Alibaba's smart glasses could redefine consumer tech by integrating AI with everyday activities, challenging global competitors in wearable tech.

The post Alibaba unveils new smart glasses as its AI push moves onto your face appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Tokenizing ETFs like FLHYon could democratize access to high-yield investments, but also introduces new risks in decentralized finance.

The post Franklin Templeton’s tokenized high yield bond ETF lands on Pendle as FLHYon appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The flight suspensions highlight escalating regional security tensions, potentially leading to broader disruptions in Middle Eastern air travel.

The post Airlines cancel flights to Saudi Arabia after Riyadh airport attacks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Big Tech's AI-driven borrowing spree intensifies competition for capital, potentially straining government financing and impacting investor strategies.

The post Big Tech’s AI debt binge puts it in competition with governments for capital appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Solana's rising mindshare could reshape crypto market dynamics, influencing investor sentiment and potentially altering future price trends.

The post Solana tops crypto mindshare, outpacing Bitcoin and Ethereum appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Moscow Exchange to Launch Bitcoin Trading, Testing Underway

The Moscow Exchange plans to let clients trade cryptocurrencies starting in December and has begun testing operations with professional market participants, a senior executive said last week.

“We are actively testing. We started a week ago,” Boris Blokhin, the exchange’s senior managing director for sales and business development, told journalists on the sidelines of the Sber Investments forum, according to a Thursday Interfax report. 

The exchange — the biggest in Russia — will work with a partner settlement digital depository, where market participants will open accounts. It won’t need any additional permits or licenses to launch trading, Blokhin added.

The plan follows Russia’s law on digital currencies and digital rights, which took effect in September and sets comprehensive rules for crypto in the country. 

Trades can run through existing infrastructure such as exchanges, brokers and trust managers. New players will also join, including crypto exchangers, where assets are bought and sold, and digital depositories, which record ownership.

Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, announced last month it was the first in the country to have been approved to custody bitcoin. The Bank of Russia gave it the green light for “digital currency record-keeping” and to facilitate the transfer of such assets, covering bitcoin and other, smaller cryptocurrencies.

Russia’s relationship with Bitcoin is complicated. President Vladimir Putin in 2024 seemed to praise the original cryptocurrency back in 2024. “For example, Bitcoin, who can ban it? Nobody,” he said at a forum at the time. 

But the Kremlin keeps a tight grip on what citizens can do with it. Using crypto as a form of payment has been illegal in Russia since 2022; unqualified investors can buy bitcoin and stablecoins capped at 300,000 rubles ($3,556) a year through a single intermediary. 

Qualified investors can buy any cryptocurrency traded on exchange and over-the-counter markets, with no limit.

President Putin in October signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country.  

This post Moscow Exchange to Launch Bitcoin Trading, Testing Underway first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

South Korean Lender Jeonbuk Bank to Offer Bitcoin-Backed Loans

Jeonbuk Bank has become the first bank in South Korea to offer won-denominated loans backed by bitcoin, according to reports. 

The subsidiary of JB Financial Group has started offering the loans, according to exclusive Monday reporting by the country’s Edaily paper. 

For now, the product is limited to corporate customers raising working capital, and bitcoin is the only eligible collateral. The bank said it may expand the service depending on regulatory changes and market demand, the report added. 

Jeonbuk Bank won’t own or control the bitcoin itself. The collateral is held by a specialized custodian, limited to virtual asset service providers registered under Korea’s Act on the Reporting of Specific Financial Information, it further noted. 

If a borrower defaults, the bank won’t take the coins but will rather liquidate them through enforcement procedures such as a court-ordered sale and recover the loan from the proceeds.

The bank said it chose bitcoin for its market capitalization and trading volume, the largest of any digital asset, and that its own stress tests showed bitcoin held up as collateral even during sharp price declines. To value the collateral, it uses an index based on a weighted average of prices across multiple global exchanges.

Similar products already exist abroad. JPMorgan Chase debuted bitcoin-backed loans for institutional clients in March, and Switzerland’s Sygnum Bank offers comparable credit.

The loan is the first concrete result of the “Crypto Bank” vision put forward by Jeonbuk Bank President Park Chun-won. The lender is the only regional bank to provide real-name verified accounts to crypto exchanges, and it is preparing an “all-in-one wallet” that combines fiat accounts and digital asset wallets.

“This loan is an example of designing a risk management and recovery structure that allows us to utilize existing bank lending and collateral management systems without directly holding virtual assets,” said Jeong Sang-hoon, executive vice president of the bank’s digital division.

This post South Korean Lender Jeonbuk Bank to Offer Bitcoin-Backed Loans first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Extends Slide — Can ‘Uptober’ 2026 Beat Last Year’s?

Bitcoin’s price dipped further on Monday, sliding 2% over a 24-hour period to trade at a little over $82,423. 

The coin over the past week has dropped by 3%, and so far this month, it’s trading down. 

October is usually a strong month for the OG cryptocurrency. Data from Coinglass shows that it has finished eight of the last 10 Octobers in the green. 

Last year was one of the exceptions: while bitcoin’s price notched an all-time high of $126,080, it then started to enter a bear market after October 10 — when the biggest crypto liquidation event in history battered the asset’s price. 

Markets across the board got hit hard following tariff threats from U.S. President Donald Trump. Crypto long positions got wiped out and over $19 billion in digital asset bets were liquidated. 

Bitcoin then spent most of 2026 in a bear market. 

The good news? That the coin just had its best quarter in years and a good September — historically a rough month for the cryptocurrency. Analysts now are saying that while it’s got off to a bad start so far in “Uptober”, signs of a bottom this month may already be in. 

Writing for data firm CryptoQuant, Japanese asset management platform XWIN said it could be up from here. 

“Now, signs of a potential bottom are emerging,” XWIN said in a note. “On October 12, markets priced roughly an 18% chance of an October Fed hike, while Brent crude had eased from nearly $110 to around $103.”

It added: “‘Uptober’ need not mean uninterrupted gains: a correction can build the foundation for the next advance.”

High oil prices have — at least in the short-term — hurt bitcoin’s price as investors then expect the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates in order to control inflation. 

But while the U.S. central bank last month raised interest rates, bitcoin’s price was unfazed and rose following the news. 

Other analysts have now said the biggest cryptocurrency is out of a bear market due to it crossing its 365-day moving average — a signal that has marked the start of its bull markets in past cycles.

This post Bitcoin Extends Slide — Can ‘Uptober’ 2026 Beat Last Year’s? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Ledger Investigates Fund Losses Tied to Southeast Asian Reseller After Implant Found in Device

Ledger has said it is working with authorities after users last week reported losing funds and one received a tampered device. But the company reassured customers that the number of impacted products was “limited.” 

The hardware wallet manufacturer added in an announcement on Sunday that it had reached out to affected customers. 

Paris-based Ledger on Friday said it had started an investigation after customers in South East Asia reported they’d lost funds after buying from a reseller. 

Then, on Saturday, Ledger said it confirmed that one of the impacted users’ devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant. 

Ledger would not confirm the amount of money lost but blockchain investigator Specter said $86 million had been drained from devices. 

“As the investigation continues, we are working with relevant authorities,” Ledger wrote on Sunday. 

It added: “Also, we strongly advise users not to purchase from unauthorized resellers, where the risk of buying suspicious, counterfeit or modified devices is important as nothing operates under ledger security guidelines.

“Security isn’t static and this incident underscores why we continuously review and strengthen our distribution and anti-tamper processes.”

Customers in South East Asia last week reported losing funds after buying from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based vendor CryptoBilis. 

Ledger then advised customers who’d bought from CryptoBilis to not set up their devices. 

CryptoBilis has since stopped selling its hardware wallets, Ledger said on Sunday. 

People on social media posted picture evidence of devices implanted into Ledger products, claiming it could get users’ private keys. It isn’t clear how many of Ledger’s signing devices contained the implant. 

Neither Ledger nor CryptoBilis immediately responded to questions from Bitcoin Magazine. 

Hardware wallet security has been a hot topic ever since hackers in July were able to steal close to $120 million in bitcoin from Coldcard users. 

The products, made by Canadian company Coinkite, contained a firmware bug which led to faulty seed generation, allowing hackers to essentially guess investor seedphrases. 

In a separate incident, hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor last month reported that close to 81,000 customers had their details leaked after its third-party fulfillment partner had data stolen. 

Criminals have been targeting data this year, with scammers getting hold of customer information via crypto wallet Ledger’s payment processor Global-e to send phishing emails. 

This post Ledger Investigates Fund Losses Tied to Southeast Asian Reseller After Implant Found in Device first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strategy Smash Buys $21.5M in BTC as It Continues Bitcoin Accumulation

Bitcoin juggernaut Strategy has bought more BTC as it pivots back to accumulating on a weekly basis. 

The Nasdaq-listed bitcoin treasury spent $21.5 million on 250 bitcoins from October 5 and October 11, according to a Monday filing. 

It added that it also spent $192.4 million repurchasing its STRC preferred stock. 

Strategy now holds 848,250 bitcoins worth $70.2 billion at today’s prices. Its stock (MSTR) on Monday was trading nearly 2% higher. 

The company — formerly MicroStrategy — has spent the past four weeks buying bitcoins after months of more sporadic buys or sometimes halting purchases for months altogether in order to build a bigger cash buffer. 

Monday’s filing also shows that the company bought last week’s bitcoin using net proceeds from MSTR Stock sales with its USD Cash buffer. Strategy has two cash reserves: “USD Reserve”, used to support the payment of dividends on the company’s preferred stock offerings and interest on its outstanding indebtedness, and “USD Cash”, which it uses to buy bitcoin. 

It first bought the cryptocurrency in 2020 to protect its shareholders from inflation. Since then, it has aggressively bought the asset and pivoted to being a bitcoin treasury. 

Investors can now buy its shares to get heightened exposure to the cryptocurrency, or get paid a yield via its digital credit products. 

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

Its Nasdaq-listed stock is down over 50% over the past year after the price of bitcoin took a hit. 

But since the company started buying bitcoin in August 2020, MSTR has appreciated by nearly 1,000%. 

This post Strategy Smash Buys $21.5M in BTC as It Continues Bitcoin Accumulation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

More than half of sampled tokenized US stock trading occurs outside Wall Street's regular hours, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found.

The IMF's October Global Financial Stability Report also showed that approximately 80% of tokenized equity transactions involved less than one share, providing evidence of demand for fractional investments and around-the-clock access to American securities.

However, the study found that tokenized equities experienced roughly 50% higher realized volatility than their traditional counterparts, while fragmented trading venues offered significantly weaker liquidity.

The findings come as exchanges and financial institutions expand efforts to bring US equities onto blockchain infrastructure, potentially challenging conventional market hours and settlement arrangements.

Tokenized stock prices reflect overnight market activity

The IMF examined five of the most actively traded tokenized US equity products issued by Ondo and xStocks, covering exposure to the S&P 500, Nasdaq, Tesla, Alphabet and Nvidia.

The analysis covered 11 centralized and decentralized trading venues, with more than 2 million five-minute price and trading-volume observations collected over 365 trading days.

The sampled products represented approximately $345 million in market value, or 15% of the $2.3 billion tokenized equity market as of July 31.

The trading patterns showed that investors were actively using features unavailable during conventional US stock-market sessions.

More than half of trading volume occurred outside the regular 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern session, including overnight and weekend periods.

The IMF said the activity suggested demand from investors operating in different time zones and those seeking to respond to market developments without waiting for American exchanges to reopen.

The predominance of transactions smaller than one share also pointed toward a retail-oriented market, although the researchers inferred that participation from trade sizes rather than directly identifying individual investors.

More significantly, the study found that overnight tokenized-stock prices contained information subsequently reflected in conventional equity markets.

Using centralized-exchange data, IMF researchers compared overnight tokenized price movements with the performance of their underlying securities during the first five minutes of the next US trading session.

The estimated pass-through ranged from 87% to 99%, indicating a strong relationship between overnight tokenized returns and subsequent price adjustments in traditional markets.

The findings suggest that tokenized venues can reflect information while conventional exchanges are closed, although the analysis does not establish that on-chain trading causes the corresponding price movements.

Both markets may be responding to the same developments, with conventional shares adjusting rapidly once trading resumes.

Higher volatility threatens tokenized stocks' expansion

The growing activity outside Wall Street's operating hours comes with significant differences in market quality.

The IMF found that traditional exchanges remained substantially more liquid than tokenized trading platforms, with centralized crypto venues performing better than decentralized exchanges.

On decentralized platforms, relatively small transactions could produce disproportionately large price movements because of limited market depth and market-making activity.

Realized volatility across tokenized equities was about 1.5 times that of their traditional equivalents and rose further on decentralized venues.

The comparison partly reflects different trading windows, since tokenized products trade continuously while the traditional-market measure covers regular US hours.

Despite those differences, tokenized prices generally tracked their underlying securities during regular trading sessions. However, decentralized venues saw wider and more frequent price deviations, especially when trading volumes were low.

Those conditions could complicate expansion beyond the relatively small market currently served by tokenized equities.

The IMF estimated that public tokenized real-world assets, excluding repurchase agreements and stablecoins, had reached approximately $65 billion by July, compared with roughly $300 trillion in traditional capital-market assets.

The Fund said systemic risks remain limited at current adoption levels, but broader use of continuous trading and automated settlement could accelerate market stress.

Automated collateral management, for example, could trigger margin calls and forced liquidations outside conventional trading hours, potentially amplifying selling pressure when available liquidity is already thin.

