BITCOIN HITS $85K AS CRYPTO SHORT LIQUIDATIONS SURGE
Bitcoin broke above $85,000 on September 21 for the first time since January, extending a sharp recovery from last week’s selloff as a wave of short liquidations accelerated the move. BTC climbed more than 5% within 24 hours and briefly traded above $85,000 before extending the rally toward $87,000 in subsequent sessions. CoinGlass data showed more than $750 million in crypto positions were liquidated over the 24-hour period, with roughly $648 million coming from short positions. The move marked a significant reversal from September 15, when Bitcoin traded near $75,000. By September 21, the cryptocurrency had recovered more than 13% from that low. KEY TAKEAWAYS SHORT SELLERS FUEL THE BREAKOUT The size of the liquidation wave was a major factor behind Bitcoin’s rapid move through resistance. When traders hold leveraged short positions and Bitcoin rises sharply, exchanges can automatically close those positions once their collateral falls below required levels. The forced buybacks can then push prices higher, triggering additional liquidations. CoinGlass recorded approximately $750.5 million in total crypto liquidations, with shorts accounting for about 86% of the total. Bitcoin represented around $360 million of those liquidations, while Ethereum accounted for nearly $171 million. The largest individual liquidation was an approximately $11.29 million BTC-USDT position on Binance. CryptoQuant data also showed Binance’s net taker volume jumping from roughly $11 million to $618 million within an hour. That sharp change indicated a strong wave of aggressive market buying as Bitcoin moved through the $84,000 area. The result was a classic short squeeze, where forced buying from bearish traders adds momentum to an already rising market. ETF DEMAND ADDS ANOTHER LAYER The rally was not driven entirely by derivatives. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded approximately $999 million in net inflows on September 21, according to data cited by 24/7 Wall St. That was the strongest single-day inflow in almost a year and came as Bitcoin was pushing through its January highs. That distinction matters because liquidation-driven buying is temporary. Once short positions have been closed, the market needs fresh demand to maintain higher prices. The combination of ETF inflows and the short squeeze therefore gave the rally two separate sources of buying pressure. Bitcoin’s broader recovery has also been unusually concentrated. From its September 16 low near $74,912 to a September 21 high of $87,397, BTC gained almost 17%. Two sessions, September 18 and September 21, accounted for roughly 95% of that move. MACRO CONDITIONS REMAIN A FACTOR The rally came as several macro pressures eased temporarily. Oil prices declined, while Treasury yields pulled back from recent highs. Asian and European equities also moved higher, supporting broader risk appetite. Analysts cited improving geopolitical expectations, including potential U.S. and Iranian diplomatic engagement, as another factor behind the change in sentiment. However, monetary policy remains a potential source of volatility. Markets were still pricing the possibility of another Federal Reserve rate increase in October, meaning financial conditions had not shifted completely in Bitcoin’s favor. CoinShares research head James Butterfill also warned that the Federal Reserve’s updated projections had removed expected rate cuts through 2027. He said another rate hike this year “now looks increasingly plausible.” WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE SHORT SQUEEZE? Bitcoin’s move did not stop at $85,000. It subsequently reached about $87,397 on September 21 before pulling back toward the mid-$80,000 range in the following sessions. That price action highlights the next test for the market: whether Bitcoin can retain the gains after the forced buying has faded. Derivative positioning remains elevated. Crypto market open interest rose about 7.6% to $156 billion during the initial breakout, even as large numbers of short positions were closed. That suggests traders were opening new positions rather than simply reducing exposure. At the same time, on-chain activity has not increased as dramatically as the price. Santiment data cited during the rally showed new and active Bitcoin addresses remaining around their recent averages. That leaves a question over how much of the move is being supported by organic network demand compared with derivatives activity and institutional flows. CONCLUSION Bitcoin’s move above $85,000 was powered by a combination of aggressive buying, heavy short liquidations and renewed demand from U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs. The roughly $648 million short wipeout provided a powerful burst of forced buying, while ETF inflows offered a separate source of demand. The rally has since carried BTC toward $87,000, but the next phase will depend on whether buyers can maintain demand after the short squeeze has run its course. Elevated open interest and lingering macro uncertainty mean volatility is likely to remain a major feature of the market.
