Plasma builds out senior team ahead of mainnet: Exclusive

Plasma, a forthcoming layer-1 blockchain built for stablecoins, has made three new senior hires, Blockworks has learned exclusively.

The startup brought in Murat Firart as head of product, Adam Jacobs as head of global payments, and Usmann Khan as head of protocol security. These senior level hires come shortly after the Peter Thiel-backed project held a blockbuster token sale that netted some $373 million in commitments. 

Plasma is yet to publicly announce a date for its mainnet launch.

Plasma will be purpose-built for stablecoins, which according to its public documentation means over 1,000 transactions per second, zero-fee USDT transfers, custom gas tokens, and confidential…

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Bitcoin Has A 25% Chance To Hit $140,000 By Year-End, Analysts Say

The cryptocurrency market is in a state of fragile equilibrium, with Bitcoin BTC/USD trading around the $112,500 level.

This stabilization is being closely monitored by analysts, who see it as a critical juncture that will determine if the market can transition from its current holding pattern to a potential fourth-quarter rally.

What Happened: While historical data points to a bullish seasonal trend, near-term risks, primarily tied to U.S. macroeconomic policy, could define the market’s trajectory through the end of September.

According to a Glassnode report, the past week saw a fragile recovery in momentum, with reduced sell pressure and a modest pickup in on-chain participation.

Benzinga

Onramp Institutional | Suit that Meets Fiduciary Standards

DALLAS — Sept. 5, 2025 – Onramp Bitcoin has launched Onramp Institutional, an advisory-led program built to help investment committees, boards, CIOs and treasurers evaluate, structure, and govern Bitcoin exposure with audit-ready controls—less pitch deck, more process.

Instead of steering allocators toward a single type of product/vehicle, the workflow begins with Onramp Advisory—a committee-grade briefing and decision framework—that routes clients into the access path that best fits their mandate: direct custody via a Multi-Institution Custody (MIC) vault, a U.S. statutory trust (Wyoming), or an international Cayman fund.

The custody spine is MIC:…

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Bitcoin Briefly Hits $113K As XRP Breaks $3, With Ethereum, Dogecoin Rallying – Bears Left Stunned

Cryptocurrency markets are trading higher on Tuesday morning, with Bitcoin tapping the $113,000 mark.

CryptocurrencyTickerPriceBitcoinBTC/USD$112,640.24EthereumETH/USD$4,346.21SolanaSOL/USD$217.50XRPXRP/USD$3.00DogecoinDOGE/USD$0.2410Shiba InuSHIB/USD$0.00001303

Notable Statistics:

Coinglass data shows 192,263 traders were liquidated in the past 24 hours for $ 330.31 million.

SoSoValue data shows net inflows of $368.3 million into spot Bitcoin ETFs on Monday. Spot Ethereum ET’Fs saw net outflows of $96.7 million.

Trader Notes: Crypto trader Jelle confirmed that Bitcoin locked in a hidden bullish divergence and bounced from key support, catching bears off guard and favoring further…

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Upping Tempo: Stripe’s planned L1 challenges Ethereum to move faster

Stripe and Paradigm are plotting to launch a new platform that some have likened to a “Libra that lived.” 

The chain, Tempo, aims to bring stablecoin-powered payments onchain at a scale Stripe is uniquely positioned to deliver.

The announcement came with heavyweight design partners, such as Visa, Deutsche Bank, OpenAI, Shopify, and the sketching of an architecture: not an Ethereum layer-2, but a new L1, optimized for predictable fees, sub-second finality, gas-in-stables, and 100,000+ TPS.

The Ethereum community was mostly nonplussed.

Why Tempo is an L1 — and why should we care

Paradigm’s Matt Huang laid out the case. “Tempo will be a permissionless chain. On…

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LATEST: Ripple Strengthens BBVA Partnership To Enhance Digital Asset Custody Services In Spain

Ripple has struck a major deal with Spanish banking giant BBVA to provide its digital asset custody technology. The move supports BBVA’s newly launched crypto-asset trading and custody service for bitcoin and ether, available to retail customers in Spain. With Ripple Custody, BBVA aims to offer secure, scalable custody for tokenized assets while meeting strict regulatory standards.

The partnership comes as the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation clears the way for banks across Europe to expand digital asset offerings. Ripple executives highlighted BBVA’s reputation for innovation, while BBVA emphasized the importance of leveraging trusted technology to deliver end-to-end custody services.

Building on earlier collaborations in Switzerland and Turkey, this agreement strengthens Ripple’s footprint in Europe. With over 60 regulatory licenses worldwide and more than a decade of digital asset expertise, Ripple is positioning itself as a key infrastructure provider for banks entering the crypto market.

Source

Bitcoin, Dogecoin, XRP Gain; Ethereum Trades Flat: Analyst Predicts ETH Reversal Before Q4 Parabolic Rally – Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust (BTC) Common units of fractional undivided beneficial interest (ARCA:BTC)

Leading cryptocurrencies rose in tandem with stocks on Monday, as investors increased their risk appetite ahead of key inflation data reports.

CryptocurrencyGains +/-Price (Recorded at 9:15 p.m. ET)Bitcoin BTC/USD+0.57%$111,500.30Ethereum ETH/USD               -0.08%$4,288.94XRP XRP/USD                         +2.82%$2.95Solana SOL/USD                         +3.55%$213.45Dogecoin DOGE/USD                         +4.68%$0.2381Bitcoin Continues To Test Patience

Bitcoin rose to an intraday high of $112,869.24 before falling back to the early $111,000s overnight. The leading coin’s trading volume jumped…

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World Liberty Financial is perfecting TradFi

This is a segment from The Breakdown newsletter. To read more editions, subscribe

 “Without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.”

— Satoshi

Property rights are not sacrosanct in traditional finance.

Even in the US stock market — where shareholder rights are treated with near-religious reverence — a company’s management can sometimes forcibly divest an unwanted shareholder of their shares.

In 2009, for example, the struggling software firm Selectica used a poison pill defense to cut a single shareholder’s stake in half.

When the pill was triggered, all shareholders other than Versata, a hedge…

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OpenSea launches NFT archive with $1M+ acquisition plan

The NFT marketplace OpenSea announced the creation of its Flagship Collection on Monday. According to the company, this will be a $1 million initiative to acquire and curate digital art and culturally significant NFTs.

The move marks the company’s first formal reserve, designed to showcase NFTs as cultural artifacts while giving artists and collectors heightened visibility. The launch also coincides with OpenSea’s broader strategy ahead of its SEA token rollout.

The program will operate under a committee-driven process, with OpenSea employees and external advisors selecting acquisitions. Purchases will be celebrated as “acquisition moments” across the platform’s…

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Javascript Library Compromise Goes After Bitcoin Wallets

A major NPM developer, qix, has had their account compromised. It was used to push malware that targets and searches for bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallets on users devices. If detected, the malware would patch the code functions used to coordinate transaction signing, and replace the address a user is trying to send money to with one of the malware creator’s own addresses.

This should mostly be a concern for web wallet users, so in the Bitcoin ecosystem Ordinals or Runes/other token users, as unless an update for your normal software wallet happened to be pushed just earlier today with the compromised dependency, or if your wallet dynamically loads code directly from the…

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