Expectations for a Federal Reserve rate increase this month have fallen sharply, with CME data showing a roughly 50% probability of a 25-basis-point hike, down from 70% a day earlier. Federal Reserve Governor Waller said he would support holding rates steady if August data showed continued inflation improvement, while New York Fed President Williams said the case for a hike was not strong enough. In U.S. crypto policy, the House Republican leadership canceled votes for the weeks of September 21 and September 28, making passage of the CLARITY Act before the midterm elections highly unlikely, although SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said the Senate is expected to vote on September 15 and that the bill should pass and go to the president for signature. OpenAI began releasing its GPT-6 Astra flagship model, with an initial rollout to selected institutions before wider access for paid ChatGPT users and API and Amazon Web Services customers. The company said the model achieved top results in several mathematics, reasoning and cybersecurity tests, while co-founder and president Greg Brockman said AGI may be viewed in hindsight as arriving around this model. Astra costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, 2.5 times the pricing of GPT-5.6 Sol. Crypto markets also saw product expansion: Polymarket fully launched perpetual contracts for crypto, stocks and commodities with leverage of up to 20 times; Coinbase said it is seeking to offer single-stock perpetual contracts in the United States; Ethena approved a fee-conversion proposal with 100% support and began programmatic ENA buybacks; and Jupiter launched Universal Deposit, allowing supported assets from several networks to be converted into Solana USDC for a fixed $0.30 fee. Robinhood Chain’s decentralized exchange recorded $1.89 billion in 24-hour trading volume, while Pons added tokenized stock pairs and Uniswap Labs bought PONS tokens. Other developments included major AI acquisitions, venture funding, a proposed 25 trillion won Korean electricity prepayment plan for Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the pending shutdown of Ethereum Layer 2 network Silicon, and new forecasts and trading disclosures from crypto market participants.