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ARK Asks SEC To Approve Tokenized Share Class of Venture Fund
ARK Investment Management has asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for permission to issue a share class of its venture fund whose ownership is recorded using distributed ledger technology, according to an application on file with the agency. The SEC published notice of the request on… Read the full story at The Defiant
On Thursday evening, Apple delisted Pump Fun’s iPhone app in several countries. Shortly after the memecoin trading platform vanished from App Stores in the US and India, the disappearance began trending on social media.
In its last post before the delisting, Pump Fun’s social media account promised a “memecoin supercycle that retires everyone reading this.”
The timing of Apple’s delisting action was also one day after Pump Fun unveiled Custom Pairs, allowing anyone to launch a memecoin quoted against tokenized stocks.
Whether or not asset pairs are legal — a contentious topic ever since Robinhood tokenized AMC stock against the CEO’s wishes — Pump Fun proudly promoted 93 asset pairs, including digital assets supposedly linked to publicly-traded US companies like Boeing, Costco, and Trump Media.
Pump Fun’s former App Store listing now serves an error message, “This app is currently not available in your country or region.”
The Solana app for creating and trading memecoins has booked more than $1 billion in revenue.
Pump Fun app ‘temporarily unavailable to download’
The only statement on the removal from the company came from a worker on its mobile app team who posted, “The Pump Fun Mobile App is temporarily unavailable to download from the US & India iOS App Stores.
“For everyone that already has the app installed, everything is operating as usual, and your funds are safe.”
The word “temporarily” bears heroic weight in that claim. Apple hasn’t commented on the delisting, which might be permanent.
For now, Pump Fun can only redirect US and Indian users to its website, or its Google Play app, where the Android version remains available with more than 500,000 downloads.
Canada’s listing is still live, with a publisher listed as Maius Imperium Limited of Limerick, Ireland.
Backpack Securities and Backed Finance’s xStocks help create so-called stock tokens available on Pump Fun. Asset pairs can quote in denominations of stocks, gold, or even wrapped BTC.
One day after Pump Fun started quoting these tokenized equities, Apple georestricted its app.
In 2023, Wallet of Satoshi removed itself from US app stores. Apple threatened to remove Damus over crypto tipping that same year.
The following year, Apple pulled at least nine crypto exchange apps, including Binance and Kraken, from its App Store in India. The cause was anti-money-laundering failures.
Read more: Pump Fun and Kraken delete Hunter Biden $LAPTOP promotion
Past legal issues
In December 2024, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority warned that Pump Fun operates without authorization. Pump Fun blocked UK users within a week, and has kept them out ever since.
Ten days ago, a New York federal judge allowed RICO claims against Pump Fun’s parent company Baton Corporation and founders Alon Cohen, Dylan Kerler, and Noah Tweedale to proceed in litigation while dismissing securities-related claims against the company.
Plaintiffs in that case peg retail losses as high as $5.5 billion.
No court has adjudicated the evidence of this lawsuit, which are still unproven allegations.
Whether any of those legal issues factored into Apple’s decision to georestrict Pump Fun is unknown as of writing time.
PUMP, the platform’s proprietary token, slid about 12% over the 24 hours to Thursday evening. It now trades below the $0.004 debut price of last year’s Initial Coin Offering, a sale that raised about $1.3 billion across public and private rounds.
The token is also languishing 58% below its all-time high.
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From the moment they occurred, the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 were seen as inaugurating a new age of asymmetric violence and warfare. President George W. Bush described the war on terror that followed as a generational conflict.
Yet, for all the transformations it produced, Al-Qaeda and Islamic militancy more broadly have, in my view, receded within a decade. Not so much because it was defeated on the battlefield but because it was unable to gain much support among Muslims. When popular uprisings swept the Arab world in the early 2010s, protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, and elsewhere in the region took to the streets not in the name of Islam, but democracy. The Arab Spring, more than any military victory, signaled the decline of militancy. Al Qaeda faced its greatest defeat at Tahrir Square.
Islamic militancy flourished principally on the battlefields of war on terror, in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq, a trajectory epitomized by the emergence of the Islamic State from within the American prison system in Iraq. While Islamic militancy still survives in pockets of weak or fractured states, elsewhere it has petered out into the province of petty criminals or psychologically disturbed individuals. What, then, does its brief and brutal career mean for world history?
The End of the Cold War
The dramatic arrival of Al-Qaeda and Islamic militancy in the global public sphere in the early 2000s did not mark the beginning of a new chapter of global history. Perhaps that confrontation between Al-Qaeda and America signaled a historical ending: the true conclusion of the Cold War. By the fall of 2001, the Soviet Union and the bipolar world had been dead for a decade.
The Cold War survived in the institutions and practices it had created: NATO, the United Nations and its conventions, international courts and the multilateral institutions established to knit together a divided world through systems of deterrence, development and compromise born of the fear of an atomic holocaust. For a while, these institutions appeared capable of operating without their founding cause, but that hope proved illusory. In the 1990s, wars swept across the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Africa. Al-Qaeda arose at the confluence of post-Cold War globalization and unipolar violence.
With its emergence at the turn of the millennium, Al-Qaeda, I argue, brought the Cold War to a definitive close by overturning its central presuppositions. The war on terror rendered the familiar categories of the Cold War—the balance of power, deterrence, great-power rivalry, and hegemony—increasingly obsolete. Fought in civilian spaces against nonstate actors dispersed around the globe, the war on terror also ended up destroying most of the Cold War’s remaining ideological states in the Middle East, including the socialist republics of Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Al-Qaeda’s emergence also marked the end of Islamism, which was itself a Cold War movement dedicated to revolution and the creation of ideological states. Islamism’s only durable strongholds, Iran and Afghanistan, came to embody its takeover by clerical establishments of the kind it had once sought to displace.
