Cathie Wood's Bitcoin forecast highlights potential shifts in institutional adoption and regulatory landscapes, impacting crypto's future role.

The post Cathie Wood predicts Bitcoin could surge 1,665% by 2030 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Trump's support for AI data centers may bolster GOP tech agenda but risks voter backlash and complicates Ohio's legislative landscape.

The post Trump defends AI data centers at Ohio rally amid bipartisan criticism appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

DeepSeek and Huawei's open-source tools could reshape AI development dynamics, challenging Nvidia's dominance and altering global tech alliances.

The post DeepSeek and Huawei take aim at Nvidia’s software moat appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The legal challenges OpenAI faces could redefine AI liability, prompting stricter regulations and increased scrutiny on AI developers globally.

The post OpenAI faces legal crisis after its AI agents hacked firms and governments appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The surge in tokenized stock trading on Solana highlights the growing influence of decentralized finance, raising questions about market dependency and regulatory adaptation.

The post Tokenized stocks on Solana hit $12.4 billion in DEX volume this year appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

IMF Praises El Salvador — But Still Tries To Scale Back Its Bitcoin Project

The International Monetary Fund has praised El Salvador for improving its economy — but scolded it at the same time for its ongoing Bitcoin experiment. 

In a statement Friday, the IMF said that it had  approved a $139 million disbursement to the Central American nation while also trying to “reduce the state’s involvement in Bitcoin-related activities.”

El Salvador in 2021 made Bitcoin legal tender, much to the ire of the IMF and other major institutions. The Latin American country was at the time negotiating a development loan with the agency. 

The IMF in September said that El Salvador wasn’t buying bitcoin; the country’s Bitcoin Office has repeatedly said that it does buy the cryptocurrency. 

“Economic activity has exceeded expectations, supported by sustained improvements in security and investor confidence, as macroeconomic imbalances continue to be addressed,” the IMF said. 

It continued: “However, certain performance criteria were not met, including on the Bitcoin accumulation front, for which waivers were granted based on strong corrective measures and renewed commitments.”

The IMF further said that the Salvadoran state’s involvement in Bitcoin-related activities is being unwound and that “no further bitcoin accumulation is envisaged beyond the documented donations.”

Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in 2022 said the country would buy one bitcoin per day but it was never clear where the money was coming from — or if he was actually buying at all.  

The IMF said in September that El Salvador was — at least for some time —not using public funds to accumulate bitcoin but rather had received bitcoin from private donations. 

El Salvador and the IMF entered a $1.4 billion loan agreement at the end of December but the fund asked for the country to scale back certain aspects of its Bitcoin strategy.  

The Salvadoran state gifted its citizens bitcoin in 2021 and debuted a wallet with the hope of getting more citizens using the cryptocurrency in the dollarized country. 

President Bukele in 2024 admitted that Salvadorans weren’t using the cryptocurrency to buy things as expected, but always boasted that the government was still stacking sats.  

This post IMF Praises El Salvador — But Still Tries To Scale Back Its Bitcoin Project first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

When the Banks Don’t Work, Bitcoin Does: Cornell University’s Adoption Index

A lot of people know little about Bitcoin and how it works. 

But despite knowledge being shallow, for those holding the leading cryptocurrency, it appears to be solving a problem: getting around failing banking rails or inflation. 

That’s according to new findings from the U.S. Ivy League research university Cornell, which spoke to nearly 26,000 around the globe about Bitcoin. 

In its new Bitcoin Adoption Index report, the top college found that El Salvador, Venezuela and Nigeria were the countries that had the highest number of people who had ever owned bitcoin. 

“Ranked by the share of all respondents who have ever owned bitcoin, the leaders are not wealthy financial centers — they are economies where the national currency has been unstable and everyday access to dollars or reliable banking is hard,” the report read.  

“In each, bitcoin functions less as a speculative bet and more as a practical workaround.”

Bitcoin Advocacy Associate at Strategy and Junior Fellow at Cornell University’s Brooks School Tech Policy Institute, Ella Hough, added: “Bitcoin works the same everywhere, but people’s need for it does not. 

“Across 25 countries, we found that people are more likely to see Bitcoin as a tool for financial freedom where currencies are less stable, banking access is limited, or monetary controls are tighter.”

Still, Cornell found that actually being able to explain the fundamentals of the protocol was difficult for most — including how many bitcoins would ever be minted in existence. In fact, 58% of those surveyed said they didn’t know the supply was capped at 21 million coins. 

Technicalities aside, the cryptocurrency has still proved helpful to people wanting to use it, the report found. 

One Venezuelan — who wasn’t named — told interviewers that Bitcoin was “faster, cleaner, and much less risky” than other methods of getting dollars in the country. 

While another Salvadoran was quoted saying: “When nobody controls [bitcoin], it means we all have control of it.”

A Nigerian interviewee reportedly told Cornell researchers: “I’ve been to six African countries and whenever I go there, I don’t fear it because I know I can spend my bitcoin.”

Bitcoin adoption started growing in Venezuela ahead of other countries years ago, when hyperinflation crippled the economy and strict government currency controls meant getting dollars became difficult. 

El Salvador made bitcoin legal tender — along with the dollar — in 2021. The country’s leader admitted that getting its citizens to use the cryptocurrency was difficult but the Central American nation still says it buys the asset for its government coffers. 

In Nigeria, which has had some of the highest transaction volumes in the world, saving in bitcoin has been used by some to get around the collapse of the naira.

Cornell University’s research was fielded by Morning Consult in partnership with the Tech Policy Institute in Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, the Cornell Bitcoin Club, the Human Rights Foundation and the Reynolds Foundation.

Researchers interviewed 25,880 people in 25 countries between December 16, 2024 to March 10, 2025, asking 125 individual questions. 

This post When the Banks Don’t Work, Bitcoin Does: Cornell University’s Adoption Index first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

South Africa’s Absa Becomes First Bank on the Continent to Custody Bitcoin: Report

South African bank Absa has become the first African lender to custody bitcoin, according to reports. 

As reported first by Bloomberg on Friday, the Johannesburg-based lender will serve institutional clients, mostly by custodying bitcoin — but other digital assets will also be a part of the service. 

Banks worldwide are integrating or offering bitcoin-related products and services. A number of U.S. and European banks have started offering crypto-related services by custodying assets for institutions.

Rob Downes, head of digital assets at Absa’s corporate and investment banking unit, was quoted saying that while bitcoin was the biggest asset the bank would custody, others would follow. 

Absa did not immediately respond to questions from Bitcoin Magazine. 

The African continent has a large crypto-native base, with data firms frequently highlighting the high adoption — particularly in countries where currencies have been significantly debased. 

In Chainalysis’s 2025 report, South Africa’s $36.0 billion in on-chain value made it second in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria alone received $92.1 billion, nearly three times the total of second-place South Africa. 

On the global index, South Africa ranked 30th for crypto adoption. 

The character of its market is different from Nigeria‘s: it’s more institutional, with regulatory clarity resulting in hundreds of licenses being issued to VASPs and attracting professional investors and traditional finance. 

BNY Mellon in 2022 became the first major U.S. bank to offer digital asset custody services. And this month, German multinational Deutsche Bank said it would debut a bitcoin custody service for European corporate and institutional clients later in 2026.  

This post South Africa’s Absa Becomes First Bank on the Continent to Custody Bitcoin: Report first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Price Surges Above $87,000 on Softer-Than-Expected Jobs Data

The price of bitcoin surged above $87,000 on Friday morning in New York, buoyed by constant exchange-traded fund flows and a jobs report showing that unemployment in the U.S. had ticked up. 

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at $85,990 after a 2% jump over a 24-hour period. Over the past week, it has also risen by more than 2%. 

Nonfarm payrolls increased 29,000 last month after a downward revision to the prior two months, Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed Friday. 

Weaker-than-expected jobs data can give a lift to riskier assets like bitcoin and stocks, whose prices tend to swing more sharply. 

A softer labor market typically means less consumer spending, which eases pressure on prices. That could make the Federal Reserve less inclined to keep raising interest rates to fight inflation.

Many economists and politicians have said the U.S. is in the midst of an affordability crisis, and the topic is a hot one ahead of the November midterm elections. 

The Federal Reserve’s new chair, Kevin Warsh, has said that prices in the world’s biggest economy are too high and that the central bank is fully focused on making life more affordable again. 

