The surge in cryptocurrencies like Hyperliquid and Zcash in 2026 highlights growing investor confidence and potential market resilience amid volatility.

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Nscale's potential $45B deal with Anthropic highlights the growing demand for AI infrastructure, but raises concerns about execution and reliance on few clients.

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The heightened AI espionage risks underscore the urgent need for robust cybersecurity measures to safeguard national interests and innovation.

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CoreWeave's financial instability highlights the risks of heavy reliance on debt and the potential volatility in AI sector investments.

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The rapid hedge fund exit from tech stocks signals a potential shift towards risk aversion and defensive sectors, impacting global market dynamics.

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Bitcoin Magazine

The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin

Money determines where we live, what we can afford, and how wealth accumulates across generations. Yet the mechanisms that create and distribute it remain largely occluded, even as their consequences become harder to unsee. For Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, that disconnect became the impetus for The Waterworks of Money. This ambitious project maps the hidden architecture of the financial system through drawing and animation, rendering it understandable to the people living within it without flattening its complexity.

The Waterworks of Money depicts the financial system as a vast network of reservoirs, channels, and pumps, revealing how money moves through banks, governments, businesses, and households. Some areas receive an abundance of liquidity, while others remain perpetually dry. The resulting drawing operates simultaneously as an artwork, an educational tool, and an examination of financial power.

The project emerged from two years of research, including interviews with more than 100 experts across banking, government, academia, and monetary reform movements. Kingma spent more than 2,200 hours translating that research into an intricate architectural landscape. Bollen, whose investigative journalism examines the workings of the financial system, and van der Linden, whose academic research explores money and monetary reform, helped develop the economic research and narratives behind the work.

One of the project’s scenarios explores a monetary future shaped by bitcoin. As bitcoin enters traditional finance, an alternative monetary system either challenges existing structures of financial power or eventually becomes part of them, and the project’s collaborators have watched both happen.

Ahead of Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5-6, where Bollen joins two panels, I sat down with all three of the project’s collaborators to discuss making money visible, the relationship between monetary systems and inequality, and bitcoin’s place in Europe’s financial future.

BMAG: The Waterworks of Money illustrates the financial system as a network of reservoirs, pumps, and channels, with some parts of society receiving abundant liquidity while others remain dry. After two years of research and interviews with financial experts, what surprised you most about how money actually works? What do you think the public most fundamentally misunderstands about it?

Thomas Bollen: What surprised me most is that many people inside the system know a great deal about their own corner of it: interest rate derivatives, asset management or mortgage lending. Very few of them can oversee the larger system in which they operate.

What is clearly not well understood is that banks create new money when they make a loan. They are not just intermediaries that pass on the savings of their depositors.

But can you blame ordinary people for that? During the research phase we spoke to many bankers and even a CEO of a major bank who did not know they were working for a money creating institution.

If we want to improve understanding we should start at our schools and universities. Many textbooks still get it wrong, and economics education hardly pays any attention to it. In 2022 even the Riksbank’s prize in economics (the Nobel prize that is not really a Nobel prize) was awarded for research that presents banks as mere intermediaries.

BMAG: One of the central ideas in The Waterworks of Money is that money doesn’t flow evenly through society. Housing affordability has become a major issue in Europe and the United States, while asset prices and financial wealth have increasingly outpaced wages. How much of this inequality results from the design of our monetary system, rather than broader economic forces?

Thomas Bollen: It is impossible to capture that in a precise number, because so many factors play a role. But it is quite clear that the money system exacerbated inequality enormously during all those years when credit was extremely cheap.

Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, summed it up in 2019: “Money is free for those who are creditworthy.” For everyone without money or creditworthiness, it was out of reach.

Cheap credit for rich people and large multinationals (who used it for share buybacks and M&A deals) drove up the price of shares, and of houses. Bank money creation produced a specific kind of inflation: asset inflation. Wealthy households and large multinationals, who already owned those assets, profited far more from it than people without them or small businesses that did not have the same kind of access to cheap credit as their larger competitors.

BMAG: The Waterworks of Money is filled with details that help explain how the financial system works. What was the most difficult part of the monetary system to illustrate? Did anything you learned during the research change how you approached the drawing?

Carlijn Kingma: The biggest challenge was the way all the parts are connected. How do you show that clearly?

Water is the obvious metaphor for money, and it takes you a long way. Liquidity, cash flows, money drying up: they are already in the language of finance. It was also great for connecting the different parts of the system, because I could draw the pipes and canals that run between them.

But in some places you need more than that if you want to be completely accurate. Money comes in many forms: commodity money, public money, private credit money, and further out short-term debt and repo contracts can also serve as money or near-money. It was not possible to draw that many different kinds of water running through the system.

BMAG: The Waterworks of Money has been shown to both art audiences and people interested in economics, including at Bitcoin Amsterdam last year. Have you noticed differences in how these audiences respond to the work? Has their feedback influenced how you think about the role of art in explaining complex ideas?

Carlijn Kingma: The response depends on what people already know. Visitors with more financial knowledge usually laugh more, because they catch all the small jokes. We renamed Basel III to “Babel III”, for instance, because the bank rules written after the crisis add up to about three bibles.

In our bitcoin future scenario, The Republic of a Thousand Coins, we put in a lot of jokes about central bankers. You can see Alan Greenspan there as an inflatable doll. That works best if you know who he is, and the bitcoin crowd knows far more about monetary history than the general public.

Above all, we noticed that art opens doors. The drawing gives people a visual starting point for a conversation. Even without any prior knowledge, the metaphor lets you see the social outcomes of how money flows.

BMAG: Your research has examined how financial crises can reinforce the influence of institutions considered too important to fail. More recently, you’ve explored the growing power of asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Are we witnessing a genuine transformation in how financial power operates, or have the same underlying problems simply taken new forms since 2008?

Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: Following the crisis of 2008, there was a general consensus among mainstream policymakers, think tanks and many economists that the banking sector needed to be repaired. In Europe, the influential de Larosière Group concluded that the causes of the crisis were excessive leverage, opaque securitisation, shadow banking risks, and fragmented supervision in the EU, and argued that “repair is necessary and urgent.” The banking repair consisted of new and stricter regulations, stronger coordinated supervision and new crisis management procedures. The underlying architecture remained unaltered, meaning that fundamental change never occurred.

But the architecture remained fragile. Take, for example, 2023. When Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse got into trouble, the crisis playbooks developed after 2008 stayed in the drawer. The US authorities guaranteed all SVB deposits, including the more than 90 percent above the insured limit. In Switzerland, the state backed the rescue of Credit Suisse by UBS.

Advocates of banking repair often claim to have made the system safer. But the inherent fragility of funding long-term loans with runnable bank deposits is still there. Even with all the regulation, you cannot prevent a bank run, and that fragility is precisely what they refuse to solve. The banking system only survives because of massive public safety nets and privileges given to banks.

Large powerful non-banks have indeed emerged but they do not play a pivotal role in money and payments. This is a key distinction between the two sectors.

BMAG: Bitcoin began as an attempt to create money outside the control of governments and banks. Today, it’s increasingly held through investment funds and traditional financial institutions, including some of the same powerful asset managers examined in your recent work. Does this integration strengthen bitcoin’s ability to change the financial system, or risk reproducing the concentration of power it originally sought to challenge?

Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: As a financial asset, bitcoin has benefited from investments from traditional financial institutions. But the increasing use of bitcoin as an investment has compromised its promise of an alternative payment system.

At the same time, bitcoin and the rise of stablecoins have challenged the banks on their payment infrastructure. The banks are now innovating too: look at Wero, the payment wallet that a group of European banks launched in 2024. That is a change. But it is something different from the structural reform of money and banking.

BMAG: Your project imagines bitcoin as an alternative to the existing monetary system. Amsterdam also has a remarkable history of monetary experimentation, from the development of modern financial institutions to David Chaum’s pioneering work on private digital cash decades before bitcoin. Given that history, how do you see bitcoin’s role in Europe’s financial future? Has your perspective changed since you began working on the project?

Thomas Bollen: What I appreciate about bitcoin’s design is that it resembles full reserve banking. A bitcoin is not a claim on something else, so it carries no risk of a bank run. Bank deposits are: they are a promise that you can withdraw your money at any moment, while the bank can never keep that promise to all its customers at once.

We can learn a lot from our history. The Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, founded in 1609 and often seen as the world’s first central bank, started out as a full reserve bank: every bank guilder was backed by coins in its vault. It went under only after it secretly began lending more and more to the Dutch East India Company.

That is the risk of every monetary experiment: it can go in the wrong direction. In the crypto world, all kinds of companies started copying the banks. They lent out their customers’ bitcoins, while those customers still saw their coin-balances in their accounts. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX shows how this practice can go horribly wrong.

Thomas Bollen will participate in two panel discussions at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 6, 2026, on the Treasury Stage. Europe’s Monetary History & Future: Austrian Economics, Banks & Bitcoin (11:00–11:30 AM), alongside Rahim Taghizadegan and Willem Middelkoop, and Staat vs. de Markt: Hoeveel Overheid Hebben We Nodig in Geld? (1:55–2:25 PM), alongside Paul Buitink and Simon Lelieveldt.

Watch the full two-part animated exploration of The Waterworks of Money on YouTube and support the project by purchasing a signed, limited-edition print by Carlijn Kingma or making a donation toward its continued research at waterworksofmoney.com/buy.

The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications. Learn more at museum.b.tc.

Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026. Get your tickets here and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.

This post The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Dennis Koch.

Bitcoin Magazine

Super League Stockholders Approve Metaplanet’s 2,100 BTC Investment, Paving Way for ‘Superplanet’

Super League stockholders have approved all proposals tied to Metaplanet‘s 2,100 BTC investment, clearing the way for the Nasdaq-listed company to be renamed Superplanet and become the Japanese firm’s U.S. Bitcoin treasury vehicle.

The proposals passed at Super League Enterprise, Inc.’s 2026 annual meeting of stockholders, held Friday and were disclosed Monday morning. The transaction itself was first announced in August.

Under the definitive agreement, Metaplanet, Inc. will contribute 2,100 Bitcoin and $2.5 million in cash through its wholly owned U.S. subsidiary, Metaplanet Holdings, Inc. 

In exchange, Metaplanet receives 44,859,400 shares of common stock at $3.00 per share, along with preferred stock and warrants.

At closing, Super League will be renamed “Superplanet, Inc.” and trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “SUPA.” Its advertising and media activation business will continue as a distinct operating segment, and Matt Edelman will remain chief executive officer.

Among the measures stockholders approved were the issuance of common stock and warrants to Metaplanet and the corporate name change. The proposals also included an increase in authorized preferred shares from 10 million to 100 million, according to a summary of the meeting posted on X.

“Super League stockholders have voted to approve the proposed Metaplanet transaction, an important step in our transformation from a Bitcoin treasury company into a global Bitcoin-native financial platform,” Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich wrote on X. 

“Upon close, Superplanet will be our U.S.-listed Bitcoin treasury platform, providing direct access to U.S. capital markets and greater flexibility to opportunistically raise capital.”

Edelman framed the vote similarly in the company’s announcement: “Their approval brings us one step closer to redefining what this company can become.”

Closing is anticipated in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including required filings with the Nasdaq Capital Market. The shareholder approvals represent a required step but not the final one.

Super League said the arrangement is intended to establish conditions governing Metaplanet’s ability to dispose of its equity holdings following the transaction. The company did not provide details of exceptions to those restrictions in its announcement.

Metaplanet held 43,000 BTC as of August 18, describing itself as the third-largest corporate Bitcoin treasury among publicly traded companies. The combined structure is intended to give the group two listed Bitcoin treasury platforms — one on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, one on Nasdaq — each with its own investor base and reporting currency.

Super League connects brands with what it describes as a 3.3 billion-person global gaming population through advertising and branded content programs across gaming and digital media platforms. Metaplanet is a Tokyo-listed company building Bitcoin-based financial products and infrastructure.

Shares of Super League moved higher on the news. 

This post Super League Stockholders Approve Metaplanet’s 2,100 BTC Investment, Paving Way for ‘Superplanet’ first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

No ‘Uptober’ Yet: Bitcoin Slips 2% in a Month That’s Historically Bullish

Bitcoin’s price retook $82,000 on Monday as choppy trading last week stunted the coin’s gains. 

The biggest cryptocurrency by market cap was recently trading for close to $82,393 — up by close to 2% over the past day but still down over a seven-day period. 

Bitcoin has gotten off to a slow start for so-called Uptober, a month when the cryptocurrency has typically surged: Since the beginning of October, bitcoin’s price has dropped by 2%. 

U.S. investors last week cashed out of exchange-traded funds, with speculators redeeming $228.4 million in shares from the investment vehicles managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, and Grayscale, according to data from Farside Investors. 

Bitcoin is often moved by investors buying shares of the U.S. ETFs. The funds give investors easy exposure to the asset via shares they can buy on their brokerage accounts. 

Despite the slow October so far, analysts have said that bitcoin is now in a bull market after spending most of 2026 trading under $70,000 — well below its all-time high of $126,080. 

Bitcoin’s price started rallying in August after the U.S. Treasury Department said it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. The coin had its best run in three years and third best August ever.  

