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More →AI agents make 138 million crypto payments as U.S. dominates spending on AI models
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are no longer just talking to each other. They are paying for services, buying data and even purchasing access to tokens the AI models, with more than 138 million transactions recorded through the x402 protocol on Coinbase’s Base blockchain, according to a Chainalysis’ <a href="https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/north-america-crypto-adoption-2026/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">><em>Inside North America's $3 trillion crypto economy: Agentic commerce accelerates</em> report</a>. The United States dominates this emerging market. U.S.linked wallets accounted for 88.1% of the geographically identified payments for AI model inference, compared with just 0.1% for Chinese-linked wallets, the blockchain analytics firm found. "One possible explanation is that Chinese developers are more inclined to use open-weight models such as DeepSeek and Qwen, reducing their need to purchase metered inference services," Eric Jardine, Chainalysis' head of research, told CoinDesk. The findings, released Wednesday, come as Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and other payments giants <a href="/tech/2026/07/15/visa-mastercard-and-ripple-join-the-standard-letting-ai-agents-pay-in-stablecoins" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">have backed the x402 protocol,</a> while Coinbase <a href="/business/2026/07/23/coinbase-closes-the-gaps-in-ai-agent-economy-for-businesses-users-and-developers" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">has begun allowing business customers</a> to accept payments from AI agents. Yat Siu, co-founder and chairman of Animoca Brands, <a href="/business/2026/08/29/the-next-trillion-dollar-currency-may-not-be-a-stablecoin-it-might-not-even-have-a-name-yet" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">recently told CoinDesk</a> that over the next few years he estimates up to 100 billion AI agents will be transacting on the internet and they will be using crypto. And crypto’s <a href="/business/2026/08/23/crypto-s-next-billion-users-might-be-ai-agents-and-they-re-paying-with-stablecoins" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">next billion users might be AI agents</a> paying with stablecoins. “Stablecoins are particularly well suited to the kinds of transactions we expect AI agents to make at first,” Stephanie Cohen, Cloudflare’s chief strategy officer, <a href="/business/2026/08/23/crypto-s-next-billion-users-might-be-ai-agents-and-they-re-paying-with-stablecoins" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">told CoinDesk.</a> Unlike traditional card payments, stablecoins can handle transactions worth fractions of a cent, allowing AI agents to buy data, computing power and other services without human intervention. The new Chainalysis figures offer evidence of growing use of those payment systems, although transaction counts alone do not establish how much represents genuine commercial demand. Much of the activity runs through x402, a payments protocol incubated by Coinbase that allows AI agents to pay automatically for digital services using crypto. More than 87% o
S&P 500 options are the hottest bet on this Hyperliquid exchange
Talk about options<strong> </strong>on the S&P 500 index, and you are discussing a beast of a market that trades trillions of dollars in notional volume every day. Crypto traders now appear to want to access it over a blockchain. Hypercall illustrates the demand. The options platform built on Hyperliquid, the <a href="https://defillama.com/chains" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">>eighth-largest blockchain</a> by total value locked (TVL), went live in June, and more than 80% of the $640 million in notional volume since then has come from S&P 500 options, the exchange told CoinDesk. Open interest, the value of contracts still outstanding, is about $49 million, of which $47 million is in S&P 500 options. While the numbers are small next to traditional markets and Deribit's crypto options business, which started shortly after the platform’s 2016 debut and now routinely sees billions of dollars in daily volume and open interest, they illustrate a growing trend: the desire to access financial instruments when conventional markets are closed. Hypercall lists daily, weekly and monthly expiries, including over weekends. "The volume is concentrated in options expiring the following day," Jake Sylvestre, founder of Hypercall, said in an email interview. "Traders can take a view on the next day's move or hold a position further out." Traders are gravitating to blockchains for exposure to traditional markets, including derivatives. Hyperliquid’s decentralized exchange (DEX), also known as Hyperliquid, <a href="/coindesk-indices/2026/09/10/crypto-for-advisors" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">has become a</a> go-to venue for placing trades and managing risk through perpetual futures, especially on weekends when conventional markets are closed and geopolitical tensions have repeatedly escalated. Hypercall takes Hyperliquid’s perpetual futures into the options arena. An option is a contract that pays out if an asset ends up