Weekly: Uptober Kicks Off, $766M in Crypto Losses in September, Potential Bitget IPO, and Trump’s Super Intelligence

Published: October 4, 2026 – 11:13 UTC

The Incrypted editorial team has prepared another digest for you covering the key events in the Web3 and AI space over the past week. This time, the spotlight was on the start of Uptober and the price action in bitcoin and Ethereum, record inflows into spot crypto ETFs, and large-scale investment in the artificial intelligence industry. Cyberattacks also took a prominent place in the news: in September, the crypto industry suffered losses of about $766 million, with some of the biggest incidents including attacks on Bitget and the Liquid Network. Meanwhile, Donald Trump announced the beginning of the “era of Super Intelligence” and initiatives aimed at developing and overseeing new AI technologies.

Main news

Bitcoin

Market dynamics and forecasts

Bitcoin closed September up about 6.5%, and in early October it moved close to $87,000, although amid the price move, liquidations over the past 24 hours exceeded $326 million. Wintermute expects a retest of the $82,500 level, while CryptoQuant analysts recorded the 90-day buy/sell delta returning to positive territory.

Separately, Citi raised its 12-month forecast for bitcoin from $82,000 to $113,000, linking it to expected inflows into ETFs and macroeconomic conditions. Historical performance is also being discussed in the context of “Uptober”: in 2013–2025, bitcoin ended October in the green in 10 out of 13 cases. At the time of writing, the leading cryptocurrency is trading at $85,140, according to TradingView.

*BTC/USDT chart on the Binance exchange. Source:* *TradingView*.

Institutional demand and capital flows

Strategy bought 1,665 BTC for $142.7 million, increasing its reserves to 847,666 BTC, and financed the deal by selling MSTR shares. Meanwhile, spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US attracted $2.39 billion over the week — the best result of 2026 and the largest weekly inflow since October 2025.

Amid the rebound in demand, wallets with balances from 10 to 10,000 BTC accumulated 41,025 BTC over 10 days, bringing their combined balance to 13.64 million BTC. At the same time, Galaxy Research recorded the return to activity of at least eight “dormant” bitcoin addresses, which, after 12–15 years of inactivity, moved more than 2,184 BTC with realized profits of about $178 million.

Privacy and bitcoin’s investment properties

Researchers proposed the Shielded Bitcoin protocol, which is intended to enable hiding transaction amounts, senders, and recipients using encrypted notes and ZK proofs without changing the network’s consensus rules. At the same time, the fact that a private transfer took place, as well as some of the base transaction data, would remain public.

Separately, Willy Woo said that bitcoin has never underperformed stocks over a four-year investment horizon; in September, according to Santiment, bitcoin rose by about 7%, while the S&P 500 barely changed, and gold fell by more than 6%.

Ethereum

Market dynamics and institutional demand

Ethereum closed September with positive momentum: the asset gained almost 9%, and in the second half of the month it rose above $2,700, reaching its highest levels since January 2026. At the same time, spot Ethereum ETFs in the US attracted $689.88 million between September 21 and 25, with the largest inflow among the funds coming from BlackRock’s ETHA — $326.17 million.

Against the backdrop of renewed ETF inflows, US bank Citi raised its 12-month price target for Ethereum from $2,240 to $3,028, citing favorable macroeconomic conditions among the factors. At the time of writing, the price of Ethereum stands at $ , according to TradingView.

*ETH/USDT chart on the Binance exchange. Source:* *TradingView*.

Network development and Ethereum’s future architecture

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said that Ethereum is gradually moving away from a model in which all nodes download and re-execute every transaction, and toward a system with data sampling, SNARKs, and parallel computation. The future architecture envisions optimized Proof-of-Stake, multi-proposer block production, and broader use of zero-knowledge proofs at the base layer. In Buterin’s vision, this should turn Ethereum into a “cryptographic world computer” that enables cheaper, more scalable, and more private computation.

Regulation and shadow operations

The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, together with the Bureau of Economic Security, exposed a shadow financial network that operated across Ukraine and used digital assets and cash. According to the investigation, the network’s participants transferred funds domestically and abroad, and may also have used the scheme to evade taxes and launder money. During searches, law enforcement seized more than 630 million hryvnias in various currencies.

