CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 23 🏦 Banks quietly doubled their spots on Europe's crypto register 📈 Coinbase wants to bring perp futures to US stocks 💡 NEAR jumped 80% in a week — here's the actual reason 🔒 Banker faked $1.6B in letters, took crypto bribes, got four years 📉 Gemini lost 80% since IPO — now suddenly looks cheap That one person in your group chat who was heads-down all day? This is exactly for them. CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

💸 Down 80% — and suddenly Gemini looks like a bargain Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, has lost 80% of its value since its IPO — from a $4B peak to $753M today. Q2 revenue fell 38%, spot trading volume dropped 66%. That kind of slide triggers a familiar calculation: why build when you can buy? An ARK Invest analyst publicly floated the idea of Hyperliquid acquiring Gemini as a shortcut to U.S. regulatory licenses — the kind that take years to obtain organically. Per CoinDesk, prospective buyers were already eyeing Gemini's shuttered European units back in April, drawn by the permits, not the users. One catch: the twins control 94.5% of voting power. Any deal needs their blessing. Which makes the negotiation simple — right up until they say no.

💸 Fake paper, real crypto, genuine prison Lam Chun-yin, a customer relationship manager at China Construction Bank (Asia), falsely authenticated letters of credit worth $1.6 billion and pocketed $470,000 in crypto bribes for his trouble. A Hong Kong court handed him four years. The judge's reasoning was blunt: banking is the backbone of Hong Kong's economy, and this kind of scheme corrodes the city's reputation as a global financial hub. First-time offender? Noted. Irrelevant. Hong Kong's anti-graft agency ICAC has arrest warrants out for others involved, per The Standard — so the story isn't over. Lam had pleaded guilty in advance. No drama in the courtroom. The numbers did that job already. Cointelegraph

💡 NEAR is up 80% in a week — and the reason is worth knowing NEAR Intents — Near Protocol's cross-chain swap system — has crossed $29.3 billion in cumulative volume. Over seven days NEAR jumped 78%, from ~$2.41 to $4.29, while the broader crypto market gained around 6%. The rally coincided with a privacy push: perpetual futures deposits on near.com are now confidential by default, and Zcash wallet ZODL ranked third by Intents volume — $3.8 million in a single day. Bitwise analyst Camran Khosravi calls Near and Zcash "complements." His caveat: TVL can rise simply because ZEC held inside the system appreciates, no new deposits needed. Good to remember before the numbers do the talking. Via CoinDesk. Cointelegraph

💸 Coinbase is bringing crypto-style futures to US stocks Perpetual futures — no expiry date, no need to own the underlying asset — have been crypto-native for years. Coinbase already offers them on Apple and Nvidia to non-US traders. Now it's filed with the CFTC to bring the same product stateside. Per The Wall Street Journal, the initial list would cover ~50–60 names: Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Nvidia. Trading runs 24/5; the contracts never expire. Regulatory approval is pending. Coinbase is clearly betting the wall between crypto and traditional equity markets keeps getting thinner — and wants a desk on both sides. Cointelegraph

🏦 Banks are taking over Europe's crypto register MiCA is the EU's first comprehensive crypto rulebook, in full force this year. While crypto firms queued for authorization, banks found a shortcut. Between June 26 and September 16, the bank count on ESMA's register nearly doubled — from ~40 to ~80 — pushing their share from 17% to almost 23%. One in four providers is now a bank. Germany led the charge: Deutsche Bank plus dozens of regional Volksbank and Raiffeisenbank institutions. Under Article 60 of MiCA, banks skip full CASP authorization — a 40-working-day notice to the home regulator is enough. Crypto startups who spent months on licensing paperwork might have feelings about that. Via Cointelegraph.

🪙 Crypto check ₿ BTC $86,407 📈 +1.1% (24h) Ξ ETH $2,749 📈 +0.6% (24h) 😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 22 📈 Strive holds 25K BTC and someone wanted more leverage 💀 Calacanis calls Bitcoin a dead cat again at $80K 🚀 HYPE token hits all-time high as borrowing goes live ⚖️ US crypto clarity bill dies in Senate, regulators move anyway 🇪🇺 Binance met every EU requirement and still got rejected Someone on your feed definitely missed the whole crypto circus today — pass this along CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

💸 Lagarde vs. Binance: a license too consequential to grant MiCA gives bloc-wide operating rights to any exchange approved by a single EU national regulator. Binance picked Greece, met every requirement by its own account — and got rejected at the last minute anyway. The Wall Street Journal reports the real obstacle was Christine Lagarde herself. Her concern: Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, would accelerate dollar-based stablecoins across the eurozone, undermining the ECB's digital euro project. The ECB holds no formal role in crypto licensing — yet here we are. Binance withdrew its Greek application in June and says it will try elsewhere in the bloc. Full paperwork, zero missing items, still a no. Regulation is always a little bit politics. CoinDesk

💸 Congress stalled. Regulators didn't wait. The Clarity Act — meant to give U.S. crypto markets their first federal framework, splitting oversight between the CFTC and SEC — failed its Senate cloture vote this week, 60 votes needed, not reached. Lead negotiator Sen. Lummis called its chances this year essentially dead. The CFTC responded by sending a crypto prerule package to the White House's OIRA for review, without waiting for Capitol Hill. Text isn't public yet, but the intent is clear: build a derivatives framework on its own authority. The SEC moved in parallel, rolling out an exemption letting venues trade tokenized U.S. stocks on blockchain without registering as national exchanges. Treasury Secretary Bessent once called agency rulemaking the fallback option. Per Decrypt, it's now just the option.

🔥 HYPE just hit an all-time high — and there's a reason HYPE, the native token of Hyperliquid's layer-1 blockchain and decentralized derivatives exchange, touched $90.92 on Friday — seconds after the protocol launched manual borrowing. The setup: post HYPE or Bitcoin as collateral, borrow USDC or USDT directly from real suppliers via HyperCore — no platform-level accounting magic. Day-one borrowing hit $269 million. For context: two days prior, Kraken announced onchain perpetual futures for US clients, also routed through Hyperliquid. The platform is quietly becoming infrastructure. CoinDesk has the details. 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.

💸 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

🪙 Crypto check ₿ BTC $85,455 📈 +4.9% (24h) Ξ ETH $2,732 📈 +2.8% (24h) 😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 78 — Extreme Greed

📌 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

💸 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

🔥 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.

🎙️ 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.

💸 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

💡 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