Bitcoin investors shrugged off the central bank’s interest rate hike in September, climbing on the news. 

The largest cryptocurrency started rallying in August on news that the U.S. Treasury Department said it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. The coin had its best run in three years and third best August ever.  

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

It continued to have a good September, rising nearly 6% over a 30-day period. 

October has historically delivered good returns for bitcoin investors, with traders dubbing the phenomenon “Uptober.” 

This post Bitcoin Price Surges Above $87,000 on Softer-Than-Expected Jobs Data first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Impacts of Daily Dividends on Digital Credit

In May 2026, Strive rebranded itself as “The Daily Dividend Company,” then moved SATA to daily cash dividends beginning June 16. Strategy has now pushed the same idea into its own digital credit engine. On September 24, its board proposed moving STRC, STRF, STRK and STRD to daily dividends, subject to shareholder approval at an October 28 special meeting. The proposal keeps the annual dividend economics unchanged and changes the cadence of cash payments.

STRC spent much of the summer below its $100 stated amount even as Strategy raised its dividend rate to 12% and deployed more than $1 billion buying back STRC. The move to daily dividends by Strategy could be seen as the latest attempt to make the security more attractive and help it trade near par.

Now that the overton window has fully shifted in favor of digital credit paying daily dividends, we should take a look at the actual impacts of daily dividends. 

Daily Dividends Fit Onchain Finance

Digital credit is increasingly becoming an input for other financial products—so called “digital money” or “digital yield” products. Strategy estimated in mid-May that more than $440 million of STRC exposure had moved into DeFi through stablecoins, tokenized securities, yield products and other structures.

However, there is a cash flow mismatch. Crypto products commonly accrue and distribute yield at high frequency. A security that pays monthly or twice monthly forces the product sitting on top of it to bridge the period between economic accrual and actual cash receipt.

Daily dividends compress that gap to one day. The protocol, fund or issuer receives cash from the underlying asset at almost the same cadence that users expect to receive yield. That simplifies liquidity management and reduces the cash needed between dividend dates. This is much more impactful to a financial product funding daily distributions or redemptions than to a long term investor focused on total return. The crypto-heavy setting of the “Layer 3” products on top of digital credit raises the attractiveness of daily dividends. 

Daily Dividends Are Primarily a Retail Feature

For investors focused strictly on total return, dividend payment frequency makes little difference in underlying economic value. The asset’s price accrues between distribution dates and adjusts post-payment, meaning annual, quarterly, monthly, and daily payouts produce comparable long-term results.

The true advantage of daily dividends lies in product psychology and user experience. Cash arriving every day provides immediate visibility and an engaging feedback loop. Investors can spend, withdraw, or automatically reinvest the payout while leaving their principal position intact, turning an abstract yield metric into tangible recurring cash flow.

This dynamic mirrors the strategy of Realty Income, which built a massive retail follower base by branding itself as “The Monthly Dividend Company.” As a member of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index, Realty Income has paid and raised dividends for 31 consecutive years. 

Daily dividends on digital credit extends this product concept even further: SATA pairs frequent daily payouts with a target price near $100 and a double-digit yield.

While institutional investors prioritize yield spreads, liquidity, tax structure, and balance sheet coverage, daily payments offer their strongest appeal to retail buyers. If the overarching objective is to raise capital to purchase Bitcoin, optimizing security design for retail investor preferences is the most effective approach.

Options Get Cleaner Too

Daily dividends also change options mechanics. STRC currently pays $0.50 twice monthly. SATA pays roughly five cents each business day. Larger dividend events create larger discrete adjustments in the underlying price, which affects option pricing and early exercise decisions. Daily payments spread the same annual cash flow across much smaller adjustments.

The total value of dividends over an option’s life is a key economic input. The more interesting effect comes from the price stability created by daily dividends. If daily dividends, variable rates and active par management keep SATA and STRC trading in narrower ranges, realized volatility should fall. Implied volatility can follow as the market gains confidence in that behavior.

The Biggest Test

The real test is whether daily dividends increase demand enough to eventually lower the required yield.

If investors consistently support SATA near the top of its target range, Strive can theoretically reduce the dividend rate while attempting to keep SATA near par. Success would show that a Bitcoin company can issue permanent preferred capital, manage it around a stable price, and adjust its yield with market demand. The benefit of the variable rate preferreds was, from inception, the eventual opportunity to lower the rate and reduce the cost of capital without upsetting price stability. In comparison, fixed rate credit locks in fixed rate forever. 

Conclusion 

Strategy adopting daily dividends would move the feature from a SATA differentiator toward a digital credit category standard. The annual economics barely change but the retail appeal and crypto composability become meaningful improvements. 

This post Impacts of Daily Dividends on Digital Credit first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Allard Peng.

Bitcoin Core has added a safeguard against signing transactions that may not bind funds to the payment destination a user approved.

The change, merged into Bitcoin Core’s master development branch on Sept. 25, targets a narrow flaw in partially signed Bitcoin transactions, or PSBTs, that could produce a valid signature without protecting the intended output.

Bitcoin Optech highlighted the update on Oct. 2. The issue does not expose a user’s private key, but creates a different risk: a signature can remain valid even when the transaction’s recipient is changed under specific conditions.

The weakness involves SIGHASH_SINGLEwhich is a signing mode designed to commit an input to the output in the corresponding position. If the transaction contains no output at that position, the protection breaks down differently depending on the type of Bitcoin being spent.

For legacy inputs, the missing-output case can produce a signature over a fixed hash value. Bitcoin Core developers said that signature may then be reusable against other unspent outputs controlled by the same key when the same structural conditions are present.

SegWit v0 transactions retain stronger protections because the signature still commits to the specific coin being spent and its amount. The destination output, however, can remain unbound.

That creates an authorization problem for wallets and signing devices: software could present one payment to the user while producing a signature that does not cryptographically guarantee that the approved recipient remains unchanged.

Bitcoin Core blocks the risky signing request

Bitcoin Core already rejected the edge case through its raw-transaction signing interface. Its PSBT path, including walletprocesspsbtcould still sign it.

The new code moves the check into Bitcoin Core’s shared signature-creation logic, preventing affected legacy and SegWit v0 inputs from being signed while allowing other valid inputs in the same PSBT to proceed.

PSBTs are commonly used to coordinate transactions between software wallets, hardware devices and offline signers. They allow transaction builders to pass information to a separate signer without giving that system control of the private keys.

The fix therefore reinforces a boundary that wallet developers must enforce independently of key security: a valid cryptographic signature must commit to the transaction details the user actually authorized.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 174, which defines PSBTs, already tells signers to reject unacceptable signing modes and recommends SIGHASH_ALL when no alternative is specified. The Bitcoin Core change explicitly prevents this missing-output configuration from reaching the signing stage.

Users do not yet have a confirmed production release containing the safeguard. The Sept. 25 change was merged into Bitcoin Core’s development branch, while the project’s published release listings had not identified a fixed version or confirmed backport as of Oct. 4.

That leaves wallet providers and hardware-signing integrations with the more immediate decision: review their own handling of SIGHASH_SINGLE requests rather than waiting for a Bitcoin Core release to enforce the same protection downstream.

The post Bitcoin Core’s new fix closes gap that could redirect funds without stealing keys appeared first on CryptoSlate.

US government debt is one of the easiest assets in the world to borrow against, which lets financial companies get cash without giving up their investments for good.

Washington is rewriting the rules for that borrowing, and the result will reach crypto through the companies that keep Treasury securities behind their dollar tokens.

The SEC wants more Treasury transactions to pass through a central clearinghouse, an institution that becomes the buyer to each seller and the seller to each buyer.

If one trading company fails, the other side can look to the clearinghouse to complete the covered trade, under its rules, instead of trying to recover everything from the failed company itself.

Providing that kind of protection takes a lot of money, so the new system will also affect what companies pay to trade and borrow. Stablecoin issuers depend on those services when they need to convert reserve assets into dollars for customers, so the cost and availability of Treasury trading affect how well their tokens work.

The SEC's deadlines are Dec. 31 for eligible outright purchases and sales of Treasuries, followed by June 30, 2027, for eligible repurchase agreements, known as repos. Commissioner Mark Uyeda said on Sept. 22 that the agency didn't currently intend to extend them.

These requirements cover specified trades involving clearing members, rather than every purchase of a Treasury by anyone who owns one.

