CoreWeave's debt issues highlight the broader risks of aggressive AI infrastructure investments, potentially leading to sector consolidation.

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The reopening may ease market fears of a broader airspace closure, but ongoing threats keep long-term security and economic stability uncertain.

The post Riyadh airport reopens to international flights after Houthi attack closure appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The delay in South Korea's crypto tax may boost investor confidence but highlights ongoing regulatory and infrastructure challenges.

The post South Korea set to delay crypto gains tax to 2029, marking fourth postponement since 2020 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The liquidation event signals a potential shift in market dynamics, affecting investor confidence and future leveraged crypto market strategies.

The post Over $815M in crypto positions liquidated as Bitcoin, Ether prices drop appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The rise of 24/7 trading on Robinhood Chain highlights a shift towards global, round-the-clock financial markets, challenging traditional exchanges.

The post Robinhood Chain sees 59% of stock token trading after Wall Street closes appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

NY Seeks $1.37 Billion Judgment Against Operators of NovaTech Crypto Ponzi Scheme

New York Attorney General Letitia James is trying to secure a $1.37 billion judgment against the operators of NovaTech and its predecessor AWS Mining, two successive cryptocurrency investment schemes that allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide out of more than $1 billion.

Alleged founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion never appeared in court and, according to the AG’s office, fled the country.

“NovaTech and AWS Mining scammed thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers by telling them they were making a safe investment when in reality, they were victims of a pyramid scheme,” James said in a statement. “These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings.”

The schemes, AWS Mining and later NovaTech, relied on promoters who recruited heavily in Haitian and other immigrant communities — through prayer groups, WhatsApp chats, and ads in Haitian Creole.

AWS Mining sold crypto mining contracts promising 15 to 20 percent monthly returns and 200 percent within 15 months. It collapsed in 2019. The Petions then launched NovaTech, marketed as a registered hedge fund broker, promising weekly trading returns of two to four percent — more than 140 percent a year.

Those returns were fabricated, according to prosecutors. Records from B2Broker, which supplied NovaTech’s white-label trading platform, show that of the more than $1 billion investors deposited between 2019 and 2023, only about $26 million was ever actually traded — and NovaTech’s traders lost $18.2 million of that. Returns to earlier investors came from newer deposits, not trading. When NovaTech collapsed in mid-2023, tens of thousands of investors could not withdraw their funds.

The AG is also seeking $134.5 million the Petions allegedly withdrew to their own wallets from the investor account Cynthia Petion solely controlled, plus $4.7 million tied to the earlier AWS Mining scheme. A default judgment entered in August 2025 already bars the couple and their companies from the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency industries.

Separately, four of the scheme’s top promoters have agreed to pay nearly $6 million in disgorgement to victims and accepted the same industry bans.

This post NY Seeks $1.37 Billion Judgment Against Operators of NovaTech Crypto Ponzi Scheme first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Blockstream Launches Institutional Consulting Services, Opens Lugano Office

Blockstream has launched a consulting business for financial institutions and opened an office in Lugano, Switzerland, the company shared today. The expansion gives banks, asset managers and other institutions direct access to the firm’s engineering teams and Bitcoin infrastructure, Blockstream said. 

Blockstream Consulting Services will support institutions through the evaluation, design and implementation of Bitcoin-based financial infrastructure. The company said the business will develop solutions for tokenized asset issuance, confidential settlement and related infrastructure, with services spanning technical strategy, system architecture, integration and implementation.

From Lugano, Blockstream plans to serve clients across Switzerland, including Zurich, Geneva and Zug. The company said the office will serve as a hub for its European operations, supporting client relationships, strategic partnerships and collaboration with the region’s financial and technology communities.

“Switzerland is an important market for Blockstream given its longstanding banking tradition and supportive regulatory framework for digital assets,” said Peter Bain, chief marketing officer of the company. “We look to provide regional expertise in markets where we see demand for Bitcoin infrastructure. Our consulting business, combined with our new office in Lugano, will bring tailored Bitcoin solutions to financial institutions across Europe.”

Founded in 2014, Blockstream develops technology and services across Bitcoin custody, settlement, payments, asset issuance and self-custody. Its products include the Liquid Network sidechain, Elements, Simplicity, Core Lightning, the Jade hardware wallet and the Blockstream App. This year, the company launched Simplicity smart contracts on Liquid and added Lightning support to Jade.

Bitcoin adoption by financial institutions

The company said the consulting business draws on that experience, with capabilities in cryptography, protocol engineering, security and financial technology. Multidisciplinary teams will give institutions access to the firm’s technical staff from initial evaluation through deployment.

“The next phase of Bitcoin adoption is its integration into existing financial systems,” said Adam Back, Blockstream’s co-founder and CEO. “Our extensive experience in Bitcoin cryptography, protocol development and engineering gives Blockstream the technical expertise to address the complexities of integrating Bitcoin into traditional financial infrastructure.”

The company framed the move as part of a long-term commitment to Switzerland and a broader strategy of building a presence in key markets to support institutional Bitcoin adoption. 

The country has become a center for digital asset firms, with Zug’s “Crypto Valley” and a regulatory framework that permits banks to hold and trade bitcoin on behalf of clients.

There was no pricing disclosed, headcount for the Lugano office or named clients for the consulting business. The company said the Lugano office is open and that consulting engagements are available to institutions across Europe.

This post Blockstream Launches Institutional Consulting Services, Opens Lugano Office first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Core Ends Long Embargoes for Bugs AI Can Rediscover

Bitcoin Core has changed its security disclosure policy to speed up fixes for vulnerabilities that large language models can find with little effort, ending the months-long embargoes those bugs once received.

Maintainers merged the change to the project’s security policy on Thursday. Chaincode Labs developer Antoine Poinsot, who wrote the proposal, announced it in a message to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List the same day.

“We recently experienced an increase in the number of reports for security vulnerabilities that can be easily (re-)discovered,” Poinsot wrote. “This is largely due to LLMs drastically reducing the bar to find certain classes of issues or identify covert fixes.”

How the policy worked before

Bitcoin Core, the software that runs on most nodes in the Bitcoin network, has graded each reported vulnerability by severity and timed its disclosure to match. Low-severity flaws were made public two weeks after the next major version shipped. 

Medium- and high-severity issues stayed under embargo until two weeks after the last affected release reached end of life, a span that could stretch to a year.

The extended timelines gave node operators, many of whom upgrade at a slow pace, time to move to patched software before details became public. In practice, the approach meant fixes went unreleased for older maintained versions and arrived with the next major release.

Poinsot argued that this tradeoff fails for bugs that are easy to rediscover. “The embargo period achieves little but it delays the availability of a fixed release,” the policy reads.

What changes

During triage, Bitcoin Core can flag a vulnerability as “easily discoverable,” a category the policy defines as issues that can be found “with minimal effort, such as through a simple LLM prompt.” The label is open to flaws found by other means as well.

For those issues, the project will backport a fix to every maintained major version, cut point releases as soon as possible and publish a security advisory with some details at the same time as the fixed software. 

Poinsot acknowledged that such fixes will have less testing time before they reach users.

Vulnerabilities outside that category keep the existing severity-based schedule. Critical bugs, those that could enable coin theft at the protocol level, inflate the supply or cause a permanent chain split, remain outside the standard policy and will be handled case by case.

Developer Antoine Riard pushed for an option to ship a fix without an advisory and withhold details on a case-by-case basis. Poinsot declined, writing that alerting users without details “could create more risk unnecessarily” by prompting a rushed migration among users who would otherwise be unaffected.

A summer of AI-driven reports

The change follows months of heightened pressure on Bitcoin’s open-source projects. In late July, a volunteer group of 16 developers known as the Bitcoin Red Team ran AI models across 390 bitcoin repositories in about a day and logged 4,962 findings, including 85 rated critical.

Within days, a BTCPay Server flaw the group had reported in private was exploited on live merchant servers, draining Lightning nodes.

In August, Core Lightning developers told operators to upgrade or disconnect after AI-generated reports to the project proved accurate.

The Red Team effort followed a Coldcard hardware wallet exploit in which attackers drained 594 BTC in 25 minutes on July 30. Losses across four sweeps approached $114 million.

This post Bitcoin Core Ends Long Embargoes for Bugs AI Can Rediscover first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin ETFs Lose Over $635M In One Day Following Oil Price Spike 

U.S. investors quickly reversed course on Thursday, cashing out over half a billion dollars from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds as risk-off sentiment surfaced again. 

A total of $635.6 million left the funds on Thursday, data from Farside Investors shows. The redemptions put downward pressure on the price of bitcoin, which dropped under $81,000 at one point. 

The coin has since rebounded and was recently trading for nearly $81,669, down just 1% over a 24-hour period. 

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust saw the biggest outflows, with investors cashing out over $254 million. Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund followed, losing close to $218 million. 

Over $109 million left the ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF; Morgan Stanley’s fund and Bitwise’s ETF lost nearly $30 million and over $27 million, respectively. 

But the investment vehicles this week have this week received net positive investment of over $439 million. 

Investors went into “risk-off” mode after flare ups in the Middle East sent the price of oil higher. Brent crude hit its highest price in five months after Yemeni rebel group the Houthis on Thursday attacked Saudi Arabia, sparking concerns over more disruption to energy supplies. 

Bitcoin’s price has been rattled this year since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, halting oil supplies as ships have struggled to pass through the strategic Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil passes through. 

A higher oil price can hurt the price of bitcoin and other “risk-on” assets because it increases the chances of the U.S. central bank raising interest rates. 

Bitcoin has typically done well in a low interest rate environment because it means the asset has more liquidity to rally. 

Investors on Thursday also sold off tech stocks, which had rallied earlier in the week off the back of SpaceX’s impressive earnings. 

Analysts are saying bitcoin is entering a bull market again. Data last month showed that  the leading cryptocurrency crossed above its 365-day moving average — a typical sign it is out of a bear market — following a strong run in August. 

Bitcoin notched a record of $126,080 in October 2025 but then began to sink later that month after the biggest liquidation event in crypto history saw over $19 billion in bets closed. 

The coin spent the first half of 2026 trading well below that level but picked up again in August and September, having its best quarter in years. 

This post Bitcoin ETFs Lose Over $635M In One Day Following Oil Price Spike  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Franklin Templeton Clears Final Hurdle For ETFs That Turn Stock Dividends Into Bitcoin

Franklin Templeton has taken the last regulatory step before launching two exchange-traded funds that convert stock dividends into bitcoin. 

On October 22, Franklin Templeton filed a Form 8-A with the Securities and Exchange Commission to register shares of the Franklin US Equity Bitcoin DRIP Index ETF and the Franklin US Innovation Bitcoin DRIP Index ETF for trading on the Nasdaq. A prospectus filed the same day lists an effective date of October 27.

The filings for both funds arrived in June without tickers or fees. Four months later, the details are in.

How the funds work

The Equity fund, ticker FBEQ, tracks the VettaFi US Large-Cap 500 Bitcoin DRIP Index. The index holds the 500 largest U.S. companies by market capitalization, weighted by float-adjusted market cap. 

As of September 30, it held 499 stocks ranging from $10.2 billion to $5.5 trillion in size, with a concentration in information technology.

At inception, the index allocates 95% to those stocks and 5% to bitcoin. Each dividend the companies pay, regular or special, is reinvested into bitcoin at the market open on the day after the ex-date. The bitcoin share of the portfolio grows with each payment.

A traditional dividend reinvestment plan, or DRIP, buys more shares of the company that paid the dividend. Franklin’s version routes that cash into bitcoin. 

For a holder, the dividend stream from the largest companies in America becomes a recurring bitcoin purchase, with no exchange account, no wallet and no custody decisions.

The bitcoin position has limits. At each quarterly rebalance, an allocation above 5% is trimmed to 4.5%. If bitcoin exceeds 20% of the index between rebalances, it is cut back to 4.5% within two business days, and the proceeds return to stocks. The result is a stock fund with a bitcoin sleeve, not a bitcoin fund.