The war on terror also weakened the liberal state, another creature of the Cold War, whose animating purpose had been to pose capitalist liberty against Communist dictatorship. Osama bin Laden used to claim that Westerners thought their interventions in the Middle East would remake the region’s states in the images of their own, but instead it was the Americans and Europeans who came to resemble their despotic and corrupt clients in the region.
One of the goals of Al-Qaeda’s campaign of terror was to precisely achieve that by showing how even violence falling short of a conventional war and posing no genuine existential threat was sufficient in provoking Western democracies to dismantle the civil liberties of their own citizens, exposing their claims to freedom as hypocritical. As the war on terror dragged on, Al-Qaeda’s leaders portrayed the anti-terror laws and the increasingly militarized conduct of the U.S. and its allies not as signs of resolve and strength but as displays of weakness and proof of the shallowness of Western liberalism. Bin Laden might have been disappointed by Al-Qaeda’s inability to mobilize enough Muslims around the world to overthrow their dictatorships, but the U.S. and its European allies, which sustained those authoritarian regimes, sadly behaved much as he had predicted.
A sacrificial, if not nihilistic, movement whose iconic figure was the suicide bomber, Al-Qaeda had little interest in conquest and government. One of its major objectives was to provoke Western states into attacking their own democracies, in a kind of auto-immune response to terrorism, in which the effort to defend the political body corroded it from within. In that particular sense, bin Laden was perversely successful in dragging America and its allies into expensive wars and weakening their liberal norms as they chose widespread use of emergency powers, surveillance, indefinite detention, torture, and rendition. The war also brought suspicion of Muslims, hostility toward immigration, civilizational rhetoric, and border militarization from the political margins to the center of Western public discourse.
America’s preoccupation with the war on terror did squander its unipolar decade. It wasn’t a coincidence that the rise of China—and the China shock—came a few years after the Great Recession of 2008 and a decade after the 9/11 attacks. The cultural and political landscape of Europe and America today—characterized by polarization, populism, and a pervasive distrust of institutions—can be understood, at least in part, as the legacy of the response to the 9/11 attacks by Al-Qaeda. By this measure, my assertion would be that bin Laden won the war on terror much as he had predicted he would.
What sustained the liberal order
The rise of populism and far-right politics in America and Europe has generated great laments for the corrosion of a golden age of liberalism and progress following the victory of the Allied powers against fascism in World War II. The flowering of postwar liberal democracy owed less to the defeat of fascism than to the Cold War, when the existence of a socialist alternative compelled Europe and North America to emphasize social protections, greater equality, and meaningful political rights.
Thus, the crisis of liberal democracy after 9/11 might be better understood not simply as a blowback from the war on terror, but as an aftershock of socialism’s collapse. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, that pressure disappeared. Though liberal institutions survived formally, the social and economic settlement that sustained them had begun to erode.
During World War II and in its immediate aftermath, the Allies were hardly exemplars of liberal standards. Several allied powers were colonial empires engaged in the violent suppression of nationalist movements in Asia and Africa even as they fought fascism. Nor can any account of Allied conduct ignore the firebombing of German cities or the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Although the war in Europe and the Pacific dominates debates about Allied misconduct, the colonial character of World War II may tell us more about the origins of our present moment. Colonial armies fought in every theater and constituted some of the forces deployed during the war. At least a million soldiers fighting in the British and French armies against fascism were Muslims. Civilians in territories like India, though far from the principal battlefields, also suffered immensely during the war. The Bengal famine, in which some three million people, Hindus and Muslims, starved to death, was, as many have argued, caused in part by wartime disruptions to grain supplies and by imperial policy.
Europe didn’t only take men and material from the colonies for the Great War, but also a repertoire of its illiberal practices in the colonies. The Nazis drew upon precedents established in colonial wars waged by European powers. The Allies, in turn, brought home methods of coercion that had previously been largely confined to their empires. Among them was the revival of medieval doctrines of just war, which subordinated contractual obligations to unilateral claims of moral authority—doctrines that resurfaced during the war on terror to justify pre-emptive attacks and torture.
World War II should be understood not simply as liberalism’s triumph over tyranny but also as a source—and continuation—of Western illiberalism, much like what came to the surface after 9/11. It was the Cold War that provided the real foundation of mid-century liberalism. One might even argue that the post-9/11order, from which today’s far-right movements partly emerged, has its roots in World War II’s struggle for global hegemony, a contest suspended for the duration of the Cold War.
The war on terror represented a failed effort to impose a unipolar order on the world, one that could no longer rely on the economic instrumentality of globalization alone. And its failure also discredited the globalization associated with free trade and mass migration. In its place arose far-right movements in Western Europe and North America dedicated to dividing the world into racial and cultural blocs, divisions often defended in the language of the struggle against terrorism and Islam.
In America, this political vision harks back to the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine; in Europe, it reaches further, to the myth of a culturally homogeneous Christian continent. In both cases, the animating force is not social conservatism alone but hostility toward immigrants, and toward Muslims in particular. Its deeper history may therefore lie in decolonization, which transformed immigration into a defining political reality distinct from the colonial systems of slavery, indenture and managed labor migration that preceded it.
Asian and African decolonization not only overlapped with the Cold War but was, in many important ways, made possible by it. As the rival superpowers courted newly independent countries, they helped secure what sovereignty many of those states possessed. Yet decolonization, no less than the Cold War, also made possible the European Economic Community and, eventually, the European Union. Europe emerged from World War II with most of its colonial possessions more or less intact. It was only decolonization that allowed the continent to cohere into a new kind of economic and political unit.
The long aftermath of decolonization
Immigration has a double history in America, proceeding from two waves of decolonization: the 19th century independence of Latin American countries and that of Asian and African nations in the 20th century. American anti-immigrant politics consequently differs from the European version, remaining more closely bound to the Monroe Doctrine and its vision of hemispheric control.
Europe may possess the older political history, but its encounter with immigration is more recent, starting with labor migration to help with European reconstruction after World War II and expanding again in the wake of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War weakened the sovereignty of many postcolonial states, producing new waves of migration as those countries faced economic pressure or were drawn into conflict. It also reduced European countries from strategic partners in the Cold War to increasingly dependent allies—a relationship laid bare by the war on terror, which expanded American power while disproportionately rewarding American companies.
