🎸 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.

🔥 Trump Bans CNN, MSNBC and Politico From the White House

Not his first move of this kind. Last year Trump barred AP from the Oval Office for refusing to call it the "Gulf of America" — an appeals court upheld the ban. Precedent established.

On Friday, CNN, MSNBC (Trump insists on writing "MSNOW," a dig at its dwindling ratings) and Politico were added to the list, for "constant fake news." Closing line: "Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow."

Politico got a special mention: federal agencies spent over $8 million on its subscriptions under Biden. "Seems like corruption to me." None of the three have commented, per Variety.

💸 Grayscale is splitting its Zcash ETF shares three ways

Zcash is a privacy coin whose transactions can be fully shielded — sender, recipient, amount, all invisible. In August, Grayscale turned its Zcash Trust into ZCSH, the world's first spot Zcash ETF, and investors piled in: $233 million in a month, including a single $112 million day on September 8.

ZEC is up 2,800% over the past year, hitting $1,521 on Friday. That's the problem — ETF shares can't be bought fractionally the way tokens can, so a runaway price locks out smaller investors. Fix: a 3-for-1 forward split, record date September 28, new shares distributed the 29th, split-adjusted trading starts the 30th. Same ticker, same CUSIP.

A coin engineered to make money invisible, now repackaged for retirement accounts — with a line out the door.

Decrypt

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 21

💡 O'Leary says $1M Bitcoin — after quantum hurdle
💸 Treasury hunts the exchange behind Iran's Bitcoin tolls
🎙️ Reporter's badge stopped working live on air
🔥 CNN, MSNBC, Politico officially locked out of White House
💸 Grayscale splits its Zcash ETF into three

Someone on your timeline definitely missed today — pass this along

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $85,455 📈 +4.9% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,732 📈 +2.8% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 78 — Extreme Greed

💸 When a Bitcoin ETF isn't levered enough

Strive is a publicly traded company that holds Bitcoin as its primary treasury asset — currently fifth among corporate holders with 25,000 BTC on the books. REX Shares and Tuttle Capital thought plain exposure wasn't exciting enough.

On Friday they launched ASSX on Cboe: a 2x daily ETF targeting 200% of Strive's share-price move. The leverage resets every session, so multi-day math gets complicated fast. No Bitcoin held, no Bitcoin price tracked — just a leveraged bet on Strive's equity.

Per Yahoo Finance, REX and Tuttle already run similar 2x funds on Strategy, BitMine and Circle. Leveraged Bitcoin-treasury ETFs are quietly becoming their own genre.

Cointelegraph

💬 The tie stays

Jason Calacanis — venture investor and long-time bitcoin sceptic — dropped another obituary as BTC slid back to $80K. His verdict: bitcoin feels like a CD in the age of Spotify, a dead cat that keeps bouncing. No killer use case, no mass adoption, and its advocates traded pirate flags for orange ties and cringe memes.

Michael Saylor's reply was three sentences and a door closing:

"You've watched Bitcoin grow since 2011. It's now a $1.6 trillion success. Preserving wealth across generations is a bigger ambition than entertaining a dinner party."

Then: *"The orange tie stays."*

Seventeen years in, two serious people look at the same asset and see completely different animals. According to CoinDesk, both are still watching.