The ETF does not hold bitcoin on-chain. It gains exposure through bitcoin exchange-traded products, including Franklin’s own spot fund, through bitcoin futures and options, or through depositary receipts, in some cases via a Cayman Islands subsidiary.

FBEQ carries a 0.09% expense ratio with no 12b-1 fee. Franklin Advisory Services manages the fund, with Franklin Templeton Institutional as sub-advisor. Dina Ting, Hailey Harris, Joe Diederich and Basit Amin serve as portfolio managers.

The Innovation fund follows the same mechanic on the VettaFi US Innovation 100 Bitcoin DRIP Index, which draws from the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq.

A deeper bet on bitcoin

Franklin Templeton filed for a spot bitcoin ETF in September 2023 and launched it as EZBC in January 2024. In April, the firm acquired 250 Digital and formed Franklin Crypto, an institutional digital asset division. Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has argued that blockchains threaten Wall Street’s fee structure more than its technology.

The DRIP funds extend that strategy to investors who may never buy bitcoin on their own. A retiree holding an S&P 500-style fund in a brokerage account can, through FBEQ, let dividends from the companies she already owns build a bitcoin position over years.

The prospectus warns that investors can lose money, and that bitcoin’s price swings may affect the fund’s net asset value. Whether that trade-off appeals to the audience Franklin Templeton is targeting will become clear after October 27.

This post Franklin Templeton Clears Final Hurdle For ETFs That Turn Stock Dividends Into Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Kraken's parent company wants a place in your finances long before you buy Bitcoin and long after you sell it. On Oct. 14, Payward agreed to acquire Saldo Finance Oy, the Finnish owner of Lithuania's Saldo Bank, in a deal expected to close in 2027 if regulators approve it. The purchase would add deposit accounts,…

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The spring contest allowed eligible duplicates to earn rewards, while Bhatt's retrospective links repeated discoveries partly to slow review.

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Eligible institutions can collect rebates funded by matched redeemers, whose auction fees are capped at the Express rate.

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Crypto exchange Kraken has withdrawn intrusive compliance demands sent to Monero customers after its co-CEO admitted the requests were unjustified. On Oct. 24, Arjun Sethi said that customers who purchased and withdrew Monero (XMR) had received emails requesting information about their employers, sources of funds, and intended use of the cryptocurrency. He acknowledged that no…

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Arthur Hayes has exited Maelstrom's directional crypto positions, and on-chain analysts are tracking about $26 million in token sales. In an Oct. 24 statement, Hayes said he had taken profits on Ethereum (ETH), Ethena (ENA), Uniswap (UNI), and other cryptocurrencies, citing mounting macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. The decision follows blockchain analytics firm Santiment's Oct. 23…

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Hedera costs $0.0785 on Sunday morning and is therefore 8.8 percent cheaper than a week ago. The reason lies less in news out of the network than in money that is no longer following: according to figures from October 23, the American spot fund on HBAR still holds $62.57 million, even though net inflows of around $113.75 million have gone into it since launch. At the same time, November brings a rebuild inside the network which affects no holder, but does affect everyone running their own infrastructure on Hedera.

Hedera (HBAR) This Week: 8.8 Percent Below the Level of the Previous Sunday

According to CoinGecko the price stands at $0.0785, or €0.0700, as of Sunday morning around 6 a.m. Over 24 hours that makes a gain of 0.85 percent, over seven days a loss of 8.76 percent and over thirty days a loss of 14.99 percent. Market capitalisation comes to $3.48 billion, which puts HBAR in 32nd place among all crypto assets.

Within the week it first went sideways and then down. The weekly high was $0.0854 on October 19, the weekly low $0.0774 on October 24. From there the price has pulled away by just under one percentage point. Trading turnover over the past 24 hours came to $61.5 million, which against a market capitalisation of $3.48 billion corresponds to a turnover of about 1.8 percent. For a token of this size that is a quiet figure, and it explains why individual larger sales move the price noticeably at the moment.

The all-time high is a long way off. It dates from September 15, 2021 and stands at $0.5692. Today's price is 86.2 percent away from it. In circulation are 44.33 billion HBAR out of a maximum of 50 billion that the protocol can ever issue. This upper limit has been fixed at Hedera from the start. Circulation grows through scheduled releases from the network's treasury, and there is no halving along the way as there is with bitcoin.

The Spot Fund on HBAR Holds Only $62.57 Million

A spot ETF is a fund that holds the token itself and whose shares trade on a securities exchange. For HBAR it exists in the United States under the ticker HBR; according to the prospectus the shares are listed on Nasdaq. The net assets of this fund stood at $62.57 million on October 23, and at $63.39 million a day earlier. On October 24 the fund recorded no net flow at all, neither in nor out.

The more telling figure sits next to it. Since launch, net inflows of around $113.75 million have gone into the fund. Today the fund holds $62.57 million. Between the two values there is a gap of about $51 million, and that gap is not money withdrawn but price value lost.

Price Loss or Outflow: With an ETF These Are Not the Same Thing

Two quantities count in judging a fund, and they are often confused. Net flow measures how much money investors pay in or take out. Net assets measure what the fund is worth at the end of the day, so flows plus price performance. If the price of the token held falls, the assets shrink even if not a single investor sells.

That is exactly the case at HBR. The largest reported single outflow in October was $559,000 on October 16, and on October 24 nothing moved at all. Compared with the decline in assets, those are small amounts. Anyone who infers a flight of institutional investors from the falling fund assets is reading the figure wrongly; the shareholders are largely staying invested, their stake has simply become worth less.

For you as a holder in Germany, that has one practical consequence. An ETF on a crypto asset that attracts hardly any new money gives the price no additional push. The expectation that an American fund approval would carry demand on its own has not been borne out at HBAR so far. How fund products on crypto assets are accessible here at all, and how they differ from a direct purchase, is set out in the overview of crypto ETFs in Germany.

Block Streams Replace the Record Stream: The Switch in November

Every blockchain has to record what has happened inside it. Hedera did this up to now through the so-called record stream, a sequence of files holding all confirmed operations. This format is being replaced. According to Hedera's announcement, the block stream becomes the authoritative format from November 2026, with the mainnet release of the consensus node in version 0.79.

The switch runs in stages. In July 2026 version 0.75 brought the first stage, in which packaged records initially ran over the new block nodes. Anyone who only evaluated record files noticed nothing of it. November brings the decisive step: the block stream then receives network-wide bundled TSS signatures. TSS stands for threshold signature scheme, a procedure in which a minimum number of participants must act together to produce a valid signature. For the network that means the validity of a block follows from the signature itself and no longer from reconciling many individual files.

In Hedera's release notes, version 0.78 currently stands without a mainnet date; it was deployed on the testnet on October 8. The exact day of the mainnet switch to 0.79 is therefore not yet finally published, but the month is set.

What HIP-1193 Requires of Mirror Node Operators

A mirror node is a server that reads along with the network's data and makes it queryable through interfaces. Exchanges, wallets, analytics services and tax tools hang off it. For these operators November is not a side issue but a deadline with a hard consequence.

Hedera names three points. First, at least mirror node version 0.163.0 has to be running in the production environment; older versions take in no new data after the switch. Second, the service that reads the data stream today needs read rights on the new stores for current block streams, and that for mainnet, testnet and previewnet. Third, after the switch it should be checked whether ingestion is actually running, which can be established by querying the most recent blocks. The full specification carries the identifier HIP-1193; the underlying proposals for block streams and block nodes are HIP-1056 and HIP-1081.

Anyone running an application over the usual interfaces, the SDKs or the JSON-RPC access does not, according to Hedera, have to change anything in the code. The switch concerns the data layer, not the application layer.

Why It Still Counts for HBAR Holders

Your balance does not change through the switch. There is no fork, no new tokens, no action in the wallet. What can change is the availability of services around HBAR, should individual operators sleep through the switch. An exchange whose mirror node takes in no more data after the cutover will show deposits with a delay or freeze withdrawals temporarily until the situation is fixed.

Realistically the risk is small, because the large providers keep their versions up to date and Hedera has announced the deadline since June. A look at the status of your trading platform in the days around the switch still costs nothing. That more than plain transfers now runs on Hedera became clear in October, when tokenised equities became tradable through HashPack.

Hedera Council: Companies Instead of Anonymous Developers

Hedera's further development is decided by a body made up of companies, the Hedera Council. Each member runs a node in the network and votes on development, by its own account with equal voting rights. FedEx joined most recently; the logistics group announced this on February 13, 2026 and gave digital supply chains as the reason.

This line-up is the network's selling point towards companies and explains why Hedera turns up regularly at public authorities and large corporations. It is not, however, a promise about the price. A seat on the body does not mean the company holds HBAR, moves sums in the network or runs products on it. Analysts who infer future demand from council memberships are mixing a governance question with a market question.

Levels Up and Down: $0.0774 and $0.0854

The two points at which the week was decided lie close together. On the downside, the weekly low of October 24 at $0.0774 marks the zone that has held most recently. Below it, at $0.0750, follows a round level with no particular history this week. On the upside stands the weekly high of October 19 at $0.0854, and before it the round $0.0800 which the price ran down through on October 23.

These are observations from the price series of the past seven days, not price targets and not a recommendation. How far such levels carry depends on turnover, and at 1.8 percent of market capitalisation per day that is currently low. A continuously maintained reading of the longer-term situation is on the Hedera prediction page.

Buying HBAR in Germany: Access, MiCA and Fees

HBAR is regularly tradable in Germany. That is not a given, because since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets took full effect, only authorised providers may supply crypto asset services here, and individual tokens have dropped out of the offering as a result. For HBAR that does not apply; the token is carried by several trading venues authorised in the EU.

On the purchase, it is above all the cost side that decides. On top of the trading fee comes the spread between the buy and sell price, and with a token doing $61.5 million in daily turnover that spread is noticeably wider than with bitcoin. Anyone buying small amounts pays both twice, on the way in and on the way out. A comparison of the terms is therefore worth more than with the large assets; the authorised trading venues are in the overview of the best crypto exchanges.

Custody, Holding Period and Leverage at Hedera

On custody you have the choice between the account at the exchange and your own wallet. If you leave HBAR at the exchange you carry the provider's risk, but have no key to lose. If you hold it yourself, responsibility for securing it rests entirely with you. Hedera balances can be held on common hardware devices, which generate the key and never reveal it.

For tax, the same applies to HBAR as to other crypto assets held as private assets. If you sell at a profit within a year of the purchase, that profit is taxable as a private disposal; after a year has passed it is tax free. The federal government is working on abolishing this holding period, it has not been decided, and until the law changes the one-year period stays as it is. Because Hedera transactions are very cheap and many users accordingly accumulate a great many operations, assigning the acquisition dates quickly becomes hard to keep track of.

Anyone trading HBAR with leverage should take another look at the turnover situation. In thin trading, smaller market moves are enough to bring a position to liquidation, that is to forced closure by the platform as soon as the collateral is no longer sufficient. The distance between today's price and the weekly low is around one percent; at tenfold leverage, a tenth of the stake is already used up within that range.

HBAR at $0.0785: Without New Inflows the Push Is Missing

The week has shown two things. The fund in the United States is losing assets because the price is falling, and not because investors are getting out on any larger scale. And the network keeps working on its data layer in November, without holders having to do anything for it.

1. Check whether your trading venue is authorised in the EU and what fee, including the spread, it charges for HBAR. The authorised providers and their terms are in the exchange comparison.
2. Decide where the tokens should sit. For holdings that stay longer, self-custody is the variant without provider risk; the devices for it are in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Record your acquisition data for as long as the one-year period applies. With many small operations, a tax and portfolio tool takes that over.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

BNB Chain completed its 37th quarterly burn on October 19, 2026 and in doing so removed 1,646,196.44 BNB from circulation for good. Total supply has stood at 131,512,085 BNB ever since. At the time of the operation, the burned amount was worth around $1.197 billion.

