The token's debut on Solana highlights growing investor interest and speculation in AI valuations, potentially influencing future IPO strategies.

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Anthropic's acquisition may bolster its AI leadership in privacy-sensitive markets, potentially reshaping competitive dynamics by 2026.

The post Anthropic acquires confidential AI startup Opaque Systems appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Investor confidence in fiscal discipline may stabilize UK economic expectations, influencing monetary policy and reducing inflation concerns.

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The potential tax delay in South Korea may boost short-term crypto market confidence, affecting asset prices and regulatory perceptions.

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The escalating unrest in France could reshape political landscapes and influence security policies across Europe, affecting future elections.

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Bitcoin Magazine

Poetic Justice: Scammer Lost $5M in Bitcoin After Being Targeted by Ledger Thieves

Call it poetic justice: one of the biggest victims of last week’s Ledger theft happened to be a scammer themself, according to blockchain analysts, and lost nearly $5 million in bitcoin. 

In a post Thursday, Chainalysis wrote that a crook lost 60 bitcoins worth about $4.8 million they’d stolen via a so-called task scam. 

According to Chainalysis, the address was linked with a con where people were paid to fake sales and reviews of real items. They were told to add their own money in order to get paid — and then stolen from. 

But the mastermind behind the task scam moved the stolen money to Ledger addresses which were then targeted by different scammers last week.

“On Sep 22, the person behind the scam moved the proceeds into three separate Ledger addresses,” Chainalysis said. “On Oct 9, thieves emptied all three. One transfer each, into the same wallet. The wallet is reported as stolen funds.”

Paris-based Ledger last week said it had started an investigation after customers in South East Asia reported they’d lost funds after buying from Malaysia-based reseller, CryptoBilis. 

Ledger has since said that the scam was a massive organized crime operation where a group installed implants into devices and put them back on the market. The implants could read users’ seed phrases so criminals could then drain wallets. 

Calling it one the most “sophisticated attacks” the digital asset industry has experienced, Ledger is yet to reveal how much money has been lost — but blockchain investigator Specter said $86 million had been drained. 

And the task scam conman, according to Chainalysis, was one of the victims.

Ledger has said that it is working with law enforcement to “follow the funds and dismantle the attackers’ infrastructure” and has made sure no other vendors have been targeted by scammers. 

CryptoBilis has stopped selling Ledger products, the company said. 

Criminals have targeted bitcoin hardware sellers this year, with a huge attack taking place in July on the popular Coldcard products. 

Crooks were able to steal close to $120 million in bitcoin from Coldcard users because the devices had a firmware bug which led to faulty seed generation, allowing hackers to guess investor seedphrases. 

This post Poetic Justice: Scammer Lost $5M in Bitcoin After Being Targeted by Ledger Thieves first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

BFFS26 Denver: Joseph Kelly on Bitcoin Custody and Credit; Alan Lane on Banking Lessons

The Bitcoin for Financial Services Summit (BFFS26) returns to Denver October 20–22, 2026, bringing together CPAs, wealth advisors, attorneys, lenders, and finance leaders who are building Bitcoin into their practices. Now in its second year, the summit has grown to more than 30 sessions across two full program days, with a speaker lineup drawn from the firms defining Bitcoin custody, credit, and advisory.

Headlining the program are Joseph Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Unchained, who opens the summit with a keynote on custody, credit, and trust at scale; Alan Lane, former CEO of Silvergate Bank, on lessons for Bitcoin and banking; Patrick Lowry, CEO of Samara Asset Group, on holding Bitcoin as a public-company treasury reserve; and Colin Crossman, Wyoming’s Deputy Secretary of State, on the regulatory outlook for banks, exchanges, and advisors. Additional speakers include Kate Goldman of Anchorage Digital, Sam Baker of River, Eric Yakes of Epoch Ventures, Daniel Hillery of UTXO Management, Moish Peltz of Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, and CJ Konstantinos of Peoples Reserve.

Sessions focus on practical application: bringing Bitcoin into wealth planning and family offices, Bitcoin-backed lending and mortgages, treasury accounting and valuation, retirement and income planning, charitable giving strategies, mining as an asset class, and fiduciary duty when clients hold Bitcoin. Dedicated workshops will offer continuing education credit for financial advisors and CPAs.

“Last year proved that financial professionals want more than a Bitcoin primer. They want to know how to serve clients who already own it,” said Jordan Guess, CPA, co-host of the summit in a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “This year’s program is built around the questions advisors and accountants are actually getting from clients, answered by the people building the infrastructure.”

The summit opens Tuesday, October 20, with the Better Money Invitational golf tournament at City Park Golf Course, hosted with Bitcoin Sports Network, followed by a welcome party at The Space sponsored by Falcon Rappaport & Berkman. Evening programming includes wine and whiskey tastings, and Thursday begins with an optional sunrise hike in the Rocky Mountains.

BFFS26 is co-hosted by Jordan Guess and Wyatt O’Rourke of BFFS Media, producers of the Bitcoin for Financial Services podcast. Sponsors include Unchained, Anchorage Digital, UTXO Management, River, SOUND HSA, SustainHash, and Stormrake.

Registration is open now at https://www.bffs.media/summit.

Media contact: Wyatt O’Rourke, wyatt@bffs.media

This post BFFS26 Denver: Joseph Kelly on Bitcoin Custody and Credit; Alan Lane on Banking Lessons first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

Bitcoin Magazine

Sazmining Now Sells Jack Dorsey’s Proto Immersion Hashboards 

Bitcoin mining just got a lower barrier to entry. 

Sazmining announced Thursday that it is now selling Proto’s immersion hashboards directly to individual and institutional buyers through its mining-as-a-service platform. Previously, the hardware was mostly in the hands of large-scale operators.

Each hashboard delivers roughly 200 TH at around 15 J/TH, and buyers own them outright while Sazmining handles deployment, monitoring and maintenance at a US facility. Mining rewards go straight to the owner’s wallet.

The move follows a multi-megawatt supply deal between Sazmining and Proto — the bitcoin mining arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block (NYSE: XYZ) — which both companies expect to expand as demand grows.

“Because of our aligned-incentive model, Sazmining only earns when we produce bitcoin for our clients,” said Kent Halliburton, CEO and co-founder of Sazmining. 

He also pitched mining as a form of bitcoin acquisition diversification: rather than paying the market price on the day of purchase, a miner’s costs are spread across the machine’s working life.

Wyoming-based Sazmining, founded in 2018, operates renewable-powered facilities across the US, Paraguay, and Norway. It says its fleet runs more than 20 percentage points ahead of the Bitcoin network’s carbon-free share.

Proto is Jack Dorsey’s Block’s bitcoin mining play. The Twitter founder has spent years arguing bitcoin is the foundation of “a more open financial system,” funding everything from Cash App’s buy-and-send rails to the Bitkey self-custody wallet, and he framed mining as the obvious missing piece back in 2021: “Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source.” 

Block formally announced it was building an open bitcoin mining system in January 2022, with the stated aim of making mining “more distributed and efficient.”

This post Sazmining Now Sells Jack Dorsey’s Proto Immersion Hashboards  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Hot Inflation Data Puts Bitcoin Under Pressure, but ‘Difficult’ Isn’t ‘Bearish’: CoinShares

Bitcoin’s price has dropped this week as new inflation data has come in hot. 

But while the largest cryptocurrency’s near-term setup is difficult, it’s not “fundamentally bearish,” according to European asset manager CoinShares’ Head of Research, James Butterfill. 

In a report Friday, the analyst said that bitcoin’s near-term challenge stems from a macro environment that’s caught in an awkward middle ground: inflation is too elevated for the Fed to ease up, while the economy is too resilient to force a policy pivot. 

“Bitcoin and the broader digital asset market have moved lower on the resulting hawkish repricing, a reminder of how sensitive Bitcoin remains to monetary policy over short horizons,” he wrote. 

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at $81,473, down 2% over a seven-day period. 

The price of the leading cryptocurrency dropped Wednesday after data showed that U.S. consumer prices shot up more than expected in September. 

Then, on Thursday, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said that U.S. producer prices rose in September at the fastest pace in more than four years. 

This has weighed on bitcoin’s price because higher inflation means the Federal Reserve may hike interest rates. Higher borrowing costs can restrict the liquidity the digital coin needs to rally. 

The Federal Reserve hiked rates in September and will meet at the end of this month. 

But Butterfill added that investors should be patient and advised investors to instead think in the long-term and not react to any single weekly data point. 

“For investors, that argues for reading the coming weeks as a data-driven range rather than a trend, and for sizing digital asset exposure against a strategic allocation rather than against this week’s print,” he wrote. 

Bitcoin spent the first half of 2026 in a bear market but had its best quarter in years after surging in August and September. Analysts have now said the leading cryptocurrency is now back in a bull market after trading above its 365-day moving average. 

This post Hot Inflation Data Puts Bitcoin Under Pressure, but ‘Difficult’ Isn’t ‘Bearish’: CoinShares first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Deutsche Bank To Debut Bitcoin Custody Within Weeks: Report

German multinational Deutsche Bank is just weeks away from its crypto custody service, according to reports. 

The lender — which is Germany’s biggest — also plans to ​expand the custody platform into Asia next year​, according to a Friday Reuters report, which quoted its corporate banking chief. 

Top banks worldwide are debuting or planning to debut crypto custody services, with BNY Mellon, State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citigroup all committing to direct crypto custody over the past 18 months.

Deutsche Bank first officially announced plans to debut a bitcoin custody service for European corporate and institutional clients in September, with the German multinational at the time saying service was subject to the completion of the applicable regulatory timeline.

Friday’s report added that the service will support custody of ​major ⁠cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin before moving to services that help clients move money into and out of ⁠stablecoins.

Gerald Podobnik, co-head of the corporate ⁠bank, was quoted by Reuters saying that the financial system will need to “offer tokenized or blockchain solutions.” 

A number of top banks have started using the technology that powers bitcoin, the blockchain, for their own products in recent years. 

Stablecoins and tokenization in particular have become a hot topic as traditional financial firms aim to accelerate certain services. 

Crypto custody is often a starting point for banks moving into the digital asset space. BNY Mellon in 2022 became the first major U.S. bank to offer digital asset custody services.  

Banks like Citi and Standard Chartered have this year debuted or announced plans for bitcoin custody around the world. 

This post Deutsche Bank To Debut Bitcoin Custody Within Weeks: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

The Oct. 16 notice cites unfinished creditor procedures and payment-processing issues, without assigning individual distribution dates.

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NU7 would leave legacy funds issued but unspendable, even with intact keys, while the mainnet activation decision remains pending.

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The California agreement requires notice if Fidelity ends its retail transfer feature, while preserving security restrictions and IRA exclusions.

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The crypto industry has finally found a way to participate in America's partisan warfare without committing to either of the (only) two available parties: help elect people who agree with it about crypto, then let them argue about everything else. Fairshake's latest House spending plans cover 32 candidates, with 19 Republicans and 13 Democrats on…

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Two tracked Ethereum V3 Umbrella stakes fell 9.7%, while their implied annualized reward run rate stayed near $2 million.

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When you transfer euros to a crypto exchange and leave them there until you buy, that money sits somewhere. Not with you, not in your wallet, but in an account somebody else runs. Which account that may be, and in whose name it has to be held, is what the European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA, spelled out in a new answer on October 16, 2026. The short version: a payment service provider without a banking licence is a staging post for no more than one business day, and the account at the bank has to be in the exchange's name, not in the name of the provider in between.

What ESMA answered on MiCA article 70 on October 16

ESMA published five new questions and answers that day. Four concern crowdfunding platforms and the calculation of the active account under the EMIR 3 reform, and are of no relevance to retail investors. The fifth, Q&A 2949, is addressed to crypto asset service providers, and therefore to every exchange where you hold a euro balance.

A market participant had asked two things. First: may an authorised crypto asset service provider park client funds temporarily in an account at a payment service provider without a banking licence, such as an e-money institution or a payment institution? Second: may the funds stay there longer if the account does sit at a genuine bank but is held in the name of that payment service provider and kept technically separate from its other accounts?

ESMA answers the first question with a qualified yes and the second with a plain no. The answer is dated October 6, 2026 and was published ten days later.

MiCA article 70: the duty that holding client funds triggers

A crypto asset service provider, CASP in the rulebook, is any firm that commercially trades, exchanges, holds or arranges crypto assets in the EU and needs a MiCA authorisation for it. Every exchange you can legally buy through in Germany falls under it.

Article 70 of the MiCA regulation governs what such a firm has to do with its clients' money. Paragraph 2 requires arrangements that safeguard clients' ownership rights in their funds and prevent those funds being used for the firm's own account. Paragraph 3 then sets the actual duty: the money belongs in an account at a credit institution or a central bank.

The contrast with the crypto side matters. Different paragraphs of the same rulebook apply to your coins. Article 70 covers only the euros you have deposited and not yet invested, and the euros sitting in your exchange account after a sale. That money is precisely what raises the hardest questions if an exchange becomes insolvent. How supervision of these firms will be organised from 2027 is set out in our overview of ESMA's direct supervision of crypto providers.

The one-day limit: when the money has to sit at a credit institution

The first part of ESMA's answer is a permission on a short leash. When a crypto asset service provider receives client money, whether directly from the client or from a third party on the client's behalf, it may hold that money temporarily in a payment account at a non-bank payment service provider. Throughout that time it must continue to meet the safeguarding requirements of article 70 paragraph 2.

Then comes the deadline. By the end of the business day following receipt of the money at the latest, the provider has to place it in an account at a credit institution or a central bank. That is not a new rule, it is what article 70 paragraph 3 says. What is new is the clarification that a stop at an e-money institution neither extends nor replaces that deadline.

In practice that means: transfer on a Monday and your money should be in a bank account by the close of Tuesday at the latest. What happens at weekends and on public holidays depends on what counts as a business day in the country concerned. On this reading, a transfer on a Friday evening can be in transit until Monday evening without any rule being broken.

Why an account in the payment provider's name is not enough

The second part of the answer is the tougher one. ESMA writes that the account at the bank or central bank must be opened and maintained directly in the name of the crypto asset service provider, or in line with whichever legal regime on asset segregation applies.