The end of the Cold War, made visible through 9/11 and its aftermath, has also transformed Europe’s understanding of its past. While World War II is still invoked, especially by liberals, it no longer occupies its former place as the 20th century’s defining event and the founding moment of the international order now coming apart.
The ascendance of immigration—and, with it, race and culture—as the central political concern on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that decolonization has displaced the war in the historical imagination. Narratives about the struggles against fascism or Communism still shape Western identities, but political debate is increasingly dominated by fears of what might be called “reverse colonization.”
Europe’s unwillingness or inability to reckon with colonialism may explain its strange, even pathological identification with the anxieties of its former subjects. The fear of foreign settlement, demographic change, and cultural swamping all echo the language once used in colonized societies of Asia and Africa, where the Christian West was regarded as precisely such a threat. This switching of places is apparent in portrayals of Islam as both an alien and more virile force than Western liberalism, a force whose supposed cohesion and will to dominate must be countered by weapons of solidarity and domination.
European politics has thus increasingly begun to appropriate the defensive posture of the peoples Europe once ruled. Perverse though this identification may be, it reveals the extent to which decolonization—itself part of the Cold War’s history— has become the century’s central historical drama. This switching of places is especially true of Islam seen as an alien but also more virile force than Western liberalism, one whose power thus needs to be countered by its own weapons of solidarity and domination.
For all the spectacle of its asymmetric attacks, Al Qaeda—and Islamist militancy more broadly—never had more than some tens of thousands of committed supporters worldwide. These movements did not emerge from some hermetically sealed Islamic history. They belonged to global events and narratives, which gave them what influence they possessed. The disproportion between their small numbers and enormous consequences cannot be explained primarily by technology, mass media or even the war on terror. It arose from the institutional and political vulnerabilities exposed by the Cold War’s belated conclusion.
We now live amid the detritus of the end of the Cold War and are able to recognize decolonization as the crucial event of the 20th century. Its legacy animates both movements seeking greater inclusion and campaigns promising to restore a national unity defined in racial or cultural terms. More than three decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, we still live in the wake of the Cold War, an aftermath that first revealed its force in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on New York and Washington, D.C.
Your day-ahead look for Sept. 11, 2026
Summary
- PayPal, M0, and MoonPay launched PYUSDx on September 9, a platform letting any business issue an application-specific stablecoin backed by PayPal USD.
- Three issuers are live at launch, Saturn, Concrete, and Cap, which the companies say have collectively processed more than $100 million, with USD.AI and Fairblock expected next.
- The structure has two layers: PYUSD is issued by Paxos Trust Company, a federally regulated national banking association, and backed by dollar deposits and Treasuries; PYUSDx tokens are issued by MoonPay Digital Assets Limited and backed by PYUSD.
- Tokens created on PYUSDx are not PayPal or Paxos products and cannot be sent, received, or used inside PayPal or Venmo.
- The GENIUS Act requires permitted issuers to back payment stablecoins one to one in named high-quality liquid assets, and a token backed by another stablecoin, issued by a different entity, is a structure the statute does not obviously address.
Draw the plumbing and something odd falls out.
PayPal, M0 and MoonPay went live on September 9 with PYUSDx, a platform that lets any business issue its own branded stablecoin without touching reserves, custody or redemption infrastructure. Three issuers launched with it. More than $100 million already processed between them. The pitch from all three partners is that the product layer should belong to whoever is building the product, and the monetary plumbing should belong to people who do plumbing. That is a good pitch and a sensible product.
Now draw it.
PYUSD is issued by Paxos, a federally regulated national banking association, backed by dollar deposits and Treasuries. Fine. Compliant. Boring, in the way a reserve asset should be.
PYUSDx tokens are issued by MoonPay Digital Assets Limited. Their reserve asset is PYUSD.
So the thing backing the second token is the first token. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025 and still being turned into regulations, tells you who may issue a payment stablecoin and what has to sit behind it. Cash. Insured deposits. Short-dated Treasuries. Repos against Treasuries. Money market funds holding those.
It does not say anything about a stablecoin backed by a stablecoin, issued by someone else entirely. Nobody covering the launch has asked about it. It is worth asking now, while the rules are being drafted, instead of in eighteen months when they are not.
What was actually built
Three companies, three jobs. The details matter because they decide who is on the hook for what.
M0 supplies the infrastructure. Its platform lets an issuer configure individual components of a stablecoin instead of accepting a fixed model: token name, access restrictions, reward distribution, collateral policy, and cross-chain availability are all set by the issuer. M0’s chief executive has described the design intent as making the product layer belong to the builder, and the company also works with Stripe-owned Bridge and with regulated custody firms.
MoonPay issues the tokens and holds the backing. MoonPay Digital Assets Limited is the issuing entity for PYUSDx-layer tokens and holds the PYUSD that backs them. It also contributes onboarding and distribution.
PayPal supplies PYUSD. The underlying stablecoin remains a Paxos-issued product reserved with dollar deposits, Treasuries, and similar cash equivalents. PayPal’s role is supplying the asset that sits underneath and the ecosystem connection.
The disclaimers are specific and worth reading. Tokens created on PYUSDx are not PayPal or Paxos products. They cannot be sent, received, or used inside the PayPal and Venmo applications. That is an unusual carve-out for a platform named after a company’s own stablecoin, and it tells you the partners have thought carefully about where liability sits.
At launch: Saturn, Concrete, and Cap, with more than $100 million in combined processed volume. Cap migrated part of its cUSD onto PYUSDx so that a portion of its covered-credit float would rest on PYUSD instead of more volatile decentralised finance liquidity, which is a sensible use of the product and the clearest illustration of what it is for. USD.AI and Fairblock are next.