The coin’s price has recently benefited from the so-called debasement trade: when investors buy certain assets to hedge against currency being devalued. The dollar slid in value in August. 

It continued to have a good September, rising nearly 6% over a 30-day period. Bitcoin in the third quarter of this year had its best three months since 2024. 

After a record third quarter, will October keep the streak alive?

This post No ‘Uptober’ Yet: Bitcoin Slips 2% in a Month That’s Historically Bullish first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Keeps Buying: Third Purchase This Month Brings October Spending to $73 Million

The largest corporate holder of bitcoin, Strategy, bought another 267 BTC last week, bringing its holdings to 848,517 digital coins — worth $69.5 billion at today’s prices. 

According to a Monday filing, the software company said it spent slightly more than $22 million on buying the new bitcoins. 

The latest buy allowed Strategy to snap up slightly more coins than its transaction the previous week, when it spent again $22 million on 250 BTC. So far in October, Strategy has spent $73 million on buying bitcoin. 

Strategy stock (NASDAQ: MSTR) was trading nearly 2% higher Monday morning New York time at about $139 per share. Over the past month, MSTR has dropped by 17%. Year-to-date, it’s down 11%. 

Monday’s filing also shows that Strategy also repurchased $193.1 million of its STRC preferred stock. 

Strategy has bought back its stock this year as its STRC preferred shares have traded below their $100 face value due to market volatility and index changes.

Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — started buying Bitcoin in August 2020 as a way to generate better returns for its shareholders. 

It has since spent around $64 billion on BTC, making it the largest corporate holder of the asset. Investors can buy its shares to gain exposure to the leading cryptocurrency without having to buy bitcoin themselves. 

The company is now also focusing on products that pay investors yield via its STRF, STRC, STRK, and STRD preferred shares. 

Strategy could face trouble soon though after Morgan Stanley Capital International last week said it was moving ahead with a proposal “to define and classify non-operating companies as ineligible for inclusion in the MSCI Global Investable Market Indexes.” 

Such a move could eventually remove Strategy from the index, leading to fewer institutional investors holding the stock. 

This post Strategy Keeps Buying: Third Purchase This Month Brings October Spending to $73 Million first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office Hosts Five November Events Led by Herbert and Keiser

El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office, led by Stacey Herbert and Max Keiser of Keiser Report fame, is hosting a series of Bitcoin events this November in El Salvador. Five main events will take place, with plenty of side events hosted by the local community. 

The Bitcoin Capital Summit starts off the official schedule on November 10 at the downtown library and tech center, BINAES. Bitcoin Histórico runs November 11 and 12 at the National Palace and surrounding sites in Centro Histórico. The Renaissance Rodeo follows on November 13 at Lake Ilopango. EmTech AI LATAM is set for November 18 and 19 at the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios. The Global Bitcoin Circular Economies Summit closes the sequence on November 19 and 20 in El Zonte. 

Bitcoin Capital Summit
The Bitcoin Capital Summit takes place on November 10 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at BINAES in San Salvador. Hosted by Luca Esposito of Blockstream Capital Partners in collaboration with the Bitcoin Office, the evening is framed around Bitcoin’s institutional era from treasury to capital markets. The agenda includes a welcome by Luca Esposito, a keynote by Sean Bill, former CIO of BSTR at Blockstream, and a panel on the institutional Bitcoin stack featuring Pierre Rochard, CEO of The Bitcoin Company, and Juan Diego Sol, Regional Manager, Central America at IBEX. As well as a closing fireside with Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, among other panels. Registration is free but approval-required through the official Luma page.

Bitcoin Histórico
Bitcoin Histórico runs November 11 and 12 across the Centro Histórico of San Salvador, with keynotes at the National Palace live-streamed to giant LED screens on Plaza Gerardo Barrios. Organized by the National Bitcoin Office, the conference focuses on Bitcoin, financial freedom, and El Salvador’s transformation. Tickets are sold exclusively in Bitcoin at bitcoinhistorico.com. The $350 Trailblazer Seat includes guaranteed seating, access to public sessions, tech demos, community meetups, and an invitation to the afterparty, while locals with Salvadorian ID can buy entry with the $21 Satoshi Chero ticket. 

The $2,100 Genesis Crown Pass adds VIP seating inside the National Palace, fast-track entry, private lounge access with meals, an exclusive merch pack, and priority networking with keynote speakers. 

All tiers include free admission to the Renaissance Rodeo the following day. Promo codes CROWN15 and Cowboy21 have been shared by organizers.

Renaissance Rodeo
The inaugural Renaissance Rodeo takes place on November 13 on the shore of Lake Ilopango. The event features bull riding, mutton busting, barrel racing, music, and barbecue, and is positioned as a celebration of Salvadoran cowboy culture and regenerative agriculture. Details and a waitlist are available at the official site renaissance.rodeo. Holders of any Bitcoin Histórico ticket receive free admission.

EmTech AI LATAM
EmTech AI LATAM runs November 18 and 19 at the Escuela Superior de Economía y Negocios. This is the first Latin American edition of the MIT Technology Review conference, organized with Opinno and local partner C² Labs and supported by the Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia Artificial. The agenda covers moving AI from pilots to production impact, governance, talent development, and technology trends. Coverage of the announcement is available via Diario El Salvador. Registration is available at emtechai-latam.com. 

Global Bitcoin Circular Economies Summit
The Global Bitcoin Circular Economies Summit takes place November 19 and 20 in El Zonte. Organized by Bitcoin Beach and the Federation of Bitcoin Circular Economies, this is the first public edition of the gathering. Previous events have been invite-only and have gathered top international talent, focused on delivering the benefits of Bitcoin to the developing world. 

Registration is free via the official Bitcoin Beach summit page. Confirmed speakers include Jeremy Almond, Co-Founder and CEO of Paystand, Alexandra Navarro of Paystand, Gerardo Linares, and Evelyn Lemus. The program focuses on Bitcoin as everyday money, merchant adoption, education, and lessons from circular economies across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

This post El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office Hosts Five November Events Led by Herbert and Keiser first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Strategy's discretionary USD Cash fell to $447.3 million as the company spent another $193.1 million on STRC buybacks and raised its preferred-stock repurchase authorization to $3 billion. The Michael Saylor-led company disclosed on Oct. 19 that it bought Bitcoin for $22.1 million at an average price of $82,900 over the previous week. The acquisitions increased…

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CFTC data for Oct. 13 show rising spread legs lifted gross longs despite fewer outright longs, without establishing spot buying.

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Crystal’s selected cohort cut USDT balances in Q3, while Allium assigns it 84% of January–September 2026 classified payment value.

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GHO would remain transferable, while a return swap, withdrawal of USAT and issuer redemption would each face separate conditions.

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A moving weekend index helps explain how a 5.9% opening-to-low mark decline coexisted with minute-close mark/index gaps below 3%.

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Seventy-six minutes passed between the unauthorised mint and the freeze, and in that time the damage was already done. On Saturday, October 17, 2026, at 12:31:38 UTC, ten million CYS came into being on BNB Smart Chain without anyone having deposited a single token. The Cysic Foundation added the recipient address to the token contract's blacklist at 13:47:52 UTC. By then, 7.2 million of the new tokens had already left the address, around 72 percent of the mint.

The bridge the attack ran through has been switched off since, and the foundation has named no date for a restart. For holders that is the real point: what decides the fate of the rest of a position is not the price swing but the question of which blockchain your own tokens sit on and who is allowed to create them there.

What happened in the 76 minutes between mint and blacklist

The chronology can be read off the movements on the blockchain, and it is tightly timed. Five minutes after the mint, at 12:36 UTC, the first selling round began: 5.65 million CYS went out within five minutes for 588,315 USDT, at an average of about ten cents per token. At 12:44 UTC, 100,000 USDT left the setup through a bridging service, and a minute later 40.88 ETH arrived on Ethereum.

At 12:53 UTC, 488,315 USDT followed in six transfers through another service. Between 12:57 and 12:59 UTC the second selling round ran, with roughly 1.55 million CYS that brought in about 220 BNB. Shortly afterwards, between 13:05 and 13:06 UTC, 80 and 139 BNB were withdrawn by two different routes. At 13:11 UTC a second wallet received 306.52 ETH in five transfers. The industry service Cryptopolitan traced this sequence from the transactions on October 18.

By the time the blacklist took effect at 13:47:52 UTC, the address had sent no tokens for 48 minutes. The freeze therefore only bit once the outflow was long over; all it caught was the remainder left behind.

Unauthorised mint: how ten million CYS arose with no deposit

A mint is the creation of new tokens by a smart contract. On a cross-blockchain bridge, that process is normally tied to something given in return: anyone wanting to move tokens from one blockchain to another locks the original on the source blockchain, and only then does the contract create a representation on the destination blockchain. That representation is called a wrapped token and is nothing other than a voucher for the locked original.

It is precisely that coupling that broke here. According to the Cysic Foundation's report, published on October 18, 2026 on the @cysic_fdn account, the attacker gained unauthorised access to a database serving services around the bridge operation. They then used a weakness in the processing of messages to submit a forged mint instruction that bypassed the check. The foundation explicitly describes these findings as preliminary; the definitive cause has not yet been confirmed.

What arose in the process were not duplicates of existing tokens but ten million units with no backing whatsoever on the source blockchain. The voucher existed, the collateral behind it did not.

The cause according to the Cysic Foundation: access to a bridge database

The foundation draws a clear boundary around the incident in its report. Affected was solely the processing of bridge messages and the creation of tokens. Consensus, block production and smart contract execution on the Cysic mainnet remained untouched, it says, and existing user balances were not stolen.

That distinction matters, and reports on incidents often blur it. An attack on a bridge hits the accounting between two blockchains, not users' wallets. If your tokens sit under your own keys, nothing was taken from you. Hold wrapped tokens, by contrast, and you hold a claim whose backing has just deteriorated.

6.22 percent more in circulation: what the mint does to supply

The scale only becomes clear in relation to the existing stock. Around 160.8 million CYS are in circulation out of a maximum supply of one billion. Ten million additional tokens therefore amount to 6.22 percent of circulating supply, created on a Saturday lunchtime in a little over a minute. At the price of $0.1113 at which CYS stands on October 19, 2026, the mint has a value of roughly $1.11 million.

What is decisive here is the ratio to market depth. Total daily turnover in CYS runs to about $1.75 million. The 7.2 million tokens sold come to around $801,000 at today's price, close to half of a full trading day. Selling pressure of that size cannot be absorbed in a market of that depth without the price giving way.

The price itself shows how little cushion there is. CYS reached its high of $1.78 on August 15, 2026, and its low stands at $0.1063. At $0.1113 the token trades 4.7 percent above that low and 93.7 percent below the high.

Blacklist in the token contract: why 2.8 million CYS are stuck and 306 ETH are not

A blacklist is a function in the token contract with which the operator can bar individual addresses from sending and receiving. Here it froze around 2.8 million CYS, the 28 percent of the mint that still sat on the recipient address.

The reach of that freeze, however, ends exactly at the token. It applies to CYS on BNB Smart Chain and nowhere else. By that point the proceeds had already been swapped into USDT, BNB and finally a total of roughly 306.6 ETH and moved to Ethereum, which at an ether price of about $2,372 on October 18 corresponded to a value of around $727,000. The blacklist does not reach those funds.

For judging a token, that means two things. A blacklist function can save what has not yet been moved in the event of damage, and in this particular case it was useful. At the same time, its existence means a central party can decide at any time how freely your own tokens can move.

Wrapped tokens and bridge risk: what a bridged token really is

Move a token across a bridge to another blockchain and you exchange a property right for a claim. On the destination blockchain you hold a representation whose value depends on the original staying locked on the other side and on nobody being able to create further representations without backing. Both hang on the technology and on the bridge operator's keys.

A hardware wallet offers no protection against this kind of damage. The device keeps the private key such that nobody can take tokens out of your wallet. That does not help against a dilution of supply on the destination blockchain, because the attack does not go after your key at all. Which devices solve that task how, and where the differences in handling lie, is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

The second way around this risk is to do without the bridge. Hold a token on its source blockchain, or leave it with a provider that takes on custody, and you carry other risks, but not this one.

CYS on 13 venues: not a single euro pair

For investors in Germany, where a token can be had at all is part of weighing the risk. cryptoticker.io compiled this survey itself on October 19, 2026. It is based on the 15 trading pairs CoinGecko lists for CYS, spread across 13 venues.

The result: not one of those 15 pairs is against the euro. Nine run against the dollar stablecoin USDT, one against Bitcoin, one against the South Korean won, and the remaining four against stablecoins directly on BNB Smart Chain. The largest single venue by turnover is in South Korea. The two decentralised venues on BNB Smart Chain account for 816,538 of the $3.01 million in total daily turnover, or 27.1 percent.

In practice that means: anyone wanting to buy CYS goes either through an exchange outside the European Union or through a decentralised venue on precisely the blockchain where the mint took place. Buying in euros from a provider that falls under the European MiCA regulation and uses its authorisation in Germany is currently not an option for this token. Which providers hold that authorisation and what it means for you is set out in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

$700 million through bridges: Cysic in the 2026 annual tally

The incident does not stand alone, and that can be quantified. cryptoticker.io compiled this survey itself on October 19, 2026, on the basis of the 299 incidents DefiLlama records for 2026. Together they account for $2.25 billion in damage.