An account held in the name of a non-bank payment service provider does not satisfy article 70 paragraph 3 on this reading. The authority's reasoning is a legal one, but it has tangible consequences: in that construction the crypto asset service provider would merely hold a claim against the payment service provider, instead of being the account holder vis-a-vis the credit institution itself. And according to ESMA that applies expressly even where the account was set up for that single crypto asset service provider and kept technically separate from every other account.

A claim is an entitlement against a firm. An account balance is an entitlement against the bank that holds the account. If another firm sits between you and the bank and fails, you have to join the queue in its insolvency proceedings. Keeping that chain of staging posts short is exactly what the rule is for.

How quickly that turns practical was shown by the case of the broker Trive, which we reported on in September: Trive froze client funds, and holders of crypto CFDs could not reach their money. The more staging posts lie between your money and a bank account, the longer it takes to establish who owns what.

E-money institution, payment institution, credit institution: the three terms apart

ESMA's answer hangs on a distinction almost nobody draws in everyday life. It is worth a look.

• A credit institution is what people colloquially call a bank. It holds a banking licence, may take deposits from the public and grant loans, and it belongs to a statutory deposit guarantee scheme.
• An e-money institution issues electronic money and runs payment accounts. It may not take deposits and does not lend out client money. Instead it safeguards client funds through trust accounts or insurance.
• A payment institution processes payments without issuing e-money itself. Here too there is no banking licence and no classic deposit guarantee.

All three are supervised, and all three are legitimate business models. But only the first is a permissible permanent home for your euro balance at a crypto exchange under article 70 paragraph 3. Under the new answer, the other two may only be the staging post of at most one business day.

Deposit guarantee: your euro balance on the exchange is not a bank balance

Here is the point where many investors assume something the rule does not give them. The fact that your money ends up in an account at a bank does not make you a client of that bank. Your counterparty remains the exchange.

The statutory deposit guarantee in the EU covers deposits up to 100,000 euros per client and institution. Whether and how it applies where an account is held in a provider's name and pools many clients' funds depends on the specific legal structure of that account and on national law. ESMA does not address this in Q&A 2949 and answers a narrower question: who has to be the account holder.

That is precisely why the answer matters to you. The more directly the path runs between your money and a credit institution, the fewer parties can fail in between. If you would rather not leave a euro balance sitting on a trading platform permanently, withdraw it after buying or selling, and hold the coins yourself. Which devices are suitable for that we have gathered in our hardware wallet comparison.

Interest on client funds: what Q&A 2486 awards the client

The new answer does not stand alone. It builds on an older one that shows how tightly the supervisor reads article 70 as a whole. Q&A 2486, last updated on February 18, 2026 and answered by the European Commission, dealt with interest.

The question was whether a crypto asset service provider may earn interest on client funds it places in a savings account at a credit institution. The answer is no. On that reading, CASPs are obliged to place client funds in risk-free savings accounts and may not earn interest from them for themselves. The duty serves the protection of clients alone. Any interest arising from compliance with article 70 paragraph 3 has to be passed on to the client, because the income comes from the client's money.

That differs from what some platforms do in other jurisdictions, where interest income on client deposits is a revenue line of its own. In the EU, on the Commission's reading, that income belongs to the client. Whether and how exchanges implement it is in their price and service lists, and it is a question worth asking.

What a Q&A does legally and what it does not change

Some perspective belongs here so the reach of these answers is not overstated. ESMA puts a note in front of its own Q&As: these answers explain provisions that already stand in applicable law. They do not extend rights and obligations, they introduce no additional requirements, and they are meant only to help authorities and firms with application. Only the Court of Justice of the European Union can interpret Union law bindingly.

In practice it carries weight all the same. National supervisors such as Germany's BaFin take their bearings from these answers when they examine business models. A crypto asset service provider that permanently routes client funds through an account in a payment provider's name has to expect questions after this answer.

ESMA has also declared digital finance and innovation a supervisory priority for 2027, so clarifications of this kind are unlikely to be the last. Another, considerably harder deadline is already running: for stablecoins without MiCA authorisation the authority has given platforms until January 8, 2027, which we set out in our piece on ESMA's stablecoin deadline.

Your exchange's documents: where the custodian for euros is named

You cannot look up where your money sits tonight. But you can read what your exchange commits to. Three places are worth it.

The terms and conditions almost always have a section on client funds or the holding of monies. That is where it says whether the funds sit in trust or pooled accounts and who the account holder is. The risk disclosures say whether the provider claims a deposit guarantee for euro balances, and if it makes no such claim, that is the answer. The price and service list tells you whether interest on balances is credited.

If one of those statements is missing or stays unclear, that is not an accusation but a reason to ask the provider. A list of the platforms that can show a MiCA authorisation in the EU is in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges. Anyone comparing anyway should look at that section of the documents as closely as at the trading fee.

Euro balances: after one business day the bank has to hold them

ESMA's answer changes nothing about your balance today. What it does sharpen is the question you can put to your exchange, and it hands you three steps.

1. Read up on who the account holder is. Find the section on client funds in your platform's terms and check whether a credit institution is named there and in whose name the account runs. Whether your platform holds an EU authorisation at all is shown in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Keep the euro balance small. What you do not intend to invest does not have to sit on the trading platform. A current account at a bank is covered by the deposit guarantee; an exchange balance is legally something else.
3. Separate trading from storage. Coins you intend to hold for longer do not belong on an exchange permanently. Which hardware is up to the job and what it costs is in the hardware wallet 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.)

Crypto airdrops in week 43: two windows close, one exchange shuts down

This is the densest week of the month: Meteora closes the claim for its season 2 LP Stimulus on October 21, 2026, and four days later the Pharos claim portal shuts. Both deadlines fall inside this calendar week, and the same applies to both: planning for the last day is planning tight.

There is also a case this format rarely sees. StandX is not distributing a token of its own but winding the platform down and paying out the remaining proceeds as DUSD. The entitlement is real and the dates are fixed, but the claim itself only opens in November.

If you are new to the subject, what an airdrop is, how snapshots work and how to spot dubious offers are covered in our airdrop guide. Last week's situation was still shaped by the Sonic deadline; that expired on October 15 and appears here only as a footnote.

The dates at a glance

1. Meteora (MET): the season 2 claim closes on October 21

This is the next closing date, and it falls in the middle of this week. Meteora opened the claim for its season 2 LP Stimulus on July 21, 2026; the project's governance post gives the period as July 21 to October 21, 2026. No time of day is stated there, and no time zone for the claim window itself. The UTC reference in the post applies to the assessment period. The last day is therefore not a buffer you can rely on.

The distribution covers 20 million MET, around two percent of total supply, from the Ecosystem Reserve. Eligibility covers anyone who earned fees as a liquidity provider on the Solana blockchain between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026 (UTC). Only fees from DLMM and DAMM v2 pools count; limit orders and DAMM v1 pools are expressly not eligible.

Two thresholds decide whether anything arrives at all: at least 100,000 points are required, and the calculated allocation must come to at least 10 MET. Fall below either and the entitlement is lost, with the share redistributed among the remaining eligible wallets. What happens to allocations nobody claims by the closing date is not something the project sets out.

The conditions, the points formula and both thresholds are in Meteora's governance post on the LP Stimulus season 2. We have written up the details of the process in a separate piece on the Meteora claim deadline.

2. Pharos (PROS): the claim portal closes on October 25

The Pharos airdrop has been running since April 28, 2026 with a clearly stated duration of 180 days. That gives October 25, 2026 as the last day. What happens afterwards is in the project's FAQ: unclaimed tokens return to the Pharos Foundation, and the airdrop page is closed. Here too the project names neither a time of day nor a time zone.

Eligible, according to the project, are testnet participants, contributors to the "Stake Before the Stake" campaign, holders of certain Discord roles and users of the OKX wallet campaign. Anyone eligible across several categories has their entitlements combined automatically into a single claim.

The conditions and the closing date are in the FAQ of the Pharos claim portal, and the details of the process in our piece on the Pharos claim deadline.

3. StandX (DUSD): no token, but a payout, and a fixed schedule

This week's new entry is not an ordinary airdrop. StandX, an exchange for perpetual futures, has cancelled its planned token launch and is shutting operations down in stages. Instead of a token of its own, the remaining proceeds will be distributed to users once as DUSD. There is no lock-up attached.

The schedule is dated throughout in the project's announcement. The perpetual contracts move on October 20, 2026 into a mode in which positions can only be reduced. The page for checking your own entitlement opens on October 26, 2026 at 00:00 UTC. Claiming runs from November 1, 2026, 00:00 UTC, to December 31, 2026, 08:00 UTC; whatever nobody claims by then expires. Open positions will be closed at market price on January 15, 2027, and withdrawals and DUSD redemptions end on January 31, 2027.

How much falls to an individual address is something the project has not published, neither a total sum nor a formula. By its own account the inputs are advance deposits, participation in the alpha phase, mainnet trading, market making and referrals, and the project says it will filter out multiple accounts and wash trading. In concrete terms: whether and how much reaches you only shows on the eligibility page on October 26.

All the dates are in StandX's announcement on the payout and wind-down, which the notice banner on the exchange's home page also points to. In the same notice the project makes clear that it never contacts users by direct message and never asks for private keys.

4. Grass (stage 2): until January 22, 2027, and paid out in USDC

With Grass this is about the rewards for taking part in the network in stage 2. Eligibility covers anyone who shared bandwidth in epochs 1 to 19, the period from October 14, 2024 to June 8, 2026. The hard deadline runs to January 22, 2027; rewards that go unclaimed stay with the project.

The point many people read past: the payout is in USDC, not in GRASS. No new GRASS tokens are created, so circulating supply does not change. For you that means you are not receiving a project token whose price you have to watch, but a dollar stablecoin, and for tax purposes that is a different event from a token airdrop. Grass sets out the background in its explanation of the stage 2 distribution. Because the window stays open three months longer than the two October deadlines, this is the entry with no urgency.

Before the claim: two points that count this week

Only the genuine portal. The closer a closing date comes, the more cloned claim pages appear. Clones with similar-sounding addresses are known for Pharos, and StandX warns about them expressly in its wind-down notice. Always reach the claim address through the project's official channel, never through a link in a direct message, and check it character by character. A signature asking for more than the claim is one you cancel. How to keep entitlements and wallets apart is shown in our hardware wallet comparison.

The claim is the moment that matters for tax. Record the time, the token amount and the price at the moment of receipt, and do it immediately: a wallet transaction on its own rarely answers those questions later. Unsold airdrops can be taxable too, which catches many people out every year, and our piece on taxing crypto airdrops covers the basics. How an entitlement arises in the first place and when it expires is explained in our piece on claiming airdrops.

And afterwards? What happens to a claimed token

A freshly claimed airdrop token is almost always a low-cap token: thin trading volume, wide spreads, prices that can halve or double within hours. Total loss is a realistic outcome here, not a theoretical one. Doing nothing at all after the claim is also a decision, and often the calmer one.

If you do want to trade tokens like these, you need something other than a charting tool: Dexscreener and TradingView show you prices, they do not let you trade. The mobile app FOMO Family is built for it, with meme and low-cap tokens discovered, swiped through and traded directly in the app, and fast deposits. Download the app through the link and secure ten percent off the trading fees. The community is also speculating about a possible airdrop for active users; that is unconfirmed, there is no announcement from the provider, and it is no reason to deposit money.

What does not make the list this week

Two things are deliberately missing. Sonic (S) is done: the deadline for the season 1 and season 2 airdrops expired on October 15, 2026, around 32,690,000 unclaimed S tokens have been free for burning since then, and there is no grace period. The claim cannot be made up; the details are in our piece on the Sonic claim deadline.

And MINT (MNTD) stays out, even though the token appears in several round-ups with a launch on October 20. The project itself names only a quarter rather than a day, and the statements about the blockchain contradict each other. Missing as before are OpenSea, MetaMask, Base and Lighter: all four have been traded as likely airdrops for months, and none of these projects has published a snapshot or claim date. "Airdrop confirmed, date open" is not an entry for a deadline list.

Disclosure: some of the providers named in this article work with us through partner programmes. That has no influence on the editorial assessment.

(As of October 19, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Deadlines and participation terms change; check them with the provider before taking part.)

Since today, Monday, October 19, 2026, the first Sparkasse customers have been able to buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly in the App Sparkasse. Five assets are tradable: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Polygon. Behind the offering stands DekaBank, the securities house of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, with custody run in cooperation with Boerse Stuttgart. There is no nationwide launch date.

"When a savings bank starts is for it to decide," Joachim Schmalzl, a managing board member of the German Savings Banks Association (DSGV), told the news agency dpa. "Interest within the group is high," Schmalzl added. Another 30 to 40 institutions are to join each month, and in the first half of 2027 the association wants a large share of the interested savings banks connected. The details are in the dpa report of October 19, 2026.

For around 50 million Sparkasse customers, the barrier to entry has just moved. Buying Bitcoin used to mean registering with a crypto exchange, running a second account and finding a custody solution of your own. Going through your own bank saves those steps. It costs something else instead, and that is what this article is about: control over your own coins. Our assessment of the launch while it was still only planned is in our overview of crypto trading at Sparkasse.

Krypto - powered by Deka: DekaBank's execution-only offering

The product is called "Krypto - powered by Deka" and is, according to DekaBank, an execution-only offering available exclusively to Sparkasse customers. Execution-only means the savings bank does not check whether a crypto investment suits your financial position, and it does not recommend a purchase either. DekaBank puts it on its product page as being aimed "exclusively at self-directed investors," with no advice given at the savings bank.

Execution-only is not a footnote, it is the legal foundation of the whole construction. In investment advice, the institution is liable for a recommendation matching the client's profile. Remove the advice and that check goes with it. The DSGV stresses that from the savings banks' point of view cryptocurrencies remain "highly speculative investments," and it points customers explicitly to sharp price swings and the risk of total loss. According to the association, there are no plans to market the product actively on a broad scale.