The two-layer question
Nothing here accuses anyone of anything. This is a question the statute has not answered, asked while there is still time to answer it.
The GENIUS Act, enacted July 18, 2025, restricts issuance of payment stablecoins to permitted issuers across four routes and requires reserves backing outstanding tokens one to one in specified high-quality liquid assets: currency, insured deposits, short-dated Treasury bills, Treasury-collateralised repurchase agreements, and money market funds holding those instruments. Our dedicated page on the law sets out the framework in full.
PYUSD fits that cleanly. Paxos is a federally regulated national banking association, the reserves are cash and Treasuries, and the disclosure obligations apply.
PYUSDx tokens are a different object. They are issued by a separate entity, and their reserve asset is PYUSD, not the asset classes the statute names. Three questions follow and none has a public answer.
Is a PYUSDx token a payment stablecoin? The statutory definition captures a digital asset used for payment or settlement, redeemable at a fixed monetary value, whose issuer represents it will maintain stable value. An application-specific dollar token used inside a credit product appears to meet that description.
If it is, who is the permitted issuer? The entity issuing it is MoonPay Digital Assets Limited, not Paxos. Permitted status attaches to issuers, not to reserve assets, and the four routes to permitted status all describe entities, not backing arrangements.
Does PYUSD count as a permitted reserve asset? The named list does not include other stablecoins. Whether a token fully backed by a compliant stablecoin satisfies a one-to-one reserve requirement is a reasonable reading and it is not the reading the text supplies on its face.
None of this suggests anyone is doing anything improper. The Act does not take effect until the earlier of January 18, 2027 or 120 days after final implementing regulations, and the agencies missed their one-year rulemaking deadline in July 2026 with proposals issued and final rules outstanding. Building a product during that window is entirely legitimate. The point is narrower: the rules that will govern this structure are being written now, and this structure is not one the drafters obviously had in mind.
Why anyone would build it this way
The commercial logic is genuinely good, which is why this structure will spread whatever the regulators decide.
Reserves are the hard part. Issuing a compliant stablecoin means holding, custodying, and reporting on cash and Treasuries, contracting an accounting firm for monthly attestation, and building redemption infrastructure. That is a bank-adjacent operation with bank-adjacent costs, and it is completely disproportionate for a company that wants a branded dollar inside its own application.
The alternative was worse. Before platforms like this, a business wanting an application-specific dollar either built the whole stack, partnered bilaterally with an issuer on bespoke terms, or used an existing stablecoin and accepted no control over its properties. All three are bad options for a small team.
Configurability is the product. Access restrictions, reward distribution, collateral policy, and cross-chain availability set per issuer is a different offering from a single stablecoin with fixed properties. Cap’s use case, resting covered-credit float on PYUSD instead of volatile decentralised finance liquidity, is exactly the kind of thing that needs configuration and not a generic token.
And for PayPal it solves a distribution problem. PYUSD sits around $2.81 billion, eighth in a stablecoin market near $305 billion where Tether holds roughly 60%. Growing that through direct payments means competing with incumbents on their own ground. Growing it as a reserve asset for other people’s tokens means every PYUSDx issuer that scales needs more PYUSD behind it, expanding the footprint without PayPal operating any of those applications. That is a second lever on demand and a considerably cheaper one.
What the layering actually adds
Two layers is better than one in one respect and worse in another.
On the positive side, the backing asset is a regulated, attested, cash-and-Treasuries stablecoin instead of an ad hoc reserve. An application dollar backed by PYUSD is substantially better collateralised than one backed by a decentralised finance yield strategy, which is precisely why Cap moved. Layering onto a compliant base is a meaningful improvement over the alternatives that existed before.
On the risk side, a holder of a PYUSDx token now depends on two entities instead of one. The issuer must hold the PYUSD it claims to hold and honour redemption. Paxos must maintain PYUSD’s peg and reserves. A failure at either level reaches the holder, and the holder’s legal relationship is with the upper entity, not the lower one, which is what the disclaimer about these not being PayPal or Paxos products makes explicit.
That second point deserves emphasis because it is the practical consequence of the structure. The name on the platform is PayPal’s. The underlying asset is PayPal’s stablecoin. The token in a user’s wallet is neither, and cannot be used in PayPal’s own applications. A user who does not read the documentation could reasonably form the wrong impression about whose obligation they hold.
The precedent this sets
This is not really a PayPal story. It is what happens when issuing a dollar stops being a product and becomes plumbing.
The pattern is familiar from other financial layers. Card networks did not issue cards; they let banks issue them on shared rails. Payment processors do not hold funds; they let merchants transact on shared infrastructure. In both cases the layer underneath became more valuable as the layer above proliferated, and the entity operating the rails captured economics from activity it did not conduct.
M0’s chief executive framed the fragmentation problem directly, noting that as more financial institutions get involved the landscape fragments, and that most of those institutions do not know how to engage with developers, so the middle layer abstracts the complexity. That is a rails argument, and it is the correct one.
What follows, if the model works, is a large number of application-specific dollars backed by a small number of compliant base stablecoins. That concentrates systemic importance in the base layer while distributing the customer relationships across hundreds of issuers, which is a structure regulators generally find difficult, because supervision attaches to entities and the entity holding the reserves is not the entity facing the customer.
Our stablecoin status page sets out the three gaps the GENIUS framework left open, and this sits squarely in the space between two of them.
The three issuers, and what they reveal
Three issuers is a small enough list to go through one by one, and they tell you more than the press release does.
Cap is the clearest case. It migrated a portion of its cUSD onto PYUSDx so that part of its covered-credit float would rest on PYUSD instead of more volatile decentralised finance liquidity. That is a treasury decision: a credit product needs its float in something stable, and a regulated, attested, cash-and-Treasuries-backed stablecoin is materially better collateral than a yield-bearing position in a lending protocol. Cap did not want a branded token for marketing. It wanted better backing for an existing liability.
