• Crypto Intel
  • Posts
  • A $352 Million Exchange Hack, Rate Hike Odds Jump, and the NYSE Goes Onchain

A $352 Million Exchange Hack, Rate Hike Odds Jump, and the NYSE Goes Onchain

Withdrawals are paused at a major exchange right now. The number that came out overnight makes this the most expensive month crypto has had all year.

September 25, 2026

Somebody moved a third of a billion dollars out of an exchange’s wallets overnight, and the exchange says your money is fine. 

Whether that holds up depends on a distinction most people never think about until a morning like this one.

Elite Picks (Sponsored)

This report focuses on a narrow group of stocks identified through a detailed screening process.

Analysts apply a combination of metrics to narrow down potential opportunities.

Past selections have shown strong momentum, but no outcomes are guaranteed.

The newest edition is now open for access.

Get the report now.

*This free resource is being sent by Zacks. We identify investment resources you may choose to use in making your own decisions. Use of this resource is subject to the Zacks Terms of Service.
*Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Investing involves risk. This material does not constitute investment, legal, accounting, or tax advice. Zacks Investment Research is not a licensed dealer, broker, or investment adviser.

Market-Moving News

Three things landed since your last edition, and they refuse to agree with each other.

One reminds us that the weakest link in crypto is almost never the blockchain itself. One quietly rewrote what the Fed is likely to do next month. And one put the most famous ticker tape in the world onto a crypto app.

ETFs

Bitcoin ETFs Erase $5.5B Deficit as Six-Day Inflows Hit $2.8B

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have completed a dramatic turnaround, pulling in more than $2.8 billion across six consecutive trading sessions and pushing 2026 net flows back into positive territory.

Thursday added another $191 million, lifting year-to-date inflows to roughly $787 million. That reverses a deficit of about $5.5 billion recorded at the end of June, creating a swing of more than $6 billion in less than three months.

BlackRock’s IBIT contributed roughly $1.35 billion during the six-day streak, almost half of the total.

Billions Return to Bitcoin Funds

The latest run peaked with nearly $999 million entering the ETFs on Monday, followed by $715 million Tuesday and $347 million Wednesday.

Daily buying has since slowed, but inflows have continued even as Bitcoin retreated from above $87,000 toward $84,000. That makes the streak more notable than capital simply chasing a fresh high.

The 2026 Deficit Disappears

Bitcoin ETFs spent much of the year fighting heavy withdrawals, making the return to positive annual flows a meaningful reversal. The recovery still has plenty of ground to cover compared with previous years, and BlackRock remains responsible for a large share of demand.

Take: Nearly $3 billion entering Bitcoin funds while BTC pulls back suggests institutional demand is surviving beyond the initial breakout.

With annual flows finally positive again, you have a much stronger demand picture than the one sitting $5.5 billion underwater only a few months ago.

Security

Bitget Loses $352M After Hackers Trick Its Own Wallet System

Crypto exchange Bitget lost about $351.6 million after attackers compromised a critical wallet backend and fed spoofed transaction data into its authorization process.

Bitget says attackers did not steal its private keys, meaning the breach hit the transfer-approval machinery rather than the cryptographic keys controlling the wallets.

The attack affected hot and warm wallets, while cold storage remained secure. Bitget detected the unauthorized transfers on September 24 and suspended withdrawals while keeping deposits and trading available.

The Keys Were Safe, the System Wasn’t

Attackers appear to have manipulated transaction data so fraudulent transfers looked legitimate when they reached Bitget’s normal approval process.

That creates a different problem from a stolen-key attack. An exchange can protect private keys behind strong custody controls, but those defenses still depend on backend systems telling the keys what to authorize.

Bitget Says Users Remain Covered

Bitget says its User Protection Fund holds more than $464 million, enough to cover the loss, and that no further unauthorized transfers are possible. 

Withdrawals remain suspended while technical teams investigate how the attackers entered the wallet backend and harden the affected systems.

The full technical report has not been released, leaving the initial intrusion method unresolved.

Take: A $352 million loss without stolen private keys shows that exchange security can fail before the signing stage becomes the problem.

If you keep assets on centralized platforms, backend controls now deserve as much attention as the wallets holding the keys.

Tether, the biggest stablecoin, launched in 2014 under a different name. Which?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

Tax Strategy (Sponsored)

Capital gains taxes can take a bigger bite out of your profits than expected.

Fortunately, some deductions may help reduce the impact — including:

  • Investment-related expenses

  • Cost basis adjustments

  • Certain real estate selling costs

Because rules and eligibility vary, many investors turn to fiduciary financial advisors for guidance.

Tokenization

Ethena Pushes USDe Beyond Crypto With Tokenized U.S. Stocks

Ethena is expanding the strategy behind its USDe synthetic dollar into tokenized U.S. equities, bringing traditional stocks into a system previously centered on crypto assets.

Binance’s bStocks will provide tokenized spot exposure, while Ethena plans to short corresponding equity perpetual futures to offset price movements. The structure applies the same delta-neutral approach used in its crypto basis trades to a new market.

