🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $77,334 📉 -1.1% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,469 📉 -0.2% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 56 — Greed

🔌 300 rigs, one dam, zero electricity bills

Mexican federal prosecutors, the Navy and Puebla state police raided a remote mountain property in the Sierra Norte and seized 300 mining rigs drawing power illegally from the Nuevo Necaxa hydroelectric complex. No contract, no payment.

The tip-off was low-tech: unusual noise and a suspiciously large power draw near the dam. The hardware appears GPU-based — altcoins, not Bitcoin. Mining is legal in Mexico; tapping a federal dam for free electricity is not. Forensic accountants are now tracing the money behind the operation for possible laundering links.

Mexico's state utility puts losses from illegal hookups at 6,346 GWh in just the first seven months of 2024 — around $817 million. Per Decrypt, this is already the fourth mining bust in the region this year.

💸 The $24 billion criminal escrow got raided

Xinbi Guarantee is a Telegram-based escrow for criminals — vendors of stolen data and money-laundering services post crypto deposits so buyers trust them. Since 2022: $24 billion processed, the second-largest illicit market ever tracked. The first, Huione Guarantee, was shut by Telegram in May 2025; Xinbi absorbed the traffic.

On September 8, the U.S. Secret Service and Elliptic froze 52 wallets — $52.8 million in USDT. Treasury's OFAC designated Xinbi a transnational criminal organization, cartel-tier. Xinbi called it "arbitrary" and shifted $2.8M into USDD, a stablecoin with no freeze switch — which is partly backed by the very USDT they're fleeing.

The DOJ's Scam Center Strike Force has seized $938M since November 2025, per Elliptic. Xinbi's balance is still on the board.

Decrypt

📱 Apple finally made the fold

For years, Apple watched Samsung and Google put foldable phones through their paces on real customers. Today came the classic "One more thing": the iPhone Duo at $1,999 — cheaper than most expected.

Apple chose the passport rectangle over a square, and mocked the alternative on stage: square foldables distort apps and drown video in black bars. Outside, a 5.4-inch display with asymmetric corners; inside, a 7.6-inch Super Retina XDR panel.

The crease has always been the foldable's original sin. Apple promises a multi-layer build — flexible glass, titanium, a custom nano-texture polymer — kills it for good. Samsung spent six years getting to "barely noticeable." Whether Apple cleared that bar on attempt one is the question no keynote can answer.

Ars Technica

💸 Jack Dorsey wants a real bank — just not the boring kind

Block has filed an application with the OCC to charter Builders Bank & Trust, a national trust bank that would hold BTC and stablecoins under federal supervision — no deposits, no loans, no resemblance to anything your grandmother banked at.

This isn't exactly blazing a trail. Ripple has conditional approval for a similar charter; Circle and BitGo have already crossed the finish line. Kraken's parent and crypto infrastructure firm Zerohash are in the queue too. The industry that once ran from regulators is now filling out their paperwork voluntarily.

Block's digital asset strategy lead Lee Woolley is set to run the new bank, leaning on the company's experience with Square Financial Services. Turns out the best way to custody other people's Bitcoin is with a federal address on your letterhead.

Via CoinDesk.

Cointelegraph

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 11

⚡ 300 rigs stole power from a mountain dam
🕵️ $24 billion criminal escrow finally got busted
📱 Apple's first foldable costs less than you feared
🏦 Jack Dorsey is building a Bitcoin bank, sort of

Know someone buried in meetings all day? This recap's for them

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $77,326 📈 +0.0% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,523 📈 +2.2% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 63 — Greed

💸 Bitcoin's $78,300 moment of truth

Houthi strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure sent markets into risk-off mode. At Tuesday's Wall Street open, BTC dropped to $77,600 — lowest since September 3 — while WTI crude surged toward $95 a barrel.

Analyst Rekt Capital flags an uncomfortable echo of May: Bitcoin held $78,300 briefly back then, then collapsed to $57,000. His read now:

"The retest of ~$78,300 is in progress. A weekly close below it would likely confirm a breakdown."

Trump, meanwhile, promised $2 gasoline once the US wins the war with Iran. Markets seem to be treating that as literature, not a forecast.

Via Cointelegraph.

💸 A $263M crypto heist, 28 exotic cars, and a guilty plea

Malone Lam — a Singaporean national who organised an international crew recruited through online gaming platforms — pleaded guilty this week to a RICO conspiracy involving over $263 million in stolen crypto. The ring ran from late 2023 through May 2025, targeting holders via fake Google and Gemini support calls, screen-sharing tricks and physical home break-ins.

The spending: 28 exotic cars, private jets, luxury watches — and nightclub tabs of $500K a night. Lam was reportedly still directing luxury deliveries to his girlfriend from pretrial detention.

Next hearing: December 8th. Sentencing date TBD, per CoinDesk.

Cointelegraph

🔐 $47M somewhere between "white hats" and extortion

Liquid Network, a Bitcoin sidechain run by Blockstream, lost 4,000 BTC (~$320M) last weekend after a bug let attackers mint unbacked L-BTC tokens and swap them for real reserve Bitcoin.

The attackers called themselves white-hat researchers on-chain, then returned 3,400 BTC on Monday. The remaining ~598 BTC — around $47M — is subject to ongoing negotiations, terms undisclosed.