For you as a holder, the billion-dollar figure matters less than the direction: the supply of the fourth-largest cryptocurrency keeps shrinking under a fixed procedure, and the price has barely reacted to it. BNB is quoted at $741.49, 3.36 percent higher than a week ago. This article sorts out what exactly happened, how the procedure does its arithmetic, and what a tighter supply means for your decisions.

Quarterly Burn of October 19: 1,646,196 BNB Are Out of Supply

A burn is the final destruction of tokens: the tokens land at an address from which nobody can withdraw anything again, and they therefore disappear from supply. BNB Chain documented the operation on its blog and also linked the transaction on BNB Smart Chain there, so the destruction can be verified publicly. The entry is dated Monday morning, October 19, 2026.

The figures from the official announcement: 1,646,196.44 BNB burned, remaining supply 131,512,085 BNB, worth around $1.197 billion. Individual industry outlets give the remaining supply as 131,512,500 BNB. What counts is the number from the blockchain itself, and that number is 131,512,085.

Auto-Burn: Price and Block Count Set the Amount, Not Profit

Many readers associate burns with profit sharing: a company earns money and buys back its own tokens with it. With BNB Chain's quarterly burn that is expressly not the mechanism. The procedure is called Auto-Burn and calculates the amount from two quantities, the BNB price and the number of blocks BNB Smart Chain produced during the quarter. The higher the price, the fewer tokens are destroyed, and the other way round.

That has a consequence which is easily lost when reading the headlines: a large burn is no proof of a strong quarter. It can just as easily mean that the price was low. The formula is in the open, and the community's public burn tracker sets it out together with the history. As a long-term goal, the procedure names a total supply of 100 million BNB.

BEP-95: The Second Burn Runs Along With Every Transaction

Alongside the quarterly burn there is a second, less conspicuous route. BEP-95 is a rule of BNB Smart Chain that destroys part of the fees directly with every transaction. This burn runs continuously and depends on how much happens on the blockchain.

How small these amounts are by comparison is shown by a look at the data after the quarterly burn. CoinGecko currently reports BNB's total supply as 131,511,767 tokens. Against the 131,512,085 immediately after October 19, that is around 318 BNB fewer in six days. The quarterly burn therefore takes a good five thousand times as much out of supply in a single step as the ongoing fee burn does in not quite a week.

Remaining Supply of 131,512,085 BNB: 31.5 Million Short of the 100 Million Target

The maximum amount of BNB originally stood at 200 million tokens. Of those, 131,512,085 are left after the 37th burn, and the procedure's target is 100 million. So 31,512,085 BNB are still outstanding, a good 24 percent of today's supply.

A projection from this is easy to make but should be read with care: if every future burn stayed as large as the most recent one, around 19 more quarters would be needed, so just under five years. That is precisely not what should be expected, because the amount depends on the price. If BNB rises sharply, the burns get smaller and the road gets longer. The figure is an order of magnitude, not a date.

Three Quarters Compared: The 35th, 36th and 37th Burn

The course of the last three quarters shows how evenly the procedure works. At the 35th burn on April 15, 2026, BNB Chain destroyed 1,569,307.34 BNB according to its own announcement and then reported a remaining supply of 134,786,916.53 tokens. For the 36th burn, industry outlets report around 1.61 million BNB and a remaining supply of about 133.17 million; an announcement from BNB Chain itself on this could not be found in this research, which is why that figure should be read as a third-party statement. At 1,646,196.44 BNB, the 37th burn sits at the upper end of this range.

All told, a good 4.8 million BNB have therefore disappeared across three quarters. That is the part of the story which is documented. Everything beyond it is interpretation.

BNB Price $741: Weekly High $745.99, Weekly Low $722.68

According to CoinGecko, BNB stands at $741.49, or 661.81 euros, on Sunday morning. Over seven days that makes a gain of 3.36 percent, and over 24 hours one of 0.96 percent. The weekly low was $722.68 on October 19, which is to say on the very day of the burn, and the weekly high was $745.99 on October 22. Over 30 days there is a loss of 4.50 percent.

Market capitalisation stands at around $97.5 billion, and trading turnover over the past 24 hours at about $780 million. BNB therefore remains the fourth-largest cryptocurrency.

45.9 Percent Below the All-Time High of $1,369.99

The all-time high dates from October 13, 2025 and stands at $1,369.99. From today's price that is a distance of 45.9 percent. Anyone who bought at the high in the autumn of 2025 is therefore still sitting on a clear loss, even though supply has shrunk in four quarterly burns since then.

As an observation in both directions, that produces a narrow range: the weekly high at $745.99 is the next level at which it will show whether the recovery holds; below it, at $722.68, lies the weekly low from the day of the burn. The round $700 mark is the next orientation below that. These are observations from the weekly data, not price targets.

A Tighter Supply Is No Promise About the Price

The logic of "less supply, higher price" sounds compelling and still often fails to hold in the market. A price arises out of supply and demand, and demand is the more fickle of the two. The 37th burn is a good example: it took tokens worth $1.197 billion out of circulation, and six days later the price stands 3.36 percent higher than a week ago and 4.50 percent lower than a month ago.

On top of that comes a point that burn announcements rarely mention. What is destroyed comes from holdings that were not on the market anyway. How much freely tradable supply such an operation really tightens is not apparent from the announcement. With BNB, circulating amount and total supply coincide according to the CoinGecko data, both standing at 131,511,767 tokens. That makes the arithmetic clearer than with many other projects, but it does not answer the question about actual market liquidity.

Buying BNB in Germany: MiCA Authorisation and the Purchase Route

MiCA is the EU regulation for crypto assets. What it regulates are the providers, not your private holdings: anyone addressing retail customers in the EU needs authorisation as a crypto asset service provider. For you, that mainly means checking before you buy whether your provider holds that authorisation. The supervisors keep public registers for this, in Germany at BaFin and EU-wide at ESMA. A look there costs two minutes and says more than any marketing page. Which providers hold an authorisation and what they charge for trading therefore belongs among the first two questions before a purchase.

On the purchase itself, nothing special applies to BNB: the token is tradable against euros and against stablecoins on the large venues. What differs between providers is the spread, the order fee and the cost of withdrawing to an address of your own. That last point in particular is readily overlooked, and it decides whether self-custody pays off at all on small amounts.

Custody: Exchange Account, Software Wallet or Your Own Device

After the purchase you have three routes. You leave the tokens in the exchange account, in which case you carry the provider's risk. You move them into a software wallet on your phone or your computer, in which case the key sits on a device with an internet connection. Or you use a hardware device that keeps the private key offline and releases transactions only after confirmation on the device itself.

Which route fits depends on the amount and on how often you trade. For sums whose loss would hurt, offline custody is the calmer route; the devices and their differences are set out in the hardware wallet comparison. What remains important in all three cases is the recovery phrase: whoever loses it loses the tokens, and whoever passes it on gives them away.

Leveraged Products on BNB: Liquidation Comes Before the Margin Call

BNB is also tradable as a futures contract with leverage. The decisive difference from an equity account: there is no phone call and no deadline to top up. If the collateral is no longer sufficient, the platform closes the position automatically, and it does so precisely in the fast moves in which a price briefly overshoots. With a coin that has run between $722.68 and $745.99 in a week, a high level of leverage on a move of a few percent is already enough for that. How the platforms do their arithmetic and where the fees sit is shown by the perp DEX comparison.

Holding Period: One Year Decides the Tax

For private investors in Germany, crypto assets fall under the one-year holding period set out in section 23 of the Income Tax Act: anyone who holds for longer than twelve months and then sells pays no income tax on the gain. Within the year a threshold applies which, once exceeded, makes the entire gain taxable. Abolishing the holding period is under political discussion but has not been decided, so the period continues to apply until the law changes.

In practice that means: for every purchase you need the date, the amount and the price, otherwise the period cannot be documented later. That holds all the more if you buy through several providers. Tools that collect the records and produce a statement for the tax return take this bookkeeping off your hands. Binding guidance on your own case comes only from a tax adviser.

BNB Supply: From 131.5 Million, 31.5 Million Short of the Target

The 37th burn is documented, verifiable and so far unremarkable in its effect on the price. Three steps follow from it:

1. Check the authorisation before you buy. Look in the BaFin or ESMA register to see whether your provider is authorised as a crypto asset service provider. The overview is supplied by the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Weigh the withdrawal cost against the amount. Only once the withdrawal fee stands in a sensible relation to the sum does self-custody pay off. The terms for each venue are set out in the exchange comparison.
3. Record your purchase data. Keep the date, the amount and the price for each purchase so that the one-year period remains documentable; the tools for this are in the tax software comparison.

The primary source on the burn is BNB Chain's announcement with the linked transaction: 37th BNB Burn. The running history including the formula and the target amount is kept by the public BNB burn tracker.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Here is what is on the record: bitcoin stands at $80,853 on Sunday morning, and the three dates that will act on the price this week fall an hour earlier for you than they did last week. Our own assessment follows further down: the shifted hour changes nothing about the direction, but it decides whether you are awake for the moment of the decision or miss it.

The clock change overnight into Sunday applies to Europe only. In Germany the clocks went back from 03:00 to 02:00, as set out in the Central European time zone rules, whose implementation the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt distributes as the legal time. The United States does not switch until November 1. Between today and next Saturday, the gap between Berlin and New York is therefore five hours instead of the usual six.

Bitcoin Price on Sunday Morning: $80,853 After a Low of $79,263

Bitcoin is quoted at $80,853 on Sunday morning, measured against CoinGecko market data. Over 24 hours that is a gain of 0.06 percent, so the price is barely moving at all. Within those 24 hours, however, $1,686 separated the low at $79,263 from the high at $80,949. The quiet daily close therefore hides a night in which the eighty-thousand mark was briefly undercut.

The all-time high of $126,080 is 35.9 percent away. Market capitalisation stands at around $1.63 trillion. For the week ahead, the absolute figure matters less than the position relative to the moving averages, and that changed on Friday.

Bitcoin Below the 50-Day Line: What Has Moved Since Friday Morning

On Friday morning the price stood at $80,806. Our own calculation from 366 daily closing prices on October 24 put the 50-day line at $81,807, and in our article from Friday we described how the price had crossed it from above for the first time in 66 days.

Since then the price has moved by $47, or 0.06 percent. The line therefore remains above the price. For the coming trading days, what counts above all is whether the price reclaims it within a few days. If that does not happen by the close of the week, Friday's break was not a slip but the new state of play. The overnight low at $79,263 temporarily widened the distance to the line to $2,544.

The US Trading Day Starts at 14:30 German Time This Week

Wall Street opens at 9:30 local time in New York. Last week that was 15:30 German time. This week it is 14:30. The close at 16:00 local time correspondingly falls at 21:00 instead of 22:00. The trading hours of the New York Stock Exchange itself do not change, only where they sit in the German calendar.

That sounds like a footnote and is a practical figure for anyone who holds bitcoin alongside equities. The correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq has stayed high in recent weeks, and Friday's setback came in substantial part from the technology sector. Anyone who watches the first minutes after the US open, because that is where the largest share of the daily volume is created, moves that observation point forward by an hour this week. From November 2 the old rhythm applies again.

Fed Decision on Wednesday: 19:00 Instead of 20:00, Press Conference at 19:30

The Federal Open Market Committee, FOMC for short, meets on October 27 and 28. The body decides on the policy rate and traditionally publishes its statement at 14:00 local time on the East Coast, with the chair's press conference beginning half an hour later. The dates are listed in the Federal Reserve's meeting calendar.

For you, this week, that means the statement arrives on Wednesday at 19:00 German time and the press conference at 19:30. At the previous meeting round in September it was 20:00 and 20:30. Anyone who has aligned an order or a stop level with the minutes after publication should look at that setting now, before Wednesday comes.

On substance, the market expects little movement. The current target range is 3.75 to 4.00 percent, after the FOMC raised by 25 basis points in September. The CME Group's FedWatch tool showed a probability of around 90.6 percent for an unchanged rate on October 22, and around 9.4 percent for a further increase of 25 basis points. Consumer prices stood at 3.7 percent year on year in September, well above the central bank's two percent target.