Of those, 32 incidents involve bridges and cross-blockchain procedures, with damage of $700.1 million between them. Seventeen incidents concerned the unauthorised creation of tokens, the same mechanism as at Cysic, totalling $349.2 million. The largest single case of that kind hit Liquid Network in September with $320 million.

The Cysic case is a small one in that series. What makes it instructive is the speed: 35 minutes passed between the first forged message and the proceeds flowing out onto another blockchain. How hard such gaps are to find in advance was broken down in our piece on the scope of crypto audits. A similar case hit the routing of Bitcoin across another bridge in October, covered in our report on the Symbiosis exploit.

Mint rights, blacklist, backing: what can be read off the token contract

Three properties of a token contract determine how large this risk is for a particular position, and all three are publicly visible.

The first is the mint right. In any block explorer, the verified contract shows whether a mint function exists and which address may call it. If it hangs on a single address, that address's security determines the supply. If it hangs on a multi-signature contract, the bar is higher.

The second is the blacklist. Where it exists, the operator can immobilise addresses, to holders' benefit in the event of damage and to their detriment in a dispute. Both belong in the assessment.

The third is the backing. With a bridged token, the supply on the destination blockchain can be compared with the balance locked on the source blockchain. Where one diverges from the other, there are representations without collateral. That difference was precisely the damage on October 17.

Documenting losses: what to evidence in the event of a total loss

Anyone affected by an incident like this needs evidence first, regardless of how the case turns out. German tax law treats gains from the sale of crypto assets as a private disposal, in which the one-year holding period and the exemption threshold play a role. How a loss from a theft or from a token that has become worthless is to be classified in an individual case depends on the facts and belongs with a tax adviser; there is no blanket answer for it.

Independently of that, the evidence can be secured: transactions with timestamps and addresses, acquisition costs, the price level at the time of the incident, and the project's own publications. Tools that record such events across several exchanges and wallets are set out in the comparison of tax software and portfolio trackers. The later such documentation is put together, the more gaps it will have.

How things proceed at Cysic and which dates remain open

The foundation has announced a second report covering the verified scale of the damage, the tracing of the funds and the countermeasures. There is no date for it. Equally open is when the bridge will run again; the condition the foundation names is the completion of a security review, for which it has brought in an external firm.

Until then the route between the Cysic mainnet and BNB Smart Chain stays closed. Trading in CYS on BNB Smart Chain itself continues, as does trading on the exchanges that list the token. What remains open is how the 2.8 million frozen tokens and the supply that has grown by 6.22 percent will be handled. Whether and how the additional tokens will be taken out of circulation again, the foundation has not so far said.

Cysic bridge: without a restart the route to BNB Chain stays shut

Three steps make sense now, and in this order:

1. Check which blockchain your tokens sit on. For every bridged balance the rule holds: the representation is worth only as much as its backing. A balance held under your own keys is protected against theft, not against dilution. Which device suits you is shown in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Look at the contract's mint rights before you buy more. A single address with a mint right is a risk that can be established in two minutes in a block explorer. For anything you want to buy in euros from an authorised provider, the overview of regulated crypto exchanges sets the frame.
3. Document every position before the situation clears up. Acquisition costs, dates and price levels belong on record while they can still be retrieved. The tools for that are in the comparison of tax software.

(As of October 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The stablecoin USD1 has shrunk by roughly $401 million in two weeks. Its market capitalisation fell from about $4.43 billion on October 6 to around $4.02 billion, a drop of 9.1 percent. The dollar price held steady throughout: the token traded consistently between $0.998 and $1.000. What shrank, then, was not the price but the number of tokens in circulation.

Who triggered that decline is the striking part. According to an analysis by the blockchain research outfit Onchain Benchmark, just under $200 million of the redemptions trace back to a single address whose owner is unknown. For holders in Germany, a practical question hangs on this: what rights do you have against the issuer when a stablecoin shrinks quickly?

What happened to USD1 between October 6 and October 19

USD1 is a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial. A stablecoin of this design holds its price through deposited reserves rather than an algorithm: for every token issued, a dollar or a dollar-like asset is meant to sit with the issuer.

Between October 6 and October 19, 2026, market capitalisation fell by about $401 million according to CoinGecko data. World Liberty Financial's proof-of-reserves dashboard showed roughly $4.01 billion in reserves over the same period, a figure close to the reported market capitalisation. CoinGecko data put USD1 at $0.9990 on October 19, 2026, with a market capitalisation of $4.01 billion and daily turnover of around $958 million.

For a sense of scale: Tether (USDT) stood at roughly $183.5 billion the same day, USDC at about $72.3 billion. At four billion dollars, USD1 is a mid-sized stablecoin, where a single withdrawal of several hundred million dollars lands hard in percentage terms.

$184.60 million on Ethereum: 63 burns through the BitGo wallet

When a stablecoin is redeemed, the returned tokens are destroyed. That process is called a burn: the issuer takes the tokens out of circulation and pays out from the reserve in exchange. Every burn is visible on the blockchain, and that is precisely how a decline can be recalculated.

On Ethereum, Onchain Benchmark counted net redemptions of $184.60 million between October 6 and October 15, spread across 63 burns. USD1 circulation on Ethereum fell 11.45 percent over those nine days. More than 99 percent of the tokens submitted for redemption ran through a wallet labelled as BitGo, according to that analysis. BitGo is currently the issuer and custodian of USD1.

63 burns over nine days works out at an average of around $3 million per transaction. The picture on Ethereum is therefore one of a broader return by many participants, not of a single exit.

$200.43 million on BNB Chain: a single address behind nearly all of it

On BNB Chain the distribution looks entirely different. There, Onchain Benchmark recorded $200.43 million in redemptions over the same period, but only 12 burns. Just under $200 million of that came from a single address, which returned tokens in tranches of $30 million to $50 million.

Who controls that address, and why the tokens were returned, the research outfit says it could not establish. That is an important caveat: a large return could be a market maker reshuffling holdings, an exchange holding client money differently, or a fund getting out. Blockchain data alone cannot separate those cases.

Why circulation was not merely shifted between blockchains

With a token that exists on several blockchains, the first cross-check is always the same: has the balance really disappeared, or has it just moved? USD1 runs on Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana, among others.

Onchain Benchmark puts cross-blockchain transfers between Ethereum and BNB Chain at less than $1 million over this period. On Solana, the USD1 balance stayed at around $1.42 billion across the nine days examined, so nothing new was issued there to offset the redemptions either. The decline is therefore a genuine reduction in circulation, not a relocation.

The dollar price held: $0.998 to $1.000 over nine days

The real stress test for a stablecoin is its price, not its size. When a token meant to be a dollar falls persistently below a dollar, that is called a depeg, and at that point a means of payment turns into a risk asset.

That did not happen here. Onchain Benchmark found no sustained depegging over the period studied; the price moved between $0.998 and $1.000. That a return of several hundred million dollars was processed with no visible price effect suggests the reserves were available at that scale.

USDC, USDT and USDe over the same period: the comparison on Ethereum

An 11.45 percent decline on Ethereum says little on its own. It only becomes interesting next to the other large dollar tokens over the same window. For October 6 to 15 on Ethereum, Onchain Benchmark reports the following changes: USDe lost 4.93 percent, USDC 2.18 percent, circulating USDT 0.76 percent.

October was therefore a month of outflows for several dollar tokens, but USD1 sat well clear of the field. Part of that is the arithmetic of the smaller number: for a token worth four billion dollars, a $200 million withdrawal weighs more than it does for one worth $183 billion.

Burn, redemption, proof of reserves: the terms in brief

Redemption means a holder submits tokens to the issuer and receives money for them. Burn is the technical part of that: destroying the submitted tokens on the blockchain. Proof of reserves is a disclosure by the issuer of which assets it holds as backing.

A proof-of-reserves dashboard is not, however, an audit by an independent accountant. It shows what the issuer reports as backing, and it says nothing about what liabilities sit alongside it or how quickly those assets would turn into cash. Anyone wanting to judge how robust a stablecoin is therefore reads both side by side: the reported backing and the conditions under which the issuer actually pays out.

MiCA and the redemption right under Article 49: what applies to USD1 in Germany

For holders in Germany it is the European MiCA regulation that decides, not US law. It treats stablecoins pegged to a single currency as e-money tokens. Article 49 of MiCA obliges the issuer of such a token to redeem it at any time, at par and free of charge. Article 50 also prohibits paying interest on e-money tokens.

That claim depends on authorisation. As the ESMA register stood on September 30, 2026, USDC and EURC are authorised as e-money tokens, issued by Circle Internet Financial Europe and supervised by France's ACPR. For USDT and USD1 there is no register entry. Which stablecoins are listed with which MiCA status is tracked continuously in our overview of stablecoins with MiCA status.

In practice that means: if you hold USD1, your redemption follows the issuer's terms and not the European claim to par value. What obligations authorisation brings with it, and how to recognise an authorised provider, is covered in our overview of MiCA licensing duties for crypto companies.

Concentration risk: when a few large holders carry the size

The finding on BNB Chain describes a pattern that appears more often with young stablecoins: a substantial share of circulation sits with a few addresses. Twelve burns for $200 million means a handful of large participants exited here, not a mass of retail holders.

For small holders no immediate loss follows from that, as long as price and reserves hold. A dependency does follow, though. When a large holder withdraws, the token's liquidity on trading venues falls, trading pairs thin out, and spreads can widen. Anyone using a stablecoin as a parking position between two purchases notices that first when selling.

The switch of issuer to the trust company: the next test

Onchain Benchmark points to a step ahead: "The next tests come with the change of issuer." World Liberty Financial has announced that a trust company of its own is to take over the issuance of USD1. The research outfit reads that as meaning this company would take on a token whose size depends on a few large holders, and do so under a charter whose legal basis is being litigated. The report gives no date for the opening.

A change of issuer is no marginal formality for holders. With it come a different counterparty, a different custodian and a different supervisor, and therefore a different address against which a redemption claim is directed at all. The background on the trust company and the open questions is set out in our piece on the World Liberty Financial US Trust Bank.

What is established and what remains open

Established is the order of magnitude: roughly $401 million less in circulation, $184.60 million of redemptions on Ethereum, $200.43 million on BNB Chain, a stable price between $0.998 and $1.000, reported reserves of around $4.01 billion.

Open is the cause. Neither who controls the large address on BNB Chain nor why tokens were returned there is known. No accusation against the issuer follows from a decline in circulation alone: redemptions are the intended way to leave a stablecoin, and that they worked without breaking the price is, for now, a sign that the mechanism held. Reading more into it would require information that nobody currently has in public.

USD1 in Germany: no MiCA entry, no claim under Article 49

Three steps make sense now if you hold dollar stablecoins:

1. Check the authorisation status of your stablecoins. What matters is whether the token is listed in the register as an e-money token, because the claim to par value under Article 49 hangs on that. The status per token is in the stablecoin overview with MiCA status.
2. Check which provider you hold through. A service provider authorised in the EU is subject to rules on segregating client funds and on custody. Which houses hold an authorisation is shown in the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.
3. Weigh holding period against risk. For brief parking between two purchases, liquidity counts; for longer holding, the legal framework counts. Anyone holding larger balances over longer periods should factor in custody away from the exchange; the differences are set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

The figures in this report come from the Onchain Benchmark analysis published on October 19, 2026, and from CoinGecko market data of the same day. They can be read in the Cointelegraph report and at Onchain Benchmark.

(As of October 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The XRP Ledger reported transfers worth $49.66 billion on Monday. That is 60.4 percent of XRP's entire market value, moved in a single day. On exchanges, $1.47 billion changed hands over the same 24 hours, one thirty-third of that figure. The fees the network withheld and destroyed for the whole movement come to roughly $664.

XRP traded at $1.30, or 1.16 euros, on Monday evening, after a daily low of $1.26 and a high of $1.32. Which ranges are in play at all over a horizon of months is set out in our XRP price prediction. This piece takes on the number that ran through Monday's market reports and works out what it says about demand. The answer is a sober one.

$49.66 billion in a day: what Santiment measured

The figure comes from the data service Santiment and was circulated on Monday morning by the analyst account Ali Charts. What it measures is the dollar value of all coins that moved from one address to another on the blockchain within 24 hours. Santiment itself calls the spike anomalous.

What matters is what this metric is not. It is not a trading volume. It does not count purchases or sales. What is added up are amounts that changed their place on the blockchain, regardless of whether an owner changed with them. An exchange moving 2 billion XRP from a hot to a cold custody address generates a billion-dollar figure in this statistic without a single investor having bought anything.

For a sense of the orders of magnitude: XRP's market value stood at $82.16 billion on Monday evening, with 63.13 billion XRP in circulation out of 99.99 billion in total. A transfer volume of $49.66 billion therefore claims that a good three fifths of all existing XRP changed place within a single day.