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet wasn't convinced:

"The 'white hats' still hold 600 BTC. It looks more like extortion than white-hat hacking."

A bridge patch is live, an emergency update is in review. The $47M question, per Decrypt, remains open.

🔪 Four lives for a cold wallet

In Atizapán de Zaragoza, Mexico, four people were killed — Jonathan Meléndez, keyboardist for rock band Camilo Séptimo, his pregnant wife, their daughter, and an employee. The alleged motive: attackers believed the family owned a cold wallet holding millions in Bitcoin.

Two suspects are in custody; one was a business associate of the victim who used that relationship to get inside the home. A court hearing Wednesday will determine whether the case proceeds — each man faces 25 to 70 years per victim if convicted.

CertiK counted 52 physical attacks on crypto holders worldwide in H1 2026, up 33% year-on-year, with Chainalysis estimating over $30M stolen through such attacks in that period alone, per La Jornada.

A cold wallet protects against hackers. Former business partners, apparently, are a different threat model.

Cointelegraph

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 12

📉 Bitcoin crashes to September lows on Middle East shock
🚗 Gamer turned crypto thief pleads guilty, 28 cars seized
🔐 Blockstream lost 4,000 BTC to "white-hat" hackers
🔪 Four people killed over a suspected Bitcoin cold wallet

Tag whoever spent today offline — they missed a lot.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $77,150 📉 -0.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,514 📉 -0.4% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 61 — Greed

💸 Strive is knocking on a billion-dollar door

Strive runs the Michael Saylor playbook: raise money, buy Bitcoin, repeat. Last week: 1,375 BTC for $109 million at $79,281 a coin, bringing the total to 24,531 BTC (~$1.9 billion). Three weeks straight of 5%-plus weekly growth.

Seventy percent of the capital came through SATA — preferred stock paying 13% annually, now at $999 million notional. CEO Matt Cole: "Time to break the billion-dollar wall."

The risk is real. Strategy's equivalent fell below face value this year, forcing it to sell Bitcoin for the first time since 2022 to cover dividends. SATA has held — but hasn't faced pressure like that yet, per Decrypt.

A year ago Strive wasn't a Bitcoin company. Today it's the fifth-largest corporate BTC treasury on the planet, ahead of SpaceX and Coinbase.

💸 $340M bitcoin heist — and most of it came back

Liquid Network is a settlement layer built by Blockstream in 2018, connecting several major crypto exchanges under one roof. Over the weekend, a hacker exploited a bug to drain roughly 4,000 BTC — about $340 million — making it one of the largest crypto thefts of the year, per the Rekt leaderboard.

Then the plot twisted. The hacker offered a deal: fix the bug, get the coins back. Blockstream fixed it. Around 3,400 BTC were returned — the remaining ~600 BTC (~$47M) are still with the hacker, and the network stays paused while additional security work is completed.

A white-hat heist, live-streamed negotiations, and 600 bitcoins quietly kept as a consulting fee. The cheapest security audit in history this was not.

TechCrunch

🎬 *A New Hope* hits IMAX — first time ever

Forty-eight years, and somehow this never happened before.

*Star Wars: A New Hope* — the film that reinvented the blockbuster on May 25, 1977 — is getting its first-ever IMAX release, timed to the franchise's 50th anniversary.

Select venues with 70mm projectors will screen a restored original print: no Episode IV subtitle, no Special Edition tweaks. Other IMAX theatres also get the film, though which cut is still unclear.

Collider has the details.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGKikqxxSdA

🔐 AI agents just slashed Bitcoin's quantum attack cost by 86%

Quantum Day — when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to crack Bitcoin's cryptography — hasn't arrived. The price of getting there just dropped sharply, though.

Eigen Labs ran an open competition called ECDSA.Fail: 100+ participants working with AI agents optimized a quantum circuit targeting secp256k1, the elliptic curve securing transactions on Bitcoin and Ethereum. The resource score fell from 10.75 billion to 1.496 billion — 86% in two months.

Caveat: no real private key was cracked, and full hardware costs weren't counted. Still, NIST has already proposed banning classical encryption algorithms after 2035.

The deadline is set. The clock is running.

Decrypt

📈 Nasdaq just wrote a $100M check to Kraken's parent

Kraken is one of the world's largest crypto exchanges. Its parent Payward has been collecting checks from traditional finance fast: Deutsche Börse put in $200M in April, now Nasdaq's venture arm adds $100M — valuing Payward at $21 billion.

The deal has Kraken listing tokenized Nasdaq stocks on its own platform. A legacy exchange paying a crypto venue to become its storefront — not a sentence that would have made sense two years ago.

The full tokenized-stock market sits at $2.9B today, per RWA.xyz, up 7.4% in a month. Modest — until it isn't.

Cointelegraph

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 13

💸 Strive stacks 24,531 BTC and nears $2B
🪙 $340M Bitcoin hack — most of it bounced back
🎬 Star Wars hits IMAX for the very first time
🔐 AI agents cut Bitcoin quantum attack cost by 86%
📈 Nasdaq writes Kraken's parent a $100M check

That person who was heads-down all day? They missed every single one of these — fix that.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $77,616 📈 +0.6% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,517 📈 +0.1% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 57 — Greed