Saturn and Concrete have been named without the same public detail, though the three together account for the more than $100 million in processed volume the partners cite. MoonPay’s executive has argued the figure matters because the same issuance stack is already supporting credit, vault, and Bitcoin-linked products, which suggests three different applications instead of three variations on one.
USD.AI and Fairblock are next, with no announced timing.
Two observations follow. First, the early adopters are crypto-native firms building financial products, not consumer brands wanting a loyalty token. That is a more demanding customer set and a better signal, because a credit protocol choosing your stablecoin as its float has done diligence a marketing department would not.
Second, the $100 million figure is processed volume, not market capitalisation and not revenue. The distinction is worth holding, since processed volume measures throughput over a period and says nothing about how much of the token is outstanding at any moment. A payments product cycling the same dollar repeatedly produces a large volume figure and a small float. Both are real; they measure different things, and only one of them determines how much PYUSD sits in reserve.
The redemption chain
The question that matters if you hold one of these: what happens when you want actual dollars back. The answer goes through two companies, in order.
A holder of a PYUSDx token redeems with the issuing entity, MoonPay Digital Assets Limited, which holds PYUSD as backing. To deliver actual dollars, that PYUSD must itself be redeemed with Paxos, which holds the cash and Treasuries. So a full redemption to bank money traverses two independent obligations, each with its own terms, timing, and operational capacity.
In ordinary conditions this is invisible and fast. Stablecoin redemption at both layers is routine, and the whole point of building on a regulated base is that the lower layer is dependable.
The interesting case is the stressed one, and it has a specific shape. If a large number of holders redeem simultaneously, the upper issuer must convert PYUSD to dollars at the same time its own customers are converting tokens to PYUSD. Those are sequential operations, and the second one is not under the upper issuer’s control. Paxos’s redemption capacity and terms become the binding constraint on a token whose holders have no relationship with Paxos.
None of this is unique to PYUSDx and none of it suggests a defect. Every layered financial structure works this way, and layering onto a well-reserved base is precisely what makes it safer than the alternatives. But it is the reason the disclosure that these are not PayPal or Paxos products is doing real work, not lawyerly throat-clearing. A holder’s claim runs to the entity that issued their token, and that entity’s ability to pay depends on an entity the holder cannot call.
The practical instruction for anyone evaluating one of these tokens is to read the upper issuer’s redemption terms specifically, since those are the terms that bind, and to understand that the quality of the backing asset and the reliability of the redemption path are two separate questions with two separate answers.
What a regulator would ask
Forget whether it is permitted. Here is what an examiner would ask, and every one of these is answerable today.
Is the backing segregated and verifiable? The upper issuer holds PYUSD backing its tokens. Whether that PYUSD sits in an identifiable, segregated arrangement, whether it is attested to on any cadence, and whether the reporting is public are the first questions in any reserve examination. M0’s platform advertises support for on-chain reporting and reserve validation, which is the right capability; whether each issuer uses it is a separate matter.
Who bears redemption obligation and under what terms? The disclaimers make clear the tokens are not PayPal or Paxos products, which answers the question negatively for two parties without answering it positively for the third. Published redemption terms from the issuing entity would.
What happens on issuer failure? The GENIUS Act gives holders of permitted payment stablecoins a priority claim in insolvency ranking above administrative expenses. Whether a holder of a token backed by such a stablecoin, issued by an entity that may not itself be a permitted issuer, inherits any comparable protection is unresolved and is the single most consequential open question for a holder.
Which jurisdiction supervises the issuing entity? MoonPay Digital Assets Limited is the named issuer. Its regulatory status and home jurisdiction determine which authority examines it and under what standard, and that is a fact rather than a judgment call.
None of these are difficult to answer and none is commercially sensitive. That they are not currently prominent in the launch materials is unremarkable for a product three days old, and it is also the gap between a product announcement and the disclosure a supervised financial instrument eventually requires.
The broader point for readers tracking stablecoin regulation is that this is where the next round of rulemaking pressure will land. The first round addressed who may issue a dollar. The obvious second question, once platforms like this proliferate, is who may issue a claim on someone else’s dollar, and the answer is not in the statute.
Who actually owes you money
Worth being blunt about this, because the branding and the obligation point at different companies.
The platform is called PYUSDx. The backing asset is PayPal’s stablecoin. PayPal’s name is on the announcement. And if the token in your wallet fails, your claim is against MoonPay Digital Assets Limited, an entity most holders will never have heard of and cannot call.
The partners say this clearly. Tokens created on the platform are not PayPal or Paxos products. They cannot be sent, received or used inside PayPal or Venmo. Read that second sentence again, because it is genuinely strange: a token backed by PayPal’s dollar, launched on a platform carrying PayPal’s name, that PayPal’s own applications will not accept.
That is not sloppiness. It is a boundary drawn on purpose, and it is drawn to keep liability where the issuing entity is. Which is fine, correct even, and also exactly the kind of thing a user skims past when the logo at the top says PayPal.
The general lesson travels beyond this product. In any layered financial arrangement, the recognisable brand and the counterparty are frequently not the same entity, and the gap between them is where retail confusion lives. Card networks, white-labelled banking, payment facilitators, and now stablecoin issuance platforms all have this shape. The name sells it. Someone else owes you.
If you are evaluating one of these tokens, the only question that matters is which legal entity issued it and what its redemption terms say. Everything else on the page is marketing.
What breaks first
Every new financial structure has a most-likely failure mode, and it is usually not the one the launch coverage worries about.
For PYUSDx the risk is not PYUSD depegging. Paxos runs a regulated, attested, cash-and-Treasuries reserve, and that is about as solid as this asset class gets. If the base layer goes, the problem is considerably larger than one platform.
The realistic failure is at the upper layer and it is mundane. An issuer scales faster than its operational capacity. Redemption requests arrive in a cluster. The issuer holds the PYUSD it says it holds, but converting it to dollars at speed depends on Paxos’s redemption process, which the issuer does not control and which was built for a different volume profile. Nothing is insolvent. Everything is slow. And slow, in a product marketed as a dollar, looks identical to broken from the outside.