DekaBank says it is a notified crypto asset service provider and holds the cryptocurrencies in custody for its clients. Notified, under the EU's MiCA regulation, means the institution has extended its existing banking licence to cover crypto services and needs no separate authorisation. For investors that is the decisive difference from an offshore exchange, because supervision, the complaints route and insolvency law all sit in Germany.

No nationwide launch date: 30 to 40 savings banks join each month

Around 350 independent savings banks each decide on their own start. Crypto trading can therefore already be in the app in Hamburg while Passau waits until the spring. If you find nothing in the app today, you do not have a technical problem, you have an institution that is not yet connected. The association gives the pace as 30 to 40 houses a month and the target as the first half of 2027.

In arithmetic terms that pace means this: a good eight months lie between today and the end of June 2027, and at 35 institutions a month just under 290 houses would come on board. The phrase "a large share of the interested savings banks" leaves open how many institutions want to take part at all. A house that decides against the offering never shows up in that figure.

The crypto account in the App Sparkasse: the "Anlegen" section and push TAN

Access runs through a dedicated crypto account at DekaBank, opened inside the App Sparkasse. According to DekaBank you open the "Anlegen" investing section in the app, call up "Krypto - powered by Deka" there and open the account in a few steps. A current account at a participating savings bank is the prerequisite. Approvals run through the familiar online banking security tools, such as push TAN.

The portfolio value then appears alongside the other accounts in the same app. That is the strength of the model and at the same time its blind spot: the coins sit visibly inside your banking, but they do not sit in your hands. The section on withdrawals below sets out what follows from that.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Polygon: the five tradable cryptocurrencies

The selection is deliberately narrow. According to DekaBank's product page, Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL) and Polygon (POL) are tradable. Memecoins, small altcoins and stablecoins are absent entirely. By market capitalisation these five assets cover the largest part of the market without the bank having to put thinly traded tokens into a mass-market product.

Two details are worth a second look. First, DekaBank lists Polygon as POL rather than MATIC; the token was renamed, and the bank follows the new designation. Second, there is no staking function at all. Ethereum, Solana and Polygon all allow rewards to be earned on the network when tokens are committed. The Sparkasse offering has no such option, so a holding sits there without any running yield.

If you need a broader selection, staking or payouts to any address of your choosing, a regulated crypto exchange as a second route is unavoidable. Our overview is in the comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

Omnibus wallet at DekaBank: why the private key is not yours

A private key is the secret key that opens access to crypto assets. Whoever holds it can move the coins. With "Krypto - powered by Deka" the private keys are, in the bank's words, held "in trust" for clients in a "jointly managed omnibus wallet."

Omnibus means that all clients' holdings sit in one shared pot on the blockchain, not in separate addresses per person. Who is entitled to which share follows solely from the bank's internal books. On the blockchain, your share is not identifiable as yours. This is the usual route at banks and large exchanges, and it works reliably for as long as the bookkeeping is correct and the institution solvent.

One point hangs on that which the marketing rarely mentions: crypto assets do not fall under the statutory deposit guarantee scheme. DekaBank writes this itself. The 100,000 euros that protect your savings account do not apply here. The protection comes instead from custody law, which separates crypto assets held in custody from the bank's own assets. Even with professional custody, risks remain, for instance from external attacks on blockchain infrastructure, as the bank concedes in its risk disclosure.

Withdrawals only to CASP addresses: your own hardware wallet stays excluded

This is the hardest restriction in the offering, and it is written out in DekaBank's own glossary: a withdrawal is only possible to the wallet addresses of certain crypto asset service providers, meaning other licensed providers, CASPs in the jargon. "A withdrawal to other wallet addresses is excluded," it reads.

In everyday terms: you can send your Bitcoin from Sparkasse to a regulated exchange, but not to a Ledger or Trezor in your drawer. Self-custody, the actual core of the Bitcoin promise, is not provided for in this product. Taking the coins into your own hands requires an intermediate step through a provider that permits withdrawals to private addresses.

The mechanism behind it is regulatory, not technical. Under the anti-money-laundering transfer rule, providers have to collect details about the recipient of a transfer and, for payments to self-custodied addresses, additionally verify who owns the address. Many houses solve that workload by not offering such payouts at all. The restriction is therefore not an oversight but a product decision that avoids verification duties.

Fixed-price trades instead of an order book: where the spread sits behind 99 cents an order

Trading does not run through an order book in which buyers and sellers meet. According to DekaBank, a binding price guaranteed by the bank is provided for each transaction for a limited period. You see a fixed price, click to accept it and know what you are getting.

That is convenient, and it shifts the cost to a place no price list discloses. In a fixed-price trade the provider earns on the difference between its own purchase price in the market and the guaranteed price for the client, the spread. An order fee can be compared, a spread cannot, as long as it goes unquantified. Our own review of the price information for crypto assets, September 2026 edition, was published by cryptoticker.io on October 10, 2026: the transaction fee for buying and selling came to 0.99 euros there, there was no minimum order size, and the spread was not named in the documents examined. Those figures come from our article on the fees and are not external evidence for today's position; check the current version in the price and service list of your own savings bank.

A comparison makes the order of magnitude tangible. On a purchase of 1,000 euros the order fee is 99 cents, which is 0.099 percent. If the spread is one percent, the same purchase costs 10 euros on top. The visible fee is, in that case, the smaller part of the price.

No deposit guarantee for crypto assets: what applies during outages and maintenance windows

In its disclosure, DekaBank names three situations in which trading can be restricted: unusual market conditions, technical faults and scheduled maintenance windows. Buying or selling is then not possible at any time of your choosing or at the price you are aiming for.

In practice that matters more than it sounds. Crypto markets move at night, at weekends and on public holidays too. Wanting to sell into a slump and running into a maintenance window means carrying the price move until trading reopens. A crypto exchange with an order book knows the same risk, but it usually stays open continuously and offers limit orders that trigger automatically. DekaBank's fixed-price model has no such tool.

The 1,000 euro exemption limit: what DekaBank says about tax

On taxation, DekaBank points to the exemption limit of 1,000 euros a year for private disposals, which under current law include gains from trading cryptocurrencies. If the annual gain stays below that threshold, the proceeds are tax free. The bank attaches the 2026 position to that statement, together with the note that tax treatment depends on personal circumstances and may in future be changed even retroactively, for instance by legislation or a different reading by the tax authorities.

An exemption limit is not an allowance: exceed it by one euro and the entire gain becomes taxable, not just the part above it. It also matters that the bank issues no tax certificate of the kind it provides for shares, because crypto gains are not subject to withholding tax. Recording them therefore remains a matter for your tax return, and anyone trading on an exchange as well is merging two histories.

Our assessment: the distribution channel weighs more than the product range

In the view of this desk, this launch is the more important crypto event of the year for German retail investors, and not because of the product. Five coins, no staking, no withdrawal to your own wallet and a fixed price with no disclosed spread add up to less than any regulated exchange offers. The leverage lies in distribution: the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe reaches around 50 million customers through an app those customers already open every day. That is reach no crypto provider in Germany can buy.

Against it stands the construction itself. Buy crypto as a hedge against bank risk and you get the opposite here: a claim against a bank, booked in a shared pot, with no deposit guarantee, no key and no route to self-custody. Both are documented, the omnibus custody and the exclusion of third-party wallet addresses, in DekaBank's risk disclosure and glossary. As a first entry with small amounts inside familiar banking, the offering is usable. As a permanent home for a larger holding, it lacks control. None of this is a recommendation to buy or sell, and the risk of total loss remains in every case.

Sparkasse crypto trading: DekaBank holds the key, not you

Three steps put the situation in order:

1. Settle custody before you buy. As long as withdrawals only run to service provider addresses, the holding stays in someone else's keeping. Holding coins yourself requires a device and a provider that permits withdrawals to private addresses. The devices sit side by side in the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Keep a tax history from day one. Without a tax certificate the burden of proof is yours, and with two routes running at once two histories quickly turn into one gap. The tools for it are in the overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
3. Weigh up a second route. Staking, limit orders, a broader selection and unrestricted payouts are not part of the bank offering. Which licensed houses cover them is shown in the comparison of the best regulated crypto exchanges.

(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.)

Bitcoin stands at $82,769 on Monday morning. That is 1.6 percent above Friday's close of $81,501, and the whole gain was built over two days in which exchange turnover ran at a third of its usual level. That is what makes it fragile: buying on a Saturday or a Sunday moves the price with less money than buying on a Tuesday. The level that decides the week therefore sits below the market rather than above it, at $81,501.

This article checks the weekend against our own data: 84 daily candles for the Bitcoin against US dollar pair on the Kraken exchange, collected for the period from July 28 to October 19, 2026. That makes it possible to quantify how much thinner the book really is at the weekend, and what that means for an order sent on a Sunday evening.

Bitcoin starts the week at $82,769

The reading on Monday morning: $82,769. The high of the past 24 hours is $82,774, the low $80,568. Monday opened at $82,002, Sunday's closing price.

The week before was weak. On Thursday, October 15, the price fell to $79,709 during the session and so dropped below the round $80,000 mark, but recovered to $82,134 by the evening. Friday gave part of that back and closed at $81,501. Against that Friday close, Bitcoin now stands $1,268 higher.

On Sunday we looked at the network fees in the mempool in this slot, at a price of $81,685 at the time. Little has changed on the network itself since then; the price has moved $1,084, almost all of it overnight into Monday. The $81,000 mark, which counted as the floor back then, has not been tested a second time.

Saturday and Sunday in numbers: 599 and 987 Bitcoin of turnover

The weekend in detail, daily candles in coordinated universal time, turnover in Bitcoin:

Saturday was the thinnest day of the entire week: 599 Bitcoin of turnover, less than a third of Friday's, and a daily range of 1.24 percent. Sunday picked up to 987 Bitcoin but stayed below half of Friday's figure. Together the two days turned over 1,586 Bitcoin, less than Friday managed on its own.

The $620 gain that Sunday closed with was therefore built on turnover that would have passed for a quiet half day during the working week. That is not a judgement, it is the basis for everything that follows.

Why the Bitcoin order book thins out at the weekend

The reason does not lie with the crypto exchanges. They trade around the clock, Christmas Eve included. What closes is the other part of the market: the stock exchanges where the Bitcoin funds are listed.

A spot Bitcoin ETF is a fund that holds Bitcoin physically and whose shares trade on an exchange like a stock. When an investor buys a share, the fund can acquire Bitcoin for it; when the share is handed back, the fund can sell. This mechanism is called creation and redemption, and it only works while the exchange is open. New York is open Monday to Friday, and so is Frankfurt. From Friday evening to Monday morning, then, not a single fund share is created or destroyed, and the fund neither buys nor sells any Bitcoin in that time. How this route looks for investors in Europe is set out in our overview of crypto ETFs in Germany.

There is also the professional side of the market. Market makers, the firms that keep buy and sell quotes in the book and so create the narrow gap between bid and offer in the first place, run their positions down over the weekend because they cannot hedge them against futures while the derivatives exchange is closed. Less hedging means less quoted volume. What remains is retail trading, and that is smaller.

The result shows up in the trade counts above. Saturday produced 71,492 trades, Friday 144,685. The number of transactions halves, but turnover in Bitcoin falls to less than a third. Every single trade is smaller at the weekend. The large blocks are missing.

Our own survey: 84 daily candles compared

A single weekend proves nothing. We therefore went through the daily candles of the past twelve weeks, from July 28 to October 19, 2026: 84 days, of which 24 are weekend days and 60 are weekdays. The comparison uses the middle value, the median, because individual outliers such as the slump of October 8 would distort an average.

Weekend turnover therefore comes to a good third of weekday turnover, the number of trades to around 57 percent and the daily range to just under half. At 599 and 987 Bitcoin, the weekend just gone sat below that median of 912, so it was not a quiet exception but a normally thin to below-average weekend.

The ratio between the three figures is the revealing part. If turnover falls to 35.6 percent while the range only falls to 47.4 percent, then a dollar of turnover moves the price further at the weekend than it does on a working day. In arithmetic terms, a third of the money is enough for half of the movement at the weekend. That is the number behind the claim that a thin book is more vulnerable.

Spread and slippage: what thin liquidity costs a market order

Two measures matter in practice. The spread is the gap between the best bid and the best offer in the order book. Slippage is the difference between the price you see when you send a market order and the price at which it is actually filled.

Both depend on the depth of the book. A market order works its way up through the available offers until it is filled. If there are offers for ten Bitcoin within $50 at midday on a Tuesday, a purchase of one Bitcoin costs barely any premium. If only three Bitcoin sit in the same price range on a Sunday evening, the same order reaches deeper into the book and pays more.

The figures above quantify how large that difference is on average. At 35.6 percent of weekday turnover the book is not only narrower, it also refills more slowly after a larger order has cleared it. For a position of a few hundred euros this stays a rounding error. For a four-figure sum in one go it is measurable.

Which exchange quotes which spread differs considerably, and at the weekend that difference weighs more heavily than on a working day. We have set the fees and spreads of the providers available in Germany side by side in our crypto exchange comparison.

How to check the execution day of your Bitcoin savings plan

A Bitcoin savings plan buys on a fixed day, not at a fixed price. That day is in the contract, and most providers let you change it. If you have put it on a Saturday or a Sunday, you are buying into the thinnest book of the week by design.

Three points count here. First, the setting that holds the execution day, usually under savings plan, interval or execution. Second, whether the provider fills the order as a market order, which is the normal case, or lets you set a limit. Third, whether the provider adds its own premium to the reference price on top of the spread.

An execution day in the middle of the week makes sense, because Tuesday to Thursday were consistently above the weekday median of 2,559 Bitcoin in our survey. If you cannot change the day, you lose nothing dramatic: across a year with twelve purchases the difference largely averages out. This is about basis points, not percentages. Which providers offer a savings plan at which minimum amount and interval is covered at the end of this article.

The levels: $81,501 as the floor, $82,826 as the ceiling

Both of this week's levels come out of the weekend itself, not out of a model.

On the downside it is Friday's close of $81,501. If the price falls below it, the entire weekend gain has been worked off, and the week starts, in arithmetic terms, where the previous one ended. Below that lies the weekend low of $80,568 as a second step, and behind it the round $80,000 mark, which was already briefly breached on October 15 at $79,709.