above or below — depending on the details — a set price by a specified date. A call option pays off when the asset finishes above that price at expiry. A put option works the other way round. Traders use both to hedge against price swings and bet on direction, volatility and time. Each Hypercall contract has a $1 multiplier, which means each index point is worth $1 at settlement. A call with a 7,000 strike pays $100 if the index settles at 7,100. Contracts settle in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, against the average price over the final 30 minutes for Hyperliquid's S&P 500 perps. Trading around the clock is the draw. "Hyperliquid has become the best venue for trading these markets outside exchange hours," Sylvestre said. Hypercall’s exchange's market makers, the firms that quote prices, "hedge on Hyperliquid's perpetual futures, including on weekends when the cash equity market is closed," Sylvestre said. Earnings, economic data and company news can move an underlying asset while its home exchange is closed, and makers "hav
Osmosis community proposal to terminate OSMO inflationary issuance
According to news from Bijie, the Osmosis community has proposed a proposal to terminate OSMO inflationary issuance, planning to stop the daily issuance of new tokens and suspend the daily unlocking of developer tokens, so that staking rewards are fully funded by protocol revenue such as transaction fees. Currently, the relevant module distributes about 121,800 OSMO per day, of which about 9,740 are used as staking rewards, 30,400 are for the unlocking of developers' existing tokens, and the remaining about 81,600 enter the community pool. If the proposal passes, the approximately 51.9 million OSMO not yet unlocked by developers will continue to remain locked, and future releases will require separate governance decisions.
Over the past 4 hours, the proportion of active buy trades in BTC contracts was 45.27%.
Bjie.com data: For the BTCUSDT perpetual contract over the most recent 4 complete hours, active buy trades accounted for 45.27% of volume, while active sell trades accounted for 54.73%, with active selling dominating. Compared with the same-methodology snapshot 24 hours earlier, this is down 10.309 percentage points; compared with the same-methodology snapshot 7 days earlier, it is up 3.4766 percentage points.
BTC liquidations totaled $197 million over the past 24 hours.
Bijie data: BTC's rolling 24-hour liquidation amount is approximately $197 million, involving about 9,634 liquidated accounts. Compared with the same-caliber snapshot 24 hours ago, it rose by 497.77%; compared with the same-caliber snapshot 7 days ago, it rose by 151.66%.
Korea Gas Corporation purchased LNG cargoes for delivery from December to January in preparation for winter.
Coin World news: Korea Gas Corporation purchased LNG cargoes for delivery from December to January in preparation for winter. According to people familiar with the matter, Korea Gas Corporation, in order to cope with the peak winter demand season, has purchased at least two LNG cargoes under DES agreements, with delivery periods from December to January.
Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry: Japan and the U.S. reached their first chip project under the $550 billion investment plan.
According to CoinWorld news, Japanese Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Ryosei Akazawa said at a press conference held in Tokyo on Thursday that Japan and the United States have reached an agreement on the first semiconductor project under the $550 billion investment plan agreed last year. It is expected to invest no more than $21 billion in a new chip factory that GlobalFoundries plans to build in New York State. Akazawa said that in the AI era, cooperating with the United States to secure chip supply is crucial to economic security, and Japan remains firmly committed to implementing the terms of last year's trade agreement. The latest project will further strengthen Japan-U.S. relations.
Step 5 open-sources 600B weights: 92-layer deep architecture, million-token indexing overhead reduced to
Bitcoin News reports that StepFun has released the preview model weights of Step 5, featuring a 92-layer deep architecture with 600 billion parameters and support for a 1 million token context. A new technical blog discloses that the model introduces sparse GQA, merging the indices of 8 adjacent tokens, reducing the overhead of indexing and top-k filtering to 1/8 of the per-token indexing scheme. The model adopts the custom StepFun Model License 1.0, which allows general commercial use, but hardware manufacturers such as mobile phone and automobile companies must sign a separate licensing agreement if they integrate the model's capabilities into commercial products.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott leads in reelection forecast
CoinWorld news: Texas Governor Greg Abbott leads with nearly an 80% win probability in Kalshi's reelection prediction. He has pushed to make Texas the U.S. hub for Bitcoin mining and included $5 million in Bitcoin in the state reserve.
Bitcoin price falls below $81,000 amid uncertainty over the Federal Reserve's interest rate policy
Bitcoin's price recently fell below $81,000, and market bets on a Federal Reserve rate hike in October briefly rose to nearly 50% before pulling back.