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Satoshi Nakamoto's computer ran on London time, but his sleep pattern points to North America
Timestamps in Bitcoin's first release and in 144 of Satoshi Nakamoto's emails show a computer set to British time. The hours Satoshi slept, the mining rig switched off in those hours and a Los Angeles home connection all point to North America.
Crypto laundering for Asia's scam compounds moved within days of every US crackdown
When Telegram shut Huione's channels and the US froze Xinbi, their trade reappeared on rival markets and a different stablecoin within days. Cartel cash brokers and Iran's Revolutionary Guard move money in crypto too, and US courts are testing how it gets frozen.
Crypto casino Duelbits hacked again: about $6 million taken from five blockchains in under an hour
Someone holding the keys to Duelbits' hot wallets emptied them on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Tron, Solana and Bitcoin on 24 September 2026, turned the lot into ether and parked 2,234.60 ETH, about $6.02 million, in one wallet.
GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna (OpenAI): the cheaper GPT-6 models, at half the GPT-5.6 price
OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna on 22 September 2026, the cheaper models below GPT-6 Astra. Sol costs $2 and $10 per million tokens and Luna $0.10 and $0.50, half the GPT-5.6 prices, and both take 1,050,000 tokens of context.
Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): Fable-level work at 40% less than Opus 5
Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 on 22 September 2026 at $4 and $20 per million tokens, 20% below Opus 5. Anthropic says it matches Claude Fable 5.1 on most work, costs 40% less than Opus 5 on typical jobs and writes output more than 30% faster.
Qwen-Audio-3.1 (Alibaba): five speech models for transcription, voices, sound and live conversation
Alibaba's Qwen team announced Qwen-Audio-3.1 on 23 September 2026: five audio models for speech recognition, speech synthesis, live voice conversation and sound creation. The new TTS-Next generates speech, effects and ambient sound in one pass.
Qwen Intelligence (Alibaba): an AI agent platform that phone makers build into their phones
Alibaba launched Qwen Intelligence on 22 September 2026: a platform that lets phone makers put Qwen-powered AI agents on their phones, able to carry out tasks across several apps. Its own site sells plans from ¥78, about $11.63, a month.
Command A+ (Cohere): an open 218B model that runs on two H100 GPUs
Cohere released Command A+ on 20 May 2026: a 218-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 25 billion active, open under Apache 2.0. It reads text and images in 48 languages, and its 4-bit version runs on two NVIDIA H100s or one B200.
Solar Mini 4 (Upstage): a 35B Korean-English model with 3B active and a 512K context
Upstage released Solar Mini 4 on 22 September 2026: a 35-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 3 billion active, a 512K context and fluent Korean, English and Japanese. It lists at $0.10 and $0.40 per million tokens, half price until 22 October.
Aion 3.5 and Aion 3.5 Mini (AionLabs): roleplay and storytelling models built on GLM
AionLabs released Aion 3.5 and Aion 3.5 Mini on 23 September 2026: roleplay and storytelling models built on Z.ai's GLM family, with a 256K context. Aion 3.5 costs $3 and $6 per million tokens, and Mini $0.70 and $1.40.
The ECB now settles blockchain trades in central bank money, with 13 banks connected on day one
The Eurosystem switched on Pontes on 21 September 2026, linking market blockchain platforms to TARGET so tokenised asset trades settle in central bank money. Thirteen banks and four DLT operators were connected on day one.
ASI exploit: $2.23 million traced, and the bitcoin leads to one Hyperliquid account
An unauthorised party reached SingularityNET's cloud systems on 19 September 2026 and minted 895.96 million AGIX. Selling that and other tokens put about $2.23 million into two wallets, and part of it became bitcoin and then wrapped Monero on one Hyperliquid account.
Google's Gemini broke into three real companies during a safety test
Google confirmed on 18 September 2026 that a Gemini model guessed a password and used credentials found in public repositories to reach the systems of three real companies during a cyber evaluation run by Irregular in May.
