TLDR Crypto 2026-09-10

Robinhood is acquiring a minority stake in Crypto.com, marking a significant step in the retail brokerage's ongoing crypto expansion following its 2024 Bitstamp acquisition. The deal deepens consolidation among retail-facing platforms and positions Robinhood to tap Crypto.com's global user base and exchange infrastructure.

Block filed an OCC application to establish an uninsured national trust bank, Builders Bank & Trust, which would provide custody and fiduciary services, including for bitcoin and stablecoins. Joins a wave of fintech/crypto firms (Revolut, Coinbase, Paxos, BitGo, Ripple, Circle, and Trump-backed World Liberty Financial) seeking federal charters under an OCC that's approved 21 of 40 de novo applications since 2025.

EtherFi Cash launched a new four-tier membership rolling out regionally: Core (free, 3% cashback), Luxe ($199/year or 30,000 staked ETHFI, tiered cashback up to 3% on first $10K/month, uncapped), Pinnacle ($999/year, up to 3% on first $50K/month), and VIP (requires $500K in Liquid Vaults or 500K staked ETHFI, 4% flat on first $50K/month uncapped) with each adding travel discounts, lounge access, virtual/physical cards, and balance protection scaling with tier.

Flex (processing $20B in annualized fiat payment volume) is rolling out stablecoin wallets and payments so business customers get one account for fiat, stablecoins, and cards instead of juggling separate platforms. Early users include e-commerce brands paying overseas suppliers, multi-entity companies moving money globally, and businesses running payroll/creator payouts.

Ethereum researchers simulated Glamsterdam's proposed gas limit increase from 60M to 200M across 12 demand scenarios, replaying 21 days of mainnet transactions through an instrumented reth fork with 50 simulation paths per scenario. After a 10-hour adjustment period, nine of twelve scenarios settled near 50% block utilization, with median base fees ranging from under 0.0001 gwei to 0.39 gwei depending on demand level and price elasticity. Three low-demand scenarios failed to reach the 100M-gas utilization threshold even at near-zero base fees, shifting gas costs to priority tips at a median of 0.025 gwei. At 2x demand, base fees varied 18-fold across elasticity assumptions (0.006 to 0.106 gwei), indicating block utilization alone cannot predict post-upgrade fee outcomes.

Tokenized equity tokens generated $1.01 billion in trading volume over Labor Day weekend while US stock markets were closed, nearly matching Friday's $1.02 billion in open-market activity across the 42 largest tokenized stock instruments. Robinhood Chain captured 57% of weekend flow at $572.8 million, followed by Binance's bStocks ($303.5M) and Backed Finance's xStocks ($87.1M), with a Nasdaq-100 tracker on BNB Chain ($180.5M) and SPY tokens ($125.5M) leading by instrument. Decentralized exchanges handled the majority of volume across most instruments, with centralized venues taking only roughly 8% of QQQB trades, and prices tracked Friday's close at minimal premiums throughout the closure. The volume parity across open and closed market sessions signals that on-chain equity markets can sustain institutional-scale liquidity independent of traditional exchange schedules.

Visa's stablecoin-linked card ecosystem has grown to 160+ active programs with $20 billion in annualized settlement volume, up 15x year over year, but early-stage issuers face a structural gap: daily settlement obligations must be funded before cardholders pay, at sizes too small to justify traditional warehouse facility costs. Credit Coop built a stablecoin-denominated revolving credit facility secured by settlement receivables, routing repayments through a Spigot smart contract and calibrating underwriting directly from Visa settlement files, cutting borrowing costs for participating programs by as much as 30%. The facility has financed over $2.5 billion in cumulative volume since 2023 with zero defaults and more than 9,000 onchain repayment events, serving programs including Rain (a Visa Principal Member) and Karta. The next phase adds just-in-time disbursements triggered directly by daily Visa settlement files, so programs pay for capital only during the hours it is deployed rather than maintaining a standing draw.

EIP-8250 proposes replacing Ethereum's single per-account nonce with multiple independent keyed nonces stored in a NONCE_MANAGER system contract, serving use cases such as privacy pools running UTXO/nullifier models and accounts with independent authenticated signers. Under weak statelessness, each nonce key compounds VOPS storage requirements, prompting researchers to examine bloom filters as a compression mechanism that cuts per-nonce storage from roughly 64 bytes to 1-2 bytes by testing only whether a nonce equals zero. The approach breaks for non-binary nonces: those variants produce two-sided errors that let attackers push invalid transactions through mempool validators, which the one-sided bloom filter design specifically avoids. Researchers propose reserving the first byte of each nonce key as a nonce-type tag at creation time, separating binary from non-binary nonces and allowing the storage optimization to activate retroactively once statelessness launches with minimal changes to the EIP.

Malone Lam, a Singaporean citizen based in Miami who used aliases like "Anne Hathaway" and "King Greavy," pleaded guilty to leading an international social-engineering ring that stole and laundered over $245M in crypto.

Canary Capital's Staked TRX ETF gives investors exposure to TRX.

Rain Global Payouts lets partners fund payments from a stablecoin balance while recipients receive local currency in 50 currencies across 80+ countries.

EtherFi Cash seems to have the highest cashback and the cleanest fee structure.