What an FOMC statement is, in one sentence: the written justification of the rate decision, in which the central bank condenses its reading of prices and the labour market into a few paragraphs. Experience shows that crypto markets react less to the number itself, which is usually expected, than to the wording about the path ahead.

Options Expiry on Friday: $11.1 Billion Runs Out at 9 a.m.

The monthly options on bitcoin expire on Friday, October 30. We put the open interest at $11.1 billion in our article from October 24. The expiry at Deribit, the largest exchange for crypto options, takes place at 08:00 coordinated universal time. This week that is 09:00 German time; last week it would have been 10:00.

The mechanism behind it is worth two sentences, because it is often confused with a price crash. An option is the right to buy or sell bitcoin at a set price, and whoever has sold such rights hedges on the spot market. The closer the expiry comes, the more that hedge has to be readjusted, and it is precisely this readjustment that creates additional buy and sell orders around the strikes with the highest open interest. After the expiry that compulsion falls away, and the price often moves more freely than before.

Friday carries two further dates. It is the last trading day of the month, on which funds square their positions for the monthly accounting. And the CME futures on bitcoin are settled on the last Friday of the month against a reference price fixed at 16:00 London time, which this week means 17:00 German time.

ETF Outflows of $909.7 Million in Two Weeks Press on Supply

The American spot bitcoin ETFs lost a net $909.7 million in the two weeks to October 16, made up of $681.1 million in the first week and $228.6 million in the second. On October 22 the largest single-day outflow since June was added, $635.6 million, of which $254.1 million came from BlackRock's iShares product and $217.5 million from Fidelity's fund. On October 23 a further $110.3 million flowed out of the BlackRock fund.

Why these figures count for the price and not only for the statistics: an outflow means the fund redeems shares and sells bitcoin to do so. Supply in the market therefore rises by exactly that amount, regardless of what individual investors think. Cumulative net inflows since January 2024 still stand at around $57.3 billion, so the holdings are far from dissolving. But the direction of the past two weeks points down, and it coincides with the break of the 50-day line.

Mining Difficulty Rises by an Estimated 5.55 Percent on October 29

Between Fed Wednesday and expiry Friday sits a date from the network itself. On October 29 the bitcoin network adjusts mining difficulty, estimated 5.55 percent higher. Difficulty is the dial with which the blockchain makes sure, every 2,016 blocks, that a block is found every ten minutes on average, no matter how much computing power is connected.

For investors this is not a trading signal. It is a cost figure for the miners: revenue per kilowatt hour deployed falls by the same percentage as long as the price does not rise with it. With the price 35.9 percent below its high, that increases the pressure on the operators with the most expensive electricity contracts, and historically some of them have sold holdings in such phases.

Holding Period and Purchase Time: Which Clock Time Stands in Your Tax Record

For investors in Germany, cryptocurrencies held as private assets fall under the one-year holding period set out in section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Anyone who holds for longer than twelve months sells tax free; anyone who sells earlier pays tax on the gain at their personal rate, provided they exceed the threshold of 1,000 euros in the calendar year. We track the current state of the political debate about this period on our page on the crypto holding period.

The clock change touches this period at one point that almost nobody thinks about. Your purchase record carries a time stamp, and depending on the exchange it shows coordinated universal time, the provider's local time or your own. A purchase on October 25, 2026 at 00:30 German time is still October 24 in coordinated universal time. On a sale close to the anniversary, that difference decides whether you stand on the safe side of the deadline.

The practical consequence is simple and costs you five minutes: download your purchase record as a file instead of relying on the view in the app, and note next to it which time zone the stamp uses. Anyone who wants to do this continuously, without keeping it by hand, will find the right tools in our comparison of crypto tax software. These tools pull the transactions through an interface and convert the time stamps into German time.

Savings Plan at Month End: Check Your Execution Date Before Friday

Many savings plans on bitcoin are executed on the last day of the month or on the first business day of the following month. This month the last trading day falls on the same Friday as the options expiry and the funds' monthly accounting. That is no reason to pause a savings plan, because the whole point of one lies precisely in not choosing the moment.

It is a reason to know two things. First the execution time: if it falls in the morning, this week it sits after the Deribit expiry at 09:00 and therefore in a phase in which the spread between bid and ask is, experience shows, wider. Second the fee structure of your provider, because with small instalments a fixed minimum fee counts for proportionally more than any price move of the day. Anyone who wants to compare both will find the terms in our overview of crypto exchanges.

The Editorial View: Two Figures Weigh More Than the Wednesday Date

From the editorial desk, the shifted hour is a question of scheduling and not a question of price. The data supports that: the rate decision will with around 90 percent probability bring no change, and an expected decision rarely moves a market. Nothing in the price data argues against it either, because the 24-hour change of 0.06 percent shows a market that is not positioning itself.

What can actually decide the week are two other figures. The 50-day line at $81,807 sits $954 above the current price; reclaiming it would be the first reliable sign that Friday was a slip. And the ETF outflows of $909.7 million in two weeks are the quantity that brings supply to the market independently of any central bank meeting. If they do not turn, even a friendly press conference on Wednesday evening will help for only a few hours. This assessment weighs up the situation and is not a recommendation to buy or sell.

Fed Week: Three Dates Between Wednesday 19:00 and Friday 9:00

1. By Tuesday evening: look at the times in your notifications and limit orders. Everything that is tied to US dates sits an hour earlier this week. If you notice in the process that your exchange does not state a time zone, it is worth a look at the crypto exchange comparison, where the details on order types and time stamps are set side by side.
2. Wednesday, 19:00: the FOMC statement, with the press conference at 19:30. What matters is not the rate itself but the wording about the path ahead. Keep the $81,807 level in view; it is the first against which a counter-move can be measured.
3. Friday, 09:00: expiry of the monthly options, in the afternoon the settlement of the futures and the funds' month end. Anyone who works with leverage in this phase should check their liquidation price beforehand; the terms and margin rules of the providers are set out in the crypto broker comparison.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Solana staking currently brings you around 4.96 percent a year if your validator takes the usual commission of 5 percent. That figure appears in no advertisement; it follows from two quantities the network publishes itself: the issuance of new SOL currently stands at 3.59 percent a year, and 68.7 percent of all SOL are staked. Whoever splits the reward among fewer participants gets more per head, and that is exactly where the yield comes from.

This article takes you through the procedure and shows the figures that actually stood in the network on Sunday morning: 665 active validators, 25 of them delinquent, a median commission of 5 percent and an epoch currently lasting a good 25 hours. That epoch length determines how long you wait for the first reward and for a withdrawal. Where the price stands and which levels analysts name is set out in our Solana price prediction; here it is about the mechanics.

Solana staking in one sentence: delegate the stake, share the block reward

Solana secures itself with proof of stake. Anyone wanting to propose and confirm blocks needs voting weight, and voting weight arises from deposited SOL. Because very few retail investors run a computer of their own for it, there is delegation: you transfer the voting weight of your SOL to a validator and receive a share of the reward it collects for it.

What matters is what does not happen in the process. Your SOL do not leave your wallet and do not pass into the validator's ownership. The coins sit in a stake account of which you remain the owner, and the voting right merely points at the validator. It can neither spend nor lend the coins. What it can do is work sloppily, and that costs you yield. The terms and account types are described in the Solana documentation on staking.

One peculiarity compared with Ethereum: Solana knows no penalty deductions from the deposited amount. Whoever makes a mistake on Ethereum loses part of their stake; on Solana the stake stays untouched, and negligence comes through only as rewards that fail to arrive. How that looks on Ethereum and which yields stand there is something we have written up in our comparison of Ethereum staking providers.

The calculation behind the yield: issuance divided by the staking rate

The formula is simpler than the marketing pages suggest. The network issues a fixed share of new SOL per year, and that quantity is distributed in full among the stakers. If half of all coins were staked, each staker would receive twice the issuance rate. If all coins were staked, each would receive exactly the issuance rate.

On Sunday morning the issuance rate stood at 3.587 percent and the staking rate at 68.66 percent of total supply. That gives 5.22 percent gross, before the validator takes its share. At the median commission of 5 percent, 4.96 percent remains. With a validator charging no commission it would be 5.22 percent, with one charging 10 percent still 4.70 percent.

The second calculation is the uncomfortable one. If the network issues 3.59 percent new coins a year and you receive 5.22 percent, your share of the whole network grows only by the difference, that is by around 1.6 percent. The remaining 3.59 percent merely offsets the dilution. Whoever does not stake loses just under 3.6 percent of their relative share in a year; whoever stakes gains a good one and a half percent. Neither has anything to do with the price.

3.59 percent issuance: where the reward comes from in the first place

The issuance of new SOL began on February 10, 2021 at 8 percent a year and has since fallen by 15 percent of the respective previous year's value, until a floor is reached at 1.5 percent. That is how it is set out in the documentation on the issuance schedule. Today's 3.587 percent is therefore an intermediate step on a predetermined curve: extend the factor and the rate stands at about 3.05 percent in a year and at around 2.6 percent in two. If the staking rate does not rise in the same time, the yield falls in the same proportion.

On top of that comes a second source of income that is usually missing from yield figures: transaction fees and priority fees. Part of them goes to the validator producing the block, and large validators pass some of this income on. In times of high network load that can lift the yield by a fraction of a percentage point; in quiet weeks it is barely noticeable. For planning, rely on the issuance rate, not on fee spikes.

What otherwise defines Solana as a network, from the block time to the supply structure, is set out in our overview of what Solana is and how the blockchain behind SOL works.

68.7 percent of all SOL are staked: the consequences for the yield

Of a total supply of 636,396,109 SOL, 436,976,347 SOL were active as voting weight on Sunday morning. That is 68.66 percent of total supply and 74.09 percent of the freely circulating supply. Both figures belong side by side, because comparison sites name sometimes the one and sometimes the other, which leads to yield figures half a percentage point apart.

The movement is the interesting part. On October 9 the rate stood at 74.6 percent of the circulating supply, as we recorded at the time in our analysis of the Solana staking rate. Two weeks later it is 74.09 percent, that is half a percentage point less. For you as a staker that direction works: the fewer coins take part, the larger the share per unit. A rate of 74 instead of 76 percent lifts the gross yield by about 0.15 percentage points.

A high rate has a second side that is rarely written about. Two thirds of the supply sits in stake accounts with a deactivation period and is therefore not immediately available on the market. That supports the price in quiet phases. In a slump the effect reverses: whoever wants out must first wait for the network's rhythm, and the sales hit the market with a delay and in a bundle.

The validator commission decides: median 5 percent, 63 take everything

Every validator sets for itself what share of the reward it keeps. Among the 665 active validators, the commission on Sunday morning was 5 percent at the median. 267 validators took precisely those 5 percent, 228 charged nothing at all, 29 took 10 percent. And 63 validators stood at 100 percent, keeping the entire reward.

Those 63 are not a fraud, but they are a trap. Behind a commission of 100 percent there are usually arrangements in which the operator serves its own stake, or providers that distribute their returns by other routes. Whoever delegates there without checking receives zero yield while the voting weight counts. The commission appears in every serious validator overview; look before you delegate, not afterwards.

The converse does not hold, though. A validator at 0 percent is not automatically the best choice, because without income there is no money for proper hardware and standby. Downtime costs you more than a commission of 5 percent. Which providers deliver staking as a finished product with an interface and statements is compared in our comparison of staking platforms.

665 validators, 18 hold a third: why the choice is also political

Solana had 665 active and 25 delinquent validators on Sunday morning. The distribution is markedly more uneven than the total number suggests: the 18 largest together hold a third of the entire voting weight, the 40 largest half of it. A third is the threshold from which a group can block decisions of the network.