Owning the Treasury bond is only half the transaction

Suppose an investment fund owns Treasury securities but needs dollars today, before the government is due to repay it. The fund could sell some of those securities, or it could use a repo: sell them now with an agreement to buy them back on a set date, often the next day, for a slightly higher price.

Economically speaking, the fund has borrowed cash, with the Treasuries protecting the lender and the price difference paying for the loan. The borrower gets money it can spend while keeping a road back to its securities, and the lender earns a return on cash it wasn't using.

Dealers, usually banks or securities firms, connect much of this business. The New York Fed's explanation of the repo market follows cash from lenders such as money-market funds through dealers to borrowers such as hedge funds.

Dealers can borrow in one part of the market and lend in another, earning money for arranging and financing the transactions.

The scale is enormous: activity used to calculate the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, or SOFR, went from about $1 trillion in early 2022 to roughly $3 trillion, according to the Fed research.

SOFR measures the cost of overnight borrowing against Treasuries, and those volumes cover the transactions feeding that benchmark, rather than the whole repo market.

But even with that much money moving around, an individual customer can struggle to borrow on good terms. Dealers have limits on how much business they can carry, partly because their trades use capital and count toward regulatory constraints.

Plenty of available cash elsewhere in the market doesn't help much if the firm connecting you to it has reached its limit.

Central clearing can reduce some of that burden through netting, which means recognizing offsetting amounts. In a simplified example, a dealer owes $100 and is due to receive $95 on the same settlement date.

If both obligations qualify for netting through the same clearinghouse, the cash payment can be reduced to $5.

Real Treasury trades also involve securities deliveries, and the legal agreements determine which obligations can be combined. But the basic benefit is straightforward: companies can need less money to complete offsetting trades, and qualifying netting can also reduce the balance-sheet resources those trades consume.

That could let a dealer serve more customers with the resources it already has. Whether customers get cheaper borrowing depends on how much the dealer saves and how much of that saving it passes on, after accounting for clearing costs.

Someone still has to bring the collateral

The clearinghouse can promise to complete trades because it collects financial resources and has procedures for dealing with a member that can't pay. International standards for clearinghouses require them to manage the exposures they take on and hold resources they can use during stress.

One part of that protection is margin, meaning cash or eligible securities posted against a position. If a company defaults and its trades cost money to close, that collateral helps cover the bill.

Until then, the company must keep it available, even if it would prefer to put the money to work elsewhere.

This is where a safer transaction can become a more demanding one for its participants. Being able to afford a trade over its full life doesn't mean a company has the right collateral ready when it's due, especially when several obligations need funding at once.

Many customers also need another company to get them into the system. The Fixed Income Clearing Corporation, or FICC, operates a Sponsored Service in which an approved sponsoring member handles operational duties and guarantees specified obligations for its customers.

That sponsor takes on work and risk, which can affect the terms it offers.

FICC's Collateral-in-Lieu service for eligible cash lenders uses protections involving the Treasury collateral in the transaction so those lenders don't have to post initial margin under that model. The arrangement shows why being required to use a clearinghouse doesn't automatically mean every participant must find the same amount of extra cash.

Customers still need to compare the full price of access, including the fee they pay a provider and the cost of keeping collateral available.

Savings from netting can make one part of the transaction cheaper while the new service adds expenses elsewhere, so the final bill depends on the arrangement the customer can obtain.

DTCC's July survey of FICC members gives us plenty of good reasons to watch that choice of providers. While 79% of responding netting members already had the necessary account setups, only about a third expected to offer Treasury cash clearing to their clients.

Those numbers just describe the survey respondents, and they don't prove customers will be shut out. But they do show why a dealer being ready to comply isn't the same as that dealer being willing to take on your business.

If customers have few providers to choose from, providers have less reason to compete away the savings that clearing can produce.

Digital dollars inherit the operating hours

Issuers of dollar-linked stablecoins can keep part of their backing in short-term Treasuries because those securities earn income and have a large resale market. But when an eligible customer redeems tokens, the issuer owes dollars, so it needs cash on hand or a reliable way to obtain it from its reserves.

That's a different arrangement from a bank putting an existing deposit on a blockchain. Tokenized deposits and the money behind bank lending explain how those products preserve the customer's claim on the bank.

With a Treasury-backed stablecoin, the issuer's reserve management and banking relationships determine whether it can meet the redemption terms it offers.

The connection to clearing runs through those relationships, whether the issuer trades directly or uses a fund manager and other intermediaries.

If its providers can sell or finance Treasuries more efficiently, managing redemptions could become easier or cheaper. If access becomes more expensive, the issuer may face higher reserve-management costs, although that doesn't automatically mean customers pay a new fee.

Nor does central clearing make the reserve market operate around the clock. You can send a token on Sunday while the issuer's banks and securities providers work on different hours, and sending that token to another person is different from asking the issuer to pay dollars into a bank account.

The issuer has to plan for that gap through its cash holdings and the redemption terms it promises.

Keeping more cash readily available can help meet withdrawals, but it may earn less than other permitted reserve investments. Relying more heavily on selling or financing securities can preserve flexibility elsewhere, but it makes dependable access to those services more important.

Each issuer has to choose an arrangement it can actually operate when customers want their money back.

The overhaul could improve that access by making dealers' resources go further and giving trading partners a common process when a firm fails. It could also leave some customers dependent on a small number of providers, especially if opening a replacement account takes time.

Both outcomes can exist in the same market, with larger customers getting better terms than smaller ones.

That makes the price of access and the ability to switch providers worth watching as the deadlines approach.

Treasury-backed tokens depend on people who can turn securities into a payment, and the benefit of Washington's new rules will reach their holders only if that job becomes more dependable at a cost the issuer can support.

The post New Treasury rules could change how stablecoin issuers get your dollars back appeared first on CryptoSlate.

India’s crypto users send substantial value to centralized exchanges, but domestic platforms receive just 0.7% of exchange value in Chainalysis’s new regional report. Its Brazil chapter puts Brazil-based exchanges at 12.5% of inflows.

The contrast separates two business questions that adoption figures can blur: how much activity is associated with a country, and how much its domestic platforms capture. India’s transaction withholding can reduce the cash available for another trade. Its role in venue choice remains an operator explanation, rather than a measured cause of the split.

The findings appeared in Chainalysis’s CSAO chapter on Sept. 30 and Latin America chapter on Sept. 23. Their main annual reporting window runs from July 2025 through June 2026, while the share observations’ precise dates remain unspecified in the chapters’ prose. The new publications describe earlier activity, ending before October.

Chainalysis attributes $88.4 billion in centralized-exchange inflows to India-based users during that annual period, making India the largest such market in Central and Southeast Asia and Oceania. That activity can reach platforms based abroad.

The Indian chapter reports that domestic platforms’ share of exchange value received fell from around 7% to 0.7%, with a sharp decline in mid-2022. Brazil’s chapter describes a different trajectory: Brazil-based exchanges previously received 1.5% of inflows and now receive 12.5%.

Those percentages describe received value in Chainalysis’s exchange analysis. Executed trades, revenue and customer numbers measure other parts of a platform’s business. One deposit can fund subsequent trading, so the amount entering an exchange and the activity inside it answer different questions.

Whether the platform sample stayed unchanged also remains unspecified. The reported divergence supports a descriptive comparison; a synchronized annual market-share comparison would require matching dates and samples.

Brazil’s broader crypto economy recorded $252.5 billion in activity in the year ending June 30, despite contracting 1.6%. That total combines several kinds of activity and has a different scope from exchange inflows. An annual domestic-exchange dollar estimate for either country would require a share and inflow total with matching windows, samples and denominators.

Chainalysis’s general 2026 methodology assigns pooled service activity to user countries using website traffic. For that allocation, it adjusts traffic shares for income differences using the square root of GDP per capita. The chapters leave the detailed calculation of the domestic exchange shares unspecified.

The country assignment follows estimated users. This allows activity at an exchange based abroad to contribute to India’s measured market, while domestic platforms receive a small reported slice.

Chainalysis acknowledges that removing VPN and bot traffic is imperfect. The figures are estimates of geographically attributed activity, with that uncertainty built into the comparison.

Withholding changes the cash available for another trade

India’s current section 393 sets 1% withholding on consideration for a virtual digital asset transfer paid to a resident, subject to applicable exemptions. The responsible payer deducts at the earlier of credit or payment.

