Bitcoin is consolidating on Wednesday after an explosive breakout on Monday, trading at $86,379 in the European morning, up 0.24% since midnight UTC and 1.3% over 24 hours as daily trading volume dips by 36% to $38 billion.

Beneath the surface the rally has narrowed sharply, with 38 of the 100 CoinDesk 100 constituents lower on the day, even as the index itself rose 0.67% to 1,926.99. Over the rolling 24 hours the picture is still broad, 87 higher and 13 lower, which places the weakening firmly in the past few hours rather than on Tuesday.

The majors have split rather than moved together, XRP (XRP) adding 3.3% to $1.62 and bitcoin cash 2.0% to $351.59, while ether slipped 0.089% to $2,750.24 as chainlink lost 0.0053%.

BitMEX, the crypto derivatives platform that helped pioneer perpetual futures trading, marked the end of an era Wednesday, shutting down exchange operations except for withdrawals..

Trading, deposits and new positions are no longer available as of 04:00 UTC on Tuesday, BitMEX said in a statement on X. Users can still log in and withdraw their balances through the platform’s website, but the company said deposits are definitely no longer possible.

BitMEX, which was co-founded by Arthur Hayes, Ben Delo and Samuel Reed in 2014 urged its customers to withdraw funds and said account fees now apply to know-your-customer (KYC) verified users who leave balances on the exchange. The monthly charge is based on an annualized 1% of assets or a $50 equivalent minimum, whichever is greater.

The closure brings to an end the 11-year run of an exchange that helped establish the perpetual swap, now the dominant instrument in crypto derivatives markets. But BitMEX’s shutdown is not a freeze on customer assets, as the platform reiterated that withdrawals remain available as it winds down.

US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Chair Michael Selig said financial markets should prepare for “mass tokenization” as regulators adapt existing frameworks for blockchain, artificial intelligence and onchain markets.

In remarks delivered Tuesday at the US Treasury Market Conference, Selig said tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs) could become the foundation of a more efficient financial system, enabling near-instant settlement and real-time collateral movement between clearinghouses, intermediaries and users.  

“Just as the transition from hand signals to electronic trading advanced our financial system, I believe tokenization can do the same for all asset classes,” Selig said, adding that the CFTC would pursue principles-based rules as tokenization and onchain finance evolve.

Selig said in August that the CFTC would move ahead with crypto rules under its existing authority if Congress did not pass the CLARITY Act. The Senate failed to advance the bill on Sept. 15.

Related: CFTC issues warning over risky prediction market ‘mention’ contracts

On Sept. 17, the CFTC submitted a regulatory action covering crypto asset transactions and markets for White House review. The filing is still at the “prerule” stage and does not detail the planned regulations.

SEC also moves to bring markets onchain

Officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have also promoted the development of tokenized markets.

In a Bloomberg TV interview, the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets Director Jamie Selway said that tokenization and crypto have recently become politicized but are “not naturally a politicized function.”

Selway said US success in developing the markets should receive bipartisan support.

On Sept. 17, the SEC granted a temporary “Innovation Exemption” for tokenized US stock trading. 

The exemption lets certain platforms trade digital versions of US-listed stocks under certain conditions.

SEC Chair Paul Atkins said in February that such an exemption could facilitate onchain trading while regulators developed longer-term rules.

Magazine: Who needs CLARITY anyway? ARB could see 70X increase: Hodler’s Digest

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of that, as well, can be a tailwind for operating cash flow of the hyperscalers, as customers — especially in the enterprise space — spend more money. The health of the AI economic ecosystem, Sløk said, relies on it.

“At the moment, what’s driving the US economy is AI,” Sløk said. “Yes, the scale here is still tilted towards more growth, but there are some headwinds that are beginning to emerge when it comes to a sharper risk of a slowdown in the economy, especially as we get into 2027. “

Jake Conley is a breaking news reporter covering US equities for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on X at @byjakeconley or email him at jake.conley@yahooinc.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

Reliance on China

Fierce competition

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

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

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

Artificial intelligence could be one of the biggest drivers for digital asset adoption as autonomous agents begin buying services, moving money and sourcing computing power, according to a BlackRock paper.

The asset manager argues that AI provides “machine-native intelligence” while digital assets provide the payment and settlement infrastructure agents may need to act on their decisions. An agent carrying out a task could, for example, pay for a data request, book a service or purchase computing capacity without waiting for a person to to complete.

Stablecoins are likely to be the first major beneficiary. Their relatively stable value makes them useful for pricing services, while blockchain networks can support payments around the clock. BlackRock highlights Coinbase x402 protocol as one emerging way agents to pay for online resources, including API calls. It also acknowledges that existing payments networks are adapting to agentic commerce.

