A bullish week again with BTC +4% flirting at the 115k level and ETH similar +4% at 4500. Real outperformers were the tail end though with WLD +85% on DAT news, a ‘new’ MEME coin called MemeCore +50% together with PUMP +37% PENGU +27% and HYPE +25% on the HYPEd stable proposal. On the flipside we have LINEA which airdroped at 550mm market cap and is now down -20% over the first 24h. In the news we had Stripe revealing their own L1 “Tempo”, Blackrock talking ETF tokenization, Kiln/Swissborg experienced a 40mm SOL exploit, we have some more positive comments from US regulators and even some from Hong Kong and finally in good news an even larger hack resulted in minimal losses. Enjoy reading!
Bat Tai Chi — btc21@mail.com
The big topic this week was the race from stablecoin issuers to court the HYPE holders voting for their partnership proposals for the native stablecoin USDH. It was fun to watch but of course raised debate about the state of onchain governance state of the ecosystem. There were heavy accusations from prominent VCs that the process was rigged towards Native Market who apparently got a heads up on the RFP timeline. They are currently the clear fav on Polymarket too but it was interesting to watch the movement of odds when proposals came in. At one point paxos had almost the lead while others just gave a fair shot. It was a good way for each project to gain publicity but many actually went head over heels to announce undisclosed details of their roadmap. Then of corse there was trolling with one validator requesting to speak in cat language to appeal to his 15% HYPE voter share and of course that grabbed headlines. The essence of the whole episode is pretty sad though, HYPE is very HYPEd so everyone wants to be attached. That’s why projects were bending over backwards to be considered and proposals were all giving away more than sustainable. That HYPE is not lead by VCs made it somewhat a bit more of an open market bidding at least that’s what people initially thought but then remember how dear the community takes cypherpunk decentralization values. (see ABC 28 March 2025). Foundation went in on the closing and although they’ve also removed their staked HYPE tokens from validator weighting in the USDH vote so theoretically giving greater control over the decision to community token holders but it still seems all but a done deal now. Regardless it put HYPE further front and center of headlines and industry partners and of course the fees continue to climb >100mm past 30 days.
On September 8th, 2025, at around 9AM EST, a threat actor had managed to gain control of the node package manager (NPM) account of well-known developer Qix via social engineering. The threat actor then published several malicious releases to popular Java Script libaries. Following the discovery of this attack, at around 11AM EST the maintainer acknowledged the compromise and initiated the removal of the malicious versions, and they were indeed quickly removed from npm a few hours later. However, during the short 2-hour timeframe in which the versions were available for download, if they were incorporated into frontend bulds and shipped as web assets, any browsers loading the affected website would execute a malicious payload that hooks network and wallet APIs in order to silently rewrite cryptocurrency recipients/approvals before signing, so that transactions would be diverted to attacker-controlled wallets. Since the package was discovered so quickly and fixed the attacker made away with almost nothing but of course caused a hook heist on Twitter.
The HKMA has circulated a draft guidance to the banking sector, proposing softer capital requirements for banks holding certain crypto assets, Caixin reported. It would have to be on permissionless blockchains and under specific risk controls but this if implemented is a major step for the financial hub to plant a flag in the sand. There’s obviously expectation that under Trump the current prohibitive capital requirement rules of even custodian crypto assets with a 1:1 capital charge. WIth Hong Kong putting this paper out they are testing the waters, although in the past we have not seen very brave new regulation out from HK before anything in the US was approved so will be interesting to watch.
The SEC will ensure capital can be raised on-chain without continuous legal scrutiny, and will support innovation for a super-app trading platform
SEC Chair — Paul Atkins
Public blockchains are the base environment for execution. The transformation comes when you add the trust layer that makes outcomes legally enforceable, compliant and safe to scale. And that’s why the next wave won’t look like crypto-native networks trying to replace finance. It’ll look like finance absorbing the best of public chains on its own terms
SWIFT Chief Innovation Officer — Tom Zschach
Don’t Believe the Hype We are coming to the HYPE ecosystem in a big way. We intend to be a major player and contributor to the ecosystem. Happy to see others purchase new USD tickers and compete Hyper fast native USDC with deep and nearly instant cross chain interoperability will be well received.
Circle CEO — Jeremy Allair
All Been Crypto — Week 12 Sep 2025 was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Also read: MemeCore (M) Explodes by 400% in a Month: What Fuels the Massive Rally?