$664 in fees: what the movement cost the network

This is where a cross-check is possible, using numbers that come straight from the blockchain. Every transaction on the XRP Ledger carries a fee, and that fee goes to no one: it disappears from the total supply. The total supply appears in every closed ledger in the total_coins field. The difference between two ledgers is therefore the sum of all fees paid between them.

In ledger number 107,765,823, closed on Monday evening, the value reads 99,985,589,187.52 XRP. In ledger 107,739,858 from Sunday afternoon it still stood at 99,985,589,698.40 XRP. Between the two lie 25,965 closed ledgers and a difference of 510.88 XRP. At Monday's price of $1.30, that is $664.

Measured against the claimed transfer volume, that means the network collected $13.37 in fees for every $1 billion the statistic says was moved. That is precisely why transfer volume grows so easily on this blockchain. Shift $10 billion between two addresses you own and you pay fractions of a cent for it. It is not expensive, and for that very reason it is not meaningful either.

The network's base fee is 0.00001 XRP per transaction. In practice more is due, because the fee rises under load. The 510.88 XRP across 25,965 ledgers works out at an average of 0.0197 XRP per ledger. Every one of these values can be looked up in the public XRP Ledger explorer.

Why a high transfer volume says nothing about demand

The mechanism behind it takes three sentences. A purchase happens on an exchange, in the order book, and it shows up in spot turnover. Nothing of it appears on the blockchain at first, because the exchange rebooks internally. Only when someone withdraws their XRP does a transfer arise, and that then says something about custody, not about demand.

The reverse holds too. The largest items in a transfer statistic typically come from four sources: exchanges reshuffling between their own addresses, market makers balancing their holdings across several venues, custodians consolidating client balances, and individual large holders redistributing their positions. None of those four movements is a buy order.

Spot turnover, by contrast, is the number that counts when demand is the question. It stood at $1.47 billion on Monday, 68 percent above Sunday's $872 million. That is a genuine increase, and it is the real news of the day. It is simply 33.8 times smaller than the figure that ran through the reports.

How to look up the total supply on the XRP Ledger yourself

Anyone with a spare minute can follow the calculation above. In the XRP Ledger explorer, pick a confirmed ledger and find the total_coins field in the data set. The value is given in drops, that is millionths of an XRP. Separate six digits from the end and you have the amount in XRP.

Take the same value again 24 hours later. The difference is the amount of XRP destroyed by fees over that period. Nothing more is needed to place a volume report: if a supposedly enormous movement is matched by a fee total in the tens or hundreds of dollars, the movement was cheap and therefore no evidence of demand.

Two further values are worth a look, because they determine the cost of running your own address. The base reserve is 1 XRP, currently around $1.30. Every additional entry in an address, such as a trust line for a token, ties up a further 0.2 XRP. These amounts are not lost, but for as long as the address exists they are locked and cannot be transferred.

Hold through an exchange instead and you pay no network reserve but trading and withdrawal fees, and those differ widely. What each provider charges in Germany is set out in our crypto exchange comparison.

11.81 billion XRP sit on exchanges

Against Monday's friendly reading stands a second number. XRP reserves held on exchanges reached a local high of 11.81 billion XRP, according to the day's market reports. Measured against the 63.13 billion XRP in circulation, that is 18.7 percent.

That amount sits where selling happens. It is not a sell signal, because holdings on exchanges can equally sit there for years. It is, however, the ceiling on what can hit the market at short notice, and it has just risen rather than fallen.

One caveat belongs with it, because it is often missing. Exchange reserves are estimates. They are arrived at by data services assigning addresses to particular venues. If an address is assigned wrongly or not at all, the figure shifts. As a direction it is reliable; as an exact balance it is not.

ETF inflows break after 13 weeks

The third number comes from the fund side, and it is the most uncomfortable. In the week to October 16, US spot ETFs on XRP recorded a net outflow of $1.84 million, according to SoSoValue data. That ends a run of 13 inflow weeks that had been going since the start of July.

A single day accounts for most of it. Canary Capital's XRPC fund saw $2.47 million leave on October 16. Without that session the week would have stayed positive on the same reports. The funds' net assets stand at roughly $1.47 billion, down from about $1.57 billion a week earlier, a decline of 6.4 percent.

The outflow is small compared with a market value of $82 billion. Its significance lies in the sign. For 13 weeks the fund side was the reliable buyer, taking up material regardless of the daily news. That reliability is gone for now, and it is missing in precisely the week in which exchange reserves are rising.

$1.26 and $1.32: Monday's levels

Two documented levels emerge from the daily data. The daily low of $1.26 sits 3.1 percent below Monday's price and marks the point where buyers stepped in during the morning. The daily high of $1.32 is the other side. For as long as the price stays between the two, Monday is a recovery day within a weak week and nothing more.

The longer lines support that reading. Over seven days XRP is down 5.5 percent, over 30 days 9.8 percent, and it remains 64.4 percent short of its record of $3.65. Monday's jump changed none of those figures.

A third level appears in the day's market reports, and it is explicitly not ours. The chart analysis there sees a target of $1.80 to $2.00, but only above $1.56. That is 20 percent away, and for as long as the gap exists, the target is a condition rather than an expectation.

What has changed in the numbers since Sunday

On Sunday this space worked through the supply side, namely the fee burn against the escrow release. XRP stood at $1.29 then, and $1.28 was named as the decisive level. That level held. The price now sits 0.6 percent higher.

Two things have been added since. First, the 510.88 XRP the network destroyed across the 25,965 ledgers since Sunday afternoon, which puts the total supply at 99,985,589,187.52 XRP. Second, Monday's volume report, which bears no relation in scale to the fee total, and which is exactly why it has been recalculated here.

Unchanged is the date that governs the supply side in November. On November 1 the escrow contracts open and release 1 billion XRP. Against that amount the burn since Sunday is negligible, and Monday's transfer volume changes nothing about it either.

What German investors can actually buy

The ETF figures in the section above refer to spot funds listed in the US. For retail investors in Germany these funds are not the route in, because they are not approved for distribution here. Read those numbers and you are reading demand you are not part of. As a sentiment gauge they remain useful nonetheless.

In practice two routes remain in Germany. The first is buying the coin directly from a provider with a MiCA licence, with the option of taking the holdings into your own custody afterwards. The second is exchange-traded notes on XRP, which run through a securities account. The two routes differ on three points, and those are worth laying side by side before you buy.

First, the legal nature. A spot purchase makes you the owner of the coin. A note is a claim against an issuer, even when it is collateralised, and it therefore carries that issuer's default risk. Second, the running costs: trading fees and spread against the paper's annual management fee. Third, custody: with the coin you can choose between exchange custody and your own keys, with the paper you cannot.

The editorial team's assessment

Our assessment: Monday's transfer volume is not a buy signal, and anyone selling it as one has not done the arithmetic. The evidence is above and can be checked: $664 in fees for a supposed $49.66 billion of movement, spot turnover of $1.47 billion, exchange reserves at a local high of 11.81 billion XRP, and a fund week that comes out negative for the first time after 13 positive ones.

What argues against our reading belongs here too. Spot turnover rose 68 percent against Sunday, and liquidations in the futures market stayed small at $5.75 million according to the day's reports. That combination suggests Monday's recovery really did come from the cash market rather than from forced position closures. It is a genuine argument. It only supports the $1.47 billion, not the $49.66 billion.

XRP at $1.30: $664 in fees does not carry a rally

Monday evening's picture can be worked through in three steps:

1. Recalculate the number itself. Before a volume report justifies a buying decision, compare it with the same day's spot turnover. Which tools report such data is shown in the comparison of analytics platforms.
2. Settle the custody question. When 18.7 percent of the circulating supply sits on exchanges, whether your holdings need to sit there too is not a theoretical question. The devices and how they differ are set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document the purchases. Purchase date, amount and price per tranche belong on record before the number of tranches gets out of hand. What automates that is covered in the comparison of crypto tax software.

(As of October 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The euro plays a minor role in Shiba Inu trading, and a smaller one than the Turkish lira. A proprietary analysis of the hundred highest-turnover trading pairs, taken on Monday afternoon, October 19, 2026, puts the euro at 1.59 percent of all reported daily turnover. The lira accounts for 6.54 percent, the Korean won for 5.16 percent. Four fifths of the trading runs through the dollar stablecoin USDT.

For an investor in Germany, that is not a statistic at the margin. The share determines how tightly bids and offers sit in your order book, how far apart bid and ask prices lie, and how much a larger order moves the price. For where the price could reach over a horizon of months, see our Shiba Inu price prediction. This piece looks at what sits between your order and that price.

Shiba Inu in euros: 1.59 percent of trading, the lira carries four times as much

SHIB traded at $0.00000502, or 0.00000446 euros, on Monday afternoon, up roughly 2.2 percent over 24 hours. The daily high was $0.00000504, the low $0.00000480. Over one week the coin is down 7.5 percent, over thirty days 8.7 percent, over twelve months 50.7 percent. Market capitalisation stands at about $2.95 billion, rank 36 in the overall market. All figures come from CoinGecko, retrieved on the afternoon of October 19.

More telling than the price level is which currencies that trading runs through. Across the fifteen counter-currencies in the top 100 pairs, the split looks like this:

• USDT: $41.04 million, 80.51 percent
• Turkish lira: $3.34 million, 6.54 percent
• Korean won: $2.63 million, 5.16 percent
• USDC: $1.35 million, 2.65 percent
• US dollar: $1.28 million, 2.51 percent
• Euro: $0.81 million, 1.59 percent

That leaves the euro in sixth place, behind two currencies from countries whose crypto markets have traditionally been carried by retail investors. Turkish demand for dollar-linked and speculative assets follows from the country's history of inflation, and the Korean market has for years been treated as a world of its own, with price premiums to match. The German investor trades in a book smaller than either.

How this analysis was produced

The figures come from a query of our own. On October 19, 2026 we called CoinGecko's public interface for the Shiba Inu trading pairs, sorted by turnover, first page with one hundred pairs. For each pair the interface reports 24-hour turnover converted into dollars, along with the bid-ask spread in percent as quoted at that moment. The sum across all hundred pairs came to $50.98 million. The same provider's coin endpoint gives $47.7 million of total turnover for the same period; the gap between the two numbers stems from different retrieval times and from the pair list ending at one hundred entries. Both values are quoted here rather than smoothing one of them away. The method is set out in the documentation for the interface and can be repeated by anyone.

Two caveats belong with it. First, exchanges report their own turnover, and not every report carries the same weight. Second, a bid-ask spread is a snapshot; it moves through the day, and more sharply in thin books than in deep ones. The orders of magnitude below do not change because of that, the second decimal place does.

Seven euro pairs and $811,651 a day

Behind that 1.59 percent sit seven trading pairs against the euro, carrying $811,651 of daily turnover between them. This is how they split, each with the bid-ask spread quoted at the time of retrieval:

• Bitvavo: $311,683, spread 0.074 percent
• Kraken: $156,937, spread 0.022 percent
• Bit2Me: $153,798, spread 0.022 percent
• Niza.io: $78,469, spread 0.045 percent
• WhiteBIT: $61,255, spread 0.670 percent
• Coinbase: $25,540, spread 0.224 percent
• Binance: $23,969, spread 0.224 percent

On the arithmetic, each of those pairs carries around $116,000 of turnover a day, or roughly $4,800 an hour. The largest euro pair averages about $13,000 an hour, the two smallest around $1,000. An order of 10,000 euros is no longer a routine event on those smaller venues; it is a noticeable slice of hourly turnover.

The spread varies 30-fold

The bid-ask spread is the gap between the highest bid and the lowest offer in the order book. That gap is a cost that no fee schedule discloses: buy immediately at the market price and you pay the ask, sell immediately and you receive the bid, and the difference stays in the market.

Between the cheapest and the most expensive euro pair on the measurement day sits a factor of 30, from 0.022 to 0.670 percent. Same coin, same blockchain, same day, and still a thirtyfold difference in invisible costs depending on the venue. For Bitcoin, where euro books are considerably deeper, the same range at the major venues runs to a few hundredths of a percent.

What an order of 1,000 euros actually costs

A simple calculation makes the scale tangible. Buy 1,000 euros of SHIB and sell it again later, and you pay the bid-ask spread once in full, on top of the exchange's order fee:

• 0.022 percent spread: around 0.22 euros
• 0.074 percent spread: around 0.74 euros
• 0.224 percent spread: around 2.24 euros
• 0.670 percent spread: around 6.70 euros

In absolute terms that sounds harmless. It becomes decisive in two patterns. The first is the savings plan: buy 100 euros twelve times a year and you pay the spread twelve times, and on the most expensive venue that single line item adds up to a noticeable share of the annual return on a coin that has already lost half its value over twelve months. The second is the large single order: in thin books the quoted spread is not the end of it, because the order consumes the top offers and eats into deeper, worse price levels. That second effect appears in no spread statistic; it shows up only on the settlement note.

The trading fee itself is well above the spread at most venues and remains the larger line item. Current tiers are published by the providers themselves, for instance in Kraken's fee schedule. Which platforms trade under a MiCA licence in Germany and what they charge per order is set out in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

Bitcoin as a yardstick: 175 times the euro volume

Whether $811,651 is a lot or a little only becomes clear against a second coin. Same query, same day, same method, applied to Bitcoin: there, $142.17 million runs through euro pairs. That is 175 times the Shiba Inu figure. In percentage terms the euro is actually lower for Bitcoin, at 0.44 percent, because the overall Bitcoin market is incomparably larger at $32.29 billion a day. In practice, though, what counts is the absolute depth of the book your order lands in, not its share of a global total.