North Korean hackers used fake job offers to infect 30,000 computers and steal crypto
Seven agencies across Japan, the United States, Australia and Germany have named WaterPlum, the group running fake developer job interviews, and counted 30,000 infected PCs and ¥1.7bn in stolen crypto.
Circle sold $222m of ARC to institutions in May, four months before Arc opened
Circle raised $222 million selling ARC at a $3 billion network valuation on 12 May 2026, with a16z crypto leading and BlackRock, Apollo and Intercontinental Exchange among the buyers. Arc opened to the public four months later, on 16 September.
DOE opens a $215m quantum competition with $2.5m appropriated
The Energy Department opened its Quantum Genesis Q Competition on 17 September 2026. It plans up to $215 million for a fault-tolerant machine of at least 100 logical qubits by 2028. DOE's own announcement says $2.5 million of that is Fiscal Year 2026 money.
Revolut disclosed customer identity and Bitcoin records after a fraudulent government request
Revolut's customer notice describes a fraudulent request from a mailbox inside a government domain, with identity documents and transaction records potentially disclosed.
Blockstream rejects Liquid ransom as about 598.5 bitcoin remain outstanding
Blockstream has refused a ransom after 3,400 BTC were returned. The transaction trail links the message wallet to an earlier withdrawal and preserves a smaller tracing lead.
IonQ opens Superion 256 orders and estimates a 26-day quantum attack on Bitcoin signatures
Superion 256 deliveries are targeted for 2027. A separate IonQ study models a secp256k1 attack using 19,397 physical qubits with an estimated 63% success probability per attempt.
Diamond chips, faster control and Helix error correction advance three quantum approaches
Fujitsu's diamond-spin prototype, Chalmers' theoretical Floquet method and Quantinuum's Helix experiments address hardware connections, control speed and error correction.
U.S. quantum awards pair funding for D-Wave, Rigetti and Quantinuum with equity stakes
D-Wave, Rigetti and Quantinuum have finalised CHIPS awards totalling up to $300 million under a programme requiring minority government equity stakes.
Quantinuum signed a non-binding MOU with Aramco, which already runs a rival's quantum computer
Quantinuum announced a memorandum of understanding with Aramco signed in Riyadh on 31 August. Read in full, it commits to technical onboarding, knowledge exchange and benchmarking. Aramco already has a rival's quantum computer installed and running.
QC Ware and IonQ report chemical accuracy on eight qubits, with no paper and no named benchmark
QC Ware said on 1 September 2026 that a hybrid workflow on IonQ's Forte computer got within 0.5 kcal/mol of classical benchmarks for an enzyme active site. The quantum part was eight qubits, and the benchmark it was measured against is not named.
Pasqal listed with $360m and 90.57% of the SPAC's public shareholders took their money out
Pasqal began trading as PSQL on 28 August and closed its first session at $19.11. Shareholders redeemed 26,039,602 of 28,750,000 SPAC shares, and $250m of the cash at closing came from convertible bonds sold at a 20% discount.
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The newest releases
- Qwen-Audio-3.1Audio
- Aion 3.5 and Aion 3.5 MiniLLM
- Qwen IntelligenceAgent
- Claude Opus 5.5LLM
- GPT-6 Sol and LunaLLM
- Solar Mini 4LLM
- Grok 4.7LLM
- Gemini 3.8 LiveLLM
- Xiaomi opens MiMo Desktop beta for editable work and computer control
- OpenAI shares a proposed Navier-Stokes proof as researchers debate credit
- Hermes joins Omarchy's desktop and terminal workflow
Tech explainers
ExplainedThe models, assets and machines behind the news, across all three desks.
- Large Language ModelsThe models that read, reason and write, from the frontier labs to the open-weight field.68
- Networks & CoinsThe blockchains and the coins that run on them, from Bitcoin to the top 50 by size.50
- Hardware & CompaniesThe labs and companies building the machines, from IBM to the pure plays.13
- Video GenerationText and image to video models, from the safe Western defaults to the leaderboard leaders.21
- DeFi & InfrastructureThe exchanges with no company behind them, and the rails that keep fees down.6
- Policy & InvestingThe national programmes and the listed stocks: where the public money is going.6

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