Enso's integration with Arbitrum could accelerate the adoption of tokenized equities, enhancing liquidity and simplifying access for developers.

The post Enso opens xStocks access to Arbitrum’s growing onchain ecosystem appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Paxos' XRP integration for institutions may enhance crypto market liquidity, stability, and acceptance, bridging traditional finance and digital assets.

The post Paxos Crypto Brokerage adds XRP trading and custody for institutional partners appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

OpenAI's IPO delay highlights the urgent need for robust AI safety measures, influencing regulatory frameworks and investor strategies globally.

The post Sam Altman delays OpenAI IPO to 2027, citing AI safety risks appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

HIVE's expansion in Paraguay could significantly boost its global mining capacity, but reliance on a single energy source poses strategic risks.

The post HIVE plans 400 MW hydro-powered campus in Paraguay with Phase 3 expansion appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

OpenAI's proactive engagement at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 highlights the strategic importance of AI agents in shaping future tech ecosystems.

The post OpenAI’s Alexander Embiricos to discuss Dots at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Robinhood Adds Bitcoin to Its Balance Sheet: A Strategic Signal from a $100B Fintech

Robinhood has taken a clear step into corporate Bitcoin ownership. On October 7, 2026, Johann Kerbrat, the company’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Crypto and International, disclosed that Robinhood has added $25 million worth of Bitcoin to its own corporate balance sheet—its first proprietary BTC holding.

Kerbrat framed the purchase as more than a financial allocation. Speaking in an interview at the Digital Asset Summit Asia, he described it as a deliberate signal of commitment: “We care deeply about bitcoin and the ecosystem around it. For us, it’s more aligning our company and our vision with the crypto community.” He was equally clear about scale, noting that Robinhood’s market capitalization sits around $100 billion and that “the $25 million worth of bitcoin is not going to change a lot of the current trajectory of the company.”

The company did not disclose an exact coin count. Using this week’s average price near $84,960, the outlay equates to approximately 294 BTC. Other estimates based on prices around $84,000 place it near 300 BTC. The precise figure is expected to appear in Robinhood’s next public filing.

Signal Over Size

For Bitcoin For Corporations, the absolute size is less important than the decision itself. Robinhood is a publicly traded fintech platform with massive retail reach. Moving from solely facilitating customer crypto trading to holding Bitcoin as a corporate treasury asset represents a meaningful shift in posture. It is the difference between offering the product and putting principal capital behind the thesis.

This is distinct from the much larger pool of digital assets Robinhood already holds in custody for customers—roughly 185,000 BTC (approximately $15.5 billion) plus other cryptocurrencies, totaling around $25 billion across multiple chains according to on-chain analysis. Those assets belong to users. The new $25 million position belongs to the company.

An Early, Directional Allocation

Kerbrat’s comments make clear this is an initial step rather than the launch of a large-scale treasury program akin to Strategy’s. The amount is modest relative to Robinhood’s cash position and market value—roughly half a percent of reported cash holdings in some analyses and a rounding error against a $100 billion valuation. Yet first allocations of this kind often serve as internal and external catalysts: they align incentives, educate boards and investors, and create optionality for future expansion.

In the broader corporate landscape, the purchase lands alongside continued accumulation by established Bitcoin treasury companies. Strategy, for example, acquired 334 BTC for approximately $28.7 million in early October at an average price near $85,839, bringing its total holdings higher. Robinhood’s outlay sits in a similar dollar neighborhood but marks an entry point rather than an addition to an already dominant position.

Why This Matters for Corporate Strategy

Corporate Bitcoin adoption continues to mature from niche experiment to recognized strategic tool. Companies are increasingly evaluating Bitcoin as a reserve asset, a hedge against monetary debasement, a long-duration store of value, and a market signal that can differentiate them with investors and stakeholders. Robinhood’s move fits this pattern: a high-profile operating company in the financial sector publicly affirming Bitcoin’s role on the balance sheet.

For other public and pre-IPO companies watching, the lesson is practical. Allocations do not need to be transformative on day one to be strategically valuable. Clear messaging, disciplined sizing relative to overall capital structure, and alignment with the firm’s broader vision can turn a modest purchase into a credible signal. The next questions for Robinhood—and for peers considering similar steps—will center on governance frameworks, custody arrangements, accounting treatment, investor relations positioning, and whether this initial holding evolves into a more systematic treasury strategy.

Robinhood’s decision adds another data point to the growing list of public companies treating Bitcoin as a corporate asset. At Bitcoin For Corporations, we view every such step—large or small—as progress toward normalizing Bitcoin on balance sheets with clarity, confidence, and capital efficiency.

Disclaimer: This content was prepared on behalf of Bitcoin For Corporations for informational purposes only. It reflects the author’s own analysis and opinion and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Nothing in this article constitutes an offer, invitation, or solicitation to purchase, sell, or subscribe for any security or financial product.

This post Robinhood Adds Bitcoin to Its Balance Sheet: A Strategic Signal from a $100B Fintech first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Nick Ward.

Bitcoin Magazine

Crypto Card Payments Hit Record $12.5 Billion as Stablecoin Adoption Surges

Payment volume processed on crypto cards has climbed to a record $12.5 billion, up 140% year-to-date, according to data from paymentscan.xyz, first shared by The Kobeissi Letter.

The figure is also 247% higher than levels recorded in October 2025.

The surge is being driven by growing use of stablecoins as a payment rail and a broader push for cheaper, faster cross-border transactions, The Kobeissi Letter said.

QR-code payments are another bright spot: demand for QR-based spending helped push activated cards on Jupiter Spend, one of the largest on-chain card providers, up 55% quarter-over-quarter.

“Crypto cards are the next phase of crypto adoption,” The Kobeissi Letter said.

The figures come as major players move into the space of crypto cards. Fold Holdings (NASDAQ: FLD) announced earlier this year that it had started issuing its Fold Bitcoin Credit Card to select waitlist members, with wider access rolling out in batches over the coming weeks and months. 

The card runs on the Visa network, is powered by Stripe Issuing and is accepted at 175 million merchants. It offers a base rate of 1.5% back in bitcoin, rising to as much as 4% through behavior-based boosts and partner offers. Cardholders who pay their bill in bitcoin earn an extra 0.5% back.

Aven has taken a different approach. Its Aven Bitcoin Visa Card, unveiled at the Bitcoin Conference 2026 in Las Vegas, lets holders borrow up to $1 million against their bitcoin without selling it, with rates starting at 7.99% APR and repayment terms of up to 10 years. 

Collateral is held by BitGo, while Coastal Community Bank issues the card.

This post Crypto Card Payments Hit Record $12.5 Billion as Stablecoin Adoption Surges first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

$350M St Cloud CEO: The First Credit Union to Put Bitcoin on Core Ledger | Jed Meyer

A credit union founded by postal workers in 1930 is now custodying real Bitcoin for its members. St. Cloud Financial Credit Union CEO Jed Meyer explains how its patent-pending hybrid custody model gives each member individual Bitcoin ownership in a multisig vault. He also covers how the credit union has grown to more than 20 BTC under custody without even trying.

Chapters:
00:00 St. Cloud Financial Credit Union’s Path to Bitcoin
01:08 Stablecoins, Dollars, and Bitcoin as New Money Networks
02:26 Bitcoin ETF vs. Credit Union Custody: The Hybrid Custody Model
03:18 Bringing Main Street Into Bitcoin With Direct Buy and Sell
04:45 Minnesota Custody Law, NCUA Exams, and the CLARITY Act
07:32 20+ Bitcoin in Member Vaults and Lightning Plans
09:38 What It Takes for a Credit Union to Own Bitcoin
10:57 The Cloud Dollar Stablecoin and the Cooperative Ownership Model
12:59 How Credit Unions Decide Which Digital Assets to Offer
14:10 Educating Skeptics and Why Credit Unions Must Own Their Rails

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post $350M St Cloud CEO: The First Credit Union to Put Bitcoin on Core Ledger | Jed Meyer first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Housingwire’s Logan Mohtashami: Real Estate vs Bitcoin & Bond Market Outlook

Mortgage rates just hit their highest level in nearly three years, and homebuyers are already pulling back. HousingWire Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami explains why the 10-year Treasury yield keeps climbing since talks with Iran broke down, and why the Federal Reserve has turned hawkish. He also explains how mortgage spreads are keeping 30-year rates from climbing above 8%.

Chapters:
00:00 30-Year Mortgage Rates Hit 7.28%, Highest in Nearly Three Years
00:52 Iran Talks, the Fed, and Why the 10-Year Yield Keeps Rising
01:58 Mortgage Spreads Explained: Why Rates Aren’t Above 8.6%
03:28 What It Would Take to Get Meaningful Home Price Cuts
04:43 Homebuilders, Profit Margins, and Mortgage Rate Buydowns
06:17 Why Today’s Housing Market Isn’t 2008
08:13 Bitcoin vs. Real Estate: Competing for Monetary Premium?
09:52 Borrowing Against Bitcoin for a Home Down Payment
10:52 Grant Cardone’s Bitcoin and Real Estate Model
13:15 2027 Outlook for Mortgage Rates, Home Prices, and Affordability

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Housingwire’s Logan Mohtashami: Real Estate vs Bitcoin & Bond Market Outlook first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Leon Wankum: BTC Taking on Real Estate’s $300T Monetary Premium

For generations, property has been the default place to store wealth, but Leon Wankum says that run is over. The author of Digital Real Estate, published by Bitcoin Magazine Books, explains how fiat debasement since 1971 inflated a monetary premium in real estate. He argues Bitcoin, as absolutely scarce money, is now pulling that premium away. He also explains why both residential and commercial real estate will feel the shift.

“Digital Real Estate is required reading for anyone who owns property and hasn’t yet considered how Bitcoin is set to disrupt the real estate market.”

Buy Leon Wankum’s ‘Digital Real Estate’ now in the Bitcoin Magazine bookstore
https://store.bitcoinmagazine.com/collections/books/products/digital-real-estate

Chapters:
00:00 Leon Wankum’s “Digital Real Estate” Thesis
00:35 Why Real Estate’s Run Since 1971 Is Over
01:39 The Monetary Premium in Residential and Commercial Real Estate
03:58 Saving in Bitcoin vs. Spending It on a Home
05:57 Bitcoin as Collateral: Borrowing vs. Renting and Stacking
08:19 Why the Housing Crisis Is a Crisis of Ownership
09:56 Pricing Real Estate in Bitcoin
10:57 Homeowners, Banks, and Bitcoin-Backed Mortgages
14:14 Bitcoin Mining and Treasury Strategies for Real Estate Developers
16:04 Why Grant Cardone’s Bitcoin Real Estate Funds Could Lead

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.

This post Leon Wankum: BTC Taking on Real Estate’s $300T Monetary Premium first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Robinhood is adding $25 million of Bitcoin to its balance sheet after executives previously debated whether corporate crypto holdings would benefit shareholders.

Johann Kerbrat, Robinhood’s senior vice president and general manager of crypto and international, announced the allocation Wednesday, saying the brokerage views Bitcoin as a strategic addition to diversify its assets.

“We believe firmly in the future of crypto,” Kerbrat said on X.

The allocation is small relative to Robinhood’s financial resources, but it represents a shift in how the brokerage uses its own capital. Until now, Robinhood’s crypto strategy has largely centered on giving customers access to digital assets, acquiring infrastructure and expanding into services such as tokenization, staking and institutional trading.

The company held $5.362 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of June 30, 2026, along with $155 million in stablecoins, according to its second-quarter filing. The $25 million allocation is equivalent to less than 0.5% of that reported cash balance.

Its limited size makes the move more of a strategic signal than a material bet on Bitcoin’s price.

Robinhood’s earlier Bitcoin treasury debate

The allocation marks a notable change from Robinhood’s position less than a year ago, when executives openly questioned whether buying Bitcoin with company funds would benefit shareholders.

Asked during Robinhood’s third-quarter 2025 earnings call whether the company would adopt Bitcoin or other digital assets as part of its corporate treasury, finance executive Shiv Verma said management had spent considerable time debating the idea.

The central concern was capital allocation.

Putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet could align Robinhood more closely with the crypto community, Verma said, but shareholders could already buy Bitcoin directly through Robinhood. Management also had to weigh a treasury allocation against investments in engineering, products and other growth initiatives. At the time, Verma said the company was “still thinking about it.”

Robinhood has now resolved at least part of that debate in favor of holding the asset itself.

Kerbrat's rationale also addresses one side of management’s earlier concerns. Robinhood describes the allocation as part of its broader asset-diversification strategy.

Still, at $25 million, the initial position leaves Robinhood well short of the kind of Bitcoin accumulation strategy pursued by companies like Strategy, which routinely raises capital to expand its holdings.

The announcement does not specify whether the $25 million allocation is a one-time move or the start of a recurring treasury program.

That distinction will determine whether the move remains largely symbolic or develops into another meaningful use of corporate capital.

Bitcoin joins a rapidly expanding crypto business

The balance-sheet allocation comes as crypto becomes more deeply embedded in Robinhood’s broader business.

The company acquired Bitstamp for about $224 million in June 2025, giving it a global crypto exchange with institutional and retail customers across multiple markets. The acquisition accelerated Robinhood’s expansion outside the US and gave the company additional regulated infrastructure in Europe and Asia.