The base matters: consideration is the amount paid for the transfer. Withholding is calculated against that amount, so a deduction can reduce available proceeds even when the transaction produces little gain.

Consider a ₹100,000 cash sale with consideration paid to a resident seller subject to the standard 1% deduction. Before fees or other adjustments, the seller receives ₹99,000, with ₹1,000 withheld toward tax. That ₹1,000 cannot immediately fund another purchase.

Another liable sale can generate another deduction, adding to the amount already withheld. The final tax calculation determines how those deductions are credited, while each applicable deduction reduces the proceeds immediately available.

The current Act’s exemptions depend on the payer and tax-year aggregate consideration. The limit is ₹50,000 for eligible individuals or Hindu undivided families, including those without business or professional income. Eligibility also covers the stated prior-year business turnover ceiling of ₹1 crore or professional receipts ceiling of ₹50 lakh. Other payers have a ₹10,000 limit.

The limits apply to the tax-year aggregate. Their relevance depends on the payer’s circumstances, so checking eligibility comes before applying the general rate.

Who handles the deduction also matters. The statutory obligation belongs to the responsible payer. The department’s historical section 194S guidance separately explains buyer responsibilities in direct transactions and exchange responsibilities in relevant exchange settlements.

The department’s VDA tax-certificate FAQ explains that the deductee can claim TDS credit when filing a return. The Act allows a refund where tax paid exceeds tax due, with a return claim required.

For traders and platforms, tax credit and trading cash therefore work on different timelines. A deduction can offset tax while reducing immediately available proceeds. The transition guidance explains how credits follow the relevant tax period; it supplies no fixed refund waiting time.

CoinSwitch co-founder Ashish Singhal told Chainalysis that tax friction helps explain offshore use, adding that foreign venues may not make the deduction. That is an operator’s account of the competitive pressure facing compliant exchanges.

How much withholding contributed to the reported share decline remains unmeasured. Foreign platforms may comply with Indian obligations, and a platform’s location alone supplies no blanket exemption. Singhal’s explanation identifies a plausible competitive pressure while leaving its contribution to the measured outcome open.

Payment access extends across local and international venues

Fiat access offers another possible part of the explanation. Mercado Bitcoin describes a Pix route for buying cryptocurrency from a customer’s bank app. That connects a familiar payment service with crypto access.

An INR buying explainer from CoinSwitch describes deposits through UPI and net banking on platforms operating in India. The generic explainer shows how local currency access can work in India; availability depends on the platform and supported method.

International competition can use local rails as well. Binance’s BRL deposit guide describes Pix and TED transfers. These examples show local payment routes appearing in both domestic and international offerings.

Chainalysis presents regulatory clarity, investment and stronger local offerings as possible explanations for Brazil’s growing domestic share. Its industry interviewees also describe corporate stablecoin use for liquidity and cross-border transfers. Such demand could give platforms opportunities beyond investment trading. Its effect on domestic venue choice remains a hypothesis: the product pages document offerings, while the interviews describe industry experience.

India’s large attributed exchange market can coexist with a small domestic-platform foothold. Brazil’s reported domestic gain shows a different pattern. For operators, the destination of exchange inflows remains a distinct question from the size of national participation.

The post India’s local crypto exchanges get just 0.7% of inflows, Chainalysis reports appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Drift Protocol opened claims and redemptions for its DFX recovery token on Oct. 1, giving victims of its April exploit a way to receive the USDT stablecoin from the Recovery Pool. The exit has a permanent tradeoff: redeemed tokens are burned and no longer share in future deposits.

In its launch announcement, Drift described a payout of about 0.0104 USDT per DFX from a pool holding roughly 3.1 million USDT. Because victims receive one DFX for each USDT of verified loss, that launch rate represented about 1.04% of the corresponding loss. Those are Oct. 1 figures; a redemption pays the rate quoted when the transaction is made.

DFX is a transferable token on Solana, separate from the DRIFT governance token. Drift sets its fixed allocation at 299,500,810.998 DFX, corresponding to nearly 299.5 million USDT of verified losses. Outstanding supply falls as tokens are burned.

What redemption gives up

The USDT payment and DFX burn happen in one transaction: either both succeed or neither does. Drift says completed redemptions are final. If a holder redeems only part of their DFX, the tokens they keep continue participating in the pool.

Future deposits are divided among the DFX that remain. Cashing out therefore locks in the quoted recovery amount for the tokens burned, while giving up their share of later revenue or recovered funds.

Selling DFX on a secondary market such as Raydium is a different transaction. It transfers the tokens to another holder rather than redeeming them against the pool. Holding preserves participation in future deposits, whose size and timing remain uncertain.

The recovery dashboard defines the redemption price as the pool balance divided by outstanding DFX. Under Drift's stated design, redemption removes cash and burns tokens in the same proportion, leaving that ratio unchanged. New deposits raise the amount redeemable per remaining token.

The support plan announced in April 2026 was restated in Drift's Oct. 1 update: up to 127.5 million USDT from Tether for relaunch and user recovery, plus up to 20 million USDT from strategic partners for recovery. Those commitment ceilings do not measure cash already available for redemption.

In its April 16 announcement, Tether said capital would be introduced progressively and aligned with platform performance. Drift's April recovery framework described a package including a revenue-linked credit facility, an ecosystem grant and market-maker loans. Such financing can support a relaunch without the full headline amount becoming immediately available to DFX holders.

Drift says a share of net protocol revenue from the Velocity trading platform enters the pool daily at 00:00 UTC, alongside any recovered stolen funds. Further recovery funding depends on those deposits arriving; the commitments are not a promise that each victim will recover their full loss.

The DFX claim window closes Jan. 1, 2028, at 00:00 UTC, when unclaimed DFX will be permanently burned. That is a deadline to claim tokens, rather than a stated redemption deadline. Insurance Fund claims follow separate terms.

The post Drift hack recovery opened near one cent per dollar lost appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Ethereum Foundation's Oct. 1 announcement that zkAPI is running on mainnet gives the private AI-payment design coauthored by Davide Crapis and Vitalik Buterin a concrete financial-control test: how does a user get unspent money back when the billing server stops cooperating?

zkAPI, a billing system for metered APIs, documents an onchain withdrawal route that does not require the server's clearance. But a user's ability to recover a balance depends on which spending state they hold and whether they can start an exit in time. The implementation's pause powers and expiring notes put boundaries around that control.

Open Anonymity built the implementation with the Ethereum Foundation. Crapis and Buterin published the underlying design on Feb. 11; the foundation's October announcement credits the team that turned it into software and contracts. Etherscan records the announcement-linked vault's creation on Sept. 30, a day before the announcement.

The announcement describes its linked vault as holding USDC credits. The current mainnet manifest identifies that same vault as native ETH, with balances accounted for in whole gwei. Its explorer activity also shows ETH-valued deposits and close payouts.

CryptoSlate's February coverage examined the proposal. The mainnet implementation now gives withdrawal rights, deadlines and settlement dependencies practical significance.

Two routes out of a prepaid balance

Under the current protocol, a deposit funds a note. The wallet keeps the private spending state locally and uses proofs to authorize metered service. Individual API requests do not each move money onchain. As usage is settled, the server signs a successor state representing the remaining balance. The practical dividing line is between an unused spending state and a predecessor that has already authorized a request: the latter can be challenged if used to seek an escape payout.

That arrangement makes the spending state central to recovery. The vault can check a withdrawal proof against its rules, while the wallet must still possess the information needed to prove the balance it wants to withdraw. Preserving the note and its recovery records is essential to proving a withdrawal balance after an interruption.

The cooperative route, called mutual close, begins with server clearance. A separate server signing key authorizes the withdrawal, and the wallet includes that signature inside its proof. The vault checks the proof and pays the remaining balance to a destination bound into it. That destination can differ from the address that originally funded the note.

The second route is the escape withdrawal. A wallet can initiate it without the clearance signature. The vault removes the note from the active set and records a pending payout rather than immediately handing over the money.

The public mainnet configuration specifies a challenge period of 86,400 seconds, or 24 hours. If no valid challenge succeeds before the deadline, finalization pays the recorded balance to the user's destination and the deposit-minus-balance share to the treasury, provided the transfers succeed.

A server outage therefore does not automatically eliminate the documented withdrawal path. A user with a usable spending state can seek an exit without obtaining fresh clearance. The waiting period gives the system time to detect an attempt to withdraw from a state that has already authorized service.

