitcoin recovered Monday’s losses to trade at $84,170 on Tuesday, up 0.82% since midnight UTC and 1.4% over 24 hours, with 72 of the 100 CoinDesk 100 constituents higher and the index adding 0.89% to 1,904.49.
The bid is arriving despite conditions that have been suppressing risk assets for a week, the 10-year Treasury yield sitting at 5.234% after ending Monday above 5.2%, near levels last seen in 2007, and the 30-year at 5.549% having topped 5.56% on Monday, around a 2004 high.
U.S. stocks fell for a second session on Monday, the Dow dropping more than 300 points and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite shedding 0.8% and 0.9%, with futures mixed on Tuesday morning.
Decentralized finance (DeFi) is driving the move for the second time in a week, with the DeFi Select Index (DFX) gaining 5.0% since midnight, led by lending protocol token aave at 11% and curve dao token at 5.2%. The CoinDesk 80 rose 2.0% against the CoinDesk 5’s 1.3%, though the ranking inverts over 24 hours, where the CD5’s 1.7% beats the CD80’s 0.44%.
The D’CENT wallet hack, the year’s second-largest drain of XRP behind the Bitget crypto exchange hack, has spilled beyond the XRP Ledger onto additional blockchains like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Stellar.
Hackers have drained more than 12.4 million XRP from more than 7,000 D’CENT wallets, still some way behind Bitget’s loss of 102.9 million XRP.
Although the wallet was popular among the XRP community, D’CENT users who owned assets of other blockchains have also lost their funds.
D’CENT’s own disclosure named Bitcoin, Tron, and Ethereum, for example. Even a Stellar user has lost XLM in the incident.
Hackers are able to sweep funds across blockchains with one compromised recovery phrase for the multi-blockchain wallet.
IoTrust, the maker of D’CENT, confirmed at least 110 abnormal transfer reports, including non-XRP assets, per ZDNet Korea.
XRP holders lose $18 million in D’CENT hack
Drains of XRP are the most well-documented, due to the prominence of D’CENT among XRP holders.
At least six waves of theft occurred between September 15 and 20, emptying 6,678 wallets of 11.7 million XRP.
The thief stole from large wallets first, by hand, and soon wrote scripts to take funds from progressively smaller wallets.
Warnings from D’CENT and other members of the XRP community couldn’t stop the drainage. Thieves took 640,370 additional XRP after September 21, bringing the tally to above 12.4 million.
By Friday, 6.3 million of those stolen XRP had crossed to Ethereum’s blockchain through the swap service THORChain.
As the theft spilled over to other blockchains, researchers admitted the scope of the losses, saying, “Most of it is no longer XRP.”
Read more: David Schwartz warns of hard fork because XRP nodes won’t upgrade
In August, D’CENT was still touting its hardware wallets’ secure element, boasting that it was impervious to vulnerabilities linked to the Coldcard hack.
D’CENT now warns users that wallets they created using its app are vulnerable, urging them to create a fresh recovery phrase and immediately migrate everything, including tokens, NFTs, and any staked assets.
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Market action since 2022 backs Thielen’s take. The 10-year yield more than doubled to 3.88% that year as the Fed raised interest rates rapidly, including several 50- and 75-basis-point hikes to fight inflation.
Bitcoin fell 64% that year. Fed tightening and rising yields added to the pain from crypto scams and blowups.
The picture has been different since. From the end of 2023, the 10-year yield has risen 135 basis points to 5.23%, the highest since 2007. Over the same stretch, bitcoin has roughly doubled to $86,000, even after pulling back from its October record above $126,000.
Thielen and others attribute much of the recent rise in yields to fiscal fears and a higher term premium. In plain English, investors want to be paid more to lock up their money in long-term bonds, given the uncertainty over inflation and government borrowing.
Chicago-based Strategic Analytics made a similar point about gold, noting that it has tracked fiscal risk more closely than the Fed’s policy path since 2022.
“Since 2022, gold has increasingly tracked fiscal-risk perceptions – term premium, deficits, debt sustainability – rather than the Fed’s policy path. Gold is not defying real yields. It is pricing fiscal sustainability and currency debasement, which has become the marginal driver,” it said recently in a LinkedIn post.
Humanoid robots box during the 5th Global Digital Trade Expo on September 25, 2026 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
BEIJING — China’s securities regulator is raising the bar for public listings of humanoid robot startups, according to three sources familiar with the CSRC’s thinking.
