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XRP’s open interest across major derivatives platforms has dropped by about 23% in under a month, falling to roughly $871 million from $1.128 billion in late August.

The decline, which wiped out close to $257 million in outstanding positions, points to traders unwinding leverage built up during the summer rally rather than a fresh wave of bets against the token, and it lines up with a difficult week for XRP on the regulatory front.

XRP Traders Pull Back as Price Loses Ground

CryptoQuant contributor Arab Chain noted that Binance accounted for much of the decline, with open positions falling to $423 million from $558 million in August. Bybit fell to about $291 million from $379 million, while OKX dipped to $107 million from $125 million.

That decline points to positions from the earlier rally being closed or liquidated. Arab Chain also stressed that lower open interest does not by itself establish a continuing bearish trend. Instead, it reflects less exposure to derivatives and traders repositioning.

The change follows a difficult week for XRP as the token fell 8% in the 24 hours following the Senate’s failure to advance the CLARITY Act on September 15. It dropped from around $1.46 toward $1.27 as selling intensified, with cumulative volume delta falling to negative 10.5 million.

The latest CoinGecko snapshot has XRP around $1.30, having barely moved over 24 hours. However, it is down nearly 7% over seven days and 5.5% in the last 14 days, although it is still up more than 30% across one month. Trading volume is about $3.6 billion, down 39% from the previous day.

The Market Is Testing a Weekly Support Level

Analyst ChartNerd wrote on X on September 17 that XRP was “hugging” its weekly 20 EMA at $1.29. A weekly close above that level, in his opinion, could set up a rebound, while a close below it would leave room for another retracement.

On September 10, he had also identified $1.29 as the first area to watch if XRP continued rejecting the 50-period moving average. That technical level matters because the latest selloff weakened an earlier bullish setup. XRP previously held expectations of a move toward $1.70-$1-78, but analyst Diana said the loss of $1.34 pushed the token toward $1.26.

The $1.24-$1.26 zone is now being watched, with $1.14 to $1.10 and then $1.00 entering the discussion if support fails.

The drop in derivatives exposure also comes after XRP’s earlier surge, with 85 new wallets holding at least 1 million XRP appearing two days before the August 17-21 rally that saw the token jump 70%.

The post XRP Open Interest Plunges 23% as Traders Unwind Leverage appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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[PRESS RELEASE – Paris, France, 17th September 2026]

Following June’s launch with Morpho and Steakhouse, Zama extends confidential access to 16 curated vaults across five curators and five asset classes, and opens the Zama Swap Protocol for confidential swaps between positions.

Zama, the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance, today announced a major expansion of confidential access to onchain yield in partnership with Morpho, alongside five of the leading DeFi curators: Steakhouse Financial, Armitage by Wintermute, Flowdesk, RockawayX, and Bitwise. The launch adds 16 confidential vaults across 5 asset classes (USDC, USDT, WBTC, AUSD, and TGBP), and opens the public launch of the Zama Swap Protocol, allowing users to confidentially swap between confidential assets on Ethereum.

This launch builds on the confidential Steakhouse USDC Prime vault Zama launched with Morpho and Steakhouse in June 2026, which grew from zero to $40 million in TVL within seven weeks and established confidential DeFi as a proven institutional product category.

On public blockchains, positions, balances, and strategies are visible to competitors and front-runners, a structural blocker to institutional deployment at scale. By expanding the range of curated confidential vaults and adding four new asset classes as deposit assets, Zama enables institutional allocators, corporate treasuries, and active market participants to access diversified onchain yield without disclosing their holdings or strategies.

“When we launched the first confidential USDC vault with Morpho and Steakhouse in June, we proved that confidentiality and DeFi are not mutually exclusive,” said Dr. Rand Hindi, Co-founder and CEO of Zama. “Today’s expansion is proof of the model at scale. Sixteen vaults, five curators, five asset classes, all built on the same DeFi infrastructure that sophisticated capital already uses. Same vaults, same curators, same liquidity, now with confidential entry. This is how confidential DeFi becomes a category and not an experiment.”

The expansion offers depositors two types of confidential vaults, running in parallel:

• 12 Hybrid vaults: confidential entry to existing curated vaults, including the Prime USDT vault curated by Steakhouse. Same strategy, same liquidity, and same risk profile as the underlying vault, with confidential deposit and position.
• 4 Exclusive vaults: net-new confidential-only vaults with no public equivalent, including the Wintermute Confidential WBTC – armcWBTC. (—-)

All 16 vaults are deployed on Morpho and available today through the Zama App. Additional entry points, including Utila, Zerion Wallet, and Yield.xyz, will roll out in the weeks following launch.