The difference feeds straight through to the spread. At the largest euro venue it stood at 0.011 percent for Bitcoin and 0.074 percent for Shiba Inu, close to seven times as wide. At Kraken the figures were 0.013 against 0.022 percent. Trade both coins in euros on the same venue and you reliably pay more for the smaller one, and that premium is not an exchange's error but the result of demand.

The detour via USDT and its tax catch

Because the dollar books are deeper, a detour suggests itself: swap euros into USDT, then buy SHIB against USDT. That can work out in trading terms, since the USDT book carries $41 million of turnover against $0.81 million in the euro book. Against it, two spreads apply instead of one, on the euro-USDT swap and on the USDT-SHIB purchase, and two more on the way back.

The catch lies elsewhere. Under German tax law, swapping one cryptocurrency for another is a private disposal under section 23 of the Income Tax Act, and a stablecoin is not exempt from it. Swapping euros into USDT triggers nothing in itself, because the euro is legal tender. But swap USDT for SHIB and later SHIB back into USDT, and you have two tax-relevant events instead of one, each with its own acquisition and disposal date. With a coin that moves sharply in a short time, that creates documentation work which a direct euro pair never generates. How long you have to hold for gains to stay tax-free, and how lawmakers are currently handling it, is covered in our continuously updated overview of the state of the holding-period reform. Tools that record every single swap automatically take the job of reconstruction off your hands.

What has changed since the October 18 analysis

Yesterday this space dealt with the supply side: 99.96 percent of all SHIB is in circulation and no major unlock date is pending, as the analysis of circulating supply showed. That figure has not moved since, with circulation still at roughly 589.24 trillion tokens out of 589.50 trillion in total.

That is precisely why the question shifts. If no pressure is coming from the supply side for the foreseeable future, the demand side decides, and demand is measured where trading actually happens. The price has gained around 2.2 percent since yesterday but remains 7.5 percent down on the week. The explanation for that is not in the circulating supply but in books that, on an ordinary Monday, move less than $51 million between them, against a market capitalisation of $2.95 billion.

Our assessment: the venue weighs more here than the price view

In the editorial team's view, the choice of venue is currently the lever with the best ratio of effort to effect for Shiba Inu. The evidence sits above: a factor of 30 between the cheapest and the most expensive quoted euro spread on the same day, a euro book with $811,651 of turnover, and a difference of roughly 6.70 against 0.22 euros per 1,000 euros traded from the spread alone. That difference is certain, it applies on every order, and the investor can influence it.

Against that, these amounts stay small in absolute terms on small sums and are swamped by the order fee; buy 200 euros once and the choice of venue shifts a few cents. A spread is also a snapshot and can look entirely different in quiet overnight hours than in the afternoon. For anyone trading regularly or in larger tranches, the ratio reverses. No statement about price direction follows from any of this, and a buy or sell recommendation certainly does not: a coin that has lost 50.7 percent over twelve months does not become a better investment through a tighter spread.

Keeping an eye on the spread

Three things can be settled in a few minutes before your next order. First: does your exchange display bid and ask side by side in the order book, and how far apart are they for SHIB? The difference divided by the midpoint gives the spread in percent. Second: does your exchange trade a genuine euro pair, or only a dollar pair with automatic conversion? In the second case a conversion margin is added that is rarely disclosed. Third: is there enough depth for your order size? A look at the order book shows how much volume sits in the top price levels.

A limit order instead of a market order protects against both effects. Such an order is filled only at your price or better, and it does not run into deeper price levels. The price for that is that it can stay open during fast moves. Which venues run a direct euro pair for SHIB at all is shown in the list above: there are seven, and two of them carry close to 58 percent of euro turnover between them.

Trading SHIB in euros: the spread decides your return

1. Before your next order, check the bid-ask spread for SHIB in euros at your venue and compare it with a second provider. On the measurement day, best and worst euro pair stood at 0.022 and 0.670 percent. Which venues trade under licence in Germany is set out in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges linked above.
2. Choose deliberately between a direct euro pair and the detour via USDT. The dollar book is roughly fifty times deeper, but costs two spreads per direction and creates additional taxable swaps. Anyone taking the detour needs clean records, for instance with crypto tax software.
3. For amounts from a few thousand euros upwards, use a limit order and split it when the book is thin. The order fee remains the larger line item, which makes it worth looking at the tiers in the crypto exchange comparison.

(As of October 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Bittensor has changed the rule by which a subnet distributes its rewards. Since the release of Runtime 475 on October 7, 2026, the owners of a subnet may choose between two procedures: the existing Yuma Consensus and a new mode called Null. Under Null, no vote among many validators decides the weights any more; exactly one validator does, namely the one with the largest stake. At the same time the number of slots per subnet rises from 256 to as many as 2,500.

For holders of TAO this is no footnote from a developer channel. Anyone delegating their tokens to a validator receives their dividend on a different calculation. And anyone wanting to enter a subnet as a miner no longer needs TAO to do it under certain conditions. The price stands at $273.87 on Monday, October 19, 2026, or 244.29 euros, which is 7.3 percent below the level of a week ago.

Null Consensus: the largest stake scores alone

A subnet at Bittensor is a market of its own for one kind of computation, for language models or for image processing, say. Miners deliver results, validators score them, and the distribution of the emission arises from those scores. The score is called a weight in the protocol, and whoever may set weights thereby decides about money.

This is exactly where Null takes hold. The mode grants precisely one validator permit, to the identifier with the largest unrounded stake; in a tie it goes to the lower identifier. Only that one identifier may set, commit or reveal weights, and that also covers the routes by which an owner scores itself. It is set out that way in the corresponding pull request of the Subtensor project, which was merged into the main branch on October 6, 2026.

The consequence is a markedly shorter calculation. Under Null an epoch loads only the single weight row, skips the consensus and skips the bonds, that is the accounting of trust over time. The frozen bond stores are retained but no longer updated. If the chosen validator supplies no valid weights, the protocol distributes the miner rewards evenly across all registered identifiers.

Yuma Consensus: what the existing procedure delivers

Yuma Consensus is the procedure Bittensor has used for years to score the participants of a subnet and fix their rewards. It takes the weights of all eligible validators, forms a stake-weighted consensus from them and penalises outliers: whoever deviates sharply from the majority view loses influence. The Bittensor protocol documentation still describes it as the procedure that translates weights into rewards.

That mechanism costs computing time, and it costs it quadratically in the number of validators. Hence a subnet's capacity under Yuma sits at 256 identifiers. Null buys the higher capacity by leaving out the most expensive part of the calculation. That is a trade, not an improvement on every axis: the deviation penalty that reins in a single validator under Yuma falls away with the consensus.

2,500 slots, divided by the number of mechanisms

The 2,500 slots are not a fixed figure per subnet but a shared budget. It is divided by the number of emission mechanisms: with one mechanism 2,500 identifiers are available, with two it is 1,250, with four 625. An owner can raise the capacity only after switching to Null. The project's tests draw the line sharply; 2,500 identifiers are accepted, 2,501 rejected.

The way back is more laborious than the way out. Anyone switching from Null back to Yuma has to prune their subnet explicitly to the shared ceiling of 256 identifiers beforehand. That pruning deletes at most 64 identifiers per operation, aborts commitments already running and clears orphaned entries in limited steps. A subnet with 2,000 participants therefore does not come back in a single step.

The upshot for the projects: Null is built for large subnets with a division of labour, in which many miners deliver a clearly measurable service and the scoring leaves little room for argument. For small subnets with contested scores, Yuma remains the more robust procedure.

Dividends under Null: inactive identifiers are served too

Here lies the point that concerns delegators directly. Although only one identifier may set weights, all identifiers with a positive stake keep their pro-rata dividends, expressly including the inactive ones and those without a validator permit. The permission to score and the entitlement to a dividend are decoupled under Null.

Anyone who has delegated TAO to a smaller validator therefore does not lose their entitlement through the switch. What changes is influence: in a Null subnet the validator you follow no longer has a say in how the miners are scored, as long as it is not the largest. The payout then depends solely on the stake share, no longer on the quality of the scoring.

The allocation itself is computed by the protocol in whole units with wide integers, and it never exceeds the funded epoch budget. That sounds technical but has a practical side: rounding remainders that arise with many thousands of recipients do not run out of the budget.

Fee-free PoW registration: computing work instead of a TAO burn

The second part of the upgrade is the more tangible one for newcomers. Until now, entering a subnet as a miner cost a registration fee, the so-called burn: you destroy TAO to obtain a slot. The upgrade places a second route alongside it, one that the owners of a subnet can enable. Through the pow_register call, a slot arises through computing work, a proof of work.

A direct call without a tip requires neither a TAO transaction fee nor the registration burn nor the prior purchase of a security deposit. The root subnet is excluded from this. New or missing settings default to off, and expressly stored enablements are retained. The old registration routes keep their burn behaviour unchanged.

The proof is tied to the slot and not transferable. It binds the subnet, a recent historical block hash, the hotkey, the signing coldkey and a nonce. It is accepted at an age of one to five blocks. If the search takes longer, the command line fetches the latest block hash and the difficulty anchored to it every twelve seconds. A proof that has been found and then sits too long is rejected.

Burn price and PoW difficulty rise separately

The two routes do not affect each other in price. Registrations via computing work raise only the PoW difficulty, registrations via the burn raise only the burn price. Both draw on the same settings for multiplier and half-life, but they have their own price limits and their own demand.

A subnet owner can offer the burn alone, computing work alone, or both. The protocol refuses to switch off whichever route is the last one remaining; so a subnet cannot accidentally close itself to new participants. The existing rules continue to apply to the owner's cool-down and lock-up periods.

Economically this shifts entry from capital to hardware. Whoever has graphics cards and electricity pays with computing work. Whoever does not keeps paying with TAO. For the price the direction is ambiguous: less burn means less demand for TAO for registrations, more participants mean more demand for stake. Which effect prevails will only show once enough subnets have enabled the route. Anyone looking for an exchange with a European licence for that will find one in the crypto exchange comparison.

Runtime 475 to 478: how a Bittensor upgrade goes live

Between October 5 and October 13, 2026 the project published five runtime versions: Runtime 473 on October 5, Runtime 475 on October 7, a proposal for 476 and Runtime 477 on October 8, and Runtime 478 on October 13. Null Consensus and the PoW registration sit in Runtime 475; the pull request itself carries specification number 474, which received no release entry of its own. cryptoticker.io compiled this review itself on October 19, 2026, on the basis of the eight most recent release entries of the Subtensor project and the pull request named.

The interim entry for 476 is interesting because it lays open the route by which a new runtime lands on the Finney mainnet. The entry names a deployment via a two-of-two multi-signature: the build automation sets its half, after which the three-member panel has to produce the second approval. Alongside that it carries the commit, the call hash, the checksum of the runtime file and a deployment time, so that anyone can check the published file against a rebuild of their own.

For holders that is a useful yardstick. An entry with the addition “proposed” is code waiting for signatures, not a change already in effect. Anyone wanting to know whether an announced change has arrived in the network looks at the specification number the network reports, not at the headline.

What stays open in the pull request

The upgrade is merged and shipped, and it carries two open points in its own record. The project's owner expressly admitted a single review instance named Skeptic as a non-green check; its five findings on resource accounting remain unresolved and visible. All other checks had to pass.

Plainer still is the sentence at the end of the rationale: the accounting of the reference weights and the resource envelope of the deployment remain unchecked, and a runtime update on a shared testnet had not been submitted at that point. The owner settled on 2,500 identifiers with atomic payouts and deferred further optimisations of the reward accounting. Historical comparative costs for 4,096 identifiers are noted in the project as a historical measurement, not as a reason for the smaller capacity.

Our assessment: the capacity of 2,500 slots is documented and tested, operation at that size is not, according to the project's own record. In favour are the passed boundary tests and the successful registration without a balance; against are the five open findings on resource accounting and the missing testnet run. Anyone holding TAO should therefore read the first wave of large Null subnets as a stress test and not as a settled matter. No recommendation to buy follows from that; with TAO a total loss is possible.

TAO price week on week: $273.87, with $269 as the weekly low

The price stood at $273.87 on Monday, October 19, 2026 at around 9:50 a.m. German time, according to CoinGecko data. Over 24 hours that is 1.5 percent more, over seven days 7.3 percent less and over 30 days 6.5 percent more. The weekly high of the daily values was $295.17 on October 12, the weekly low $269.16 on October 18. Within the past 24 hours the range ran from $254.35 to $275.54.

Market value comes to $3.11 billion, which corresponds to rank 35. In circulation are 11,339,646 TAO out of a maximum of 21 million, so 54 percent. Daily turnover is $162 million and therefore a good 5 percent of market value; in that respect TAO is considerably more liquid than many tokens of comparable size. The price is 63.9 percent away from the peak of $757.60 of March 7, 2024.