It’s a sign of how one of the hottest sectors of the market is cooling, as investors globally assess whether artificial intelligence stocks are in a bubble.
The Chinese regulator wants local “embodied AI” startups seeking to go public to meet three specific criteria, according to the sources, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation.
They are:
- The “window guidance” requires that the humanoid applicants have sustainable revenue and commercial orders.
- Losses must narrow, with one source saying a three-year forecast is needed.
- The company must possess core technology such as robotic brain or hands.
Even if a startup only has to meet two of the three criteria, as one source indicated, it’s unclear which, if any, of the companies can do so.
That’s lowered expectations to just a handful, or none, of these startups making it to public markets, the sources said.
At least two dozen humanoid-related embodied AI companies have filed to list in Hong Kong alone, according to two of the sources. Hong Kong in May 2025 started letting tech companies file confidentially for IPOs.
The Hong Kong stock exchange declined to comment. The China Securities Regulatory Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Mainland China companies wanting to list in Hong Kong also need the CSRC’s blessing.
Unitree IPO impact
Scrutiny on China’s growing number of humanoid robot startups and their fast-growing valuations — supported by a mix of government and private sector funds — has grown over the last several weeks.
The industry’s posterchild, Unitree, got a regulatory fast-track to its listing in Shanghai on Aug. 19 as the World Robot Conference kicked off in Beijing.
But in a keynote a day later, founder Wang Xingxing cautioned that commercialization beyond dancing robots remained years away. It accentuated a debate that picked up in subsequent weeks on what humanoids can actually do — and whether industry startups were actually making money.
China now has well over 100 humanoid companies, which fall under the national push for “embodied AI.” The term received Beijing’s support in the last two annual government work reports, although authorities have warned of a bubble in the humanoid robot industry.
Reflecting a rapid surge in interest, investment in the sector hit 47.09 billion yuan ($6.95 billion) in the second quarter, more than double that of the first quarter — and up over six times versus the same period last year, according to industry data provider Xiniu.
Unitree raised about about 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) in its IPO on Aug. 19 with Shanghai-listed shares skyrocketing more than 460% in their debut to close at 845 yuan.
The stock had nearly halved in price as of Monday, at 459.65 yuan a share.
Hong Kong-listed Ubtech has also tumbled more than 40% so far this year. The company, which went public in December 2023, still reported an operating loss for the first half of this year of 279 million yuan.
The share price decline contrasts with the flood of capital pouring into humanoid robotics companies over the last 12 months or so. The tech, often called “physical AI” in China, has been seen as a way for early-stage investors to benefit from the surge of interest in artificial intelligence models.
However, Rhodium Group analysis this month found that China’s AI companies only make about 10% the revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI. The ratio of valuation to revenue — especially for Chinese AI startups Moonshot and DeepSeek — was far higher than their U.S. rivals, the report said.
While expectations grow for the U.S. AI giants’ IPOs, chipmaker AMD said Monday it is acquiring World Labs for $8.2 billion in a stock deal. The startup, founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, is building AI models for creating virtual 3D environments frequently used in humanoid robot development.
The launch this morning was both imperfect and stripped down to its orbital essentials. On the way up, one of the Starship’s six engines failed to burn properly, requiring the other engines to compensate for the missing thrust to get the ship in orbit.
In addition, the return to Earth was simplified. SpaceX has made itself famous for safely landing the first stage of its Falcon 9 and Starship boosters—with 641 out of 688 Falcon 9 launches featuring this kind of recovery, allowing the boosters to be reused and make flying cheaper. Starship’s first stage, meantime, performs what has become known as a chopstick recovery, with the booster navigating its way back to the launch tower where two giant metal arms pluck it from the sky. For the current mission, the chopstick recovery was done away with to simplify the flight objectives; instead the first stage made a soft, engine-assisted splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship spacecraft was planned for a six-orbit, 10-hour mission, with the ship’s engines set to fire around the dinner hour Monday to bring the spacecraft down for a similar gentle, watery landing.
Goldman Sachs’ Anshul Sehgal says bonds yielding 5% or more are not the best trade right now. He still favors AI infrastructure, which he sees as a far more asymmetric bet than the long bond.
Sehgal, a global co-head of Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities (FICC) at the bank, laid out the view just a few days after the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.