Crypto industry security

In September 2026, the crypto industry suffered 55 major hacking attacks, and total losses from them reached $766.49 million, according to PeckShield. That is 462% more than in August, when the figure was about $136.3 million. The bulk of the losses came from two incidents — the attack on Bitget and the withdrawal of bitcoin from Liquid Network.

MetaMask and the security incident

The MetaMask team reported an incident that affected part of the company’s infrastructure, but said no direct threat to users’ wallets had been identified. As a precaution, MetaMask Staking began exiting Ethereum validators associated with the issue from Lido. The full cycle of exiting, withdrawing, and re-entering validators can take up to 45 days.

Robinhood Chain and tokenized assets

Onchain analyst Wazz said there was a series of 53 linked memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain, and estimated the amount of funds withdrawn at at least $18.43 million. Meanwhile, the LONG protocol introduced a Community Vault LP update that allows holders of tokenized stock pairs to route liquidity into STOCK/USDG pools and receive a share of the fees. The LONG team plans to gradually roll this feature out across all pairs on the platform.

In early September, daily trading volume in “memecoin-tokenized stock token” pairs on Robinhood Chain reached about $440 million, and the combined market capitalization of popular tokenized stocks at its peak was about $69 million. At the same time, the price of such tokens in pools could deviate significantly from the value of the underlying shares, and one example of this new format of speculation was a memecoin linked to the Hims & Hers Health token.

Altcoins

Market dynamics and tokenomics

Chainlink’s LINK token rose to $15.3, setting a new 2026 high. Since the start of June, its price has climbed more than 100%, and its market cap has topped $11.5 billion. At the same time, analyst Darkfost said there are early warning signs in the altcoin market: since June, their combined market cap is up 45%, but exchange deposits have increased, and a bearish RSI divergence has formed for Total2.

The NEAR community is also discussing a tokenomics change — cutting the maximum annual issuance from 2.5% to 1.6% over two years, with the prospect of a full shift to a fixed supply.

Meanwhile, Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal considers POL, formerly MATIC, the “most undervalued and underappreciated project,” while Balancer is preparing to shut down. BAL holders will start receiving payouts in 2027.

Memecoins, politics, and the crypto market

US President Donald Trump will attend a gala dinner for the 185 largest holders of the TRUMP memecoin. After the announcement, the token initially jumped by about 9%, but then gave back almost all of those gains. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2409, which bans public officials and certain government employees from issuing memecoins, and crypto services from offering state residents related political tokens starting in 2027.

Meanwhile, Zcash increased its share of market cap relative to bitcoin from about 0.1% to 1.5% over the year, and Grayscale links ZEC’s further upside potential to growing demand for financial privacy.

In turn, according to CoinMarketCap, last week’s top gainer among crypto assets was Quant, up more than 300%.

Artificial intelligence

Trump, AI, and public policy

In December 2025, Trump consulted Grok during a closed-door meeting with Elon Musk, using the chatbot to gauge how Venezuelans might react to the capture of Nicolás Maduro. After the operation, according to TIME, the US president called Grok “brilliant.”

At the same time, the US president is considering former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Jay Clayton for the role of White House AI adviser, and plans to make a final decision within a few days. In a separate executive order, he announced the start of the Super Intelligence era and reached an agreement with Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI, and Nvidia on voluntary controls, audits, and safety oversight for advanced models.

AI development and investment

Google unveiled Gemini 4 Argon with context up to 1 million tokens, the ability to work with 800,000 lines of code, and new cybersecurity features. OpenAI, meanwhile, fired three researchers over alleged violations of rules for handling confidential information, but plans to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation of around $1.4 trillion.

Anthropic is preparing to go public, plans to spend $518 billion on cloud services, compute, and infrastructure, and its potential valuation could reach $2 trillion. NVIDIA also launched the Open Agent Safety Platform to monitor autonomous AI agents, which more than 100 organizations have already joined.

In addition, Tavus introduced Griffin — a new-class Human Interaction Model (HIM) that can, in real time, simultaneously see, listen, speak, and respond to a conversation partner’s nonverbal cues. The AI model passed the Turing test and outperformed 15 models in an NVIDIA test.

AI safety and new risks

OpenAI temporarily paused training new models after a series of incidents in which autonomous agents acted outside their assigned tasks, and plans to resume the process after strengthening safety mechanisms. The company also reported 53 image-related cases and attempts to obtain data from US government entities during agents’ interactions with government agency websites.