Robinhood has since pushed further into tokenized equities and blockchain infrastructure, including its Robinhood Chain initiative, while expanding crypto trading and related products across international markets.

Customers traded about $40 billion of crypto across Robinhood and Bitstamp during the second quarter, including $18 billion through Robinhood’s app and $22 billion through Bitstamp.

Crypto remains an important revenue source even as activity has cooled. Robinhood generated $100 million of cryptocurrency transaction revenue during the second quarter, down 38% from a year earlier. Crypto contributed 8% of total net revenue during the period, compared with 16% a year earlier.

That makes the Bitcoin allocation different from a company adding crypto exposure to an otherwise unrelated business. Robinhood already earns money when customers trade digital assets and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars building and acquiring crypto infrastructure.

The new position puts some of its own capital behind the asset class as well.

For shareholders, the announced $25 million position adds direct Bitcoin exposure while remaining small relative to Robinhood’s reported cash balance.

The post Robinhood adds $25 million of Bitcoin to its own balance sheet appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Polymarket’s Protocol V2 rollout does not automatically move existing bets held under its older Conditional Tokens Framework, or CTF, onto new contracts. Its migration guidance tells trading integrations to retain support for those holdings while adding a separate system for V2 positions and new trading permissions.

In his Oct. 5 announcement, Rajath Alex said Polymarket would run a few live test markets, known as canary markets, from Oct. 5 through Oct. 30. He described Nov. 2 as a tentative switch for newly created markets, rather than a deadline for converting every existing bet.

For people using Polymarket’s app or website, no technical migration is required. Users should complete any approval prompts shown in the app. The guides address Polygon-based onchain trading; Polymarket’s main documentation directs users of Polymarket US to separate documentation.

A separate mechanism does allow holders to move CTF positions into V2. Polymarket’s contract registry says the relevant condition or event must be registered by Polymarket first. Its indexing reference describes events connecting the old CTF balance to the new PositionManager balance. That is a distinct operation from updating trading software.

Integrations must support both systems

For developers, the change starts with where shares are recorded. Legacy CTF positions remain on the older ledger, while V2 balances sit in a separate contract called PositionManager. The contract migration guide requires integrations to handle the appropriate balances and retain CTF identifiers for older markets.

Permissions also stay separate. Under the API migration guide, the account holding a V2 buyer’s assets must authorize ExchangeV3, the new trading contract, to spend enough pUSD, Polymarket’s trading collateral, to cover purchases and fees. Selling requires permission for ExchangeV3 to operate on the seller’s PositionManager shares. Existing CTF permissions do not grant either approval.

Trading software must select the correct share identifier from each market’s version, even if both generations’ identifier fields appear in the response. V2 orders use position IDs and signing-domain version 3; CTF orders retain their exchange and signing-domain version 2. Those signing versions distinguish the two trading paths. Balance requests also distinguish V2 shares from CTF shares.

For integrations that create, combine or redeem positions directly through contracts, V2 uses Router. Creating positions requires approval for Router to spend pUSD; combining or redeeming them requires Router operator permission on PositionManager. Integrations also need to update balance handling and payout reads.

The similar version labels refer to different upgrades. Polymarket’s changelog records CLOB V2 going live on April 28 and Data API v2 launching on Sept. 4, both in 2026. The October Protocol V2 rollout adds the separate position system.

For integrations already using pUSD and the CTFExchangeV2 order format, collateral, wallets, order-book credentials and endpoints stay the same. Polymarket nevertheless tells developers to verify purchases, sales and balances on both a V2 market and a CTF market.

The post Polymarket’s upgrade won’t automatically move existing bets to new contracts appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin’s October 7 morning market readings showed roughly $143 million in Bitcoin futures positions liquidated over the preceding 24 hours and a price range that dipped below $84,000. The positive US ETF session could not predict whether leveraged positions would survive their margin tests.

CoinGlass reported a BTC futures liquidation total of $143,016,790 at 06:53 UTC.

The 24-hour price range included a low of $83,647. CryptoSlate’s Bitcoin price page showed the price at around $84,288 during EU trading hours, down 1.25% over 24 hours.

US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $118.8 million in net inflows for October 6, according to Farside Investors after a net outflow for October 5.

Why positive fund flows are no price floor

Liquidation responds to the trader’s margin position as prices change. Bybit’s liquidation rules use mark price, the exchange’s reference price for margin calculations, rather than the last trade. The trigger varies by margin mode.

Nor does a daily ETF inflow represent a standing bid at a guaranteed Bitcoin price. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, or IBIT, uses authorized participants creating or redeeming baskets for cash or Bitcoin in its prospectus. While the fund seeks to track Bitcoin’s price, the flow figure alone cannot show when or where an equivalent spot purchase occurred.

Subtracting ETF inflows from liquidation notional would therefore reveal no net buying or selling balance. Fund demand and forced closures can coexist without establishing that derivatives selling overwhelmed ETF buying.

For traders, the remaining question is whether enough leverage has cleared to ease further liquidation pressure. The fresh total confirms forced closures, but CoinGlass’s single open-interest reading, a measure of outstanding futures exposure, provides no comparable before-and-after view.

Gross spot volume leaves a similar gap: turnover alone does not show whether net buying weakened. The next useful signals are changes in outstanding positions and directional spot trading measured on the same venues over the same interval. Those would help distinguish cleared leverage from persistent selling pressure.

The post Bitcoin drops to $84k sees $143 million in liquidations as ETF inflows turn positive appeared first on CryptoSlate.

S&P Global is bringing ratings-style risk assessments to crypto lending vaults as the fast-growing market confronts fresh security failures.

The ratings firm launched its Vault Risk Assessment framework on Oct. 4, creating a standardized approach for comparing the likelihood that investors suffer impairment in lending vaults. Deposits in the products reached about $10 billion in September, up from $1.5 billion two years earlier, according to S&P.

The launch came the same day blockchain security firm CertiK flagged suspicious movements involving an unnamed vault on Coinbase-backed Base network.

According to the blockchain security firm, the newly deployed proxy borrowed about 1,783 aBaswstETH, worth roughly $6 million, from the vault before redeeming the tokens through Aave for around 1,783 wstETH.

The incident did not exploit Aave itself. Instead, it highlighted a problem that grows more relevant as vaults become more popular: investors can be exposed to risks introduced by the contracts, permissions, and managers between their deposits and the underlying lending protocols.

That distinction sits at the heart of S&P's new framework. Vaults pool investor assets and allocate them according to predefined strategies, with those decisions either automated through smart contracts or overseen by human managers known as curators. Investors receive tokens representing claims on the pooled assets and returns.

Vault growth brings new layers of risk

S&P's framework evaluates six areas: portfolio credit quality, liquidity mismatch, curator risk, blockchain risk, protocol risk, and vault security and governance.

The assessment is designed to move beyond the point-in-time transparency provided by blockchain transactions and examine how a vault could behave as conditions change.

That becomes more important as vaults increasingly resemble onchain versions of managed investment products. S&P said the structures can replicate functions associated with money-market, private-credit, private-equity and hedge funds, while allowing pooled capital to operate directly on blockchains.

The added flexibility also introduces additional failure points. A depositor may ultimately have exposure to a large lending protocol, but losses can still emerge from a curator's allocation decisions, weak withdrawal liquidity, changes to smart-contract permissions or vulnerabilities in the vault itself.

S&P's grades use a “(v)” suffix, with AAA(v) representing the lowest relative risk category. They are not credit ratings, do not assess expected yields and do not guarantee that investors will recover their capital. The agency describes them instead as forward-looking opinions about the relative risk of impairment.

Assessments can also change as eligible assets, their risk profiles, smart-contract features or liquidity conditions evolve. That gives S&P scope to reassess vaults whose structures become riskier even when their historical on-chain record remains clean.

The next test will come when S&P begins publishing assessments for individual vaults, which it said will follow in future announcements.

Those grades could give institutional allocators a common benchmark for comparing strategies in a market that has expanded almost sevenfold in two years.

They could also raise the stakes for vault managers if investors demand higher returns from weaker-rated products or direct deposits toward structures with stronger assessments.

The post S&P brings ratings-style scrutiny to $10 billion crypto vault market as $6 million Base incident exposes risks appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Abstract will shut down on Dec. 15 despite onboarding more than 400,000 users, hosting 144 apps, and landing brands including Disney and Red Bull Racing.

The consumer-focused Ethereum layer-2 (L2) cited stagnant growth, thin liquidity, restricted DeFi activity, and limited institutional crossover.

Igloo CEO Luca Netz said the company had lost “tens of millions of dollars” supporting the network and chose to forgo a token launch as a lifeline. Abstract says funds left on the chain at the deadline will become inaccessible.

Users arrived, and liquidity stayed home

DefiLlama's snapshot shows that Abstract’s 41,078 daily active addresses produced $9.7 million in DeFi total value locked (TVL), $6.4 million in stablecoins, $398,134 in daily DEX volume and $2,876 in daily chain revenue, roughly $1 million annualized.

In comparison, Coinbase-backed Base logged 325,671 daily active addresses, $6.4 billion in DeFi TVL, $5.2 billion in stablecoins and over $1 billion in daily DEX volume.

This means that Base's active-address count runs about 7.9 times Abstract's, while its DeFi TVL runs about 662 times higher and its DEX volume about 2,722 times higher. Each daily active address on Base carries roughly $19,756 of DeFi TVL against about $237 on Abstract.

Abstract's list of what it lacked reads like the same table in words: liquidity, DeFi depth, institutional crossover, and scale.

Ethereum Layer 2 shutdowns became budget decisions

Blast announced its shutdown days earlier, saying maintenance costs exceeded revenue and that economic sustainability looked out of reach.

Users have until Oct. 26 to move assets back to Ethereum mainnet. Silicon stopped accepting new bridge deposits on Sept. 3 and gave users until Dec. 31 to withdraw. Blast and Abstract both cite economics.

Sophon reached the same arithmetic in June and chose migration. It sunset its L2, moved its consumer apps to Base, and cut annual burn by about $3 million, from roughly $3.4 million a year spent on chain infrastructure, rollup services, data, and tooling.

At Abstract's current revenue run rate, a chain carrying Sophon's cost stack would need about 3.2 times the revenue to break even, before counting team, incentive, and business-building costs.

L2Beat tracks $34.3 billion of value secured across rollups, and Base's $16.3 billion plus Arbitrum One's $11.4 billion add up to about 80.6% of it.

DefiLlama's figures for other chains show a long tail operating far below those leaders. Scroll has about $8.7 million in DeFi TVL and $57 in daily chain revenue. Metis has $2.6 million in TVL and $59,318 in daily DEX volume, and Mode has nearly $2 million in TVL and $1,741 in DEX volume.

Taiko has $243,822 in TVL and about $205 in DEX volume, and Zora has $47,528 in TVL and $1.86 in DEX volume. These readings show how many networks carry the fixed cost of independent infrastructure on a fraction of the liquidity and fee base available on the leaders.

What the closures mean for crypto

Ethereum's scaling roadmap has delivered, with a recent academic paper finding that upgrades through March 2026 doubled throughput on mainnet and L2s.

Mainnet median fees fell from above $2 to below $0.02, and L2 median fees dropped more than 95%, from $0.05 to $0.0015. Cheap execution is becoming abundant, so the defensible layer sits in liquidity, distribution, compliance, app revenue, and institutional access.

Abstract shows that a chain can onboard hundreds of thousands of wallets while building shallow markets.

If standalone chains find reasons to exist beyond generic cheap EVM execution, such as gaming rails, brand distribution layers, identity networks, or compliance-focused venues, the long tail narrows to chains that earn their keep.

Their teams would measure success by fee revenue and enterprise value, and the Abstract and Blast closures become evidence for which designs deserve to continue.

If more teams run the same burn-versus-revenue comparison and land where Blast, Abstract and Sophon did, chains with thin liquidity and sub-$10 million DeFi footprints face a choice.

They can subsidize the chain, migrate to Base or Arbitrum, or shut down. Each wind-down sets a deadline for users to bridge out, which turns a corporate economics decision into a user-protection problem around stranded assets and phishing.

Ethereum needs rollups, and Abstract's 400,000 users failed to sustain the idea that every crypto product benefits from owning one.

The post Why Abstract is killing its Ethereum L2 instead of launching a token to save it appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Cardano has given back in a single trading day everything the price had gained over the weekend. Cardano trades at $0.2546, or 0.2275 euros, on Wednesday, October 7, 2026. That is 7.97 percent less than 24 hours earlier, measured against CoinGecko data. Over seven days there is still a gain of 4.28 percent, over 30 days one of 16.80 percent. That is precisely where the news lies: the slump erases the move of October 5 and 6, not the trend of recent weeks.

The trigger was not at Cardano. Positions were closed by force on a large scale market-wide, and ADA was hit harder than the average. For you as a holder, three things therefore matter more than the percentage figure: whether you are in the market with borrowed money, when your holding period expires, and where your coins sit.

Cardano today: $0.2546 after a 7.97 percent loss in one day

The range of the past 24 hours runs from $0.27981 at the high to $0.252659 at the low. In euros that corresponds to 0.25003 euros at the top and 0.225769 euros at the bottom. The current price therefore sits just above the daily low and around nine percent below the daily high. In euros the loss, at 7.52 percent, comes out slightly smaller than in dollars, because the euro gave way against the dollar at the same time.