BlackRock has argued that broad AI adoption may become a largely overlooked driver of demand for digital assets—particularly through machine-to-machine payments and tokenized infrastructure. In a new research paper, the asset manager links the growth of AI “agents” to the need for 24/7, programmable settlement systems, and it points to stablecoins and other on-chain instruments as likely beneficiaries.

The report, titled “The Machine-Native Economy,” also raises the possibility that AI could expand crypto beyond payments by creating a market for tokenized claims on compute resources—assets that could be traded, used as collateral, or automatically purchased as AI systems request additional capacity.

Key takeaways

• BlackRock frames AI and machine-to-machine payments as a “structural catalyst” for digital asset adoption.
• The paper argues stablecoins are particularly suited for high-frequency, low-value transactions between autonomous systems.
• It suggests compute markets could emerge where tokenized claims on processing capacity are transferred, pledged, or traded.
• BlackRock positions digital assets as potential infrastructure for an increasingly autonomous “digital economy,” an angle aimed at institutional investors.

Why AI could change the demand for payment rails

BlackRock’s core premise is that agentic AI—where software acts on behalf of users and other systems—will intensify the need for payment mechanisms designed for automation. While existing payment infrastructure can support some forms of automation, the report argues that critical steps such as account setup, credentialing, authorization, and the economics of very small transactions can still require human involvement.

In addition, the paper highlights that settlement finality and speed can differ across providers, which may not align neatly with the requirements of machine-to-machine commerce that runs continuously. Against that backdrop, BlackRock says digital assets and tokenized instruments may better fit the operational realities of autonomous transactions.

The authors specifically describe stablecoins, native cryptocurrencies, and tokenized real-world assets as suitable for machine-to-machine payments that are high-frequency and sub-cent, occurring around the clock. They add that multiple digital assets could support “agentic commerce,” but that stablecoins are likely to lead transactional usage.

Tokenizing compute capacity as a new crypto market

The research goes further than payments by identifying an opportunity in the compute sector. BlackRock describes compute as the processing power required to train and run AI systems, and it argues that as AI demand surges, companies may look for ways to control costs and manage risk with clearer access to resources.

In BlackRock’s model, claims on compute capacity could be represented as tokens. Those tokens could then be transferred, pledged as collateral, or traded—creating a potential market that broadens participation from institutional investors. The paper also claims AI agents could use such markets to automatically acquire resources as needed, aligning procurement with system demand in real time.

By emphasizing how tokenized claims could connect AI-driven resource needs with programmable settlement, BlackRock effectively reframes parts of the compute economy as a candidate for on-chain financial infrastructure.

Institutional spotlight on a long-running crypto thesis

BlackRock’s argument echoes a theme long promoted within parts of the crypto industry: AI will not only increase the volume of transactions, but also create a need for financial rails that can operate without constant human oversight. BlackRock’s contribution is the institutional framing—using research intended for a mainstream investor audience to advance the idea that digital assets could become part of the underlying mechanics of an increasingly autonomous economy.

This perspective also aligns with public comments from crypto leaders. In July, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back on calls for the industry to “pivot” toward AI, arguing instead that AI agents could drive demand for crypto-based financial services. Earlier coverage noted his view that AI being a megatrend does not diminish crypto’s relevance; he argued that agents would need programmable money rather than traditional banking rails.

Armstrong’s point appears consistent with BlackRock’s emphasis on machine-native settlement and automation. Where BlackRock speaks in terms of infrastructure and institutional participation, Armstrong focuses on the practical requirement for programmable payment capabilities in agent-driven systems.

Tools already emerging for automated agent payments

While BlackRock’s paper is forward-looking, it is not made in a vacuum. The input highlights that some crypto and payments firms are already building tooling aimed at enabling AI agents to transact automatically. For instance, the article notes Coinbase’s x402 protocol and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol, both designed to let AI agents automatically pay for online services.

It also references Circle’s introduction of agent wallets and USDC payment tools and OKX’s Agent Payments Protocol, which is described as supporting recurring payments and escrow-style arrangements where funds are released after a task’s completion.

These examples matter for investors and builders because they suggest at least some demand signals are being converted into product development. BlackRock’s research provides a macro rationale for why that direction could scale as AI agents become more common and transaction patterns become more autonomous and continuous.

For now, the big question is how quickly tokenized payment rails and compute-claim markets move from concept to real usage at scale. Readers should watch whether stablecoin-based payment workflows for autonomous agents expand beyond pilots, and whether any compute-market tokenization proposals gain traction—because that would be the clearest test of BlackRock’s “compute as a new opportunity” thesis.

Key takeaways

• Zcash remains above $1,600 after gaining 10% during the previous session.
• Weekly shielded transactions reached 62,379, their highest level since 2022.
• The newer Ironwood pool accounted for 55,549 of the shielded transactions recorded last week.
• A confirmed breakout above $1,700 could put the $2,000 psychological level in focus, while $1,595 is the nearest support.

