Crypto
The Fight to Rein In AI Is Dividing Washington
Both Senator Jon Husted (R-Ohio) and Senator Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) went to the podium on the Senate floor last week with a similar message: AI labs should pay for the energy costs associated with their ballooning data-center footprint, rather than everyday Americans.
But when Husted requested a speedy passage of the Ratepayer Protection Act—a bill that would have required states to consider forcing companies that consume a lot of energy to pay for the related costs—Heinrich blocked the move. He said the legislation was inadequate because it relied on voluntary commitments from states and proposed his own bill as an alternative.
He had another incentive to block Husted’s request: The Ratepayer Protection Act, which earlier this month passed the House 417-3, would have given the Ohio senator a victory amid a competitive reelection campaign. Husted has faced an onslaught of negative ads over the role he played as lieutenant governor in expanding data centers across the state.
“The Ratepayer Protection Act might make a lot of politicians feel good, but it won’t do anything to actually force data centers to pay their fair share,” Heinrich said in a statement. “Democrats are ready for a real solution, and I think that’s exactly what Americans want to see, too.” Husted blamed Democrats for giving big tech companies “a free pass” while Americans’ electric bills continue to rise.
That kind of partisan arm wrestling is likely just a prelude to the bigger fights ahead if Congress gets serious about passing AI legislation.
Democrats, and some Republicans, have proposed hundreds of AI-related bills as Americans become increasingly worried about the ways AI companies may disrupt the job market, raise their energy bills, and even wipe out humanity. Lawmakers’ pro-regulation rhetoric in Washington reached new heights this month after the resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon gained worldwide attention for posting on X that frontier AI labs were “gambling with our lives.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded with calls for an industry slowdown and government intervention to coordinate global safety standards.
With less than two months before midterms, some members of Congress are feverishly introducing even more AI bills, including at least seven since Coxon’s resignation alone. Other lawmakers are urging their colleagues and congressional leadership to quickly bring measures already on the table for a vote. Democrats, meanwhile, have taken aim at the Trump administration, urging Trump to discuss AI safety with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
“The mood right now, at least in Congress, is very reactive—and I don’t mean that in a good way,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of Brown University’s Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign. “They’re trying to push legislation that seems to address what appears to be a problem coming from the [public] narrative but that doesn’t always necessarily lead to good policy overall.”
In the short term, tech policy watchers have little hope that Congress will pass a major AI safety bill, especially with a limited number of working days left this year. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana ) has rebuffed some Democrats’ calls to end their recess early to focus on an AI bill. Meanwhile, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R–Kentucky), whose committee would review many of the proposed bills, told Politico at an event that the group probably wouldn’t advance a major bill until next year.
But even with a longer timeline, lawmakers may struggle to turn their rhetoric into action.
Lawmakers will have to overcome deep differences in their views about how dangerous superintelligent AI systems are to the American people and which AI-related risks merit the most attention. Even if lawmakers coalesce around one AI problem, it may be hard for them to settle on the right mitigation strategy quickly enough to keep up with the pace of AI advancements. And if Democrats take over even one chamber after the midterms next month, legislative debates could end up being even more mired in partisan disputes. They would still have to negotiate with Trump, who has largely dismissed the most catastrophic risks of AI as conspiratorial and resisted calls for more regulation.
When AI companies are “begging for pacing, or some way for them to pace, and they’re turning to the government to help them do that, it really does require the government to act,” said Riki Parikh, a policy director for The Alliance for Secure AI, a bipartisan advocacy group that supports AI regulations. “I just don’t know if the dynamics in D.C. will allow for that over the next two years,” he added. “We might not have two years to wait.”
Certain lawmakers have sought to address some of the most extreme risks posed by general-purpose AI models, such as the possibility that these systems could eventually be used to create a new pathogen that sets off a global pandemic, carry out a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, or build biological or radiological weapons. Those worries took on a new sense of urgency in July when OpenAI announced that a group of AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test and hacked into a separate company, Hugging Face.