With a market capitalisation of $9.56 billion, Cardano is number 17 in the market. In circulation are 37.55 billion ADA out of a maximum of 45 billion. Trading volume over the past 24 hours was $703.7 million. The price is far from its all-time high of $3.09, reached on September 1, 2021.

What the daily closes show

On October 4, ADA closed at $0.24389. On October 5 it was $0.25973, on October 6 $0.27041. That is a rise of just under eleven percent in two days. Today's price of $0.2546 sits below the closing price of October 5 and therefore back in the range from which the move started. Anyone who bought on Monday evening or Tuesday is sitting on a loss today.

Where the rally came from: Leios teaser, RealFi launch and the golden cross

Three things coincided in early October. On October 1, RealFi went live on the Cardano mainnet, after months of public testing. On October 5, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson drew attention on social media to the planned Leios extension, a rebuild intended to raise the network's throughput considerably. Over the same period a golden cross formed on the chart, that is the crossing of the short-term moving average above the long-term one.

None of these three points is a completed fact with immediate effect on the price. RealFi has launched but is still young. Leios is announced and tested, not shipped. A golden cross is a chart pattern, not an event in the network. A rally resting on an announcement and a chart pattern is correspondingly fragile as soon as the broader market tips. That is exactly what happened on Tuesday and Wednesday.

$547 million of liquidations in 24 hours: the trigger lay outside Cardano

According to CoinDesk, liquidations on the crypto market rose by 235 percent within 24 hours to $547 million. Of that, $174 million fell on Ether positions alone. CoinDesk names as drivers a rally in the oil price, high yields on US government bonds and a firmer dollar. The CoinDesk 80 index, which tracks the broader mass of altcoins, lost just under four percent.

A day earlier The Block had already reported that Bitcoin briefly slipped below $84,000, liquidating long positions worth $487 million in the process. Both outlets thereby describe the same situation independently of each other: this was not selling out of conviction but a chain reaction among positions that had bet on rising prices.

That ADA, at just under eight percent, gave way about twice as strongly as the CoinDesk 80 has a sober reason. Coins that have risen sharply shortly beforehand carry an above-average number of fresh leveraged positions. When the market falls, the automatic closures hit those coins first.

Leverage and liquidation: positions were closed by force at $0.2527

A liquidation is not a decision by the investor. Anyone trading with leverage on a futures exchange posts only a fraction of the position's value as collateral. Once that collateral is no longer sufficient, the exchange closes the position automatically and sells the coins behind it into the market. The more positions breach that threshold at the same time, the harder the selling pressure pushes the price down, which in turn makes the next positions break.

In practice that means for you: the daily low of $0.252659 is not a price anyone considered fair. It is the point at which the forced sales ran out. Anyone holding ADA without leverage has seen only the price effect of this mechanism.

How to spot a leveraged position

Not everyone knows they are running with leverage. One sign is any position for which a liquidation price appears in the overview. A second is an ongoing funding rate, often simply called funding, settled at fixed intervals. A third is products listed as perpetual, future, CFD or knock-out. With a plain purchase of ADA on a spot exchange there is none of that.

Buying ADA in Germany: MiCA authorisation, spread and order types

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets has applied in full, any provider selling crypto assets to retail clients in Germany needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. For you that is the first filter in the selection: a provider without that authorisation is not allowed to serve you here, and in a dispute you stand outside the European framework. Which houses hold the authorisation and what they charge for buying ADA is in the overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

The second point is the price you actually pay. The visible fee is rarely the whole bill. On top of it comes the spread, that is the gap between the buying and selling price, and with card deposits often a surcharge of its own. On a day like today a third factor is added: in fast moves, execution prices deviate from the displayed price more than usual.

A limit order helps against that. You set the price at which the purchase happens at most, and accept that the order stays unfilled if the price does not run there. A market order, by contrast, is executed immediately, at whatever price is currently in the order book. In calm phases the difference is small. In a wave of liquidations it can amount to several percent.

Holding period: one year separates the tax-free sale from the taxable one

In Germany, crypto assets held in private assets count as other assets. If you sell them at a gain within one year of purchase, that gain is taxable as a private disposal transaction, at your personal income tax rate. If more than twelve months lie between purchase and sale, the gain stays tax-free. For the sum of all private disposal transactions in a year, an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros applies in addition. Once it is exceeded, the entire amount is taxable, not just the part above it.

A price slump is therefore always a question of the purchase date too. Anyone selling ADA at a loss creates, inside the one-year period, a loss that can be offset against gains from other private disposal transactions. Anyone who, by contrast, is shortly before the twelve months expire and sitting on a gain may pay the full tax rate for a few days of impatience. Anyone buying in over several months therefore needs a schedule that carries each tranche with its own purchase date.

Whether this one-year period remains is currently open. The Bundestag's petitions committee takes up a submission on the crypto holding period on October 12. A hearing is not a change in the law, but it is the point at which a possible change becomes visible.

ADA staking in the protocol: five-day epochs, no lock-up

Cardano differs from many other networks in one respect, and that respect becomes important in falling markets. Anyone delegating ADA transfers no coins to a pool. What is delegated is the wallet; the coins stay with the holder and are available at any time. In the protocol there is no lock-up and no notice period.

The network counts in epochs of five days. Rewards are allocated after an epoch has elapsed; with a new delegation it takes around two to three weeks for the first payment to arrive. So anyone who wants to sell today has nothing to cancel and nothing to wait for.

It looks different when ADA is staked through an exchange or a provider that sets its own deadlines. Such offerings replicate the protocol but follow their own terms, and there lock-up periods may very well apply. For tax purposes the distinction is relevant too: allocated rewards must be recorded as other income in the year they are received, regardless of whether you sell them.

Custody after the sell-off: exchange, software wallet, hardware wallet

A day with high liquidations is a good occasion to look at your own custody. If the coins sit on an exchange, they belong to you legally, but the provider holds the keys. That is comfortable as long as everything runs. It is a concentration risk as soon as a provider gets into difficulty or suspends trading.

A software wallet on your phone or in the browser gives you the keys back and stays practical for everyday use. Its fate hangs, however, on the device it runs on. A hardware wallet separates the keys from the internet and is the solution for holdings meant to sit still. The same basic rule applies to all three routes: the recovery words do not belong in a photo, in a notes app or in a cloud.

The levels above and below the price: $0.2439, $0.2527 and $0.2798

Three values can be read off the course of recent days, and they are verifiable because they come from prices actually traded. On the downside, the closing price of October 4 at $0.24389 is the base from which the rally started. If the price falls below it, the move has been more than given back. Above that sits today's daily low of $0.252659, the point at which the forced sales ended.

On the upside stands the daily high of $0.27981. That value was traded within the past 24 hours and is therefore the next hurdle against which a recovery has to be measured. None of these three values is a forecast. All that is marked is where trading actually took place in the most recent course, and a move can be placed against that without betting on a price target.

What matters is the order of observation. As long as the broader market is under pressure from the oil price, bond yields and the dollar, ADA follows those cues more closely than its own news. Only once the market-wide liquidations ebb away do network topics such as Leios regain weight for the price.

Leios and CIP-164: what is running on the testnet and what is still outstanding

Leios is the reason the rally arose at all, so a sober look at it is worth taking. The rebuild is described as improvement proposal CIP-164 and runs under the name Linear Leios. The idea behind it: additional blocks, so-called endorser blocks, take on transaction data so that the network processes more data in the same time. In tests on the experimental network Musashi Dojo, a sixfold data throughput was measured.

What matters is the status: Leios is tested, not shipped. The developers are aiming for a launch towards the end of 2026. Between a successful testnet and a hard fork on the main network, several months regularly lie at Cardano, votes included. Anyone who read the announcement of October 5 as a completed improvement has overrated it.

The network treasury has a say

One detail from September shows how Cardano now works. An application by the Pogun project for 12.29 million ADA from the network treasury did not find enough support and failed. Funds from the treasury are decided on by the holders' delegates. For you that means that announced projects in the Cardano environment have to pass a vote before they see money. An announcement there is even less equivalent to implementation than in other networks.

Cardano price: Your next three steps

1. Check whether a liquidation price appears anywhere. Open the position overview at every provider where you hold ADA. If you find a liquidation price, a funding rate or a product with a knock-out threshold, you are trading with leverage and are exposed to exactly the mechanism that closed $547 million of positions today. Anyone who did not take on the leverage deliberately should unwind it on a quiet day, not in a slump. How the products work and which providers list them is in the overview of analysis tools.
2. Note down the purchase date of every ADA tranche. Whether a sale is taxable depends solely on the twelve months since each purchase, and with several purchases every tranche has its own date. That list belongs on the table before any decision to sell, all the more because the hearing on the holding period is due on October 12. Which tax tools track the deadlines automatically is shown by the comparison.
3. Move the part that is meant to sit still off the exchange. Whatever you do not intend to trade in the coming weeks does not have to sit with the provider. Delegation at Cardano carries on without a lock-up, including from a wallet of your own, so you lose no rewards by moving. Which devices are available in Germany and what they cost is in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

A purchase of 100 euros in a crypto ETP costs 1.98 euros at Scalable Capital on the free FREE tariff. That is 0.99 euros of order fee and a 0.99 percent spread mark-up on the price. On the PRIME+ subscription the mark-up falls to 0.69 percent, but the order fee only disappears from an order volume of 250 euros. At 100 euros you pay 1.68 euros there plus a monthly charge of 4.99 euros.

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 7, 2026. The basis is three price and product pages from Scalable Capital, the cost overview for the two tariffs FREE and PRIME+, the product page for crypto ETPs and the page on the PRIME+ subscription, plus the three ETPs the provider itself highlights on its product page. The calculation covers three order sizes and both tariffs, so six cases.

The figure that surprises most in this is not the order fee. It is the spread mark-up. It appears in the price table under a line of its own named crypto fees and is charged as a percentage, not as a flat amount. That is precisely why it grows with every euro you invest, while the order fee stays at 0.99 euros.

Scalable Capital and crypto: you buy ETPs, not coins

The most important sentence first, because it determines everything else: at Scalable Capital you trade crypto exclusively through ETPs. The provider's product page itself calls the offering crypto ETPs and describes the route in a way that needs no additional wallet. According to the provider, 32 cryptocurrencies are available as ETPs, with a minimum of one euro, and some papers come with staking rewards.

ETP stands for exchange traded product. It is an exchange-traded security that tracks the price of another asset, here the price of a cryptocurrency. So you acquire a paper in your securities account, not a coin on a blockchain. Anyone who buys Bitcoin via such a paper has afterwards no private key, no address and no way to send the holding to a wallet of their own.

That is neither good nor bad; it is a different product with different properties. The differences between coin, ETN and certificate we have taken apart in a separate article. Anyone who first wants to see which exchange-traded crypto products are available in Germany at all will find the situation in the overview of crypto ETFs and ETPs in Germany.

What ends up in the securities account and what does not

What ends up there is a security with an ISIN, tradable like a share. What does not end up there is a balance you could withdraw, send or secure in a hardware device. Custody, according to the provider, sits with the ETP issuer, which stores the underlying cryptocurrencies with specialised custodians.

The 0.99 percent spread mark-up is the actual crypto fee

Scalable Capital's price table has one line that applies to crypto alone. That line is named crypto fees and states a spread mark-up of 0.99 percent on the FREE tariff and 0.69 percent on PRIME+. A footnote in the provider's cost overview makes clear that this line applies to all financial instruments that track the value of cryptocurrencies, ETPs, ETCs and ETNs included.

A spread is the gap between the buying and selling price of a paper. A spread mark-up means that something is added on top of that gap, which exists anyway. On your settlement statement this mark-up does not appear as a fee item of its own. It sits in the price at which you are filled. Anyone who looks only at the line with the order fee thereby misses the larger part of the cost as soon as the order volume is above around one hundred euros.

For the calculation below, the obvious assumption applies that the percentage mark-up relates to the order volume. On a purchase of 1,000 euros, 0.99 percent is therefore 9.90 euros, with the order fee beside it at 0.99 euros. The ratio flips completely with order size: at 100 euros both items carry the same weight, at 1,000 euros the mark-up carries ten times the order fee.

The calculation: what is left of 100, 250 and 1,000 euros in the ETP

Here are the six calculated cases. The percentages relate to the respective order volume; the monthly charge for PRIME+ is not yet included in this table, because it is incurred independently of individual purchases.

Of 100 euros, then, 98.02 euros arrives in the paper on the FREE tariff. At 250 euros it is 246.53 euros, at 1,000 euros 989.11 euros. The share falls with order size, because the fixed order fee spreads across more euros, but it falls only as far as the floor set by the spread mark-up. A FREE purchase never gets below 0.99 percent, however large it is.

On PRIME+ that floor sits at 0.69 percent, and from 250 euros it is also the entire price, because the order fee drops to zero there. That is why the PRIME+ column shows an identical 0.69 percent at both 250 and 1,000 euros.

PRIME+ at 4.99 euros a month: from what order volume the subscription pays off

PRIME+ costs 4.99 euros a month, FREE costs nothing. For crypto the subscription brings two advantages: the spread mark-up falls by 0.30 percentage points, and the order fee of 0.99 euros disappears from an order volume of 250 euros. Both have to earn the monthly charge back first.