From that follows a choice that goes beyond your yield. Whoever delegates to one of the largest validators reinforces that concentration; whoever delegates to a smaller one with good standby spreads the weight. The yield is almost identical either way, because the reward is distributed in proportion to the stake and not to the size of the validator. The difference lies solely in the commission and in the downtime.

Public validator lists with commission, delinquency rate and stake distribution are there for checking. Three metrics are enough for a decision: a commission below 10 percent, no outages in the last epochs, and a stake share below one percent of the network.

An epoch lasts a good 25 hours: the rhythm for reward and withdrawal

An epoch on Solana comprises 432,000 slots. How long that takes in hours depends on how fast the network works through the slots, and that value fluctuates. Frequently read figures of two to three days stem from earlier years. By our calculation the current epoch was running at 212 milliseconds per slot; the preceding epoch lasted 91,673 seconds in full, that is 25 hours and 28 minutes. Two separate routes, the same result.

In practice that means three things. First: if you delegate, your stake only becomes active with the next epoch, so you wait at most about a day for the start. Second: rewards are credited at the epoch change, not continuously. Third: if you deactivate, the stake becomes inactive at the next epoch change and is only freely available after that. The several days of waiting often quoted do not apply at the current network speed.

For planning that means: between the decision to sell and the available balance there is as a rule less than a day, in the worst case just under two. Anyone wanting to act at short notice should keep part of the holding unstaked rather than wait for the epoch change.

From purchase to stake: where that works from Germany

There are two routes, and they differ in effort as much as in risk. The convenient one runs via an exchange: you buy SOL, activate the staking function in your account and have the reward credited automatically. The exchange chooses the validator, keeps part of the return and holds the coins in custody. Since January 1, 2026 only providers authorised under the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets may provide such services to retail customers in Germany.

The second route is delegating from your own wallet. You transfer the SOL to a wallet that supports Solana, create a stake account there and choose the validator yourself. The advantage: the coins stay in your hands, you know the commission, and the exchange's counterparty risk falls away. The price is taking responsibility for the access key and a few minutes of setup.

A practical note on costs: every action on Solana costs a network fee in the range of fractions of a cent, and a stake account ties up a small deposit of SOL that you get back when closing it. Below around 20 euros the effort is out of proportion to the return, because 5 percent on 20 euros is one euro a year.

Native staking against liquid staking: the difference in risk

With native staking your stake stays tied up until you deactivate it. With liquid staking you put SOL into a pool and receive a tradeable claim certificate in return, which gains in value against SOL over time. Well-known variants are JitoSOL and mSOL. The appeal lies in the fact that this certificate remains tradeable and can be deployed in other applications while the reward keeps running.

In return, two risks are added that do not exist with native staking. First, the programme risk: the pool is software, and software can have bugs or be attacked. Second, the deviation risk: the claim certificate is traded on the market and can quote below its calculated value, particularly in nervous phases in which many want out at once.

On the return the difference is small. Liquid staking pools usually take a fee of their own on the reward, which on balance leads to a net yield similar to a validator with a moderate commission. Whoever does not want to put the claim certificate to further use is therefore paying for the two additional risks without getting anything in return.

What can go wrong: outages, price losses and the deactivation period

The biggest risk does not sit in the staking but in the price. SOL was quoted at $102.38 on Sunday morning, and thus 65.1 percent below the record of $293.31 of January 19, 2025. Over twelve months the value is down 47.1 percent, over 30 days down 12.5 percent. A yield of 4.96 percent a year catches none of that. A total loss is possible with a crypto-asset.

The second risk is outages. 25 of the 690 validators were marked delinquent on Sunday morning, but together they held only around 215,000 SOL, a fraction of the total stake. Whoever has delegated to a delinquent validator earns nothing during that time; the stake stays untouched, because Solana knows no penalty deductions from the deposited amount. Check your validator's standby once a month and such a thing will come to light in good time.

The third risk is timing. Tied-up coins cannot be sold immediately, and on Solana the epoch change stands between decision and execution. At a good 25 hours per epoch that period is short, but it bites precisely when prices are falling fast.

Tax in Germany: staking income as other income

Two separate rules apply to the reward and to the staked coins, and many people confuse them. The reward itself is taxable when received, as a rule as income from other services under section 22 number 3 of the German Income Tax Act, at the price on the day of the credit. A threshold of 256 euros a year applies to it: stay below and nothing falls due; exceed it and the entire amount is taxable.

The staked SOL themselves are treated by the tax office like purchased coins, as another asset with a one-year holding period. Delegating does not reset that period, and the extension to ten years for staked coins once discussed is off the table. On the current state of the political debate about the holding period, we have put together the state of the reform.

The effort lies in the documentation. Every epoch produces a credit, so at a rhythm of a good 25 hours about 344 individual entries a year, each with its own price. That cannot be kept by hand. Which programmes read in staking credits per epoch and value them at daily prices is shown by our comparison of crypto tax tools. This is not tax advice; with larger amounts the case belongs in expert hands.

Solana staking: at 5 percent commission, 4.96 percent a year remains

The yield follows from 3.587 percent issuance divided by a staking rate of 68.66 percent, giving 5.22 percent gross and, after the usual commission, 4.96 percent net. The share of the network grows by around 1.6 percent in the process, the rest offsets the dilution. This is how to proceed, in order:

1. Obtain SOL and settle the route. Buy from a provider with EU authorisation and decide there whether the holding stays put or moves to a wallet of your own. Fees, spreads and deposit routes are set out in the overview of crypto exchanges.
2. Select a validator or platform. Watch for a commission below 10 percent, no outages in the last epochs and a stake share below one percent of the network. Finished products with an interface and statements are compared in the overview of staking platforms.
3. Set up records before the first credit arrives. Every epoch produces a tax entry of its own, around 344 a year. Set up the records before delegating, not next spring; the suitable tools are set out in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Kaspa is a cryptocurrency with its own proof-of-work network that does not build one row of blocks after another, but allows several blocks at once and then puts them into a binding order. Around ten blocks per second instead of one every ten minutes: that is the technical core. For holders, a date is coming up that concerns the money supply. On November 4, 2026 the reward per block falls from 2.060 to 1.945 KAS. The amount newly created each day shrinks again with it, and that in a network where 96.8 percent of all coins ever possible have long been in circulation.

The price stood at $0.0361 and 0.0322 euros on Sunday morning, with a market capitalisation of a good one billion dollars. That is enough for 75th place among all cryptocurrencies. How far the price sits from its record, how the valuation has moved lately and which levels analysts name is set out in our Kaspa price prediction. This article explains the substance behind it: how the network works, where new KAS come from, where you can trade them in euros, how custody works and what the tax office wants to know about it.

What is Kaspa? A proof-of-work BlockDAG instead of a linear blockchain

A classic blockchain is a row: block follows block, each pointing to exactly one predecessor. If two blocks arise at the same time, one wins, the other drops out of history and its work was for nothing. That is precisely what ties down bitcoin's speed limit: whoever clocks the blocks faster produces more such collisions and makes the network less secure.

Kaspa solves this with a different data structure. A BlockDAG, written out as directed acyclic graph, is a directed graph without cycles: each block may point to several predecessors, and several blocks may point to the same predecessor. Instead of a single row, a mesh arises. No block is discarded because it was finished at the wrong millisecond.

The security comes from the same procedure as with bitcoin. Proof of work means that anyone wanting to propose a block has to demonstrate computational work whose result anyone can check in fractions of a second. Kaspa uses the kHeavyHash algorithm for this, which runs on specialised hardware. There is no staking, no validators with a stake, no delegation. Whoever secures the network pays for it with electricity and equipment.

Two things Kaspa does not have matter more for the assessment than anything else. There was no pre-sale and no allocation to founders or funds; the project started in November 2021 with an empty balance for everyone. And there is no foundation watching over the treasury and the voting rights. Both make the distribution flatter than at many younger projects, but they also deprive the network of the marketing budget with which other ecosystems attract developers.

GHOSTDAG: how Kaspa orders parallel blocks instead of discarding them

GHOSTDAG is the set of rules that turns the mesh into a list. The mechanism in two sentences: the protocol looks in the graph for the largest group of blocks that know one another mutually, declares it the honest majority and arranges all remaining blocks into that order. Blocks of the majority group are called blue, the others red; red blocks stay valid, their transactions count, they simply carry less weight in the ordering.

The practical gain lies in the waiting time. With bitcoin, the security of a payment rises with every new block on top of it, and a block takes ten minutes on average. With Kaspa, ten blocks arrive per second, and each of them increases the weight of the majority group. A payment is therefore settled firmly enough after a few seconds that a reversal becomes unrealistic, without the network having to rely on a second settlement layer.

The procedure was designed by Yonatan Sompolinsky, an Israeli computer scientist whose earlier work on block ordering was already cited in bitcoin circles. The successor procedure DAGKnight, which is meant to lower the waiting time further without a fixed security parameter, has been described for years but does not run on the main network. Whoever uses Kaspa today uses GHOSTDAG.

Ten blocks per second: what the Crescendo upgrade delivered

Until spring 2025 Kaspa ran at one block per second. Then came Crescendo, a protocol change that multiplied the pace tenfold. The developers published the necessary software at the end of March 2025 as the mainnet Crescendo release; the change became active at the beginning of May 2025, tied to a counter reading in the network rather than to a clock time.

What matters for holders is what Crescendo did not change: the issuance per second. The reward per block was cut in the same proportion in which the number of blocks rose. Ten times as many blocks, each with a tenth of the reward, gives the same quantity of new coins per unit of time. Anyone who read back then that the reward had fallen by 90 percent saw only half the calculation.

In our own count on Sunday morning, a good nine blocks per second came together: 846 new blocks in a good minute and a half. The ten is therefore a target figure that the network falls just short of in everyday use, because the difficulty adjustment always trails the actual computing power. For practical purposes the difference makes no odds; for assessing advertising claims it does.

Mining instead of staking: how new KAS come into being

New KAS arise exclusively as a block reward for mining. There is no staking yield, no lending programme in the protocol and no way to obtain more coins by holding. Anyone reading about a yield on Kaspa is reading about a third party's offer, not about a property of the network.

Mining is done with ASICs, that is specialised chips for kHeavyHash. Graphics cards were competitive in the first months and have not been since 2023. For private individuals in Germany, the sums come down to the electricity bill: a device drawing several kilowatts continuously at German household prices does not usually pay for itself at a coin price of three cents. Anyone going in regardless should do the arithmetic first rather than follow reports from regions with different electricity prices.

For tax, mining in Germany is a different matter from buying and holding. There is a separate section on that below.

The KAS supply: 96.8 percent is already in circulation

Kaspa has a fixed cap of 28,704,035,605 KAS. In circulation on Sunday morning were 27,774,126,762 coins. That works out at 96.76 percent of the final supply, leaving around 930 million KAS still to arise before issuance ends. For comparison: with bitcoin a good 5 percent of the 21 million is still missing, and those last coins are spread over more than a hundred years.

The difference from bitcoin lies in the issuance schedule. Bitcoin halves the reward every four years in one go. Kaspa lowers it every month by a fixed factor, namely by the twelfth root of one half. Twelve such monthly steps add up arithmetically to a halving, but the curve runs smooth instead of in stages. In the network this is called chromatic emission, because the factors correspond to the semitone series in music.

For investors this has two consequences. The first: with Kaspa there is no event on which a halving narrative can be built, because the tightening comes in small portions and does not culminate in a single date. The second weighs heavier: because almost all the coins have already been distributed, hardly any pressure comes from the supply side. Whatever moves the price moves it through demand.

November 4, 2026: the block reward falls to 1.945 KAS

The next monthly step is calculated for November 4, 2026 at 13:54 UTC. The reward per block then falls from 2.06017223 to 1.94454365 KAS, that is by 5.6 percent. At ten blocks per second that corresponds to a daily issuance falling from around 1.78 million to around 1.68 million KAS; at a price of three cents that is some $3,600 less in new coin value per day.

