Ethereum and Base are set to implement different account abstraction standards after efforts to agree on a shared account abstraction standard broke down last week.

Interoperability standards became secondary to each chain’s core goals, leading both to go their separate ways and “putting the burden on wallets,” Derek Chiang, founding member and researcher at Ethlabs, as well as a co-author of Ethereum’s EIP-8141 proposal, said in a Monday X post.

The divergence could require wallet developers to support separate transaction formats to provide a consistent experience across networks. Account abstraction allows programmable rules for authorizing transactions and paying fees.

Ethereum is now advancing Frame Transactions under EIP-8141 as a “headliner” item under its Hegotá upgrade, which would introduce native account abstraction and create a path toward post-quantum authentication. Separately, Base is developing native account abstraction via Keystore under EIP-8130, currently live on devnet.

The divergence also highlights different priorities between layer-1 and layer-2 blockchain networks. Chiang said L1s are increasingly focused on censorship, capture-resistance, open-source, privacy and security features, favoring different account standards, while scalability-focused L2s are more aligned with standards such as EIP-8130.

The researcher argued that the separation won’t necessarily result in a bad outcome, as both Ethereum and Base are now “free to innovate on AA to the maximal extent in accordance with their own visions.” 

Ethereum developers could begin implementing Hegotá in late 2026 following Glamsterdam, arguably one of the most consequential upgrades of the year. Glamsterdam is designed to improve scalability, harden the L1, and make the network easier to use, with a mainnet launch expected sometime in the second half of 2026, according to Ethereum’s public roadmap.  

Related: Standard Chartered forecasts SKY rising fivefold to $0.325 by 2028

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.

A Senate cloture vote, a Federal Reserve decision where hike odds just jumped to 86.5%, Pi Network’s final planned upgrade, and the Bank of Japan. Three of the four are scheduled. The one driving everything was not on anyone’s calendar two weeks ago.

Crypto spends most of its time waiting for things that never quite happen. This week is the opposite problem. Between Tuesday and Friday, the Senate votes on whether to begin debating the bill that would define every digital asset in America, Pi Network ships the last upgrade on its published roadmap, the Federal Reserve announces a decision that markets have suddenly repriced toward a rate hike, and the Bank of Japan meets. Four events, five days, and each of them capable of moving prices on its own. What makes the week unusual is not the density. It is that the three events everyone has been watching for months are probably less consequential than the one that appeared out of nowhere: a jump in hike expectations from 69.4% on Friday to 86.5% on Monday, driven substantially by an oil spike following attacks on Saudi infrastructure. Crypto has never traded through a Federal Reserve tightening cycle as an institutional asset class. It is about to find out what that looks like, and it is looking the wrong way.

Tuesday: the vote that is not a vote

The CLARITY Act cloture vote lands at 2:15 p.m. Eastern, and precision about what it is prevents a great deal of misreading.

This is cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633. It requires sixty votes. Passing it means the Senate begins debating the bill. It does not enact anything, and success would leave a second cloture vote, an amendment process, and House concurrence still ahead.

The arithmetic has not moved. Republicans hold 53 seats with at least two defections expected, which requires seven or more Democrats to cross. The Democrats who negotiated through the summer walked away in July over the ethics provision, and what has changed since is a reported White House concession on expanded conflict-of-interest rules and state-level enforcement powers, which addresses their specific objection.

Senate Republicans also released a revised text hours before the vote, expanding the bill from roughly 616 pages to 635, including a definition that would classify XRP as a commodity in secondary markets regardless of Ripple’s holdings.

Estimates of eventual passage sit between ten and twenty percent depending on the source, with prediction markets at the higher end and research desks at the lower. Our status page tracks where the bill stands.

Tuesday: Pi ships its last planned upgrade

The same day, Pi Network activates Protocol 27 on mainnet, the final upgrade on its published core roadmap, adding flexible smart contract authentication and groundwork for a native decentralised exchange. Node operators must reach version 27.1 or fall out of sync with the network.

