The most useful detail in the Bitget breach is what the attacker did in the first six minutes. Unauthorized transfers began at 18:31 UTC on September 24 with a 0.84 ETH test from a wallet labelled Bitget 6. Within minutes, the USDT, USDC and Tether Gold in the haul were being swapped into ether on Uniswap at prices up to 5% above spot. A thief holding roughly $67M of dollar tokens and $12.8M of tokenized gold accepted up to about $4M of slippage to avoid holding any of it for an hour. Those assets can be frozen by their issuers. Ether can’t. By the time the last transfer landed at 21:23 UTC, about 24,590 ETH sat in three previously unused wallets, and the total loss was confirmed at $351.6M.

Velocity, a stablecoin treasury and settlement platform, has raised $38 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Dragonfly and FirstMark, with participation from Activant Capital, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Coinbase Ventures, Wintermute Ventures, and Ripple. The round brings the company’s total funding to roughly $50 million, all raised since it emerged from stealth last year with a $10 million pre-seed led by Activant Capital. For a startup founded only in 2025, assembling a cap table that spans crypto-native funds, a traditional bank’s venture arm, and two of the largest names in the stablecoin ecosystem is itself a signal of how quickly enterprise stablecoin infrastructure has moved from speculative bet to contested land grab.

The announcement reads like a customer roster for the entire global payments industry. Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Google, Shopify, Ripple — more than 140 firms lined up behind a single dollar token before it has settled a single transaction. Open USD does not exist yet; it is expected to go live later in 2026. What launched on June 30 was not a product. It was a coalition.