On the upside it is Friday's high of $82,826. That is where the price turned down on Friday, and it has not reached that value since; the high of the past 24 hours, at $82,774, sits $52 below it. As long as that ceiling holds, Bitcoin is moving in a range of around $1,300, or 1.6 percent.

What decides the outcome is not the level itself but the turnover on which it gives way. A break of $82,826 on Monday on 2,500 Bitcoin of daily turnover carries different weight than the same break on a Sunday on 900.

October 28: what the rate decision has to do with the weekend

The next meeting of the US Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee takes place on October 27 and 28, 2026, with the rate decision on the second day. The date appears in the Federal Reserve's official meeting calendar and is therefore the only firmly scheduled major event that can act on the price this week and next.

For liquidity that means two things. Ahead of a date like this, professional traders keep their books smaller, because a decision can move the price in jumps. That reinforces the effect that is already at work over the weekend. After the event, volume usually returns quickly.

So if you still want to move a larger position in one go in October, the more liquid days lie between today, Monday, and October 27, not after it. That is a statement about the order book, not about the direction of the price: which way the rate decision cuts is open, and nobody can evidence it today.

Holding period: why the purchase date on the calendar counts

For investors in Germany the purchase date carries a second meaning that has nothing to do with the price. Under current law, gains from the sale of Bitcoin are tax free if more than a year lies between purchase and sale. That period runs to the day, and it starts on the day of the purchase.

Buy today, on October 19, 2026, and you can sell the position tax free from October 20, 2027. Miss the deadline by a day and the gain is taxed at your personal income tax rate. With a savings plan that buys monthly, each individual execution starts its own period, which is why documenting the purchase dates is worth the effort.

Whether that period stays is open. The German finance ministry has not committed itself so far; we track the state of the debate in our overview of the crypto holding period. As long as no change has been passed, the one-year rule applies.

Our assessment: the gain hangs on Monday's volume

In the view of this desk, Sunday's rise is not yet a turn, for a reason that can be quantified: it came on 987 Bitcoin of turnover, which is 39 percent of the weekday median of 2,559. Moves that form at the weekend are frequently corrected on Monday, once the funds and the market makers are back and put their quotes into the book again.

The survey above supports that: a third of the money produces half of the movement at the weekend, so the price runs further than demand carries it. Against it stands the fact that the price on Monday morning is already above Sunday's close and has left the weekend low of $80,568 well behind. The decision falls at $81,501. If that level holds into Tuesday on turnover above the weekday median, the gain is confirmed. If it gives way, it was a weekend phenomenon.

The direction cannot be evidenced today, only the condition under which it shows itself. If you are building a position, Monday and Tuesday are the most liquid days of the week ahead of you.

Bitcoin on Monday: below $81,500 the gain is gone

The price stands at $82,769, built over a weekend running on a good third of the usual turnover. Three steps follow from that:

1. Check the execution day of your savings plan and, if it falls on a Saturday or Sunday, move it to Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. The providers with the matching intervals and minimum amounts are in the savings plan comparison.
2. For a larger purchase, compare your own provider's spread on a working day with the one at the weekend. Where Bitcoin is available at what cost is set out in our overview of buying Bitcoin.
3. Note the purchase date, because the one-year holding period runs to the day. A purchase made today can be sold tax free from October 20, 2027; the tools for tracking it are in the crypto tax software comparison.

The price data in this article comes from the daily candles of the Bitcoin against US dollar pair, queried through Kraken's public market data interface.

(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. Trading cryptocurrencies carries the risk of total loss.)

If you hold bitcoin on two exchanges and in a wallet of your own, and then sell part of it, you need to know which of your tranches counts as sold. That is what decides whether the sale stays tax-free. The answer goes by the name of crypto FIFO, and in Germany it works differently from what most holders expect: the Federal Ministry of Finance does not calculate across your total holdings but separately for each wallet and each exchange account. A sale on account A never reaches the older coins in wallet B, however long they have been sitting there.

That separation decides more in the autumn of 2026 than it did in earlier years. Providers will report to the Federal Central Tax Office under the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act for the current year for the first time, each one on its own. And under the draft bill on the holding period, 31 December 2026 is to become the line between protected legacy holdings and taxable new holdings. Which tranche sits in which pot has stopped being an academic question.

What FIFO means for crypto, and why individual identification comes first

FIFO stands for "first in, first out": the units bought first count as the units sold first. The term describes an assumed order of consumption, in other words an assumption about which units of a holding of the same kind leave it in a partial sale. That assumption is needed for crypto assets because one bitcoin cannot be told apart from another.

It is only needed, though, where you cannot identify the individual units. The BMF guidance on individual questions of the income tax treatment of crypto assets of 6 March 2025 puts individual identification first in Randnummer 61, its paragraph 61: the governing principle for the order of use is individual identification. Only where that is not possible do the crypto assets of one trading designation acquired first count as sold for the purposes of the holding period.

Individual identification means that you prove which specific unit you sold. On a wallet of your own with clearly separated access and unbroken records, that is possible. On an exchange account that pools deposits and withdrawals into a single balance, it generally is not. FIFO is therefore the rule in practice rather than the exception, even though it is the second step in law.

“A wallet-by-wallet view applies”: paragraph 62 of the BMF guidance

The sentence that settles the matter sits one paragraph further on. Randnummer 62 opens with the words "Es gilt eine walletbezogene Betrachtung" — a wallet-by-wallet view applies. It goes on to say that within a wallet the chosen method must be retained until all crypto assets of one trading designation in that wallet have been sold in full.

For holders, that means every wallet and every exchange account is a pot of its own with an order of its own. A FIFO calculation running across all your holdings on every platform does not exist under this administrative view. Anyone running three accounts runs three orders. This is the most common false assumption on the subject, and it cuts both ways: the separation can take away a completed holding period you never actually had, and it can leave you one you would have lost under a combined view.

The tax authorities are sticking to this reading even though it means more work for investors. The reason is easy enough to follow: the records from which any order can be derived in the first place arise provider by provider. An exchange knows nothing about your hardware wallet.

Holding period and gain calculation follow two different methods

Paragraph 61 separates two questions that are often thrown together. For the holding period, the crypto assets of one trading designation acquired first count as sold. For valuation, meaning the size of the gain, the guidance names the average cost method and refers for it to a Federal Fiscal Court ruling of 24 November 1993. For reasons of simplification, though, it may equally be assumed there that the units acquired first were sold first.

In practice, you may use FIFO for both questions but do not have to. The holding period is set by the oldest tranche in the pot concerned, while the gain can be calculated from that pot's average price. Running both on FIFO puts you on the safe side of the administrative view and leaves you with the simpler schedule.

Section 23 EStG prescribes FIFO for foreign currency amounts only

Here lies a point that many guides skip past. No statutory FIFO obligation exists for crypto assets. Section 23(1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act contains a FIFO fiction in its third sentence, and that fiction is expressly limited: where several foreign currency amounts of the same kind are acquired and sold, the amounts acquired first are to be assumed to have been sold first.

Crypto assets, under settled practice, are not foreign currency but other assets within the meaning of the same provision. The fiction in sentence 3 therefore does not apply to them directly. What applies to crypto sits in the BMF guidance, and BMF guidance is an administrative instruction to the tax offices, not a statute. It binds the offices, not the courts. That is exactly where the dispute set out further below comes from.

Is FIFO permitted in Germany?

Yes, and in two senses. FIFO is permitted for the holding period where individual identification is not possible, and it is permitted for valuation too, for reasons of simplification. Apply FIFO wallet by wallet, document it, and retain it across the entire holding of one trading designation in that wallet, and you are moving inside the administrative view.

The question the other way round is the more interesting one: whether FIFO is mandatory. The statute does not prescribe it for crypto assets; the tax authorities expect it. For the tax return, that means FIFO brings no argument, while another method may well bring one.

Worked example: the same sell order, two wallets, two tax outcomes

A worked example with round numbers shows how strongly the wallet-by-wallet view bites. Assume you hold 0.2 bitcoin in two pots:

• Account at an exchange: 0.1 bitcoin, bought on 1 February 2026 for 8,000 euros.
• Your own hardware wallet: 0.1 bitcoin, bought on 1 June 2024 for 5,500 euros.

On 20 November 2026 you sell 0.1 bitcoin for 7,000 euros. Which pot you use for it decides the outcome.

Sale through the exchange account: the oldest tranche in this pot is the purchase of 1 February 2026. Roughly nine months lie between acquisition and sale, so the one-year period is not met. The transaction is taxable, and it ends in a loss of 1,000 euros, because 7,000 euros of proceeds stand against 8,000 euros of acquisition cost.

Sale out of the hardware wallet: the oldest tranche in this pot is the purchase of 1 June 2024, more than two years back. The holding period is met and the gain of 1,500 euros stays tax-free.

The same quantity, the same day, the same price, and yet two entirely different outcomes. A FIFO calculation across platforms would consume the 2024 tranche in both cases, because it is the oldest of them all. That is precisely what paragraph 62 rules out. Knowing the difference lets you choose the pot deliberately; not knowing it means hearing about it from the tax office.

The loss in the first case is not worthless, incidentally, but it is tightly tied: losses from private disposal transactions may be offset only against gains of the same kind, not against wages, interest or equity gains. How far that offsetting reaches across the years is set out below in the section on the exemption threshold.

The election exists per wallet and per trading designation

Paragraph 62 grants two separate elections. The first applies per wallet: in every pot you decide independently whether you apply individual identification, the average cost method or FIFO. The second applies per trading designation, meaning per type of coin. Where crypto assets with differing trading designations are held through one wallet, a separate election exists in each case.

You may therefore choose one method for bitcoin in your hardware wallet and another for ether in the same wallet, and another again for bitcoin on the exchange account. What you may not do is switch back and forth within the same pot for the same type of coin. That consistency is the price of the election.

A change of method is possible only after a complete sale

The commitment does not end with the calendar year; it ends with the holding. Under paragraph 62, the chosen method must be retained until all crypto assets of one trading designation in that wallet have been sold in full. Only after a complete disposal and a subsequent fresh acquisition of crypto assets of that trading designation can the method be changed.

An example: you sell all the bitcoin in your hardware wallet and buy bitcoin into the same wallet again two months later. From that fresh acquisition onwards, the choice of method is open to you once more. But as long as a single satoshi of the old trading designation remains in that pot, the method once chosen stands. Anyone hoping to switch annually, as some other tax questions allow, finds no door here.

LIFO and HIFO: the dispute between the tax authorities and a tax court

Alongside FIFO, practice knows two further procedures. Under LIFO ("last in, first out") the units bought last count as sold first; under HIFO ("highest in, first out") the most expensive ones do. Both can lower the tax burden, LIFO above all where older tranches have already met the holding period and the holder wants to leave them untouched.

The administrative view does not mention these procedures. Several tax firms do report, however, on a decision of the Nuremberg tax court of 22 January 2025 in which the court is said to have held LIFO admissible alongside FIFO, on the grounds that no specific statutory rule exists for crypto assets. The accounts of the case number and of whether the decision is final diverge, and no clarification from the Federal Fiscal Court, the highest court in tax matters, is available.

For practical purposes the position therefore stays a sober one: FIFO matches what your tax office expects. Another method is legally defensible but will with some probability lead into a dispute that you have to conduct and evidence yourself. Anyone weighing that route talks to a tax adviser beforehand, not to a forum. Our earlier assessment comparing FIFO and LIFO for crypto in Germany sets out the background in more detail.

How to keep track of your tranches wallet by wallet

The schedule that has to carry all of this is manageable, but it has to be kept per pot. For every wallet and every exchange account you need a list of its own, and in that list each inflow and each outflow carries the date, the quantity, the type of coin, the price in euros, the fees and the nature of the transaction. Paragraph 102 of the BMF guidance frames the standard as being that every private disposal transaction can be traced individually and in its own right.

In concrete terms, every line holds at least the ticker or the full name of the crypto assets concerned, the number of units, the gain with acquisition cost and disposal proceeds, or the time and the rate of purchase and sale, together with the holding period. Anyone who did not buy in euros also states the market rate and the source it was taken from. A spreadsheet is enough for that; from a three-figure number of transactions upwards, a crypto tax tool or portfolio tracker does the work more reliably, because it keeps the pots separate automatically.

On a transfer between your own wallets, the acquisition data travels with it

A transfer from one wallet of your own into another wallet of your own is not a sale. It triggers no tax and does not reset the holding period. What it does do is move a tranche out of one pot and into another, and with that the order in both of them changes.

The original acquisition data therefore has to travel with it. Paragraph 103 of the BMF guidance expressly names the documentation of reallocations within wallets, for the wallet-by-wallet application of the average cost or FIFO method, as a record a tax office can request. Send a tranche from the exchange to your own hardware wallet without noting the purchase date and you have not lost the holding period, but you can no longer evidence it. What else is worth watching when moving between providers is written up in our piece on switching crypto exchange and the holding period.

What your exchange reports to the Federal Central Tax Office from 2027

Up to 2026, the order of your tranches was a matter between you and your tax return. That is changing. The Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act obliges providers under section 9(1) to transmit information on reportable users to the Federal Central Tax Office annually, by 31 July at the latest, for the preceding reporting period in each case. The transmission runs electronically via an officially prescribed data record.

The first report therefore covers the current calendar year and reaches the authority in the summer of 2027. Which details flow in, and why the amount reported is not your gain, is something we took apart in our assessment of the crypto reporting obligation and the gross amount. That providers need a tax self-certification from you for it, and that accounts without that certification can be restricted, is set out in the piece on self-certification at the crypto exchange.

The report comes provider by provider, not as one combined holding

This is where the circle closes back to the wallet-by-wallet view. Reporting happens per provider, because each provider holds only its own records. The Federal Central Tax Office therefore receives several data records about the same person, one per exchange, and no consolidated total holding. Your own wallet, which no provider operates, appears in none of those records.

Two things count in the end. First, the structure of the reporting matches the structure of the taxation: both run pot by pot. Second, your own schedule is the only place where the pots come together. If a reconciliation raises questions, because an exchange has reported a high gross turnover for instance, that schedule is your evidence. Without it, the exchange's figure stands there on its own.