The context is what makes it interesting. PI trades near $0.098 with a market capitalisation around $1.09 billion and daily volume of roughly $7.85 million, which is thin against that capitalisation. The token sits roughly 96.7% below its $2.99 high. Total value locked in Pi’s decentralised finance ecosystem is zero dollars.

Its testnet launchpad drew 242,000 participants and 15.92 million in test commitments, which is genuine engagement. Against that, roughly 16.6 million of a claimed 60 million engaged users have migrated to mainnet, a conversion rate near 27.6%, and approximately 6.5 million PI unlock daily against a network that has never burned a token.

So an upgrade delivering decentralised exchange infrastructure arrives at a chain with no decentralised finance activity, where roughly three quarters of the userbase cannot reach what it delivers. Our coverage of that gap examined the economics underneath it.

Wednesday: the one that actually matters

Here is where the week turns, and it is the event nobody was positioned for.

Market-implied odds of a 25 basis point rate increase at Wednesday’s Federal Open Market Committee meeting jumped to 86.5% on Monday, from 69.4% the previous Friday. That is a substantial repricing inside one trading session.

The driver was geopolitical. Attacks on Saudi pipeline infrastructure, including reported strikes on residential areas and a mosque, pushed oil roughly 11% higher over five days. Higher energy prices feed directly into inflation expectations, and inflation expectations feed directly into the case for tightening.

Two things about this deserve emphasis.

Crypto has no experience of this. Bitcoin existed through the 2022 tightening cycle, but as a considerably smaller, less institutionally held asset. Spot ETFs did not exist. Treasury companies held a fraction of what they hold now. Pension and endowment allocations were negligible. The asset class that faces a hike on Wednesday is structurally different from the one that faced the last cycle, with far more of its holder base subject to conventional portfolio construction rules that respond mechanically to rate moves.

And the market is watching the wrong thing. Crypto coverage this week has been dominated by the cloture vote. A cloture vote determines whether a legislative process continues. A rate decision determines the discount rate applied to every risk asset on earth, including this one. If the Fed hikes and crypto falls, the coverage will search for a crypto explanation, and the explanation will be in the dollar.

Friday: Japan closes the week

The Bank of Japan’s decision on September 18 completes the set, and it matters for a reason that is indirect and historically underestimated.

Japanese policy has been the anchor of global carry trades for years. When the BOJ moves, leveraged positions funded in yen get repriced, and the unwinding that follows reaches assets with no obvious connection to Japan. August 2024 provided the demonstration: a BOJ adjustment triggered a global deleveraging in which crypto fell sharply alongside equities, for reasons that had nothing to do with anything happening in crypto.

That is the tail risk in this week. Not that any single event is catastrophic, but that a hawkish Fed on Wednesday followed by a BOJ move on Friday compounds into a funding-conditions shift, and funding conditions are what leveraged crypto positions are made of.

What is actually priced

Reading the market’s positioning matters more than the calendar, and the signals are mixed in an informative way.

Total crypto market capitalisation sits near $2.69 trillion, down roughly 0.9%. Bitcoin trades around $77,453 with dominance at 57.9%, ether near $2,502, XRP at $1.40, and Solana at $101.92.

The Fear and Greed Index reads 57, down from 61 the previous day and 71 a week earlier. That is a market drifting from greed toward neutral, which is a positioning signal, not a panic one.

Bitcoin dominance near 58% is the more informative number. Rising dominance in a flat-to-down market means capital rotating toward the largest asset, which is what participants do when they expect volatility and want liquidity. The market is not selling; it is consolidating into the position it wants to hold through an uncertain week.

What that pricing does not obviously reflect is the Fed. The hike repricing happened Monday. Crypto’s move was modest. Either the market has concluded a 25 basis point increase is already absorbed, or it has not finished processing a repricing that occurred less than a day ago. Those are very different conclusions and only one of them is comfortable.

The asymmetry in each event

Worth separating, because the four are not equivalent in how they can move things.

CLARITY is asymmetric to the upside and small in both directions. Failure changes nothing operationally; the framework governing crypto today is a joint SEC-CFTC interpretive release that continues regardless. Success starts a process. The token most exposed is XRP, which has rallied on procedural CLARITY news twice this year and given both moves back.