The IMF identified legal certainty, regulatory clarity, interoperability between trading networks and reliable settlement assets as major constraints on further growth.

Questions also remain over the rights attached to tokenized securities, particularly whether holders receive direct ownership claims over underlying shares or contractual exposure to their prices.

To address the emerging risks, the IMF called for circuit breakers, trading halts and liquidity safeguards adapted to continuous markets, alongside stronger monitoring of connections between tokenized and traditional finance.

Regulators must also assess whether existing protections can operate during weekends and overnight trading, when automated liquidations may occur without the liquidity normally available during Wall Street's regular session.

The post IMF finds over half of tokenized US stock trading happens after Wall Street closes appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) warned that stablecoins could face redemption crises if, during market stress, reserves become inaccessible across borders.

In an Oct. 12 report, the global financial watchdog said stablecoin issuers operating through affiliated entities in different countries could struggle to meet concentrated withdrawal demands when their reserve assets are held elsewhere.

The warning comes ahead of an Oct. 15 meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, as regulators confront growing risks from a stablecoin market valued at approximately $300 billion in mid-2026, with 99% of its value pegged to the US dollar.

FSB Chair Andrew Bailey said international regulatory coordination remains underdeveloped, leaving authorities without mature arrangements for managing cross-border stablecoin failures.

Stablecoin reserves face cross-border stress test

The FSB identified particular vulnerabilities in stablecoins issued by multiple affiliated companies that share liability for the same token while maintaining separate reserves.

Under such arrangements, holders may be able to redeem their tokens through any participating issuer, regardless of where the stablecoins were originally issued.

That flexibility can create liquidity mismatches when redemption demand concentrates in one jurisdiction while much of the collateral backing the tokens remains in another.

Moving reserves between entities could resolve the imbalance under normal conditions. However, banking restrictions, settlement delays and differences in national regulations could complicate those transfers during a market panic.

The speed at which stablecoins circulate amplifies the risks.

Digital tokens can move across borders and trade around the clock, while the Treasury securities, bank deposits and other traditional assets backing them remain subject to local financial-market operating hours and settlement arrangements.

The FSB warned that delays in meeting redemptions could push holders to sell stablecoins at discounts on secondary markets, potentially destabilizing their dollar pegs.

A sufficiently large run could also spill into traditional finance if issuers liquidate reserve assets rapidly or withdraw substantial deposits from banks to meet redemption requests.

For context, Circle's European stablecoin arrangements illustrate how cross-border reserve management can affect redemption procedures.

Under its redemption policy, updated in September, Circle co-issues USDC through its French entity for the European Economic Area and its US entity for markets outside the region.

The policy allows Circle France to adjust or defer certain redemption requests during a defined stress event when the two entities cannot complete reserve rebalancing.

Those measures could include temporary redemption limits for European crypto-asset service providers, while preserving holders' rights to redemption at par.

The provisions describe contingency arrangements rather than an existing liquidity failure. They also operate under Circle's specific jurisdictional redemption rules, which differ from the FSB's unrestricted cross-issuer redemption model.

Nevertheless, the regulator's concerns extend to affiliated issuers' legal responsibilities when a stablecoin faces distress.

The FSB noted that issuers may struggle to identify where their tokens are held because blockchain transactions can be pseudonymous, complicating efforts to determine which entities are responsible for particular redemption obligations.

Differences in national insolvency laws could create additional uncertainty over which regulator has authority to intervene and how remaining reserves should be distributed.

Those challenges are compounded by uneven regulatory development.

The FSB's 2025 assessment found substantial gaps in countries' implementation of its global stablecoin recommendations, increasing opportunities for issuers to structure operations across jurisdictions with different supervisory requirements.

FSB seeks stronger regulatory regime

In response, the watchdog is seeking stronger international information-sharing arrangements and closer monitoring of where stablecoins circulate, where redemptions occur and where reserve assets are held.

It also wants regulators to assess the depth of secondary-market liquidity and develop more coordinated approaches to handling stablecoin distress or insolvency.

However, regulators face significant information gaps. The FSB said blockchain analytics providers often use different methods to estimate stablecoin activity, and reliably establishing holders' geographic locations and cross-border transactions can be hard.

The proposed measures build on the FSB's 2023 recommendations and are non-binding, leaving national authorities responsible for implementing any changes.

At this week's G20 meeting, officials will receive the FSB's findings as part of discussions on financial stability.

The watchdog has identified further work on cross-border monitoring, information sharing and crisis planning, but has not established a timetable for common procedures governing a stablecoin issuer's failure across multiple jurisdictions.

The post Global watchdog warns the $300 billion stablecoin market could face bank runs even with full reserves appeared first on CryptoSlate.

SWI Group has raised €800 million to expand AI infrastructure, advancing its plan to repurpose FTX-backed Bitcoin miner Genesis Digital Assets.

On Oct. 12, the Amsterdam-listed company announced a capital increase backed by institutional investors, valuing the group at €6.1 billion and bringing total equity raised since March above €1 billion.

The financing will support data-center development, power infrastructure and computing deployments across Europe and the United States, where SWI is converting its digital infrastructure portfolio toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

The expansion includes Genesis Digital Assets (GDA), a former major investment of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX's trading affiliate, Alameda Research, which SWI acquired control of earlier this year.

The fundraising comes as Bitcoin miners increasingly redirect capital toward AI infrastructure, attracted by stronger projected profitability and rising valuations for companies with access to electricity and data-center capacity.

Former FTX investment becomes foundation for AI expansion

Genesis was among Alameda Research's largest venture investments before FTX collapsed in November 2022.

The trading firm invested approximately $1.15 billion in Genesis between 2021 and 2022, when the miner was valued at about $5.5 billion.

The investment later became the subject of bankruptcy litigation, with FTX's recovery trust seeking to reclaim funds it alleged Alameda improperly transferred. The trust dismissed the lawsuit in June 2026.

SWI has since consolidated control of Genesis, completing the acquisition of a stake exceeding 70% in August through share purchases and restructuring.

The company plans to rename the miner SWI Digital and use its US mining infrastructure as a foundation for high-performance computing and AI services.

Genesis's existing power-connected sites are central to that strategy, giving SWI access to infrastructure it can redevelop for more demanding computing workloads.

SWI previously disclosed that its combined European and American digital infrastructure portfolio exceeded 4 gigawatts of power capacity, with more than 80% of its capital allocated to the sector.

The group also plans to develop its own AI cloud platform, extending its business beyond data-center ownership into computing services for enterprises and developers.

SWI Chief Executive Max-Hervé George said the latest fundraising would help the company expand alongside growing demand for computing capacity.

The new shares will be issued in several series, although SWI did not identify the participating investors or disclose how much of the proceeds would be allocated specifically to Genesis.

Bitcoin miners' AI pivot delivers stronger returns

SWI's expansion follows a sharp divergence in the financial outlook for Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure.

According to CoinShares' second-quarter mining report, AI computing infrastructure could generate approximately $1.5 million in annualized profit per megawatt, compared with an estimated $500,000 from Bitcoin mining.

That threefold difference has helped drive a substantial revaluation of former mining companies pursuing AI opportunities.

CoinShares found that 10 of the 12 publicly traded mining companies it tracked gained between 70% and 195% during the second quarter.

Companies focused on AI infrastructure, including Hut 8, Cipher Mining, TeraWulf and Core Scientific, traded at an average of 19.4 times forward sales, compared with 6.6 times for a group of more mining-focused competitors.

The shift reflects growing investor demand for companies with existing electricity connections and infrastructure capable of supporting AI workloads.

However, converting those assets remains capital-intensive.

CoinShares estimates that developing AI-grade facilities from mining infrastructure can cost $8 million to $15 million per megawatt, compared with approximately $700,000 to $1 million for mining infrastructure.

The report also found that more than $100 billion in disclosed AI computing contracts across the covered companies supported only about $1.1 billion in annualized revenue, with roughly 550 megawatts generating billings against more than 4 gigawatts of contracted capacity.

That gap has made project execution increasingly important as investors assign higher valuations to companies transitioning away from Bitcoin mining.

SWI's €800 million capital increase provides additional financing for its expansion, but the company has not disclosed which Genesis facilities will be converted first, their development costs or when they will begin generating AI computing revenue.

The post FTX’s former Bitcoin mining bet gets new life as parent raises €800 million for AI appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Standard Chartered has launched custody for Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin as it prepares to expand its use as collateral for institutional trading.

On Oct. 12, the bank announced that eligible institutional clients can now hold RLUSD issued on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) through its Dubai International Financial Center branch, regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority.

The launch forms part of a broader arrangement with Ripple and trading group LMAX that would allow institutions to use RLUSD as collateral while keeping their stablecoin holdings with Standard Chartered.

Under the proposed model, the bank would mirror the value of eligible RLUSD holdings to LMAX, enabling clients to support trading positions without transferring the underlying tokens directly to the venue.

The arrangement could reduce counterparty exposure and operational risks associated with moving assets between custodians and exchanges, while allowing institutions to deploy capital across trading activities.

Ripple expands RLUSD's institutional reach after rapid supply growth

The development comes as RLUSD emerges as one of the fastest-growing stablecoins by absolute market value added, reflecting Ripple's efforts to expand its use across financial markets.

According to RWA Foundation, Ripple recorded the second-largest increase in stablecoin market capitalization during the third quarter, adding $765.3 million over 90 days.

Only Circle's USDC posted a larger increase, $915 million, while United Stables ranked third at $474.2 million.

Data from DeFiLlama shows RLUSD's total circulating supply has since climbed to about $2.4 billion, with about $1.14 billion issued on XRPL and another $1.3 billion on Ethereum.

The expansion gives Ripple a larger pool of dollar-denominated tokens as it seeks to establish RLUSD beyond payments and transfers, including as collateral for institutional trading.

That effort gained momentum in January when Ripple and LMAX announced a multiyear partnership to integrate RLUSD across the trading group's infrastructure.

Ripple committed $150 million in financing to support LMAX's expansion, with the agreement targeting RLUSD adoption across spot cryptocurrency trading, perpetual futures, contracts for difference, and other institutional products.

Standard Chartered's involvement adds a traditional banking custody channel to the arrangement, allowing participating institutions to maintain custody arrangements with the bank while accessing LMAX's trading infrastructure.

Waqar Chaudry, Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets in Securities Services, said institutional investors increasingly want to participate in digital asset markets without compromising asset safeguarding and risk management.

For Ripple, accepting RLUSD as trading collateral could drive additional demand from banks, brokers, and investment firms that need dollar-denominated assets to support their positions.

However, the commercial impact will depend on how widely institutions adopt the arrangement and which LMAX products ultimately accept the stablecoin.

Standard Chartered has not disclosed the amount of RLUSD held in custody or identified participating institutional clients.

The companies have also not announced when the collateral integration will become operational. Implementation remains subject to final documentation, technical testing, regulatory requirements and internal approvals across relevant jurisdictions.

Those remaining steps will determine when institutions can begin using RLUSD held at Standard Chartered to support trading positions on LMAX.

The post Standard Chartered brings Ripple’s RLUSD into banking custody after $765 million quarterly surge appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin options expiring Friday carry substantial put exposure below the market price, while short-term volatility pricing has fallen ahead of Wednesday's US inflation report.

Data from Coinbase-owned Deribit, a crypto options exchange, showed that in an Oct. 12 snapshot the Oct. 16 settlement carried approximately 15,502 BTC in outstanding options, comprising 9,128 BTC in puts and 6,373 BTC in calls. The put-to-call ratio stands at 1.43, with about $451 million in underlying notional exposure concentrated in puts at $76,000, $78,000 and $80,000.

The snapshot put Bitcoin near $83,450 after last week's selloff, while derivatives platform Laevitas reports declining short-term volatility expectations ahead of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) release.

Bitcoin puts cluster between $76,000 and $80,000

Deribit's options data shows the largest concentration of puts at the $80,000 strike, with outstanding contracts carrying about $188 million in underlying notional exposure.

Another $162 million is concentrated at $78,000, while the $76,000 strike accounts for approximately $101 million.

Combined, the three levels represent nearly 35% of the $1.29 billion options expiry, highlighting the scale of downside positioning after Bitcoin briefly fell toward $80,000 during last week's market downturn.

Additional put exposure worth about $89 million is concentrated at $83,000, near Bitcoin's current trading price.

The concentration suggests traders remain concerned about renewed selling pressure, although put open interest also includes contracts sold by investors seeking to collect premiums rather than exclusively buyers seeking protection.

Deribit data shows approximately $94 million in call exposure at $90,000, followed by $70 million at $87,000 and $55 million at $85,000.

Together, the three levels account for $219 million in outstanding notional exposure, less than half the amount concentrated at the three major downside put strikes.

The distribution leaves Bitcoin's largest downside positions relatively close to prices tested during the recent decline, while the $90,000 call strike requires an advance of nearly 8% from current levels.

Meanwhile, Deribit's maximum pain calculation stands at $83,000, indicating the settlement level that would minimize the aggregate intrinsic value of outstanding options based on current positioning.

Later-dated Bitcoin options also carry substantial upside exposure: Deribit’s Oct. 30 expiry has approximately $4.54 billion in call notional across the $90,000, $95,000 and $100,000 strikes.

Bitcoin volatility expectations retreat before Wednesday's CPI

Laevitas’s Oct. 12 brief described a volatility curve that prices Wednesday’s CPI as a non-event.