The date is not an event at which holders would have to do anything. No address changes, no wallet needs an update, no deadline expires. Those affected are the miners: miners' revenue falls by 5.6 percent at the same electricity consumption, and anyone calculating tightly switches off. If the computing power in the network falls as a result, the difficulty adjusts downwards and the balance settles anew.

For anyone who needs a figure for the calendar: because the factor stays the same each month, the reward will in a year's time be at about half today's value, that is at a good one KAS per block. That calculation is not a forecast; it follows directly from the schedule laid down.

Toccata: Kaspa gains programmability on layer 1

For a long time Kaspa was a pure payment network: send coins, nothing further. In June 2026 the developers released the software for Toccata, the second major protocol change after Crescendo. This version brings so-called covenants to the first layer, that is conditions a transaction can impose on its own follow-up transactions, together with a facility for checking cryptographic proofs.

That makes it possible to build applications without Kaspa acquiring a virtual machine of its own along the lines of Ethereum. The route was deliberately chosen differently: an application computes outside the main network and only proves the result there. Toccata has been live on the main network since the summer, which can be read off the protocol's progress figure, long past the switchover point laid down.

Whether an ecosystem comes of it is open. The tools are young, the number of applications small, and a large part of the activity has so far run through a single rollup application. Whoever buys Kaspa for the sake of future applications is buying an expectation, not an inventory.

Where KAS can be traded in euros: Kraken and Bitvavo carry the pair

We checked the large trading venues on Sunday morning, and the picture is clearer than many comparison sites paint it. Kraken carries a KAS against euro pair with online status; the smallest order there is 120 KAS, the minimum amount 45 cents, and the price is quoted to five decimal places. Bitvavo likewise carries KAS against euro in normal trading, with a minimum order of 5 euros or 154.96 KAS and a finer price increment of six decimal places.

Coinbase carries no KAS pair, neither against the euro nor against the dollar. Bitget and MEXC trade KAS against the dollar stablecoin USDT, that is without direct euro access. Anyone wanting to buy in euros therefore ends up, as things currently stand, at two addresses, and both are authorised in the EU. Which platform charges which fees and where the spread lands in everyday use is shown by our comparison of crypto exchanges; if supervision matters more to you than selection, the overview of regulated crypto exchanges leads straight to the providers with EU authorisation.

One point that counts for more than the fee table when buying a coin of this size: market depth. Across all trading venues together, just under $9 million was turned over in KAS in the 24 hours before Sunday morning, against a market capitalisation of a good one billion. Some 2.8 million KAS of that fell to Kraken's euro pair, around 89,000 euros converted. An order of a few thousand euros moves the price measurably in a book like that. Limit orders instead of market orders are not a refinement for the advanced here.

Kaspa against bitcoin: the difference lies in the confirmation time

Both networks secure themselves with computational work, both have a fixed cap, neither knows a pre-allocation. What separates them is the pace at which things settle. With bitcoin a block takes ten minutes on average, and merchants usually wait for several blocks before treating a payment as final. With Kaspa, several thousand blocks arrive in the same time, and a payment counts as practically irreversible after seconds.

For that, Kaspa pays a price the comparison likes to leave out. Ten blocks per second generate far more data, and whoever wants to keep the whole history of the network needs space accordingly. Kaspa solves this with pruning: older parts of the mesh are discarded as soon as their validity has been proven in another way. That keeps the storage requirement small, but it means that not every participant holds the complete history, as is customary with bitcoin.

The second difference is maturity. Bitcoin has run since 2009, has survived several complete market cycles, is carried on the balance sheets of listed companies and underlies authorised funds in the United States and Europe. Kaspa has run since November 2021, has a narrower trading base and no comparable financial products. Whoever puts Kaspa into a portfolio is putting a markedly younger and smaller project there.

MiCA authorisation: what has applied to German customers since January 2026

The European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short, requires anyone offering crypto services in the EU to hold authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. Germany ended the transitional period for existing providers at the end of 2025; since January 1, 2026 only authorised houses may serve German retail customers. Which institutions the supervisor has recorded and which permissions they hold is published by BaFin in its register of crypto institutions.

For KAS that means, concretely: the authorisation attaches to the provider, not to the coin. MiCA does not examine individual crypto-assets for quality and issues no recommendation. An exchange with an EU permission may list any crypto-asset as long as it does not securitise a monetary claim. The fact that you can buy KAS at an authorised house therefore says nothing about the coin and everything about the exchange.

What the authorisation does give you is not little: segregated custody of client funds, mandatory disclosures on fees, an orderly complaints procedure and a supervisor that can intervene. What it does not give you is deposit protection. Price losses and insolvency risks remain entirely with you.

Custody: KAS needs an address of its own

KAS lives on the Kaspa blockchain itself and not as a token on another one. An Ethereum address accepts no KAS, and sending to a wrong address is as a rule final. Kaspa addresses begin with the prefix kaspa:, which makes checking before sending easier.

There are three ways to store it. The exchange itself is the most convenient and the one with the greatest counterparty risk: whoever leaves coins there is trusting the house. A software wallet on your own computer or phone gives you the keys but ties the security to the device. A hardware wallet keeps the keys in a separate chip that never releases them; how that works technically is explained in our article on what a hardware wallet is and how the device protects the keys.

A practical note on choosing a device: KAS is not supported by every hardware wallet, because a dedicated integration is needed for it. Check support on the manufacturer's site before you buy a device, and transfer a small amount first before you move the whole holding.

Tax in Germany: holding period and the special role of mining

Purchased KAS is treated by the tax office like other crypto-assets: as another asset within the meaning of section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. If you sell at a profit within a year of buying, that profit is taxable at your personal rate as soon as the sum of all private disposals in a year exceeds the threshold. After a holding period of one year the profit is tax-free. On the state of the political debate about this period and what the German finance ministry last said about it, we have put together the state of the crypto holding period reform.

Mining runs by different rules. Block rewards received are to be recognised as income at the time they are received, at the price applying then, and where the operation is permanent and directed at profit, a trade is often present, with business registration and trade tax. The coins later sold are then no longer covered by the one-year privilege for private disposals. Anyone mining more than occasionally should settle this with a tax adviser before the first business year closes.

Documentation is more laborious with a coin like KAS than with bitcoin, because purchases often run across several platforms and additionally via dollar stablecoins. Every exchange of USDT into KAS is itself a tax-relevant event. Which programmes bring acquisition dates, holding periods and swaps together across several exchanges is shown by our comparison of crypto tax tools.

The risks: 82.6 percent below the record and a thin market

On Sunday morning the price stood 82.6 percent below its high of $0.2074, which it reached on July 31, 2024. Over the last twelve months the value is down 31.9 percent, over 30 days down 9.4 percent, over the past week up 2.3 percent. A total loss is possible at any time with a crypto-asset of this size.

Three risks are specific to Kaspa. The first is the concentration of computing power: a few manufacturers of specialised chips and a few large mining pools decide how distributed the network really is. The second lies in the absence of a foundation. What works as an advantage in the distribution is missing in development funding; the protocol lives on volunteers and donations. The third is the trading base: two euro pairs and a daily turnover in the single-digit millions mean that one larger seller can move the price on their own.

Against that stands a network that has run for five years without a standstill, has come through two major protocol changes without splitting the network and offers a property that is rare in the proof-of-work camp: confirmations in seconds without a second layer. What comes of it will be decided by whether applications arise on Toccata or whether the network remains a fast means of payment without demand.

Kaspa: from November 4 every block delivers 1.945 instead of 2.060 KAS

Kaspa is a proof-of-work network with a BlockDAG structure, around ten blocks per second, a fixed cap of 28.7 billion KAS and an issuance that falls each month by one twelfth of a halving. 96.8 percent of the coins are distributed, and the next step falls on November 4, 2026. If you want to touch the coin, these are the three steps in a sensible order:

1. Choose a trading venue. In euros, Kraken and Bitvavo currently carry a KAS pair, both with EU authorisation. Compare fees, spread and deposit routes beforehand in the overview of crypto exchanges and work with limit orders in a thin book.
2. Settle custody. Decide before buying whether the holding stays on the exchange or moves to a device of your own, and when buying a device check KAS support first. The models with their integrations are set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Set up documentation. Record the purchase date, quantity and price of every inflow, including for swaps via stablecoins, because the one-year period depends on it. Which tools manage that across several platforms is set out in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

(As of October 25, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

A policy change effective Oct. 16 carves out an exception to Google’s long-standing pledge—letting connected Gmail, Drive, and Photos data personalize ads through its Personal Intelligence AI features.

Sweden's Government Offices will block ChatGPT and Claude on staff computers from Monday, steering civil servants to Microsoft Copilot as the only AI that passed its security review.

Robert Bowling, who spent six years working on Call of Duty, told Decrypt that Activision suggested cutting discs nearly two decades ago.

HSBC switched on its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin inside PayMe on Friday, testing whether a bank-issued token can become everyday money.

Days before Israel’s election, Netanyahu said he has asked for a blockchain plan in case banks are hit with sanctions, and told Israelis to prepare for a rainy day after Trump.

Payments giant Mastercard has reportedly praised Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin during the XRP Ledger Hackathon in New York.

Veteran Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff has warned of a potential plunge to $75,000 after the world's largest cryptocurrency crashed below $80,000 amid a massive market sell-off.

Shiba Inu exchange activity sees a sudden reversal into bullish territory as surging demand from traders fades selling pressure.

Dogecoin community member reveals what must be done to help DOGE thrive.

Near Protocol's open interest has declined 9.5% over the past 24 hours as NEAR's price fell 7.9% to around $4.50.

TLDR:

• US Manufacturing PMI rose to 56.0 in October, beating the 55.5 forecast and reaching a 53-month high.
• Factory hiring grew at its fastest pace since March 2012, even as the output index eased from 56.2 to 55.8.
• S&P Global’s survey suggested 5% annualized Q4 GDP growth, versus a PMI-implied 4% for the third quarter.
• Composite selling prices climbed to 59.8, their highest since August 2022, while input costs stood at 64.9.

The US Manufacturing PMI climbed to 56.0 in October 2026, its highest reading since May 2022, as factory hiring reached a 14-year high. S&P Global’s preliminary survey, released October 23, showed manufacturers expanding despite rising costs and supply constraints.

The reading exceeded economists’ 55.5 forecast and edged above September’s 55.9, extending the sector’s recovery from its 2023 contraction. Meanwhile, stronger employment and orders helped sustain broader activity, even as services lost momentum. The services PMI declined from 58.8 to 57.9.

The composite PMI fell from 58.4 to 57.6, remaining at its second-highest level since March 2022. The US Manufacturing PMI also accompanied a survey-based estimate suggesting annualized fourth-quarter economic growth could reach 5.0%, supported by stronger new orders and employment. That projection reflects business conditions, rather than an official GDP figure.

Factory Hiring Accelerates Despite Supply Bottlenecks

The US Manufacturing PMI marked a 53-month high, reversing much of the weakness visible when the index fell near 46.2. The employment component delivered the clearest improvement, with hiring growing at its fastest recorded pace since March 2012.

Manufacturers added workers to meet demand and manage growing backlogs. However, production growth slowed slightly, with the output index easing from 56.2 in September to 55.8 in October.

That distinction matters as the US Manufacturing PMI measures overall business conditions, not production alone. Employment gains strengthened the headline reading while factories continued reporting output expansion at a slower rate.

Supplier deliveries also took longer amid raw-material shortages, shipping disruptions and capacity constraints. These delays added to the difficulties manufacturers faced as they worked to clear outstanding orders. Consequently, improving demand coincided with operational pressures rather than an uninterrupted recovery.

New Orders Reach 2022 High as Inflation Pressures Intensify

Composite new orders rose to 58.2 from 58.1, their strongest level since March 2022. Export sales registered their fastest growth since May 2022, while goods export orders increased for the first time since June 2025.

The US Manufacturing PMI thus contributed to a survey indicating fourth-quarter GDP growth near 5%, compared with a PMI-implied 4% third-quarter pace. Separate economists’ estimates placed third-quarter growth around 3%, underscoring the difference between survey signals and forecasts.