Zcash (ZEC) continued its rally on Wednesday, trading around $1,619 after gaining 7.5% during the previous session. 

Rising use of the network’s privacy features and stronger demand for regulated ZEC investment products are supporting the token’s positive price action.

The privacy-focused cryptocurrency is also approaching the upper boundary of a bullish channel near $1,700. 

Momentum indicators remain constructive without showing excessively overbought conditions, allowing buyers to attempt another breakout.

A decisive move above $1,700 could carry ZEC into price discovery and bring the $2,000 psychological threshold into view. 

Failure to clear the resistance, however, could trigger a retreat toward support around $1,595 or the $1,422–$1,424 region.

Zcash Shielded activity reaches four-year high

Zcash’s latest rally has coincided with increased use of its shielded transaction system, which allows users to conceal certain transaction details.

Data from Blockworks shows that the network processed 62,379 shielded transactions last week. That was the highest weekly total recorded in four years, suggesting that demand for Zcash’s privacy functionality is increasing alongside its price.

The Ironwood pool accounted for 55,549 of those transactions, representing approximately 89% of the weekly total. The concentration of activity in the newer pool indicates that users are increasingly adopting the latest version of Zcash’s shielded infrastructure.

Unlike transparent blockchain transactions, shielded transfers can use cryptographic proofs to verify that a transaction is valid without publicly exposing all of its underlying information. This functionality is central to Zcash’s value proposition as a privacy-oriented network.

Increasing shielded activity may provide a stronger fundamental basis for ZEC’s rally because it suggests that network usage is rising rather than the price move being driven entirely by speculation.

One strong week does not establish a sustained adoption trend, however. Shielded transaction volumes will need to remain elevated over a longer period to demonstrate that the increase represents a durable change in user behavior.

Institutional investment products have provided another source of support for Zcash. Grayscale’s ZEC-focused product recorded $32.81 million in inflows on Tuesday, according to SoSoValue data. The inflow lifted the product’s net assets under management to approximately $979.48 million.

The sizeable daily increase indicates growing investor demand for ZEC exposure through a regulated investment vehicle. Such products allow investors to follow the token’s performance without independently purchasing, storing, and securing it.

Zcash has also gained additional institutional exposure in Europe. 21Shares recently launched a ZEC-focused exchange-traded product on Euronext, expanding the range of regulated channels through which investors can access the privacy token.

The combination of inflows into Grayscale’s product and the availability of the new 21Shares ETP points to improving institutional confidence. Continued inflows could reduce the amount of ZEC circulating freely in the market and support prices if demand remains strong.

Nevertheless, investment-product flows can reverse quickly. Traders will need to determine whether Tuesday’s inflow marks the beginning of a sustained trend or reflects a temporary response to ZEC’s recent price performance.

Zcash approaches $1,700 channel resistance

Zcash was trading around $1,619 on Wednesday, maintaining its bullish short-term structure.

On the four-hour chart, ZEC remains comfortably above its major exponential moving averages. The 50-period EMA stands near $1,424, the 100-period EMA is around $1,295, and the 200-period EMA sits at approximately $1,108.

Trading above all three averages shows that buyers remain in control across multiple short-term time frames. Their bullish alignment also provides several potential layers of support if the token experiences a pullback.

ZEC is now approaching a descending resistance line connecting the August 23 and September 19 highs. That barrier is situated near $1,700.

Meanwhile, a rising trendline connecting the September 2 and September 16 lows forms the lower boundary of a bullish channel. The structure indicates that buyers have repeatedly entered the market at progressively higher prices.

A confirmed breakout above the channel resistance could strengthen the rally and push ZEC into price-discovery territory. Under that scenario, the next notable target would be the round-number level at $2,000, representing a potential gain of roughly 25% from $1,600.

A breakout should ideally be supported by increasing trading volume and a sustained close above $1,700. A brief move beyond the resistance followed by a rapid reversal could instead signal a failed breakout.

Zcash’s momentum indicators continue to support the bullish outlook. The Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator remains in positive territory and has crossed above its signal line. The crossover suggests that upward momentum is strengthening as ZEC tests the upper boundary of its channel.

The Relative Strength Index stands near 63. The reading is above the neutral midpoint of 50 but below the conventional overbought level of 70, indicating strong momentum without suggesting that the rally is excessively stretched.

If ZEC fails to overcome $1,700, its first support sits near $1,595, corresponding with the September 19 high. Holding that former resistance as support would keep the immediate breakout thesis intact.

Below $1,595, the next important area lies between $1,422 and $1,424. That zone combines the September 18 low with the four-hour chart’s 50-period EMA, making it a stronger potential support region during a deeper correction.

For now, rising shielded usage, institutional inflows, and constructive technical signals support the upside bias. The next decisive test is whether buyers can convert the $1,700 resistance into support and extend the rally toward $2,000.