Why Goldman Sachs Is Passing on 5%+ Bonds
On Goldman’s The Markets, Sehgal said the 30-year Treasury, known as the long bond, had hovered around 5% for weeks. He noted that clients want to buy it at 5% or higher, yet he still sees little upside.
The yield has kept climbing since the recording, reaching 5.56% on September 29, a new 52-week high. Sehgal blamed structural pressure for the strain on the long end. Retiring baby boomers are buying fewer long bonds, and heavy long-dated borrowing tied to AI is crowding the market.
Those pressures explain why the selloff can persist even without a fresh inflation shock. Fewer retirees buying long bonds and a steady flow of long-dated borrowing tied to AI both weigh on prices, and neither fades quickly.
Sehgal adds that fear over US debt sustainability makes investors less willing to hold the long end, which feeds on itself.
The takeaway is that a rising yield does not necessarily break his thesis. It may instead show why he sees limited reward in owning the bond, while the risk to his AI trade is that costlier long-term borrowing squeezes the levered companies he favors.
AI Compute Is the Asymmetric Trade
An asymmetric trade offers far more potential gain than risk. Sehgal applies that label to compute (AI computing power), data centers, and Neoclouds, which are cloud providers built to rent out that capacity.
“I think the asymmetric expression is being long compute.”
Anshul Sehgal, Goldman
The catch is leverage. Savers collecting higher interest have effectively financed the AI build-out, leaving equities more indebted than a year ago. Sehgal admits these are levered bets. Still, he thinks they can multiply in value, while the wider stock market looks less certain.
Tighter Policy Hits Spenders, Not Capital
Sehgal says the Fed frames its September 16 hike as catch-up after five years above its inflation target. Schwab counts 16 of 19 Fed officials expecting another increase this year. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh also stressed three times that the Fed is easing back some stimulus rather than turning restrictive, Sehgal adds.
He argues that government interest payments flow to capital rather than workers, so higher rates curb household spending, a risk for the broader stock market.
He also rejects the debt-sustainability fears weighing on long bonds.
“For me, that’s a red herring.”
Anshul Sehgal, Goldman
Meanwhile, BlackRock’s Rick Rieder is cutting equities for bonds paying 7% to 8%, though his high-grade bond call still cautions against rushing into the 10-year Treasury.
Sehgal names the Middle East conflict as the top driver of policy and markets in the weeks ahead.
The post Goldman Sachs Explains Why Not to Buy the 5%+ Bonds and Rather Stick to AI appeared first on BeInCrypto.
“Bitcoin has pulled back to $83K, testing the lower boundary of last week’s consolidation range,” Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro, said in an email to CoinDesk. “As with the market as a whole, a retest of the $82K region, where peaks were formed in May and early September, is entirely to be expected under current conditions.”
“Looking ahead, a sustained return to prices below $80K would be an important signal that the market is not ready to move higher for some time yet. If, however, this consolidation is soon followed by a new bullish momentum, it could send the leading cryptocurrency well above $90K,” he added.
The pressure is coming from bonds and oil.
Treasuries steadied in Asia after tumbling during U.S. trading, with the 10-year yield up one basis point to 5.25% after reaching its highest level since 2007 on Monday. A higher guaranteed return on government debt raises the bar for holding assets that pay no income, bitcoin among them.
Brent rose more than 1% to nearly $107 a barrel, its second straight gain, as hopes for an imminent diplomatic breakthrough with Iran faded.
Pricier oil feeds into inflation, and traders have been adding to bets that the Fed will raise rates again. MSCI’s All Country World Index fell to its lowest since Sept. 18, and Nasdaq 100 futures slipped 0.3% after Monday’s tech-led selloff on Wall Street.
U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin Tether is a go-to tool for the Iranian government to bypass sanctions, a new report from a group of Senate Democrats said.
Democrats on the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Intelligence published a report Monday laying out the argument that Tether plays a key role in allowing Iran to conduct transactions that skirt international sanctions.
“Iran’s cryptocurrency-based shadow banking network has processed significant volumes of funds and implicates various Iranian interests,” the report said, adding that Tether has “repeatedly failed” to block Iran-connected wallets.
“USDT has become a significant financial lifeline within Iran’s shadow banking network,” the report said.
When Tether does freeze wallets, it sometimes takes weeks, but the company also sometimes responds to requests without actually blacklisting wallets, the report claimed.