The Zama Swap Protocol launches alongside the vault suite, allowing depositors to swap between confidential assets, including all vault share positions, and cUSDC, cUSDT, cWBTC, cAUSD, and cTGBP, without exposing intent or size. This closes the full deposit-earn-swap loop entirely inside a confidential envelope.

“Institutions have increasingly been exploring how onchain capital allocation can be made more confidential to fit their requirements. Adding these confidential vaults on Morpho was an important step for us. It’ll scale confidential DeFi efficiently and open new possibilities for allocators onchain, without changing the strategy, the liquidity, or the risk profile.” said Merlin Egalite, Co-founder of Morpho

“Confidentiality is the condition onchain capital markets have to satisfy before they can carry institutional-scale volume. Through our work with Zama, we’re opening up confidential access to our AUSD RWA Strategy Vault, giving institutional allocators a compliant path onchain.” said Guilhem Chaumont, Co-founder and CEO of Flowdesk.

“We were happy to work with Zama on its first confidential vault, and the market response makes it clear that depositors value confidentiality,” said Sébastien Derivaux, Co-founder of Steakhouse Financial. “The natural next step was to extend that access to a five-vault suite across USDC, USDT, and tGBP. Depositors now have more choice in how they use stablecoins across Morpho, while keeping their positions private.”

“BTC has mostly sat onchain as collateral because there has rarely been meaningful yield to earn on it. The Wintermute Confidential WBTC vault gives WBTC holders a way to actually put it to work, pairing Armitage’s active risk curation with a confidential-only design that has no public equivalent, so positions stay off the public record,” said Igor Igamberdiev, Armitage Lead.

“Zama’s confidential product suite is unlocking institutional adoption opportunities globally including in the UK where stablecoin adoption with large institutions is a greenfield opportunity,” said Benoit Marzouk, CEO of BCP Technologies the issuer of tGBP. “The combination of confidentiality with bluechip protocols like Morpho provide a clear entry point for any institutional player integrating stablecoins into their business.”

“Every position a self-custodial wallet user holds is public by default. That’s one of the reasons people are reluctant to keep large amounts onchain. Zama’s confidentiality layer plugs into vaults people already use rather than asking them to move to a new chain. A wallet can support this natively with minimum friction, and why these vaults are coming to Zerion in the weeks ahead.” — Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-founder & CEO at Zerion.

Institutions can be hesitant to lend onchain for two reasons. They can’t tell exactly what they’re exposed to, and anyone with a block explorer can see what they hold. RockawayX’s RWA vault handles predictable returns and collateral you can check onchain, underwritten the same way we’ve run CeFi and DeFi lending since 2022 with zero defaults. Zama handles the second with its confidentiality platform.” Nassim Alexandre, Head of Onchain Asset Management and Curation at RockawayX.

“Confidentiality should not require institutions to abandon the platforms they already use. Yield.xyz makes Zama’s confidential Morpho Vaults accessible through the same integration layer that wallets and financial platforms use to offer onchain yield. That gives platforms a practical path to support confidential positions while preserving the underlying strategy, liquidity, and risk profile,” said Serafin Lion Engel, Co-Founder and CEO at Yield.xyz.

“Institutions need to protect their investment strategies while maintaining clear control over how capital is deployed,” said Bentzi Rabi, Co-founder and CEO of Utila. “Through our work with Zama, we’re bringing confidential access to Morpho vaults into Utila’s MPC wallet infrastructure, so treasury and investment teams can access onchain yield with the policy controls and approval workflows they rely on across their digital asset operations.”

“Incentives were the one thing confidential assets could not have, because rewarding a balance meant reading it. It was a real pleasure working with the Zama team to change that, extending Merkl’s engine to ERC7984 so campaigns run on encrypted balances. Depositors see an APR and earn, while no position, reward, or leaderboard entry ever becomes public.” said Pablo Veyrat, CEO of Merkl.

This expansion establishes the operational blueprint for further additions to the confidential DeFi ecosystem in 2026 and 2027, including additional curators, asset classes, distribution surfaces, and native institutional custody integrations.

The 16 confidential vaults will officially open for deposits on September 15, 2026 on the Zama app.

For more information, technical documentation, or to review the integration architecture, please visit zama.org or follow @Zama on X.

About Zama – www.zama.org

Zama is the fastest growing confidentiality protocol for onchain finance. By leveraging Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), it enables digital assets to be issued, managed, and traded privately on existing public blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. Founded by FHE pioneer Dr. Pascal Paillier and entrepreneur Dr. Rand Hindi, Zama brings together one of the world’s largest teams of FHE researchers and engineers and supports a global ecosystem of developers building confidential applications. zama.org.

The post Zama Opens Confidential Access to DeFi’s Existing Yield Venues appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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State-linked hackers accounted for roughly two-thirds of new activity each quarter as the number of times attackers stored malware instructions or infrastructure information on public blockchains rose 420% over the past 12 months, according to a Chainalysis report. 