Protocol 27 is contained. A Pi-specific event affecting a $1.09 billion token with $7.85 million in daily volume. It matters enormously to Pi holders and barely registers elsewhere.

The Fed is asymmetric to the downside and large. A hike is now the expected outcome, so the hike itself is partly priced. What is not priced is the guidance: whether this is the start of a cycle or a one-off response to an energy shock. A hawkish path repriced on Wednesday reaches every asset.

And the BOJ is a tail. Most likely nothing. Occasionally the thing that unwinds global leverage in seventy-two hours.

Ranked by expected impact, the order is almost exactly the inverse of the attention each is receiving in crypto media this week.

The scenario table

Because the events interact, the useful exercise is not forecasting each one but mapping how the combinations land. Four rough configurations cover most of the probability.

Cloture fails, Fed hikes hawkishly. The worst combination and not the least likely. Crypto loses a narrative catalyst it had partly priced and takes a discount-rate hit in the same week, with the coverage attributing the whole move to the vote because the vote is the crypto-native story. Bitcoin dominance would likely rise further as capital consolidates, and the assets most exposed are the ones that rallied on legislative hope, XRP foremost among them.

Cloture fails, Fed hikes with dovish guidance. The energy shock is framed as transitory, the path stays shallow, and the legislative disappointment is absorbed within days because nothing operational changed. This is the most probable configuration by most readings and the least dramatic.

Cloture succeeds, Fed hikes hawkishly. The confusing one. A crypto-positive procedural outcome into a tightening signal, producing a market that cannot decide which input dominates. Expect a sharp move in either direction followed by a reversal, which is what markets do when two large signals conflict.

Cloture succeeds, Fed hikes with dovish guidance. The favourable case, and the one where the risk is overreaction. A cloture vote is a procedural step toward a bill that still needs a second cloture vote, an amendment process, and House concurrence. XRP has priced legislative progress as legislative success twice this year and given both moves back.

The Bank of Japan sits across all four as a multiplier. In three of them it is probably irrelevant. In the first, a hawkish BOJ on Friday turns a bad week into a deleveraging event.

What the table is for is not prediction. It is to have decided in advance what each combination means, because the one thing guaranteed this week is that the explanations offered in real time will be wrong at least half the time.

Why this week is a test of the institutional thesis

Underneath the calendar sits a question the sector has been arguing about since the ETFs launched, and this week supplies unusually clean evidence.

The institutional thesis holds that crypto has matured into an asset class held by allocators with mandates, risk frameworks, and portfolio construction rules. The implication, usually left unstated, is that this makes the market more stable, because professional holders do not panic the way retail does.

The counter-thesis is that institutionalisation changes the correlation instead of reducing the volatility. Allocators with mandates respond to macro inputs mechanically. When the discount rate rises, risk assets get repriced across the board, and an asset held inside conventional portfolios gets repriced with them regardless of its own fundamentals.

This week distinguishes between them. If crypto absorbs a hawkish Fed with limited damage while crypto-specific news drives the tape, the first thesis has evidence. If a rate decision moves crypto more than a Senate vote on the bill defining its legal existence, the second one does.

The structural change since the last tightening cycle makes the test meaningful. Spot ETFs now hold substantial assets. Treasury companies hold hundreds of thousands of bitcoin, and as our coverage of the largest one documented, several have stopped accumulating. Pension and endowment allocations exist where they did not. Each of those is a holder whose behaviour is governed by something other than conviction about the asset.

The honest expectation is that the second thesis wins this week, because it has won every comparable week since the ETFs launched. What would be genuinely informative is if it did not.

What a hike would actually do to crypto

Worth being concrete, because “rates up, risk assets down” is a slogan, not a mechanism, and the mechanism has several distinct channels.

The discount rate channel. Every asset with cash flows far in the future gets valued by discounting them, and a higher rate makes distant cash flows worth less today. Bitcoin has no cash flows, which sounds like immunity and is the opposite: an asset valued entirely on expectations of future adoption is pure duration, and pure duration is what a rate move hits hardest.