31 December 2026 separates legacy holdings from new holdings

Running alongside the reporting obligation is the reform of the holding period. Under the draft bill, gains from crypto assets acquired after 31 December 2026 are to become taxable regardless of how long they were held; for purchases up to that cut-off date, grandfathering is envisaged. The plan has not been passed: the Bundestag rejected an abolition of the holding period in October, and a cabinet date expected for the middle of October passed without a decision. We track the state of the legislation in our assessment of grandfathering and the 31 December cut-off date.

Should the draft become law in this form, the order within each pot matters even more. The acquisition date of every single tranche then decides whether it can still become tax-free at all. And because the order applies wallet by wallet, the pot you sell from decides whether you touch protected legacy holdings or not. Anyone who wants to keep that cleanly separated later needs the acquisition data per wallet now.

Can the tax office see into your wallet?

Not directly. The information documented in a blockchain is open to anyone, but because public keys pseudonymise it, it allows no direct inference about the identity of individual taxpayers. The BMF guidance expressly assigns that information to the sphere of the taxpayers, who are closer to the evidence. Handing over a public key alone is not enough for the office to discharge the burden of proof; share it, though, and it can be used to check what you have declared.

Indirectly the reach is wider than that sounds. The office can request tax reports and, with them, the files they were produced from, such as transaction statements or CSV files. Once it has exhausted its own enquiries, through a block explorer for example, the guidance also regards requesting screen recordings from a wallet or an exchange account as proportionate. With providers based abroad, an extended duty of cooperation under section 90(2) of the German Fiscal Code applies on top: you have to clarify the facts and obtain the evidence, by retrieving the transaction statements regularly and in full. Missing records and data losses, after an insolvency of the trading platform or an attack for instance, fall to your detriment under this instruction.

The 1,000 euro exemption threshold and the offsetting of losses

Two figures belong to any FIFO calculation. The first is the exemption threshold: under section 23(3) sentence 5 of the Income Tax Act, gains stay tax-free where the total gain realised from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. The decisive word is threshold: where the total gain reaches 1,000 euros or more, it is taxable in full, not merely the part above the line. And the count runs across all private disposal transactions of the year, meaning across all the pots together.

The second concerns losses. These may be offset only up to the amount of the gain you realised from private disposal transactions in the same calendar year. A deduction from other types of income is ruled out; a carry-forward into later years and a carry-back into the immediately preceding year are possible in accordance with section 10d EStG, but again only within the same type of income. For the choice of method, that means a loss from the young pot is no free pass, and is usable only inside those narrow limits.

Crypto FIFO: every wallet counts on its own, and 31 December decides

The wallet-by-wallet view is no formality. It is the lever the tax exemption of a sale hangs on. Three steps bring your records up to the state that 2027 will demand:

1. List the pots. Write down every wallet and every exchange account separately, and assign to each tranche its acquisition date, its quantity and its euro price. A tax tool or portfolio tracker takes this over where there are many transactions and keeps the pots apart.
2. Retrieve the transaction reports. Get the complete history from every provider as a file while you still have access, and store it safely. Which providers deliver usable reports is covered in the exchange comparison; with platforms based abroad, the extended duty of cooperation applies.
3. Choose the pot before you sell. Use your list to see which tranche is the oldest in the pot concerned before you place an order. Transfers into a hardware wallet of your own are tax-free, but they shift the order and have to be documented with the acquisition date.

(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.)

MapQuest’s app now offers an optional map layer that plots known license plate readers from Flock Safety and other vendors, as backlash against the cameras grows.

Bitcoin ETFs lost a net $228.6 million this week, following a $681.1 million drain the week before and pushing October deep into the red.

A Bank for International Settlements working paper found that stablecoin growth slows when U.S. banks raise deposit rates, with Circle’s USDC most sensitive.

An FEC filing shows the Fairshake affiliate Defend American Jobs disclosed roughly $7 million more in ads against the Ohio Democrat, pushing its total past $46 million—days after the PAC expanded its map to 32 House races.

The nine-member group, modeled on the Internet Engineering Task Force, aims to set open standards for testing quantum-resistance claims as forecasts place the first practical attack in the late 2020s.

XRP might finally recovery for the first time since September plunge.

Binance founder Changpeng Zhao (CZ) has mocked longtime Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff over his history of bearish BTC predictions, joking that the gold advocate will eventually be right only after changing his mind.

Ripple's David Schwartz has hinted at a major breakthrough in XRP Ledger-based decentralized finance.

The market's response to the Uptober is certainly disappointing with most assets struggling to beat September's highs.

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès has stepped in to address Ledger's security woes, developing an affordable device capable of detecting hidden spy implants in hardware wallets without opening them.

TLDR:

• Qubic says an attacker drained 1,404 wallets of about 2.94 trillion QU in under two hours.
• The flaw came from weak seed generation, not the Qubic protocol, and version 4.26.4 fixes it. 
• Computors halted the network at tick 85,371,949, and 87.1% of the stolen funds remain frozen.
• MEXC froze the account holding the other 12.9%, and exchanges paused QUBIC deposits and withdrawals.

Qubic attack losses reached approximately 2.94 trillion QU after an attacker drained 1,404 wallets, the Layer 1 network reported. The activity ran from 23:42 UTC on October 17 to 01:26 UTC on October 18.

Qubic traced the breach to wallet seeds created with insufficient randomness. The network protocol was not the source.

Roughly 87.1% of the stolen funds remain frozen, and the rest moved to MEXC. Exchanges have since suspended QUBIC deposits and withdrawals.

How the Qubic Attack Happened

Qubic detailed the incident in a security update on X on October 18. The post drew about 85,900 views.

It described the event as an exploit of weakly generated seeds. Based on the stated times, the attack window lasted about one hour and 44 minutes.

Qubic said the attacker used this weakness to reach the affected wallets. The seeds were weaker than they should be. In a follow-up post, Qubic then listed the seeds at risk.

Seeds created on an iPhone or iPad in any browser before October 18, 2026 are affected. The same applies to Mac seeds made in Safari before that date.

Seeds from the Qubic iOS app created before July 2025 are also included. Qubic said it fixed the cause in version 4.26.4. No new weak seeds can be created.

Network Halt and Frozen Funds

Computors coordinated a protective halt at tick 85,371,949. As a result, no transactions are processing on the network.

Qubic stated that the drained funds cannot be moved or sold during this period. This pause remains active as the matter is resolved.

Most of the stolen QU never left the network. Qubic put that share at 87.1%, and it remains frozen in place. The other 12.9% went to MEXC. Qubic confirmed this split in its update thread.

The MEXC team froze the receiving account within about an hour. Qubic said other exchanges were notified. Those exchanges have suspended QUBIC deposits and withdrawals. Qubic described the funds as contained after the Qubic attack.

Recovery Steps and User Safety

Any resolution is a decision for the Computor quorum under network rules. The Core team is identifying every affected identity.

It is also preparing options for the quorum to consider. Qubic has not announced a final outcome for the Qubic attack yet.

A community poll is open on Discord. It gives the Computors a clear view before they decide. Meanwhile, Qubic urged affected users to file reports with police or cybercrime authorities in their country.

Reports should list the wallet ID, the amount lost, and the explorer.qubic.org transaction link. Qubic said formal reports help exchanges keep funds frozen.

Qubic also issued a scam warning. Nobody from the project will message first, ask for a seed, or offer paid recovery services.

Users should report such messages. A full technical report will follow once recovery is settled. Qubic will keep users updated on X.

The post Qubic Attack Drains 1,404 Wallets as 87.1% of Stolen QU Stays Frozen After Network Halt appeared first on Blockonomi.

Crypto staking is often described as an easy way to earn passive income. Advertised rates range from about 3% to 19% a year, depending on the coin and the platform.

Those headline numbers rarely match what ends up in your account. Fees, inflation, lock-up periods and price swings all change the final result.

This article uses data from five published sources to show what staking pays in practice. It covers rates by asset, monthly earnings, platform fees and the risks that can cut returns.

Rates change often, and one source uses data from 2019 and 2020. Treat every figure as a snapshot, not a promise. This article is for information only and is not financial advice.

What Staking Pays by Asset

Staking means locking up coins in a proof-of-stake network. The coins help validators confirm transactions and secure the blockchain. In return, the network pays rewards, usually in the same token.

Rates differ a lot from one asset to the next. Diamond Pigs puts Ethereum at about 3.3% APY in early 2026. Freshminers lists a range of 4% to 5%, which shows how much the number depends on timing and method.

Solana is listed at 6% to 8% by both sources. Cardano sits at 4% to 6%, and Polkadot at 10% to 12%. Cosmos-based tokens show the widest spread, from 8% to 19%.

Network participation also moves rates. Freshminers says that when fewer tokens are staked across a network, the remaining stakers usually earn higher yields. Competition among validators and governance changes can shift long-term earnings too.

Higher rates usually come with higher risk. Diamond Pigs notes that Cosmos-style networks carry more inflation and more concentrated validator risk than Ethereum.

Stablecoin lending is a useful comparison point. Diamond Pigs lists 4% to 12% APY with no lock-up and no token price exposure. That is a high bar for staking to beat.

The 2020 Medium analysis shows how wide rates can get. It lists some popular staking coins at 5% to 7% a year and others at 50% or more. Section six looks at what happened to those returns once prices moved.

Exchange staking sits at the lower end, at about 3% to 6%. The exchange holds your coins, but the setup is simple. Diamond Pigs describes it as the option for beginners who want simplicity.

Ethereum Staking by the Numbers

Ethereum is the largest staking network, so it makes a good reference point. In early 2026, about 35.86 million ETH was staked. That is roughly 28.9% of the total supply.

At the same time, staking paid about 3.3% APY. When more of the supply is staked, the reward rate tends to fall. Kraken’s guide describes the same rule for staking rewards in general: more staked coins mean a lower rate for everyone.

There are three main ways to stake ETH. Running your own validator needs 32 ETH. Liquid staking and exchange staking have no such minimum.

The Staking Rewards calculator gives a real example. It shows $10,000 of ETH staked at a net rate of 3.36% earning about $333.55 over one year. That equals roughly 0.1416 ETH.

Net rate means the figure after provider fees. That is the number to look for, because it is closer to what you keep.

Withdrawal times also matter. Freshminers says Ethereum unstaking takes 1 to 4 days, while Diamond Pigs describes a variable queue. Plan for some delay before you can sell.

Why Headline APY Overstates Real Returns

APY shows how many new tokens you earn. It does not show what those tokens are worth. Two things can shrink the real gain: inflation and price changes.

Inflation comes first. Networks create new tokens to pay stakers, which adds to the total supply. Diamond Pigs gives a simple case: a network with 8% inflation and a 10% APY leaves a real yield near 2%.

The reverse can also hold. A network paying 3% with very low inflation may reward holders more in real terms than one paying 10% with high inflation.

Price changes matter even more. Diamond Pigs says a 10% APY on a token that falls 40% still means a large loss in dollar terms. The math supports that. A 10% reward on a token that drops 40% leaves you down about 34%.

The Medium analysis uses the same method. It multiplies the price change by the reward rate to find the real return. A staking rate is only half of the equation.

Rewards are also paid in the staked token. This means they are not income in the same way bank interest is. They are more units of an asset whose price can move either way.

How Much Can You Earn Each Month?

Rewards come from a few places. Kraken lists three: rewards paid by the protocol for validating, priority fees (tips) that users pay for faster transactions, and MEV, which is extra value validators earn by ordering transactions. Tips and MEV change with network activity, so they are hard to predict.

Freshminers names five things that set your monthly income: the APY, the amount you stake, network inflation, validator performance and market conditions. Poor validators can miss rewards or face penalties. That means the advertised rate is a ceiling for many stakers, not a guarantee.

The monthly math is simple. Divide the annual rate by 12, then multiply by the amount you stake. Freshminers shows £5,000 at 6% earning £300 a year, or £25 a month, before compounding and fees.

Freshminers also says £1,000 staked at 4% to 15% earns about £3 to £12 a month. Small balances produce small amounts. At 6%, £100 earns about 50 pence each month.

Compounding adds a little more over time. Compounding means rewards are added to your stake so they earn rewards too. Kraken’s guide says this does not happen on its own at the protocol level, though some platforms reinvest rewards for you.

Time horizon matters too. Freshminers says short-term staking may not justify a lock-up, while long-term strategies benefit more from compound growth.

Payout timing differs by platform. Kraken says rewards are usually shown and compounded daily or weekly. Check the terms of your provider before you stake.

For most people, the size of the stake matters more than the rate. Moving from 4% to 6% on £1,000 adds about £1.67 a month. Adding £4,000 to the stake at 4% adds about £13.33 a month.

How Fees Cut Your Staking Rewards

Fees are one of the easiest costs to overlook. Freshminers says exchanges often charge 10% to 25% of staking rewards as commission. The Medium analysis puts the usual range at 8% to 10%.

The fee comes out of your rewards, not your stake. A 10% fee on a 6% reward leaves you with 5.4%. A 25% fee leaves you with 4.5%.

On £5,000, a 6% reward is £25 a month before fees. After a 10% fee it is £22.50. After a 25% fee it is £18.75.

The gap grows with a bigger stake. On £10,000 at 6%, the monthly reward is £50 before fees, £45 after a 10% fee and £37.50 after a 25% fee. Over a year, the 25% fee costs £150 in rewards.

Network fees can add to the cost. Freshminers notes that claiming or restaking rewards can carry its own charge. Some validators also add service fees.

Staking Rewards makes a related point. Two providers advertising the same rate can leave you with different amounts once commission is taken. That is why its calculator shows the net figure.

Kraken adds that its projected annual rate is shown before commission and can change. Always check whether a rate is gross or net.

What Past Price Moves Did to Staking Returns

The Medium analysis tested six assets over six months, from December 2019 to June 2020. The author multiplied each price change by the nominal reward rate. Fees and compounding were left out.

The results were uneven. Tezos gained 135.6% as its price rose from $1.29 to $2.88. Cosmos lost 20.6% even with an 8.34% reward rate.

Among the four volatile coins, only one finished with a gain. Synthetix paid a 53.66% rate and still lost 5.7%. V.Systems lost 46.8% as its price fell by more than half.