DOJ CHARGES FORMER ROBINHOOD ENGINEERS OVER CRYPTO LISTING TRADES
The U.S. Department of Justice has charged two former Robinhood engineers with allegedly using confidential information about upcoming cryptocurrency listings to trade perpetual futures on Hyperliquid before the listings were publicly announced. Hefu Chai, 36, and Huaisong “Jerry” Xiang, 30, were each charged with commodities fraud and wire fraud in complaints unsealed on September 15 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors allege the pair repeatedly used nonpublic listing information obtained through their roles at Robinhood to position themselves in Hyperliquid markets. KEY TAKEAWAYS HOW THE ALLEGED TRADES WORKED According to the DOJ complaints, both men had access to confidential information about whether and when Robinhood Crypto planned to add particular digital assets to its platform. Prosecutors allege that the information was shared through a private Slack channel for employees with access to upcoming listing plans. Robinhood’s internal policies prohibited designated employees from trading the relevant tokens on any platform before a public listing announcement and for 24 hours afterward. The complaints allege that Chai and Xiang instead used Hyperliquid to establish positions before Robinhood disclosed the listings publicly. Chai’s complaint identifies at least 10 alleged instances. In one example, prosecutors say he learned in December 2025 that Robinhood planned to list LDO and subsequently opened long positions in LDO perpetual futures on Hyperliquid before Robinhood announced the listing. The complaint also describes similar trades involving DOT and LIT in January 2026. The DOJ alleges that Chai generated more than $50,000 from the trades. Xiang is separately alleged to have carried out a similar strategy and also earned more than $50,000. WHY HYPERLIQUID PERPETUALS MATTER The alleged trades did not involve buying the underlying tokens directly on Robinhood or another spot exchange. Instead, prosecutors say the defendants traded perpetual futures on Hyperliquid. These derivatives allow traders to speculate on the price of an underlying asset without owning the asset itself. Unlike traditional futures contracts, perpetuals do not have an expiration date and use periodic funding payments to keep their prices aligned with the underlying market. That distinction is significant because the case extends beyond the traditional scenario of an employee buying an asset before a company’s announcement. The DOJ is alleging that confidential information about a future crypto listing was used to trade a related derivative product on a separate, decentralized venue. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said the charges demonstrate that corporate insiders cannot avoid federal fraud laws by using derivatives or similar financial instruments to trade on misappropriated information. ROBINHOOD SAYS IT REPORTED THE MATTER Robinhood said it has zero tolerance for insider trading and maintains policies and procedures covering confidential information associated with new crypto listings. The company said it immediately investigated the matter and reported it to law enforcement and regulators. Robinhood also said it would continue cooperating with the investigations. The allegations also put attention on how information about future listings is controlled inside crypto companies. A listing can create increased trading activity around an asset, giving anyone with advanced knowledge an information advantage over ordinary market participants. LEGAL CONSEQUENCES AND PRECEDENT Chai and Xiang each face one count under the Commodity Exchange Act and one count of wire fraud. The commodities fraud charge carries a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison, while the wire fraud charge carries a maximum of 20 years. Those figures are statutory maximums and do not represent a prediction of any sentence. The case follows earlier federal enforcement involving alleged insider trading connected to cryptocurrency listings. In 2022, the DOJ charged individuals in what it described at the time as the first cryptocurrency insider trading tipping scheme, involving confidential information about Coinbase listings. The Robinhood case differs because the alleged trading involved perpetual futures rather than the underlying tokens. CONCLUSION The Robinhood case highlights how confidential information surrounding crypto listings can move from a centralized company’s internal systems into decentralized derivatives markets. For regulators, the allegations raise questions about how existing commodities and fraud laws apply when privileged corporate information is used on decentralized trading venues. For crypto companies, the case also underscores the importance of controlling access to listing information and monitoring employee trading activity. For now, the allegations remain unproven. Chai and Xiang are presumed innocent unless and until they are found guilty in court. The proceedings will determine whether prosecutors can establish that the defendants deliberately misappropriated Robinhood’s confidential listing information and used it to profit from the resulting market movements.