Bitcoin's seven-day at-the-money implied volatility declined to 32.01% from approximately 34.5% a week earlier.

That compares with 34.66% for 30-day contracts, 37.29% for 90-day options and 38.24% for 180-day maturities.

For illustration, converting the annualized seven-day implied volatility to a weekly move at the $83,450 snapshot price gives a one-standard-deviation move of roughly 4.4%, or $3,700, under conventional volatility assumptions.

That would place the modeled weekly range between approximately $79,750 and $87,150, encompassing the $80,000 put strike but falling short of the substantial call concentration at $90,000.

Meanwhile, Laevitas reported that Bitcoin's seven-day 25-delta options skew shifted from +1.98 to -2.40 over the past week, a 4.38-point reversal.

Laevitas characterized the move as an unwind from a call-bid extreme toward nominally put-bid pricing, with puts still cheaper relative to calls than their 52-week median.

Bitcoin perpetual-futures open interest fell 1.9% over the past week to approximately $29.33 billion, while annualized funding rates stood at 5.6%, according to Laevitas.

The positioning comes as investors assess whether US inflation could prompt the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates again at its Oct. 27-28 policy meeting.

MarketWatch’s Oct. 12 preview cited expectations for September headline inflation to accelerate to approximately 3.7% annually from 3.4% in August, partly reflecting higher energy costs. Monthly core inflation, which excludes food and energy, is forecast to rise 0.2%.

Laevitas described an October increase as close to priced out, with December pricing around an 85% probability of a hike.

However, elevated oil prices and Treasury yields continue to complicate the outlook for risk assets, with stronger-than-expected inflation potentially reviving expectations of another rate increase.

In illustrative price scenarios, hotter inflation could pressure Bitcoin toward the heavily populated $78,000–$80,000 put strikes, while softer inflation could encourage a recovery toward the higher call concentrations.

The CPI report arrives Wednesday, Oct. 14, at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, followed by producer-price inflation and retail-sales data Thursday, Oct. 15, giving traders two days of economic releases to absorb before Friday's $1.29 billion options expiry.

The post Bitcoin options price a quiet CPI week while shorts cluster at $76,000–$80,000 appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ether traded at $2,533.59 on Tuesday morning, 1.47 percent below its level of 24 hours earlier and 6.39 percent below where it stood a week ago. The more interesting number sits in the derivatives market rather than in the price: open interest in Ethereum contracts on the OKX exchange has fallen from $2.113 billion to $1.776 billion since October 7. That is $337 million, or almost 16 percent less leverage in five days. If you hold ETH, read the two numbers together, because a market without leverage falls more slowly and rises more slowly as well.

Ethereum price today: $2,533.59 after the low at $2,411

The range of the past 24 hours runs from $2,411.24 to $2,575.42 according to CoinGecko data. That is $164 between high and low, a good 6.4 percent of the range measured against the low. The current level of $2,533.59 sits above the midpoint of that range, which runs at $2,493. Ether worth $16.26 billion changed hands over the period.

Against the wider market, Ethereum stands out in neither direction. Bitcoin trades at $83,697 and has given up 2.31 percent in seven days, Solana stands at $108.59 and lost 9.73 percent over the same period. Ether sits between the two with a weekly loss of 6.39 percent. No coin-specific problem can be read from that.

The $2,495 level has gone, and what has happened since

On Sunday the question here was whether the $2,495 level would hold. Ether cost $2,504 at the time, and the network fee had dropped to a sixth of its September value; the detail is in our October 11 analysis of the Ethereum price and the collapsed base fee. The answer is that the level did not hold. At the low of the past 24 hours the price stood at $2,411.24, $84 below it.

The price has come back nonetheless. At $2,533.59 Ether trades almost $39 above the old level. For the chart picture, the support at $2,495 has turned into a waypoint rather than a floor or a ceiling. Only a second test will show what role it plays from here.

Open interest: $337 million less leverage in five days

Open interest is the sum of all futures contracts that are currently open and have not yet been closed out. The measure shows how much borrowed money sits in a market. When it rises, leverage is being added; when it falls, leverage is leaving, either because traders close positions voluntarily or because the exchange liquidates them.

According to the public OKX market data we reviewed on Tuesday, open interest in ETH contracts stood at $2.113 billion on October 7. It has fallen every single day since: $1.904 billion on October 8, $1.835 billion on the 9th, $1.814 billion on the 10th, $1.783 billion on the 11th and $1.776 billion on October 12. Six trading days down in a row, $337 million or 15.9 percent in total.

A second signal arrived on October 12. Trading volume in the same contracts jumped from $2.122 billion the previous day to $5.551 billion, a factor of 2.6. High volume alongside falling open interest is the classic pattern of a wave of position closures: a great deal is traded, but on balance positions are being closed rather than opened.

Long-short ratio falls from 2.30 to 1.73

The same data source tracks the ratio of accounts betting on rising prices to those betting on falling ones. On October 7 there were 2.30 long accounts per short account in ETH contracts. By October 12 the figure was 1.73. That is the lowest reading of the week under review and a decline of a quarter.

The number says nothing about the size of the positions, only about how many there are. As a price forecast it is therefore useless. What can be read from it is that the bet on a quick rally has thinned out. Those same positions generated the selling pressure of the past week as they were closed one after another.

Funding rate near zero: the derivatives market barely pays a premium

A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry date. To stop its price drifting away from the spot price, holders on one side pay a fee to holders on the other at fixed intervals, the funding rate. When it is clearly positive, buyers are paying, and the market is crowded on the buy side.

On the ETH-USDT perpetual on OKX the rate stood at 0.00255 percent per eight-hour period on Tuesday morning. Annualised, that is around 2.8 percent, and the futures price was even 0.04 percent below spot. By comparison, in an overheated phase the rate sits at 0.05 percent or more per period. The market is currently asking almost no premium for a bet on rising prices.

How a liquidation happens: the mechanism in three steps

This sequence is responsible for last week's deleveraging, and it is the reason a single sell-off can grow larger than the news behind it would suggest.

Step 1: the margin shrinks

Buy $10,000 of Ether with five times leverage and you post $2,000 as collateral. If the price drops 10 percent, $1,000 of that collateral is gone. The buffer halves on a price move that would barely register without leverage.

Step 2: the exchange closes the position

Once the collateral falls below the maintenance margin, the exchange closes the position automatically and sells the underlying coins on the market. The selling is real rather than a book entry, and it hits the same order book as any other sale.

Step 3: one sale triggers the next

That selling pressure pushes the price lower, which breaks the maintenance margin on the next position. This is the chain reaction that produces more price movement in half an hour than a week of quiet trading. The volume spike of October 12 shows exactly that.

The reverse holds on the way up. The less leverage sits in the market, the fewer forced sales a pullback can trigger. A market with $1.776 billion rather than $2.113 billion of open interest is slower in both directions. If you use leveraged products, the terms and maintenance margins of the providers are set out in our comparison of perpetual exchanges.

A 2:1 leverage cap: what applies to retail investors in Germany

At a provider supervised in Germany, the numbers in the example above would not be permitted at all. BaFin has made permanent, by general administrative act, the restrictions on contracts for difference that the European Securities and Markets Authority introduced in August 2018. Cryptocurrencies fall into the strictest tier: a maximum of two times leverage for retail clients. For comparison, the cap is 30 for major currency pairs and 5 for equities.

Two further protections come with it that are often missing at exchanges outside the EU. An obligation for retail clients to add funds is prohibited, so the loss is limited to the money committed. And the position is closed at the latest when the collateral has shrunk to half of the initial margin. The detail is in BaFin's publication on the general administrative act covering contracts for difference. A perpetual on an exchange without an EU licence is not covered, and there 50 times leverage and margin calls are the norm.

Futures and tax: 25 percent from the first euro

The tax gap between a perpetual and a bought Ether is wider than the economic one, and it is regularly overlooked in leveraged trading. A gain from a futures transaction counts as investment income under section 20 of the German Income Tax Act. It attracts 25 percent capital gains tax plus the solidarity surcharge and, where applicable, church tax, so at least 26.375 percent in total. There is no holding period after which the tax falls away. We worked the case through in detail on October 12, in our piece on the tax on crypto futures and perpetuals.

One relief has applied since the 2024 Annual Tax Act. The separate loss-offsetting pool for futures transactions and the annual ceiling of 20,000 euros have both been scrapped, and for all open cases. Losses from perpetuals can therefore be set against other investment income again. The statutory text is at section 20 EStG on gesetze-im-internet.de. Whether your provider withholds the tax automatically depends on whether it is a domestic paying agent; with foreign exchanges you have to declare the income yourself.

Spot instead of perpetual: the holding period applies to the coins alone

Buy Ether directly and take it into your own custody and you fall under section 23 EStG. The one-year rule applies there: after twelve months of holding, the disposal gain is tax-free regardless of its size. Within the year the personal income tax rate applies, though there is a 1,000-euro exemption threshold covering all private disposals in a year.

That produces a decision which has nothing to do with a view on the price. Two investors with identical expectations for the Ethereum price pay different amounts of tax depending on whether they invest through a perpetual or through bought coins. For holding periods beyond a year, buying directly is the cheaper route in tax terms; over short periods the difference barely matters. Which venues are licensed in Germany and what they charge is set out in our comparison of crypto exchanges.

The ETF side: a tenth day of outflows in a row

Alongside the derivatives market, a second flow has been running against Ether. The American spot ETFs on Ethereum recorded a net outflow of $85.4 million on October 12, according to figures from data provider SoSoValue. It was the tenth trading day of outflows in a row. BlackRock's ETHA fund accounted for the bulk at $75.1 million, with a further $10.3 million from Grayscale's mini trust. None of the eleven funds took in money that day.

Net assets under management across all Ethereum ETFs now stand at $15.86 billion, with cumulative inflows since launch of $13.17 billion. At Bitcoin the outflow was smaller on the same day at $65.4 million. For the coming weeks this is the figure that shows whether new money is returning: as long as the ETFs are selling, the price lacks the demand that could offset the deleveraging.

Our assessment: less risk and less momentum at the same time

From the newsroom's point of view, the deleveraging is the better of the two pieces of news, even though it sounds like the worse one. The evidence: $337 million less open interest, a long-short ratio of 1.73 instead of 2.30 and a funding rate of 0.00255 percent per period together mean the crowded buy side has been cleared out. A sell-off from the current level meets far fewer forced sales than the one on October 8 did.

Against that stands the ETF side. Ten days of outflows in a row and $85.4 million on Monday alone show that the demand which carried the price through the summer is not there at the moment. A market with neither leverage nor inflows moves sideways until one of the two flows turns. We therefore read the situation as a calming rather than a turning point. This is an assessment of market conditions and not a recommendation to buy or sell Ether; with cryptocurrencies a total loss is possible.

Ethereum and leverage: without inflows, $2,575 stays the ceiling

The range the price has moved in since Monday is the framework for the days ahead: $2,411 at the bottom, $2,493 in the middle, $2,575 at the top. As long as open interest keeps falling and the ETFs keep selling, a break above the upper end is unlikely. Three steps follow from that:

1. Recalculate your own leveraged position. At what price does the maintenance margin bite, and how far is that price from the low at $2,411? The providers' margin rules are in the comparison of perpetual exchanges.
2. Settle on how you buy. For holding periods beyond a year, the one-year rule argues for buying directly rather than for a futures transaction. The venues licensed in Germany and their fees are in the comparison of crypto exchanges.
3. Sort the paperwork for the tax return. Futures transactions belong in the KAP schedule, sold coins in the SO schedule. Tools that report the two pots separately are in the comparison of crypto tax software.

(As of October 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The Financial Stability Board delivered a status report on stablecoins to the G20 on 12 October 2026, and its central finding is an uncomfortable one: “Global stablecoins and national regulatory frameworks remain untested in severe stress and insolvency.” That is not a description of an acute problem today, but of an open flank. Nobody knows what happens when a large issuer fails and holders in dozens of countries want their money back at the same time.

If you hold stablecoins in Germany, this is not an abstract debate from Basel. Stablecoins are the short-stay car park of the crypto market: almost every trade runs through them, withdrawals go through them, and investors locking in a gain swap into them. The report sets out where that construction is thin, and it names what supervisors cannot currently measure. This article sorts the points and says which of them European law already settles.

What the Financial Stability Board sent to the G20 on 12 October

The Financial Stability Board (FSB) is the body in which the central banks, finance ministries and supervisory authorities of the large economies coordinate their regulation. It does not pass laws. It drafts recommendations that member countries then cast into law of their own.

On 12 October 2026 the body published the nine-page note “Global Stablecoin Arrangements: Cross-border vulnerabilities and financial stability monitoring”, together with the letter from its chair, Andrew Bailey, to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors. Their meeting takes place on 15 October 2026 in Bangkok. Alongside the stablecoin note, the round also received a peer review on public backstops, a consultation report on modernising supervision and the finalised principles on the use of artificial intelligence.

What the note is and what it is not

The note describes itself as a summary of work in progress, not as a final policy decision. It builds on the FSB recommendations of 2023 and on the 2025 review of how they have been implemented. Three questions sit at its centre: how are these arrangements built? Along which paths could problems spread? And which metrics would supervisors need in order to see that in time?

$300 billion in stablecoins, 99 percent of it pegged to the US dollar

The report gives two figures for the scale. At mid-2026 the total market value of all stablecoins stood at around $300 billion, practically unchanged from the year before. And 99 percent of that value sits in tokens pegged to the US dollar.