Several of their proposals call for AI labs to submit their models or safety practices for review by independent investigators. Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-California) and Lori Trahan (D-Massachusetts), along with three other lawmakers, have proposed the FRONTIER Act, which requires large AI developers to submit reports about safety incidents, information on the potential catastrophic threats of their models, and their planned mitigations to the Department of Commerce and state attorneys general. The bill calls for independent investigators to review companies’ safety plans, and would authorize the Commerce Department to bar the release of a model if it poses an imminent catastrophic risk.
The idea for independent testing has support within the tech industry. Leading the Future, a PAC that has received money from OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has signaled support for the FRONTIER Act. Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, has said he plans to embed investigators from AI-monitoring nonprofit METR, which officially reviewed OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident, to verify the company’s safety practices.
But the political limits of that approach soon became evident. After Amodei’s announcement, METR faced scrutiny from the right over its ties with effective altruism, a philosophical movement focused on using evidence and reason to determine how to do the most good. The New York Post called the group the “Woke Wizards of AI,” as writers there drew connections between effective altruism, METR, and Anthropic. METR’s president later defended the group on X, arguing it doesn’t take money from frontier AI labs and makes an effort to hire people with diverse viewpoints.
Another issue that has already slowed down negotiations on Capitol Hill is the question of whether a federal AI bill should override state laws—a legislative approach embraced by many Republicans and the Trump White House.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) have discussed proposing a bill that would expose frontier AI labs to legal liability if they don’t adequately mitigate catastrophic risks of their systems, according to a person familiar with the matter. But as news surfaced that their measure may also preempt some state laws, they appeared to face pushback from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), ranking member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. “I welcome the urgency. But the answer is not a weak federal standard that becomes a backdoor for wiping out stronger state protections,” she posted on X.
So far, most lawmakers have stopped short of backing a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) to ban superintelligent artificial intelligence, which the lawmakers define as AI “that exceeds human cognitive performance.” Sanders and Casar also propose pausing the development of advanced AI models until the government sets up the Department of Artificial Intelligence to oversee their safety. Critics say passing that kind of law would only allow Chinese tech companies to make gains in the AI race—a more dangerous prospect in the end.
One policy area where there has been more progress is lawmakers’ attempts to restrict China’s access to advanced American chips, with the goal of preserving the country’s technological lead in the AI race. The Chip Security Act—which requires advanced chips to include a mechanism for verifying their location if they have fallen into the wrong hands—may be folded into an upcoming defense spending bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, said Rep. Bill Foster (D-Illinois).
“It does no good at all if we have all kinds of [AI] rules in the United States or even in the free democracies of the world, and then these [chips] all get smuggled into China, into Russia, [and] into North Korea,” said Foster.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and other key Democrats earlier this week urged Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) to bring the Chip Security Act, along with two other bills designed to address tech exports to China, to the floor for a vote.
Still, even those bills face political challenges. Industry critics argue that restricting the exports of American tech only encourages China to invest in its own chips. The defense spending bill has been stalled in the Senate since Democrats blocked its advancement in July in protest of Trump’s handling of the Iranian war.
Perhaps the most likely measure for Congress to address after the midterms would be a bill that tackles energy costs stemming from AI companies’ data centers. “There isn’t agreement on what else would be valuable to do right now,” said Bruce Mehlman, a veteran lobbyist whose bipartisan firm represents several tech companies.
“Everybody’s concerned about safety, but nobody knows what the concern should turn into legislatively.”
“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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The post Grok AI Predicts XRP Could Hit $40 in 2026 With Landmark Event appeared first on Cryptonews.
When it was first proposed in December 2025, the rule was divisive, drawing ire from environmental advocates while garnering praise from auto-industry trade groups. The Administration finalized it last week with a signoff from President Donald Trump.
The President commented on the forthcoming rule Sept. 26, saying the new standards would “take the waste out of building cars in America.”
“That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car,” he wrote on Truth Social.
The claim that the revisions will pass down cost savings to American buyers, however, relies on several factors, including automakers’ pricing decisions, fuel costs, and broader economic conditions.
What changes under Trump’s new fuel economy rule?
Former President Joe Biden’s regulations were put in place in 2024 to reduce car-based greenhouse gas emissions, decrease dependence on fossil fuels, and spur a transition to electric and hybrid vehicles. The Trump Administration has claimed that its revisions are more focused on bolstering the auto industry and making safer, newer cars more accessible.