The two stablecoin examples gained, but by less. USD Neutrino showed 10.1%, or $1,010 on $10,000. USD Coin showed 2.3%, or $230.

The author applied the nominal rates directly to the six-month window. The author also noted that USDN staking was not available six months earlier. Keep both points in mind when you read the numbers.

The author also gave dollar results for a $10,000 stake. Tezos would have returned $13,560. Cosmos would have lost $2,600, Synthetix $507 and V.Systems $4,680, all before platform fees.

This data is several years old, so it does not predict today’s returns. It does show a pattern: price moves can outweigh the reward rate in either direction.

Lock-Ups, Drawdowns and Platform Risk

Lock-up periods limit your ability to react. Cosmos requires 21 days to unbond, according to Diamond Pigs. Solana takes about 2 to 3 days, and Ethereum takes 1 to 4 days according to Freshminers.

Freshminers says Cardano allows immediate unstaking. Liquid staking tokens can be sold at any time, but Freshminers warns they may trade at a small discount to the staked asset.

Drawdowns make waiting costly. Diamond Pigs says established crypto assets can fall 70% or more in bear markets. A locked position cannot be moved during that time.

Recovery math is harsh. A 50% loss needs a 100% gain to break even. A 70% loss needs a gain of about 233%.

Platform risk is the second concern. Diamond Pigs points to the platform failures of 2022 and 2023 as proof that exchange custody carries real risk. Staking through a smart contract adds the chance of code bugs.

Slashing is a third risk. Validators that act dishonestly or go offline can lose part of the staked amount. Kraken says the risk is small when you use a reputable platform, but it exists.

Tax is the last cost to plan for. Freshminers says staking rewards are usually taxed as income at their market value when received. You can owe tax even if the price later falls.

Custody rules differ by method. Exchange staking means the exchange holds your coins. Delegated staking on networks such as Solana and Cosmos is non-custodial, according to Diamond Pigs, but it still carries validator risk.

Product terms can also limit what you earn. Kraken’s disclosures say its flexible staking pays rewards on up to 50% of the assets you choose to stake. Read the fine print on every platform.

Kraken also states that staking rewards are not guaranteed. Validator uptime, total coins staked and network conditions can all change what you earn.

What a Realistic Range Looks Like

Diamond Pigs says a realistic range for most retail stakers is 3% to 8% APY in token terms. The real yield after inflation is lower. Fees come on top of that.

Here are three simple cases for a £5,000 stake. They use the rates and fees from the sources above. They do not include price changes, compounding or tax.

Even the high case pays about £30 a month on £5,000. The low case pays under £10. A 5% price move on the stake is £250, which is more than two years of rewards in the low case.

Diamond Pigs sets out three conditions for staking to make sense. You already hold the asset for the long term, you believe in the network, and you do not need cash during the lock-up window. If one of those is missing, the case gets weaker.

It lists cases where staking does not fit. These include chasing yield in a coin you would not otherwise hold, a lock-up longer than your cash needs, and a platform that takes custody of your coins. Staking also does not protect against a price decline, because rewards build slowly.

Staking tends to suit people who plan to hold the coin for years, believe in the network and do not need quick access to cash. Diamond Pigs and Freshminers both describe this profile. For short time horizons, the lock-up and price risk often outweigh the rewards.

Stablecoin lending and simply holding are the main alternatives. Each has its own platform and counterparty risks. The best choice depends on your goals.

Key Takeaways

• Advertised staking rates run from about 3% to 19%, but most retail stakers see 3% to 8% in token terms.
• Inflation can cut a 10% headline rate to a real yield near 2%.
• Platform fees of 8% to 25% come out of your rewards.
• On £5,000, a 6% reward pays about £25 a month before fees.
• Price moves can outweigh rewards. In the 2019 to 2020 sample, only one of four volatile coins finished with a gain.
• Lock-ups, custody risk, slashing and tax all affect what you keep.

Sources

• Is crypto staking actually worth it? An honest answer (Diamond Pigs)
• How much can you earn from crypto staking monthly? (Freshminers)
• Crypto Staking Calculator (Staking Rewards)
• How much can you really earn with crypto staking? We’ve calculated the ROI (Jacksmithwriter, Medium)
• Bitcoin staking rewards explained (Kraken Learn)

The post How Much Can You Realistically Make From Crypto Staking? appeared first on Blockonomi.

AI search has moved from a test to a daily habit. Millions of people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude a question before they open a search box. This article looks at the numbers behind that shift.

The data comes from studies by Pew Research Center, Similarweb, Ahrefs, Adobe, SE Ranking and others. Each figure names its source and the month it was measured. Where two studies disagree, both are shown.

The numbers cover four areas: how many people use each tool, how fast each one is growing, what happens to clicks on Google, and how much traffic AI sends to websites. Most figures are from 2026.

One caution applies throughout. Many studies come from companies that sell SEO or AI tracking tools, and each one counts something different. Treat the figures as a guide to direction, not as exact totals.

How many people use ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude?

ChatGPT leads on every usage measure in the data. OpenAI said in September 2026 that ChatGPT has more than 1.2 billion weekly users. That is up from more than 900 million in February 2026 and 800 million in October 2025.

Google reports its numbers differently. The Gemini app has 950 million monthly active users, according to Google in July 2026. Google also said AI Overviews has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode passed 1 billion in May 2026.

These figures do not measure the same thing. OpenAI counts weekly users, while Google counts monthly users. A weekly count is the stricter test, so the real gap between the two may be smaller than the raw numbers suggest.

Survey data shows who is using what. Pew Research Center found in June 2026 that 44% of US adults use ChatGPT. That is up from 34% in 2025 and 18% in 2023.

Gemini came second at 24%, and Claude was at 6%.

Age makes a large difference. Pew found that adults under 50 are about twice as likely as older adults to use ChatGPT, at 57% against 28%. About a quarter of US adults use an AI chatbot every day, and 12% use one several times a day.

Young people lead the trend. Pew reported in February 2026 that 64% of US teens say they use AI chatbots. Among teens, 57% have used a chatbot to search for information.

Which chatbot gets the most web visits?

ChatGPT drew 56.4% of global AI chatbot website visits in September 2026, according to Similarweb data. That equals about 5.9 billion visits. Gemini was second with 25.0%, or about 2.6 billion visits.

Together, those two sites took more than 80% of all chatbot web traffic. Claude ranked third with 9.6%, or roughly 1.0 billion visits. That is more than DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot and Perplexity combined.

The shares cover desktop and mobile web visits only. They leave out app use, API use and AI built into other products. Copilot, for example, shows 1.5% because only visits to its own website are counted.

Visit counts are estimates calculated by Visual Capitalist from Similarweb’s published shares.

A year earlier the picture was different. In October 2025, ChatGPT held 71.8% of visits, Gemini 13.6% and Claude 2.3%, which put Claude in fifth place. Gemini and Claude were the only major chatbots to gain share over the year.

The four smaller rivals lost ground. DeepSeek, Grok, Copilot and Perplexity together fell from 11.4% to 8.1% of visits.

Other data sets point the same way. BCG, using Similarweb data for six European markets, reported that ChatGPT’s share of chatbot visits fell from about 90% in late 2024 to 57% in May 2026. In that month Gemini held 27% and Claude 10%.

Which chatbot is growing fastest?

A falling share does not mean falling traffic. ChatGPT’s website drew about 5.9 billion visits in September 2026, up from 5.7 billion in January. Its rivals simply grew faster.

Over the past year, Gemini’s monthly visits rose roughly 2.5 times, from 1.1 billion to 2.6 billion. Claude’s rose about sixfold, from 157 million to 1.0 billion.

Source: Similarweb data via Visual Capitalist. The earlier period differs for ChatGPT.

Visual Capitalist links Gemini’s rise to Google’s launch of Gemini 3 in late 2025. By the end of that year, the Gemini app had passed 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million a quarter earlier.

Claude’s rise sped up in early 2026. Anthropic ran Super Bowl ads in February that promoted Claude as ad-free, around the time ChatGPT began showing ads to free users. Claude later reached the top spot on the US App Store, and its share of chatbot visits hit 8.0% by April.

Since April, ChatGPT’s share has recovered from 53.7% to 56.4%. Gemini’s slipped from 26.7% to 25.0%, while Claude kept climbing to 9.6%.

Separate Similarweb data shows Claude’s app monthly active users grew about 1,318% between June 2025 and May 2026. That was the fastest growth of any major assistant. Across all generative AI sites, visits averaged 9.5 billion a month, up 70% in a year.

Estimates of user counts vary widely. One 2026 roundup lists Claude at 18.9 million monthly users, yet the same list shows 968 million monthly web visits. User counts and visit counts measure different things, so they should not be compared directly.

How do marketers and everyday users use them?

Marketers pick tools differently from the general public. A September 2026 Ahrefs survey of 301 marketers found that Claude was the most used AI tool, at 83.2%. ChatGPT followed at 75.7% and Gemini at 57.9%.

The same survey found that 93% of marketers use AI to help create content, up from 87% a year earlier. Of those who use it, 85% say they produce content faster. Only 2.5% say it slowed them down.

The most common tasks are brainstorming topics (78.6%), creating outlines (76.4%), improving content (75%) and editing (70%). The fastest growth is in specialist work. Data analysis rose from 28% to 60%, image creation from 19% to 43%, and keyword clustering from 23% to 45%.

Everyday use looks different. A study by OpenAI, Duke and Harvard researchers sorted ChatGPT messages into three types. About 49% were asking for information or advice, 40% were asking it to do a task, and 11% were expressing views or feelings.

Using AI to look things up is growing fast. Pew found in 2026 that 42% of US adults use chatbots to gather information. About 38% of employed adults use them for work tasks.

News is a small but rising use. The Reuters Institute found that weekly use of chatbots for news rose from 7% to 10% across markets in a year. People aged 18 to 24 were three times as likely as those over 55 to use them for news, at 17% against 5%.

Trust is a limit. Only 20% of people worldwide trust news from AI chatbots, according to the Reuters Institute. In a Fractl survey, the share of consumers who said AI was more helpful than traditional search fell from 82% in 2025 to 54% in 2026.

How often do Google AI Overviews appear?

Studies give very different answers. The share of searches that show an AI Overview ranges from 18% to 86.7%, depending on who did the counting and what they counted.

The gap comes from method. Pew counted real searches by 900 US adults.

Advanced Web Ranking tracks a broad keyword panel. Ahrefs looked at branded keywords, and Peec AI tracks prompts that its customers chose, which lean toward business topics.

Broader keyword studies land lower. Ahrefs found AI Overviews on 21% of keywords across 146 million results pages in November 2025. Conductor found 25.11% of 21.9 million US searches produced one in a four-week sample.

Query length matters. Pew found that 8% of one- or two-word searches produced an AI summary, against 53% of searches with ten words or more. About 60% of searches that began with a question word produced one.

Intent matters too. Seer Interactive found that 36% of informational queries showed an AI Overview, against 8% of commercial queries and 5% of transactional ones.

Comparison queries triggered one 95.4% of the time. Ahrefs found that shopping queries triggered one only 3.2% of the time.

Location also changes the result. Peec AI measured coverage of 91.4% in the US, 91.7% in the UK and 75.6% in Germany. In France it was 0%, because Google does not serve AI Overviews or AI Mode there.

What do AI answers do to clicks?

Clicks fall when an AI summary appears. Pew Research Center tracked real browsing and found that users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary. Without one, the figure was 15%.

Links inside the AI summary itself drew a click in only 1% of visits. Users also ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% of pages without one.

Other studies find drops of a similar size. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page when an AI Overview was present, across 300,000 keywords in December 2025. Advanced Web Ranking found that AI Overviews cut the position 1 click-through rate on US desktop by 52%, from 20.02% to 9.69%.

The picture is not all one way. Seer Interactive found that click-through on AI Overview queries recovered from a low of 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026, in a larger sample of 53 brands. Brands cited inside an AI Overview also got a 35% higher organic click-through rate than brands that were not cited.

The size of the effect is still debated. A meta-analysis of more than 15 studies found results from a 19% gain to an 85% loss, with an average of 40% lower clicks. Google has said that total organic click volume from Search has been relatively stable, though it gave no numbers.

Zero-click behavior is also rising. SparkToro found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026. Only 0.34% of those searches moved on into AI Mode.

Which sources do ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude cite?

The three assistants handle sources in different ways. Muck Rack found in May 2026 that ChatGPT cites a source in 96% of responses, with about 5 links each. Gemini cites in 82% of responses with about 8 links, and Claude in 55% with about 13.

So ChatGPT cites most often, while Claude cites least often but packs in the most links when it does. Each assistant also has a favorite. ChatGPT’s most cited domain is Wikipedia, Claude’s is PubMed Central and Gemini’s is Reddit.

Source: Muck Rack, May 2026.

Journalism is a major source for all of them. Muck Rack found that journalism makes up about 27% of AI citations, while paid and advertorial content makes up 0.3%. About 84% of the links AI assistants cite come from earned media rather than a brand’s own pages.

Across engines, Reddit leads. Peec AI found that Reddit was the first or second most cited domain on all five platforms it measured in March 2026. The top ten across 30 million US sources were Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Forbes, G2, Yelp, Facebook, Medium and TechRadar.

Citing a source and naming a brand are not the same thing. A Growth Memo study of April 2026 found that ChatGPT cites sources 87.0% of the time but names brands in only 20.7% of answers. Gemini does the reverse, naming brands in 83.7% of responses but citing a link only 21.4% of the time.

Those rates differ from Muck Rack’s because the studies used different prompts. Growth Memo also found that only 2% of cited URLs appear across AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity. About 91% of citations appear in just one engine.

How much traffic do AI platforms send, and does it convert?

AI platforms send a small share of website traffic. SE Ranking found that they sent 0.32% of all traffic from January to April 2026, up from 0.24% in 2025. The data covers 101,574 sites.

ChatGPT sent 74.78% of that AI traffic. Gemini sent 11.56%, Perplexity 7.23%, Copilot 3.51% and Claude 2.62%. Statcounter data for April 2026 gave a similar order: ChatGPT at 78.16%, Gemini at 8.65% and Claude at 2.91%.