The second figure is the more interesting one. In plain terms it means that a European investor holding stablecoins is almost always holding dollar risk. Park in a dollar token for months and you carry the move in the euro-dollar rate with it, without that being disclosed anywhere. A token that is stable against the dollar is anything but stable against a current account in euros.

The report also records what stablecoins are actually used for today: mostly as liquidity, to move into crypto markets and back out again. In emerging and developing economies a second role is added, as a store of value and as access to financial services. Everyday use in the real economy is something the body calls a possibility for the future, not the state of play today.

Global stablecoin: the term as the FSB report defines it

Under the body’s 2023 definition, a global stablecoin is a stablecoin that is distributed and used across several jurisdictions and could become systemically important in one or more of them. Systemically important means large enough and interconnected enough that its failure drags other parts of the financial system down with it.

That crossing of borders is the core of the problem the note describes. A single supervisor only ever sees its own section. The issuer sits in country A, the reserves lie in country B, trading happens on exchanges in country C, and the holders are spread across the whole world. None of these authorities has the complete picture, and the activities around such a token are spread across different types of firm as well, each with its own supervisor.

Why an issuer does not know its own holders

A bank has an account and therefore a name for every depositor. It knows how much money can be withdrawn at short notice and manages its balance sheet accordingly. A stablecoin issuer has no such view. The report puts it soberly: it may not know who holds its liabilities, where those holders are resident, and in which country redemption will eventually come knocking. The liabilities are internationally mobile and in part simply unobservable.

Multi-issuer structures: when redemption shifts onto a single issuer

One case the note singles out is the multi-issuer arrangement. Several affiliated companies issue the same token and are jointly liable for it, but each holds its own reserves in its own jurisdiction. To a holder it looks like a single token, and it can be redeemed with any of those companies.

In normal operation that works, because the companies move reserves between themselves and the secondary market evens out the differences. Under stress, that balancing act rests on four conditions the report names one by one: the reserves must be mobile, the markets accessible, the information must flow, and the companies involved must coordinate. If one of those falls away, redemption concentrates on a single company while the money sits elsewhere.

A legal question hangs on this that nobody has answered so far. If it cannot be established where the holders sit, it is also unclear which liability belongs to which company. In insolvency that turns into the question of which national insolvency law applies at all. The report writes that this could in some circumstances prove difficult. That is supervisory language for unresolved.

Tradable around the clock, redeemable only in market hours

A second fault line lies in time. Stablecoins trade on secondary markets around the clock, on every day of the year. Redemption into real money and the management of the reserves, by contrast, run through traditional markets, with their opening hours and settlement conventions, and increasingly under regulatory requirements.

Under stress that gap works as an amplifier. Selling pressure can build in hours when the reserve side cannot act at all. If redemption fails to keep up with demand, the peg to the dollar comes under pressure. The report names the counterforce as well: deep and liquid secondary markets allow arbitrage that can pull the price back to the peg.

What a depeg means technically

A depeg is the moment when a stablecoin loses its peg and trades below its nominal value on the market, at 97 cents instead of a dollar, say. In law the claim to redemption at full value continues to exist, provided the issuer can pay. In practice, only those who can enforce redemption directly with the issuer receive the full value at that moment. Everyone else sells on the market, at the market price.

From depeg to bank: how a run jumps across to the financial system

The report describes four transmission channels along which a run on a large stablecoin reaches the traditional financial system. First, the issuer has to sell reserve assets to meet redemptions, quickly and in size, which pushes the prices of those assets down. Second, it withdraws deposits from banks to raise liquidity. Third, it hits everyone who needs the token for payment and settlement in the real economy. And fourth, foreign exchange markets move with it, wherever stablecoins are used for cross-border payments.

Emerging and developing economies are hit particularly hard, the report says. There, currency substitution, meaning the displacement of the domestic currency, the bypassing of the banking system and difficulties in managing capital flows are added to the list. A stablecoin can become systemic there at far lower adoption than in the euro area.

The quality of the reserves and the supervisory regime an issuer works under remain the decisive lever. An issuer holding illiquid or low-grade assets in a country that has not implemented the 2023 recommendations sharpens both problems at once, liquidity and day-to-day operations. To see which supervision your trading platform works under, the overview of crypto exchanges licensed in Europe helps more than any reserve report from an issuer.

Regulatory arbitrage: issuers sit in weakly regulated countries

One finding in the note is politically delicate and therefore remarkably openly worded. The interaction of national rulebooks has produced complex cross-border structures and opened up opportunities for regulatory arbitrage; some issuers have chosen to operate out of weakly regulated or unregulated jurisdictions. Regulatory arbitrage means deliberately picking a location for its laxest supervision.

At the same time the body pushes back against the reflex of deriving a single solution from this. No one-size-fits-all approach exists, it says; countries implement the recommendations within their own mandates and legal orders. How those frameworks mesh remains complex and uncertain. And that is where the sentence that gives this article its headline comes from.

The data gap: supervisors rely on private data providers

The second part of the note deals with something that almost never comes up in the public debate: how do authorities actually know what they think they know about stablecoins? The answer is sobering. Supervisors rely for the most part on private data providers, which filter and aggregate raw blockchain data with their own, in part undisclosed, methods. Those methods differ in accuracy and transparency, and different providers arrive at different results.

One hurdle can barely be removed, in the body’s assessment. Public blockchains are pseudonymous, and the smart contract infrastructure behind most stablecoins gives no information about what a token is used for or where. Attribution by use or by country is therefore often impossible; where it is possible, it cannot be verified, because the methods are inconsistent and in part secret.

Yet that attribution is precisely what the note asks for in order to monitor the market: the depth, liquidity and structure of secondary markets, plus the geographical distribution of holdings, redemptions and reserves, with particular attention to the multi-issuer arrangement. What is being demanded, then, is a measurement that the same note explains cannot currently be delivered. For the coming months the report names three steps: develop metrics and identify data gaps, make better use of the data that already exists, and examine industry standards for collection.

MiCA in Germany: the legal framework for holders is already in place

At this point it is worth looking to Europe, because much of what the report treats as an open question has already been answered here. The EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets, MiCA for short, places stablecoins under a regime of their own. Tokens that reference a single official currency count as e-money tokens and may only be offered publicly in the EU by authorised electronic money institutions or credit institutions. For tokens that reference a basket of values, the rules for asset-referenced tokens apply.

Obligations hang on this that address precisely the weak points in the FSB report: the reserves must be held separately from the issuer’s own assets, holders have a claim to redemption at par value, and the issuer needs authorisation from a European authority. In Germany that route runs through BaFin, the federal financial supervisory authority. Our overview of the MiCA obligations for crypto companies sets out which duties those are in detail.

What that means for the tokens in your account

In practice, not every stablecoin traded on an international exchange may also be offered to European customers. Several trading venues have reorganised what they offer EU customers for that reason; we reported on the ESMA deadline for exiting non-authorised tokens on 8 October 2026. Anyone holding stablecoins today should know which category their token falls into, before a trading platform makes that decision for them.

Tax and custody: two points for stablecoin holders in Germany

Two things regularly get lost in the regulatory debate, even though they affect holders directly.

The first point is tax. For tax purposes a stablecoin is not a euro. Swapping a coin into a stablecoin is a disposal within the meaning of section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, with everything that follows from it: the gain on the coin given up is realised, and a new holding period of one year begins for the stablecoin received. Moving into a dollar token feels like parking, but it triggers a taxable event. The exemption threshold for private disposals stands at 1,000 euros a year under section 23(3) of that act; exceed it and the entire gain is taxable.

The second point concerns custody. If your stablecoin sits on an exchange, you hold a claim against that exchange, not the token itself. The FSB report describes how unclear the legal position becomes if the issuer becomes insolvent. A second uncertainty is added when a platform stands between you and the issuer. To avoid that, hold the tokens in a wallet whose keys you control yourself, and take on the responsibility for backing them up.

What the report expressly does not do

The note is not a regulation and will not become one. The header of every FSB document states that the activities of the body and the decisions taken in them are not binding and create no rights or obligations. What lies on the table in Bangkok on 15 October is a description of the situation and a list of proposals, each of which is adopted country by country. In Europe that step has already been taken with MiCA; in other jurisdictions it is still pending. For holders that means the gaps the report describes stay open for now, and they stay open precisely where the tokens that dominate the market come from.

Stablecoin oversight: on 15 October it stays at recommendations

The report changes nothing about your holdings this weekend. It does tell you fairly precisely which three questions to put to your own stablecoins.

1. Establish the legal framework of your token. Find out whether the stablecoin you hold comes from an issuer authorised in the EU, and which platform it sits on. The stablecoin overview shows which tokens are regularly offered in Europe.
2. Decide on custody. The longer you hold a stablecoin, the less there is to be said for leaving it on a trading platform. Which devices come into question is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Document your swaps. Every move into a stablecoin is a tax event with a date of its own. Records kept as you go save a laborious reconstruction in the spring; the tax tools and portfolio trackers take that work off your hands.

The next hard date is not the G20 meeting but the moment when the first large arrangement actually comes under pressure. That this test is still outstanding is the real news out of Basel.

(As of October 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Chainlink has issued invitations to New York for 29 October. The event is called Link:NYC, it runs for one day, and the organiser describes it on its own page as a meeting point for executives rebuilding the global financial markets. If you hold Chainlink, you will see an entry in the calendar first of all. What makes it interesting is a number that has nothing to do with the price: 28.

That is how many days it takes for staked LINK to become freely available again. Start the exit today and you reach your coins on 9 November, eleven days after the event. Anyone who wants to react on 29 October with LINK sitting in staking has therefore already made that decision today, without noticing.

Link:NYC on 29 October: what Chainlink has announced for the date

Chainlink's event page names five topic blocks: institutional real-world assets, agentic financial applications, interoperability, market infrastructure, and stablecoins and payments. A venue is not given there, nor is an attendance figure. Speaker names sit in a tab of their own that reveals nothing publicly so far. Officially settled, then, are the date, the city and the list of topics.

That is less than the figures circulating in recent days. Several crypto outlets wrote of more than 35 executives expected and listed institutions said to be attending. Chainlink itself confirms none of those details, and the organisers have pointed out explicitly that the presence of individual houses is not an announcement of new partnerships. Anyone treating the 35 as a settled figure is working with a number nobody has evidenced so far. The official description is on Chainlink's event page.

Who is in the room: banks, market infrastructure and institutional allocators

The target audience, by contrast, Chainlink names clearly. Banks, operators of market infrastructure, asset managers and institutional allocators are invited. This group does not decide on code but on budgets, and on the question of which infrastructure a house will settle on two years from now. Link:NYC is explicitly not a developer conference.

That is why dates like this move LINK at all. Chainlink does not sell an application to retail customers. The project supplies data connections and transfer routes between chains, and between chains and the old financial world. Every contract with a large house is therefore news about future revenue, not present revenue. With LINK the market regularly trades the expectation rather than the revenue.

LINK at $13.07: where the price stands 17 days before the event

On Monday evening LINK trades at $13.07, or EUR 11.72. That is 1.7 percent less than 24 hours earlier and 6.7 percent less than a week ago. Over 30 days, a gain of 12.6 percent still stands. Market capitalisation is $10.0 billion, 766.8 million LINK are in circulation, and coins worth $295.3 million changed hands in 24 hours. The figures come from CoinGecko, as of Monday 12 October.

The daily range ran from $12.85 to $13.49. That leaves the price some three quarters below the all-time high of $52.70. Between today and 29 October lie 17 days in which none of these figures stands still.

Swift and Infosys in September: how LINK reacted to the last institutional news

A date on its own says little. More useful is a look at what happened at Chainlink after comparable announcements, and there were two in September.

On 29 September we reported on 11,500 institutions being connected to the Swift ledger, with a quote from Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov. The price jumped above $15 at the time. A day later the counter-move was already in our own pages: LINK slid from $15.44 to $14.14, a drop of 8.4 percent, without anything about the Swift news having changed. Measured against that high, the price today sits 15.4 percent lower.

The pattern is nothing new for LINK. An institutional story carries the price for hours, rarely for weeks, because it confirms an expectation already in the price. For 29 October that means the move, judging by recent weeks' own experience, tends to come before the date rather than after it. That is not proven; it is an observation from two cases.

65.6 percent in large addresses: the second look alongside the chart

Alongside the price, a movement is running in the wallets that a chart does not show. Addresses holding between one million and 100 million LINK held 65.6 percent of the circulating supply on 12 October. On 1 October it was 65.38 percent. The change is small but the direction is unambiguous: while the price gave way over that period, coins moved into larger addresses. The survey comes from TokenPost and names no data provider, which is why it serves as an indication and not as proof.

Two points matter about it. High concentration means comparatively few addresses can move the market. And part of those holdings sits in staking, so it cannot be sold immediately, which cushions downward moves and delays upward ones.

Two dates in two days: the Fed decides on 28 October, Chainlink hosts on the 29th

One point has been going missing in the coverage of Link:NYC so far. The Federal Reserve's meeting calendar lists a session of the open market committee for 27 and 28 October, with the decision falling on 28 October. Link:NYC lies exactly one day after it.

For the market that means two things. On Wednesday evening Central European time, a rate decision moves the entire crypto market, Chainlink included, regardless of what Chainlink itself does. On Thursday, news out of New York meets a market still digesting the rate move. Anyone attributing the price reaction on 29 October to the event may be confusing two causes. Know that sequence before you read a move on the evening of the 29th.