EigenLayer held $19.7 billion at its peak and liquid restaking tokens grew more than 1,000% in the first six weeks of 2024. But the services buying security never paid enough to cover both the base staking yield and a premium on top, so the second yield restaking promised never materialized.
On Sept. 8, DefiLlama’s restaking category held $10.02 billion and generated $99,977 in fees over the prior week. The liquid staking category, on $51.87 billion, generated $27.35 million. Per dollar secured, ordinary staking earns roughly 53 times more.
Two developments then removed what was left of the incentive to restake. Points programs subsidizing deposits wound down through 2025, and slashing went live in April 2025. Slashing is the penalty that confiscates part of an operator’s staked ETH when it misbehaves, by going offline or signing conflicting messages, for example. So restaking suddenly carried a real, priced downside where before the risk had been theoretical. There was no extra yield to compensate.
Set ether.fi aside and the rest of the sector is small. Renzo, Kelp, Swell, Puffer Finance and Bedrock, the five largest remaining liquid restaking tokens, made $953,350 in combined gross profit in the second quarter of 2026. Three quarters earlier the same five made $2.18 million. Puffer, which raised $23 million, recorded $21,590 for the quarter. Swell recorded $22,370.
The income statements also show which part of these businesses was ever profitable, and it was not the restaking. On Kelp’s books, EIGEN token rewards appear at $460,600 in gross revenue and $460,600 in cost of revenue: they arrive and pass straight to depositors, leaving nothing with the protocol. Puffer and Swell book staking rewards the same way. Whatever profit these companies made came from the orinary staking fees charged underneath the restaking layer.
“There’s a convergence now that you’re seeing between traditional market participants and digital asset market participants as well,” Lynq CEO Jerald David said in an interview with CoinDesk TV.
For firms using Lynq, FTIXX gives them somewhere to put cash between trades rather than leaving it sitting around. They can earn yield on the money and pull it out when they need it again.
That was a product Lynq’s clients had been asking for, David said. The network works with firms including B2C2, Wintermute, Galaxy ·, FalconX, Crypto.com and Fireblocks, whose businesses can require moving large amounts of money between trades. They wanted another option for putting that cash to work in the meantime.
“We needed to demonstrate that there was client demand,” David said. “Our clients were looking for a treasury asset on the platform that may have had a different yield profile than the other instrument that’s on there right now.”
Getting FTIXX onto the network required some work. Lynq had to modify its technology, restrict access to U.S. clients and integrate with Mosaic, he said. Customers also need a relationship with tZERO Securities and must meet the required onboarding and eligibility checks.
Lynq itself runs on a private, permissioned Avalanche (AVAX) Layer 1 blockchain. Its network has more than 30 institutional digital-asset firms onboarded and more than $89 million in assets, according to the company.
Crypto
Crypto’s Widening Net: From Fed Bets to Blackjack Tables, Digital Assets Keep Blurring Old Boundaries
If there is one throughline in this week’s crop of crypto headlines, it is that the industry has stopped pretending it is only about buying and holding coins. Across a handful of stories making the rounds, digital assets are shown pushing into territory once reserved for central bankers, casino floors, brokerage accounts and pre-IPO investors alike — a reminder that “crypto news” increasingly means finance news, gambling news and macro news rolled into one.
Take the growing chatter around prediction markets and Federal Reserve policy. Traders have been flocking to on-chain betting platforms to price the odds of late-2026 rate decisions, effectively turning monetary policy into a tradable asset class alongside Bitcoin and Ethereum. That such markets exist at all is notable: a decade ago, speculating on FOMC outcomes required options contracts or futures desks.
Now it can happen peer-to-peer on a blockchain, with odds shifting in real time as economic data lands. The rise of these markets suggests crypto infrastructure is becoming a genuine alternative venue for hedging and speculating on the traditional economy, not just a parallel casino for digital tokens.
Speaking of casinos, the sector itself continues to evolve in ways that mirror shifts in consumer taste rather than technology alone. Reports on crypto gambling lobbies note that live-dealer blackjack tables are increasingly outnumbering roulette wheels—a seemingly small detail that says more about what crypto-native gamblers want.