A Complete Guide to Crypto Due Diligence Checklist
In May 2025, a federal jury found SafeMoon CEO Braden Karony guilty of fraud after prosecutors showed that he and his co-conspirators secretly retained access to SafeMoon’s liquidity pools, despite telling investors those funds were locked. They diverted millions of dollars for personal purchases, including luxury cars and real estate. On February 10, 2026, Karony was sentenced to 100 months in prison and ordered to forfeit about $7.5 million. That case captures why crypto due diligence matters: verify claims before you invest, not after you lose money. With the crypto market now worth about $2.76 trillion, the risks remain significant. In addition, Chainalysis estimates that scams and fraud cost victims $17 billion in 2025, with the average scam payment reaching $2,764. First things first, What Is Crypto Due Diligence? Crypto due diligence is the process of checking a project’s claims, risks, and fundamentals before you put money into it. It borrows from how professional investors vet traditional companies, but it’s adapted for crypto’s specific dangers: teams that can hide behind fake names, code that runs itself once deployed, and rules that vary wildly from one country to the next. Traditional investing has decades of paperwork, disclosure laws, and regulators standing between you and a scam. However, crypto often has none of that. A person can write some code, launch a token, and take your money in an afternoon. That’s why the checking has to come from you. What Poor Due Diligence Actually Costs Which Investments Need the Deepest Checking Not every crypto asset needs the same level of scrutiny. Match your effort to the risk: The 12-Category Due Diligence Framework A useful crypto due diligence checklist covers twelve areas. Miss one, and you’ve left a door open for something to go wrong. 1. Whitepaper and Documentation Analysis A whitepaper is the project’s blueprint. Bitcoin’s original whitepaper, published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, is nine pages long and still readable today. That’s the bar for clarity, not the bar for length. What to check: Immediate red flags: no whitepaper at all, plagiarized content lifted from another project, guaranteed-return language, and vague claims like infinite scalability or solves the blockchain trilemma. If a whitepaper reads like it was built for the marketing team instead of engineers, that’s the point. 2. Team and Leadership Verification Technology, tokenomics, and marketing can all be improved after launch. A dishonest or incompetent team cannot be fixed. This is the single biggest factor in whether a project survives. How to verify a team, step by step: Anonymous teams aren’t automatically disqualifying; some privacy-focused projects have legitimate reasons to stay pseudonymous. But outside that specific case, an anonymous team with no verifiable identity is a serious risk, because there’s no one to hold accountable if things go wrong. Red flags: stock photos used as team headshots, LinkedIn profiles with almost no connections, team members previously tied to failed or fraudulent projects, and founders who hold no tokens themselves, meaning they have nothing at stake if the project fails. 3. Technology and Innovation Assessment You don’t need to read code to judge a project’s technology. You need to know what to look for. Checks that don’t require a computer science degree: Closed-source code that the team promises to open up “after launch” is one of the more common excuses used to hide problems until it’s too late to matter. 4. Smart Contract Security and Audits Smart contracts are close to permanent once deployed. A bug isn’t a bug you patch quietly; it’s a vulnerability sitting in public, waiting for someone to find it. DeFi losses show why this matters: according to Chainanalysis, since the first half of 2026, at least $36.7 million has been stolen from protocols whose source code was never publicly verified. What a real audit looks like: A bug bounty is a good sign, not a nice-to-have. A program with rewards of $10,000 or more for critical bugs, hosted on a platform like Immunefi, shows the team is confident enough in its code to invite scrutiny. Red flags: no audit before launch, an audit from an unverifiable firm, unresolved Critical findings and closed-source contracts that the public can’t review at all. 5. Tokenomics and Economic Model Tokenomics is the economic design behind a token: who holds it, how it’s unlocked, and what it’s actually for.Bad tokenomics has killed technically solid projects more than once. Even the best product falls apart if the token is designed to reward insiders at the expense of everyone else. The core questions to answer: A quick way to read vesting schedules: if a project shows you a chart with a big cliff where 20%+ of supply unlocks all at once, expect heavy sell pressure around that date. A steady, linear unlock over years is far less disruptive to the price. 6. Community and Social Presence A real community argues, asks hard questions, and sometimes disagrees with the team in public. A manufactured community repeats the same phrases, like great project and to the moon, and bans anyone who asks something uncomfortable. What to look for: Tools worth using: LunarCrush for social analytics, Social Blade to track growth patterns over time, and a simple Twitter Audit check for fake followers. 7. Market and Competition Analysis No project exists in a vacuum. Before investing, understand what it’s actually competing against and whether it has a real edge. Questions to work through: If a project claims to be the first in a space that clearly already has established competitors or dismisses everyone else as legacy without addressing why users would switch, treat that as a marketing tactic rather than an analysis. 8. Partnerships and Backers Investor quality is a real signal. Funds like a16z crypto, Paradigm, Polychain Capital, and Coinbase Ventures do their own due diligence before writing a check, and their involvement means someone else has already looked closely at the project. How to check a claimed partnership Go to the partner’s own official channels. If Chainlink, Binance, or any other named
Best Crypto Investments for 2026: Top Coins to Consider.