The calendar beats the news: working backwards to be able to act on the date

This is where the date turns into an action. Chainlink staking has run since version 0.2 with a cooldown of 28 days followed by a withdrawal window of seven days. Both are set out in the official overview of Chainlink Staking v0.2.

Work it through on your own calendar. Start the exit today, 12 October, and the cooldown ends on 9 November. From then until 16 November there is time to withdraw the LINK. Miss that window and the coins move automatically back into staking, with the 28 days starting over. On 29 October, the day of the event, you are in the middle of the period in every one of those cases.

A plain consequence follows. On 29 October, staked LINK is not a holding you can dispose of but one you watch. Anyone who wants it otherwise acts today and forgoes the staking income of the next four weeks. Which providers set which periods and rates is in the comparison of staking providers; the periods differ considerably between staking in the protocol and staking through an exchange.

A second deadline runs independently of that. Buy LINK today and hold the coins as private assets, and the one-year speculation period under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act ends on 12 October 2027. From 13 October 2027, a gain on sale stays tax free. That applies to real coins, not to a certificate on LINK; we worked that distinction through on 10 October using the LINK funds as an example.

Custody before the date: access, firmware and records

On days with heavy trading volume, the result depends less on the choice of exchange than on whether you have access at the right moment. Three points can be checked beforehand, without haste.

Access and withdrawal routes

If your LINK sits on an exchange, check whether the withdrawal function is enabled and whether a change to two-factor authentication is still pending. Many houses lock a newly stored withdrawal address for 24 to 72 hours. Anyone seeing that lock for the first time on 29 October has seen it too late. Which providers in Germany are licensed under the European crypto regulation MiCA, and what their fees look like, is in the exchange comparison.

Self-custody

If the holding sits on a hardware wallet, check the firmware before the date and whether the recovery words are where you can reach them if it matters. A device that demands an update first costs half an hour at the decisive moment. Check too whether your device supports the token at all before you send coins to it.

Records

Note the purchase date, amount and price as soon as you trade. For the one-year period the day counts, not the month, and the tax office accepts no estimate. An export from the exchange on the day of purchase saves a reconstruction the following year.

Levels above and below: $13.49 at the daily high, $12.09 as the weekly low

Two values from current trading can be checked and serve as orientation. Above sits the daily high at $13.49. It lies around 3.2 percent above the current price and marks the point at which the market last sold today. Below, the daily low sits at $12.85, a good 1.7 percent under the price.

Further down waits the weekly low of 8 October at $12.09, which TokenPost reports for last Thursday. Between that low and today's price lie 8.1 percent. As long as the price stays above it, the move since Thursday is intact; fall below and the recovery of the past four days has been worked off. Both levels come from trading and not from a model, and neither is a forecast.

Our assessment: a calendar entry is not yet a price driver

From this newsroom's point of view, Link:NYC is for the next two and a half weeks above all a date that expectations can attach to, and not yet an event with documented content. Three observations argue for that. Chainlink has announced neither speakers nor outcomes. The attendance figures in circulation are second-hand. And the two institutional stories in September, Swift on the 29th and the Infosys connection the week before, each carried the price for hours and then gave way; LINK today sits 15.4 percent off the high of 30 September.

Against that stands the timing. A meeting with banks and market infrastructure one day after a rate decision can amplify a move that is running anyway, and the shift into larger addresses shows that somebody is accumulating at today's prices. Anyone drawing a purchase decision from that is betting on an expectation and not on a number. A total loss is possible at any time with crypto assets.

Link:NYC: 17 days remain until 29 October

Three steps can be worked through before the date, and all three cost nothing.

1. Clarify your staking status. Look up whether and where your LINK is locked and when the period runs. Anyone who wants to be able to dispose of it on 29 October starts the exit today. Providers' terms are in the staking comparison.
2. Check your access. Go through the withdrawal address, two-factor authentication and firmware once while there is no deadline pressure. The provider situation in Germany is in the exchange comparison.
3. Note the deadlines. Record the purchase date and amount, plus 28 October for the rate decision and 29 October for Link:NYC. Keeping both dates separately in the calendar makes the price move afterwards easier to read. A tax tool helps with the records.

(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Cardano processed exactly 1,780,896 transactions in the five days between 6 and 11 October 2026. The chain has never moved more in its history; the previous high, from November 2021, sits 13.7 percent below it. The Cardano price has not responded: ADA stands at around $0.2384, about 5.3 percent below where it was 24 hours earlier.

Most reports name the Cardano governance votes as the cause, above all the proposal for a minimum fee of 75 ADA for stake pools. That explanation does not add up arithmetically. We counted the votes on that proposal one by one: there were 148. This article sets out what the chain data supports about the record, why the proposal has since lapsed, and what follows from it if you hold ADA in Germany.

The figures in this article rest on the public block data of the Cardano chain itself, analysed across all 662 epochs since the chain launched, and on the full list of votes on the proposal in question. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on 12 October 2026.

Epoch 660: 1,780,896 transactions between 6 and 11 October

Cardano counts in epochs rather than days. An epoch is a fixed stretch of five days in which the chain produces blocks, settles rewards and fixes voting rights. Epoch 660 began on 6 October 2026 at 9:44 p.m. and ended on 11 October at the same time.

Within that window, 1,780,896 transactions were written into 21,243 blocks. For comparison: epoch 659, the five days before, carried 158,011 transactions. The jump is 11.3-fold. Epochs 653 to 657 all sat between 89,353 and 130,442 transactions, in other words within the usual band. Epoch 660 is not a trend but a single, extremely sharp spike.

The previous high dates from epoch 304 in November 2021

The old record stood at 1,566,974 transactions and was set in epoch 304, which ran from 21 to 26 November 2021. ADA was then just past its all-time high, the market was in the closing phase of the last big cycle, and the chain had only recently gained smart contracts.

That comparison is the genuinely interesting part, and most coverage leaves it out: in 2021 the load came out of a hot market with prices to match. In 2026 it comes at a price 92.3 percent below the all-time high of $3.09. The same throughput, an entirely different price base. Anyone reading network activity as a price driver gets a counter-example here straight from the chain data.

83.8 transactions per block: the block count stayed the same, the load did not

The decisive observation lies in the ratio, not in the total. Cardano produces a quantity of blocks per epoch set by the chain, and that quantity has not changed: 21,243 blocks in epoch 660 against 21,207 in epoch 659. A difference of 36 blocks, which is to say nothing.

Per block that works out at 83.8 transactions against 7.45 the week before. The blocks were roughly eleven times fuller, not more frequent. The look back is interesting too: in the 2021 record epoch 304, a block held 74.3 transactions at an almost identical block count. The chain packed more into the same frame in 2026 than in 2021, even though block size has not multiplied in that time.

For the technology that means the load was not spread across a larger infrastructure, it was pressed into the existing one. The chain carried that without an outage, and that is the solid finding of the week. It has nothing to do with a capacity upgrade or a protocol change.

337,720 ADA in fees over five days, 0.19 ADA per transaction

The fees draw the same picture from a second angle. Epoch 660 generated 337,720 ADA in transaction fees, where epoch 659 produced 49,495 ADA. The factor is 6.8.

Notably, fees rose less steeply than the transaction count, 6.8-fold against 11.3-fold. In arithmetic terms that means an average fee of 0.19 ADA per transaction in epoch 660, against 0.31 ADA in epoch 659. The transactions were more simply built than usual, then: few inputs and outputs, no demanding smart-contract calls. On Cardano the fee follows the size and complexity of a transaction, not an auction procedure as on Ethereum. A mass event made up of many small, uniform transfers therefore produces exactly this pattern.

At 337,720 ADA and a price around $0.2384, we are talking about roughly $80,500 in fees over five days. For the stake pool operators, whose remuneration was at issue over the same period, that is not a sum that turns a situation around. Precisely that is why the fee question became political on Cardano at all.

The minPoolCost vote on 75 ADA lapsed in epoch 661

minPoolCost is the fixed amount a stake pool retains from rewards each epoch before anything at all is distributed to delegators. That amount stands at 170 ADA today. The proposal voted on since epoch 654 wanted to cut it to 75 ADA. Small pools would have become more competitive, and delegator returns would have shifted slightly.

When we reported on this vote on the minimum fee on 10 October, it stood at 34 percent in favour with the deadline approaching on 11 October. The result is now in, and it moved, but not enough: the delegated representatives' yes votes ended at 44.18 percent of the active voting power, the no votes at 55.82 percent. The majority was therefore missed. The proposal lapsed when its deadline passed in epoch 661, meaning it was neither adopted nor enacted. The 100,000 ADA deposit goes back to the submitters, and the minimum fee stays at 170 ADA.

For delegators that means, concretely: nothing changes in how your staking rewards are distributed. How hard that fixed amount actually presses on returns depends on the size of your pool; across the pools we recalculated at the start of October, returns ran between 2.1 and 2.7 percent a year.

148 votes cast: why the governance explanation does not add up

Now to the question of cause. Several trade outlets trace the transaction record to a rush on the governance votes: users are said to have moved their wallets in order to vote on network parameters, with the deadline coinciding with the end of the epoch. That sounds plausible, because the timings line up.

It can be counted, though, and we counted it. The full list of votes on the minPoolCost proposal contains 148 entries: 87 yes votes and 37 no votes from delegated representatives, plus 19 abstentions and 5 yes votes from the constitutional committee. Each of those votes is one transaction on the chain.

148 transactions against 1,780,896. That is 0.008 percent of the record. Even counting every other open proposal in the epoch and assuming similar participation for each, you do not get beyond a few hundred votes. The governance explanation does not carry the record even as an order of magnitude.

The reason lies in how the system is built: on Cardano it is not individual holders who vote but DReps, delegated representatives who exercise the bundled voting weight of many wallets. A holder who has delegated their voting power to a DRep once need not send a single transaction for any further vote. The whole purpose of the design lies in that bundling. A voting deadline on Cardano therefore produces almost no chain load, structurally.

629 stake pools vote permanently to abstain, 17 to “no confidence”

The vote list shows something else that matters more for placing the vote itself than for the record: not one stake pool voted actively on this proposal. 629 pools sit on the permanent default of "always abstain", bringing a voting weight of some 12.22 billion ADA with them, and 17 more on "no confidence". Among the delegated representatives, a further 10.5 billion ADA or so sits on permanent abstention.

Measured against the active stake of roughly 21.27 billion ADA in this epoch, Cardano parameters are therefore decided by a fairly small, alert share of participants, while the large remainder parks on a default setting. That distribution is what the chain data says and is no judgement on those involved. Anyone who does not want to leave their voting weight unused has to delegate it actively to a representative; with a hardware wallet in self-custody that works directly from the wallet, while with ADA on an exchange it generally does not work at all.

A stake pool report names a HOSKY campaign as the driver of the first three days

If it was not the vote, then what? The only concrete attribution so far comes from the epoch report of a stake pool operator, quoted by the outlet TechBullion. On that account, some 1.08 million transactions fell in the first three days of epoch 660 alone, and most of them traced back to a campaign around the Cardano token HOSKY, in which participants were to send ADA to an address and receive tokens back. A post on the exchange platform KuCoin credits the same campaign with a peak of 440 transactions per second in a single block.

We cannot confirm that attribution. Both accounts rest on the same source, and we have not recalculated a single campaign's share of 1.78 million transactions from the chain data. What we can say is that the pattern fits. An event in which many people send small amounts back and forth produces exactly what the data shows, namely very many very simple transactions at a below-average fee each. The vote does not produce that pattern.

Our assessment: the record is real and the chain carried it without disruption, but it is not a demand signal for ADA. Three pieces of evidence point that way. First, 148 votes do not explain 1.78 million transactions. Second, the fee per transaction, at 0.19 ADA, came in below the previous week's, which argues for mass simple transactions and against economically heavy use. Third, the current epoch 661 is already well lower again. Against that it could be objected that even an artificially generated load test proves resilience, and that is true. Only nobody pays a higher ADA price for resilience.

$66.5 million in Cardano DeFi: the record does not come out of capital

A second angle, alongside price and transaction count, is the capital actually at work on the chain. Around $66.5 million is currently deposited in Cardano applications. That means the sum working in trading venues, lending protocols and similar applications on the chain.

That figure puts the record in proportion. Cardano carries a market capitalisation of roughly $8.95 billion, which places it 17th among the largest cryptocurrencies; 37.55 of a maximum 45 billion ADA are in circulation. Against that stand $66.5 million of active capital in the applications. For comparison: on Solana that value is around $6.1 billion, on NEAR around $262 million. A record number of transactions coming off such a narrow base of capital points to many small movements rather than to new money.

ADA at $0.2384, 92.3 percent below the 2021 all-time high

The price itself gives the record week no confirmation. ADA trades at around $0.2384, after a daily high of $0.2556. Over 24 hours that is about 5.3 percent lost, over seven days around 11.4 percent. Only over 30 days does a gain of about 14.8 percent stand. The all-time high of $3.09 from September 2021 sits 92.3 percent above today's level. Trading volume over the past 24 hours comes to roughly $376 million.

The pattern is striking: the most transaction-heavy week in the chain's history coincides with a week in which ADA loses a good tenth of its value. Anyone reading the record as a reason to buy should read that sentence twice. Network activity and price ran in opposite directions on Cardano this week, and the chain data supplies an explanation for it in the fee per transaction.

Delegation, holding period and purchase route: four points for ADA holders in Germany

A failed vote and a throughput record yield four concrete points for you.