As levels on the downside, the weekly low at $269 and the round mark at $250 suggest themselves, on the upside the weekly high at $295 and the $300 mark. That is an observation of the range the price has moved in over the past seven days, and not a price target. The hard ceiling of 21 million tokens makes TAO scarcer than most protocol tokens; release schedules and the running emission determine how quickly the remainder reaches circulation.

Buying TAO in Germany: the route via a licensed exchange

TAO is not a token every German platform carries. Since the end of the MiCA transition period, only licensed providers may supply crypto-asset services in Germany, and the range of thinner altcoins differs markedly from provider to provider. Before buying, first check whether your provider trades TAO at all and whether it holds a licence under the European crypto regulation; the list of licensed institutions is kept by the supervisor, not by the exchange itself.

On custody the same arithmetic applies to TAO as to other protocol tokens. If the holding sits on the exchange, you carry the provider's default risk. Anyone holding it themselves takes on responsibility for the keys. Delegated staking is the normal case at Bittensor and not a side business, because stake decides influence in the network. Anyone delegating through an exchange should establish beforehand who holds the keys in that case and what share of the reward stays with the provider.

For tax, the one-year holding period remains unchanged for 2026: anyone holding TAO for longer than twelve months and then selling pays no tax on the gain. Staking income is to be kept separate from that and runs as other income. With several exchanges and wallets the allocation of acquisition dates quickly becomes confusing; how the order counts there is set out in our piece on the FIFO method across several exchanges.

Leveraged products on TAO exist, and with a token that runs through a range of $21 in a single day they are correspondingly risky. A position with fivefold leverage is liquidated on a counter-move of 20 percent, and those 20 percent sit inside the monthly range with TAO.

Bittensor upgrade: 2,500 slots change the arithmetic for stakers

Three steps make sense now:

1. Check which mode the subnets holding your stake run in. The mode is a setting of the owner, and it determines whether your validator's scoring still counts at all. If your stake sits with a smaller validator in a Null subnet, the dividend remains, the influence does not. If you want to change provider, compare the terms in the staking comparison first.
2. Settle your buying route before you top up. TAO is not traded at every licensed provider, and fees for smaller altcoins are frequently above those for Bitcoin. Which institutions hold a European licence is set out in the comparison of regulated exchanges.
3. Keep the holding period and staking income apart in your records. The disposal gain after twelve months and the running staking income are treated differently. Which tools keep the two separate is set out in the comparison of tax tools.

(As of October 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Hobbyists are booting iOS 16 on Xiaomi and Nothing phones and posting the proof. It barely works, but it suggests Apple's software is no longer welded to Apple's hardware.

Unveiled at Money20/20, the API-based tool combines payment and blockchain intelligence to flag fraud, scams and sanctions exposure before funds move on-chain.

Nine companies, including Verizon, Broadcom and UnitedHealth, have objected to having their shares traded on the planned OKX-ICE tokenized stock venue.

The Department of Homeland Security told civilian agencies to remove China's DeepSeek and any service built on it, and banned buying more, citing the risk of sensitive data reaching Beijing.

JPMorgan is rolling out JPM Coin on Ethereum for institutional clients, a token backed by dollars in its accounts that settles in seconds, any day of the week.

Hyperliquid claims the SEC’s new crypto framework contains critical flaws that trap Web3 developers, demanding five immediate fixes.

XRP has finally launched its official X account after more than a decade, drawing a warm welcome from Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and quickly attracting over 21,000 followers.

Solana clinches a landmark 1.4 million equity holders milestone, exposing a massive new divide on the RWA market $SOL.

XRP exchange reserves have surged to 11.81 billion tokens, nearing the highest level this year as Binance traders reduce leverage and whale activity weakens.

Shiba Inu sees 2,349% burn activity surge, but the real figure behind it remains surprising.

TLDR

• RELL stock climbs 3.60% to $18.99 following LaserSlat SAVER sales expansion.
• Richardson Electronics brings LaserSlat SAVER to more markets across Europe.
• U.S. customers can now order select LaserSlat SAVER products directly online.
• LaserSlat SAVER targets slag buildup to reduce maintenance and machine downtime.
• Richardson will highlight its laser consumables at EuroBLECH and FABTECH 2026.

Richardson Electronics expanded LaserSlat SAVER distribution across Europe and introduced online purchasing for selected products in the United States. Meanwhile, RELL stock rose 3.60% to $18.99, gaining $0.66 during Monday’s trading session. The rollout broadens customer access as the company develops its recurring industrial consumables business.

Richardson Electronics, Ltd., RELL

Richardson Electronics expands digital sales capabilities

Richardson Electronics added e-commerce capabilities to rellaser.com, allowing U.S. customers to order selected LaserSlat SAVER products. Customers can now research eligible products and complete purchases through the company’s website. The service adds a digital option alongside Richardson Electronics’ existing direct sales and technical support.

The company serves industrial customers that use laser systems for metal cutting and fabrication. These businesses regularly replace consumables and maintain machinery to keep production lines operating. Online purchasing gives them another way to obtain maintenance supplies without contacting a sales representative.

Richardson Electronics expects the new channel to extend its reach in the laser-cutting market. The company also continues to support customers through its established sales teams. Together, these channels cover online orders and purchases requiring direct technical assistance.

European expansion supports Richardson Electronics’ consumables business

Richardson Electronics also extended LaserSlat SAVER availability into a broad range of European markets. The company will use its existing European infrastructure to supply manufacturers and fabricators. That expansion supports its efforts to grow repeat purchases of parts and maintenance products.

LaserSlat SAVER helps prevent slag buildup on the slats that support material during laser cutting. Cleaner slats can support steady cutting performance and reduce routine cleaning requirements. The product also aims to limit downtime and extend the useful life of cutting table components.

Richardson Electronics markets LaserSlat SAVER as an environmentally friendly maintenance solution. The company says the product works with all laser cutting machines, including high-power fiber lasers rated up to 100 kilowatts. This compatibility gives equipment operators across different production settings another maintenance option.

Richardson Electronics prepares for EuroBLECH and FABTECH 2026

Richardson Electronics will present LaserSlat SAVER at EuroBLECH 2026 in Hanover, Germany, from October 20 to 23. Visitors can find the company at booth 11-F166 at the Hanover Exhibition Grounds. The trade show brings together suppliers and manufacturers involved in sheet metal processing.

The company will also exhibit at FABTECH 2026 in Las Vegas from October 21 to 23. Its team will meet visitors at booth C2422 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. FABTECH focuses on metal forming, fabrication, welding, and finishing across North America.

Alongside LaserSlat SAVER, Richardson Electronics will showcase additional parts and consumables for industrial laser systems. Its lineup includes power grid tubes, optics, nozzles, dust collection filters, bellows, and service parts. Both events offer opportunities to connect with manufacturers seeking less downtime and longer equipment life.

The post Richardson Electronics (RELL) Stock: Surges as Company Expands LaserSlat SAVER Sales Across Europe appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• CTSH stock rises 0.66% to $66.46 following an expanded Google Cloud alliance.
• Cognizant assigns over 18,000 employees to its new Gemini engineering group.
• The partnership targets AI automation across retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.
• A retail project reports 40% higher productivity and 35% lower costs using Gemini.
• Over 55,000 Cognizant employees complete Gemini training as deployment expands.

Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) stock gained 0.66% to $66.46 on Monday, adding $0.43 as afternoon buying strengthened. The increase followed Cognizant’s announcement of an expanded Google Cloud partnership focused on enterprise AI adoption. The companies introduced a new Gemini Frontier Capability Group to support businesses deploying advanced automation systems.

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, CTSH

Cognizant and Google Cloud Expand Enterprise AI Partnership

The new partnership brings together Google’s enterprise AI technology and Cognizant’s engineering expertise to develop business automation solutions. Cognizant will support the initiative with more than 18,000 dedicated employees across its global operations. The group will help companies move AI projects from early testing into full commercial deployment.

Furthermore, the initiative builds on Cognizant’s Gemini practice, which launched in April 2026. The companies aim to simplify enterprise adoption through specialized engineering services and structured deployment methods. Their expanded collaboration targets businesses seeking greater efficiency across software development, operations, and cybersecurity.

Meanwhile, Cognizant plans to focus its engineering resources on modernizing older technology systems and improving developer productivity. The company will also develop autonomous business processes and strengthen enterprise cybersecurity capabilities. These services will combine Google’s cloud infrastructure with Cognizant’s experience across several major industries.

New Gemini Initiative Targets Retail, Healthcare, and Manufacturing

Cognizant plans to introduce enterprise applications that automate specific tasks across retail, healthcare, and manufacturing operations. Its retail support agent will help businesses manage product catalogs and related customer service processes. Its healthcare marketplace will coordinate specialized digital agents across different operational functions.

The manufacturing initiative will focus on automating order processing, billing, and payment collection through connected systems. Cognizant will also use standardized architecture to support secure communication between enterprise applications. Google Cloud’s Model Armor will help protect these systems from security threats.

The partnership has already produced measurable improvements through an earlier retail software development project. Cognizant reported a 40% increase in developer productivity after integrating Gemini models into development workflows. The same project reduced delivery times by 30% and generated cost savings of 35%.

Cognizant Expands Workforce Training and Internal AI Deployment

Cognizant continues to expand employee training as enterprise demand for advanced AI services increases. More than 55,000 employees completed its recent Build with Gemini workshop alongside Google Cloud. Participants developed applications and automation agents while earning credentials related to Gemini technology.

The training initiative supports Cognizant’s broader effort to develop engineers with specialized AI deployment skills. These employees will help enterprise clients integrate new technology into existing business systems. Consequently, the company expects its trained workforce to support larger and more complex customer projects.

Cognizant is also expanding Gemini adoption across its internal workforce throughout 2026. The company plans to provide the technology to 100,000 employees this year, with a longer-term target of 200,000. This expansion strengthens its existing Google Cloud partnership and extends AI capabilities across its global business operations.

The post Cognizant Technology Solutions (CTSH) Stock: Gains as Google Cloud Unveils New Gemini AI Initiative appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• NVIDIA (NVDA) stock gains 1.54% to $217.43 following a European quantum milestone.
• NVIDIA completes a 104-qubit simulation using Europe’s JUPITER supercomputer.
• New magic-state cultivation method could cut required quantum qubits by 90%.
• Researchers scaled testing to 8,192 GPUs and reduced weekslong work to days.
• NVIDIA’s cuQuantum and CUDA-Q software powered the fault-tolerant simulation.

NVIDIA (NVDA) stock rose 1.54% to $217.43 on Monday as the company reported a major quantum computing simulation in Europe. Shares gained $3.30, although intraday selling trimmed earlier advances. The announcement highlighted a 104-qubit test aimed at improving fault-tolerant quantum computing.

NVIDIA Corporation, NVDA

NVIDIA Completes Record 104-Qubit Simulation

NVIDIA researchers ran the simulation on JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, at Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The project used NVIDIA GH200 processors to model complex quantum operations under realistic hardware noise. According to NVIDIA, the work represents the largest comprehensive simulation of a fault-tolerant quantum processor.

The researchers examined magic-state cultivation, a method that helps quantum systems carry out reliable calculations. Quantum computers face errors because their qubits respond to noise during processing. Consequently, scientists need methods that limit these errors without requiring excessive hardware.

Earlier research at Jülich modeled 50 qubits under ideal conditions without noise. The new project extended that work by examining 104 qubits in a more realistic setting. This approach helps researchers assess how proposed quantum machines might perform outside controlled simulations.

Quantum Method Targets Lower Hardware Requirements

NVIDIA said the cultivation approach could require 90% fewer qubits than previous methods. That reduction matters because useful quantum computers need substantial resources to correct processing errors. Lower hardware requirements could simplify future designs and reduce the cost of scaling them.

Magic states support calculations that ordinary error-correction methods cannot complete alone. However, quantum processors continually consume these states during fault-tolerant operations. Researchers therefore study faster and more efficient ways to produce them.

The team tested how noise affects cultivation and identified ways to evaluate future improvements. Its findings could guide hardware developers before they commit resources to physical prototypes. Such testing also supports research involving drug discovery, financial modeling and advanced materials.

NVIDIA Expands GPU Simulation Capacity

The team first developed its methods using NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL72 system at its Accelerated Quantum Research Center. Researchers expanded testing from four GPUs to hundreds before moving to JUPITER. They eventually used 8,192 GPUs to perform the larger simulation.

This process helped the team check accuracy and compare overall performance across computing environments. It also shortened work that previously required weeks into a process lasting days. The development stage prepared the software for JUPITER’s much larger computing resources.

NVIDIA used its cuQuantum software to improve simulation performance across the entire system. Meanwhile, its CUDA-Q platform provided tools for describing fault-tolerant quantum circuits. Together, the systems showed how conventional GPU supercomputers can support quantum research before engineers build larger physical processors.