Google still sends far more. Ahrefs found that Google sent 190 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT across 76,000 sites. In August 2026, across 112,309 sites, Google sent 24.24% of all visits and AI assistants combined sent 0.41%.

Total usage tells the same story. Datos found that AI tools made up 1.83% of US desktop activity in the second quarter of 2026. Traditional search made up 10.52%.

The volume is growing quickly. Similarweb found that AI platforms sent an average of 770.7 million referral visits a month between June 2025 and May 2026, up 117.4% from the year before.

Visitors from AI tend to convert better. Adobe found that AI-referred visitors to US retail sites converted 54% better than other visitors in May 2026, and brought 53% more revenue per visit. A year earlier, in March 2025, AI traffic converted 38% worse.

These studies use different sites, periods and definitions of a conversion, so the platform rankings do not match.

What the numbers show

ChatGPT leads in users, web visits, citations and referral traffic. Its share of chatbot visits has fallen from 71.8% to 56.4% in a year, but its traffic is still growing.

Gemini has gained the most ground in reach, helped by Google’s place in search. Claude is the smallest of the three but the fastest growing by visits, and it is the top choice among marketers in the Ahrefs survey.

Google remains the main source of traffic for websites. AI platforms send about one visit in a hundred or less, though those visits appear to convert well. The data is changing quickly, and studies often disagree, so it is best to check the date and method behind any figure.

Sources

• AI search statistics for 2026 (GSC Wizard)
• 594 AI Search Statistics for 2026 (Malte Landwehr)
• Ranked: The Most Used AI Chatbots in 2026 (Visual Capitalist)
• AI Search Statistics 2026: The Numbers Marketers Need This Month (Passionfruit)
• 100+ AI SEO Statistics & Insights That Matter for 2026 (Position Digital)
• 2026’s AI Search Statistics Every CMO Should Know (Exposure Ninja)
• 123 AI Search Statistics October 2026 (BlazeHive)

The post AI Search Statistics for 2026: ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude appeared first on Blockonomi.

Solana had a stronger third quarter in 2026. Revenue, transactions, trading volume and tokenized assets all grew compared with the second quarter.

This article collects the main Solana statistics from Q3 and September 2026. The figures come from Blockworks, the Solana Foundation, Solana Compass, Castle Labs, RWA.xyz and other reports.

Each section covers one part of the network, from application revenue to price forecasts. The numbers show growth, and they also show where the risks sit.

Sources define their metrics in different ways, so totals for the same topic can differ. Where that happens, this article names the source and explains the gap.

Solana Q3 2026 at a Glance

Blockworks published its Q3 2026 Solana report on October 15, 2026. It showed real economic value (REV) rising 48% from the second quarter to $75.7 million. This was the first quarterly increase in REV since Q4 2024.

Application revenue also rose 48%, to $299.1 million. That is the highest quarterly total since Q3 2025.

Trading measures grew as well. Decentralized exchange (DEX) volume rose 23% to $197.2 billion. Tokenized equity trading reached a quarterly record of $7.1 billion, up 40% from Q2.

REV measures selected value from network activity, such as transaction fees and priority fees. Application revenue is different, because apps earn it and not the Solana protocol. The two figures should not be added together.

Solana Application Revenue Statistics

Applications on Solana earned $299.1 million in Q3 2026. That is 48% more than in Q2. The number counts what apps earn from their users.

The growth built up month by month. Application revenue was $75.4 million in July, $106.5 million in August and $117.1 million in September. September was the strongest month since January 2026.

REV moved in the same direction. Blockworks reported $30.1 million of REV in September alone. That is about 40% of the $75.7 million earned in the whole quarter.

Application revenue is not the same as SOL token revenue. An app can earn more money without that money flowing to SOL holders. The token gains value through transaction fees and other network-level links.

Month	Application revenue	Change from prior month
July 2026	$75.4 million	Not available
August 2026	$106.5 million	+41.2%
September 2026	$117.1 million	+10.0%

Source: Blockworks. Monthly changes are calculated from the reported figures.

Revenue is spread across several apps, but one app leads by a wide margin. Pump generated $121.5 million in Q3, about 41% of all application revenue.

Collector Crypt followed with $35 million. Fomo earned $24.9 million, Pacifica earned $18 million and Axiom earned $16.2 million. Together these five apps earned $215.6 million, or about 72% of the total.

Growth was not limited to the biggest names. Fomo’s revenue quadrupled from Q2. Axiom’s revenue grew 65%.

Still, revenue sits with a small group of platforms. If one of them loses users, the total could change quickly. Analysts often watch this kind of concentration as a risk.

Solana Transaction Statistics

Solana completed 3.18 billion non-vote transactions in September 2026, according to Solana Compass. It was the third monthly record in a row. The Q3 total was 8.78 billion, which is 23.3% above the 7.13 billion in Q2.

Non-vote means validator votes are left out. Votes are part of how the network reaches agreement. Leaving them out shows activity by users, apps and bots.

Blockworks analyst Sam Schubert counted about 3.2 billion successful non-vote transactions in September, up 7.5% from August. His Q3 total was 8.92 billion. That is 1.6% above the Solana Compass count, and both datasets show a record.

Schubert described Q3 as 18% above the prior quarterly high in his series. Solana Compass reports 23.3% because its data starts in December 2025 and it compares Q3 with Q2. The two percentages use different baselines.

Reverted transactions fell in September. A reverted transaction runs and then rolls back, often because a trader’s price limit was hit. These dropped 30%, from 2.19 billion in August to 1.52 billion in September.

As a result, the share of non-vote transactions that completed rose from 57.3% to 67.6%. Solana Compass treats completed transactions as the stricter test of work done for users. High counts can still include bots and short-term trading.

Solana DEX Volume Statistics

Blockworks reported that DEX volume rose 23% in Q3 to $197.2 billion. The Solana Foundation put September DEX volume at $78.33 billion, up from $65.29 billion in August. That is a 20% rise.

Other sources give different totals. DefiLlama counted about $78 billion in September, based on the DEXs it lists. Solana Compass counted $184.1 billion of spot swaps over 1.17 billion trades, across 95 programs and more than 1.6 million markets.

The gap comes from method. Solana Compass counts every spot swap its tool sees, including circular and bot-driven trading. Bitquery classified $117.7 billion, or 58%, of Solana DEX volume from August 24 to September 22 as circular or bot-like.

Aggregators routed 27.1% of the September volume counted by Solana Compass. Readers who compare DEX figures should check which source and method sit behind each number.

Solana Stablecoin Supply Statistics

The Solana Foundation’s September ecosystem report put stablecoin supply at a record $17.51 billion. Its payments review reported $17.3 billion on September 25.

Supply and transaction volume are different measures. Supply is the value of stablecoins on the network at one point in time. Volume is the value moved over a period, so supply can stay flat while volume changes a lot.

Traders use stablecoins to move between positions without converting back to cash. DeFi apps use them for lending, collateral and liquidity. Businesses use them to move dollars across borders and outside banking hours.

Payments news added to the picture in September. Column integrated stablecoins into its banking core, so businesses can convert between supported stablecoins and dollars on the same ledger used for ACH, wires and SWIFT.

Open USD also launched on Solana on September 30. Its reserves are held at BlackRock, Lead Bank and BNY.

Supply alone does not show how the money is used. Some balances sit idle or support leveraged trades. Transfer activity, active users and payment volume give a fuller view.

Solana Tokenized Real-World Asset Statistics

Castle Labs research shows Solana’s tokenized real-world asset (RWA) market grew from about $700 million to $4.3 billion in a year. That is a gain of about $3.6 billion, or 514%. The figures leave out conventional stablecoins such as USDC and USDT.

Ethereum is still much larger. Its tokenized asset base grew from $15.5 billion to $16.6 billion, a rise of 7.1%. Solana’s RWA market is now about 26% of Ethereum’s, up from about 4.5% a year earlier.

RWA.xyz data cited in an October 1 SEC filing by Forward Industries put Solana’s distributed RWA value at about $4.3 billion on September 30. That was up from more than $3.3 billion at the end of June, or roughly $1 billion in one quarter.

The Solana Foundation reported $4.6 billion across more than 3,000 assets. That is a different snapshot and may cover different assets.

Growth spans Treasuries, investment funds, equities, private credit and insurance products. OnRe’s tokenized reinsurance asset, ONyc, rose from $203.4 million on June 30 to $286.2 million on September 30.

Value changes can reflect new issuance, redemptions and price moves in the underlying assets. They are not the same as net investment inflows. Tokenized assets also depend on issuer obligations, custody and regulation.

Solana Tokenized Equities Statistics

Tokenized equities are shares of listed companies issued as tokens that can trade around the clock. Trading value on Solana reached a record $7.1 billion in Q3 2026, up 40% from Q2.

The Solana Foundation’s October 6 report said tokenized stock supply reached about $684 million in September. That was up 47% over three weeks. Trading volume for the month was about $4.4 billion.

Holder counts vary by provider. The Foundation reported one million holder wallets. Token Terminal data shared on October 1 showed more than 1.2 million wallets, a new high.

Crypto Briefing also reported more than 1.2 million holder wallets across the ecosystem, including Raydium and xStocks. The report said regulation, ETF approvals and partnerships will shape future growth.

SolanaFloor, citing Blockworks, reported that Solana carries more than 32% of daily tokenized equity trading volume across chains. BNB Chain holds 27% and Robinhood Chain holds 25%. The xStocks platform has issued 74% of Solana’s tokenized equities.

This market is young. Trading volume can rise and fall quickly with market mood, so a record quarter does not guarantee a repeat.

SOL Price and Market Value Statistics

SOL traded between about $102 and $105 in mid-October 2026. The KuCoin ticker showed $104.72 on October 16. 24/7 Wall St. reported a price near $102 and a market value of about $60.2 billion on October 15.

October began near $118, peaked at about $124 and fell as low as $102. The price is still about 64% below the all-time high of $293.31, set on November 6, 2021. Solana traded near $149 in January 2026.

XRP traded at $1.31 with a market value of about $82.6 billion. That put it roughly $22 billion ahead of Solana. According to 24/7 Wall St., Solana would need to gain about 37.3% against XRP to pass it.

Recent moves against XRP have been mixed. Over 30 days, Solana gained 2.7% while XRP fell 5.6%. Over the last week, Solana fell 9.8% and XRP fell 6.3%.

Fund flows have been weak this month. SoSoValue data showed US Solana funds had withdrawals in nine of ten October sessions. Earlier, US Solana ETFs took in money for 14 straight weeks, their longest run yet.

The price also fell 5.1% to $102.19 after a September CPI reading of 3.7%, which was higher than expected. A network upgrade called Alpenglow is set for October 21 and aims for about 150 millisecond finality. A faster network does not automatically mean a higher price.

Solana Price Forecast Statistics

Price forecasts are estimates, not data about what will happen. The CoinStats forecast page lists projections from banks, research firms and software models. They vary widely.

Standard Chartered, as reported by CoinDesk on February 3, 2026, targets $250 in 2026, $400 in 2027, $700 in 2028, $1,200 in 2029 and $2,000 in 2030. A Finder panel put the end of 2030 at $892. Model-based tools are lower, with CoinCodex at $341.66, DappRadar at $146.41 and Binance at $122.43 for 2030.

For the end of 2026, CoinCodex estimated $140.24 and a Finder panel averaged $182. Changelly gave a 2026 range of $100.14 to $123.59.

The gap reflects different assumptions. Bank models assume Solana wins a growing share of payments, stablecoin transfers and tokenized assets. Technical models lean more on past price behavior.

CoinStats also set out its own scenarios. For 2027 it gave a range of $100 to $400, with an average of $250. For 2030 it gave a range of $250 to $2,000, with an average of $900.

At $2,000 per SOL, Solana’s market value would be about $1.175 trillion using today’s circulating supply of 587 million SOL. CoinStats says that is about 17.8 times the market value it used in its report.

What the Solana Numbers Show

Solana’s Q3 2026 data shows growth across several areas. REV and application revenue both rose 48%, transactions set records and stablecoin supply reached $17.51 billion.

Tokenized assets grew from $0.7 billion to $4.3 billion in a year. Tokenized equity trading hit $7.1 billion in the quarter.

The same data shows limits. One app earned about 41% of application revenue, and application revenue does not flow directly to SOL holders. Transaction and volume counts also depend on how each source measures them.

The price tells a different story from the network data. SOL is down from its 2021 high and US Solana funds saw outflows for most of October.

Reports also separate three ideas that are easy to mix up. Application revenue shows what apps earn, protocol revenue shows what the network collects, and token demand shows what buyers pay for SOL. Each can move on its own.

Key items to watch include the October 21 Alpenglow upgrade, revenue spread across more apps, the staying power of stablecoin supply and fund flows. Broader market conditions will matter too.

This article is for information only and is not financial, legal or investment advice.

Sources

• Solana Q3 2026 Report: Revenue Jumps 48% as Stablecoin Supply Reaches $16.8B (KuCoin)
• Solana Logs Record 3.18B Completed Transactions in September 2026, Capping a Record Q3 (Solana Compass)
• Solana’s Tokenized Real-World Asset Market Surges From $700 Million to $4.3 Billion in One Year (FinanceFeeds)
• Solana Hits Record $7.1B in Tokenized Equities Volume in Q3 2026 (Crypto Briefing)
• Solana Is 37% Away From Passing XRP. Could It Happen by the End of 2026? (24/7 Wall St.)
• Solana (SOL) Price Prediction 2026-2030 (CoinStats)

The post Solana Statistics 2026: Q3 Revenue, Stablecoin Supply and Network Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• MARA-linked wallets deposited 1,000 BTC worth $82.8 million into Binance and Gate over five days.
• The transfers equal roughly 2.8% of MARA’s 35,577 BTC holdings reported in late June.
• Exchange deposits do not confirm selling, although MARA previously sold 23,093 BTC for $1.63 billion.
• Bitcoin faces resistance at $82,500, while analyst Minga identifies $79,700 as a potential downside target.

MARA Holdings has transferred 1,000 BTC worth approximately $82.8 million to Binance and Gate over five days, according to Lookonchain.