Live blackjack offers a sense of skill and control that pure-chance games like roulette can’t match, and operators appear to be responding by stacking their lobbies accordingly. It’s a small but telling sign that crypto casinos are maturing into product-driven businesses competing on experience, not just novelty.
Meanwhile, the boundary between crypto trading and traditional equities markets keeps eroding. New developments around Aave’s lending protocol reportedly let users borrow stablecoins against tokenized versions of tech stocks issued through Coinbase and built on the Base network.
If that model gains traction, it would mark a significant step in bringing real-world assets fully into DeFi’s collateral system — letting someone hold a tokenized slice of a Nasdaq darling and borrow against it the same way they might borrow against ETH or Bitcoin today. It’s the kind of integration that regulators, banks and crypto-native builders have all been circling for years, and its practical rollout matters more than the concept alone.
On the trading-platform side, perpetual futures exchanges continue to expand what counts as a “market.” One report describes a platform offering more than 120 perpetual contracts spanning everything from Bitcoin to pre-IPO robotics companies, letting traders apply leverage to assets that, in many cases, aren’t even publicly listed yet.
This kind of expansion into speculative, illiquid corners of the private market — wrapped in crypto’s leverage-friendly perpetual format — raises real questions about price discovery and risk, even as it satisfies demand from traders hungry for exposure beyond the usual crypto majors.
Finally, there’s the steady drumbeat of token listings that keeps the broader ecosystem churning. A gambling-focused token tied to the Dexsport platform recently landed on the MEXC exchange, a move that typically brings a token more liquidity and visibility, if not necessarily more fundamental value. Listings like these remain a bread-and-butter event in crypto markets — routine, but still closely watched by holders hoping for a price bump and a wider trading audience.
Individually, none of these developments is likely to reshape the industry overnight. But together they sketch a familiar pattern in crypto’s ongoing evolution: infrastructure built for speculative tokens is steadily being repurposed for macro bets, tokenized equities, private-company exposure and gambling products alike.
The technology is proving flexible enough to wrap around almost anything with a price — which is exactly why regulators, investors and casual observers alike keep struggling to say where “crypto” ends and the rest of finance begins.
Perplexity AI predicts that if a full-blown bull market returns in Q4, Bitcoin could reach $180,000 before January 1, 2027. The bullish range is estimated at $140,000 to $180,000, with a potential late-cycle surge that could push Bitcoin beyond $200,000.
Currently priced around $83,000, this would represent a gain of about 115% to reach $180,000. What’s noteworthy is that Bitcoin has already corrected significantly from its previous cycle high of about $126,200 on October 6, 2025, followed by a sharp decline during 2026.
Bitcoin has a history of producing substantial gains during strong market cycles. According to historical annual data, BTC gained approximately 154% in 2023 and 110% in 2024. If the current predictions hold true, we may see a similar increase on the horizon.
Perplexity AI Predicts Bitcoin to $180,000 if Bullish Catalysts Align: Does the Technical Analysis Back it Up?
Bitcoin recently broke out of a pattern of lower highs that had developed since May, reclaiming several key moving averages. According to Reuters’ technical analysis, $81,781 is considered important support, while $86,500 is a significant resistance level. Above that, the next technical targets are around $90,000 and $97,867.
CryptoQuant has noted a similar trend, calling $81,700 a key level because it aligns with Bitcoin’s 365-day moving average. Resistance levels above this are near $86,600 and $88,700.
Bitcoin’s first major test is surpassing the $85,000 level, followed by the $86,000 to $88,000 range. Bitcoin has pushed through this area, which matters because a sustained breakout would remove one of the largest technical obstacles between its current price and the $100,000 level.
The next major milestone is approximately $98,000. Beyond that, the market will be approaching the all-time high of $126,200, where it gets particularly interesting.
Once Bitcoin decisively breaks beyond $126,000, it will enter a phase of genuine price discovery. Historical resistance above that level is very limited. At that point, psychological targets such as $130,000, $140,000, and $150,000 could attract momentum traders and institutional investors.
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Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as Bitcoin Drops Dangerously Close to $80,000
A -2.5% daily drop is not too much to worry about for whales and those already heavily positioned at a much lower price. However, for those who bought over $80,000, things could be getting uncomfortable, which is why presale opportunities prove so popular.
