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Kraken layer-2 Ink has launched the Charter Foundation, a new support framework aimed at lowering the cost of launching crypto tokens. The launch comes amid a slowdown in token issuance and token-linked venture investment, as rising barriers to token-related deals have pushed many digital-asset investors toward equity-focused structures instead. Crypto market maker GSR and audit firm ChainSecurity are among the Charter Foundation’s partners.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said companies cannot control every financial product created on the basis of their publicly traded shares amid controversy over the company’s stock token business, according to a CNBC interview. Tenev explained, "tokenization" is a way to represent the value of various assets, including listed securities and real-world assets, in digital form on a blockchain. He added holding an asset token does not confer direct ownership of the underlying asset itself. Once a company’s shares are listed, shareholders own transferable property, and other financial institutions should be able to create products referencing those shares without the issuer’s permission, Tenev said. While stock issuers can determine the rights and obligations attached to the shares they issue, they cannot control whether third parties create separate securities based on those shares, he added.

Whale Alert reported that 268,000,000 USDC has been transferred from Coinbase Institutional to Coinbase. The transaction is valued at about $268 million.

The U.S. Department of Justice seized $52 million worth of cryptocurrency in a crackdown on Xinbi Guarantee, a China-linked money laundering network. According to BlockBeats, the DOJ said Xinbi Guarantee operated an illicit scam-services platform through Telegram, providing fraud groups with customized investment scam websites and money laundering services, while also taking part in recruiting trafficking victims in Southeast Asia. Law enforcement also seized Xinbi’s Telegram channel and two crypto wallets holding about $12 million, while imposing usage restrictions on 47 wallets linked to the group. Separately, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the platform as a transnational criminal organization. Earlier, Tether froze about 39.3 million USDT across 10 Tron (TRX) addresses tied to Xinbi Guarantee.

Cosmos has launched a partner network with 17 companies, including BitGo, to support financial institutions adopting tokenization and cryptocurrency infrastructure, Crypto Briefing reported. The network is designed to let banks access the systems needed to build crypto services through a single integrated environment. Rather than adopting custody, compliance, payments and settlement, and know-your-customer services separately, banks can use pre-integrated infrastructure to reduce deployment time and complexity. Cosmos provides its own tokenization suite and digital ledger technology.

Most major holders of Hunter Biden-themed memecoin LAPTOP are newly created wallets, and 60% of them have no prior on-chain activity history, Bubblemaps reported.

Coinbase has expanded support for USDC onchain use for users in Brazil. Brazilian users can now deposit USDC directly through the Coinbase app to earn rewards.

U.S. Bancorp has completed a pilot of its USBDC stablecoin on the Stellar blockchain, testing the full transaction cycle for stablecoins including issuance, redemption and settlement, Crypto Briefing reported. The bank also verified how the token could be integrated with its existing digital infrastructure. USBDC marks the first case of a bank-issued stablecoin being deployed on a public network.

Consensys will separate MetaMask into an independent company, Crypto Briefing reported. The existing entity will keep the Consensys name and focus its business on protocols, developer tools, and blockchain services for institutional clients. The move was led by Consensys Chairman and CEO Joseph Lubin. No plans for a MetaMask IPO or native token issuance have been announced.

PayPal has launched PYUSDx, a developer platform for custom stablecoins, as it expands its blockchain-based stablecoin business. According to CoinDesk, the platform was built with support from fiat-backed token specialist M0 and crypto payments firm MoonPay, and provides infrastructure for issuing custom stablecoins based on PYUSD.

Stablecoin payments infrastructure firm Latitude has completed a $35 million Series A round led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from NEA, Coinbase, Lightspeed Faction and OpenFX. Latitude, co-founded by former executives from Stripe, Uber, Coinbase and Meta, is building infrastructure that helps businesses send fiat in local currencies to users in emerging markets using stablecoins. The company has secured licenses across 45 U.S. markets and plans to expand related licensing into Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. Latitude, which currently has 15 employees, said it will use the funding to expand its compliance, engineering and sales teams and accelerate the buildout of its global payments network.

Wintermute, known as the market maker for Hunter Biden’s meme coin LAPTOP, has been selling the token on-chain after receiving 2.5 million LAPTOP tokens, according to Lookonchain monitoring. So far, Wintermute has sold 466,255 LAPTOP at an average price of $4.47, worth about $2.08 million.

The three major U.S. stock indices opened lower today. - S&P 500: -0.28% - Nasdaq: -0.33% - Dow Jones: -0.64%

Ledger is consolidating oversight of its internal IT and security teams as cryptocurrency attacks using artificial intelligence increase, Bloomberg reported. The hardware wallet company appointed former Fireblocks executive Oded Blatman as chief information officer and chief security officer, and Blatman will oversee security, IT operations and enterprise risk management. Blatman said hackers can now use AI to identify vulnerabilities faster and at lower cost, while attacks are becoming more sophisticated and are being carried out at greater scale, making faster security responses necessary.