Assuming a single crypto purchase a month, the tariffs break even at an order volume of around 1,334 euros. Below that FREE is cheaper, above it PRIME+. An example in the other direction: anyone who puts 1,000 euros into a crypto ETP once a month pays 10.89 euros on FREE and 11.89 euros on PRIME+ including the subscription. In that case the subscription is one euro more expensive, even though it has the lower fee line.

This calculation looks at crypto alone. Anyone holding the subscription for shares, ETFs or derivatives anyway gets the lower crypto mark-up thrown in for free. Anyone considering PRIME+ only for crypto should first set the threshold of around 1,334 euros of monthly order volume beside their own purchase amounts. How other providers set that threshold is shown by the overview of the best crypto brokers.

Savings plan from 1 euro with no order fee: the mark-up stays all the same

Savings plan executions are free of charge at Scalable Capital on all broker models, from a savings rate of one euro. That sounds like a zero tariff, and with shares and ETFs it is one. With crypto the spread mark-up is untouched by it, because it does not belong to the order fee but to the crypto fees line.

In practice that means: a monthly crypto savings rate of 100 euros costs 0.99 euros per execution on FREE and 0.69 euros on PRIME+. Over twelve months that adds up to 11.88 and 8.28 euros respectively. For the savings plan case the subscription threshold shifts markedly upwards, because PRIME+ can no longer save any order fee here: only from a monthly savings rate of around 1,664 euros does the lower mark-up carry the monthly charge.

Anyone saving in small instalments is therefore better off with crypto on the free tariff, and across a very wide range. That is the reverse of the reflex one is used to with brokers.

TER from 0.15 to 2.50 percent: product costs vary by more than sixteenfold

Alongside the broker's costs sits the ongoing charge of the paper itself. The technical term for it is the TER, the total expense ratio: the annual costs of an exchange-traded product as a percentage of the amount invested. This rate is never debited. It is taken from the product's assets on an ongoing basis and thereby depresses the price.

Scalable Capital highlights three papers on its crypto product page, and their TERs lie far apart:

Between the cheapest and the most expensive of these three papers lies more than sixteenfold on the ongoing cost rate. Calculated on 1,000 euros and one year, that is 1.50 euros against 25.00 euros, a difference of 23.50 euros. The broker's spread mark-up is incurred once, at purchase; the TER is incurred every year. Over a holding period of several years, product selection is therefore the bigger lever than the choice of tariff.

A side effect of the table: the most expensive of the three papers is the one with staking rewards. Whether the distributed income outweighs the higher TER depends on the staking yield of the respective network and on the issuer's terms. That yield varies from month to month; the paper's ongoing cost rate stays constant.

Where to look up the TER yourself

The TER appears in the key information document of the respective paper, which every issuer has to publish, and additionally on the product page in your securities account. Anyone comparing two ETPs on the same cryptocurrency compares that figure first, then the trading spread on the chosen exchange.

Custody with the ETP issuer: no delivery claim, no wallet of your own

Scalable Capital describes custody clearly. Responsibility sits with the ETP issuer, which stores the underlying cryptocurrencies with specialised custodians. For you that removes key management, and with it the risk of losing a seed phrase.

What you have bought instead is a different risk. An ETP is as a rule a bearer bond, that is a claim against the issuer. If that issuer becomes insolvent, the collateralisation helps you only as far as it is legally separated from its remaining assets. This issuer risk does not exist with a coin in your own wallet; there you carry the risk of your own custody instead.

Anyone who wants to hold both side by side, an ETP in the securities account and a holding in self-custody, needs a route other than Scalable Capital for the second part. An exchange that pays out real coins, and a device that keeps the keys offline, are the usual building blocks for that.

Exchange trading hours: a crypto ETP stands still at the weekend

Crypto markets run around the clock, seven days a week. For ETPs that does not hold. On its product page Scalable Capital points out explicitly that ETPs are tradable only during regular exchange trading hours and that prices reflect the underlying crypto markets.

For a savings plan that is irrelevant. For someone who wants to react to a price slump on a Sunday evening, it is the decisive difference from buying directly on a crypto exchange. The price then keeps moving, only your order does not. On Monday morning the gap to the Friday close can be considerable, and you will be filled at whatever price applies then.

Tax on crypto ETPs: why the holding period depends on the delivery claim

With cryptocurrencies held directly in private assets, the one-year rule under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act applies: after more than twelve months of holding, the gain stays tax-free; inside the period your personal tax rate applies. With a security that is not automatically the case.

What matters is whether the paper embodies a delivery claim, that is the right to exchange the bond for the actual cryptocurrency. Physically backed papers with such a claim are regularly treated like a direct investment, so under section 23 with the one-year rule. A pure bearer bond without that claim falls under section 20, and then the flat withholding tax of 25 percent plus the solidarity surcharge applies, regardless of how long you have held. The revised circular of the German Federal Ministry of Finance of March 6, 2025 is the authoritative administrative basis for this.

In practice that means: the broker does not give you the answer. It is to be found in the securities prospectus and in the key information document of the individual ETP. Two papers on the same cryptocurrency can run differently for tax purposes. Anyone holding several positions should settle that before buying rather than at tax return time, and in case of doubt speak to a tax adviser. This article does not replace tax advice.

Trade Republic, comdirect and Bitpanda: where Scalable Capital sits beside them

Scalable Capital is not alone with this model. Several German providers make crypto available via securities and charge the lion's share through a percentage spread rather than a visible fee. The comparison is therefore worth making along two questions: how high is the percentage share, and do I get real coins or a paper?

At Scalable Capital the answer to the second question is unambiguously a paper. With providers that sell real coins, the question of withdrawability is added, that is whether and at what price you can send the holding to an address of your own. The two cannot be set off against each other; they are different products with different risks.

On the cost side a simple rule of thumb follows from this analysis: below 250 euros of order volume the fixed order fee decides, above it the percentage decides. A provider with one euro of order fee and a 0.5 percent spread is more expensive on small purchases and markedly cheaper on large ones than one with no order fee and a one percent spread.

Scalable Capital crypto in figures: the balance of this analysis

The visible fee at Scalable Capital is low at 0.99 euros per order, and with crypto it is the smaller part of the cost. The larger part is carried by the spread mark-up, 0.99 percent on FREE and 0.69 percent on PRIME+, and it grows with every euro invested. On 100 euros that adds up to 1.98 euros of cost, on 1,000 euros to 10.89 euros.

The PRIME+ subscription pays off for crypto alone only at amounts far above what a typical savings plan moves. And over several years it is the TER of the chosen paper that decides, not the tariff: between 0.15 and 2.50 percent a year lies more than sixteenfold. Anyone who picks the paper carefully saves more than with any change of tariff.

That leaves the point no fee table captures: an ETP is a security. You get the price, not the coin, and you get the exchange trading hours thrown in. Anyone who wants exactly that will find it comfortable. Anyone who wants their own keys is in the wrong place here, and that is not a question of cost.

Scalable Capital and crypto: Your next three steps

1. Work through your own order size before you choose the tariff. If your monthly crypto outlay is below around 1,334 euros on single purchases, or below around 1,664 euros on a savings plan, FREE is the cheaper choice. How other providers price the same case is shown by the overview of crypto savings plans on Bitcoin.
2. Decide deliberately between paper and coin. If you want to hold the position in your own custody at some point, you need real coins, and therefore a route other than an ETP account. Which devices keep the keys offline is in the hardware wallet comparison.
3. Check the TER and the delivery claim on the ETP you pick. The TER decides the ongoing cost, the delivery claim decides the tax. Both are in the key information document. Anyone who would rather buy directly will find the licensed trading venues among the best crypto exchanges.

(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Anyone searching for “buy Solana with PayPal” is usually looking for a button in the PayPal app. In Germany there isn't one. What there is, is a detour: you top up a crypto exchange with euros from your PayPal account and buy Solana there. That detour costs you two things an ordinary bank transfer does not: a fee whose size you only see right at the end, and three days during which your SOL may not leave the exchange.

With Solana two further quirks come on top, ones that Bitcoin and Ether do not have in this form. A Solana account has to keep a minimum balance, otherwise the network closes it. And anyone who wants to delegate the SOL they bought straight away waits a second time after the 72 hours. This article works through the costs of three deposit routes and shows where the transfer to your own wallet typically fails.

The buy button in the PayPal app does not exist in Germany

Two things are readily conflated in guides: PayPal as a dealer in crypto assets and PayPal as a payment route. The first exists in the United States, the second in Europe. On PayPal's German site the address of the crypto product page leads nowhere, and a trade in crypto assets does not appear in the German terms of use.

That is not a formality; it determines who your counterparty is. If you buy via the detour, you hold your SOL with the exchange, not with PayPal. Custody, authorisation and, in a dispute, liability therefore sit with the exchange. In this chain PayPal is only the route by which your euro gets there.

The detour: PayPal tops up euros at the exchange, the purchase happens there

The sequence is the same in every case. You open an account at a crypto exchange, verify your identity, connect PayPal as a deposit route and transfer euros. You then buy SOL with that euro balance. This differs from a direct purchase in three respects: you need a verified exchange account, you pay a fee twice, once for the deposit and once for the trade, and you get a withdrawal lock thrown in.

Which providers accept PayPal at all keeps changing. It is verifiable at Kraken, whose fee overview lists PayPal as a euro deposit route for the European Economic Area, with a minimum of one euro and almost instant crediting. Which other houses offer this route and what they charge for it is in the overview of buying with PayPal; the terms there always come from the provider itself, because they change without notice.

A 72-hour withdrawal lock: what the exchange holds after a PayPal deposit

The real price of the convenience is not a fee but time. After a deposit by PayPal, Kraken imposes a withdrawal lock of 72 hours. During that period you can trade but withdraw nothing: neither euros back to your account nor SOL to your own wallet. The same lock applies to the debit card. With an ordinary SEPA transfer it does not exist.

The reason is chargeback risk. A PayPal payment can be disputed after the fact, a crypto withdrawal cannot. The exchange therefore holds the amount until the chargeback window is practically over. For you that means: anyone who wants to move into self-custody immediately after buying cannot. And anyone who wants to sit out a price move during those three days does have the option to sell, but still will not get the proceeds paid out.

The only fee you do not know in advance

For SEPA, SWIFT and debit card, Kraken states the deposit fee up front and puts a number on it: SEPA free, debit card 0.25 euros plus 3.75 percent, a SWIFT transfer three euros. For PayPal there is no figure at that point, but a reference to processing fees that vary by region and only appear on the final confirmation page.

That is not an insinuation; it is precisely what the provider states. For you it means that this article too cannot cleanly calculate the PayPal variant, and you should distrust any guide that asserts a fixed percentage at this point. The only figure that holds up is the one shown in the order process before your click. Read it before you confirm, and abort if it surprises you.

What arrives in SOL from 100 euros, depending on the deposit route

The two routes that state their fee up front can be calculated. The basis is the terms of early October 2026, a SOL price of 106.86 euros and the trading fee of the lowest tier in professional trading, that is 0.80 percent as a taker in the order book.

• SEPA transfer: no deposit fee. Of 100 euros, 0.80 euros goes on the trading fee, 99.20 euros is invested, which is around 0.9283 SOL. No withdrawal lock, but up to three banking days if the provider does not support instant transfers.
• Debit card: 0.25 euros plus 3.75 percent, so exactly 4.00 euros. That leaves 96.00 euros, of which another 0.77 euros goes on the trading fee, 95.23 euros is invested, which is around 0.8912 SOL. Plus a 72-hour lock.
• PayPal: credited almost instantly, fee unknown in advance, 72-hour lock.

The difference between SEPA and debit card comes to around 0.037 SOL, for just under 4 euros of extra cost on 100 euros. Anyone who buys through the simple buy button in the app instead of professional trading pays 1.00 percent there rather than 0.80 percent, and that price additionally contains a mark-up on the market rate that appears in no fee line. On small amounts that mark-up is regularly larger than everything argued over in fee tables.

A Solana account needs a minimum balance of 0.00065024 SOL

This is where the similarity with Bitcoin and Ether ends. Solana requires a minimum deposit for every account, which the network withholds for the storage space occupied. A simple account currently comes to 650,240 lamports, and a lamport is one billionth of a SOL. That is 0.00065024 SOL, so around seven cents at the early-October price.

The amount is tiny, the consequence is not. Anyone who withdraws their holdings completely and pushes the account below that threshold has their account collected by the network. In practice that means for you: always leave a small remainder if you want to keep using a Solana wallet, and budget for that remainder when you want to send “everything”. The address itself stays valid; what disappears is the account behind it, along with the balance you did not withdraw.

SPL tokens need an account of their own, and that costs again

The same mechanism hits you a second time as soon as you hold tokens on Solana alongside SOL, a stablecoin for instance. Such tokens do not simply sit in your wallet but in an account of their own for each token, the associated token account. That too occupies storage, that too needs a minimum deposit, and at 1,488,440 lamports, that is 0.00148844 SOL or around 16 cents, it is more than twice as high as for the simple account.

This account is created on the first receipt, and it is paid for out of your SOL balance. So anyone who buys SOL and immediately swaps all of it into a stablecoin ends up with no SOL and can then no longer sign a transaction. On this network a small SOL holding in the wallet is not an accessory but a prerequisite.

Priority fees: the surcharge that is added under heavy load

The base fee of a Solana transaction is in the range of fractions of a cent. Alongside it sits the priority fee, a voluntary tip with which a transaction is moved ahead under heavy load. In early October that additional fee was consistently zero across a broad field of recent blocks, so the network was not congested.