The opportunity cost channel. When Treasury bills pay a meaningful risk-free rate, the bar an alternative asset must clear rises. This is the channel that reaches allocators most directly, because a portfolio construction model with a higher risk-free input mechanically reduces the weight assigned to volatile assets without anyone forming an opinion about crypto.

The funding channel. Leveraged positions cost more to carry when rates rise. In crypto this compounds because perpetual futures funding, margin lending, and the basis trade all reprice together, and a large share of open interest exists specifically to harvest spreads that narrow when funding costs rise.

And the dollar channel. Tightening generally strengthens the dollar, and a stronger dollar is a headwind for anything priced in it. This channel is why crypto frequently moves inversely to the dollar index on days with no crypto news at all.

Four channels, all pointing the same direction, none of them requiring any participant to change their view of the technology. That is why the Fed matters more than the Senate this week, and it is also why the coverage will miss it: none of these channels produces a headline with a crypto noun in it.

The events nobody scheduled

Three of this week’s four were on the calendar months ago. The one driving the repricing was not, and that asymmetry is the durable lesson rather than anything specific to September.

Attacks on Saudi pipeline infrastructure pushed oil roughly 11% higher over five days, and that move did more to change market expectations than anything on the crypto calendar. Nobody’s positioning accounted for it, because nobody’s positioning could.

This happens with some regularity and crypto handles it badly, for a structural reason. The sector maintains an extensive calendar of its own: unlock schedules, upgrade dates, ETF decision deadlines, regulatory milestones, conference keynotes. That calendar is genuinely useful and it creates a habit of attention that points inward. A market conditioned to watch its own schedule is poorly positioned for the events that arrive from outside it.

The August 2024 episode is the cleanest example. A Bank of Japan adjustment triggered a global deleveraging and crypto fell sharply, and for two days the sector searched for a crypto-native explanation because the actual cause was a central bank most crypto participants had never thought about.

The practical adjustment is not to abandon the crypto calendar, which contains real information. It is to hold it alongside the macro one and to recognise which is more likely to move prices on any given week. This week, three scheduled crypto events sit alongside two central bank decisions and one geopolitical shock, and the ranking by expected impact runs almost exactly opposite to the ranking by coverage volume.

That inversion is not unusual. It is the normal state of the sector’s attention, visible this week because the calendar happens to make it obvious.

The week after

Whatever happens between Tuesday and Friday, the following week is where the consequences actually appear, and three of them are worth anticipating now.

The CLARITY aftermath resolves fast. If cloture succeeds, the amendment process begins immediately and the newest provisions in the 635-page text become targets. If it fails, leadership makes a statement within a day about refiling, restructuring, or moving on, and that statement is more informative than the vote itself. Either way, the question is answered by roughly Thursday.

The Fed’s effect takes longer to read. A single day’s price reaction to a rate decision is mostly noise, because positioning unwinds and rebuilds over several sessions. The meaningful signal is where funding rates, open interest, and the futures basis sit a week later, since those describe whether leverage is being rebuilt or has actually left. Watching the price on Wednesday afternoon tells you very little.

And Pi’s upgrade is measurable on a different clock entirely. Total value locked at zero is the baseline, and whether decentralised exchange infrastructure produces any activity is a question answered over weeks, not days. Node operator compliance with version 27.1 is the immediate test; ecosystem usage is the real one.

One further thing worth holding. Weeks like this generate an enormous volume of explanation, and most of it is written within hours of events by people who have not seen the second-order effects. The 635-page bill has not been read by anyone describing it. The Fed’s guidance has not been parsed. The interaction between a hawkish Fed and a BOJ decision three days later cannot be assessed until both have happened.

The useful posture is to decide in advance what each outcome would mean, which is what the scenario section above is for, and then to check the interpretation against what actually happens instead of against what the coverage says happened. In a week with this much scheduled noise, the gap between those two is where most of the mistakes get made.

What to watch

The CLARITY roll call, not the result. Which Democrats vote yes determines whether a second attempt is viable and what it would cost.

Fed guidance, not the decision. A 25 basis point increase is now the base case at 86.5%. The dot plot and the press conference determine whether this is one move or a path, and the path is what gets repriced.

