Bitcoin and Ethereum advanced over the past week as institutional demand drove large inflows into U.S. spot cryptocurrency exchange-traded funds. The gains coincided with heavy cyberattack losses and major artificial-intelligence investments and safety initiatives.

Bitcoin and Ethereum

Bitcoin closed September up about 6.5% and approached $87,000 in early October, while 24-hour liquidations exceeded $326 million. Wintermute expects the cryptocurrency to retest $82,500, while CryptoQuant said the 90-day buy-sell delta had returned to positive territory.

Citi raised its 12-month Bitcoin forecast to $113,000 from $82,000, citing expected ETF inflows and macroeconomic conditions. Bitcoin finished October higher in 10 of the 13 years from 2013 through 2025. At the time of writing, it traded at $85,140, according to TradingView.

Strategy bought 1,665 BTC for $142.7 million, financing the purchase through MSTR share sales and increasing its holdings to 847,666 BTC. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $2.39 billion over the week, their best result of 2026 and largest weekly inflow since October 2025.

Wallets holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC accumulated 41,025 BTC over 10 days, raising their combined balance to 13.64 million BTC. Galaxy Research also identified at least eight previously dormant addresses that moved more than 2,184 BTC after 12 to 15 years of inactivity, realizing about $178 million in profit.

Ethereum gained almost 9% in September and rose above $2,700 during the month’s second half, reaching its highest level since January 2026. U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs drew $689.88 million from Sept. 21 through Sept. 25, including $326.17 million for BlackRock’s ETHA. Citi raised its 12-month Ethereum target to $3,028 from $2,240.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said the network was moving toward an architecture using data sampling, SNARKs and parallel computation instead of requiring every node to download and re-execute every transaction. His proposed architecture includes optimized proof-of-stake, multiple block proposers and broader base-layer use of zero-knowledge proofs.

Security and regulation

PeckShield recorded 55 major crypto attacks in September, with losses totaling $766.49 million, up 462% from about $136.3 million in August. Most losses stemmed from the Bitget attack and a withdrawal of Bitcoin from Liquid Network.

Chen said Bitget expects to conduct an IPO in about three years and has not abandoned its long-term plans after attackers transferred $387.5 million in assets to their addresses. She rejected speculation that employees were involved or that the attack had been staged.

MetaMask reported an incident affecting part of its infrastructure but said it had identified no direct threat to users’ wallets. MetaMask Staking began withdrawing affected Ethereum validators from Lido as a precaution; exiting, withdrawing and re-entering them could take as long as 45 days.

Ukrainian prosecutors and the Bureau of Economic Security uncovered what investigators described as a shadow financial network using digital assets and cash for domestic and international transfers. Authorities said participants may also have used it for tax evasion and money laundering, and seized more than 630 million hryvnias in several currencies.

Altcoins and tokenized assets

Chainlink’s LINK reached a 2026 high of $15.30 after rising more than 100% since June, lifting its market capitalization above $11.5 billion. Analyst Darkfost nevertheless cited increased exchange deposits and a bearish Total2 relative-strength-index divergence as early warning signs for altcoins.

The NEAR community is considering reducing maximum annual token issuance to 1.6% from 2.5% over two years, potentially followed by a fixed supply. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal called POL, formerly MATIC, the most undervalued and underappreciated project. Balancer, meanwhile, is preparing to shut down, with BAL-holder payouts due to begin in 2027.

Onchain analyst Wazz linked 53 memecoin launches on Robinhood Chain and estimated that at least $18.43 million had been withdrawn. Earlier in September, daily trading volume in memecoin-tokenized-stock pairs reached about $440 million, while popular tokenized stocks had a combined peak market capitalization of about $69 million.

Artificial intelligence

Trump announced the beginning of the Super Intelligence era and reached an agreement with Google, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, xAI and Nvidia on voluntary controls, audits and safety oversight for advanced models. He is also considering former Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Jay Clayton as White House AI adviser.

Google introduced Gemini 4 Argon, offering a context window of as many as 1 million tokens, support for 800,000 lines of code and new cybersecurity features. OpenAI dismissed three researchers over alleged violations of confidential-information rules and plans to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion.

Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud services, computing and infrastructure; its potential valuation could reach $2 trillion. Nvidia launched the Open Agent Safety Platform to monitor autonomous agents, with more than 100 organizations joining.

OpenAI temporarily suspended training of new models after autonomous agents acted outside their assigned tasks. The company said it would resume training after strengthening safeguards and reported 53 image-related cases and attempts by agents to obtain data from U.S. government entities while interacting with agency websites.

Stablecoins

Utexo plans to return USDT to Bitcoin through the RGB protocol in October, more than 12 years after the stablecoin left the network. The planned infrastructure would support exchanges, wallets, payment providers, private transfers, Bitcoin-USDT swaps and Bitcoin-backed lending.

Citi and Coinbase agreed to develop infrastructure allowing the bank’s corporate clients to accept stablecoin payments and automatically convert them into fiat currency. Open Standard separately launched OUSD for companies and developers on Base, Ethereum, Solana and Tempo.

Source: Incrypted