📌 Daily Recap · Sep 17

📈 Iran deal hopes push Bitcoin back above $79K
💡 AI chiefs agree to slow down, chip stocks crater
💸 Venezuela's oil giant went full crypto to dodge sanctions
🏛️ Senate kills crypto bill after millions in lobby cash
📉 Bond yields at decade highs drag Bitcoin to $75K

Whoever was offline today just missed a lot — pass this along

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $77,581 📈 +1.4% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,489 📈 +1.7% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 56 — Greed

💸 Nine years, then the lights go out

CoinEx — a Hong Kong crypto exchange running since 2017 — is closing for good. December 22, 2026, exactly nine years after launch. Signups are already frozen; spot trading ends September 29.

Founder Haipo Yang turned down a sale, calling this a "clean ending." Holders of CET get a buyback at the original listing price of 0.005 USDT, no volume cap. Reserves sit above 100%.

CoinEx is the third exchange to fold this year, after BitMEX and BitMart. A coincidence, or just how 2026 is going.

One footnote: in June, TRM Labs alleged $3.8 billion flowed between CoinEx and sanctioned Iranian platforms over seven years. The exchange denied it. Yang says the exit is his call — per Decrypt.

💸 Binance, Iran, and $1.5 billion

Background: in 2023, Binance pleaded guilty to sanctions violations, paid billions in fines, and its founder Changpeng Zhao did four months in prison before Trump pardoned him. Seemed like the end of it.

The DOJ sees it differently. Per The Wall Street Journal, $1.5 billion moved through Binance into Iran, some of it reaching the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Two Hong Kong middlemen sold black-market Iranian oil to Chinese buyers, cycling proceeds through Binance wallets. One of them, Blessed Trust, was an official Binance partner.

Both companies are now banned from the platform. The investigators who found them were fired — "individual circumstances," says Binance.

Classic.

Engadget

💸 Bitcoin under a 20-year federal lock

In March, Trump signed an executive order telling the government to stop selling seized crypto. Congress now wants to make that permanent — surviving any future administration.

The House Financial Services Committee passed ARMA (H.R. 8957) 28–21. The government's 324,527 BTC (~$24.7B) would be frozen for at least 20 years, with mandatory quarterly audits. The bill also writes private key ownership into law as "fundamental to financial sovereignty."

Full House and Senate votes still ahead. But a government legally barring itself from touching Bitcoin for two decades isn't crypto politics anymore — it's fiscal architecture.

Via CoinTelegraph.

💸 The Fed just hiked for the first time since 2023

The Fed had been on hold since 2023 while markets waited for cuts. Wednesday: +25 basis points, range 3.75%–4%, unanimous. PPI at 5.4% annually, CPI up 0.4% on the month, oil back above $100 — the case for waiting ran out.

The political layer stings. Trump nominated Warsh in May saying he wanted someone who'd cut rates. Third meeting as chair — Warsh hiked. "Be independent" was apparently also on the list; he took it literally.

Bitcoin held support at $73,500–75,600: spiked to $75,900, pulled back to $75,100. Fear & Greed dropped from 69 to 51. Next meeting October 27–28. Was Wednesday the finale or the opening act?

Decrypt

🎸 One Last Bow

On July 5, 2025, Ozzy Osbourne played his final concert at Villa Park in Birmingham — the city where Black Sabbath began. Seventeen days later, he was gone, after years of fighting Parkinson's disease.

It was also the first full Black Sabbath reunion in 20 years. 42,000 in the crowd, 3 million on the livestream. Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Steven Tyler — all there to say goodbye.

"He wanted to perform again and say goodbye to his fans. That's all." — Sharon Osbourne

Now it's a film. *Ozzy & Black Sabbath: Back to the Beginning* arrives in cinemas worldwide on October 28, directed by Ben Wainwright-Pearce, who filmed *Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour*. Tickets on sale September 24 at backtothebeginning.com.

As Variety reports — the farewell that 3 million watched on a small screen is heading somewhere bigger.

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

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 18

🌅 CoinEx chose a clean exit over a sale
⚖️ DOJ still eyeing Binance despite the billion-dollar settlement
🔒 Congress wants Bitcoin reserves locked away for 20 years
📈 Fed hikes rates for the first time since 2023
🎸 Ozzy's last concert was also Black Sabbath's reunion

Someone you know spent today in back-to-back meetings — pass this along so they don't miss the whole world moving without them

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $81,079 📈 +4.5% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,629 📈 +5.7% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

🏗️ Circle is betting on the rails, not the coin

Circle — the company behind USDC — launched its own blockchain, Arc. CEO Jeremy Allaire called it "more consequential than USDC itself."

Arc is framed as an "economic operating system" for payments, tokenized assets and lending. 100+ institutions are involved, including BlackRock, Mastercard, Visa and DTCC. Fees are paid in USDC, not a volatile native token. An ARC token exists — 10 billion minted — but no public launch yet, with any real utility pushed to 2027.

The backdrop: BofA, Citi and Goldman are building a rival stablecoin; Stripe has its own chain. Circle's wager is that the winner won't be the best stablecoin — it'll be whoever owns the pipes, per CoinDesk.

💸 Decentralized platform ≠ legal loophole

Two Robinhood engineers, Hefu Chai and Huaisong Xiang, had access to a private Slack channel with upcoming token listing plans. Federal prosecutors allege they traded perpetual futures on Hyperliquid ahead of announcements — Chai before at least 10 listings, Xiang before 11 — each clearing over $50,000.