You should not rely on that nonetheless. In phases of high load, for instance at the launch of a sought-after token, these surcharges rise sharply, and a transaction without a surcharge then sits there or fails. Anyone transferring in such phases raises the priority fee in the wallet and does not repeat the send in a hurry, because every attempt costs again.

The transfer to your own wallet and the wrong network

SOL exists on Solana, and there are wrapped versions of it on other chains. A Solana address is a string of letters and digits with no leading prefix; an Ethereum address, by contrast, begins with zero and x. Anyone who sends SOL to an address on the wrong chain, or picks the wrong network at withdrawal, as a rule loses the amount for good, because nobody there can access it.

That is why the same routine applies before every larger withdrawal: a small test amount first, then the rest. The few cents of fee for the test send are the cheapest insurance this network has to offer. Which devices keep the keys off the computer is shown by the hardware wallet comparison.

Staking after the purchase: two waiting periods that add up

Many buy SOL in order to delegate it. Delegating means you transfer your vote to a validator, that is to a machine that confirms blocks, and receive a share of its reward. The keys stay with you, but you cannot sell during that time.

On the PayPal route two waiting periods lie one behind the other. First the 72 hours during which you cannot move the SOL off the exchange. Then, when you want to end the delegation again, the network's waiting period: a Solana epoch comprises 432,000 blocks, which at the usual block intervals corresponds to roughly two days, and the release only takes effect with the next epoch. Anyone who has to be able to sell again quickly budgets for those days. Which providers take delegating off your hands and what they keep for it is in the comparison of staking providers.

Holding period and exemption threshold under section 23 of the Income Tax Act for your SOL

For investors in Germany, selling crypto assets held privately counts as a private disposal transaction. After one year of holding, a gain stays tax-free. Within the year it counts as other income and is charged at your personal tax rate, provided the sum of all such gains in the year exceeds the exemption threshold. An exemption threshold is not an allowance: once it is exceeded, the whole amount is taxable, not just the excess.

When buying via PayPal the documentation matters above all, because the payment route has one station more. Purchase date, purchase price, fees and the later transfer to your own wallet belong on record; a transfer between your own wallets is not itself a sale. Tax questions around delegating we have covered in more detail for Ether elsewhere, in the version on Ethereum via PayPal; the principles apply equally. This section is an explanation, not tax advice.

What to watch in the provider's MiCA authorisation

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets, MiCA for short, providers of crypto services in the European Union need a permission. That permission is valid Europe-wide and is granted by the supervisor of the country in which the provider is based, in Germany by BaFin. For you that is the difference between a supervised house and an offering where, in a dispute, nobody is responsible.

It can be checked before the first deposit: an authorised provider names its registered office, the competent supervisor and its permission in the imprint or in the legal notices, and it can be found in the register of the relevant supervisor. Anyone who finds nothing there deposits nothing there. Which houses are tradable with authorisation in Germany is set out by the comparison of crypto exchanges. We wrote the same thing up for the Bitcoin route in the version on Bitcoin via PayPal.

Solana with PayPal: What to take away

The PayPal route is convenient and rarely the cheapest. It pays off when you want to deposit quickly and without a bank account, and it gets in the way as soon as you want to hold the SOL yourself or delegate it promptly.

1. Decide before the deposit whether you have the three days. If you are leaving the SOL alone anyway, the lock does not weigh much; if you want to move into your own wallet right away, take SEPA. Which providers accept PayPal and what they charge is in the overview of buying with PayPal.
2. Check the authorisation before you send money. Registered office, supervisor and permission come from the provider itself, and a glance at the register takes two minutes. An assessment of the tradable houses is provided by the comparison of crypto exchanges.
3. Practise the transfer with a tiny amount and leave a SOL remainder. A test send first, then the rest, and never empty the account completely. Which devices separate the keys from the computer is shown by the hardware wallet comparison.

The terms on deposit routes, fees and lock periods are in the overview of Kraken's deposit options; how Solana handles accounts and minimum deposits is in the network's documentation.

(As of October 6, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The Ethereum price stands at $2,598.54 on Wednesday morning. That is 3.9 percent below the level of 24 hours earlier, or 2,321.84 euros, down 3.5 percent. The figures come from CoinGecko's price feed on October 7, 2026. The trigger for the move is not new, but it has hardened: the American spot ETFs on Ether have recorded more redemptions than inflows for a sixth consecutive trading day, and in the derivatives market leveraged long positions were closed by force.

Three things follow from that which you can verify yourself, and they are what this article is about. First, the levels at which the price has caught itself on the way down over recent days. Second, the distance between the current price and the price at which a leveraged position gets liquidated. Third, the tax side of a sale, because a falling price is the moment when the one-year rule and loss offsetting stop being theory.

Ethereum price on October 7, 2026: $2,598 and 2,321 euros

The daily range was narrow and nonetheless directional. Over the past 24 hours the high stood at $2,723.16 and the low at $2,599.82, measured by CoinGecko as of October 7. Between high and low lie 4.5 percent. The current price of $2,598.54 sits below that low, so the market left the range at its lower edge while the measurement was running.

Ether's market capitalisation comes to $317.0 billion on the same query. The price is 47.5 percent away from its all-time high of $4,946.05. That framing matters more than it sounds, because it says which part of the cycle a position is sitting in: anyone who bought at summer highs is holding a loss that is usable for tax purposes as long as the one-year period has not run out. Anyone positioned earlier faces the opposite.

The broader market is giving way the same morning. Bitcoin is down 2.6 percent, Solana 1.5 percent, XRP 3.5 percent, Dogecoin 5.7 percent and Shiba Inu 6.3 percent, all values from the same CoinGecko query of October 7. At 3.9 percent, Ether sits in the middle of that group, weaker than Bitcoin but firmer than the two meme tokens.

Sixth trading day of net outflows from the US spot ETFs

The American spot ETFs on Ether have been the most visible channel for institutional money since they were approved. A net outflow means that more shares were redeemed than created on a given trading day; the fund sells Ether from its holdings to cover it. That is exactly what happened on October 6, for the sixth time in a row.

The surveys diverge on the size of the daily outflow, and that spread belongs in any honest account. The German-language outlet BeInCrypto puts October 6 at $201.9 million and calls it the largest daily outflow since mid-September. Phemex arrives at $202 million, CryptoSlate at $206 million. The analyses by Blockonomi and Parameter.io, by contrast, rely on Lookonchain figures and report a net flow of minus $58.29 million for the same day, equal to 21,432 Ether, against minus $215.37 million or 79,193 Ether over seven days.

What explains the discrepancy

The difference comes from providers using different fund groups and different cut-off times. Some surveys count only the nine original spot products, others add converted trusts; some close the trading day at 4 p.m. New York time, others run to midnight UTC. What holds up, therefore, is the direction and the streak, not the second decimal place. The streak is unambiguous, and according to Parameter.io it is the longest continuous outflow phase since June 2026. You can look up the current state yourself at any time, as the flow data is public at CoinGlass.

What that streak means in practice is more limited than headlines suggest. Measured against a market capitalisation of $317 billion, $200 million is around 0.06 percent. The pressure comes less from the volume itself than from the signal trading algorithms read into it, and from the leveraged positions tied to that signal.

Long liquidations between $15.3 million and $400 million

A liquidation is the forced closing of a leveraged position by the exchange, as soon as the posted collateral is no longer sufficient. The process runs automatically, and it sells into a falling market, which amplifies the decline in the short term.

Here too the figures lie far apart, depending on the window and the survey. BeInCrypto puts liquidated Ether long positions over the past 24 hours at $164.88 million, citing CoinGlass, against $10.22 million on the short side. Parameter.io and Blockonomi, also citing CoinGlass, give $15.3 million in total for a different 24-hour window, of which $10.5 million was on long positions. Watcher.Guru separately reports around $400 million in long positions closed market-wide within 20 minutes, that is across all coins and not only Ether.

These three figures do not necessarily contradict each other; they measure different things: a rolling daily window, a daily window that began later, and a short event window across the whole market. What counts for you is the shared pattern. In all three surveys the long side carries by far the larger share of the forced closures, with the ratio running between roughly sixteen to one and roughly three to two. Leveraged bets on rising prices were therefore clearly in the majority when the price gave way.

Support at $2,558 and the 50-day line at $2,500

The technical assessment by Parameter.io and Blockonomi of October 7, 2026 names four support lines and three obstacles above. Below sit the 20-day moving average at $2,656, a level at $2,631, another at $2,558 and the 50-day moving average at $2,500. Above stand $2,781, $3,075 and $3,260.

Put the current price of $2,598.54 beside those and the picture is clear. The two upper support lines at $2,656 and $2,631 have already been breached and now act as resistance. It is 1.6 percent to the next level at $2,558 and 3.8 percent to the 50-day line at $2,500. On the upside, reaching $2,781 would take 7.0 percent.

The level that counts is therefore the $2,500 line. It counts not because of its round number but because the 50-day moving average appears as the lowest support line named in either source. If the price falls below it, the zone for which any support is currently identified comes to an end. The RSI reading remains above 50 on the same analyses, and the MVRV ratio is given as a range of 1.4 to 3.5 percent. Both values come from technical analysis and are snapshots, not promises.

A second point belongs beside this, because the two are often conflated. Ethereum's protocol side is currently developing independently of the price. As cryptoticker reported on October 6, 2026, the Glamsterdam upgrade is live on the Sepolia testnet, there however with a gas limit of 64 million instead of the 200 million previously discussed. A testnet activation is not a price driver and should not be read as one; it is a scheduling marker for what is due on mainnet later.

Liquidation distance at 2x, 5x, 10x and 20x leverage: how to check your position

When leveraged long positions are closed in series, the obvious question is how far your own position is from that point. The calculation is simpler than many interfaces suggest. With isolated margin and no fees, the arithmetic liquidation price is the entry price times one minus one divided by the leverage. A leverage of 10 therefore tolerates around a 10 percent decline, a leverage of 20 around 5 percent.

Applied to the current price of $2,598.54 that gives: 2x liquidates arithmetically at around $1,299, 5x at around $2,079, 10x at around $2,339 and 20x at around $2,469. Now the comparison that counts: the range of the past 24 hours was 4.5 percent. A position at 20x leverage therefore sits inside this market's normal daily move, one at 10x just outside it.

Three variables that push the calculation higher

The formula above is the best case. In practice the actual liquidation price sits closer to the entry, for three reasons. The exchange's maintenance margin pulls the threshold in, usually by half a percentage point to two points depending on position size. Trading fees and the funding rate on perpetual contracts eat into the collateral continuously, especially when the long side predominates and pays for it. And under cross margin the entire account balance is liable, not just the amount posted.

In practical terms: look up the liquidation price shown in your exchange's position overview rather than the one you calculated yourself, and set it against the levels from the section above. If your liquidation price sits between $2,558 and $2,631, it stands precisely in the zone where the analyses see the next support lines. If you want to see the fee and margin models of different platforms side by side, they are in the cryptoticker comparison of perp DEX platforms.

The one-year holding period under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act

A falling price is the moment when the tax side turns from a theoretical topic into a concrete line item. In Germany, crypto assets count as other assets within the meaning of section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the Income Tax Act. It states that a private disposal transaction exists where the period between acquisition and disposal is no more than one year.

The period runs to the day, not by calendar year. Anyone who bought on February 14, 2026 is outside the period on February 15, 2027. A sale after that is tax-free regardless of the size of the gain. A sale within the period is taxable and is charged at your personal income tax rate, not at the flat withholding rate.

For allocating several purchases of the same coin, the order is decisive. The statute prescribes the FIFO method in sentence 3 explicitly only for foreign currency amounts; for crypto assets the tax authority has set it as the default case in its guidance on crypto assets where individual allocation is not possible. In practice that means your oldest holding counts as sold first, so your purchase date from twelve months ago decides whether a sale today falls inside the period.

The 1,000-euro exemption threshold and loss offsetting within the calendar year

Two sentences of the same section matter most on a loss-making day. Under section 23 (3) sentence 5 of the Income Tax Act, gains stay tax-free where the total gain from private disposal transactions in the calendar year came to less than 1,000 euros. This is an exemption threshold and not an allowance: at 999 euros of gain everything stays tax-free, at 1,000 euros the full amount becomes taxable.

Sentence 7 governs the opposite direction. Losses may only be offset up to the amount of the gain you made from private disposal transactions in the same calendar year. They cannot be set against income from employment, letting or capital. Whatever remains is carried back one assessment period under sentence 8 or forward into following years, but there too only against gains from private disposal transactions.

From this follows the actual check on a day like this one. If you have already realised taxable gains in 2026 from sales inside the one-year period, then a sale at a loss that also falls inside the period lowers your tax burden for this year. If, on the other hand, your Ether has been in your holdings for more than a year, a loss is worthless for tax purposes, because the transaction is no longer a private disposal at all. Both cases are common, and they lead to opposite decisions. Which tools track the deadlines and the FIFO allocation automatically is shown in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

Whether the one-year period survives in this form is politically open at the moment. A petition to abolish the one-year holding period comes before the Bundestag's petitions committee on October 12, 2026, as cryptoticker reported on October 6. What is deliberated there changes nothing about today's legal position, but it is a date to keep an eye on before you commit to long-term selling plans.