The second realistic failure is configuration. M0’s platform lets issuers set access restrictions, reward distribution and collateral policy individually. Flexibility is the selling point, and flexibility means a hundred issuers making a hundred different decisions about parameters that determine whether their token behaves like a dollar under stress. Some of those decisions will be wrong. The base asset being sound does not save a token whose issuer configured redemption badly.
Neither of those is a reason not to build this. They are a reason to read the specific issuer’s terms rather than the platform’s, which almost nobody does, and which is the entire practical takeaway from every layered financial product ever launched.
What to watch
Whether final rules address layering. The OCC and FDIC proposals are drafted and comment periods have run. Whether the final text addresses tokens backed by other stablecoins is the single most consequential detail for this structure, and it is answerable within months.
Whether any PYUSDx issuer seeks permitted status. If the answer to the layering question is that the upper issuer needs its own permitted status, the economics of the platform change substantially. Watch for applications.
PYUSD’s supply against PYUSDx growth. The indirect demand mechanism is testable. If Saturn, Concrete, Cap, and their successors scale, PYUSD outstanding should grow to back them. The partners have published no targets, so the correlation is the only available evidence.
Whether the carve-out holds. PYUSDx tokens currently cannot be used inside PayPal and Venmo. If that changes, the liability and regulatory picture changes with it, because the distance the disclaimers create would narrow.
Who else launches one. Stripe’s Bridge works with the same infrastructure provider. A competing platform from another payments incumbent would confirm that this is the direction of the category and not one company’s experiment.
Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or legal advice. It describes a recently launched product and raises regulatory questions that have not been resolved by implementing rules, and nothing here alleges non-compliance by any party. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of September 10, 2026.
What is PYUSDx?
A platform launched September 9 by PayPal, M0, and MoonPay that lets businesses issue their own application-specific stablecoins backed by PayPal USD. Issuers configure the token’s name, access restrictions, reward distribution, collateral policy, and cross-chain availability instead of accepting a fixed model. Three issuers went live at launch with more than $100 million in combined processed volume.
Who actually issues the tokens?
MoonPay Digital Assets Limited issues PYUSDx-layer tokens and holds the PYUSD backing them. Paxos Trust Company separately issues the underlying PYUSD, reserved with dollar deposits and Treasuries. Tokens created on PYUSDx are not PayPal or Paxos products, and PayPal’s role is supplying PYUSD and the ecosystem connection.
Can I use a PYUSDx token in PayPal or Venmo?
No. Tokens created on the platform cannot currently be sent, received, or used inside the PayPal and Venmo applications. That carve-out is stated explicitly by the partners and is worth noting, because the platform carries PayPal’s name and is backed by PayPal’s stablecoin while the tokens themselves are neither.
How does this interact with the GENIUS Act?
That is the open question. The Act requires permitted issuers to back payment stablecoins one to one in named high-quality liquid assets: currency, insured deposits, short-dated Treasuries, Treasury-collateralised repos, and money market funds holding those. A token issued by a separate entity and backed by another stablecoin is not obviously described by that framework, and final implementing rules have not been issued.
Does that mean PYUSDx is non-compliant?
No, and nothing here suggests it. The Act takes effect on the earlier of January 18, 2027 or 120 days after final rules, and the agencies missed their one-year rulemaking deadline in July 2026. Building during that window is legitimate. The point is that the rules governing this structure are being written now and were not obviously drafted with it in mind.
Why would a business want its own stablecoin?
Control and configuration. Issuing a compliant stablecoin independently requires holding and reporting on cash and Treasuries, contracting monthly attestation, and building redemption infrastructure, which is disproportionate for a company that wants a branded dollar inside its own application. Cap’s use case, resting part of its covered-credit float on PYUSD rather than volatile decentralised finance liquidity, illustrates the appeal.
What does PayPal get out of it?
A second lever on PYUSD demand. PYUSD sits around $2.81 billion in a stablecoin market near $305 billion where Tether holds roughly 60%. Every PYUSDx issuer that scales needs more PYUSD behind its token, expanding PYUSD’s footprint without PayPal operating those applications. The partners have published no issuance or reserve targets.
What is the risk to a holder?
Dependence on two entities instead of one. The PYUSDx issuer must hold the PYUSD it claims and honour redemption, and Paxos must maintain PYUSD’s reserves and peg. A holder’s legal relationship is with the upper issuer, not with PayPal or Paxos, which is what the disclaimers make explicit. This is educational analysis, not investment advice.
Bitcoin price extended its pullback toward $77,000 as rising oil prices, stubborn US inflation and higher Treasury yields reduced demand for risk assets. Technical charts now place BTC near a major weekly support level, while short-term momentum remains bearish.
Summary
- Bitcoin price traded near $76,800 after losing the $78,000 support area.
- The 4-hour RSI fell to 34.25 as the Supertrend turned bearish.
- A weekly close below the 50-week EMA could expose the $72,000–$74,000 zone.
- Liquidation clusters near $80,000 could fuel a rebound if BTC reclaims $78,000.
Bitcoin price action today
According to data from crypto.news, Bitcoin (BTC) price traded near $76,800 at the time of writing, down from a 4-hour opening price of $77,230. The token reached $77,500 before sellers pushed it to a session low of $76,800.
The latest move extended a decline from the Sept. 4 local high near $82,280. Bitcoin has since formed a series of lower highs and lost the short-term support zone between $78,000 and $78,200.
The daily chart showed a small intraday recovery from a low of $76,563, but BTC remained below its 20-day simple moving average at $78,601. A daily close below that average would keep short-term control with sellers.
Bitcoin still traded above its longer moving averages. The 50-day SMA stood at $70,673, the 200-day SMA at $70,058, and the 100-day SMA at $66,915. The arrangement keeps the broader recovery structure intact even as the latest rally loses momentum.
