The week AI stopped hedging and TradFi stopped waiting: OpenAI declared AGI, while banks and exchanges bought their way deeper onchain.

Five that actually mattered:

— Circle to acquire payments firm Tazapay for $400M

— OpenAI launches GPT-6 Astra, a model it calls the onset of AGI

— Revolut wins conditional US approval to form a national bank

— Cronos rolled back its chain to reverse a $120M Tectonic exploit

— Bitget launches 24/7 H100/B200 GPU-compute perps at up to 10x

Plume has launched its Vaults on Fordefi Earn, bringing real-world credit-backed yield directly to the institutional MPC wallet and custody platform, which processes around $120B in monthly onchain volume.

The first Vaults now live on Fordefi are nOPAL, backed by Brazilian credit receivables, and nFXCF, offering FalconX structured credit exposure.

The integration allows institutions to access RWA yield while keeping assets within the custody and security controls they already use, creating a new distribution channel for tokenized real-world credit.

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Tether has frozen approximately 39.27M USDT across 10 TRON addresses that blockchain intelligence platform MistTrack identified as linked to Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language Telegram-based guarantee marketplace.

Xinbi Guarantee emerged on Telegram around 2022 and has been identified as a major marketplace serving scam operators and money-laundering networks across Southeast Asia. Research from Elliptic found that the platform had received more than $8.4B in USDT, while TRM Labs estimates its total transaction volume at approximately $24.2B.

The marketplace has hosted vendors offering services including money laundering, stolen personal data and infrastructure used in fraud schemes such as “pig butchering” scams. Xinbi was also sanctioned by the UK in March 2026.

The affected addresses were identified on TRON, where USDT remains one of the most widely used stablecoins for transfers and settlement.

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Visa is combining its VisaNet settlement data with onchain lending infrastructure to help stablecoin-linked card programs access working capital, as stablecoin settlement volume surpasses a $20B annualized run rate, up more than 15x YoY.

More than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs are now live on Visa’s network, with payment volume growing nearly 200% YoY. The company says early-stage programs often struggle to secure traditional working capital needed to fund daily settlement obligations.

Visa is working with decentralized lending platform Credit Coop to use settlement data alongside onchain transaction records for credit underwriting, while smart contracts can automate collateral management, disbursements and repayments.

Credit Coop has financed more than $2.5B in cumulative settlement volume since 2023, processing over 3,000 borrow events and 9,000 repayment events onchain with zero defaults.

The initiative could make settlement financing more accessible to smaller stablecoin card issuers while creating a data-driven path for programs to graduate from onchain revolving facilities to larger institutional credit lines.

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Circle has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tazapay, a Singapore-based B2B cross-border payments company, in a move to push USDC deeper into global business settlement.

Tazapay brings more than $25 billion in annualized payment volume, 60-plus banking and fintech partners, and local payout rails spanning over 100 markets, with roughly 60% of its transaction volume already touching stablecoins. Circle plans to fold those rails into its own network to originate and terminate cross-border payments around the clock, a step CEO Jeremy Allaire framed as accelerating worldwide USDC adoption. Tazapay has been a design partner for Circle Payments Network since 2025.

The deal is expected to close in 2027, subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals including the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Circle says Tazapay customers should see no disruption to service, APIs, pricing or support in the meantime.

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Robinhood has struck a deal to bring Crypto.com's yes-or-no event contracts into its prediction-markets hub and take an equity stake in the crypto exchange, in a move first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The partnership adds Crypto com to Robinhood's growing roster of contract suppliers, which already includes Kalshi, Interactive Brokers' ForecastEx and Rothera, the prediction exchange Robinhood launched with Susquehanna in 2025. Plugging in another CFTC-registered venue widens the range of outcome-based markets Robinhood's retail users can trade without leaving the app, while the equity stake ties the two firms together as prediction markets become one of the fastest-growing corners of retail trading.

Prediction markets have turned into a competitive battleground this year, with brokers and exchanges racing to lock in contract supply. Crypto com tie-up deepens Robinhood's bid to be the default destination for event-contract trading in the US.

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Two ways to read top gainer, and they barely overlap. By price, the summer went to Akedo and Bitway. But a lot of that is just a small base moving. Rank by actual dollars added to FDV and the board flips: Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP.

One name shows up on both sides, Zcash, +182% in price and +$12.5B in value. Worth keeping both columns in mind before calling anything the "best" performer.

Ethereum Foundation has set a December 2029 target to make Ethereum's base layer quantum-resistant, publishing a research roadmap that spans the chain's execution, consensus and data layers alongside its first unified tier list for a network upgrade.

In a parallel post, the cluster graded all 62 EIPs proposed for the Hegota upgrade, drawing 397 assessments from about 60 protocol specialists across nine teams. Two proposals earned the top S-tier "must ship" rating: EIP-7805 (FOCIL), a fork-choice enforced inclusion-list design that hardens the chain against censorship, and EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions), a core account-abstraction change. Another 15 were rated A-tier "expected to ship", while 28 were rejected outright.

Beyond the next fork, the roadmap names five cross-upgrade research areas that will shape Ethereum for years: fast finality, post-quantum security, privacy, state, and zkEVM, with post-quantum cryptography flagged as the defining challenge.

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Cronos rolled back its blockchain to reverse a $120M exploit of lending protocol Tectonic, restoring most affected balances but confirming in a post-mortem that $9.19 million had already left the network and cannot be recovered.

On August 30, an attacker manipulated the price of TONIC, Tectonic's governance token, and used the inflated asset as collateral to borrow $120.4 million across nine lending markets. Validators halted the chain, then rolled it back to block 90,896,188, the last block before the attack, discarding 10,961 blocks, about one hour and 54 minutes of history. The reorg restored roughly $111.2 million of impacted value to its pre-exploit state.

The $9.19 million that escaped before the halt, about 7.6% of the affected funds, is beyond the rollback's reach. Cronos did not name the attacker or say what will happen to the missing money.

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