Purchase route and custody: what evidence a licensed exchange in Germany provides

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets has applied in full, any provider addressing retail clients in Germany needs authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. That this authorisation is no formality became clear on October 7, 2026, when BaFin refused the trading venue bitcoin.de its licence under the regulation; client assets there continue to be held in custody by futurum bank AG, as cryptoticker reported the same day.

Two things about this are practical for you. First, before a purchase you should check whether your provider appears in the public list of licensed institutions; the supervisor maintains it, and a provider without an entry is either operating under a transitional rule or not permitted at all. Second, the form of custody decides how quickly you can act if it matters. If your Ether sits with the exchange, you are tied in the event of a withdrawal freeze, and experience shows that such freezes occur precisely when the market is moving.

The third point concerns the records. A licensed platform gives you evidence for every purchase and sale with date, time, quantity and euro value. You need that data later for the Anlage SO of your tax return, and you need it in full, including for swaps from one coin into another. A swap is, for tax purposes, a sale followed by a purchase, and it restarts the one-year period for the coin received.

Staking in a downturn: locked Ether and the exit queue

Anyone who has staked Ether faces an additional question on a day like this. Staked Ether cannot be sold immediately. Exiting validator operation runs through a queue whose length depends on the number of validators exiting at the same time; the protocol permits only a limited number of exits per time period. With providers that pool staking, their own withdrawal period comes on top.

From that follows a plain consequence, one that belongs settled before you enter rather than after: the part of your holdings that is staked is not available for short-term decisions. If you want to react to price moves with staked Ether, you need either a liquid staking product with a tradable share certificate or an unstaked portion as a buffer.

For tax purposes the staking position is now settled: the tax authority treats the rewards as other income in the year they are received, and it does not apply to crypto assets the extension of the holding period to ten years that was originally discussed for income-generating assets. The rewards themselves, as a separate acquisition, start their own one-year period from the day they arrive.

Ethereum price: what to take away

The day delivers a clear picture and three verifiable steps. The price stands at $2,598.54, the next identified support line sits 1.6 percent below it at $2,558, the lowest at $2,500. The ETF streak is in its sixth day, and the forced closures hit predominantly the long side.

1. Read the liquidation distance, do not estimate it. Open your platform's position overview and compare the liquidation price shown there with the levels at $2,631, $2,558 and $2,500. If it sits in that zone, the position is at risk within a normal weekly move. The margin and fee models of the platforms are in the comparison of perp DEX providers.
2. Hold your purchase date against the one-year period. Look up the acquisition date for each partial holding and count twelve months to the day. Only holdings inside the period produce a tax-usable loss on a sale at a loss, and that loss can be offset under section 23 (3) sentence 7 of the Income Tax Act solely against gains of the same kind. Which tools track this automatically is in the comparison of tax tools and portfolio trackers.
3. Check custody before it gets urgent. Review which share of your holdings sits with an exchange, which is staked and which is in your own custody. Only the last part is available at any time. An overview of the devices and how they differ is in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you hold crypto assets at bitcoin.de, the short answer is this: on the operator's own account your balance is still there, but you cannot trade with it for the time being. The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) has refused futurum bank AG, the operator of bitcoin.de, authorisation as a provider of crypto-asset services. The parent company Bitcoin Group SE announced this on Tuesday, October 6, in a mandatory disclosure, stating at the same time that customers' assets would continue to be held securely until their transfer to an alternative regulated custodian and that all customer claims would remain unaffected.

An ongoing procedure has thereby turned into a decision. At the end of September the position was still that the application sat with the supervisor and the platform was waiting for the permission; we wrote about that on September 29. This piece sets out what the refusal triggers in practice: what happens to your balance, which routes Bitcoin Group SE itself names, what a change of custodian means for your holding period, and how you can tell at another exchange whether it holds the permission that has just been refused here.

The BaFin refuses the MiCAR authorisation, and the forbearance ends with it

MiCAR is the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, Regulation (EU) 2023/1114; it sets out who may offer crypto-asset services commercially in the European Union and which duties come with that. A crypto-asset service is any commercial activity involving other people's crypto assets, from exchange through trading venue to custody. Whoever offers one needs authorisation from the competent supervisor; in Germany that is the BaFin.

It is precisely that authorisation the authority has refused futurum bank AG. The Bitcoin Group SE disclosure contains the sentence that changes the situation: with it, the previous forbearance of the provision of crypto-asset services by futurum bank AG no longer exists either. Forbearance is the supervisor's tacit acceptance of an activity while a procedure is running. It is not a permission, and the forbearance ends as soon as the procedure is decided.

The company itself relays the reasoning. In the BaFin's view, according to the disclosure, the current degree of progress on implementation and operationalisation, and the further progress achievable in the short term, were insufficient, making a refusal of authorisation unavoidable at this point. Moritz Eckert, chief executive of Bitcoin Group SE, calls the decision a setback in the same disclosure, considers it wrong on the substance and points out that the implementation of the required points had already been advanced. That account comes from the company affected; no public reasoning of its own from the supervisor on the matter is available.

Important for placing this: a refused authorisation is an administrative decision about requirements on organisation, processes and documentation. It says nothing about a company's solvency and nothing about the existence of customer claims.

The wording on custody: customer assets secured, claims unaffected

For you as a customer, everything hangs on two sentences of the mandatory disclosure. The first: futurum bank AG continues to hold customers' assets securely until their transfer to the alternative regulated custodian. The second: all customer claims remain unaffected. Both sentences appear in a publication by a listed company, which stands behind their content.

Custody here means that a service provider holds the keys to your crypto assets and manages them for you, while the assets are economically yours. It is precisely that separation between holding and being entitled which explains why the disclosure makes two separate commitments: one on custody and one on claims.

What the disclosure does not say is at least as important. A date for the transfer to the alternative custodian is not stated there, the future custodian is not named, and on the question of whether and from when withdrawals are possible there is not a sentence. All that is announced is that futurum bank AG will inform customers on its own website in the near future about the specific arrangements, the steps required of customers and the timetable. Anyone planning a withdrawal today therefore has an assurance about existence, but no date.

From marketplace to broker: the chronology since June 12

The refusal hits a platform that has not been running normally for months. According to the trade publication Cointelegraph, trading at bitcoin.de has been largely suspended since June 12. Behind it is a rebuild: the original marketplace, on which buyers and sellers were brought together directly, was to become a broker model, with more than a hundred crypto assets, with swap functions and with staking. The launch was scheduled for the end of June and was postponed because the authorisation was missing.

In a statement in August, according to the same report, the customers' holdings had already been moved to a new custody infrastructure and the old trading system had been switched off. That explains why holdings and trading are two different things here: the assets sit in a new environment, only the marketplace on top of it is missing. How the standstill began, we set out in August, and what the shareholder meeting at the end of August produced on it is covered in a separate piece.

The order of magnitude makes the situation relevant: Bitcoin Group SE states more than 1,100,000 registered users for bitcoin.de and an operating history of over ten years. By its own account, the holding owns 100 percent of futurum bank AG and 50 percent of Sineus Financial Services GmbH, an investment firm supervised by the BaFin. Anyone affected here is therefore not part of a niche but of one of the best-known addresses in the German crypto market.

Crypto assets are not deposits: deposit insurance does not apply here

One expectation dissolves at this point. The statutory deposit guarantee protects money in an account up to 100,000 euros per customer and institution. Crypto assets, however, are not deposits but assets held in custody, and there is no deposit guarantee for crypto balances in Germany; we described that on October 4 in our overview of the Crypto Markets Supervision Act.

A different principle takes the place of deposit insurance: the segregation of holdings. Crypto assets held in custody are to be kept separate from the service provider's own assets, and the Crypto Markets Supervision Act regulates in Section 45 how crypto assets held in custody are allocated in an insolvency. That is a general rule for every custodian in Germany. It is expressly not a statement about futurum bank AG; on its own situation, Bitcoin Group SE states that all customer claims remain unaffected.

In practice that means the protection of your balance here does not hang on a guarantee fund, but on the holdings being kept cleanly segregated and transferred correctly. That is why the announced move to a regulated custodian is the decisive event of the coming weeks, and why it is worth reading the official announcements on it.

Objection, new application, cooperation: the three routes of Bitcoin Group SE

The disclosure names three routes, and none of them carries a date. The first is the objection, the formal appeal against an administrative act lodged with the authority that issued it. The company writes that it is reviewing the decision and has the opportunity to object. A deadline for that is not stated in the disclosure; anyone naming a concrete deadline is not reading it from this source.

The second route is a renewed application for MiCAR authorisation at a later point. The third is the one the company says it is currently pursuing: a cooperation agreement with regulated German companies, one for trading and one for custody, so that trading becomes possible again through the technically renewed bitcoin.de app. The time horizon the disclosure gives for that reads: within the next few weeks.

For you, the combination of three routes and zero dates means above all one thing: there is no predictability at present. Anyone who depends on being able to trade at a particular moment should not tie that part of their holdings to an assurance without a date. Anyone who can leave things sitting has, going by the wording of the disclosure, no cause for hasty decisions.

What a change of custodian triggers for the holding period and documentation

For crypto assets held privately, a one-year holding period applies in Germany under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act: if more than twelve months lie between acquisition and disposal, a gain from the private disposal stays tax-free. Within the year the tax liability applies, and the proof of the acquisition date and acquisition cost lies with you, not with the platform.

What a transfer to another custodian triggers in tax terms depends on the specific arrangements, which futurum bank AG has not yet published. As long as those conditions are open, any blanket statement on it is unserious. What holds up is the preparation: pull a complete export of your transactions now, while access to the account exists, secure the account statements and trading records, and note the holding per crypto asset with a date. If the custodian changes later, you will have the earlier position in black and white.

The second part of the preparation concerns custody itself. A hardware wallet is a device that keeps your private keys offline, so that no service provider stands between you and your crypto assets. Anyone holding part of their stock for the long term can remove exactly that part from dependence on authorisation procedures; a market comparison is in our overview of hardware wallets. The price for it is personal responsibility: whoever loses the key loses the coins, and nobody can retrieve them.

Transitional permission, the KMAG and the company database: the frame around the decision

MiCAR applies directly throughout the European Union, but it contains no German procedural rules. That gap is closed by the Crypto Markets Supervision Act, KMAG for short: it is the German implementation of the MiCA regulation, entered into force as Article 1 of the Financial Market Digitalisation Act and replaced the crypto rules in the Banking Act, where they had until then been treated as crypto custody business.

Decisive for understanding the present case is the transitional permission: under Section 50 of the KMAG, providers already in the market were allowed to keep working at first while they applied for the new authorisation. That transitional permission expired on December 31, 2025. Since then there has been no grey area left for crypto providers in Germany, and that is exactly why the forbearance mentioned in the disclosure was the last thing the operation could rest on. The duties an authorisation brings with it in detail we have set out separately in our overview of the MiCA obligations.

Anyone wanting to complain about the relationship between customer and provider will also find the route in the regulation: which deadlines apply to a complaints procedure and when the supervisor is brought in, we explained in August.

How a MiCAR authorisation becomes visible at another exchange

The case supplies a test question that reaches beyond bitcoin.de: does the provider holding your money and your coins actually have the permission, or is it merely applying for one? Two registers answer that. The BaFin's company database is the official register of authorisations granted in Germany; the public register of the European securities supervisor ESMA lists the authorised providers of crypto-asset services across the whole union. If a provider is not in there, that is not a detail but the answer.

Two qualifications belong with it. First, an entry says nothing about price losses: an authorisation covers supervision, capital and organisational requirements, it is no guarantee for your money and no promise of rising prices. Second, websites keep turning up that advertise with genuine register numbers belonging to other companies; a cross-check is therefore only worth anything via the name, the address and the domain together. Which venues in Germany can show a permission and how they differ on fees and selection is shown by our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

A note of our own on the market environment: Bitcoin and the large altcoins carry on moving independently of this procedure. The refusal concerns access through one particular provider, not the crypto assets themselves.

bitcoin.de: Your next three steps

1. Secure the holding and the history while access stands. Export transactions, acquisition data and the account statement and file them separately from the platform. Tools that log exactly that permanently are in our comparison of tax and portfolio tools.
2. Wait for official announcements and ignore third parties. Bitcoin Group SE has announced that it will publish the timetable and the required steps on its own website. In situations like this, supposed helpers typically get in touch by email, telephone or messenger; nobody reputable asks for your seed or requests an advance payment to recover funds. If you need an alternative venue, pick it from the comparison of regulated crypto exchanges and look up the register entry yourself.
3. Take the long-term part out of third-party custody. What you intend to hold for years anyway does not belong on a trading venue. Which devices are candidates for that and how they differ is set out in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 7, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Speaking at Token2049 in Singapore, the chairman said Bitmine is about 100,000 ETH—roughly six to seven weeks—from its 5% cap, setting an end date on a buying spree that made it the world's largest Ethereum treasury.

Daniel Rhyne locked his company's IT administrators out of its network and demanded 20 BTC, then worth $750,000, to stop the shutdowns.

OKX raises more, $500M+ in crypto longs liquidated after a late evening selloff, and Abstract calls it quits.

The EU police agency expects blockchains to adapt to the threat, while a second report weighs the risk of data stolen now and cracked later.

The Tornado Cash founder hit back in a tweet, noting FinCEN withdrew a proposed mixer rule over concerns it could chill legitimate activity.

The long-dormant BTC saw a remarkable realized gain of about 582,198%.

