Binance adds 5 new TradFi perpetual contracts, offering up to 20x leverage.

Cronos Labs has launched a governance proposal on GitHub, proposing to allocate 100% of product revenue generated by Ult and Cronos Launch to open market repurchases of CRO, followed by token burning. The proposal calls for monthly on-chain repurchases and burns, with each transaction hash made public, to establish a direct "product revenue — CRO repurchase — supply reduction" mechanism. It notes that Ult launched on September 17, while Cronos Launch went live on September 15. The previously approved "New CRO Era" proposal originally planned to distribute product revenue across multiple areas: staking rewards, growth and user acquisition, repurchases and burns, as well as R&D and operations. This new proposal would eliminate those allocations, directing all revenue to CRO repurchases and burns instead, with operations, infrastructure, and growth expenses covered by existing funds. Separately, Cronos Labs intends to use its strategic reserve to support future Cronos POS staking rewards. As CRO’s inflationary emissions gradually decline per prior plans, the reserve will be used to supplement staking rewards to maintain current Cronos POS reward parameters, with staking methods, lock-up periods, and reward structures unchanged. The proposal is currently in the discussion phase and will later be submitted for on-chain governance voting. The voting period is 14 days, with a quorum requirement of 33.4% of staked CRO; approval requires more than 50% of non-abstention votes.

Stablecoin infrastructure firm Bastion has received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to apply for a national trust bank charter, paving the way for its partnerships with large enterprises and financial institutions. Founded in 2023 by two former a16z crypto executives, Bastion provides enterprises with white-label stablecoin issuance, reserve custody, client wallets, and payment infrastructure. Its investors include Coinbase Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, and Samsung Next, with the latest funding round last year totaling $14.6 million. Last year, Bastion became a stablecoin partner of Japan’s Sony Bank, responsible for stablecoin custody, payment infrastructure, and issuance. Sony plans to further integrate stablecoin payments into its gaming and entertainment businesses. Bastion CEO Nassim Eddequiouaq stated that with the federal regulatory qualification, the company can serve as a regulated partner for large financial institutions in the U.S. and abroad to launch stablecoin products. This approval comes amid the rapid expansion of the U.S. stablecoin market. Companies including Visa, BlackRock, Google, and DoorDash have all entered the stablecoin space, while more than a dozen financial institutions—such as Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Santander—are advancing their own stablecoin projects. The OCC has approved multiple crypto-focused trust bank applications this year. Bastion’s approval also follows days after the Senate procedural vote on the CLARITY Act failed. Eddequiouaq noted that the GENIUS Act, signed into law last year, has already established a regulatory framework for stablecoins.

On Friday, around $96 million in short-term call options flooded Sandisk (SNDK), Micron Technology (MU), Intel (INTC), and Marvell Technology (MRVL), with Sandisk surging over 11% at one point. All these options expire on October 2. Trading data shows roughly 10,000 call contracts for Micron, 4,200 for Sandisk, 20,000 for Intel, and 3,500 for Marvell, with total premiums amounting to around $96 million. CNBC host Jim Cramer posted on X that the trading pattern "looks exactly like Leopold is back," referring to AI investor Leopold Aschenbrenner and his fund Situational Awareness. According to regulatory filings, Situational Awareness’s two largest previous holdings were Sandisk and Micron, with positions of roughly $5.7 billion and $5.6 billion respectively at the end of June. On September 11, the Financial Times reported that Aschenbrenner had rebuilt positions in assets including AMD, Intel, SK Hynix, Sandisk, and CoreWeave via flex options. Nomura strategist Charlie McElligott noted at the time that roughly $315 million in option premiums had flowed into AI and semiconductor assets over several days. Aschenbrenner previously drew attention for his highly leveraged bets on AI and semiconductor stocks. His fund plunged 67% during the AI sector correction in July this year, after which he drastically cut positions. At the end of July, he wrote in a letter to investors that he would "learn the necessary lessons" and pledged that future public market investments would be managed on a "fully paid basis." To date, SEC filings have not disclosed the identity of the buyer of the nearly $100 million in options, so it remains unconfirmed whether the trades originated from Aschenbrenner. Unlike his previous use of total return swaps (TRS) for leverage, the market speculates he used fully paid options this time, with maximum theoretical losses limited to the premiums paid. However, the short term of the options means high time value decay and gamma risk.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stated that the company aims to evolve beyond a mere trading app, attracting users through trading products including stocks, cryptocurrencies, and prediction markets, then gradually converting them into long-term service clients for retirement accounts, investment advisory, banking, and wealth management. Tenev added that active traders serve as the "engine room and foundation" of Robinhood’s business: trading products help the firm acquire customers, while offerings like retirement accounts are more critical for long-term growth. As of the end of this year’s second quarter, Robinhood’s funded accounts rose 7% year-over-year to 28 million, with its average revenue per user (ARPU) jumping 24% year-over-year. Tenev also noted that over the coming decades, more than $100 trillion in global intergenerational wealth will transfer, and Robinhood seeks to expand its service suite to include trusts, estate planning, private wealth management, and private banking as its users’ wealth grows.

Insight Beating AI Express: Cua has open-sourced CUA-S1-FORMS, a model with just 706,000 parameters and 2.8MB in size, designed exclusively for automatic form filling. The system first extracts data like names and phone numbers from PDFs, then uses the model to determine which form field each piece of information belongs to, before handing off tasks to Cua Driver for execution. It follows the System One approach recently popularized by Jev, focusing solely on selection and judgment rather than text generation. While Jev targets more general decision-making tasks, CUA-S1-FORMS narrows the scope even further, addressing only information matching within forms. In Cua’s internal tests, CUA-S1-FORMS scored 99.7% on form-filling tasks, compared to Jev’s 83.6%. This result has a clear home-field advantage: the former was trained specifically for form filling, so it cannot be interpreted as a 700k-parameter model outperforming Jev overall. Jev aims to replace some large model decision-making in agents, while Cua is breaking tasks down even further. When tasks are sufficiently fixed, a general decision model is not even necessary.

According to Farside's monitoring, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a net inflow of $433 million yesterday, marking the second consecutive day of net inflows.