Oil. The proximate cause of the hike repricing. If the Saudi disruption resolves and crude retreats, the rate expectation follows it down, and the entire framing of the week changes.

Bitcoin dominance through the week. Rising dominance into events signals defensive positioning. If it keeps climbing after Wednesday, the market is expecting more volatility rather than less.

Pi’s on-chain activity after Protocol 27. Total value locked at zero is the baseline. Whether an upgrade delivering decentralised exchange infrastructure produces any is answerable within weeks and is the only real test of whether the roadmap mattered.

Frequently Asked Questions

Disclaimer: This article is for information and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial or investment advice. Market data, rate expectations, and scheduled events reflect information available at the time of writing and change continuously. Nothing here predicts any outcome. Always do your own research. Information is accurate as of September 15, 2026.

Several years into our friendship, I found her essay “Revaluing Economics” in Moving Beyond Words. Published in 1994—years before the National Domestic Workers Alliance was even the germ of an idea—she wrote about care as an essential resource that our economic model has never adequately valued, in no small part because of its association with women.  She argued that if we are to not only survive but thrive in the future, we must fundamentally protect and revalue care.  The last 15 years of my work have been deeply shaped by these ideas. 

More recently, I spent much of my time with Gloria through an intergenerational, multi-racial circle of women who affectionately call ourselves the “G Squad”—composed of a writer, two artists, a pro-democracy organizer, me, and Gloria. We gathered over the years to celebrate Gloria’s birthday, to strategize big moments in the women’s movement, or vet a new love interest in the mix. We learned about Gloria’s life and adventures from one another, and we learned about other women through Gloria. 

Solana raised its maximum transaction size from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes to allow developers to fit more complex operations into a single transaction, including zero-knowledge proofs and new onchain signature schemes.

The upgrade was activated on mainnet on Tuesday at the start of epoch 1,035 around 1:00 am UTC, according to blockchain data shared by the Solana Foundation.

The upgrade also introduced the v1 transaction format, which maintains full backward compatibility with legacy transactions. Existing transaction formats continue working for applications and wallet providers, but protocols that want to benefit from the size increase need to update to v1 transactions.

A spokesperson for the Solana Foundation told Cointelegraph that the upgrade mainly aims to help developers “do more” with applications such as zero-knowledge proofs, transactions requiring multiple signatures and new onchain signature schemes, by unlocking workloads that previously couldn’t fit inside a single transaction.

In August, Solana reduced its slot time from 400 milliseconds to 350ms. In June, the Solana Foundation shared plans to reduce slot times from 400ms to 200ms, arguing that it would improve latency and accelerate confirmations on the blockchain network.

Solana validators approved on Aug. 28 a proposal to double the network’s annual disinflation rate, reducing future issuance of Solana (SOL), the network’s native token.

Related: Solana sees record 263K tokens issued in a single day

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.

Revolut has notified 680 customers after cybercriminals used a legitimate government email account to obtain sensitive identity, banking and Bitcoin-related records.

The Financial Times reported that the fintech contacted 680 people identified during its initial investigation, while Revolut itself has publicly described the affected group only as a “very limited” number of customers. The company has not released an official numerical count.

Revolut confirmed that an unauthorized third party submitted fraudulent information requests from an email account using a legitimate government agency domain. The company treated the requests as genuine before discovering the impersonation scheme.

Revolut data breach came through a legitimate government domain

Unlike an intrusion into Revolut’s own network, the incident involved information being released after deceptive requests reached the company through an apparently authentic government channel. Revolut described the episode as a “sophisticated external impersonation scam.”

A customer notice reviewed by TechCrunch said the communication carried valid domain-authentication credentials, which led Revolut to believe it had received a genuine government request. The company has not named the agency involved or explained publicly how the third party gained control of the government email account.

Revolut said it blocked the address once the fraud was detected and contacted the government agency concerned, law enforcement, data-protection authorities and financial regulators. A spokesperson maintained that “Revolut systems and customer funds are unaffected.”

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The company’s public page for official information requests directs competent authorities and legal representatives to a dedicated court-orders address. It asks authorities to submit one email for each case, although Revolut has not publicly described which verification steps were applied to the fraudulent requests involved in the breach.