As Litecoin marks 15 years since its genesis block, Grayscale’s research head Zach Pandl backs the 'OG altcoin' amid a high-stakes NYSE ETF push.

XRP community warned as one private key mistake could put funds at risk.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) triggers its first Golden Cross in two years just as $572M in liquidated longs triggers a make-or-break test.

Metallicus CEO Marshall Hayner calls out Elon Musk’s scaling challenge after engineering a 300x speedup for Dogecoin transactions.

The power of combining interactive community engagement with a utility-driven rewards layer has been unleashed during the initial stage of a partnership between Predictfully, a free-to-play sports fan engagement platform built on the Avalanche blockchain, and the nGRND Gold Protocol, an ecosystem designed to bridge the legacy gold industry with the emerging digital economy.

Launched on September 17, 2026, the joint Participation Stream Partnership integrated Predictfully’s white-label capable fan engagement platform with the nGRND Gold Protocol Staking & Rewards Ecosystem using a custom Predictfully Dynamic Soulbound Token (DSBT). By October 6, 2026, just nine days into the rollout, the initiative sparked explosive growth across all primary user metrics. New account growth skyrocketed by 472%, active players increased by 465%, and market predictions grew by 299%, driving a 56% increase in total accounts overall.

The integration proved highly effective at converting passive sports fans into verified web3 participants without the friction of stakes, odds, or a traditional house. The custom Predictfully nGRND DSBT program rapidly scaled to 35,589 total users, maintaining exceptionally high data and identity verification standards across the board. Digital wallet verification reached a flawless 100%, while email and Telegram verification levels hit 92% and 95% respectively.

Rather than creating “empty” accounts, the campaign prioritized deep, protocol-level engagement, encouraging fans to climb the leaderboards to win rewards funded by clubs and sponsors, ranging from merchandise to matchday experiences. Within the first twenty days, 32,834 users successfully completed the Predictfully DSBT process to activate their profiles, earn their first virtual NGRND, and enter the broader staking ecosystem.

Acting as a digital passport, the DSBT provides exclusive access to participation streams and dynamically tracks on-chain activity and credentials. To date, these activated participants have completed 294,502 micro-tasks to earn Reward Points, validating the partnership’s focus on sticky, repeatable user behavior over short-term speculation.

The early performance of this joint case study underscores a larger shift in decentralized growth strategies, blending sports engagement with participation-driven opportunities backed by Preserved Gold and network engagement.

By offering a plug-and-play rewards infrastructure, the nGRND Gold Protocol allows ecosystem partners to boost user acquisition and retention without exhausting internal development resources. For Predictfully, which licenses its platform to professional clubs and rights holders, the collaboration provides a continuous loop of player activation, while the nGRND Gold Protocol successfully expands its footprint of verified, high-intent network participants. Users can find out more or get started by visiting predictfully.app and nGRND.io.

The post Predictfully and nGRND Gold Protocol Secure Massive Engagement Surge in 20-Day Campaign appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• BTCC launched a refreshed Trust Center on October 7, 2026, as it marks 15 years in operation.
• The exchange says monthly Proof of Reserves reports show a 100% reserve ratio at all times.
• BTCC holds a $25.5 million Risk Reserve Fund and says it has had $0 in hacker theft since 2011.
• CertiK runs independent security audits, with support from Chainalysis, Forter, and SEON.
• BTCC now offers US stocks, gold, forex, and commodities alongside crypto.

BTCC, a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2011, has launched a refreshed Trust Center. The company announced the update on October 7, 2026, from George Town in the Cayman Islands.

The launch comes as BTCC marks its 15th year in operation. The exchange calls itself the world’s longest-serving cryptocurrency exchange.

BTCC is also a Platinum Sponsor of TOKEN2049 Singapore this year. The company says it serves over 12 million users in more than 100 countries.

What the Trust Center Includes

The Trust Center brings together BTCC’s security tools, financial protections, and transparency commitments in one place. It is meant to show users how their funds are kept safe.

Security features include multi-signature cold storage, 1:1 asset storage, and multi-layer risk monitoring. The exchange also runs anti-money laundering (AML) controls 24 hours a day.

CertiK carries out independent security audits for the exchange. BTCC also works with Chainalysis, Forter, and SEON.

The exchange publishes monthly Proof of Reserves reports. BTCC says these show a total reserve ratio of 100% at all times.

BTCC also holds a $25.5 million Risk Reserve Fund. The company says this fund acts as an extra buffer against market disruptions.

According to the exchange, it has recorded $0 in losses to hackers since it was founded in 2011.

The 0-Barrier Trading Theme

These security measures make up what BTCC calls its “0 Panic” commitment. It is part of a wider “0-Barrier Trading” theme the exchange introduced for its 15th year.

The theme has four parts. Besides 0 Panic, there is 0 Fees, which offers zero trading fees across more than 380 pairs every week.

0 Distance refers to 24/7 support in traders’ native languages. 0 Friction covers copy trading and TradingView integration.

Alex Hung, BTCC’s Head of Operations, said the exchange has faced bull markets, bear markets, high volatility, and changing regulations. “Any exchange can be built to grow,” Hung said. “The harder thing to build is the resilience to last.”

He said security comes before everything else. “Users do not hand us an account. They hand us their assets and trust,” Hung said.

BTCC now offers US stocks, gold, forex, and commodities alongside its crypto products. “Traders no longer think in asset classes,” Hung said. “They want to move between crypto, stocks, and forex without switching platforms.”

When asked if BTCC wants to be the world’s largest exchange, Hung said no. “We don’t aim to become the biggest. We aim to be the ones that raise the standard.”

The refreshed Trust Center is available now. Visitors at TOKEN2049 Singapore can find the BTCC booth at 1F (PB1-7), where the team is hosting games and handing out swag bags.

The post BTCC Crypto Exchange Launches Refreshed Trust Center for 15th Anniversary appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Winklevoss Asset Services has filed with the SEC for a spot Zcash ETF that would trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WINK.
• Gemini Trust Company would hold the ZEC, and authorized participants would use only cash to create and redeem shares.
• Cypherpunk Technologies is named in the filing and bought a $33.33 million Zcash mining fleet in August.
• ZEC rose more than 5% in 24 hours and traded above $1,375 after the filing.
• The Zcash team will decide on the NU7 upgrade activation height on October 20, with a launch planned for November 5.

Winklevoss Asset Services has filed for a spot Zcash ETF with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The fund would hold ZEC directly and seek a Nasdaq listing under the ticker WINK.

The filing was made through an S-1 registration statement. The fund would not use futures or other derivatives to track the price of ZEC.

Gemini Trust Company would act as custodian for the fund. Authorized participants would use cash, not ZEC, to create and redeem shares.

How the Spot Zcash ETF Would Work

Under the proposed structure, Gemini would hold the ZEC that backs the ETF shares. Authorized participants would buy and sell shares using cash only.

Winklevoss Asset Services would then use that cash to trade ZEC as the fund requires. This setup gives the fund direct exposure to the token.

The filing also names Cypherpunk Technologies as a provider of services tied to the Zcash network. Its role is separate from Gemini’s custody duties.

The registration does not mean the fund can begin trading. The product still needs SEC approval before it can list.

Cypherpunk Technologies already had ties to Zcash before the filing. In August, the Nasdaq-listed company said it bought a Zcash mining fleet and hosting deals.

The deal was worth $33.33 million and was made with companies linked to Winklevoss Capital. The fleet of Bitmain Z15 Pro machines runs in US facilities.

Cypherpunk estimated the equipment made up about 18% of computing power on the Zcash network. It expected monthly output of around 7,800 ZEC, depending on mining difficulty and competition.

Payment was made through a pre-funded warrant on 43,290,042 common shares. The shares were valued at $0.77 each, with an exercise price of $0.001.

ZEC Price and the NU7 Upgrade

ZEC rose more than 5% over 24 hours after the filing and traded above $1,375, according to CoinMarketCap. The wider crypto market gained nearly 1% over the same period.

The token climbed from around $1,290 to $1,350, then pulled back to about $1,320. It later rose again toward $1,380.

Market data showed resistance at $1,375 to $1,380. Support sat near $1,355 to $1,360, with a lower level at $1,340 to $1,345.

The proposed NU7 upgrade would cut the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Daily ZEC issuance would stay the same because the block reward would also be reduced.

The upgrade would also disable version 4 transactions at activation. This would block further spending from the older Sprout pool, since version 5 transactions cannot do that.

The Zcash team is set to decide on the NU7 mainnet activation height on October 20. A launch planned for November 5 depends on the results of the testnet review.

The post Winklevoss Files for Spot Zcash ETF on Nasdaq Under Ticker WINK appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Coinbase plans to relaunch Coinbase Pro by the end of 2026 for spot, futures, perpetuals, options and equities trading.
• Coinbase completed its Deribit integration, creating Coinbase Global Exchange.
• Coinbase Financial Markets will connect eligible U.S. clients to global crypto derivatives liquidity.
• Spot margin trading is coming, with leverage of up to 10 times on selected major assets.
• U.S. retail traders are expected to get access to Deribit options later this year.

Coinbase plans to bring back its Coinbase Pro trading platform by the end of this year. The crypto exchange operator also said it has finished integrating Deribit, the options exchange it bought last year.

The integration has created a new entity called Coinbase Global Exchange. Coinbase shared the news at the Token2049 Singapore event.

“For the first time in market history, we are connecting U.S. and international derivatives markets into a single liquidity pool,” Coinbase said.

Deribit Integration Links U.S. and Global Markets

Coinbase Financial Markets, the company’s U.S.-regulated futures commission merchant, will soon connect eligible U.S. clients to global crypto derivatives liquidity. Coinbase said guidance issued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in May allows this.

According to the company, U.S. institutional clients will now have a regulated way to access options and perpetual futures. Before, these products required offshore entities, multiple counterparties and separate trading venues.

Coinbase said it will roll out Deribit-powered options, spot margin and unified portfolios in the coming weeks. Eligible traders outside the U.S. will get access to options in that time frame.

U.S. institutional clients will be able to trade Deribit options and perpetual futures through Coinbase Prime. Onboarding is already open, and options trading is expected to begin in the coming weeks.

Coinbase said institutional clients will be able to trade spot, futures, perpetuals and options on one platform. They will also be able to use custody, financing and staking services in the same place.

Coinbase bought Deribit, one of the world’s largest crypto options exchanges, for about $2.9 billion in August 2025. Deribit had more than $30 billion in bitcoin options open interest as of Sept. 30, according to Coinbase.

The exchange also processed over $1 trillion in trading volume last year, the company said.

Coinbase Pro Returns With Spot Margin

The new Coinbase Pro will support trading in spot, futures, perpetuals, options and equities. Coinbase said the platform has been “rebuilt from the ground up.”

The company said it will offer faster order routing, improved execution flows and advanced tools. These are designed for high-volume active traders using complex strategies.

Coinbase shut down the original Coinbase Pro in 2022 after moving advanced trading into its main app. The move to Coinbase Advanced was completed in November 2023.

Coinbase also plans to add spot margin trading. This will let eligible traders borrow against their collateral to make larger spot trades.

Leverage will go up to 10 times on selected major assets. Other supported assets will have leverage of up to five times.

Coinbase has also added a new matching engine and shortened its onboarding process. The company changed fee tiers for Coinbase Advanced as well.

The new fee tiers start at $10,000 in qualifying volume. Both spot and derivatives trading count toward that total.

U.S. retail traders are expected to get access to Deribit options later this year, around the same time Coinbase Pro is set to return.

The post Coinbase to Relaunch Coinbase Pro by Year-End After Deribit Integration appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Conduit Technology sued Tether in New York federal court over $2.76 million in frozen USDT.
• Tether blacklisted Conduit’s treasury wallet on Sept. 24, 2025.
• Conduit says Brazilian police never asked Tether to freeze its wallet.
• The company wants access restored, at least $2.76 million in damages, punitive damages and reserve income.
• Tether had not publicly responded to the allegations as of Oct. 7.

Cross-border payments company Conduit Technology has sued Tether over $2.76 million in USDT. The funds have been frozen since September 2025.

The complaint was filed on Oct. 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. It names Tether Holdings, Tether International, Tether Operations and Tether Investments as defendants.

Conduit says the frozen USDT was part of its own working capital, not customer money. The company claims Tether restricted the funds without any legal claim against it.

Conduit Says Brazil Never Targeted Its Wallet

The dispute is linked to a Brazilian Federal Police investigation opened in 2024. The probe involves financial intermediary Bull Intermediação de Negócios and a related company, Onix Intermediações.

Conduit once provided payment services to Onix. It says that relationship ended on April 22, 2025, almost a month before it created the treasury wallet on May 20.

The company says neither Onix nor Bull owned the wallet, sent money to it or used it for transactions.

According to the complaint, Brazilian police shared a list of suspected crypto addresses with Tether’s T3 Financial Crime Unit. Conduit says its address was not on that list.

Conduit points to a July 2026 filing from Brazilian authorities. It says this showed T3 found other addresses through its own analysis, which is how Conduit’s wallet was flagged.

Conduit’s lawyers say Brazilian investigators told them they had not picked the address for blocking. The Brazilian filing was not made public with the U.S. complaint.

Tether’s Terms and Conduit’s Claims

Unlike Bitcoin, USDT can be frozen by its issuer. Tether’s terms allow freezes when required by law, when an address is tied to an investigation, or when the company considers it prudent.