Each spending state has a nullifier, a cryptographic identifier used to prevent reuse. To challenge an escape, a challenger supplies an original request proof with the same nullifier as the attempted withdrawal. The proof establishes that the state already authorized usage.

The vault code identified by the mainnet configuration preserves the request's historical active root for that check. A valid challenge submitted before the deadline cancels the pending payout and restores the note to the active set. It does not impose a separate monetary penalty.

The challenge protects settlement against withdrawing from an already-used state. It establishes prior authorization, while the accuracy of the provider's measured bill remains a separate question. Restoring a note also leaves any missing successor signature unresolved.

That difference matters in a dispute. The escape route removes the need for the server's withdrawal clearance, but it does not let a user choose an arbitrary balance and have the contract accept it. If the state being used for an exit already authorized a request, a valid challenge can send the note back into the recovery process.

When usage has already been authorized, provider accounting and a server-signed next state remain part of recovering the remaining balance. A successful challenge reactivates the note without resolving the contested bill or guaranteeing a refund.

Pause powers, expiry and the value of the balance

That vault code gives the owner a pause switch. Deposits, mutual close and initiation of new escape withdrawals all check it. An exit that needs no server clearance can still be prevented from starting while the vault is paused.

Already-pending escape finalization does not have that pause gate. Neither do challenges or expiry claims. A user who has successfully initiated an escape is therefore in a different position from one who still needs to start it.

The code provides these powers; no use of the pause switch is established here. For a user seeking a refund during an interruption, the owner's pause control remains an availability dependency.

Expiry creates another deadline. The mainnet manifest specifies a 30-day note lifetime, but the vault code rounds deposit time plus that lifetime upward to a one-day boundary. A note's actual expiry can therefore fall later than exactly 30 elapsed days.

Once an active note expires, the code permits it to be closed through an expiry claim that sends its full recorded deposit to the treasury. That rule is different from a normal withdrawal, where the proved remaining balance goes to the user. A note already in pending withdrawal status does not qualify for the active-note expiry claim.

For funds still in an active note, prepaid cloud AI creates a time-limited claim. State recovery and timely close-out affect whether the user reaches the withdrawal path before the note becomes eligible for the treasury claim.

ETH denomination also affects what the user owns between sessions. According to the native billing documentation, the deposit is neither a stable-dollar balance nor a swap into USDC. Its dollar reference value changes with ETH's price.

Dollar-denominated inference is charged through a price quote. The browser and server verify a pinned Chainlink ETH/USD round in finalized chain state, bind that quote into the authorization and keep the accepted rate fixed through settlement and recovery. Measured dollar usage is converted into a capped charge in whole gwei, rounded upward.

Freezing an accepted quote prevents a restart or recovery attempt from repricing that existing authorization. It does not stabilize the dollar value of the user's remaining ETH. For someone prepaying for cloud inference, the service bill and the underlying balance have different denominations.

The trust that remains

The mainnet manifest selects OA-org key issuance with OpenRouter inference. Provider usage receipts and the billing server's signed successor states remain operational parts of settlement. Ethereum supplies the exit mechanism, while a trustworthy chain view, compatible proof software, retained wallet data and timely challenger operation remain necessary dependencies.

The cryptographic setup carries a separate assumption. The manifest points to the note-bound Groth16 circuit and setup artifacts described in the repository. The setup documentation says the keys were generated by one party and no multiparty ceremony has taken place. Matching artifact hashes establishes which files are being used, while the destruction of setup secrets remains a separate trust assumption.

The manifest describes the integration as experimental and not production-audited. Those disclosures limit the assurance attached to the implementation. Mainnet availability alone does not demonstrate that every live recovery scenario will work.

The inference provider still sees prompt content, and network metadata can permit correlation. Billing privacy leaves those content and network questions separate from withdrawal rights.

For prepaid AI funds, control ultimately rests on completing an exit from a usable balance before the active note expires. The escape route gives users an alternative to server clearance; its practical value depends on state recovery and the availability of the vault when they need it.

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Ether began October 2026 without direction and costs around $2,690 on Sunday morning, October 4 (according to CoinGecko), almost exactly what it cost at the start of the month. For the Ethereum price prediction the question is whether October lives up to its reputation. We evaluated the monthly candles from Binance since 2018, and for Ether the result comes out more mixed than it does for Bitcoin.

Ethereum’s October record since 2018

Five of eight Octobers ended higher for Ether. The standout was 2021 at plus 42.9 percent, followed by 2022 at plus 18.4 percent, 2023 at plus 8.6 percent, 2020 at plus 7.4 percent and 2019 at plus 0.7 percent. The years that ended lower were 2018 at minus 14.7 percent, 2024 at minus 3.2 percent and 2025 at minus 7.2 percent (monthly Binance candles against USDT, October 1 to 31).

The order stands out: the two most recent Octobers both ended lower. Bitcoin, by contrast, has closed six of eight Octobers higher since 2018, as our October record for Bitcoin shows. The month owes its reputation above all to Bitcoin.

What is coming up for Ether in October 2026

On October 6 the Sepolia testnet moves to the next network version. Nothing changes for Ether on the main network that day, and according to the Ethereum Foundation a date for the main network has not yet been set, as we explained in our article on the Sepolia fork. A smooth test run is still the precondition for that main-network date moving closer.

Fund flows argue against a tailwind: the US spot ETFs on Ether lost money on three consecutive trading days at the end of September and on October 1, while the Bitcoin funds gained again. The figures are in our analysis of the ETF outflows.

Ethereum price prediction: the levels for October

Ether sits above its 50-day average (around $2,465) and its 200-day average (around $2,315), both calculated from CoinMarketCap daily closes. It is around 46 percent short of the record high of $4,946 set on August 24, 2025 (CoinGecko).

Since September 21 every daily close has fallen between $2,669 and $2,775. The upper level is therefore the first hurdle on the way up, and the lower support sits at $2,645, the close of September 20. October opened on Binance at $2,686, in the middle of that range.

Ethereum: your next three steps

First, do not read the October record as a promise. Five good Octobers stand against three poor ones, and the two most recent were poor. Second, watch the range between $2,645 and $2,775, as a daily close outside it is the next signal. Third, anyone holding Ether for the long term can stake the coins and earn a running return; providers and exit waiting times are set out in our comparison of staking providers.

Gains on Ether held for less than a year are taxable on sale in Germany once the annual allowance of €1,000 is exceeded. Crypto-assets fluctuate heavily and a total loss is possible. This article evaluates past price data; it is not a forecast and not a recommendation to buy or sell Ether.

If you hold Shiba Inu, there is no reason to act in haste today. The most important news of this weekend is still one worth working through once: on Friday, October 2, 2026, the Ethereum chain Blast announced that it is shutting down operations. The reasoning applies to every second layer in the Ethereum orbit, because the arithmetic is the same. On the same day, a developer at Shiba Inu answered the question of who actually settles the bill for Shibarium in two words. Taken together, the two events add up to a concrete task for you, and it has nothing to do with the chart. It has to do with which chain your tokens actually sit on.

The short answer first: your SHIB holdings are very probably not on Shibarium at all, but on Ethereum or with an exchange. In that case nothing changes for you today. Anyone who sent tokens across the Shibarium bridge over the past months in order to swap or play there has an open position on a chain whose funding currently rests publicly on one individual. That position is the one to look at today.

What happened on October 2: Blast winds down, a developer pays for Shibarium

In 2024 Blast was one of the largest second layers in the Ethereum orbit. According to Friday's statement, assets held on the chain have fallen 98 percent from a peak of around $2.2 billion in June 2024. The team writes that the economics of running the chain no longer make sense, that running costs exceed revenue, and that it sees no credible path to a sustainable operation. Users can still withdraw their funds through the familiar interface until October 26, 2026. After that the bridge contract on Ethereum remains the only route, which works technically but demands considerably more work of your own. The details are at CoinDesk, October 2.

A second layer, or layer 2, is a blockchain of its own that draws its security from a main chain such as Ethereum and writes transactions back there in batches. The appeal lies in the fees: on the second layer a transfer costs fractions of a cent. The catch lies in operations, because servers, data storage and publishing the data on Ethereum cost real money every day, whether or not anyone uses the chain.