Their apparent logic: derivatives on a decentralized exchange sit outside normal enforcement. They don't. Both face fraud charges carrying up to 10 years. Robinhood says it reported the matter to law enforcement itself.

The precedent, per CoinDesk: onchain derivatives, insider information — still insider trading.

📈 The SEC just gave tokenized stocks a real rulebook

"Tokenized stocks" have mostly meant synthetic trackers — price exposure, no actual ownership. The SEC is drawing the line: a qualifying token must carry the same voting rights and dividends as the underlying share.

Under a new five-year sandbox, Tokenized Securities Venues can trade real U.S. stocks through smart contracts — no full exchange registration required. Top-tier names are capped at 75 per venue and 0.25% of daily volume. Issuers get a veto over third-party tokenization of their shares.

Tesla does ~40 million shares a day — a TSV could handle ~100,000 tokenized ones. Modest by design. More at CoinDesk.

🎬 A blue-check account, a fake app, 108 malicious ads

HBO Max has no standalone macOS app — and that gap is exactly what the attackers sold. They seized the verified u/hbomax Reddit account and ran 108 ads over ~48 hours, each offering an "official" desktop client that doesn't exist.

🔸 Mac victims got AMOS or MacSync — stealers targeting passwords, Telegram data, and wallet seed phrases
🔸 Clipboard hijackers swapped copied wallet addresses for attacker-controlled ones
🔸 C2 servers hid behind BSC smart contracts, letting hackers rotate infrastructure on the fly

Reddit paused the ads after the campaign was flagged; victim counts remain unknown, per Malwarebytes. The streaming service itself wasn't breached — just its account. The verified checkmark did the rest.

Decrypt

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 19

🏗️ Circle built a blockchain it thinks beats USDC
💸 Robinhood engineers allegedly traded on insider listing tips
📈 SEC says tokenized stocks must carry real shareholder rights
🎬 Hackers ran 108 ads selling an HBO app that never existed

Forward this to whoever spent the day in meetings — they missed a lot

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $80,303 📉 -1.0% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,575 📉 -2.0% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

💸 Iran's Strait of Hormuz toll booth ran on bitcoin

Iran charged tankers $1–2 million per vessel for "safe passage" through the Strait of Hormuz — a chokepoint for a fifth of the world's oil. Treasury just traced where that money landed.

OFAC sanctioned BitBank, a Tehran exchange founded in 2024, and its developer. The charge: hundreds of millions in bitcoin flowed through it to the Revolutionary Guards. Hormuz Safe Marine collected the fees; BitBank was the till.

Secondary sanctions put any foreign firm that touched its transactions at risk of losing dollar access. One gap, per Blockworks: OFAC named zero wallet addresses — without them, compliance screening runs blind.

A crypto toll booth on the world's busiest oil lane. Perfectly normal 2025.

CoinDesk

💸 Crypto as evidence

A Swedish gang spent ten months moving 70 million krona ($7.1M) through crypto. Their alleged leader fled Sweden, landed on an Interpol Red Notice, and resurfaced in the UAE — where he was arrested simultaneously as six associates were picked up back home.

The bigger surprise came from the transaction trail itself: following it led investigators beyond the laundering and into organised crime and contract killings.

In Sweden, that's not an abstraction — police reported 23 bystanders killed in gangland shootings over three years, with gangs recruiting teenage hitmen through social media.

Blockchain's anonymity has its fans. Two countries' worth of investigators, per Emirates News Agency, are not among them.

Decrypt

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $81,471 📈 +1.4% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,656 📈 +3.2% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 70 — Greed

💡 Mr. Wonderful names his price — with a catch

Kevin O'Leary, the *Shark Tank* investor, told The Rollup at Avalanche Summit that Bitcoin hits $1 million — but only if the industry solves "Q-Day" first: the theoretical moment a quantum computer cracks the encryption securing every wallet on the network. Until then, big funds sit at ~3% BTC exposure and won't budge.

He also buried his old thesis himself — buy BTC and ETH, capture 97% of the market:

"Ethereum isn't fast enough or secure enough. That's my own opinion."

On AI: don't guess the winning model, buy what every model needs. Power grids, land in Norway and Finland, and — for the first time in his career — physical uranium to fuel small modular reactors headed for data centers.

Decrypt

💸 Hormuz Bitcoin tolls — Treasury sanctioned the cashier

Quick context: since June, ships have been paying Iran in Bitcoin for passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a route carrying a fifth of the world's oil. Treasury sanctioned the tolling scheme in July — today it went after the exchange that moved the money.

OFAC designated BitBank, through which "hundreds of millions in Bitcoin" flowed to the IRGC between June and July, per Treasury. Its owner, Babak Zanjani, was sentenced to death in Iran in 2016 for embezzlement, pardoned in 2024, and immediately resurfaced in regime-linked ventures. Four more entities from his network were designated alongside him.

The toll scheme lasted under two months. Funny how fast geopolitics moves when there's a blockchain receipt.

Decrypt

🎙️ Hand over the badge

MS NOW — formerly MSNBC — was never Trump's favorite channel. On Friday he made it official: MS NOW, CNN and Politico banned from White House grounds for "constant FAKE NEWS." By Saturday, the locks had changed.

Correspondent Akayla Gardner described it live: scanned her badge, got a red beeping light, was asked to hand it over. Disabled. Why? "It's above me." The network's photographer lost theirs too. A producer, somehow, made it through.

MS NOW has pledged to fight for its First Amendment rights. Trump floated the NYT and Washington Post as next, per Variety.

Press credentials usually get pulled from individual reporters. Whole newsrooms is a different thing entirely.