“Prior to 2024, Tether did not comprehensively and consistently freeze wallets designated by counter-terrorism agencies and continues to fail to proactively block clearly illicit wallets,” the report said. “This absence of deterrence invited abuse: terrorist organizations such as Hamas shifted from transacting in Bitcoin and a mix of cryptocurrencies to promoting USDT.”
Elon Musk’s Grok AI predicts an extremely bullish price for Ripple (XRP) by January 1, 2027, that will blow the minds of even the most dedicated members of the Ripple Army.
If you’re holding a sizeable bag of XRP USD, you may want to sit down before reading this. Grok claims that $25–$40 is achievable by 2027, with a stretch target of $50+ under the assumption of a full-blown crypto bull market returning and being supercharged by an unprecedented institutional catalyst.
XRP currently trades near $1.50–$1.52 as of September 28, 2026, down nearly -3% over the past 24 hours and with a daily trading volume of $3.5Bn, up from $3.2Bn the day prior.
This outlook is extreme and leans far beyond standard institutional forecasts. It assumes not only a strong late-2026 bull market driven by liquidity and risk-on conditions, but also a once-in-a-generation catalyst.
What is the Catalyst that Grok AI Predicts Could Spark an XRP Run Toward $40
Major central banks (including the Fed, ECB, Bank of Japan, and PBOC) announcing that the XRP Ledger will serve as a primary settlement layer for cross-border CBDC and tokenized asset flows, combined with large commercial banks being incentivized or required to hold XRP as a liquidity buffer, and revelations of massive sovereign wealth fund accumulation.
Under this highly speculative scenario, forced institutional demand collides with retail FOMO in a classic late-cycle mania, allowing XRP to move from the current ~$1.50 range through previous-cycle highs and into the mid-to-high double digits by early 2027.
This remains pure speculation and entertainment, not a base-case or even high-probability outlook. Crypto markets are extremely volatile, and the catalyst described above would require multiple extraordinary policy and institutional developments.
However, with Ripple’s case against the SEC dropped and its subsequent rise as a highly favored US-based digital asset company under President Trump, anything could be on the table for XRP if the perfect scenario aligns.
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Technical Analysis Supporting the Insane Grok AI XRP Price Prediction
On the higher timeframes, XRP has already established a constructive recovery base after reclaiming key moving averages from the mid-September lows near $1.25–$1.30. Price is consolidating in the $1.45–$1.55 region after testing highs near $1.63–$1.66.
In a normal bull market, a sustained break above $1.70–$2.00 would open the door to the prior cycle high near $3.65. Under the extreme institutional adoption scenario outlined above, that prior high would likely be cleared with significant force, triggering a series of measured-move and Fibonacci extension targets far beyond historical levels.
Aggressive projections from the multi-year base, combined with the kind of vertical price discovery seen in previous mania phases, could theoretically extend into the $25–$40+ zone if volume and momentum expand dramatically. RSI and momentum indicators would almost certainly reach deeply overbought levels during such a move, which is typical of parabolic advances.
Key nearer-term supports remain in the $1.40–$1.45 and $1.30 zones; holding those would keep the broader recovery structure intact while the market waits for (or prices in) any extraordinary catalysts.
Overall, while the current chart supports continued upside in a standard bull market, only an extreme surge in institutional demand and narrative intensity could justify the kind of multi-thousand-percent extension implied by the $25–$50 targets.
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Maxi Doge Targets Early Mover Upside as XRP Tests Key Levels
While the Grok AI prediction of a potential 30x run for XRP is exciting, presale plays have a stronger track record of producing such returns. It does explain why attention keeps drifting toward presale-stage plays with smaller denominators.
Maxi Doge ($MAXI) is one of those plays. It is an Ethereum-based meme token built around a 240-lb canine mascot and a “1000x leverage” trading-culture identity. The presale has raised $4.8M at a current price of $0.0002841, with dynamic APY staking live for holders.
Standout features include holder-only trading competitions with leaderboard rewards and a Maxi Fund treasury earmarked for liquidity and partnerships.
The meme-first, gym-bro marketing angle (“never skip leg day, never skip a pump”) is endearing. The accumulation numbers suggest plenty of traders are picking a side.
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Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post Grok AI Predicts XRP Could Hit $40 in 2026 With Landmark Event appeared first on Cryptonews.
XRP Price in Danger: Positive Funding Masks a Fragile Setup
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