That same Friday a user on X put the equivalent question to the Shiba Inu camp: who actually pays for the maintenance and further development of Shibarium? The developer Kaal Dhairya replied with the words “Yours truly”. The industry outlet U.Today reported the exchange on October 3. Dhairya named neither sums nor a plan for how the funding is meant to hold up over the long run. The statement is not an announcement of a shutdown and should not be read as one. It is a disclosure of how narrow this chain's funding base is at the moment.

Shibarium by the numbers: 1,804 transactions and 0.0154 percent network load on October 4

Rather than speculate, it is possible to measure the situation. The public statistics endpoint of the Shibarium explorer shibariumscan.io delivers the state of the chain in real time. A query this Sunday at 16:50 UTC produced the following picture: 1,804 transactions that day, a network load of 0.0154 percent, a gas price of 2.78 gwei and an average block time of around 5.0 seconds. Since launch the chain counts 612,982,618 transactions in total, 10,572,570 blocks and 263,237,202 addresses.

The most interesting figure follows from two of the others. For that day the explorer reports gas consumption of 159,774,955 units. Multiplied by the displayed gas price of 2.78 gwei, that works out to 0.4442 BONE in fees. BONE was quoted at $0.056634 at the same moment, according to CoinGecko. Total fees earned by Shibarium up to the afternoon therefore amount to roughly 2.5 US cents. That is a derived figure, not a line in a set of accounts, since it allows neither for rebates nor for distribution to validators. As an order of magnitude it still says everything: a chain that generates fees worth the price of a postage stamp in a day does not fund its own operation.

That makes the developer's answer easy to follow. There is simply no revenue side out of which servers, data publication and maintenance could be paid. Blast failed on exactly this calculation, only with larger numbers on both sides.

The arithmetic of a second layer: power, servers and data publication cost money every day

A second layer has three large cost blocks. The first is running the nodes that accept transactions and build blocks. The second is publishing the data on Ethereum, because without that data nobody could independently verify the state of the chain. The third is development itself, meaning people who fix bugs and maintain contracts. Only the first block can be kept small when usage is low. The second continues as long as the chain produces blocks.

For you as a holder one point is decisive, and it is often confused. The risk of a thinly funded second layer is as a rule not a total loss of your tokens. The value sits in the bridge contract on Ethereum. The risk is access: if the interface is switched off, the operator becomes unreachable or the nodes stand still, you need technical knowledge and patience to get at your funds. That is precisely why Blast is setting a deadline of October 26 and pointing to the contract route after that.

Your SHIB sits on Ethereum, not on Shibarium: the difference in practice

The most common error this week is the belief that SHIB is a Shibarium token. That is wrong. The Shiba Inu contract sits on Ethereum, at the address 0x95ad61b0a150d79219dcf64e1e6cc01f0b64c4ce. Anyone holding SHIB at an exchange or in a wallet on Ethereum is technically untouched by the funding question around Shibarium. Shibarium is an additional chain belonging to the same project, one that tokens can be bridged to, and BONE is the fee currency there.

The check is therefore quickly done. Open your wallet and look at which network is selected when a SHIB or BONE balance is displayed. If it says Ethereum Mainnet, the balance sits on the main chain. If it says Shibarium, you hold a bridged balance. At an exchange the same applies in substance: there the balance sits in the provider's internal ledger, and the network only becomes relevant at withdrawal. A glance at the withdrawal dialogue shows you which networks the provider offers at all.

The Shibarium bridge according to the official documentation: 30 minutes and one hour

If you have found a bridged balance, it pays to look at the figures the project itself quotes. The bridge documentation lists two routes. Via the so-called PoS bridge, a withdrawal from Shibarium to Ethereum takes around 30 minutes according to the project, and via the Plasma bridge around one hour. Technically the tokens are burned on Shibarium and released again on Ethereum. The same source describes the Plasma variant as more rigid and less flexible.

These times are project figures, not a guarantee. For your planning they still mean something solid: a withdrawal is a matter of hours, not weeks. So you do not have to move everything tonight. You should know that you can, and you should keep the necessary fees ready on Ethereum, because the release on the main chain costs ETH. Without ETH in the account the final step cannot be carried out, and that is where most withdrawals come to grief.

What a withdrawal costs in fees

Reckon roughly with two transactions on Ethereum, a release and a completion. When the network is quiet the cost runs to single-digit euros, and considerably higher when it is busy. Compare that amount honestly with the value of your bridged balance. Where the sums involved are a few euros, it can be more economical to leave the position where it is and write off the loss rather than pay fees of a similar size. Nobody can make that judgement for you, as it depends entirely on your own figures.

Crypto custody in Germany: exchange, software wallet or hardware wallet in daily use

The second question raised by this occasion is custody. Anyone with tokens sitting on a third-party chain or with a provider depends on that party continuing to exist. Anyone holding their own keys carries the responsibility for them. Both have a price, and there is no variant that suits everybody.

A software wallet on your phone is convenient and usable for small amounts; the common programs differ above all in how they secure the recovery words. From amounts whose loss would hurt, the key belongs on a device that has never been connected to the internet; which models manage that and what they cost is set out in the hardware wallet comparison. Anyone who trades regularly and does not want to manage keys stays with a provider and should at least set up two-factor authentication and a withdrawal address list.

One note that gets lost in every migration: write the recovery words down on paper or metal and never in a photo album or a notes app. The words are the key itself. Storing them digitally reduces the security of the wallet to the security of your phone.

Buying under MiCA: the obligations a crypto exchange in Germany has carried since 2026

For the purchase route, Germany has had a clear framework since the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets took full effect. Providers that arrange or hold crypto-assets for retail clients need authorisation and are subject to supervision. For you that means checking before a purchase whether the provider is authorised in the EU and which authority supervises it. The obligations behind that range from capital requirements through the segregation of client assets to the duty to handle complaints in an orderly way. A selection of authorised venues with their respective fees is set out in the crypto exchange comparison.

In practice, with a secondary asset such as SHIB this means one thing above all: not every authorised provider lists every token, and at small venues the spread between buying and selling price is often dearer than the stated fee. Compare the amount you actually receive rather than the percentage in the price list.

Holding period and transfers: what moving between your own wallets triggers for tax

A withdrawal from a second layer regularly raises the question of whether the tax office is reading along. The baseline in Germany has been the same for years: gains from the sale of crypto-assets held as private assets remain tax free if more than one year lies between acquisition and disposal. A transfer between two wallets that both belong to you is not a sale and therefore does not trigger a disposal. The holding period continues to run.

Care is needed where a transfer technically runs through a swap, for instance when a token is converted into another form while bridging. A taxable event can then arise. So document every step with date, amount and transaction hash. That costs five minutes and spares you a reconstruction from memory if it ever comes to that. This paragraph is not binding advice; with larger sums the case belongs with a tax adviser.

The figures for the record: SHIB, BONE and the distance to the record high

For context, the values standing at CoinGecko at 16:43 UTC on Sunday afternoon. SHIB was quoted at $0.00000572, the equivalent of €0.00000508, on a market capitalisation of around $3.37 billion and in 35th place in the overall market. Supply in circulation stands at 589,238,857,696,030 tokens. The distance to the record high of October 27, 2021, then $0.00008616, comes to 93.35 percent. BONE stood at $0.056634.

These figures are a snapshot of one Sunday and change by the hour. For the question in this article they are still useful, because they fix the order of magnitude: the fee stream of a chain with 1,804 transactions a day bears no relation to the market capitalisation of the associated token. Anyone who wants to judge the future of Shibarium should look at usage rather than at valuation.

What other second layers take from the end of Blast

Blast is not the first case, but so far the largest, in which a second layer ceases operations for economic reasons. For the market that is a normalisation. In 2023 and 2024 dozens of such chains came into being, often carried by incentive programmes that drew users in for a short while. When those programmes expire, what remains is the usage a project really has. With Blast that turned out in the end to be too little.

For Shibarium it means neither reassurance nor alarm. The chain is running, produces blocks on a five-second cadence and is used by its own ecosystem, if on a very small scale. The open question is funding, and the developer's answer of October 2 has made it public rather than answered it. A project whose infrastructure hangs on a private individual carries a concentration risk. That is a sober observation and not an accusation.