The minimum fee stays at 170 ADA. Do not calculate your staking income with 75 ADA. The fixed amount is retained per epoch and per pool before anything is distributed. With a small pool it eats a markedly larger share of your reward than with a large one. Anyone who meant to move their delegation depending on the outcome of the vote now has no occasion to.

Your voting weight does not lapse, it rests. As long as you have not delegated your voting power to a representative, it counts as an abstention in every vote. That is the default setting where, according to the chain data, the largest share of the stake sits. Delegating and staking are two separate acts: you can have your ADA in a pool and your voting weight nowhere at all.

Staking income is taxable in Germany. Rewards from staking count as other income and are taxed in the year they are received. For the ADA itself, the one-year holding period for private assets applies: sell at a gain within a year and that gain is taxable, after that it is not. Whether and how staking affects that period depends on the arrangement; anyone delegating regularly should document the inflows as they come rather than reconstruct them in March of the following year.

The purchase route decides your access to governance. If your ADA sits on an exchange, the exchange holds the keys. You generally cannot vote then, and delegating to a representative drops away too. Anyone who wants that needs the coins in their own wallet. Anyone who does not need it gets along more easily with an exchange licensed in the EU.

Cardano record: epoch 661 is running at 28 transactions per block

As of this analysis, the current epoch 661 has processed 118,374 transactions in 4,269 blocks. That is 27.7 transactions per block: clearly above the normal band of around 7 in the preceding weeks, but far below the 83.8 of the record epoch. The spike is not holding, in other words. Three steps follow from that:

1. Check where your ADA sits and whether the trading venue is licensed in the EU. Since MiCA, providers targeting customers in Germany have to show an authorisation. Which exchanges hold one and what they charge in fees is set out in the overview of MiCA-regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Document your staking inflows now, not at tax return time. Every reward has its own date of receipt and its own price. Gathering that after the fact costs time and records. We compare the tools for it under crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.
3. Decide whether fees or a say weigh more heavily when you buy. The cheap route over an exchange and the route with your own keys are not mutually exclusive, but both cost something. The terms offered by trading venues are in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.

Both can be checked without a detour: the figures for epoch 660 are on Cexplorer's epoch page, and the outcomes of the votes are in Cardano's official governance portal.

(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you hold G tokens, USDC, USDT, WETH, DAI or WBTC on Gravity Alpha Mainnet, you have until 1 November 2026 to get them off the blockchain. Galxe is shutting down its first own network that day. Anything still sitting on it after that can no longer be transferred, the provider says: not a temporary halt, but the end of mobility. Galxe's own guide therefore explicitly advises bridging balances out before the date.

Two things make that deadline harder than it looks on paper. First, different tokens use different exits, and they are not interchangeable: anyone trying to send USDC over the familiar bridge will not find the balance there at all. Second, the classic route carries a waiting period of roughly seven days. Together that means the real edge in the calendar is not 1 November but a week earlier.

What happens to Gravity Alpha Mainnet on 1 November 2026

Gravity Alpha Mainnet is the older version of the Gravity network and ran as a layer 2, a side chain that draws its security from Ethereum. Galxe launched it in 2024 on the Arbitrum Nitro stack, with chain ID 1625. With Gravity L1, a standalone layer 1 with ID 127001, now in full operation, the Alpha chain has lost its purpose.

The developer documentation now lists the old chain openly as "legacy" and puts a warning in front of it: all balances should be moved back to Ethereum before 1 November. The help pages for end users put the same sentence more plainly. Gravity Alpha Mainnet will remain available until 1 November 2026, it says, after which it will be decommissioned, and whatever is still on it will no longer be transferable.

For holders this is not a price question. G traded at around $0.0041 on Monday evening, its market capitalisation stood at just under $30 million, which places it 524th among crypto assets. The price sits about 82 percent below its February 2025 peak of roughly $0.023. The sums are small for most holders, in other words. The difference between a small amount and a lost amount is the same all the same, and that is the point here.

Why Galxe is switching off its own layer 2

Galxe announced the step back in July. The reasoning: Gravity Alpha was the first stage of its own blockchain plans, carried real traffic and exposed the bottlenecks that mattered when building the new chain. Out of that experience, by the company's account, came parallel execution of smart contracts, confirmation times below one second and a price oracle that sits directly in the protocol. An oracle is the feed through which a blockchain learns data from outside, such as prices.

Put differently, the Alpha chain was a test rig that has served its purpose. That fits a development we have described several times this year. Blast is being discontinued, Abstract Chain faced the same question in October, Mintchain also set a deadline, and at NEAR it was MyNearWallet that went rather than the chain. The reason is the same in each case: too many side chains compete for too little usage, and whoever runs one pays for every block.

Different tokens, different exits

This is where most of the mistakes happen. Two different kinds of token sit on Gravity Alpha, and they leave the chain by separate routes. What decides is how a token got there in the first place.

Only three assets come out through the official Gravity bridge: the network's own G, plus DAI and WBTC that were deposited through the standard Arbitrum gateway. For those three the canonical bridge, the exit built into the rollup, is the one that applies.

USDC, USDT and ETH or WETH do not come out there. Those three were issued on Gravity Alpha by Stargate, a service that works with liquidity pools, and not by the standard gateway. The canonical bridge does not know them and cannot process them. The Gravity documentation flags this as a hazard warning and adds a sentence worth taking seriously: no further route will be added. For these three tokens, Stargate is the only exit.

One detail that will otherwise send you down the wrong path: on Stargate, USDC is not called USDC but USDC.e. Search for "USDC" and you may not find your balance and take it for gone. The three assets appear there as USDC.e, USDT and WETH with Gravity as the source network.

The seven days of the canonical bridge

Gravity Alpha was an optimistic rollup. The name describes the procedure: the chain first assumes its settlements are correct, then leaves others a window to object. That window is called the challenge period and runs for roughly seven days on Gravity Alpha. Only after it can you collect a withdrawal on Ethereum.

The documentation therefore says to start well before 1 November so the withdrawal can complete. Do the arithmetic: start on 25 October and the standard route, with its seven-day wait, just fits inside the window. Start on 29 October and that route no longer gets you out.

One more point the help pages set out separately: withdrawals you have already submitted through the canonical bridge continue under the old procedure and cannot be sped up after the fact. A transfer already running on a seven-day clock stays on seven days, even if you hear about the faster route afterwards.

Fast Withdraw: ten minutes instead of seven days

For G there is now a second exit, and Galxe itself calls it the recommended choice. Fast Withdraw sits on the official Gravity bridge and sends G to Ethereum without the seven-day wait. The guide gives about ten minutes as the typical duration.

The process has four stations: open the bridge, connect the wallet, select Fast Withdraw, enter the amount and confirm the withdrawal in the wallet. Once the G tokens have arrived on Ethereum, set the destination to Mainnet and bridge on from Ethereum to Gravity L1. For that second step you need some ETH in the wallet, because the network fee on Ethereum is paid in ETH. That is the item holders of small G balances should price in beforehand: the fee depends on how busy Ethereum is, not on the size of your balance.

Anyone who needs G on Ethereum faster and would rather not take the official route will find a pointer in the documentation to Symbiosis, a liquidity-pool route that works in minutes. The same caution applies as with any pool service: you trade waiting time for trust in one more provider, and you usually pay a discount for it.

Staked G has to come out of staking first

This part is easy to miss and costs the most if you do. The G staking page at Galxe goes with the chain. Staked G cannot be withdrawn afterwards, because the interface for it no longer exists. Anyone with G in staking therefore needs two steps in this order: unstake first, then bridge.

Allow extra time for it. Many staking contracts have a cooldown phase in which a withdrawal is announced but not yet paid out. Check in the interface which period your stake carries before you count on the bridging time. Whether a platform states its withdrawal periods clearly is one of the points our staking comparison looks at, and this case shows why that is no side issue.

The detour via a centralised exchange

If neither the bridge nor the pool route appeals, Galxe's guide names a third way: an exchange that accepts G deposits directly from Gravity Alpha. OKX and Bitget are named there. The process consists of three stations. You send G from Gravity Alpha to your exchange account, withdraw from the exchange over the Ethereum network to your own wallet, and bridge from there to Gravity L1. Here too you need ETH for the fee on the last step.

The route has one solid advantage: you avoid the waiting period. It also has two drawbacks worth knowing in advance. The deposit address has to support the Alpha chain, and it has to still support it when you send. Exchanges often close deposits for a chain before it is switched off. So check the network selection in the deposit dialogue immediately before sending, not against a guide from the week before last. And as long as the tokens sit in the exchange account, the exchange holds the keys, not you: leave them there only as long as the move takes.

Your Galxe claim fails while G sits on the old chain

The deadline is not the only reason to act now. The contracts for Galxe Quests, meaning Loyalty Points and Token Rewards, have already moved from Gravity Alpha to Gravity L1. Anyone collecting points or rewards with a direct web3 wallet needs G on Gravity L1. The system looks there and nowhere else.

If your G is still on the Alpha chain, the claim fails. The help pages give the exact error message users then see: too few G tokens, even though the balance is visibly there. The fix is the same as above. Check in the wallet which chain your G tokens are actually on, bridge them to Gravity L1, switch the network in the wallet and try the claim again.

Galxe also names a more convenient variant called Smart Balance, which lets network fees across several networks be paid out of one balance. For the plain task of rescuing holdings before 1 November you do not need it; for regular participation in quests it takes work off your hands. If you pick up tokens through tasks like these, our airdrop overview lists the current opportunities.

December 2026 and the contradiction in the sources

For context, one point that stands out in the research and that you could stumble over if you read up yourself. The announcement and the exchange notices give 1 November 2026 as the day network operation ends. Gravity's developer documentation gives the same withdrawal date but writes alongside it that the network will be "unsettled" in December 2026, meaning no longer settled.

Do not read that as an extension. Both sources require withdrawal by 1 November, and the December reference concerns the technical wind-down of the chain, not your window. Anyone relying on December is relying on a reading that neither source offers. What binds you is 1 November, and on the standard route 25 October.

Developers and operators on chain ID 1625

For developers more than a balance hangs on the date. Galxe requires that dApps, bots and scripts running on Gravity Alpha be redeployed to Gravity L1. That includes things that run invisibly day to day: a trading bot with a hard-coded chain ID, a monitoring script, a data collector that queries the old endpoint.

Two notes from the documentation help with the move. The chain ID changes from 1625 to 127001, and the contract addresses for G and the other tokens differ between the two networks. Anyone with addresses fixed in code has to swap them, not merely redirect the endpoint. The reference pages for the old chain will remain as an archive, according to Gravity, but the endpoints themselves will not.

Staying clean on tax: what counts in Germany

A chain switch is no trivial event for tax, and the position here is less clear-cut than it should be. Private disposals of crypto assets in Germany fall under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: after a holding period of more than a year a gain is tax free, while within the year an exemption threshold of EUR 1,000 applies to all private disposals in a year taken together. Exceed that threshold and the entire gain is taxable, not only the part above it.

What is open is how the individual routes should be classified. When the canonical bridge moves the same token across chains, there is economically no exchange but a transfer. A route over liquidity pools, by contrast, gives you units out of a pool at the destination and can thereby take on the character of a swap, and a swap is a disposal under Section 23. The tax authorities have not commented explicitly on bridging, and a binding classification is not something this text can give you.

What you can do yourself is useful regardless: record the time, the amount and the addresses involved for every step while the old chain still answers queries. After the shutdown you will reconstruct that evidence less easily, because the public endpoints disappear. For larger amounts, or for a pool route, asking a tax adviser is worth the money.

Gravity Alpha: after 1 November your balance stays where it is

The situation is manageable as long as you deal with it now. Three steps, in this order:

1. Review your holdings, today. Connect your wallet to Gravity Alpha and look at what is there and in what form. G, DAI and WBTC go over the official Gravity bridge; USDC, USDT and WETH only over Stargate. If G is in staking, unstake it first. Which form of custody is the right one afterwards is shown by the comparison of hardware wallets, where the keys stay with you.
2. Pick a route and start by 25 October. Fast Withdraw for G takes about ten minutes, the canonical bridge roughly seven days, Stargate works in minutes. Anyone taking the standard route starts by 25 October. If it is to run through an exchange account instead, check beforehand whether deposits from Gravity Alpha are still open there; our exchange comparison shows which houses operate under European supervision.
3. Collect the records before the chain closes. Note the date, amount and addresses of every transfer and file the confirmations. After 1 November that trail is hard to reconstruct. The tools for it are in our overview of tax software and portfolio trackers.

The sources for this article are Galxe's bridging guide and the withdrawal page of the Gravity documentation, which sets out the routes per token and the waiting period in detail.

(As of October 12, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

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TLDR

• CME Group shares slide 1.18% despite faster Globex cloud performance test results.
• Google Cloud testing delivers faster trading response times for CME Globex systems.
• Aurora Cloud Region construction advances ahead of schedule for 2027 testing.
• CME Group targets late 2027 for its livestock market migration to Aurora cloud.
• Dallas disaster recovery testing continues as CME drops interim relocation plans.

CME Group (CME) stock fell 1.18% to $277.24 on Monday, October 12, losing $3.32 despite progress on its cloud migration. The company completed initial performance testing for CME Globex on Google Cloud, achieving faster trading response times. Meanwhile, CME Group confirmed an accelerated construction schedule for its Aurora Cloud Region, supporting its planned market migration.