USDe Gets a New Yield Engine

The move arrives as equity perpetuals gain scale on Binance. Open interest has climbed above $2.9 billion, while Ethena says the market has grown at a 105% compound monthly rate this year.

Instead of depending entirely on crypto funding opportunities, Ethena can now capture funding from stock-linked perpetual markets.

Its Risk Committee had studied how the strategy performs through earnings releases, weekends, dividends, and other equity-specific events before approving the framework.

Tokenized Stocks Move Deeper Into Crypto

The bigger shift is how tokenized equities are being used. They are no longer limited to giving traders blockchain-based stock exposure; they can now support a multibillion-dollar synthetic dollar.

The diversification also introduces risks, including market closures, dividend adjustments, liquidity gaps, and differences between tokenized shares and underlying securities.

Take: Tokenized stocks becoming part of USDe’s backing strategy shows how quickly traditional assets are moving deeper into crypto infrastructure. If you were treating equity tokenization as just another trading product, its role is becoming broader.

Coin Leaderboard

Crypto Pulse

A hack headline usually drains risk appetite in about ten minutes. Today it did nothing of the sort, and all three names below traded more than their own market caps.

BENQI (QI) $0.004 +161.2%

BENQI is a lending and borrowing protocol on Avalanche, one of the older ones still upright, and it holds a few hundred million dollars of deposits against a market cap a small fraction of that size. That gap is the real argument here, not the candle.

Roughly $77 million traded against a cap in the high twenties, so close to three times the entire token changed hands in a day. It is listed on Binance and Coinbase, among others, so the liquidity is not trapped on one venue.

A protocol this established moving this hard usually means somebody is repricing Avalanche DeFi as a whole.

BREW (BREW) $0.014 +143.9%

A BNB Chain token that trades across PancakeSwap and a spread of smaller centralized venues, with about $13.5 million of turnover against a cap of almost exactly the same size. That ratio is the entire pitch.

There is no protocol revenue to model and no institutional story bolted on, so what you are buying is momentum and a float small enough to move.

It sits below its own high from earlier in the year, which you can read as room to run or as a warning, depending on your temperament. Small size, tight stop, no romance.

PHALA (PHA) $0.074 +48.3%

Phala runs confidential compute for blockchains, using secure hardware enclaves so programs can process data without exposing it, which is the sort of plumbing the AI-and-crypto crowd has been circling all year.

It is the heavyweight of today's list: around $130 million traded against a cap in the sixties, on Binance, Kraken, OKX and others. No single announcement explains the move, so read it as the privacy and compute theme catching a bid rather than company news.

The smallest percentage here, and comfortably the easiest one to get out of.

Cash Strategy (Sponsored)

A former Wall Street banker just flagged a quiet Federal Reserve docket that lays the groundwork for a mandatory digital dollar.

Over 1,400 banks are already connected to this new system, but a simple legal strategy lets investors move their cash completely outside central bank control.

Click here to see how to protect your wealth before this window closes for good.

*This content is for educational purposes only. The opinions expressed are from DM Intelligence LLC, doing business as Decentralized Masters, who are not licensed financial advisors or registered investment advisors. The reader acknowledges that DM Intelligence LLC is not responsible for any losses, direct or indirect, resulting from the use of this information, including errors, omissions, or inaccuracies.

*Results are not typical and will vary. Success with digital currencies requires time, effort, and involves substantial risk including total loss of investment. Past performance does not indicate future results. All investments are at your own risk.

Please click here if you would like to unsubscribe.

Future Forward

Quiet on the conference front, loud everywhere else.

Token Unlocks:

🔓 More than $900 million of tokens are scheduled to unlock across projects through the end of this week, which is a lot of fresh supply for a market that just got a rates scare.

Crypto Conferences:

💎 Korea Blockchain Week, Seoul (September 29 to October 1) is worth watching, specifically for Korean tokenization deals, since a major local broker just signed one and the rest tend to follow in clusters.

Crypto Know-How: Hot, Warm and Cold Wallets, and Why the Difference Just Cost $352 Million

Most exchanges split their assets across three broad tiers, and the names give away most of the plot.

A hot wallet is connected to the internet and signs transactions automatically. It is what pays out your withdrawal in thirty seconds. Speed is the point, and the cost is that the keys must be accessible to software, which means anyone who gets into that software can access them.

A warm wallet sits in the middle. Partially automated, usually with extra approvals or limits, used to top the hot wallet up so it never holds more than it needs to.

A cold wallet is offline entirely. Keys are on hardware in a vault, transactions are signed by humans, often requiring several of them. Moving money out takes hours or days by design, which is one reason attackers have a much harder time reaching it.

Well-run exchanges typically keep most assets in cold storage and hold only a working balance online. When you read that a breach “was contained to hot and warm layers,” that architecture is what did the containing.

It is also why the honest question after any exchange hack is never whether the cold storage held, but whether the operating float was sized sensibly in the first place.

The lesson underneath all of it is older and blunter than the technology. An exchange balance is somebody else’s wallet with your name written next to it. Trade there, hold elsewhere.

Everything Else

That's our coverage for today; thanks for reading! Reply to this email with feedback or any cryptocurrencies you want me to check out.

Best Regards,
— Warda Kashif
Crypto Intel