Shibarium and your tokens: what to take away

1. Establish the network. Open your wallet and read off which network your SHIB or BONE balance sits on. Ethereum Mainnet means no action is needed. If it says Shibarium, go on to step two. If everything is with a provider, look in the withdrawal dialogue to see which networks are offered; which wallet programs display the network cleanly is set out in the software wallet comparison.
2. Prepare the way back without rushing it. Put ETH aside for the fees on Ethereum and weigh the cost against the value of your bridged balance. According to the project, the route back takes 30 minutes via the PoS bridge and around one hour via the Plasma bridge. Where to top up ETH at the lowest fees is shown by the crypto exchange comparison. Then decide whether the withdrawal is worth it.
3. Set custody up cleanly. Decide which part of your holdings stays with a provider and which part moves onto a device of your own. The devices and their prices are listed in the hardware wallet comparison. Write the recovery words down in analogue form and keep them separate from the device.

(As of October 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

On Monday, October 5, 2026, a network forks at Monero. What it affects is not the main network where your XMR sits: a separate test network forks, one the developers call a stressnet. Anyone holding Monero therefore has nothing to do on that day: no wallet action, no withdrawal from an exchange, no swapping. The changeover this test is working towards is nonetheless the most far-reaching alteration to Monero's privacy in years, and it still has no date for the main network.

That separation is the whole core of the story. There is a hard, documented date, and it concerns a test environment. And there is a rebuild with an open date that decides how anonymous Monero will be in a few years and how exchanges in the EU will deal with it. This article sorts the two apart and tells you which of them concerns your coins.

What forks on October 5: the beta stressnet, not the Monero mainnet

The developer team behind the changeover released version v0.19.0.0-beta.3.0 on Friday, September 25, 2026, the so-called FCMP++ and Carrot beta stressnet v3.0. According to the developers, this package forks away from its previous test network on October 5, 2026 at block height 3102800.

A stressnet is a deliberately loaded test network. It exists to bombard a protocol with more transactions, more data and more participants than everyday use would produce, and to see where it breaks. The coins in it have no value, the blockchain in it is not Monero's, and a fork there changes nothing about the main network.

The distinction matters because news headlines about this date often say only "Monero hard fork on October 5". To a holder that sounds like a network changeover with pressure to act, of the kind Monero used to have roughly every six months. This time it is a test run in which volunteer node operators take part.

Monero price at around 550 dollars: weekly high 563.50, weekly low 525

The Monero price stands at around $550 at midday on Sunday. Over the week barely anything has moved: the gain across seven days is about 0.4 percent, according to data from CoinPaprika. Within that week there was room enough. XMR marked the weekly high on October 3 at $563.50 and the weekly low on September 28 at $525, measured on Kraken's daily candles. A good 7 percent lies between those two points.

By market capitalisation Monero is thereby the fourteenth-largest cryptocurrency. From its own record, which XMR reached in January 2026, the price is around 31 percent away. That is remarkably little for a coin the large regulated trading venues in Europe have not listed for years.

The fork date itself has not shown up in the price, and that is consistent: a test network yields no returns and changes no supply. Anyone who looked for a reaction to the announcement this week finds none.

FCMP++ explained: from 16 decoys to the whole blockchain

FCMP++ stands for Full-Chain Membership Proofs. It is a cryptographic procedure with which a sender proves that the amount being spent comes from a particular set of earlier incoming payments, without revealing which one exactly.

Today Monero works with ring signatures. When you send XMR, your wallet mixes the incoming payment actually used with fifteen others from the blockchain. An observer sees sixteen possible origins and cannot say which of them is the real one. That size of sixteen has been the standard for years and is at the same time the known weak point: anyone collecting enough additional knowledge can rule out candidates and narrow the circle.

FCMP++ replaces that small ring with a proof against the entire chain history. Instead of one of sixteen, an output is in future meant to be one among more than 150 million, that is, among practically all the payment outputs Monero has ever created. The additional knowledge with which investigators shrink rings today thereby loses its point of attack, because there is nothing left to shrink.

Carrot: what the addressing protocol changes for existing Monero addresses

Carrot is the second building block of the package and concerns how Monero addresses are constructed. It is a new addressing protocol which, according to the developers, brings additional properties in security, privacy and usability while remaining backward compatible with existing addresses.

Backward compatible here means: an address you have deposited somewhere today, say with a service that pays out XMR to you, is meant to keep working after the changeover. For holders that is the reassuring news at this point, because exchanging receiving addresses across several services is one of the most error-prone operations there is.

Stressnet v3.0 in detail: hot-cold wallets, Transaction Relay v2 and RandomX v2

Version v3.0 brings, according to the release notes, three notable additions into the test. First, support for hot-cold wallet set-ups, in which a wallet without access to the spend keys prepares transactions and a separate device never connected to the network signs them. That is the procedure hardware wallets also work with, and its availability helps decide whether devices will follow the changeover later.

Second, larger improvements to the Transaction Relay v2 protocol, that is, to the way transactions are passed on between nodes. Third, support for RandomX v2, the reworked mining algorithm. Added to that are fixes from the previous stressnet version and the current state of Monero's main branch.

That hot-cold support is entering the test precisely now is the practically most relevant detail of the whole package. It is the point at which it is decided whether you will still be able to keep your coins on a separate device after a later mainnet changeover, or whether you will have to wait for new firmware.

Why the official roadmap names no mainnet date

On the project roadmap at getmonero.org FCMP++ appears under "Full-Chain Membership Proofs" in the section of upcoming work, together with the Seraphis codebase and Jamtis. There is no date there, no version number either, and Carrot is not listed at all.

That is not an omission but the way the project works. Monero has no company, no board and no venture capitalist's treasury in the background that could enforce a delivery date. Changeovers arise in open developer meetings and are released when audits and tests are finished. The stressnet fork on October 5 is a step in that procedure, not the announcement of a launch.

For you that means: a mainnet activation of FCMP++ may come in months, it may also slip beyond a year. Anyone wanting to draw consequences from the technology now is drawing them from an intention, not from a timetable. Figures attached to a date nobody has named are, at this point, invention.

The delisting wave: how MiCA and the anti-money-laundering regulation pushed Monero out of EU order books

While work goes on at the protocol, the trading venue for Monero in Europe has shrunk over the years. Binance took XMR off its European offering in February 2024, Bitpanda in the same year, Bitvavo in 2025. Kraken ended support for Monero in the European Economic Area and, after the deadline passed, converted remaining balances that had not been withdrawn into Bitcoin.

The counts across all trading venues diverge depending on the cut-off date. Industry counts name around 73 exchanges that have delisted or restricted Monero, against roughly 51 in 2023; which month exactly is meant varies between sources. The direction is unambiguous, the exact figure you should not read as a fixed value.

The reason lies in three sets of rules that work together. The provisions for crypto service providers under MiCA require an authorised exchange to be able to trace the origin and destination of funds. The EU anti-money-laundering regulation AMLR tightens that further for anonymity-enhancing assets. And the FATF travel rule requires sender and recipient data to be supplied with transfers. A coin whose protocol necessarily conceals origin and amount cannot be reconciled with those duties.

Worth noting is the separation between trading and ownership. Owning and using Monero is legal in Germany; there is no ban. What is regulated are the service providers, not the holders. That is exactly why the wave hits the buying route and not the holding in your own wallet.

Buying Monero in Germany: which routes remain after the delistings

For a purchase out of Germany the situation is uncomfortable. The large MiCA-authorised providers through which trading usually happens here do not list XMR. Anyone looking for Monero ends up at trading venues outside EU authorisation, at decentralised exchanges, or at atomic swaps, where Bitcoin is bought first and then swapped.

As remaining centralised trading venues with XMR pairs, industry overviews name KuCoin, MEXC, Gate.io, the small TradeOgre and Kraken outside the EEA. Each of those routes brings its own drawbacks: no MiCA authorisation for the German market, no access to a German complaints body, and, in the event of insolvency or a hack, a legal position you can hardly assess beforehand. If you want to compare how regulated providers in Germany work, a look at our comparison of crypto exchanges helps, even though you will not find XMR there.

The sober sentence on this is: with Monero today the buying route is the part carrying the greatest risk, not the technology. The protocol works and is being extended. The question of which third party you get the coin through and how well you are protected there is the harder one.

Liquidity and spread: what a shrunken market means for your execution

When order books fall away, the same trading spreads across fewer venues. Daily turnover at Kraken was in the range of four to nine thousand XMR per day this week. That is tradeable, but it is not a depth in which a large order disappears without trace.