Meanwhile, Visa, after identifying vulnerabilities during AI model testing, opened part of its cybersecurity system and warned about potential attacks by autonomous agents. At the same time, Bill Gates said that, under certain conditions, AI could pose a threat to humanity, and urged the US government to introduce federal legislation to control and monitor the technology’s development.

AI Helped Decode a Historic Letter From Napoleon

In 1809, an encoded letter from Eugène Bonaparte, sent on Napoleon’s instructions to General Auguste de Marmont, remained undeciphered for more than two centuries. GPT-6 Astra spent about six hours transcribing roughly 1,300 characters and decoding the message, whose cipher was later lost. The letter contains information about the movements and troop strength of French and Austrian forces on the eve of the 1809 war.

Bitget Prepares for an IPO After a $387.5 million Attack

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said the exchange is not abandoning its long-term plans and expects to hold an initial public offering (IPO) in about three years. Her statement came after a major cyberattack in which $387.5 million in assets was transferred to attackers’ addresses. Chen also dismissed speculation that the attack may have been staged or involved exchange employees.

Stablecoins

Stablecoin infrastructure development

USDT is returning to the Bitcoin network after more than 12 years away: the Utexo project plans to launch the stablecoin via the RGB protocol as early as October. The new infrastructure is expected to make USDT available to exchanges, wallets, and payment providers, and will also support private transfers, swapping the leading cryptocurrency for USDT, and bitcoin-backed lending.

Meanwhile, Open Standard launched the OUSD stablecoin for companies and developers, which runs on Base, Ethereum, Solana, and Tempo.

Regulation and institutional adoption

The Stand With Crypto EU petition to the European Commission calling for looser rules for stablecoins collected more than 126,000 signatures, and the organization is urging regulators to allow compliant assets to offer rewards and to preserve access to global assets.

Meanwhile, the Democratic minority of a US Senate subcommittee said that USDT was widely used in transactions by addresses linked to Iran and regional groups, and called for Tether to be investigated for potential legal violations.

Separately, Citi and Coinbase agreed to develop infrastructure that will allow the bank’s corporate clients to accept payments in stablecoins, with subsequent automatic conversion into fiat.

Other News:

Iran proposed a new plan to the US to end the conflict over the Strait of Hormuz
Michael Saylor explained what the digital asset market needs to change on the path to $100 trillion
in the US, charges were filed against a suspect in a $53 million pig butchering scheme
the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission approved the launch of Coinbase’s in-house clearinghouse
Kalshi plans to raise $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation

the tokenized market reached $331.8 billion, and growth has moved beyond stablecoins, according to Pantera Capital;

law enforcement seized KillSec’s infrastructure: the group’s main operator is believed to be a 16-year-old;

Aztec relaunched the private zk.money wallet;

the SEC proposed new crypto asset custody rules for investment advisers and funds;

Gen Z gained an edge in the investment market thanks to an early start;

the ECB is looking for partners to test the digital euro with AI agents;

Ripple Labs launched asset tokenization on the XRP Ledger in Brazil;

BitMart offered users three refund options amid a balance shortfall;

Peter Schiff explained how a new economic crisis could unfold;

SlowMist revealed details of the attack on Bitget’s hot wallets;

scammers created a fake GIWA blockchain and stole more than $2 million via a spoofed bridge;

Cardano entered Brazil’s oil sector: Petrobras is testing blockchain for fuel;

Blast announced it is shutting down due to an unprofitable economy;

Bitwise explained the crypto market’s rise after the CLARITY Act failed.

What’s new at Incrypted?

Articles

The Incrypted editorial team broke down how Long turned shares into liquidity for the Robinhood ecosystem. You can read more here:

The team also tested Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol:

In addition, readers can check out a piece in the Cryptobase section on what to do and how to regain access if your Binance account gets locked:

What’s more, you can read about what the Higgsfield AI platform can do and how much video generation costs:

Meanwhile, readers also have access to a piece about Dots from OpenAI:

Plus, you can learn how to legally and reliably clone a voice using AI:

In addition…

We’ve put together key investments in blockchain, crypto assets, and AI for September in one article.

We regularly update the Incrypted crypto calendar, where you’ll find plenty of interesting events and announcements.

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Source: Incrypted