However, inflation remained a significant concern as the composite selling prices index climbed from 58.4 to 59.8, its highest level since August 2022. Meanwhile, input costs remained elevated at 64.9, reflecting persistent pricing pressures across the economy.

Although the US Manufacturing PMI indicated stronger factory activity, rising energy, transportation, and material costs continued to weigh on businesses. Furthermore, the survey linked these pressures to supply disruptions and higher oil prices, complicating efforts to bring inflation toward the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

The post US Manufacturing PMI Hits 4-Year High at 56 as GDP Outlook Reaches 5% appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Mishaboar says Dogecoin businesses should support Dogecoin Core updates, fund rigorous code reviews, and submit researched proposals to strengthen the Dogecoin ecosystem.
• His appeal extends to alternative node implementations, independent open-source developers, and transparent research with evidence and methods that others can examine.
• Dogecoin Labs brings MyDoge, DogeOS, and Such App together, while the Dogecoin Foundation says it will continue stewardship and open-source support.
• DOGE fell to $0.0775 as traders watch $0.075 support, the $0.07498 swing low, and Bitcoin’s ability to hold above $80,000.

Dogecoin contributer Mishaboar urged commercial builders to support code, research, and user protections that strengthen the Dogecoin ecosystem. In an X post, he called on Dogecoin businesses to secure and update Dogecoin Core. He also called for experienced engineers to review code and proposals grounded in research. 

He asked companies to support alternative node software and smaller independent developers. The advice comes as DOGE trades near $0.0775, down 0.96% over 24 hours as the market stays flat.

Dogecoin Ecosystem Growth Starts with Stronger Core Support

Mishaboar’s list puts maintenance alongside growth. Dogecoin Core supports the software layer that wallets and services depend on, helping keep the Dogecoin ecosystem dependable. He urged ventures to keep software secure and current, requiring steady engineering after launch. Businesses using DOGE for payments or apps can fund developers, sponsor code reviews, or share technical expertise.

Code review was one of the clearest priorities in Mishaboar’s post. He said rigorous review matters especially now, asking engineers to examine proposed changes and explain potential risks. Open-source reviewers can inspect code before release and question assumptions that a product team may overlook. Research-backed proposals also give Dogecoin ecosystem contributors evidence and reasoning to assess. Review can expose security and compatibility risks before release.

His appeal included alternative node implementations and independent open-source work. Supporting more than one implementation can widen technical participation and reduce concentration around a small developer group. He also called for data-driven research into possible improvements, with methods and findings shared transparently. Businesses can help the Dogecoin ecosystem by funding research or publishing technical reports that invite scrutiny.

Mishaboar also addressed businesses that build user-facing products. He urged ventures to publish clear business models, disclose risks and take responsibility for users. Transparent terms help customers assess Dogecoin ecosystem services before depositing funds or relying on payment features. His post tied commercial credibility to Dogecoin’s openness and decentralization, traits that earlier supporters treated as central strengths.

The proposals arrived days after Dogecoin Labs announced its formation with the Dogecoin Foundation on October 21. Labs will operate MyDoge, DogeOS and Such App, combining a self-custodial wallet, an application platform and merchant payments. The announcement described the organization as an independent group bringing products, intellectual property and development teams together. MyDoge V3 and DogeOS’s public testnet had recently launched, creating an existing product base for the new organization. 

DogeOS’s EVM-compatible testnet offers builders an application environment, while MyDoge serves more than 500,000 users. Such App adds merchant QR payment tools. The Foundation will retain stewardship and support open-source development, advocacy and community work across the Dogecoin ecosystem. Labs focuses on products as the Foundation continues open-source work. 

DOGE Price Weakness Leaves $0.075 Support in Focus

Dogecoin price has been declining as the broad crypto market turn flat. This suggesting weaker performance relative to peers during the session. Market commentary links the move to rotation away from altcoins, Bitcoin ETF outflows and macro uncertainty.

Low funding rates and declining open interest point to muted leveraged demand, while DOGE remains below key moving averages. These signals suggest weakness but do not identify the session’s trigger.

Near-term technical levels put $0.075 in focus. Holding above support could allow consolidation; a break could expose the $0.07498 swing low. The nearby support and swing low leave little room, making a decisive break significant for short-term positioning. Traders are also watching Bitcoin’s ability to stay above $80,000 as a gauge of altcoin appetite.

The post DOGE Contributor Mishaboar Urges Dogecoin Businesses to Back Open-Source Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Tokenized stocks and ETFs reached $3.53B, with 4.42 million holder addresses and $10.26B in monthly transfers.
• Twenty-two companies objected to the OKXICE plan to tokenize 63 stocks, limiting that venue’s rollout.
• Hong Kong issued $2.6B in digital green bonds, while Luxembourg followed with a €1.7B sovereign deal.
• JPMorgan launched its Ethereum deposit token as Franklin Templeton added $150M in fund shares to XRPL.

Tokenized Stocks reached $3.53 billion on October 25 as Wall Street widened its Blockchain ambitions beyond equities into bonds, deposits and funds. RWA.xyz counted 4.42 million holder addresses and $10.26 billion in monthly transfers.

Those addresses do not necessarily identify individual investors, while transfers reflect activity rather than fresh inflows. Nevertheless, the figures place Tokenized Stocks within a broader financial shift as Wall Street tests Blockchain networks for established assets.

The push now includes government bond issuance in Hong Kong and Luxembourg and tokenized bank money alongside equity venues. However, company objections and questions over shareholder protections have exposed the limits of expansion across Wall Street. The result is a market with substantial activity but uneven approval from companies whose securities may trade.

Tokenized Stocks Hit $3.53B as Wall Street Faces Issuer Pushback

On September 17, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission granted temporary, conditional exemptions for venues trading tokenized equities. Operators must preserve equivalent shareholder rights, notify issuers and honor objections.

The rules separate Tokenized Stocks conveying actual ownership from products tracking prices without shareholder claims. That distinction defines how Wall Street’s Blockchain proposals must treat investors.

OKX and New York Stock Exchange parent Intercontinental Exchange proposed placing 63 companies on Blockchain rails through OKXICE. By October 23, 22 companies had objected, including Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo.

Those objections limit that venue, rather than preventing all Tokenized Stocks offerings. This shows why institutions cannot treat Blockchain infrastructure as automatic corporate consent.

Nasdaq separately plans 23-hour weekday stock trading from December 6, pending regulatory and operational readiness. Longer trading hours do not mean shares are tokenized.

Digital Bonds and Bank Deposits Expand Across Blockchain Networks

Hong Kong priced about HK$20 billion ($2.6 billion) in digital green bonds on September 28. Its Hong Kong dollar tranche settled using tokenized bank deposits. Luxembourg followed October 14 with a €1.7 billion sovereign bond on Clearstream’s D7 platform. The 10-year security carries a 3.70% coupon.

On October 19, JPMorgan launched its Ethereum-based dollar deposit token for institutional clients, following deployment on Base. JPM Coin represents bank deposits. Wall Street’s fund push includes Franklin Templeton’s $150 million addition of Singapore money-market fund shares to the XRP Ledger.

However, the shares were held in a single wallet, making it difficult to determine the number of underlying investors. While Tokenized Stocks represent one segment of Blockchain-based finance, their growing adoption has also raised questions about market structure and investor protections.

The IMF found that nearly 80% of Tokenized Stocks trades involved fractional shares, highlighting demand for smaller investments. Nevertheless, the organization warned about fragmented liquidity and technology risks, underscoring the challenges facing Wall Street as tokenization expands.

The post Tokenized Stocks Hit $3.53B as Wall Street’s Blockchain Push Accelerates appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Zcash’s Ironwood upgrade activated on July 28, 2026, at block 3,428,143, opening a new shielded pool.
• Ironwood notes use plaintext marker 0x03, replacing Orchard’s 0x02 format to prepare for future recovery.
• ZIP 2005 reserves marker 0x0A for PRF-expand, but it does not make shielded transactions quantum-resistant.
• Recovery remains unfinished, while Sprout, Sapling and Orchard funds lack the same planned protection.

Zcash’s push toward quantum preparedness has moved from theory to how shielded funds are recorded. Its Ironwood upgrade, activated July 28, 2026, introduced notes designed to support recovery if current cryptographic protections fail. However, the change does not make transactions quantum-resistant today.

An October 25 technical update drew attention to ZIP 2005, which reserves hexadecimal marker 0x0A for a specific cryptographic operation. That marker equals decimal 10. Its role is precise but narrower than a wholesale security replacement: separating one calculation from another.

Together, the specification and new note design show how Zcash is preparing a path for legitimate holders to recover funds. Major pieces of that path, including authorization and proof systems, remain unfinished.

How Ironwood Shielded Notes Prepare Zcash for Quantum Recovery

ZIP 2005 assigns 0x0A to PRF-expand, a pseudorandom function used in split-note functionality described by ZIP 226. The separator keeps values created for different purposes from being interpreted interchangeably. Reserving this identifier alone provides no quantum resistance.

Separately, Ironwood introduces a note plaintext format marked 0x03, compared with 0x02 for earlier Orchard notes. Its commitment-randomness calculation uses transaction details, including recipient public keys, note values and other cryptographic parameters. Those inputs help link a recovered note to a valid commitment recorded onchain.

Zcash’s network activated its NU6.3 upgrade at block 3,428,143. It established the Ironwood shielded pool while restricting the original Orchard pool and applying additional safeguards to transfers. This matters because the recovery design requires funds to reside in the newer pool.

Why Quantum Recovery Still Needs Further Cryptographic Upgrades

The security gap is serious: powerful quantum computers could undermine elliptic-curve cryptography that supports existing shielded protocols. Successful attacks could enable forged transactions, unauthorized transfers or manipulation of shielded balances. Zcash therefore distinguishes protection against theft from the ability to reclaim legitimate funds later.

Under the proposed model, an eventual recovery mechanism would let valid owners reclaim Ironwood funds after vulnerable systems are disabled. However, Zcash developers have not finalized the recovery protocol, post-quantum proof system or commitment-tree architecture.

That leaves a practical divide between balances. Older Sprout, Sapling and Orchard funds would not have the same recovery protection. The specification recommends moving eligible funds into Ironwood, although migration itself cannot replace the missing security components.

Privacy also remains a separate concern. Encrypted transaction data could become readable to a future attacker who already knows the recipient address. For Zcash, quantum readiness therefore remains a staged transition, not a completed defense. Ironwood establishes one recovery foundation, while work on transaction security continues.

The post Zcash Advances Quantum Readiness With Ironwood’s Shielded Notes Upgrade appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Arthur Hayes closed the Maelstrom directional book, selling about $22.28 million in crypto assets.
• The sale included 6,400 ETH worth $15.2 million, 14 million ENA, and 323,000 UNI, among other tokens. 
• Hayes made the move just nine days after sharing a bullish outlook on both Bitcoin and Ether.
• Traders are split, with some reading the exits as buy signals and others questioning the timing. 

Arthur Hayes has closed the directional trading book of his Maelstrom fund, selling roughly $22.28 million in crypto assets.

The sales included 6,400 ETH, 14 million ENA, and 323,000 UNI. The tokens went to exchanges such as Binance and to market makers.

The move arrived nine days after Hayes shared a bullish outlook on Bitcoin and Ether. He now plans to stay on the sidelines until market conditions become clearer, citing economic and geopolitical uncertainty.

Maelstrom Sells Altcoin Holdings Across Several Tokens

The largest part of the sale was 6,400 ETH, valued at about $15.2 million. The fund also sold 14 million ENA, worth roughly $2.76 million.

In addition, 323,000 UNI, valued near $2.24 million, left the portfolio. Together, these three tokens make up most of the total sale.

Maelstrom also sold positions in ETHFI, AERO, PENDLE, and ZAMA. These sales brought the total to about $22.28 million.

Reports indicate the tokens went to exchanges such as Binance and to market makers. With these trades, the Maelstrom directional book is now closed.