Conduit does not dispute that Tether can technically freeze tokens. It argues Tether had no legal grounds and no enforceable contract allowing it to freeze these funds.

The company says the wallet handled 4,427 transactions with 78 counterparties, worth over $1.1 billion, between May and September 2025. It links the freeze to lower payment capacity, layoffs and office closures. The court has not tested those claims.

Conduit says its lawyers contacted Tether in June 2026 and sent a formal demand on Aug. 19. Tether had earlier pointed Conduit to Brazilian authorities but did not release the funds.

The lawsuit includes claims of conversion, unjust enrichment, breach of fiduciary duty and federal computer-fraud violations. Conduit has asked for a jury trial.

It seeks restored access, at least $2.76 million in damages and punitive damages. It also wants any income Tether earned on reserves backing the frozen tokens.

The case follows a separate August lawsuit from two Thai businessmen. They are challenging Tether’s freeze of about $42.4 million in USDT across 10 Ethereum addresses in October 2025.

Tether often works with law enforcement. In April, it said it supported freezing more than $344 million in USDT tied to two TRON addresses targeted by U.S. authorities.

As of Oct. 7, Tether had not publicly responded to Conduit’s allegations. The next steps include serving the lawsuit and a response from Tether.

The post Tether Sued in New York Over $2.76M in USDT Blacklisted Since 2025 appeared first on Blockonomi.

Arthur Hayes, the former BitMEX CEO and co-founder of crypto investment firm Maelstrom, told CNBC at the Gamma Prime Investing Conference in Singapore that humanity is “wasting multi-trillion dollars” on AI data centers.

His bet is that the overbuilding ends in a crash and a bailout, and that Bitcoin and other crypto absorb the money that follows.

Overbuilt, Then Bailed Out

The buildout, he argued, will leave computing power “extremely cheap and extremely plentiful.” “If you study financial history and you study every single major technological rollout, it always is overbuilt. There always is a crash, and there always is a bailout,” he stated, pointing to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and other episodes since.

“Thankfully, we have Bitcoin and other crypto to soak up that excess liquidity, and so we know the asset that’s going to perform the best when the bailout comes,” he added, telling investors “you just have to be patient.”

He claimed SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the end users behind demand for computing power, and that none of them makes money.

His contention is backed by Anthropic’s own numbers, with the firm recently sharing a prospectus ahead of a possible IPO that showed $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, up from $400 million, against net losses near $42 billion, including a $34 billion noncash charge.

Additionally, compute and infrastructure cost $7.33 billion, which was over half of $12.65 billion in operating expenses.

According to Hayes, once the data centers under construction are finished, infrastructure providers will want payment for the compute Anthropic and the other AI firms committed to, which he expects in late 2027 or 2028.

He did leave room for a different outcome, though, where AI could become “so useful” over the next 12 months that demand expands enough for AI companies to become profitable. Some suppliers already earn money, he noted, including the likes of Nvidia.

The Debt Behind the Argument

As CryptoPotato reported in September, Hayes had pointed out that compute demand from some of the biggest artificial intelligence builders backs more than $1 trillion of investment-grade debt.

According to him, a downgrade would leave insurers tied to that debt short of capital, pushing Washington to buy compute as a last resort or print money to rescue them.

Before that, the crypto investor had predicted that AI spending would slow next year, then contract, with bailouts bigger than 2008 that could possibly take Bitcoin near $1 million.

The post Arthur Hayes: AI Is Overbuilt, and Bitcoin Could Benefit From It appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin is trading below $84K after failing to continue its latest push toward the $90K region. While the general structure remains constructive, the latest pullback and weakening futures taker activity suggest that BTC may need to consolidate before attempting another breakout.

Bitcoin Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

The daily chart shows a significant structural improvement over the past several months. BTC has reclaimed both the 100-day and 200-day moving averages, currently positioned around $72K. The two averages have also converged, with the shorter-term average turning higher. This bullish crossover could potentially further strengthen the longer-term trend.

Meanwhile, the price has also moved decisively above the $75K area, which now represents an important demand zone. Holding this region would keep the broader sequence of higher lows intact and preserve the bullish recovery structure. A deeper correction toward $70K, however, would still leave the larger trend relatively constructive, although losing that area would weaken the setup considerably.

On the upside, BTC is facing a substantial supply zone around $88K. The market has repeatedly struggled to establish a daily close above this region. But a convincing breakout would expose the next major resistance area around $96K.

Momentum also remains positive but has cooled. The daily RSI is still above the neutral 50 level while leaving considerable room before reaching overbought territory. This suggests that the market is not yet displaying the type of momentum exhaustion typically associated with a major top.

BTC/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart presents a more cautious picture. BTC established an ascending triangle pattern from the September lows, with several successful tests reinforcing the structure. However, the price is now breaking below that trendline and has fallen toward $84K.

The immediate area around $84K is therefore important. If buyers reclaim this zone and restore the broken trendline, the recent decline could prove to be only a temporary shakeout. In that scenario, BTC could retest the $88K resistance area and potentially challenge for a valid breakout once more.

Conversely, a sustained move below $84K would increase the probability of a deeper correction toward the $75K-$78K region. That area coincides with the previous breakout and should be viewed as the first major support beneath the current range.

The 4-hour RSI has also fallen sharply to around 38, showing that short-term momentum has deteriorated and is approaching oversold territory. This could allow for a relief bounce, but RSI alone does not confirm a reversal.

Sentiment Analysis

The taker buy/sell ratio provides a notable warning sign. The metric compares aggressive market buying with aggressive market selling, with readings above 1 indicating that taker buying is dominant and readings below 1 suggesting that sellers are more aggressive.

The latest reading has dropped below 1 and is sitting around 0.994, significantly declining from its September highs. This indicates that aggressive buying pressure has weakened as BTC moved toward the $88K resistance area.

More importantly, the taker buy/sell ratio has been trending lower since its August peak even as Bitcoin remained relatively elevated. This divergence suggests that the latest advance has not been accompanied by steadily increasing aggressive futures demand.

That does not necessarily imply an immediate bearish reversal. However, it makes a clean breakout above $88K less convincing unless the metric begins recovering. A renewed move above 1 in the taker ratio, alongside a breakout in price, would provide stronger confirmation that buyers are regaining control.

The post Bitcoin Price Analysis: What’s Next for BTC After Sharp Drop Below $84K? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Meritz Securities is stepping further into digital assets through a new partnership with Ripple. The South Korean securities firm said on October 7 that it signed a strategic agreement with the blockchain company to explore digital asset infrastructure for the domestic market.

The deal will focus on custody and tokenization as digital assets move closer to formal recognition within South Korea’s financial system.

Ripple’s Korean Expansion

The partnership was signed on October 1 at Meritz Securities’ headquarters in Seoul’s Yeouido district. Its chief executive, Jang Won-jae, and Ripple President Monica Long attended the ceremony, along with other officials.

As part of the agreement, the companies will look at how Ripple’s tokenization infrastructure and Ripple Custody can be used in South Korea’s capital markets. Both solutions are already available to financial institutions globally. Their initial cooperation will stay within current securities business rules and other existing regulations, with plans to expand the partnership gradually as the country’s digital asset rules develop.

Meritz Securities has already been reviewing several digital asset businesses, such as spot ETFs, fractional investment products, security token offerings, trading platforms, as well as won-based stablecoins.

Ripple has been expanding its footprint in South Korea’s digital asset market this year. In April, internet-only lender K Bank moved beyond initial blockchain remittance trials through a new partnership with the company. The bank is testing whether Ripple’s network can make cross-border transfers faster, cheaper, and more transparent.

Its second proof-of-concept phase includes account integration and on-chain transfer tests with partners in the UAE and Thailand. KBank also plans to replace its in-house wallet with Ripple’s SaaS-based Palisade wallet during the next phase.

Ripple has also worked with Kyobo Life Insurance on institutional digital asset infrastructure. The focus is on tokenized government bond transactions.

Meanwhile, XRP has been particularly popular among Korean investors in their twenties. It accounted for 20.7% of their portfolios, compared with a combined 17.5% for Bitcoin and Ethereum, which put XRP 3.2 percentage points ahead.

A Bigger Institutional Push

The company is also expanding its institutional business elsewhere. For instance, Ripple partnered with Brazil’s CSD BR to use the XRP Ledger for recording and auditing tokenized financial assets. The first phase will focus on investment fund shares from BTG Pactual.

The system will run alongside CSD BR’s existing infrastructure and give eligible participants near-real-time access to blockchain records. Access will be limited to approved corporate and banking clients.

Ripple has also deepened its relationship with Brevan Howard. The investment manager will use Ripple Prime for multi-asset prime brokerage, clearing, and financing.

The post Ripple (XRP) Lands New South Korea Deal as Meritz Securities Explores Digital Asset Custody appeared first on CryptoPotato.

It was just yesterday that we wrote about ADA breaking out, as the asset had climbed to a multi-month peak of over $0.27 and analysts had just turned highly bullish, with massive price predictions flying left and right.

However, the asset was rejected badly. In fact, ADA is down by over 8% in the past 24 hours and now sits below $0.255. This is rather surprising given the latest developments on the whale front.

Whales Waking Up

Data provided by Santiment Intelligence indicates that there’s a significant increase in activity among the largest market participants in the broader Cardano ecosystem. Transactions worth at least $100,000 jumped to 314 on October 5, the highest level of such activity in over four months.

It’s worth noting that higher whale transaction counts show that large holders are becoming more active again, but do not reveal whether they are buying or selling. Cardano crowd interest is on the rise again as ADA’s social dominance reached 1.16%. This became its highest reading for the year after the token rallied from under $0.19 to over $0.27 within a few weeks.

Santiment explained that fresh developments, including the October 1 RealFi mainnet launch, anticipation surrounding Leios, Fireblocks support, and additional institutional integrations, have helped put Cardano back on the social media map. After all, the asset’s market cap gained over 42% since September 16 before today’s pullback drove it south.

Cardano Whales Wake Up, ADA Marketcap Now Up 42% Since September 16th!

Cardano’s +42% run since September 16th has whales moving again. ADA transactions worth at least $100K surged to 413 in one day, marking the highest whale activity since June 4th.

The crowd has suddenly arrived to the party as well. ADA’s social dominance hit 1.16%, its highest level of 2026. The altcoin’s move from ~$0.19 to ~$0.27 has clearly pulled Cardano back into the crowd’s spotlight.

What’s causing all this? Fresh project developments are adding fuel. RealFi launched on Cardano mainnet October 1st, while anticipation around Leios, Fireblocks support, and new institutional integrations is helping drive Cardano’s biggest discussion spike of the year.

Our Live Cardano Chart: https://t.co/txYFvaHIzO

— Santiment Intelligence (@SantimentData) October 6, 2026

Was Leverage to Blame?

As mentioned above, ADA has slumped over 8% in the past day, making it the worst-performing altcoin among the 30 largest digital assets. Some of the blame could be on leveraged positions. As reported yesterday, ADA open interest increased by 25% in just days to over $300 million.

That made the rally more than a simple short squeeze, but it also meant more leverage exposure was sitting in the market when price direction flipped. ADA was up by almost 11% to over $0.27 on October 5, but the subsequent market-wide liquidation flush has now erased a major portion of those gains.

The post Why Is ADA’s Price Down 8% Today Even as Cardano Whales Wake Up? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin was rejected again at $87,000 on Monday, and the bears took it a step further earlier this morning, pushing it south hard to under $84,000.

BTC’s decline dragged most of the altcoins with it. Ethereum slipped below $2,600, XRP dumped further away from the $1.50 support, and HYPE is close to breaking below $90.

BTC Below $84K

After the positive PCE data last Wednesday, which sent BTC up and down within minutes, the asset went on the offensive on Friday. It had climbed above $86,000 even before the US jobs report went live, which was weaker-than-expected. The bulls initiated another leg up, driving the cryptocurrency to over $87,000.

However, the bears stepped up at this point. Bitcoin slumped in the following hours and ultimately crashed below $84,000. It rebounded to just over that level on Saturday and climbed to $85,000 on Sunday. It tried to take down the crucial $87,000 support on Monday, but it was quickly stopped and dipped to $85,000.

Another breakout attempt followed on Tuesday, but BTC couldn’t go past $86,600 this time. It pulled back by a grand and stood there for a few hours before it suddenly slumped by over $2,000 on Monday morning in minutes to $83,600. Its rebound stalled at $84,400, and the asset is now struggling at $84,000.

Its market capitalization is down to $1.680 trillion, while its dominance over the alts has remained at the same level as yesterday at 59% on CMC.

Alts Bleed Out

ETH was among the hardest-hit larger-cap alts today, dropping by over 4% at one point to under $2,600. XRP has seemingly lost the $1.50 support after a 3% decline pushed it to $1.46. BNB, SOL, TRX, and ZEC are also slightly in the red.

More painful declines come from the likes of ADA (-6.5%), UNI (-8.5%), CRO (-5.5%), SHIB (-6%), as well as WLD, CC, SUI, CRO, and HBAR. DOT has plummeted by 9%, while MNT has decreased by 10%. BTW is among the few exceptions among the larger-cap alts.

The total crypto market cap has shed over $60 billion in a day and is down to $2.850 trillion on CMC.

The post These Altcoins Bleed the Most After Bitcoin’s Sudden Drop Below $84K: Market Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.