Kyrgyzstan’s investigative authorities are probing 90 criminal cases linked to the use of cryptocurrencies this year, local media outlet Akchabar reported. Interior Minister Ulan Niyazbekov said cryptocurrencies are being used in cyber fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, and the concealment and transfer of criminal proceeds, while funds are difficult to trace as they pass through multiple wallets and mixers. Niyazbekov added that during an investigation last year into an online fraud ring, authorities found information on a Tron (TRX) wallet holding assets worth more than $3 million. The Interior Ministry is also pushing to revise the criminal procedure code so authorities can track the flow of criminal proceeds while pursuing suspects.

South Korea’s Democratic Party, the Financial Services Commission, and the Ministry of Science and ICT will join industry participants to discuss legislative tasks including enacting a basic blockchain law to promote the blockchain industry, Edaily reported. The Korea Blockchain Industry Promotion Association said it will hold a parliamentary policy forum titled 'Building Digital Trust Infrastructure and Promoting the Blockchain Industry in the AI Era' at the National Assembly Members’ Office Building on Sept. 11. The event will be jointly hosted by Democratic Party lawmakers Kim Woo-young, Lee Ju-hee, and Hwang Jung-a, along with independent lawmaker Choi Hyuk-jin, and organized by the association.

Hong Kong lawmaker Duncan Chiu, who represents the technology and innovation sector in the Legislative Council, has proposed developing Hong Kong into an international digital-asset hub by 2032, Hong Kong Commercial Daily reported. The proposal includes creating early-stage investment channels for Web3 finance and a Hong Kong-style "Web3 Pink Sheets" platform for over-the-counter fundraising, while also promoting real-world asset tokenization and tokenized stocks. Chiu also proposed setting up an independent digital-asset division within Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission, expanding use cases for crypto ETFs and Hong Kong dollar stablecoins, and building an integrated regulatory and compliance infrastructure.

An anonymous trader spent 200,000 USDC to buy 919.4 LAPTOP at $217.5 per token about an hour ago, then saw the token’s price plunge to $4.4 within 50 minutes. The position’s estimated value fell to $4,045, marking a 98% drop. The unrealized loss stood at about $196,000 (260 million won), and the wallet was identified as the address with the largest loss in the LAPTOP token.

The Algorand Foundation has appointed William Herkelrath, formerly of Chainlink and Curv, as its new CEO as it pushes to strengthen institutional finance and quantum-resistant security. Herkelrath officially took office on Aug. 31 and succeeds Staci Warden, who led the foundation for about five years. Algorand said the appointment is aimed at expanding its institutional asset tokenization and payments business while preparing in advance for next-generation security issues tied to the threat from quantum computing. The network has already enabled quantum-resistant accounts on mainnet through its v42 consensus upgrade, which applied the lattice-based signature system Falcon-1024. Herkelrath said he plans to establish quantum-resistant technology as a new global standard across the blockchain industry and accelerate institutional inflows.

DeFi yield-trading protocol Pendle said it has launched products on Robinhood Chain that let users trade dividend yields tied to tokenized Nvidia (NVDA) and Pfizer (PFE) shares. Users can buy the underlying stocks at a discount through PT, or gain leveraged exposure to dividend yields without directly holding the shares through YT. The Nvidia product expires in October, while the Pfizer product expires in December.

MetaDAO, a Solana-based decentralized platform, is using a fundraising model that keeps all USDC raised from token sales in an onchain treasury rather than paying it directly to project teams, Crypto Briefing reported. Under the model, project teams can spend only a pre-set monthly budget, while additional fund disbursements or new token issuance must go through governance proposals and futarchy, a governance system that uses prediction markets to judge a proposal’s likely impact on token value. About 20% of the funds raised is deployed into an automated market maker liquidity pool alongside the token at launch, while the remaining roughly 80% stays in a treasury managed by token holders. Cumulative fundraising through MetaDAO has surpassed $100 million.

Bonk Guy (@theunipcs), a well-known trader, said Hunter Biden’s meme coin LAPTOP could become one of the fastest celebrity coin pump-and-dump cases in crypto industry history, adding in English, "those buying this deserve to lose all their money." LAPTOP’s fully diluted valuation hit $300 billion 40 minutes after trading began, then plunged to $4.3 billion. Trading volume reached $6.8 million during the first 40 minutes.

Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs’ valuation has doubled from $1 billion to $2 billion in less than six months, Fortune reported. TRM Labs said it was valued at $1 billion when it raised $70 million in a Series C round in September last year, and that a follow-on investment in the same round later lifted the valuation to $2 billion, reflecting rapid growth in its AI business.

Solana recorded about $6.56 million in application revenue over the past 24 hours, the highest among major blockchains, U.Today reported. BNB Chain followed with about $3.26 million, ahead of Robinhood Chain at about $3.22 million, while Solana’s total was more than double Robinhood Chain’s. Hyperliquid posted about $1.94 million, topping Ethereum’s $1.59 million, and Base was not included among the top five networks.

Tether, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, said it will launch StableFund, a USDT-based private credit fund, with asset manager Fasanara Capital. The two firms plan to jointly commit an initial $400 million and raise up to an additional $3 billion from external institutional investors. Through its fintech lending network spanning more than 60 countries, Fasanara will provide short-term asset-backed loans to small and midsize businesses and other borrowers, while Tether will support payment and foreign-exchange infrastructure for cross-border fund transfers. The fund will operate as an evergreen structure with no fixed maturity.