Chainalysis identified North Korea and Iran-linked operators among the state actors adopting the technique. In one of the report’s findings, the analytics firm connected previously unattributed activity spanning Tron, Aptos and BNB Smart Chain (BSC) to UNC5342, a North Korea-linked group tracked by Google Threat Intelligence. 

Encoded pointers in Tron and Aptos transactions directed infected devices to the same BSC transaction, with Tron serving as the first route and Aptos as a fallback, Chainalysis reported. The BSC transaction contained encrypted server addresses and configuration data that connected compromised devices to offchain infrastructure used for remote access and data theft. 

Chainalysis said using public blockchains increases the durability of malware campaigns because the stored information remains accessible after domains, servers or code repositories are taken down. In 2025, North Korean hackers used a similar technique called EtherHiding to place crypto-stealing code in smart contracts.

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AI tools accelerate malicious writes

The company also recorded a 440% increase in malicious blockchain writes since July 2025, when it said high-capacity open-source Chinese artificial intelligence models became capable of producing malicious code with limited safeguards.

Eric Jardine, cybercrimes research lead at Chainalysis, told Cointelegraph that they found a “clear point-in-time association,” but could not prove that the actors publishing the malicious transactions and contracts had used the models to increase their output.  

Related: Iran eases currency rules to bypass US sanctions with crypto: Report

Iran-linked actors put malware directions on Bitcoin

Chainalysis also identified threat actors it suspects are linked to Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence writing encoded command-and-control routing data onto the Bitcoin blockchain. 

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The company said its assessment was based on the malware family, decoding method, timing and server infrastructure associated with previously reported Iranian operations, rather than the blockchain activity alone.

Attacker-controlled wallets sent small payments to a well-known Bitcoin address with historical ties to Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, according to the report. Chainalysis said the address had no connection to the attackers and served as a permanent public location that infected devices could check for updated directions.

The attackers could change their server infrastructure by publishing another Bitcoin transaction, after which infected devices would automatically retrieve the new information. Once the malware obtained those instructions, the operation moved offchain for activities that could include remote access, credential theft and the delivery of additional malware. 

Magazine: Revolut ID thefts highlight KYC’s dangers: Here’s how to fix it

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The US Senate failed to advance the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act on Tuesday after a procedural vote fell short, 49-50. The vote required 60 of 100 senators to pass the bill and allow it to move forward.

While the outcome was widely considered a major setback for the industry, seven Democratic senators said that it is “not the end.”

Crypto’s Post-CLARITY Reckoning

In an official statement, US Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Mark Warner (D-VA), and Raphael Warnock (D-GA) said that Democrats have spent the last two years working to pass crypto legislation that would expand opportunity, protect consumers, punish bad actors, create regulatory certainty, and include strong, commonsense ethics provisions for elected officials. They added,

“This week was a setback, but not the end of that important work. We remain committed to working in a bipartisan fashion to get this legislation passed.”

The comment came just a day after Senator Cynthia Lummis lashed out at Democrats and said that they were never truly serious about protecting consumers and preserving American leadership. She called the party “anti-consumer and pro-illicit finance, anti-ethics, anti-free enterprise, anti-worker, anti-livable-wage jobs, pro-socialism, and anti-American.”

Meanwhile, Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse called for a post-mortem of the legislative defeat. Not all reactions to the Senate setback have been strongly negative. Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong said bipartisan discussions could continue, and the CLARITY Act may get another chance. However, he also added that the industry “cannot wait” for Congress anymore.

In a separate statement to CryptoPotato, John O’Loghlen, Managing Director, APAC, Coinbase said,

“We are encouraged by the broad, bipartisan support for a bill endorsed by law enforcement, and we believe that coalition will continue to play an important role in advancing clear and consistent rules for the industry. We also expect the SEC and CFTC to advance regulatory clarity through their respective rulemaking authorities, alongside ongoing engagement with policymakers and regulators.”

Institutions May Wait Longer

Trace Finance co-founder Bernardo Brites said that failure of the CLARITY Act is “not a fatal one” for the industry. Brites, however, argued that institutional volumes will continue to remain on the sidelines longer than they need to, and the bigger wave of incumbent participation the market is waiting for gets pushed further out. But he added that “none of this changes where digital assets are headed.”

“Banks will still move to adopt stablecoins, and blockchain rails will still become the foundation of modern finance, clarity or no clarity. But every delay like this one is a missed chance for the US to cement its role as a leader in innovative financial technology.”

More on the CLARITY Act as well as the Fed’s latest interest-rate move can be found in our video below.

The post Seven Democrats Refuse to Give Up on CLARITY Act After Senate Setback appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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