The transfers have raised questions about whether the publicly listed Bitcoin miner is preparing to sell more of its reserves. However, exchange deposits alone do not confirm that a sale has occurred. 

Bitcoin is up 1.54% over 24 hours but down 1.37% over seven days, according to CoinGecko. Meanwhile, market analyst Minga identified $82,500 as a key resistance level that could determine Bitcoin’s next short-term move.

MARA Bitcoin Transfers Raise Questions About Potential Selling

Lookonchain reported that wallets linked to MARA Holdings deposited 1,000 BTC into Binance and Gate over five days. The transfers represented approximately 2.8% of the company’s 35,577 BTC holdings reported in late June.

Transaction tracking showed repeated outflows, with individual batches ranging from approximately 100 to 500 BTC. At current reported valuations, these movements represent a substantial amount of Bitcoin potentially entering exchange liquidity.

MARA has previously sold Bitcoin to support its financial strategy. Earlier in 2026, the company sold 23,093 BTC for $1.63 billion to reduce debt and finance its artificial intelligence expansion.

The company is also expanding into AI and high-performance computing, businesses that require substantial infrastructure investment. Bitcoin mining itself carries significant electricity, equipment, and operational expenses that can influence how miners manage their reserves.

However, the latest transfers do not establish MARA’s intentions. Bitcoin sent to an exchange could be sold, transferred between accounts, or used for other purposes. Confirmation of actual selling would require additional transaction or company disclosures.

If MARA does sell these holdings, the transactions could add to available exchange supply. Their effect on Bitcoin’s price would depend on market liquidity, buyer demand, and the scale of any completed sales.

Bitcoin Price Faces $82.5K Resistance as Traders Watch $79.7K

Bitcoin traded at $82,830.29, with $23.68 billion in 24-hour trading volume, according to CoinGecko. Despite its daily gain, BTC remained down 1.37% over the previous seven days.

Minga identified $82,500 as the key support-and-resistance level to watch. The analyst said Bitcoin needs to reclaim this level as support to strengthen the case for further upside.

If Bitcoin fails to hold above $82,500, Minga sees a possible move toward the current weekly low of $79,700. The analyst identified that area as a potential zone for long positions.

Conversely, a break above resistance followed by a failed attempt to maintain higher levels could create another short opportunity. Minga cautioned that BTC remained within a range, making risk-to-reward conditions less attractive for some trades.

Separately, Ali Charts examined Bitcoin’s historical performance after U.S. midterm elections. BTC gained 30.91% in 2010 and 6.61% in 2014, before falling 47.13% in 2018 and 18.15% in 2022.

The next U.S. midterm elections are scheduled for November 3, 2026. These historical returns show differing outcomes rather than a reliable forecast for Bitcoin’s future performance.

For now, MARA’s exchange transfers and Bitcoin’s resistance test are separate developments that traders should monitor. The key questions are whether the transfers lead to confirmed selling and whether BTC can sustain a move above $82,500.

The post MARA Moves $82.8M in Bitcoin to Exchanges as BTC Tests $82.5K Resistance appeared first on Blockonomi.

World, the iris-scanning identity project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, announced on Sunday a set of World ID tools that let banks and financial firms confirm a real person is on the other end of a call.

The rollout targets deepfake fraud and also covers AI agents acting on behalf of verified users.

World ID Brings Human Badges to Zoom and Finance Firms

In a post on X, World pointed to a 2024 case in which an employee at engineering firm Arup transferred $25.6 million after joining a video call where every other participant was a deepfake. Impersonation has grown more convincing since, the company noted, while autonomous agents are taking on more financial activity.

Zoom participants can confirm they are the same Orb-verified human connected to their account. Those who clear the checks appear with a small blue badge, and companies decide when to require it.

“World ID for Zoom is designed to protect sensitive, high-stakes conversations by proving that a real and unique human is present,” World stated.

A second tool, World ID for agents, lets AI agents carry Proofs delegated by people. Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada likened it to a power of attorney and explained that each user can assign credentials to only one trusted agent, which merchants can treat as the person’s alter ego.

Bain Capital, OpenExchange, Outtake, Pantera Capital and VanEck Funds are the initial design partners. According to a company spokesperson, the financial firms will keep Orb devices in their offices for employees who have not yet had their irises scanned. Not every check needs a scan, though: the lowest of three tiers relies on government documents, while the top one, Proof of Human, matches a selfie against the Orb record.

The football-sized Orb encrypts each scan so World cannot read it, and no central database of individuals exists. Sada compared the wariness around iris scans to early reactions to Apple’s Touch ID and facial verification:

“People understand you don’t have to give Sam or any of us your photo… Everything is open source and auditable.”

Rival Agent Tools and WLD Price Action

Amazon and JPMorgan have started blocking bots outright, a tactic Sada claimed would limit companies in agentic commerce. Cloudflare is working on the same problem: In August, it announced an agent ID tool and a wallet for agents, and Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen tied the launch to bots being treated as a business opportunity.

Despite the integrations with Zoom and major financial firms, World’s latest announcement does not appear to have done much for its native token, WLD. The cryptocurrency was trading at around $0.49 at the time of writing, down 0.7% in 24 hours and more than 11% in seven days, although it had gained over 14% in 30 days.

Furthermore, WLD is still nearly 96% below its all-time high of $11.74. Recall that in June, it fell more than 10% to $0.34, even after a $52.5 million funding round to expand World ID infrastructure.

The post Sam Altman’s World Targets Deepfake Fraud With New Banking Tools appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After a major correction experienced in the past several days and a dip to a monthly low, bitcoin enters another potentially fluctuating week with the Fed now back in its blackout period.

Attention has shifted to Big Tech earnings, US PMI data, consumer inflation expectations, jobless claims, and developments in the oil market. Here’s what to expect for the following five days.

Tech Earnings and Oil Shake

This week’s macro calendar is lighter than last week’s CPI- and PPI-heavy schedule, but several events could still move BTC indirectly through risk sentiment, bond yields, and expectations for the upcoming FOMC meeting on October 27 and 28. Perhaps the biggest market event comes on Wednesday when Meta and Tesla will report earnings, alongside IBM and several other major companies.

The impact on crypto could stem from the recent sell-off, driven by concerns about AI spending and technology valuations, which shows similar developments aren’t isolated in the current market environment. The Nasdaq 100 just posted its worst week since April 2025, while semiconductor stocks plummeted. Weak guidance from Meta and Tesla could renew the risk-off trade and spill over into BTC.

The EIA’s weekly petroleum report is due the same day, adding oil as another key variable. Crude prices have become increasingly important because higher energy costs have helped push inflation upward. A renewed oil surge could revive fears that the Fed will need to keep rates higher for longer. This is highly unfavorable for the crypto market, as we have witnessed lately.

Key Events This Week:

1. September Pending Home Sales data – Tuesday

2. SpaceX, $SPCX, Reports Earnings – Tuesday

3. Tesla, $TSLA, and Meta, $META, Report Earnings – Wednesday

4. Initial Jobless Claims data – Thursday

5. October MI Consumer Sentiment data – Friday

6. October MI Inflation Expectations data – Friday

~15% of the S&P 500 will report earnings this week.

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) October 18, 2026

Friday in Focus

Thursday brings weekly jobless claims, one of the few fresh labor-market indicators available before the Fed’s next meeting. The direct impact on crypto will likely be minimal, but all eyes will be on Friday as S&P Global publishes its October flash manufacturing and services PMIs.

This report will offer an early look at growth and, more importantly, whether businesses continue to face elevated price pressures. Later that day, the University of Michigan will release its final October consumer sentiment and inflation-expectations figures, with preliminary data showing one-year inflation expectations rising to 4.7% from 4.6%. Five-year expectations also rose from 3.4% to 3.5%.

This could be particularly significant for markets after last week’s CPI and PPI data showed inflation remains elevated.

The post Bitcoin Volatility Ahead? These 5 Events Could Move Crypto This Week appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP has extended its decline into a key demand zone near $1.30, giving up more of September’s recovery. While nearby support could trigger a relief bounce, the persistent sequence of lower highs and lower lows keeps the immediate outlook bearish.

XRP Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily timeframe, XRP has fallen into the highlighted $1.24–$1.32 demand zone after failing to sustain its rebound around $1.40. Consecutive bearish candles show that sellers remain in control, with the price now approaching the region that supported September’s strong advance.

This historical reaction makes the current zone important, but buyers have yet to produce a comparable response. Stabilization followed by a sustained reclaim of $1.32 would provide an initial sign that demand is returning. Such a recovery could support a move toward the $1.38–$1.42 resistance area, where the previous rebound stalled.

Conversely, continued weakness through the lower demand boundary around $1.24 would undermine the September base and increase the risk of a deeper correction. The next highlighted daily support sits around $1.11–$1.17. For now, holding demand is essential, but a reversal requires stronger bullish follow-through.

XRP/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart shows XRP continuing to trade within a descending channel. Recent recoveries have repeatedly stalled beneath its midpoint, while the latest decline has pushed the price into the $1.27–$1.31 support zone near the channel’s lower boundary.

This confluence could attract buying interest and produce a short-term rebound. However, XRP first needs to reclaim $1.31 and the descending midpoint around $1.32–$1.33 to interrupt the immediate bearish sequence. Above that, the recent $1.34–$1.35 swing highs represent another resistance area, followed by the channel’s upper boundary near $1.39–$1.40.

If buyers fail to defend $1.27, the price could revisit the earlier wick lows around $1.25. Sustained acceptance below both support and the descending channel boundary would suggest accelerating selling pressure. Until XRP breaks the sequence of lower highs, any bounce remains vulnerable to renewed supply.

The post Ripple Price Analysis: What’s Next for XRP After Holding Key Support? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The total crypto market cap increased by $840 billion, or 39.6%, to close the third quarter at $3 trillion, per data from CoinGecko, ending three straight quarters of declines.

It was the largest quarterly rise since the fourth quarter of 2024, but prices outpaced participation with trading volumes still falling.

August Delivered More Than Half the Quarter’s Gain

Market cap peaked near $3 trillion on September 21 before closing the quarter at $2.96 trillion, which is still 4% lower year to date.

August did the heavy lifting, with a 21.8% jump worth $490 billion that followed a US Treasury announcement to at least double its planned buybacks of long-dated bonds, plus steady net inflows into spot Bitcoin ETFs. A Senate procedural vote on the CLARITY Act failed on September 15 and barely slowed the climb.

Ethereum, meanwhile, gained 71% to $2,684, beating Bitcoin and every other major coin, helped by net inflows of $3.1 billion into US spot ETH funds that erased all the outflows from the first half of the year.

However, its trading volume still fell 23.2% to $11.5 billion, and Glamsterdam, the network upgrade already delayed in the second quarter, missed mainnet again and is still reaching test networks, with Sepolia activated on October 6.

Average daily volume fell 8.6% from Q2 to $73.3 billion, a third consecutive quarterly decline, while spot volume at the top ten centralized exchanges slid 14.2% to $1.65 trillion. But leverage came back faster than buyers did, since open interest on perpetual futures, which counts the value of contracts still open, rose 40.6% and closed above $100 billion for the first time since the third quarter of 2025.

Binance Gains Share While Newer Platforms Draw Traders

Binance extended its spot share to 42.7% from 38.7% in the second quarter, and it was the only exchange in double digits. It also added $12.7 billion to open interest, while KuCoin and Deribit lost 41.2% and 18.9%, a split CoinGecko called uneven rather than broad-based.

Bitget, for its part, fell to #11 after a hack in September, having already dropped from $37.8 billion in monthly volume in June to $15.7 billion in July.

CoinGecko also tracked Robinhood Chain, which launched July 1, and recorded more than $88.9 billion in trading volume during the quarter. Although the network was built with tokenized stocks and real-world assets in mind, meme coin traders took over, becoming a major source of activity that saw transactions per day hit an average of 9.5 million in Q3, even though most newly deployed tokens failed to gain traction.

The market has since then given back some ground, with BTC falling to a monthly low of $80,200 on October 15 amid pressure from Asian stock markets and September inflation data that came in slightly above forecasts.

The post Crypto Ends Three-Quarter Losing Streak With 39% Q3 Gain: Report appeared first on CryptoPotato.

A recent report by Chainalysis claimed that the United States has become a net importer of bitcoin this year while continuing to export dollar-backed stablecoins around the world.

The trend highlights an increasingly unusual dynamic: institutions are pulling BTC into the US, while the rest of the world is becoming more dependent on tokenized dollars.

Institutions Bring BTC Into the US

The report found that the US became a net importer of BTC this year for the first time since 2022. The distinction between retail and institutional activity is particularly notable, as transfers below $10,000 remained net outbound, but larger transactions moved strongly in the opposite direction. The $10 million-plus bracket alone accounted for 53,200 BTC flowing into the country.

In other words, retail users are sending BTC out, while US-based institutions are bringing it in. Chainalysis links the shift partly to the rise of spot Bitcoin ETFs, which have steadily increased the US share of global crypto activity since their launch in early 2024.

That fits a broader trend we previously covered, suggesting BTC has increasingly migrated from exchange balances to institutional structures such as ETFs and corporate treasuries. This reduces the amount of units readily available on trading platforms.

Chainalysis also noted that the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has added another layer of implicit sovereign demand, despite there being no standing federal purchasing program yet.

Everyone Else Wants Digital USD

The report further indicated that 99.1% of stablecoin order-book volume is tied to the greenback. It argued that users outside the US increasingly rely on such assets because they offer access to dollars without requiring an American bank account. That dynamic ultimately feeds back into US financial markets because stablecoin issuers typically hold reserves in short-dated US government debt.

The growing RWA sector reinforces the same trend, as the global market exceeded $36 billion in Q2 this year. It’s up 135% from the previous period, while tokenized US Treasuries alone accounted for $15.42 billion, or almost 43% of the total.

We have previously highlighted the rapid expansion of the sector, with tokenized Treasuries emerging as one of the largest and fastest-growing niches.

Taken together, the picture is quite straightforward: foreign users are increasingly demanding tokenized dollars and US debt, while American institutions are accumulating BTC.

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