Bitcoin Reaches $123,000
At the end of the week, Bitcoin rose above $123,000, and Ethereum surpassed $4,500. By the time of publication, the BTC price had corrected to $122,300, representing a gain of almost 10% over the week. The remaining top 10 cryptocurrencies reacted moderately to Bitcoin's rise, with the exception of BNB, which set a new all-time high.
BNB Updates ATH
BNB set a new high of $1,111, up 4.7% in 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. The token is currently trading around $1,086, with a market cap exceeding $151 billion, keeping it in fifth place.
One of the factors driving this growth was a surge in interest in the Aster protocol: its TVL reached $2.3 billion, while DEX volumes reached $5.87 billion in the past month, according to DeFi Llama. The recent fee reduction on the BNB Chain network may have provided additional support: validators locked in the gas price at 0.05 Gwei, reducing the average transaction cost to $0.01–0.02.
The June Maxwell update sped up block processing and improved validator synchronization. BNB Chain is currently second only to Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin in TVL.
Plans for 2025–2026 include increasing the block gas limit to 1 billion units to meet growing on-chain demand.
Bitcoin Mining Difficulty Reaches 150.8 T
On October 1st, Bitcoin mining difficulty reached a new record high of 150.8 T, an increase of 5.9% following the latest recalculation. This increase has been ongoing since July. Despite the interblock interval consistently being below 10 minutes, it recently exceeded 11 minutes, suggesting a 1.7% decrease in difficulty to 148.1 T.
According to Glassnode, the hashrate (7 DMA) has consistently remained above 1 ZH/s. According to BitcoinMiningStock, public miners now control 39.8% of all computing power. Foundry USA leads with a 29.7% share, followed by AntPool (15.5%) and F2Pool (14.8%). Together, these three pools account for approximately 60% of the network hashrate.
Privacy Currencies Rise
Amid the overall market growth, privacy tokens particularly stood out: Zcash jumped 159% in a week, and Dash 78%. This was fueled by the announcement of Grayscale's Zcash Trust, aimed at accredited investors. The positive news spread to other privacy coins, including ZEN, which gained 62% in seven days. However, Monero, one of the sector's leaders, responded mutedly, posting a mere 12% gain.
Tether Acquires 8,889 BTC
Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, acquired 8,889 BTC worth $1 billion, moving the assets to its reserve wallet. This was reported by analysts at Onchain Lens, citing data from Nansen. According to Arkham Intelligence, the listed address does indeed belong to Tether's Bitcoin reserves. The funds came from the hot wallet of Bitfinex, a member of the same group of companies.
The purchase is in line with Tether's strategy of quarterly replenishment of its BTC reserves: starting in May 2023, the company will use 15% of its net profits to purchase the cryptocurrency. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino confirmed the deal. With this latest purchase, the company's reserves have reached 109,410 BTC ($12.4 billion), making it the second-largest holder of Bitcoin among private companies and the third-largest holder among public companies.
SWIFT and Chainlink Announce Launch of Blockchain Platform for Banks
The SWIFT network announced the launch of a blockchain ledger for processing corporate events in the financial sector – the result of a long-term collaboration with Chainlink and two years of research in digital assets.
The project involves 24 major organizations, including DTCC, Euroclear, UBS, and Wellington Management. The system uses AI to extract data from unstructured documents, after which the information is verified by participants and converted to ISO 20022 format.
The data is then transmitted through the SWIFT network, and the Chainlink protocol simultaneously sends it to public and private blockchains. Testing has shown near 100% accuracy and support for multiple languages, including Spanish and Chinese.
The solution integrates traditional systems and smart contracts, creating a single source of truth. Its key advantage is the ability to use SWIFT's existing infrastructure to interact with blockchains at a low cost.
The partnership with Chainlink began in 2016 with a demonstration of a smart contract for bonds, and in subsequent years included tests of cross-chain transfers and settlements with tokenized assets.
