Crypto investor Machi Big Brother has pulled his $1 million bid for Friend.tech and named venture firm Paradigm as the likely obstacle.

Instead, he urged co-founder Racer to relaunch the Web3 social app on Robinhood Chain. The reversal comes nine days after his original offer, sending FRIEND up more than 1,500%.

Machi Big Brother Friend.tech Bid Collapses After 9 Days

Machi Big Brother, whose real name is Jeffrey Huang, opened the bid on Aug. 27. His $1 million buyout offer asked only for the project’s X account and web address.

Friend.tech launched on Base in 2023, allowing users to trade shares with each other. Paradigm led a seed round into the startup that same year.

However, Huang offered no evidence and framed the claim as a guess. He also has a history here. He bought 11 million FRIEND for roughly 5,200 ETH, and the position later shed over $16 million.

The original team gave up control of the smart contracts in September 2024. Therefore, it remains unclear what a buyer would own.

The FRIEND token price now sits near $0.0069, up roughly 5% in the past 24 hours. Its market value of about $659,000 trails the $4.89 million peak from the August rally. Over 90 days, however, the token still holds a 382% gain.

Robinhood Chain Emerges as Racer’s Next Option

Huang closed his post with a pivot. He told Racer to rebuild the app on Robinhood Chain and promised his backing.

Robinhood Chain went live on July 1 as an Arbitrum-based layer-2 network. Since then, it has surpassed Ethereum in volume on decentralized exchanges and absorbed heavy meme-coin flows.

Meanwhile, that mix worries some analysts. Jon Ma of Artemis warned that the meme coin boom risk could undercut Robinhood’s tokenized-stock ambitions.

FRIEND held its 24-hour gain despite the withdrawal. Racer had not responded publicly by Saturday afternoon, and his answer will decide whether Friend.tech returns.

The post Machi Big Brother Sent FRIEND Up 1,500%. Then Ditched $1M Deal appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Mellody Hobson opens the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles on September 22 with her husband. The privately funded project cost roughly $1 billion.

Hobson co-chairs the museum’s board. She co-runs Ariel Investments and holds a seat on the JPMorgan Chase board, where she also serves on the risk committee.

The Wall Street Half of the Museum Sits on JPMorgan’s Board

Hobson joined the JPMorgan board in 2018. She has served as co-CEO of Ariel Investments since 2019, after serving as president from 2000. Meanwhile, the bank she helps oversee has turned into one of the loudest institutional voices in digital assets.

JPMorgan’s blockchain unit, Kinexys, has processed more than $3 trillion since its inception. It now averages over $5 billion in daily volume. This year, the bank opened its JPM Coin deposit token, JPMD, to institutional clients on Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network built by Coinbase.

South Korea’s KB Kookmin Bank said in July it would start routing dollar trade payments over JPMorgan’s Kinexys network in August. As a result, the risk committee Hobson sits on covers a lender that already settles billions onchain. Strategy meanwhile ranked JPMorgan behind Fidelity in its Bitcoin banking index.

The Lucas Museum Hides a Banksy Gallery Upstairs

Lucas built the collection around storytelling rather than abstraction. Visitors will find Frida Kahlo and Norman Rockwell works beside Luke’s landspeeder and General Grievous’s wheel bike. The building holds more than 1,300 pieces and 30,000 comic books.

Curators added two walls of Banksy works to the fifth-floor murals gallery at the last minute. One carries the silhouette of a girl releasing a heart-shaped balloon. The same gallery also holds works by Diego Rivera, Judith Baca and JR.

Lucas chased sites in San Francisco and Chicago for more than a decade before Los Angeles agreed. Hobson now straddles both worlds. One holds Star Wars props, the other decides how fast big banks move tokenized money.

The post Banksy, Star Wars and JPMorgan Meet in a $1 Billion Museum appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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A Bank for International Settlements (BIS) working paper tests the XRP Ledger (XRPL) as a proof-of-concept for verifying official statistics on-chain, recording cryptographic fingerprints of public datasets that publish in three to five seconds and verify in one to two.

The Working Paper No 1374 essentially asks how statistical agencies can give users an independent way to check the origin and integrity of published data without changing their existing dissemination systems.

International organizations (the BIS among them) rely on the SDMX standard to exchange official statistics, and the prototype binds each SDMX dataset to its source by hashing it and writing a single summary value to the ledger.

Though only the fingerprints reach the chain, never the underlying numbers, so confidential data stays off-ledger, and the method extends to formats such as XBRL. The BIS has tested public blockchains before, including Project Mariana, which trialed wholesale central bank digital currency settlement on a public chain with the central banks of France, Singapore, and Switzerland.

The system normalizes each file with Canonical XML 1.1, hashes it with SHA3-512 at the whole-file and per-series level, and collapses those hashes into one Merkle root written to the Memos field of an XRPL Payment transaction. Each file also carries a W3C Verifiable Credential in its header, signed by the publisher’s identity keys.