Chaikin Money Flow remained slightly positive at 0.02. However, the indicator fell sharply from its early September high, showing that buying pressure weakened during the retreat from $82,000.
Hot inflation and oil weigh on Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s decline came as US markets prepared for fresh consumer inflation data following a stronger producer-price report. US wholesale prices rose 0.4% in August and 5.4% from a year earlier, according to the Associated Press, increasing expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise rates.
Interest-rate futures placed the probability of a rate increase at about 67% on Sept. 11, according to Reuters. MarketWatch reported that the estimate briefly rose as high as 72% after the producer inflation release.
Higher borrowing costs tend to pressure Bitcoin and other risk assets because investors can earn better returns from government debt without accepting crypto-market volatility.
Oil prices added to those concerns. Brent crude remained above $100 per barrel after approaching $110 during the week as conflict in the Middle East threatened supply routes. Higher energy prices can feed into transport and production costs, making it harder for US inflation to return to the Fed’s 2% goal.
The global bond selloff pushed the 10-year US Treasury yield close to 5%, according to Reuters. The move continued even after the Treasury bought back $5.2 billion of longer-dated government bonds against an announced target of $6 billion.
Bitcoin indicators point to $76K support
The 4-hour chart remained bearish after BTC moved below the Supertrend indicator. Supertrend resistance stood at $79,060, placing the first major recovery test between $79,000 and $80,000.
The 4-hour Relative Strength Index fell to 34.25, while its signal line stood at 39.08. An RSI reading below 50 shows weak momentum, though the indicator is approaching the oversold threshold of 30.
Immediate support sits between $76,000 and $76,500. The lower edge also aligns with a visible liquidity cluster on the one-week CoinGlass liquidation heatmap.
A decisive move below $76,000 could expose $75,000 before attention turns to the $72,000–$74,000 range. Bitcoin’s rising 50-day and 200-day moving averages near $70,000 form a deeper support area if the correction expands.
Bulls need to recover $78,000 first. A close above the $79,060 Supertrend level would weaken the short-term bearish setup and open a path toward $79,800–$80,600.
The liquidation heatmap showed the largest nearby concentration of leveraged positions around $80,000, with another band close to $80,600. Price often moves toward areas with concentrated liquidity, but the heatmap does not guarantee that Bitcoin will reach either level.
Analysts watch the weekly close and short positions
Crypto analyst Ted Pillows said Bitcoin was testing its 50-week exponential moving average. According to Pillows, a weekly close below the indicator could push BTC toward $72,000–$74,000.
The weekly chart shared by Pillows placed the 50-week EMA near $77,000, making the current range important for Bitcoin’s medium-term direction. Holding the level would leave room for another attempt to regain $80,000, while a confirmed breakdown would weaken the recovery from the June low.
Trader Daan Crypto Trades said new short positions entered around $78,000 and remained profitable as Bitcoin approached the lower end of its $76,000 range. He also noted that funding rates were beginning to turn negative.
Negative funding means short traders pay long traders in perpetual futures markets. If Bitcoin reclaims $78,000, traders positioned for further losses could be forced to close their shorts, potentially adding momentum to a move toward the liquidity clustered near $80,000.
Failure to recover $78,000 would instead leave Bitcoin vulnerable to another test of $76,000. The upcoming US consumer inflation report and the Federal Reserve’s Sept. 15–16 policy meeting remain the main macro catalysts for US crypto investors.
Disclosure: This article does not represent investment advice. The content and materials featured on this page are for educational purposes only.
India’s securities regulator and central bank have launched a tokenized corporate bond pilot, with three companies issuing a combined 10.25 billion rupees (about $107 million) through the new market infrastructure.
On Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) said Demat 2.0 allows corporate bonds to be issued and held as digital tokens on a distributed ledger owned by the country’s statutory depositories. The system connects to the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) wholesale central bank digital currency (CBDC) through its Unified Market Interface.
The first issuance came from public-sector lender REC, which raised 5 billion rupees from 18 investors on Monday. Engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (L&T) raised another 5 billion rupees from four investors on Wednesday, while non-bank lender IIFL issued 250 million rupees in bonds to one investor on the same day.
SEBI said the infrastructure allows issuers to receive funds on the day of bidding instead of two to three days later. The regulator said atomic settlement removes the delay between the movement of money and bonds, while smart contracts can automate interest and redemption payments.
Pilot expands beyond initial REC plan
In August, Reuters reported that India planned to test tokenized corporate bonds through an REC issuance of less than 5 billion rupees involving selected investors. The launch expanded beyond the initial reported plan to include two additional issuers, bringing the total to more than double the amount originally expected from REC.
Issuances under the first phase remain ongoing. SEBI said later phases would introduce secondary trading through existing request-for-quote platforms and provide access to retail investors, with experience from the pilot guiding any wider rollout.
Related: India’s Arya.ag to put grain ownership records on Avalanche
Investors can hold the tokenized bonds in their existing Demat accounts without opening a separate account or completing new Know-Your-Customer checks. However, participants must enable Demat 2.0 through their depository and maintain a wholesale CBDC wallet with a participating bank to settle the payments.
SEBI said India is the first country to combine bonds issued natively on a distributed ledger, ownership records maintained by statutory depositories and settlement in CBDCs within existing regulated market infrastructure. The regulator said tokenization does not change the legal status of the bonds, repayment obligations or investor protections.
The bank expects Sky to pass five times as much value to token holders by 2028 as USDS adoption and borrowing capacity continue to expand.
Tempting though it is to recall pre-9/11 America through sunny filters, America seethed with partisan animus even then. Nine months before the attacks, the Supreme Court had decided Bush v. Gore; three years earlier, the Clinton impeachment had rocked the country.
