Market’s pulling back

Plus: Base's hackathon got exposed

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GM. Crypto headlines are stacking up like apples in a grocery basket - some ripe, some a little bruised.

Let's bob for the best picks:

🍍 Crypto market crashes;

👨‍💻 The hackathon illusion.

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🍍 Market flavor today

Find out more about the Fear & Greed Index here.

Name		Price	24H	7D
Crypto Market Cap: $3.59T -5.64% (24H)
	Bitcoin BTC	$106,320.18	-2.95%	-11.37%
	Ethereum ETH	$3,780.44	-4.42%	-8.69%
	BNB BNB	$1,066.35	-7.78%	-13.00%
	XRP XRP	$2.29	-3.83%	-17.31%
	Solana SOL	$180.65	-4.95%	-15.11%

Prices as of 11:00 AM EST. Click here to see live data.

Crypto woke up today with the kind of hangover where you don't even have the energy to check your phone.

👉 The Fear and Greed Index is almost in Extreme Greed;

👉 Bitcoin's getting closer to $100K;

👉 Altcoins are getting crushed;

👉 Bitcoin ETFs had $530.9M in outflows, and Ethereum ETFs bled $56.8M yesterday.

Yeah... I think the McDonald's careers page is crashing right now.

Meme about asking Bitcoin to do something and it dips

Source: @TheCryptoLark

So, wtf happened?

The panic started in TradFi, actually, with a couple of regional American banks getting into trouble:

👉 One of them, Zions Bancorp, admitted it had made two business loans that went bad. In total, it lost about $50M because those borrowers couldn't pay the money back;

👉 Another bank, Western Alliance, said one of its loans might have involved fraud - meaning the borrower may have lied to get the money.

Now, these numbers aren't huge on their own - $50M isn't gonna crash the system.

But if a few banks are losing money on loans, investors start worrying that more banks could be having similar problems (bad loans that haven’t been revealed yet).

So traders started selling shares of regional banks, which pushed the regional-bank index down about 4% in a day.

When that happens, it doesn't just affect bank stocks; it affects how everyone feels about risk in general.

Why? Because banks are the financial system's plumbing. When banks look shaky, investors worry they'll lend less or pull back on risk, which means less money sloshing around in the system.

That makes everyone - from stock traders to crypto degens - more cautious.

Scared Squidward

What happens next?

Watch the same characters: regional-bank headlines, US liquidity gauges, and ETF flows.

If banks calm down and the Fed doesn't sound panicky, this whole thing could unwind as fast as it came.

But if the credit story sticks and "regional stress" becomes "systemic worry", then this might not be just a dip - it might actually be a warning shot.

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🥝 Memecoin harvest

If these coins pumped any harder, they'd break the internet 🖥️

Data as of 09:29 AM EDT.

Check out these memecoins and plenty more here.

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👨‍💻 The hackathon illusion

Imagine you're a fresh-faced developer, hyped up and ready to build your first big project. You've got at least 3 RedBulls in your veins, a GitHub repo open, and a dream.

Then you see it: a hackathon. Big names, big prizes, big opportunity. Sounds... perfect... right?

On September 2, Base hosted the Onchain Summer Awards, a hackathon celebrating the most innovative and widely used consumer mini-apps in the Base ecosystem. 500+ developer teams joined in to chase a $200,000 prize pool.

Pretty solid deal, props to Base for supporting the community...

... is something I'd be saying if this thing wasn't rigged.

Dog shocked

On October 7, Base announced the winners.

That's when an X user named Alanas, co-founder of Ogvio (an international money transfer service), noticed something… off.

While browsing through the Top New Consumer Apps category, he realized two of the winning projects - owatch (second place) and Opi Trade (third) - were hella sus.

According to his findings, both apps were basically AI-generated landing pages with no working buttons, no product, and no real functionality.

Further investigation revealed that some of these AI-generated shell projects were connected to Coinbase employees - the same company behind the Base network, and, conveniently, the hackathon's organizer.

Alanonchain's tweet about the Base hackathon being rigged

Source: @alanonchain

Which is VERY interesting, to say the least.

Hackathons are supposed to be these exciting, open events where anyone can showcase their skills, meet other builders, and maybe even turn a side project into a funded startup.

But when insiders and AI-generated projects win over actual working products, that whole community empowerment thing starts to sound a bit hollow.

And it's not just Base. Developers have been skeptical about hackathons for years.

Across forums and social media, people have complained that many of these events are more about PR and brand image than genuine innovation.

Some even call them exploitative - getting developers to pour hours into building ideas that companies can then use for free, all under the cozy banner of "community building."

The list of hackathon controversies is long, actually: CodeX with its underwhelming rewards, Hack the Hill raising fees on student participants, Salesforce's "pre-made project" winner scandal back in 2013…

It's almost like you can't host a hackathon these days without a bit of drama. So, it makes you wonder: are hackathons even worth it?

Hm meme

Maybe the better answer is: not in the way we're told they are.

Hackathons sell the idea of "the best builders win."

But in practice, they often reward connections, presentation skills, or simply being on the inside. The judging is opaque, the timelines unrealistic, and the prizes disproportionately small compared to the value companies extract from the publicity and submissions.

That doesn’t mean no one benefits - just that it's rarely the participants:

👉 For organizers, a hackathon is cheap marketing: a burst of social media buzz and free R&D disguised as community engagement.

👉 For developers, it’s unpaid labor dressed up as opportunity.

Sure, you might still learn something or meet someone useful - but those are side effects, not the point.

So maybe the question isn't "are hackathons worth it?"

It's "worth it for whom?"