CME Group Inc., CME

CME Group Stock Declines Despite Cloud Trading Milestones

CME Group shares reversed earlier gains during Monday’s session as selling pressure increased throughout trading. The decline came as the company announced progress toward modernizing its global derivatives trading infrastructure. However, the announcement did not prevent the stock from ending the session lower.

CME Group completed initial performance tests for CME Globex, its electronic trading platform, using Google Cloud infrastructure. The tests achieved faster round-trip times, which measure how quickly trading systems process and return messages. Consequently, the results marked progress toward delivering ultra-low-latency trading through cloud technology.

The company also reported faster construction progress at its Aurora Cloud Region and co-location facility. Google Cloud will provide specialized infrastructure designed to support the trading requirements of CME Group’s markets. CME Group expects the Aurora facility to become available for client testing by mid-2027.

Google Cloud Migration Advances Toward 2027 Launch

CME Group Chairman and CEO Terry Duffy said the migration program continues to advance faster than initially expected. He attributed the accelerated schedule to construction progress and strong results from initial performance testing. Furthermore, the company expects its cloud infrastructure to support ultra-low-latency trading services ahead of its original schedule.

CME Group plans to move its livestock markets to the Aurora Cloud Region during late 2027. Previously, the company considered an interim relocation to Dallas before completing the transition to Aurora. However, faster construction progress eliminated that requirement and allowed CME Group to simplify its migration plans.

CME Group’s Dallas disaster recovery facility has supported client testing since June 2026. The facility remains part of the company’s broader infrastructure modernization program. Additionally, CME Group expects clients to access Google Cloud-managed services and co-location capabilities in Aurora during late 2027.

CME Group Expands Cloud Infrastructure for Global Markets

CME Group operates one of the world’s largest derivatives marketplaces, serving participants across several major asset classes. Its exchanges provide futures and options tied to interest rates, equities, currencies, cryptocurrencies, energy, agricultural commodities, and metals. The company also operates BrokerTec, EBS, and CME Clearing across its trading and clearing businesses.

CME Globex supports electronic futures and options trading, making reliable infrastructure essential to CME Group’s daily operations. The Google Cloud migration aims to combine specialized computing systems with the speed requirements of electronic markets. The transition will provide clients with managed cloud services and physical co-location options.

The latest milestones strengthen CME Group’s planned transition while establishing clearer testing and deployment targets for 2027. However, Monday’s stock decline contrasted with the operational progress outlined in the company’s announcement. CME Group will continue preparing its Aurora infrastructure as it advances the next stages of cloud migration.

The post CME Group (CME) Stock Falls as Google Cloud Migration Accelerates appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• HIMS stock drops 0.91% to $30.64 despite Hers launching across Australia nationwide.
• Hers expands into Australia with new treatments for weight loss and women’s health.
• Hims & Hers completes its Australian expansion following the Eucalyptus acquisition.
• Hers introduces round-the-clock care and personalized treatments for women nationwide.
• Australia’s growing telehealth market offers Hims & Hers new expansion opportunities.

Hims & Hers Health (HIMS) stock declined 0.91% to $30.64 on Monday, despite the company’s expansion into Australia’s women’s healthcare market. Shares lost $0.28 during regular trading before slipping another 0.13% to $30.60 in after-hours trading. Meanwhile, the company launched its Hers platform nationwide, expanding access to personalized healthcare services for Australian women.

Hims & Hers Health, Inc., HIMS

Hims & Hers Health Expands Women’s Healthcare Services Across Australia

Hims & Hers announced the official launch of Hers in Australia on October 12, expanding its international healthcare operations. The platform offers treatments covering weight management, hair regrowth, menopause, and perimenopause through digital consultations. Women can access healthcare professionals, medication support, and a dedicated care team available around the clock.

The expansion follows the company’s acquisition of Eucalyptus earlier this year, strengthening its position in Australia’s digital healthcare sector. Under the transition, Eucalyptus’ existing women’s healthcare platform, Juniper, will operate under the Hers brand. Meanwhile, the earlier rebranding of Pilot to Hims in August completed the company’s broader Australian platform rollout.

The company introduced specialized weight management programs that combine medical treatment with nutritional guidance and fitness support. Furthermore, Hers provides hair regrowth treatments and services addressing hormonal health concerns throughout different life stages. The platform also allows patients to request female practitioners and access a community exceeding 27,000 women.

Hers Targets Healthcare Access Gaps With Digital Treatment Programs

Hers plans to address healthcare access challenges affecting women across Australia’s metropolitan and regional communities. According to company research, 52% of surveyed Australian women reported experiencing weight-related judgment from healthcare professionals. Among those respondents, 72% subsequently avoided seeking clinical assistance, highlighting barriers to routine treatment.

The company also identified healthcare costs and geographic limitations as obstacles to accessing specialized medical services. Nearly 30% of Australians live in regional and rural communities, where specialist appointments can require extended waiting periods. Hers aims to connect patients with medical professionals through remote consultations and continuous digital support.

Rebecca Holdt, the company’s international product vice president, emphasized digital healthcare’s role in improving nationwide access to treatment. Meanwhile, Australian Chief Medical Officer Matt Vickers highlighted the need for evidence-based services addressing women’s broader healthcare requirements. Existing Juniper patients will retain their Australian practitioners while gaining access to additional treatment options.

Australia Expansion Strengthens Hims & Hers International Operations

The Australian launch extends Hims & Hers’ existing international presence across North America and Europe. Furthermore, the company enters a growing telehealth market with increasing demand for accessible digital healthcare services. Industry projections cited by the company estimate Australia’s telehealth market could reach $2.56 billion by 2034.

Gus Wood will oversee Australian operations as general manager, supported by Chief Medical Officer Matt Vickers. Hers Chief Medical Officer Jessica Shepherd will provide clinical oversight to maintain the company’s international healthcare standards. The leadership structure combines local medical expertise with the company’s wider technology and treatment infrastructure.

Despite the expansion, Hims & Hers Health stock ended Monday’s session lower, extending its losses into after-hours trading. The company’s latest rollout broadens its healthcare offerings beyond existing services and establishes a unified brand across Australia. However, Monday’s stock decline contrasted with the company’s continued expansion into international digital healthcare markets.

The post Hims & Hers Health (HIMS) Stock: Slides Despite Major Australia Expansion appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• IREN stock closes at $34.80 as Anthropic partnership reports drive market interest.
• Anthropic reportedly signed a multiyear cloud agreement with IREN Limited.
• IREN’s undisclosed AI customer could be Anthropic, according to new reports.
• IREN shares gain 0.86% after hours despite Monday’s 1.11% closing decline.
• Legacy data center concerns challenge IREN’s expanding AI cloud ambitions.

IREN Limited stock closed Monday at $34.80, down 1.11%, before recovering 0.86% to $35.10 in after-hours trading. The movement followed reports linking the company to an undisclosed multiyear cloud agreement with Anthropic. The development renewed market interest in IREN’s expanding artificial intelligence infrastructure business.

IREN Limited, IREN

The stock had gained approximately 8% in overnight trading on Sunday following speculation about the partnership. Monday’s regular session erased those early gains as shares finished below the previous closing level. The reported agreement could strengthen IREN’s position in the growing market for high-performance computing infrastructure.

IREN Limited Stock Gains Attention Over Anthropic Cloud Agreement

The Information reported that Anthropic maintains an unannounced multiyear cloud agreement with IREN, citing people familiar with the arrangement. The report examined Anthropic’s efforts to expand data center capacity and meet growing computing requirements. Neither company has publicly confirmed the partnership or disclosed its financial terms.

The report also connected Anthropic’s infrastructure expansion to several companies with backgrounds in Bitcoin mining. These included Hut 8, TeraWulf, IREN, and Nscale, which provide computing infrastructure and access to large power resources. Such providers can help technology companies expand capacity without developing every facility independently.

Anthropic’s reported relationship with IREN would support the company’s transition from cryptocurrency mining toward artificial intelligence cloud services. Growing demand for advanced computing infrastructure continues to create opportunities for specialized data center operators. A confirmed agreement would add another prominent customer to IREN’s expanding business network.

IREN’s Earlier Customer Disclosure Strengthens Anthropic Speculation

In August, IREN disclosed several multiyear cloud agreements during its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings call. CEO Daniel Roberts identified customers including Cohere, Prometheus, Perplexity, Figure AI, Fal AI, and Higgsfield AI. He also mentioned a separate agreement with a leading frontier artificial intelligence laboratory without naming the organization.

The earlier disclosure created a connection between IREN’s existing contracts and the latest Anthropic report. IREN has not established whether Anthropic represents that previously unnamed customer or a separate agreement. The reported partnership therefore remains an unconfirmed development rather than a newly announced company contract.

IREN has expanded its infrastructure business through agreements with technology companies seeking additional computing capacity. Its broader customer network and existing facilities support its move into specialized cloud services. The company also faces competition from CoreWeave, Nebius, and other operators expanding their artificial intelligence infrastructure businesses.

IREN Stock Faces Data Center Concerns Despite Bullish Sentiment

IREN has faced criticism concerning the operational quality of its older data centers in British Columbia. Research firm SemiAnalysis recently highlighted reported customer complaints involving facilities in Prince George and Mackenzie. These concerns introduced additional scrutiny of IREN’s infrastructure as the company expands its artificial intelligence operations.

Despite those concerns, retail sentiment strengthened following reports connecting IREN with Anthropic. The stock reached the top of Stocktwits’ trending list as traders discussed the possible partnership. Some market participants anticipated further gains, while others questioned the lack of official confirmation.

IREN shares have also struggled against several competing cloud infrastructure stocks during 2026. The company entered Monday’s session with a year-to-date decline of approximately 7%, according to the earlier market report. The Anthropic speculation lifted trading interest, Monday’s lower close showed that the initial rally had faded.

The post IREN Limited (IREN) Stock: Eyes Big Gains on Anthropic Deal Buzz appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Navitas (NVTS) stock rebounds 6.21% after hours following a 7.33% daily decline.
• Navitas and NVIDIA introduce a 24 kW power board for next-generation AI data centers.
• The new power delivery board targets 97% efficiency to reduce AI energy losses.
• Navitas’ 800 V-to-12 V technology simplifies power conversion for advanced GPUs.
• Navitas plans to showcase its latest NVIDIA-linked power technology at OCP Summit.

Navitas Semiconductor Corporation (NVTS) stock fell 7.33% to $9.99 at Monday’s close before rebounding 6.21% to $10.61 after hours. The recovery followed developments surrounding its latest AI data center power technology, developed alongside NVIDIA. The company introduced a 24 kW power delivery board designed to improve efficiency across next-generation computing infrastructure.

Navitas Semiconductor Corp, NVTS

Navitas Expands NVIDIA Collaboration With New Power Technology

Navitas Semiconductor announced its latest 800 V-to-12 V power delivery board for NVIDIA’s MGX ecosystem. The technology uses GaNFast components to support advanced power systems across high-performance AI data centers. Furthermore, the development expands Navitas’ existing portfolio of power solutions for demanding computing applications.

The new board delivers 24 kW while targeting 97% efficiency under full operating loads. It also achieves power density exceeding 2,000 watts per cubic inch, supporting increasingly demanding AI hardware. Consequently, the system delivers substantial power within a compact design suited for modern computing infrastructure.

Navitas developed the board using NVIDIA’s latest 400 mm by 60 mm form factor. This configuration allows manufacturers to position power components closer to processors and reduce transmission losses. Additionally, the design supports higher computing demands without requiring larger power delivery systems.

New Architecture Targets AI Data Center Efficiency

The technology converts 800 VDC directly into 12 VDC through a single-stage power architecture. This approach removes an intermediate conversion stage commonly found in existing power delivery systems. As a result, operators can reduce energy losses, hardware requirements, and overall system complexity.

The board incorporates 16 NV6034 GaNFast transistors within its primary power conversion architecture. These components use a stacked half-bridge configuration and Navitas’ latest dual-cooled semiconductor packaging. Together, these features support efficient power delivery and improve thermal management during demanding computing operations.

Navitas previously introduced a 20 kW power board that converts 800 VDC into 6 VDC. The latest development extends that earlier collaboration with NVIDIA and introduces another option for system designers. Meanwhile, both solutions support the industry’s transition toward higher-voltage power infrastructure for AI computing.

Navitas Semiconductor Advances Its AI Infrastructure Strategy

The latest announcement supports Navitas’ broader transformation strategy, which focuses on advanced power semiconductor technologies. Through this initiative, the company aims to replace traditional silicon components with gallium nitride and silicon carbide alternatives. These materials support higher efficiency and greater power density across demanding electrical applications.

Navitas President and CEO Chris Allexandre identified efficient power delivery as an important requirement for expanding AI infrastructure. He also emphasized the company’s work with NVIDIA to simplify power conversion between electrical systems and GPUs. The new technology addresses growing energy requirements across increasingly powerful computing platforms.

Navitas plans to display the new board at the NVIDIA AI Factory MGX Wall during OCP Global Summit 2026. The presentation will highlight its latest power delivery capabilities within NVIDIA’s expanding computing ecosystem. Meanwhile, the stock’s after-hours rebound followed a difficult regular session as the company advanced its AI infrastructure strategy.

The post Navitas Semiconductor Corporation (NVTS) Stock: Rebounds as NVIDIA Unveils New AI Power Tech appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Intel Corporation (INTC) stock drops 3.20% to $101.35 despite new AI GPU plans.
• Intel unveils GPU D-series with up to 480GB memory for large AI inference tasks.
• New Xeon 6+ rack designs support over 46,000 cores for enterprise AI workloads.
• Intel’s GPU D-series delivers 1.3 petaflops of compute within a 350-watt limit.
• Intel expands open AI infrastructure with new GPU designs and software upgrades.