Cost and Simplicity

The memo approach needs no smart contracts, so the authors avoided gas costs and contract risk, and XRPL’s base fee of 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, put anchoring close to free. Batching compounds that.

A single ledger entry can cover thousands of datasets, dropping the on-chain cost to a fraction of a cent each. The paper also cites the ledger’s fast consensus finality and the published technical analysis of its consensus protocol.

XRPL has taken on other institutional workloads this year. CryptoPotato reported on a pilot that linked the ledger to interbank rails with JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo, which settled tokenized Treasury bills in under five seconds, and Ripple has published an institutional roadmap adding compliance credentials and permissioned trading. The BIS tests ran on XRPL’s DevNet, a test network.

It notes that DevNet shares the mainnet’s transaction format and close cadence, so the latency figures carry over, and mainnet fees stay in the sub-cent range.

A Few Firm Limits

The paper also describes the build as an experimental proof-of-concept, stating a production service would need hardware-backed signing, pinned validator nodes and formal load testing.

Though keep in mind the ledger certifies only what was published, by whom and when, so the paper reaches no adoption decision and gives no endorsement of XRP, and the authors attribute the views to themselves, not to the BIS or its member central banks.

The post BIS Tests XRP Ledger to Anchor Official Statistics On-Chain in Proof-of-Concept Paper appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Standard Chartered extended its deliverable Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) spot trading to institutional clients in the United Arab Emirates on September 3, becoming the first Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) to offer the service in the country.

The offering runs through Standard Chartered DIFC, the bank’s arm in the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), which said it is the only global bank currently providing institutional digital asset spot trading in the region.

Built on the UK Launch

The launch adds trade execution to a custody service the bank already runs in the UAE. The trades are deliverable, so clients take possession of the underlying Bitcoin and Ether at settlement, and they can settle through a custodian of their choice, including Standard Chartered’s own digital asset custody solution that went live in September 2024.

Trades run through the bank’s electronic channels and sit inside its existing platforms, letting clients access the two assets through the same FX interfaces they already use. Standard Chartered DIFC is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA).

“The UAE has developed a clear digital assets regulatory framework that supports institutional participation and innovation,” said Rola Abu Manneh, Chief Executive Officer for the UAE, Middle East and Pakistan at Standard Chartered. She said pairing execution with custody, governance, and the bank’s global connectivity gives clients a more integrated way to participate in digital asset markets.

Standard Chartered first introduced institutional Bitcoin and Ether spot trading through its UK branch in July 2025, the first G-SIB to offer deliverable spot crypto trading to institutional clients.

“DIFC provides an established platform for international financial institutions to deploy global capabilities across markets,” said Christopher Parsons, Senior Executive Officer at Standard Chartered DIFC. He said the arrangement combines the bank’s global markets network with a regulated base for serving clients across the region.

A Wider UAE Digital Asset Push

The trading service sits inside a broader digital asset strategy that spans custody, trading and tokenization through Standard Chartered’s Corporate and Investment Bank, with its ventures ecosystem reaching into Zodia Markets and Libeara.

The bank already lets institutional clients mint and redeem USDC directly through its DIFC platform, a service it built with Circle. SC Ventures, its innovation arm, has backed a $100 million digital asset joint venture in the UAE with Japan’s SBI Holdings that targets market infrastructure, compliance tools, DeFi and tokenization.

The post Standard Chartered Extends Institutional Bitcoin and Ether Spot Trading to the UAE appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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The largest meme coin by market cap has soared on Saturday evening to $0.094, hitting a two-week high. The move is rather unexpected given the typically calm nature of the weekends.

However, there were certain signs about a potential rally, even though DOGE has slipped from its local high to $0.09 as of press time.

CryptoPotato outlined yesterday the three major signals that flashed for DOGE, including the TD Sequential. Analysts quickly determined that the OG meme coin is primed for another leg up.

However, that didn’t transpire at first, as the asset was rejected at $0.088 and slipped back down to $0.084 as the entire market bled following the strong US jobs report, which was considered bearish for risk-on assets.

Nevertheless, DOGE exploded on Saturday evening, gaining 12% from its low yesterday to the two-week high at $0.094. Popular analyst CW noted that the meme coin has reached the first major sell wall on its path forward, which is too solid to be broken now. If it falls, though, the next such wall sits all the way up at $0.14.

Fellow analyst Alex Marzell believes DOGE did “exactly what it needed to,” as it rebounded from the Friday lows to reclaim a key resistance.

$DOGE did exactly what it needed to.

Friday’s jobs print dumped it back to the $0.083 base, six flat 4H candles held it, and today one 4H candle ripped $0.0876 to $0.0952 straight back through $0.088.

Old resistance is the new line. Hold $0.088 and I think $0.095 goes next and… pic.twitter.com/y7hW91yCek

— Alex Marzell (@MarzellCrypto) September 5, 2026

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Max Crypto also weighed in on DOGE’s impressive move and even suggested that its breakouts have been the “best indicator” for the start of an Altseason.

The post Dogecoin (DOGE) Suddenly Pumps by Double Digits as Analysts Declare the Start of Altseason appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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