The post NVIDIA (NVDA) Stock: Rises as Company Achieves Quantum Computing Breakthrough in Europe appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Amazon (AMZN) stock jumps 4.98% to $262.45 following its latest nuclear deal
• Amazon backs a 960MW nuclear plant in Indiana to support growing energy demand
• X-energy will supply 12 small modular reactors for Amazon’s Indiana power plant
• Amazon and X-energy target 5GW of new nuclear power capacity by the year 2039
• X-energy shares initially surge 10% after Amazon unveils its new nuclear deal

Amazon (AMZN) stock surged 4.98% to $262.45 on Monday as the company announced a major nuclear energy project. The shares gained $12.45 during the session, while Amazon outlined plans to fund a 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana. The project expands Amazon’s nuclear energy commitments and supports its growing electricity needs across its data center operations.

Amazon.com, Inc., AMZN

Amazon stock gains as nuclear energy expansion accelerates

Amazon shares climbed throughout Monday morning before stabilizing near $262.45 during the afternoon trading session. The stock maintained most of its gains despite minor price fluctuations after its sharp morning advance. Meanwhile, the company’s latest energy agreement adds another nuclear development project to its expanding power strategy.

Amazon will fund the proposed Indiana facility and become its first electricity customer under the announced arrangement. American Electric Power will operate the plant, while X-energy will provide 12 Xe-100 small modular nuclear reactors. The companies plan to develop the facility south of Terre Haute on the site of a former coal plant.

The agreement marks Amazon’s second commercial project with X-energy and triples the capacity of their previous arrangement. Amazon previously led X-energy’s $700 million Series C-1 funding round in October 2024. Furthermore, both companies aim to develop five gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity across the United States by 2039.

Indiana nuclear project targets electricity demand

The proposed 960-megawatt facility will connect to the public electricity grid rather than supply Amazon exclusively. However, Amazon expects the project to provide electricity for its data centers alongside other grid customers. This arrangement supports Amazon’s broader plans to secure energy supplies for its technology infrastructure.

The Indiana project’s development also depends on X-energy’s progress at its first planned nuclear facility in Texas. X-energy plans to install four Xe-100 reactors at Dow Chemical’s Seadrift plant to supply heat and electricity. The company has not started construction, although federal regulators have advanced its construction permit review toward completion.

Texas authorities have sued Dow over alleged water and solid-waste regulatory violations at the Seadrift industrial complex. The legal dispute concerns the site’s environmental compliance and adds background to X-energy’s first planned deployment. Nevertheless, the nuclear construction schedule remains subject to licensing requirements and completion of the initial reactor project.

X-energy shares react to Amazon nuclear agreement

X-energy entered public markets in April through a Nasdaq listing that priced its shares at $23. Its stock gained 27% during the first trading session before declining substantially in subsequent months. Shares have since lost nearly two-thirds of their value from the initial public offering price.

Following Monday’s Amazon announcement, X-energy shares initially advanced approximately 10% during premarket trading. The stock later reversed direction and traded less than 2% lower at publication time. The price movement followed the announcement of the larger commercial agreement between the two companies.

Small modular reactor developers aim to reduce construction costs through standardized designs and repeated manufacturing processes. However, previous American nuclear projects experienced significant cost overruns and lengthy construction delays. Amazon’s latest commitment expands its nuclear portfolio, while X-energy continues developing its first commercial reactor facility.

The post Amazon (AMZN) Stock: Surges 4.98% as Company Backs 960MW Nuclear Power Plant appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• EOSE stock slides 3.02% to $1.7650 despite revenue growth of up to 172% in Q3.
• Eos projects up to $83 million in quarterly revenue as battery shipments rise 23%.
• Eos narrows gross losses for an eighth straight quarter as output ramps up.
• A $765 million backlog supports Eos as it ramps zinc battery production in the US.
• Eos targets around-the-clock Thorn Hill output as EOSE stock drops 3.02% Monday.

Eos Energy Enterprises posted rapid sales growth, yet its stock declined during Monday’s trading session. EOSE shares fell 3.02% to $1.7650, losing $0.0550 despite preliminary third-quarter revenue growth of up to 172%. The drop contrasted with rising battery shipments and improving production efficiency at Thorn Hill.

Eos Energy Enterprises, Inc., EOSE

EOSE stock drops despite higher third-quarter sales

Eos expects third-quarter revenue between $82 million and $83 million for the period ended September 30. That represents year-over-year growth of 169% to 172%, according to preliminary results. Revenue also climbed 19% to 21% from the previous quarter.

Battery shipments rose about 23% quarter over quarter as the company increased output. Thorn Hill’s second production line supplied 17% of total battery production during the quarter. Eos brought that line’s first-pass yield in line with its original line.

Eos makes American-produced zinc batteries for long-duration energy storage, including commercial and industrial applications. Its technology serves customers needing electricity storage for extended periods, including data centers and defense sites. However, the company still recorded substantial manufacturing losses despite faster sales growth.

Thorn Hill production lifts Eos gross margins

Eos expects third-quarter GAAP gross margins between negative 55% and negative 53%. That represents an improvement of 16 to 18 percentage points from the second quarter. The company recorded its eighth consecutive quarter of gross margin improvement.

Greater output and lower conversion costs per unit helped reduce production losses. However, Line 2 continued operating with partial shifts during the quarter. Eos continued hiring and training workers to support higher volumes and longer operating hours.

The company plans to add its final shift during the fourth quarter after further employee training. Eos expects that change to enable 24-hour operations at Thorn Hill as it consolidates manufacturing. The facility should eventually provide 4 GWh of annual nameplate production capacity across two lines.

Backlog and cash support Eos 2026 outlook

Eos held approximately $344 million in cash, including restricted funds, at September’s end. Cash fell from $364 million in June despite $114 million in operating cash inflows. Customer deposits, project payments and tax credit collections contributed to those inflows during the reporting period.

Eos also received an $87 million advance under its Department of Energy loan facility. Capital spending reached about $35 million, mainly for Line 2 automation. Its order backlog stood near $765 million, equivalent to roughly 3.2 GWh.

Eos received six customer orders, including a previously announced $100 million order under an existing capacity reservation agreement. The company expects 2026 revenue in the lower half of its $300 million to $350 million guidance. Defense projects and work involving MN8 and Google support demand ahead of expanded fourth-quarter production.

The post Eos Energy Enterprises (EOSE) Stock: Slide 3% Despite 172% Revenue Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

The cryptocurrency market has been anything but stable lately and is still far from the bullish conditions some anticipated this month.

Despite the overall uncertainty, optimism continues to build around select tokens like Hyperliquid’s HYPE. Here’s why it rose to the top of a notable ranking and what it could indicate.

HYPE Overtakes BTC and ETH

Ki Young Ju (founder and CEO of CryptoQuant) recently said HYPE has become the most bullish cryptocurrency in analyst sentiment. He said the optimism stems primarily from its tokenomics, specifically fee-driven buybacks.

Hyperliquid uses a portion of the fees generated on its platform to repurchase HYPE coins from the open market. In theory, this creates a constant source of demand tied directly to the protocol’s activity and could support a potential price appreciation.

According to Ju’s analysis, BNB is the second-most bullish cryptocurrency, while Solana’s SOL comes in third. The sector’s undisputed leader, Bitcoin (BTC), ranks fourth, followed by Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), Ethereum (ETH), and Uniswap (UNI).

Being the “most bullish” cryptocurrency in analyst sentiment essentially means market observers see HYPE as having one of the strongest upside cases based on its fundamentals, tokenomics, and other factors. This may sound like good news, but keep in mind that when sentiment becomes overwhelmingly positive, it can sometimes serve as a contrarian indicator, signaling that the asset may be overheating and becoming vulnerable to a short-term pullback. Commenting on the post was Ali Martinez, who said:

“From a counter-sentiment perspective, that’s bearish!”

HYPE Price Outlook and Predictions

As of press time, the asset trades just north of $80, down 18% from the all-time high of nearly $100 earlier this year. Late last week, Martinez spotted a fresh TD Sequential buy signal on the asset, noting that the previous signal preceded a rebound of around 11%.

“If this one gets similar follow-through, Hyperliquid could test $86, then resistance near $93,” he suggested.

For their part, Jelle said HYPE is testing the 100-day EMA and has bounced off it so far. The analyst revealed the price has plunged more than they initially expected, but added that the long-term picture remains unchanged as long as the June highs of around $76 hold.

Meanwhile, an anonymous investor supposedly made significant profits after trading HYPE. As CryptoPotato reported, the whale bought 257,928 HYPE toward the end of 2024, when the price of one token was around $3.50. Recently, the investor transferred more than 230,000 coins to Kraken, potentially locking in a profit of almost $20 million if an actual sale took place.

The post HYPE Beats BTC and ETH in a Surprising Category: But Is This Really Good News? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ripple’s cross-border token, which is perhaps one of the most popular crypto assets with a vast community behind it, finally received a dedicated account on X.

It almost feels unreal that more than a decade after its launch, XRP didn’t have an official account on the largest social media platform for the crypto industry. The celebratory posts and comments were quick to join the movement, led by Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse.

This one has been a long time coming… Welcome @XRP! https://t.co/UYRYIHDGGl

— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) October 19, 2026

There’s only one post on the account as of press time, which reads “hello, world,” perhaps referencing the 52-year-old tradition that started with Brian Kernighan, who first used it in a Bell Laboratories internal memorandum for a programming language.

Although the post is just a few hours old, the attention has been quite impressive since the account already has over 47,000 followers.

Moreover, some of the comments below came from major accounts, such as Gemini, Uphold, Moonpay, Flare, and others. Naturally, prominent members of the XRP community, such as EGRAG CRYPTO and the XRP Ledger account, also welcomed the new Ripple member on X.

The establishment of an XRP-dedicated account follows a highly successful week for Ripple, in which it announced a few major partnerships and expanded its reach on Wall Street.

The same cannot be said about the native token itself, which has struggled to stage a notable recovery. XRP was rejected at $1.40 last week, and tumbled to $1.25 just days later, where it finally found support.

Popular analyst Ali Martinez, who also commented on the new account’s post, believes XRP’s successful rebound from that area means that it has bottomed out, especially since the network activity on the XRP Ledger skyrocketed at that price level.

The post Major XRP Adoption News Sparks Excitement Across Ripple’s Community: Details appeared first on CryptoPotato.

It would be difficult to describe crypto venture capital as being in a funding drought. Investors deployed approximately $5.7 billion into crypto and blockchain companies during the second quarter of 2026, according to Galaxy Research, an increase of 31% from the previous quarter.

What has changed is where that money is going and what founders increasingly have to demonstrate to get it. Nearly 80% of the capital invested during the quarter went to later-stage companies. Crypto startup valuations have also fallen sharply from their highs in the final quarter of 2025, while raising new crypto venture funds remains difficult. Galaxy recorded only five new funds during Q2, the lowest quarterly number for several years.

September continued the mixed picture. FinDaS recorded $1.05 billion across 48 Web3 funding rounds, compared with a preceding 12-month monthly average of $2.01 billion and almost 67 rounds. Capital is clearly still available, but what appears to be disappearing is the assumption that a promising Web3 company should be able to raise it easily. I think that could ultimately produce better companies.

Varun Datta, venture capitalist and CEO of Truth Ventures, explores why tougher fundraising conditions may be forcing Web3 companies to build stronger businesses.

What investors now expect

There have been periods in Web3 when the strength of a market narrative could compensate for weaknesses elsewhere in a business. A compelling technology, experienced founders and a convincing token model could attract significant capital before there was much evidence of who the eventual customer would be or whether that customer was willing to pay.

Some excellent companies were funded during those periods, so I would not dismiss what abundant capital made possible. It allowed founders to experiment with technologies and business models that conventional investors may not have financed, and some of today’s infrastructure emerged from exactly that environment. But easy money also allowed companies to postpone difficult questions around who needed the product, why the technology was better than the existing alternative, how the company would make money and whether the business would still work if token prices fell and incentives became less attractive.

Those are questions I think investors are increasingly asking earlier. I have argued previously that crypto VC risks mistaking consensus for discipline when investors retreat towards companies and categories that have already been validated. Selectivity should not mean waiting until somebody else has proved that an opportunity exists.

At Truth Ventures, our focus is early-stage Web3 infrastructure, so there will often be limited revenue and sometimes a product that is still being developed when we first meet a founder. It would be unreasonable to expect an early-stage company to have everything proven.

What I do expect is a founder who understands the problem extremely well. There is a meaningful difference between uncertainty because something has not yet been built and uncertainty because nobody has worked out why it needs to exist. That distinction becomes much more important when capital is selective.

A difficult market changes how companies build

The most obvious effect of a tougher fundraising environment is that companies have to make their existing capital last longer. That can mean smaller teams and slower expansion, but it also changes the order in which decisions are made.

When a company cannot assume another large funding round will arrive in 12 or 18 months, revenue matters earlier. Customer retention matters more. Founders have to understand which parts of the product people genuinely value rather than trying to build everything at once.

I think Web3 can particularly benefit from that discipline because token incentives have sometimes made it difficult to distinguish between adoption and subsidised activity. Tokens can be extremely effective at coordinating decentralised networks. They can encourage early participation, align incentives and distribute ownership in ways that conventional technology companies cannot easily reproduce. The difficulty comes when financial incentives are mistaken for product-market fit.

A protocol can have rapidly increasing activity because people are being rewarded to use it. That does not necessarily tell an investor what happens when those rewards decline. For me, the more useful question is whether the underlying product becomes more valuable as the network matures.