Arthur Hayes announced the exit in a post on X. He wrote that he had “dumped it all” from the Maelstrom directional book. According to the post, he took profits on ETH, ENA, UNI, and other altcoins.

The exit came nine days after Hayes shared bullish views on Bitcoin and Ether. That short gap between the two positions has drawn attention from market participants. At the time, his outlook on both assets was positive. Now, his stance has moved to the sidelines.

Macro and Geopolitical Concerns Keep Hayes Out of the Market

Arthur Hayes pointed to growing uncertainty in macro and geopolitical conditions. In his post, he said the environment looks a bit dicey out there. As a result, he plans to sit on the sidelines and wait for an all-clear signal before returning to the market.

He also warned that markets could fall further before they recover. Hayes wrote that the market has to go down before it can go up.

For now, he is holding no directional positions through Maelstrom. That stance matches his cautious view of the current environment.

Market participants reacted with mixed views. Some traders see the exits as buy signals, based on past patterns tied to his trades.

These traders rely on earlier patterns that followed his exits. Meanwhile, others question the timing of the sale. The split reflects different readings of the same event.

Those critics point to choppy market conditions as a reason for doubt. They also note how soon the sale followed his bullish comments.

Arthur Hayes has said he will wait for clearer signals before acting again. Until then, the Maelstrom fund stays out of directional trades.

The post Arthur Hayes Exits Altcoin Positions Worth $22M, Cites Macro and Geopolitical Risk appeared first on Blockonomi.

Keystone Wallet has become the latest big hardware wallet provider to report a security issue after unauthorized access to its website exposed customer information.

The breach came during a particularly uncomfortable period for the broader hardware wallet industry, with the two giants, Ledger and Trezor, dealing with separate security incidents since the summer.

Keystone Customer Data Exposed

The company disclosed over the weekend that it had detected unauthorized access to its official website on October 20. After reviewing API activity on Shopify, the team confirmed several days later that the unauthorized third party had obtained customer shipping information.

The exposed data includes names, contact details, shipping addresses, and order information such as the products purchased and at what prices. However, Keystone reassured that payment card, bank information, wallet passwords, recovery phrases, and private keys were not compromised.

The hardware wallet manufacturer has since blocked the unauthorized access, patched the vulnerability, launched an investigation, and begun contacting affected clients. It also promised a more detailed report in the following days.

Nevertheless, the leaked information creates another security problem. Knowing that a particular individual purchased a hardware wallet, and having their name, contact information, and physical address, could allow criminals to launch highly targeted phishing or social-engineering attacks.

Consequently, Keystone warned that scammers could impersonate the company through phone calls, texts, emails, or even physical mail while offering refunds, replacement devices, or supposed fixes.

Problems for Ledger and Trezor

Ledger said earlier this month that bad actors had modified genuine devices distributed through some Southeast Asian resellers by installing hidden hardware capable of reading the 24-word recovery phrase during initial setup and transmitting it through an LTE connection.

The company stressed that its Secure Element, operating system, and internal servers were not compromised, describing the scheme as a localized distribution-channel attack rather than a systemic breach of Ledger’s infrastructure.

Initial reports linked more than $86 million in suspected crypto thefts to the affected devices, although Ledger has not confirmed that figure.

Earlier this summer, Trezor encountered a breach at logistics provider ShipMonk that exposed customer names, emails, phone numbers, shipping addresses, and order information. The company initially said over 13,000 US customers had their data exposed, but the number grew to more than 80,000 after more recent disclosures.

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Aside from the overall painful experience of having to endure another bitcoin leg down, these corrections are usually accompanied by Peter Schiff’s never-ending criticism and predictions about the doom and gloom of BTC and the entire industry.

Yesterday was no exception. BTC dumped to a 5-week low at $79,000, and the goldbug came out of his shell and warned that the cryptocurrency is going to $75,000. That’s not exactly what happened next.

Schiff’s Latest

Is it really a correction if Peter Schiff doesn’t lash out? As reported yesterday, the primary cryptocurrency dipped below $80,000 and slipped to just over $79,000 for the first time since September 18. The goldbug outlined on X that “Bitcoin is finally breaking down,” going even further by saying, “it’s hard to believe it’s held up this long.”

His ultimate prediction for the weekend was that the asset will inevitably dump to $75,000. He also predicted a “very long weekend for Bitcoiners, especially for ETF investors who can’t sell until Monday.”

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. At least for now. Instead, BTC rebounded swiftly, reclaimed the $80,000 level, and even touched $81,000. Although it was stopped there and has retreated slightly on Sunday morning, it still remains above $80,000 – or, $5,500 above Schiff’s weekend target.

Willy Woo was among the first to catch Schiff’s latest crash prediction and noted that he is “immensely valuable to the BTC community as a counter signal.”

Previous Schiff ‘Right’ Calls

Some of his earliest calls date back to 2018-2019. During the 2018 bear market, he predicted a crash to $750, which didn’t materialize. A year later, he said BTC would never reach $50,000. In 2021, he admitted that BTC could briefly tap $100,000, but said a permanent drop to zero was “inevitable.”

During the next major bear market in 2022, he doubled down on the idea that bitcoin won’t go back up to $50,000 as the asset had tumbled below $20,000. In 2024, he warned that the ETF launch would lead to no demand and a subsequent price crash. Just for reference, ETF investors have poured over $55 billion into the products. Oh, and BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF far surpassed any gold products in its debut year.

In July this year, when bitcoin was struggling below $65,000, he said investors would regret not selling there. BTC exploded within a month.

The post Bitcoin Reclaims $80K Immediately After Peter Schiff Predicted a Crash to $75K appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A UAE-led international operation involving Interpol and law enforcement agencies from 30 countries identified more than $39 billion in fraud-linked funds and digital assets while thwarting well over 123 million online fraud attempts between July and September 2026.

The results point to the scale of cross-border digital crime, with authorities now working to recover the identified assets and disrupt networks using online platforms, financial services and cryptocurrencies.

Operation Confrontation Ghost Ran for Three Months Across 30 Countries

Led by the UAE’s Ministry of Interior, Operation Confrontation Ghost ran from July 1 to September 30 and went after AI-enabled fraud, financial scams run through digital platforms and online sextortion. WAM, the Emirates News Agency, stated that the operation stopped at least 123.71 million online fraud attempts worldwide.

Authorities arrested more than 960 suspects and raided 29 fraud centers. Investigators identified over 3,500 suspects and 15,500 victims, while 4,126 bank accounts were blocked and more than 570 social media accounts closed. Participants also exchanged over 9,000 pieces of intelligence.

Interpol and the Global Anti-Scam Alliance took part alongside 13 private companies, including Crypto.com, Meta, Mastercard and TikTok, WAM added. The operation also reported that tokenization technology helped secure more than four billion transactions each month, reducing fraud risks and strengthening data protection.

Results were presented at a UAE-organized side event during the 13th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime in Vienna.

Colonel Dana Al Marzouqi, director-general of the Interior Ministry’s International Affairs Bureau, explained that real-time intelligence sharing helps agencies spot suspicious activity faster and trace illicit money flows.

Dr. Monica Juma, executive director at the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, called the operation a model of international cooperation. She stressed that criminals’ use of AI, bank accounts and cryptocurrencies to move money and hide its origins demands better countermeasures and closer coordination.

US Authorities Have Been Chasing Similar Networks

As CryptoPotato reported previously, the US Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force seized Telegram-based scam marketplace Xinbi Guarantee in September and restrained about $52 million in crypto in a single day.

That lifted the total the Strike Force has restrained since its founding in November 2025 to roughly $938 million. Federal data reported crypto investment fraud losses at $8.65 billion in 2025, up 89% from 2023, although the FBI calls those figures “significantly underrepresented” because most fraud victims do not report.

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The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has finalized its rules for implementing the GENIUS Act. The rule covers requirements for permitted payment stablecoin issuers, foreign issuers under the OCC’s jurisdiction, as well as certain custody activities handled by entities supervised by the agency.

Reserve backing, redemption, and risk management are among the areas covered by the new framework.

OCC Locks In Stablecoin Rules

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the GENIUS Act a “watershed moment in American finance.” He added,

“Just as President Abraham Lincoln’s National Currency Act of 1863 established a national framework for bank-issued currency, the GENIUS Act establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins in the digital age. The OCC’s final rule carries that landmark legislation forward, providing a clear, practical foundation for private-sector innovation, competition, and American leadership in digital assets.”

The OCC received hundreds of comments on its proposal from crypto companies, community banks, trade groups, academics, and other stakeholders. The final rule addresses the regulations required under the GENIUS Act, apart from provisions covering the Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money laundering, and sanctions enforced by the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Those areas will be handled through a separate rulemaking process in coordination with the Treasury Department. The OCC will also continue working with other agencies involved in implementing the law.

The agency has not yet announced when it will start accepting applications and waiver requests from prospective permitted payment stablecoin issuers. It said that announcement will come separately. The OCC also plans to monitor the industry as it develops and make adjustments to its supervisory approach if needed. Both the GENIUS Act and the final rule are scheduled to take effect on January 18, 2027.

Fed Proposals

The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins, a.k.a. the GENIUS Act, was signed into law back in July 2025. The federal regulators missed the July 18, 2026, deadline to finalize the stablecoin rules, as it required multiple agencies to build an entirely new supervisory framework.

In September, the Federal Reserve proposed two rules for stablecoin issuers and banks under its supervision.

The post Scott Bessent Calls GENIUS Act a ‘Watershed Moment’ as OCC Sets Stablecoin Rules appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin is being pulled into a broader risk-off trade as AI-related credit stress collides with another surge in oil prices, and both take place just days before the next FOMC meeting.

A recent report by QCP said BTC is still behaving like a risk asset, while the latest Middle East escalation has pushed Brent above $110 and complicated the outlook for inflation and the Federal Reserve.

AI Credit Stress Is Spilling Into Bitcoin

The research pointed to CoreWeave’s five-year CDS at roughly 1,128 basis points, more than three times Oracle’s 30 bps, as evidence that markets are becoming increasingly concerned about the financing burden attached to the AI infrastructure boom. However, the stress appears to have spread beyond a single company.

QCP’s latest market note said CoreWeave fell 10% on October 10 as investors reassessed capital costs and debt serviceability across the broader neocloud sector. It added that the repricing has spilled into equities and crypto, while longer-dated US Treasuries benefited from a flight to quality.

The report further highlights just how violent the equity response has already become, with South Korea’s KOSPI plummeting by over 14% in a single week in the middle of the month, which was its worst 5-day performance since 2008. Chip stocks were also hammered by AI-financing concerns and foreign selling.

Unfortunately for the BTC bulls, the cryptocurrency has failed to decouple from that weakness. QCP argued that bitcoin has continued to trade in line with broader equity sentiment rather than establishing itself as an independent safe haven. This follows a recent CryptoPotato report showing that the largest digital asset has remained unusually sensitive to tech stocks and macro conditions after the latest inflation-driven correction.

Oil Prices

QCP’s macro report noted that visible tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remains extremely distorted, with only three AIS-broadcasting vessels recorded on October 20. Estimates that include “dark” ships, though, suggest actual flows were much larger, roughly 3.7 million to 13 million barrels per day.

Although physical supplies have recovered substantially, the disconnect remains, and prices are still climbing. Brent crude oil tapped $114 per barrel on Friday, the highest level since May 5, after renewed Houthi attacks on Saudi infrastructure revived fears of another supply shock.

Reuters reported that Middle East crude exports are now actually above pre-war levels, yet shipping costs, insurance premiums, and geopolitical risk remain extremely high. Freight for a two-million-barrel tanker from the Middle East to China is around $1.4 million per day, more than 12 times pre-war levels.

Together, these issues create the real problem for Bitcoin: high energy costs and AI credit stress can keep inflation sticky and make aggressive Fed easing much harder. On the plus side, market expectations for an October rate hike have dropped close to zero. On the other hand, experts do not anticipate any rate cuts soon.

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