Intel Corporation (INTC) stock fell 3.20% to $101.35 at Monday’s close before recovering 0.22% to $101.57 in after-hours trading. The decline came as Intel revealed new GPU specifications and Xeon server designs at the Open Compute Project Global Summit. The announcements highlighted Intel’s efforts to expand its data center business through efficient artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Intel Corp., INTC

Intel Unveils GPU D-Series for Large AI Workloads

Intel introduced further technical details for its GPU D-series, previously known as Crescent Island, during the OCP Global Summit. The new processor uses Intel’s Xe3P architecture and targets memory-intensive AI inference across enterprise data centers. Meanwhile, the company aims to improve processing efficiency while reducing infrastructure costs and power consumption.

The GPU architecture supports up to 480GB of LPDDR5X memory and delivers 1.5TB/s of memory bandwidth. Additionally, the design provides 1.3 petaflops of FP8 computing performance within a 350-watt power limit. These specifications support large language models, long-context processing, and multiple inference workloads running simultaneously.

Intel said a single GPU can support models containing up to 300 billion parameters. Furthermore, an eight-GPU configuration can handle models exceeding one trillion parameters. Customer sampling has started, while Intel continues collaborating with hardware manufacturers and software providers on deployment solutions.

Intel Expands Xeon Server Capacity for Agentic AI

Intel also presented new Xeon-based rack designs that support growing computing requirements across enterprise AI systems. The designs use open infrastructure standards, including Open Rack v3, to simplify integration into existing data centers. Consequently, organizations can expand processing capacity without completely replacing their current infrastructure.

Select Xeon 6+ configurations deliver more than 46,000 processor cores per rack. These systems operate at 133.45 kilowatts of total rack power while supporting high-density computing operations. Intel designed the configurations to handle data processing, workload coordination, and communication between specialized accelerators.

Agentic AI systems require processors to manage several connected tasks rather than complete isolated requests. Therefore, Intel positions Xeon processors alongside GPUs to handle workflow management and data movement. This approach supports concurrent AI applications while improving resource allocation across enterprise computing environments.

Intel Strengthens Open Software and Infrastructure Development

Intel outlined additional software improvements that support applications across its CPU and GPU product lines. The company continues integrating established AI frameworks, inference tools, and open development environments into its platforms. These efforts aim to simplify application deployment and reduce software compatibility barriers.

Intel also highlighted its contributions to the Open Compute Project, including standardized accelerator card designs. Since 2011, the company has submitted 116 contributions supporting open data center infrastructure. Its latest work focuses on improving hardware compatibility and giving system manufacturers greater design flexibility.

The announcements extend Intel’s strategy of combining general-purpose processors, specialized accelerators, and interoperable software. Meanwhile, the company plans further technical presentations during the OCP Summit on October 13. Its expanding hardware portfolio targets enterprise demand for scalable AI processing and more efficient data center operations.

The post Intel Corporation (INTC) Stock: Slides as New AI GPU Details Emerge appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin’s price nosedived once again on Tuesday morning, but this time it marked a higher low and rebounded quickly toward $84,000.

Most larger-cap alts have experienced more substantial declines, including ZEC, ADA, and NEAR. SOL is below $110, ETH is down by over 1%, while XRP lost the $1.40 level.

BTC Goes Wild

Bitcoin’s troubles began at the start of the previous business week when it was rejected at $87,000 for the fourth or fifth time in the past half a month. At first, it held at $85,500 before bears took complete control and pushed it down to $83,500; the final move came last Thursday, when the cryptocurrency slumped to $80,400.

After losing nearly $7,000 in days, the asset was bound for a bounce-off, which took place by Friday evening and during the weekend. Bitcoin spent the next few days trading sideways between $82,000 and $83,000 before it tried to break out on Monday. However, it was stopped at $84,000 once again.

More volatility ensued on Tuesday morning as BTC dumped to $80,850 (on Bitstamp) and then rebounded just as quickly to $84,000. Similar violent fluctuations harm over-leveraged traders, and the total value of liquidated positions on a daily scale skyrocketed to over $800 million.

As of press time, BTC remains about $500 away from the $84,000 mark. Its market capitalization stands still at $1.670 trillion on CMC, while its dominance over the alts is up to 59.7%.

Alts See Red

Ethereum dipped to $2,400 earlier this morning, before rebounding to over $2,500. However, it’s still 1.2% down on the day. BNB is down to $745, while XRP has slipped further away from the coveted $1.40 level. SOL is below $110, HYPE has slumped by 5%, and so has ADA. Cardano’s token is below $0.24 as of now.

ZEC has dropped by over 6% to $1,226, while NEAR has plummeted by 10% to under $5.20. HBAR, ONDO, ENA, AVAX, PUMP, and WLD are also deep in the red. STX and BTW are among the few exceptions in the green today.

The total crypto market cap is down by over $20 billion on a 24-hour scale to $2.810 trillion on CMC.

The post ZEC and NEAR Plummet Hard, BTC Recovers From Rollercoaster Ride: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Evernorth Holdings began trading publicly on October 12 after merging with Armada Acquisition Corp. II.

Its XRPN stock peaked above $19 before settling just under $17 on Nasdaq, giving investors a preview of how the market values a publicly traded company built around XRP as enthusiasm for crypto treasury stock has waned.

XRPN Gives Back Its Early Gains as Trading Begins

Data from Yahoo Finance shows XRPN opened at $16.68, then went up to $19.39 before falling to an intraday low of $16.39. It later finished regular trading at $16.91, up 1.38%, with volume reaching approximately 1.29 million shares. After-hours activity then lifted the stock to $17.49.

Analyst Scott Melker described the debut as the first major treasury-company test since the sector’s speculative boom faded.

“We really haven’t had a major treasury company launch to the public market in quite a long time,” Melker wrote. “We all know that the treasury bubble popped and massively cooled.”

The company completed its business combination on October 9, clearing the way for Monday’s Nasdaq debut. As CryptoPotato reported earlier on October 10, Evernorth entered the public market with approximately 473 million XRP and around $300 million in gross cash proceeds. The transaction and associated private placements had raised more than $1 billion, with backing from Ripple, SBI Group, Kraken, Pantera Capital and other investors.

XRP Weakness Adds Another Variable

The stock’s debut came as its underlying asset remained under pressure. CoinGecko priced XRP around $1.37, down nearly 9% across seven days. The token was also 46% lower than a year earlier and was trading 62% below its $3.65 all-time high.

Daily XRP trading volume reached around $2.17 billion, up 107% from the previous day. However, a CryptoQuant analysis found that centralized-exchange spot volume had fallen by $1.94 billion between August 26 and October 11, while futures trading accounted for a growing share of activity.

That backdrop complicates the case for XRPN. Investors are buying shares in a company whose assets and planned strategies are tied to an unsettled crypto market, rather than purchasing XRP directly. As Melker put it, the debut may show whether a more cautious second wave of treasury companies can find buyers after the first wave cooled.

“So now we’ll get to see how a wrapper of XRP in a specific merged company trading on public markets will perform versus XRP itself,” Melker had posted.

And the wrapper won the first session, closing 1.38% higher while XRP lost 3.5% in the same period.

The post XRP Hits Wall Street: Here’s How Evernorth’s XRPN Performed on Debut appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Pi Network’s team is expected to complete another major ecosystem development later this week, and it remains unclear whether the move will fuel a price surge for the native token or even arrive as scheduled.

PI continues to underperform, with its valuation nosediving by 60% over the past year and currently trading just above its all-time low levels.

What’s Coming?

2026 has been quite eventful for Pi Network in terms of protocol updates. The Core team began the lengthy process at the start of the year by implementing version 19.6. It later deployed v20.2, which laid the foundation for smart contract capabilities and many more.

The summer also saw significant activity on that front, with Pi Network unveiling versions 25 and 26, which came after their initial deadlines. The last technical update on that list was protocol v27, which should have deployed on September 15 but also came later than expected.

All eyes are now on protocol update v28, scheduled for implementation later this week. X user Giannis Andreou said the upgrade is live on Pi Testnet, with Mainnet activation expected to arrive on October 16. Meanwhile, node operators must upgrade by tomorrow (October 13).

“The update improves transaction-data handling and lets developers upgrade groups of smart contracts together. A deadline for operators as PI prepares its next network upgrade,” he concluded.

Biggest Week Ahead?

X user sunday peter also commented, claiming that Pi Network’s “biggest week of 2026 is finally here.” They claimed that the next few days could mark a “massive turning point” for the future of the project, outlining the approaching protocol upgrade, PI’s smart contracts that are officially live on GitHub for community testing, audits, and building, Pi Network’s partnership with luxury automaker Lotus Cars, and the collaboration with Open USD (OUSD).

As CryptoPotato recently reported, the controversial crypto project teamed up with Open Standard (the company behind the newly launched stablecoin). The partnership could eventually introduce OUSD-based rewards and additional utility to Pi Network’s ecosystem. The Core team has not revealed any further development details, yet many X users have shared their thoughts. Pi News, for instance, said:

“The interesting part isn’t just the partnership; it’s the potential utility that can come from it. If Pi can connect OUSD with rewards, payments, and ecosystem applications, this could become a meaningful infrastructure layer for Pioneers. Waiting to see the implementation details.”

PI Price Outlook

As of now, the altcoin trades just north of $0.08, a staggering 97% crash from its all-time high of around $3 at the start of 2025. Investors and traders may hope the upcoming protocol upgrade triggers a much-needed rebound, but the price hasn’t always moved higher after previous updates. Moreover, they should be prepared for a possible delay, as Pi Network’s team has a habit of postponing important developments.

According to X user Crypto With Gopal, PI has shown a potential double bottom on its daily chart and is currently holding a support zone around $0.075-$0.085 after a prolonged downtrend.

“Buyers are attempting to stabilize price, but a bullish reversal is not confirmed yet. A breakout above $0.10-$0.12 could strengthen recovery momentum. Losing $0.075 would weaken the setup,” he concluded.

The post Important Pi Network News and PI Price Update: October 13 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

[PRESS RELEASE – San Rafael de Escazú, Costa Rica, October 12th, 2026]

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100% RTP Crypto Casino Games: How a 0% House Edge Works

Return to player (RTP) describes the theoretical share of wagers returned over a very large number of rounds. A 99% RTP game implies a 1% house edge; 100% RTP means no theoretical house edge on eligible play.

In practice, $1,000 in total wagering at 99% RTP implies $10 in expected loss; at 100%, it falls to zero. Individual sessions still vary: players can lose their stake or finish ahead.

BiggerZ 100% RTP Originals: Mines, Dice, Plinko, Hi-Lo and Keno

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Can You Win Big on 100% RTP Originals? Multipliers and Risk

Games such as Plinko and Limbo keep their multiplier outcomes, where a less likely result pays several times the wager. A 0% house edge does not guarantee a win or make high multipliers more likely. It changes the operator’s theoretical margin, not the volatility of each round.

100% RTP Originals vs High-RTP Slots: What Is the Difference?

Third-party online slots keep their own published RTP, volatility and bonus mechanics. A slot at 96% RTP carries a 4% theoretical house edge, versus zero on an eligible 100% RTP Original. The comparison concerns long-run mathematics, not which game will deliver the next big payout.

Provably Fair Crypto Casino Games: Verify BiggerZ Touch Results

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Where to Play 100% RTP Originals on BiggerZ Crypto Casino

Players can open BiggerZ Touch, select a game showing a 100% RTP badge and check its rules, limits and verification tools before placing a wager. The offer does not apply to slots, live casino, sports bets or prediction markets.

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18+. Terms, eligibility and jurisdictional restrictions apply. Gambling involves financial risk. Play responsibly.

The post BiggerZ Crypto Casino Launches 100% RTP Originals With 0% House Edge appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin’s price volatility has returned at the start of the business week, with the asset getting rejected at $84,000 yesterday, only to crash by over three grand before staging a notable comeback.

With most altcoins following a similar trajectory, it’s no wonder that the total value of wrecked positions has skyrocketed to well over $800 million on a daily scale.

BTC experienced a major leg down at the end of the previous business week when the bears drove it hard to an 18-day low of $80,400. However, the bulls finally stepped up at this point and helped it recover to $83,000 during the weekend.

The asset even tried to take down the next key level on the path of recovery at $84,000, but the bears intervened on Monday morning.

The subsequent rejection culminated earlier on Tuesday morning with another nose-dive. This time, though, BTC marked a higher low, dipping to just $80,850 (on Bitstamp).

Its rebound has taken it to almost $83,500 as of press time. The latest moves took place in just a few hours, and most altcoins mimicked them. ETH, for example, slumped to $2,410 before it recovered $100.

Although XRP also rebounded from the morning low of $1.31 and now sits at $1.36, it’s more than 3% down in the past 24 hours after it was stopped at $1.40.

As expected, these substantial fluctuations have resulted in a large number of liquidations. Data from CoinGlass shows that $810 million worth of longs and shorts have been wrecked daily, with longs responsible for roughly 85%.

The number of wiped-out traders is also quite high at 173,611 as of press time. The single biggest wrecked position took place on Binance and was worth over $9.6 million.

The post Bitcoin’s Price Volatility Explodes as Liquidations Surge Past $800 Million appeared first on CryptoPotato.