As crypto.news reported when the incident first emerged, on-chain investigator ZachXBT circulated a copy of a customer notification and said the incident appeared limited in size and potentially focused on high-net-worth users. Revolut has not confirmed that assessment.

Exposed data included identity files and Bitcoin activity

Customer notices reviewed by multiple outlets listed a large range of personal information that may have been disclosed. The records included full names, dates of birth, occupations, home addresses, email addresses and telephone numbers.

Copies of passports or driver’s licenses and the selfies submitted during identity verification were among the listed records. Revolut’s notice distinguished those verification images from biometric facial telemetry, which it said was not part of the information involved.

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Financial information went beyond basic account details. Customer statements could contain IBANs, account-opening dates, account status, withdrawal records and complete transaction histories. For crypto customers, the material included Bitcoin transactions and wallet reference numbers shown in account records.

The notice did not state that private keys, account passwords or full payment-card credentials were supplied to the unauthorized requester. It listed categories of records that may have been disclosed, meaning the available evidence does not establish that every affected person had every listed category exposed.

The Financial Times later reported that former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès was among the affected customers. Karpelès said Revolut emailed him at 5:25 a.m. on Sept. 12 warning that his information may have been compromised.

Karpelès questioned why the fintech released the records even though the request came from a verified government address. His criticism represents his assessment of Revolut’s handling of the request and not a regulatory finding against the company.

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Crypto.news has detailed Karpelès’ history as the former operator of Mt. Gox, the Bitcoin exchange that collapsed in 2014 following the loss of customer cryptocurrency.

Extortion claims emerge as customer files surface

People claiming responsibility for the incident have threatened to release customer information unless Revolut pays an extortion demand, according to the Financial Times and Recorded Future News. Revolut declined to comment to Recorded Future News on whether it had received or was responding to an extortion demand.

Recorded Future News reported that material circulated through a Telegram account claiming involvement in the incident. One customer whose information appeared in the material did not dispute its authenticity, while cryptocurrency entrepreneur Marc Zeller separately said information belonging to him had been exposed.

Parts of the attackers’ story remain unverified. The Telegram account suggested that the government email came from an Italian domain, but Recorded Future News said it could not confirm all details in the account’s posts. Italian authorities contacted by the publication had not responded, and the Telegram account was later suspended.

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Revolut has not publicly identified the government agency whose email system was used. No official statement located as of Sept. 15 establishes how the account was compromised, whether credentials were stolen, or whether the same government email access was used against other financial institutions.

The FBI has previously warned companies about criminals obtaining access to law-enforcement and government email accounts and using them to submit fraudulent emergency data requests. Recorded Future News noted that similar tactics were used against technology companies during earlier attacks involving compromised law-enforcement accounts.

UK privacy regulator is investigating the disclosure

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office has opened an investigation after Revolut reported the incident, the Financial Times reported Monday. An investigation does not by itself establish that Revolut breached UK data-protection law.

Under ICO guidance, organizations generally must notify the regulator within 72 hours of becoming aware of a reportable personal-data breach. Where an incident creates a high risk to individuals’ rights and freedoms, affected people must be informed without undue delay.

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Revolut said it directly contacted the customers it believed were affected. Its public statement says it notified the relevant government agency, enforcement bodies, data-protection authorities and financial regulators after identifying the fraudulent requests.

The case arrives months after Revolut received approval to operate a full UK bank. As crypto.news reported in March, Prudential Regulation Authority approval allowed Revolut Bank UK to begin operating with banking status and deposit protection for eligible customer deposits. Crypto trading remains outside that deposit-protection structure.

Revolut serves more than 80 million customers worldwide, according to the company figure cited by TechCrunch and Recorded Future News. The 680 people identified by the Financial Times represent the current reported count from the investigation and should not be treated as a final figure unless Revolut or regulators publish an updated total.

The ICO’s published guidance says investigators may examine the type of data exposed, the number of people involved, potential harm and the technical or organizational safeguards used before deciding whether regulatory action is warranted.

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