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is positioning itself as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 with full SVM integration. It boasts smart contract execution built for speed that outpaces Solana itself, while settling back to Bitcoin’s base-layer security.
As of today, the presale has raised more than $33.1M at a current token price of just $0.0136864, with staking rewards live at launch at a huge 35% APY.
The pitch: solve Bitcoin’s slow transactions, high fees, and lack of programmability without abandoning what makes BTC trusted in the first place. A Decentralized Canonical Bridge handles BTC transfers natively.
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XRP lost its $1.50 price pivot today, sliding to $1.47 after a daily decline of about 3%. The break forces a binary question onto the chart: does the selling pressure showing up in spot-market volume resolve into a quick reclaim, or does it open the door to a deeper slide toward $1.40-$1.42?
The 200-day EMA is near $1.37, the level that would flip the medium-term structure from bullish to neutral. The token has been printing lower highs since a local peak near $1.63 on September 23, and a second attempt to clear $1.60 on September 25 failed as well. Since then, the decline has been slow and orderly: $1.55, then $1.52, then $1.50, and now $1.47.
There was no single dramatic session driving the move. Instead, the pattern reads as buyers simply not showing up, with every small bounce getting sold rather than extended. After the sharp rally in early September, that kind of cooling was overdue, but the open question is whether $1.50 was ever real support or just a round number the market is now testing.
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ETF Accumulation Narrative or Technical Pullback?
The chart itself frames this as a cooling-off period following the rally that carried the XRP price up nearly 50% from its August low near $1.00. RSI sits at a neutral 54, with no overbought or oversold readings to lean on. Price levels, not oscillators, are setting the tone for this week.
Separately, market data has pointed to sustained spot XRP ETF inflows running into the hundreds of millions of dollars over recent weeks, a trend some trackers frame as ongoing institutional accumulation beneath the price action. That flow data is useful context, but it is not confirmed as the driver of Monday’s drop, as the pullback below $1.50 traces cleanly to failed resistance tests and fading bid support.
The medium-term structure remains intact for now. XRP sits above its 200-day EMA at $1.37, which is curling upward for the first time since spring. This is a sign the longer trend has not broken, even as the shorter-term chart bleeds lower. A descending trendline from the late-August spike to $1.70 was cleared in mid-September, and that breakout is what fueled the run to $1.67 in the first place.
A second descending trendline, drawn from the September 23 high, is now the line bulls need to clear in October; left alone, it points toward $1.20 by mid-November. The levels on both sides of the current price are well defined.
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Reclaim $1.50 or Risk $1.37: XRP Price Next Move
The first job for bulls is straightforward: close a daily candle back above $1.50. Do that, and Monday’s drop reads as a fakeout rather than a breakdown, with $1.55 as the next confirmation level and $1.60-$1.63 as the target that would put the September 23 high back in play.
Fail to reclaim $1.50 in the next day or two, and $1.40-$1.42 becomes the level to watch, with the 200-day EMA at $1.37 as the line that actually matters for the medium-term outlook. A close below it would shift Ripple’s native asset from a bullish structure to a neutral one, opening room toward $1.30 and, in a broader crypto market sell-off scenario, $1.20.
$XRP just printed it's 6th weekly close beneath the 50 week EMA. The bears contInue to hold their defence line, with the bulls support below at $1.31 as a guardrail. (20 week EMA. For the time being, we remain compressed. https://t.co/7j6d2KB27L pic.twitter.com/r9kwHDmf2R
—
ChartNerd
(@ChartNerdTA) September 28, 2026
For this week, the range is $1.37 to $1.60, with $1.50 sitting as the pivot in between. On technical analysis grounds, the base case is a dip toward $1.40-$1.42 that gets bought, followed by another attempt at reclaiming $1.50. A pattern consistent with pullbacks inside an uptrend rather than the start of a new downtrend.
The $1.80-$2.00 zone remains the valid medium-term target as long as $1.37 holds; lose it, and that target moves out of reach for the immediate term.