This is one reason infrastructure remains attractive. When I recently looked at AI agents and the infrastructure behind the emerging machine economy, the more interesting investment question was not necessarily which agent or wallet would win, but which settlement, metering and identity layers would be required if autonomous transactions became widespread.

The same principle applies more broadly. If a product solves a fundamental problem around scalability, privacy, settlement, identity, liquidity or interoperability, its utility does not necessarily depend on the market being excited about Web3 at that particular moment. In many cases, the opposite should be true: if adoption increases, the problem it solves becomes larger.

Follow where the capital is going

Recent investment activity also tells us something about what the market is beginning to value. Galaxy’s Q2 data shows that trading, exchanges, investing and lending attracted the largest amount of capital, but there was also meaningful investment across DeFi, privacy and security, tokenisation, AI and infrastructure.

More recently, S&P Global led a strategic investment in digital asset data company Kaiko, extending a relationship that already includes bringing financial benchmarks onchain. Kaiko now works with more than 250 financial firms, institutions and regulators.

I find investments like this interesting because the value proposition is relatively easy to understand. If financial markets move further onchain, institutions need reliable data, analytics, benchmarks and infrastructure. Whether a particular token rises or falls next month does not substantially change that requirement.

This does not mean every founder should pivot towards institutional infrastructure. Venture capital has its own cycles, and building whatever investors currently find fashionable is rarely a good foundation for a company. Founders should build around a problem they understand better than most people, rather than around the current preferences of venture funds. What has changed is that investors have more reason to test how real that understanding is.

What I look for in founders

At an early stage, numbers only tell you so much. A founder may not yet have meaningful revenue and the addressable market may itself still be developing. In Web3, we are often investing in infrastructure for markets that do not fully exist yet, which makes judgement particularly important.

I want to understand why a founder has chosen this problem, what they have learned that is not obvious from the outside and whether they understand where their own assumptions could be wrong. Regulatory awareness has also become much more important. A founder does not need to predict every regulatory development, but if the business model depends on regulators permanently ignoring a particular activity, that is something an investor needs to understand.

The same applies to defensibility. Having impressive technology is valuable, but technology alone does not always create a durable business. Distribution, network effects, proprietary data, developer adoption, integrations and the difficulty of replacing infrastructure once customers depend on it can all become more important over time.

These considerations are not unique to Web3 and, in some ways, that is the point. As the sector matures, I think good Web3 investing increasingly looks less like betting on crypto narratives and more like evaluating technology companies.

There will still be opportunities that are genuinely unique to decentralised networks, and there will still be periods when capital flows rapidly into a particular part of the market. That is the nature of venture investing. But founders should not assume those conditions will finance them indefinitely.

The current market is not preventing Web3 companies from raising money; the latest figures make that clear. It is becoming more discriminating about which companies receive it and at what stage. For strong founders, that is not necessarily bad news.

A company that can demonstrate real demand, sensible economics and a reason for customers to keep using its product when market sentiment changes is more likely to survive the next downturn. It is also more likely to be around when the infrastructure it has spent years building finally becomes essential.

Web3 does not need less ambition from its founders. It needs more evidence that the ambition is attached to a business that can last.

About Varun Datta

Varun Datta is the founder and CEO of Truth Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm investing across Web3 infrastructure and emerging decentralised technologies. He focuses on founders tackling fundamental problems in areas including developer infrastructure, decentralised AI, DePIN, privacy and scalability, and writes regularly about how venture capital can identify durable value as the Web3 market matures.

Disclaimer: The above article is sponsored content; it’s written by a third party. CryptoPotato doesn’t endorse or assume responsibility for the content, advertising, products, quality, accuracy, or other materials on this page. Nothing in it should be construed as financial advice. Readers are strongly advised to verify the information independently and carefully before engaging with any company or project mentioned and to do their own research. Investing in cryptocurrencies carries a risk of capital loss, and readers are also advised to consult a professional before making any decisions that may or may not be based on the above-sponsored content.

Readers are also advised to read CryptoPotato’s full disclaimer.

The post Varun Datta, Truth Ventures CEO – Web3’s Funding Boom Is Over. That Could Be Good News for Founders appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Exchanging or swapping cryptocurrencies anonymously isn’t always as simple as it should be. This is because some platforms require users to complete several steps, such as creating an account, completing Know Your Customer (KYC) verification, or even connecting their wallets before they can proceed with the transaction. Although these steps may serve different purposes, they can be inconvenient for users who prefer to swap their digital currencies without having to reveal their identity.

However, there are platforms that allow users to swap digital currencies without going through the usual registration and KYC processes.

This is where HiddenSwap comes in. The platform offers crypto swaps without requiring users to create accounts, connect their wallets, or complete Know Your Customer (KYC) verification. It also offers a simple interface designed to make the swapping process straightforward. This article takes a closer look at HiddenSwap, how it works, and its key features.

How Does HiddenSwap Work?

HiddenSwap makes crypto swaps as similar as they are with decentralized applications (dApps), such as Uniswap, PancakeSwap, and Jupiter. The difference is, you’re not connecting any wallet, creating any account, or undergoing KYC.

To execute a crypto swap, users will choose the cryptocurrencies they want to send and receive. They would also choose their preferred networks when necessary. Next, they would input the amount they intend to send. The equivalent amount to receive will appear automatically. Note that the rate displayed already accounts for the applicable fees.

Users would then paste the wallet addresses for the account they are sending from (Sending address) and the one they are sending to (Destination address). For instance, if a user is sending Bitcoin (BTC) to receive Monero (XMR), they paste both addresses on HiddenSwap’s swap page and hit the “Start Swap” tab.

HiddenSwap automatically provides an address for the user to send the crypto to. Following the example provided, the user will be provided with a BTC address to send the exact amount they want to swap.

The platform provides users with an Order ID, which serves as a way of identifying their swap. Users must save the order ID throughout the swap process, as it is what they would present in the case of a complaint or refund. They also use the order ID to track their swap.

Once the swap is complete, users can head to their destination wallet to view their account balance.

HiddenSwap requires users to provide their sending address so that, in a situation where the wrong amount is sent or a swap cannot be completed, the crypto gets moved back to the address it came from.

Key Features of HiddenSwap

Here are various features that make HiddenSwap a top choice among crypto users:

Privacy

HiddenSwap’s privacy is undoubtedly its most prominent feature. It allows users to execute crypto-to-crypto swaps without providing an ID, email, or creating an account. According to the project, one’s wallet address is the only thing needed for a crypto swap to be successful.

To bolster its privacy, HiddenSwap works in the Tor browser. This means that it cannot access users’ web traffic, such as their IP address, location, and Internet Service Provider (ISP). This sets the platform apart from competitors that quietly record users’ IP addresses or even sell this data to analytics firms.

HiddenSwap also disables JavaScript to enforce its privacy policy. Traditionally, JavaScript can be used to collect data like users’ screen resolution, device type, and other private data without cookies. Disabling JavaScript prevents HiddenSwap from harvesting users’ information.

Because HiddenSwap prioritizes privacy, it urges users whose funds are in centralized exchanges to first send them to non-custodial wallets before swapping via HiddenSwap. The platform also encourages using privacy cryptocurrencies like XMR or Zcash’s shielded addresses as destination addresses. This guarantees users’ privacy.

Flexible Fees

As mentioned earlier, HiddenSwap includes its fees in the rates. So, there are no additional costs. Note, though, that this does not include fees when sending crypto from the Sending Address.

The platform allows users to choose between floating and fixed rates before executing a swap. Floating rates are those that fluctuate with the market until the network confirms the user’s deposit. In the end, the user may get more or less than they ought to.

Fixed rates keep the rates locked at a specific amount as long as the exact deposit amount arrives in a single transaction before the timer on the order page ends. Not every trading pair offers fixed rates at the time of writing. If the market moves by 3% or more before the transaction is completed, users may be asked to choose either the new rate or a refund.

Supported Crypto Assets and Chains

HiddenSwap supports over 1,170 cryptocurrencies. This includes popular assets like BTC, ETH, SOL, and XRP. It also offers privacy coins, such as Monero (XMR) and Zcash (ZEC). Stablecoins like USDT and USDC are also available on the platform.

Adding to its diversity, the platform enables cross-chain swaps. This allows users to access tokens on various blockchains. For instance, users can decide to receive ETH via a layer-2 network that offers speed and cheap fees, such as Optimism. This way, they ditch Ethereum’s slow and expensive network.

Refunds

HiddenSwap allows refunds when the crypto swap fails or cannot be completed. Refunds also come into play when fixed-rate trades arrive late or with a different amount. Also, if the market moves significantly under the fixed rate, users may refund their assets if they do not want to go for the new rate.

Refunds are sent to the addresses the crypto came from, that is, the sending address. In the case of some privacy coins like Monero, where sending addresses are not displayed, users will write to HiddenSwap’s customer support with their order ID to request a refund by providing the address where the funds should go.

Users are wholly responsible for the network fees involved in refunded amounts. This means that the fees will be deducted from the amount to be reimbursed.

In some cases, users may deposit crypto the wrong way or fail to include a needed memo. During such occurrences, a recovery fee of $50 plus network fees is charged to facilitate the refund.

Customer Support

HiddenSwap has a dedicated live chat customer support that typically responds within an hour. This allows those with complaints to reach out with their order ID or transaction hash (if they misplace their order ID) to rectify issues with the crypto swap.

Pros and Cons of HiddenSwap

While HiddenSwap has multiple perks, it also has its downsides. Here’s an unbiased breakdown of its pros and cons:

Pros

• Provides customer support.
• Enables crypto refunds.
• Supports multiple crypto assets and blockchains.
• User-friendly interface.

Cons

• Limited social presence. (Only Telegram)
• Floating rate makes it impossible to predict the final amount.
• Recovery fee is high ($50).
• Services limited to crypto swaps.

Conclusion

HiddenSwap offers a simple way to exchange one digital asset for another without having to create an account, connect a wallet, or undergo KYC verification. This makes it an option worth considering for users who value convenience and privacy when swapping cryptocurrencies.

The platform also supports a long list of crypto assets while offering a flexible fee structure. Its simple interface, refund process, and customer support further contribute to the overall swapping experience.

Disclaimer: The above article is sponsored content; it’s written by a third party. CryptoPotato doesn’t endorse or assume responsibility for the content, advertising, products, quality, accuracy, or other materials on this page. Nothing in it should be construed as financial advice. Readers are strongly advised to verify the information independently and carefully before engaging with any company or project mentioned and to do their own research. Investing in cryptocurrencies carries a risk of capital loss, and readers are also advised to consult a professional before making any decisions that may or may not be based on the above-sponsored content.

Readers are also advised to read CryptoPotato’s full disclaimer.

The post HiddenSwap Review 2026: Enabling Crypto Swaps Without KYC appeared first on CryptoPotato.

BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) said on Monday its crypto, cash, and equity holdings were worth $15.1 billion on October 18, down from $16.2 billion a week earlier.

Most of that total is Ethereum (ETH). BitMine marked its Ether at $2,365 per token, using Coinbase prices, against $2,544 in the prior update. That is its lowest weekly mark since the update for August 16, according to its SEC filings.

The company bought 12,535 ETH over the week, taking its treasury to 6,041,481 tokens. That equals 4.9% of the 122.1 million ETH in supply, short of BitMine’s 5% goal. The buy nearly matched the 12,532 ETH BitMine added in the week to October 11.

Cash and marketable securities fell to $582 million, the fourth weekly drop in a row from $714 million on September 20. BitMine’s release gives no reason for the cash decline.

Lee Cites AI Stock Selloff

Chairman Tom Lee warned in a post on X on October 13 that a slump in South Korean equities could hit crypto. He said in Monday’s release that investors’ appetite for risk has shrunk over the past few weeks. He tied that to concerns over AI funding and AI model safety. Lee also cited the escalating US-Iran war, anxiety ahead of the US midterm elections and rising bond yields worldwide.

Lee said those worries set off a selloff in AI stocks, including chip and memory makers. That selloff then spread to South Korea and Taiwan, whose stock markets those companies dominate, he said.

“Crypto is widely held in the US, Korea and Taiwan. So naturally, when investors in those regions de-risk, this creates spillover pressures in crypto markets,” Lee stated.

He noted that past price drops that came while fundamentals held up have offered attractive risk and reward. He said he expects the same this time, citing crypto’s exposure to modernizing financial rails and to agentic AI.

Legal Note Drops The Finished-Buying Line

Lee said in an October 7 video message that BitMine needed about 100,000 more ETH. BitMine’s next weekly release then added a line to its note on forward-looking statements, and that line cited a management statement that BitMine is largely finished buying ETH.

Monday’s note drops that statement. Its wording on buying matches the updates through the week to October 4, which cited continued weekly ETH acquisitions, without any explanation.

The same note lists Lee’s staking projections. He put annual staking revenue at $309 million on the 5,067,309 ETH BitMine has staked. That staked count has not moved in any weekly update since August 9. Fully staked, he said, the treasury would earn $369 million at a 2.58% seven-day yield.

The post BitMine Adds 12,535 ETH to Treasury as Tom Lee Cites Macro and Tech Headwinds appeared first on CryptoPotato.