You open Twitter and see ten different opinions in ten minutes, one thread says Bitcoin is the only safe bet, another says you’re late unless you buy some obscure AI token right now. That expansion is exactly why picking the best crypto investments isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. Bitcoin’s stability, Ethereum’s DeFi dominance, Solana’s speed, and XRP’s regulatory tailwinds each serve different goals and stacking them against newer AI tokens or DePIN networks means weighing very different risk levels side by side. This guide walks through how to evaluate any crypto asset on its merits and breaks down the strongest options across major categories right now. Read also: Must-Know Crypto Investment Tips Best Crypto Investments to Invest In Right Now Prices move fast, but the fundamentals behind a good crypto investment don’t change overnight. Here’s a closer look at each one, along with the trade-offs to weigh before you buy. Bitcoin (BTC) Bitcoin is the largest and most liquid crypto asset, with the total market near $2.7-2.8 trillion and Bitcoin alone making up roughly 57% of it. Bitcoin’s 21 million fixed supply, deepest liquidity, and longest track record make it the most established and conservative asset in the digital asset class. Pros Cons Ethereum (ETH) Ethereum is the dominant platform for DeFi, tokenization, and smart contracts, and the second-largest crypto by market cap. Ethereum’s DeFi TVL share slipped from about 63.5% in early 2025 to roughly 56% by September 2026, though it still leads with close to $50 billion locked and a $165 billion+ stablecoin base. Pros Cons Solana (SOL) Solana is now used for stablecoin payments, DePIN, and tokenized assets, with daily active addresses holding above 3 million through much of 2026. Solana has also maintained over 30 months without a network-wide outage as of September 2026. Pros Cons XRP XRP is built around cross-border settlement, with Ripple positioning it as infrastructure for institutional payment rails rather than a general-purpose smart contract platform. The SEC and CFTC jointly classified XRP as a digital commodity on March 17, 2026, binding federal classification. Pros Cons BNB BNB is the native token of the Binance ecosystem. It is used for trading fee discounts, transactions on BNB Chain, and activities across decentralized exchanges and other applications. BNB has strong utility, but its performance is closely connected to Binance. If Binance continues to grow, BNB could benefit. However, regulatory issues, legal problems, or a loss of market share could negatively affect BNB. Read Also: Bitcoin vs Ethereum Step-by-Step: How to Start Investing in Crypto 1. Choosing a reputable exchange or platform Pick an exchange licensed in your jurisdiction, with a solid security history, transparent fees, and enough liquidity to avoid slippage. UEEx, Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance are common starting points, but verify current licensing and any recent incidents before funding an account. 2. Completing KYC/verification Regulated exchanges require ID verification (government ID, proof of address ), a legal anti-money-laundering requirement, not optional. Usually takes minutes to a few days. 3. Making your first purchase Fund via bank transfer or card, then place your buy order. Bank transfers are usually cheaper than cards. Start with a small test purchase, and compare the exchange’s spread/fees against market price before going bigger. 4. Moving assets off the exchange Crypto sitting on an exchange is in their custody, not fully yours if they’re hacked or go insolvent, your funds are at risk. For anything beyond a small trading balance, withdraw to your own wallet. Always send a small test amount first. 5. Setting up a secure wallet A wallet holds the private keys that prove ownership, lose them, and there’s no customer support to recover your funds. Hot wallets, like MetaMask or Trust Wallet, are free and convenient for frequent use, but since they’re always connected to the internet, they’re more exposed to hacks and phishing. Cold wallets, like Ledger or Trezor, keep your keys offline, making them far harder to hack and better suited for long-term storage, though they cost money upfront, are less convenient for frequent trading, and losing the device without a backup means losing access entirely. A common approach is keeping a small amount in a hot wallet for active use and holding the rest in cold storage. Read also: Best Strategies for Long-Term Crypto Investing When to use self-custody vs. use a custodian Self-custody suits investors who want full control and are comfortable managing their own security (seed phrases, phishing awareness). Using a custodian suits those who’d rather not manage keys, hold smaller amounts, or want easier trading access, trading some control for convenience. How to Evaluate the Best Crypto to Invest In Before you buy anything, it helps to run it through a consistent checklist. These are the factors that separate a durable long-term holding from a coin that’s just riding hype. Market capitalization and liquidity Market cap (price × circulating supply) shows an asset’s size; liquidity shows how easily you can buy or sell without moving the price. Large-caps like Bitcoin and Ethereum have deep order books and tight spreads. Real-world utility and use case A coin’s price eventually needs to be justified by actual use payments, DeFi collateral, gas fees, or tokenized asset ownership. Ask: “would people still need this token if the price stopped rising?” Team credibility and transparency Look for public, verifiable identities and a track record of delivering on the roadmap. Anonymity alone isn’t disqualifying (Bitcoin’s creator is anonymous), but anonymity plus vague docs, no audits, and unverifiable claims is a red flag. Institutional and exchange adoption Which exchanges list a coin, and who’s buying it, matters. Exchange listings involve due diligence, so a listing on a well-regulated platform is a mild quality signal. Regulatory status of the asset Legal standing affects both risk and long-term access. A joint SEC-CFTC guidance in March 2026 already classified 16 digital assets, offering some clarity ahead of full legislation. In the EU, MiCA is already fully in force. Risks of Crypto Investing Crypto offers real upside, but it comes with