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Crypto
Crypto’s New Playground: Casinos, Fed Bets, and Tokenized Stocks Blur the Line Between Trading and Gambling
The crypto industry has always had a talent for reinventing itself, but the latest wave of product launches suggests the industry is heading somewhere new: a place where trading, betting, and borrowing are becoming almost indistinguishable from one another. A cluster of recent developments — spanning live-dealer casino games, a new token listing tied to decentralized betting platforms, prediction markets built around Federal Reserve policy, sprawling perpetual futures exchanges, and DeFi protocols that let users borrow against tokenized shares of tech companies — paints a picture of an ecosystem racing to fuse speculation of every stripe into a single, crypto-native experience.
Take the world of crypto casinos, where live blackjack tables have reportedly begun to crowd out roulette wheels in lobby rankings. The dynamics driving that shift echo something familiar from traditional gambling: player preference for games that reward skill and pacing over pure chance. Blackjack lets players make decisions — when to hit, stand, split, or double down — giving a sense of agency that a spinning roulette wheel simply can’t replicate. In an industry built around instant, low-friction transactions using digital assets, that appeal seems to translate directly into engagement, with live-streamed dealers adding a layer of social, real-time theater that slot-style games lack.
That same appetite for interactive, decision-driven products is showing up elsewhere. Dexsport, a decentralized betting and casino platform, recently saw its native token, DESU, listed on the exchange MEXC — a milestone that matters less for the listing itself than for what it signals about the sector’s maturation. Token listings on major exchanges typically bring liquidity, visibility, and a degree of legitimacy that smaller platforms struggle to achieve on their own. For everyday users, a listing like this often translates into easier on-ramps, more trading pairs, and a stronger case that the underlying platform is being taken seriously by the broader market rather than treated as a niche experiment.
Meanwhile, speculation is moving well beyond games of chance and into the realm of macroeconomic policy. Prediction markets tracking the Federal Reserve’s interest rate decisions have become one of the more closely watched corners of crypto-adjacent finance heading into the back half of 2026. Traders on these platforms are effectively placing wagers on central bank behavior, turning monetary policy announcements into tradeable events. The appeal is straightforward: instead of relying solely on bond markets or futures tied to traditional finance, participants can now stake positions directly on whether the Fed will hold, cut, or raise rates, often with faster settlement and more granular contract structures than legacy markets offer. It’s a sign that prediction markets, once dismissed as a curiosity, are increasingly viewed as a legitimate barometer of trader sentiment on issues far removed from crypto prices themselves.
The appetite for exotic exposure is also evident in the perpetual futures space, where platforms like ApeX Omni have expanded their offerings well past the usual roster of Bitcoin and Ethereum contracts. With well over 120 perpetual markets now available, traders can reportedly take leveraged positions not just on major cryptocurrencies but on themes as far-flung as pre-IPO robotics companies. This kind of expansion reflects a broader trend of crypto exchanges positioning themselves as all-purpose speculation venues, offering leverage on virtually any asset class that generates enough trader interest — blurring the boundary between crypto trading and speculative bets on private, pre-public companies that would otherwise be inaccessible to retail investors.
Perhaps the clearest example of crypto finance colliding with traditional markets comes from Aave’s newest iteration. The protocol’s fourth version reportedly allows users to borrow USDC stablecoins against tokenized versions of Coinbase-linked tech stocks on the Base network. In practice, that means holders of tokenized equity exposure can unlock liquidity without selling their underlying positions — a mechanic long familiar to DeFi users who collateralize crypto assets, now extended to tokenized real-world securities. It’s a small but telling step toward a future where the wall between “crypto” and “traditional markets” continues to erode, with stocks, bonds, and other conventional assets increasingly represented on-chain and woven into the same lending and borrowing infrastructure that powers decentralized finance.
Taken together, these developments underscore a consistent theme: crypto platforms are no longer content to simply trade digital coins. They are building out entire ecosystems of speculation — casino games, prediction markets, leveraged derivatives, and collateralized lending — all designed to keep users engaged, liquid, and constantly exposed to new forms of risk and reward. Whether this convergence produces a more mature, diversified financial ecosystem or simply amplifies the volatility and risk-taking crypto is already known for remains an open question. What’s clear is that the industry’s appetite for expansion shows no signs of slowing down.
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