It’s not that Americans suddenly agreed on all that divided them. And to be sure, we must continue to address the hate that some wrongly embraced in the aftermath of that tragic day. But 9/11 largely clarified an essential truth: beneath our disagreements lay common cause. The 2,977 people murdered that day hailed from 92 nations. They were rich and poor, religious and secular, native-born, and immigrant. They practiced different faiths, subscribed to different political views, and lived very different lives from even those seated right next to them on that fateful day. But in those differences, they represented the American experiment itself, and in putting aside our conflicts, Americans tacitly acknowledged that it was worth protecting.
Bitcoin (BTC) buyers avoided “buying the dip” as BTC price fell to $57,800 in July, analysis reports.
Key points:
- The Bitcoin HODL Waves metric showed that buyers did not rush to enter the market as BTC/USD fell below $58,000 at the start of July.
- A single whale may have been among the only dip-buyers at the time, said analyst Willy Woo.
- Analysis continued to warn that the bear market shows no concrete signs of structural shift based on current price action.
Willy Woo: Bitcoin bottom buyer could be lone whale
Data from Bitcoin’s HODL Waves metric shows an unusually muted reaction to the most recent macro lows.
HODL Waves group the BTC supply by how long coins have remained dormant in their wallets, plotting each group over time to create the chart’s signature wave-like pattern. The newest supply, coins dormant between one and seven days, offers insight into investor buying activity following key BTC price events.
On July 1, BTC/USD briefly dropped below $58,000, reaching its lowest levels since September 2024. On that day, the portion of the supply dormant between one and seven days stood at 1.97%, per data from Look Into Bitcoin. The figure increased only marginally in the days after, reaching a mere 2.35% on July 5.
For onchain analyst Willy Woo, this lack of onchain movement stands out among long-term BTC price lows. Previously, he noted, buyers rushed to buy new lows — a knee-jerk reaction absent in July.
“Whoever bought the bottom did it slowly. Possibly even a single whale,” he wrote in a post on X this week, describing the event as an “anomaly.”
Woo acknowledged that the interpretation was not infallible, with institutional investment vehicles possibly impacting the HODL Waves data.
“I haven’t found any other thesis to explain the anomaly apart from slow steady buying by all investors involved this implies it’s a handful of buyers because if it was many they tend to act like a herd around price action and create spikes in the buying pattern,” he added.
Misgivings over bear-market floor remain
The findings add to the debate around whether July marked Bitcoin’s latest bear-market bottom.
Related: Bitcoin bear market ‘over’ as price metric copies 2023 recovery: CryptoQuant CEO
As Cointelegraph reported, opinions diverged significantly as BTC/USD rebounded above $80,000, with previous BTC price cycles dictating the need for a new macro low in the coming months.
In his latest analysis, trader and analyst Rekt Capital warned that the structure of the bear market ostensibly remains intact in the form of a series of lower highs within a broader downtrend.
“At this very moment, Bitcoin is positioned for a repeat of bearish price history. However, Bitcoin has a few more days to turn things around before the new Weekly Close, if it can. A Weekly Close below ~$78300 could set price up for a breakdown like in May,” he wrote on Thursday.
August, meanwhile, saw a rebound in buyer appetite, with the US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) seeing $3.8 billion in net inflows over a three-week period.
Ethereum price is trading at $2,465, steady and calm on the surface. Underneath it, the network is being asked a much harder question: can it actually deliver post-quantum cryptography at scale, or is this another roadmap promise that outruns its execution timeline?
The catalyst is EIP-8288, a proposal from Vitalik Buterin introducing a recursive STARK aggregation mempool framework designed to make Ethereum more quantum-resistant and more efficient at processing cryptographic proofs. The proposal merged into the official EIP repository on September 9, 2026.
Now the proposal remains in draft form with no confirmed deployment schedule, which is exactly the kind of detail traders tend to skip past when they’re excited about a headline.
ETH is in the $2,440–$2,470 band this week, with 24-hour trading volume touching $16 billion.
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Can Ethereum Price Hit $2,600 This Week?
ETH sits at $2,465, essentially flat on the day, with volume holding near $15.82 billion across major venues. Technically, the setup is a coiled range: resistance clusters around $2,544–$2,600, with a breakout above $2,600 needed to open a run toward $2,800. Support sits at $2,438–$2,440, reinforced by the 50-week moving average and a Fibonacci cluster.
The bull case sees EIP-8288 gaining developer traction while softer CPI data helps ETH clear $2,550, opening targets at $2,656 and $2,786. The base case has ETH chopping between $2,440 and $2,550 as traders wait for clearer roadmap signals.
The bear case begins with a break below $2,310, shifting focus toward deeper support near $2,220. For a longer-term view on fee revenue and staking yields, this ETH price outlook explores the fundamentals. For now, watch $2,438, the level that could decide which scenario plays out.
https://x.com/BTC_Hyper2/status/2097882993641816093?s=20Trade XRP on Bybit and Get a Chance to Win Our $1,000 USDT Airdrop
Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as Ethereum Tests Key Levels
A range-bound ETH sitting below resistance for a second straight week isn’t a disaster, but it’s not a growth story either. Traders holding ETH near $2,450 are essentially paying for optionality on an upgrade with no delivery date.
This dynamic, proven infrastructure, priced accordingly, and limited near-term upside are pushing capital toward earlier-stage plays where the asymmetry is still wide open.
Easy now. Let Hyper handle this one. — Bitcoin Hyper (@BTC_Hyper2) September 10, 2026
pic.twitter.com/MTV0jygc1L
Bitcoin Hyper ($HYPER) is pitching itself as the first Bitcoin Layer 2 with SVM integration, aiming for execution speeds beyond Solana while settling security back to Bitcoin. The presale has raised $33 million at a current token price of $0.013686, with a huge 35% staking APY offered only for early buyers.
Core features include low-latency L2 processing, SVM-based smart contracts, and a decentralized canonical bridge for BTC transfers, addressing Bitcoin’s long-standing programmability gap.
Research Bitcoin Hyper before the presale window ends.
Discover: The Best Token Presales
The post Ethereum Price Faces a Reality Check as EIP-8288 Puts Its Technology to the Test appeared first on Cryptonews.
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