In practice that means two things. First, the difference between the buy and the sell price is felt faster with Monero than with Bitcoin or Ether, especially at weekends and in the quiet hours. Second, a single larger sale moves the price more. The 7 percent gap between the weekly low and the weekly high arose without any news at all; that is an indication of how thin the book is in stretches.

Anyone buying through a market order pays that difference immediately. A limit order you set yourself takes the surprise away, and with it the certainty that it will be filled.

Custody and wallet version: what to check now

From the stressnet fork no task follows for your mainnet balance. From the direction in which the rebuild is running, one does. Monero regularly requires up-to-date wallet software at network changeovers, and FCMP++ reaches deeper into the transaction structure than the changeovers of past years.

It therefore makes sense to know now what you are holding custody with. Are you running a wallet that still receives updates? Does your balance sit on a hardware device whose manufacturer still maintains Monero? Do you have a working backup of your recovery phrase, kept separately from the device? Those three points decide whether a future changeover is an update for you or a problem. Which devices support Monero and how they differ in handling and price is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

The second point concerns coins sitting with a third party. Holding Monero on an exchange that one day delists XMR is the pattern that has produced the same deadlines again and again over past years: trading halt, then withdrawal deadline, then forced conversion into Bitcoin. Anyone moving early into their own custody decides the timing themselves.

Leverage and liquidation: 20 percent of distance at fivefold leverage

Part of the fork is a point that has nothing to do with Monero in particular. Around dated protocol events, volatility rises with many coins, even when the event has, as here, no economic substance at all. Anyone holding XMR with leverage will not be liquidated by the event itself, but may well be by the movement that expectations around it produce.

With a coin that has a thin book this effect is larger. A position at fivefold leverage sits, at a price of around $550, arithmetically some 20 percent away from its liquidation, and 20 percent is historically no great distance with Monero. This week's range alone already covered a third of it.

Tax and holding period: what applies to swapping XMR in Germany

For holders liable to tax in Germany, the one-year period applies to crypto assets as a private disposal: anyone holding longer than a year disposes tax-free under the law as it stands, and below that taxation applies above a threshold. Important for Monero in particular: a swap is a disposal. If you swap XMR into Bitcoin through an atomic swap, or an exchange itself converts your remaining balance into Bitcoin after a deadline, that triggers the same event as a sale.

With anonymity-enhancing assets that is the awkward spot, because the burden of proof lies with you, and a protocol that conceals amounts produces no convenient history for the tax office. Anyone holding XMR should document acquisition dates and acquisition costs themselves rather than rely on being able to reconstruct them later. Tools that keep such records can be found in our overview of crypto tax software. Worth noting is that tax law for crypto assets is currently being worked on; what applies today need not still apply next year.

Levels above and below: 563.50 dollars and the 525 zone

The two ends of this week serve as points of observation. Above sits the weekly high at $563.50, reached on October 3; beyond it begins the area in which the price last traded at the end of September. Below, the weekly low at $525 marks the point at which buyers stepped in on September 28, and beneath that the round level at $500.

These are observations, not targets and not a recommendation. Those two levels say nothing about where the price is heading; they only record where trading actually took place over the past days. In a market of this depth, each of those levels can be run through in a single day.

Monero and FCMP++: What to take away

1. October 5 is none of your business as a holder. A test network forks, and your mainnet balance stays untouched. For the main network there is no announced date, and FCMP++ has so far entered the project's roadmap only as a plan without a date.
2. Put your custody in order while no deadline is pressing. Maintained wallet software, a device whose manufacturer still supports Monero, and a separately stored backup are the work that should be done before a changeover. The hardware wallet comparison shows which devices come into question for it.
3. Treat the buying route as your greatest risk, not the technology. XMR is not to be had at the providers authorised in Germany, and every detour costs protection. Anyone wanting to check how regulated trading works will find the criteria in the exchange comparison.

(As of October 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

For any Dogecoin price prediction the ETF channel is the most quoted and the least load-bearing figure there is. The Grayscale Dogecoin Trust, by far the largest of these funds, last held $14.11 million in net assets against $16.34 million in cumulative net inflows. The market capitalisation of Dogecoin stood at $14.63 billion on Sunday afternoon. The largest fund therefore holds 0.097 percent of the coin it tracks.

From that follows an uncomfortable insight for anyone reading inflow reports as a buy signal: a number that sits below one thousandth of the market can barely move the price arithmetically. This article works through the ratio, puts the wind-down of the Bitwise fund in context, and shows which figures actually turn the result for investors in Germany.

Dogecoin price prediction in brief: the ETF channel carries one thousandth of market capitalisation

DOGE traded at $0.09368 and €0.0831 in the early afternoon of Sunday, October 4, 2026. That is 0.63 percent more than the previous day, 4.6 percent less than a week ago and 10.0 percent more than thirty days ago. The figures come from the CoinGecko market data query for the same hour.

The term ETF channel in this article means the sum of all exchange-traded products that back Dogecoin physically and publish their inflows and outflows daily. In the United States there are currently three providers. Their combined weight can be read off a single calculation.

Dogecoin's market capitalisation is $14.63 billion on 156.18 billion coins in circulation. The largest fund holds $14.11 million. The ratio is 0.097 percent. For comparison, and this comparison is the core of the prediction: on Friday, October 3 alone, Dogecoin worth $854 million changed hands according to market data. The entire fund holding equals 1.7 percent of a single trading day.

Dogecoin ETF holdings: 14.11 million dollars sit with a single provider

The inflows of the past week show the same picture from another direction. According to data from the analysis house SoSoValue, which 24/7 Wall St. evaluated on October 4, 2026, the funds on Dogecoin, Litecoin and Hedera took in less than $10 million combined in the week from September 28 to October 2. Three coins, five trading days, under $10 million.

The daily movements within that week explain why no trend comes of it. On September 29 the Dogecoin funds received $879,000 in inflows. A day later investors withdrew $551,430. On October 1 and 2 the statistics reported no movements worth naming. An inflow of which two thirds leave again the following day is not a demand signal but noise in a very small pot.

The monthly picture looks friendlier but stays small. September 2026 brought the Dogecoin funds $3.71 million in net inflows, the highest monthly figure since January 2026. By far the greater part of it went to the Grayscale trust, while the products from 21Shares recorded outflows of $593,000 over the same period.

A glance at another asset class makes the order of magnitude tangible. The funds on Chainlink collected $8.3 million in the same week and manage around $230 million. The Litecoin products come to roughly $14.7 million, those on Hedera to around $80 million. Dogecoin sits, despite its fame, at the lower end of that row.

One week of inflows, one trading day of turnover: 854 million dollars change hands

Put the two numbers side by side. The weekly inflow of all three coin families came to less than $10 million. The trading turnover in Dogecoin alone stood at $854 million on October 3 and at a daily average of $381 million on October 4. The complete weekly inflow of three asset classes therefore equals roughly 1.2 percent of what is turned over in DOGE alone on a single day.

Prices arise where supply meets demand, and for Dogecoin that is the spot market at the trading venues. Anyone wanting to know where the price comes from looks at order book depth and trading volume, not at a fund statistic whose daily amounts run in six figures. The analysis by 24/7 Wall St. puts the same result in one sentence: small altcoin funds have no meaningful influence on prices because their inflows are too low and too erratic.

That does not mean the products are meaningless. The funds give institutional investors a regulated route of access, and over the years they build a custody structure that did not exist before. For a price prediction over the coming weeks, however, they are too small as a driver, and every prediction built on them rests on very thin foundations.

The BWOW wind-down plan fixes October 14 and October 22

One concrete deadline stands in the October calendar. Bitwise Investment Advisers resolved on September 10, 2026 to liquidate the Bitwise Dogecoin ETF, which is listed under the ticker BWOW on NYSE Arca. The last trading day is Wednesday, October 14, 2026. Until the close of that day shareholders can sell their units on the exchange.

After that a fixed sequence runs. On October 14 the Dogecoin held is converted into cash. Before trading opens on October 15 the issue of new units ends. On Thursday, October 22, the remaining shareholders receive the net asset value of their units as of October 21 as a cash payment.

The size of the fund explains the step. BWOW started in November 2025 with around $3 million in trading volume and came, over its entire life, to net outflows of $1.23 million. Most recently the fund managed $801,400. Bitwise justifies the closure by saying the product range is continuously adapted to demand. We broke down the details of this wind-down in a separate article on cryptoticker.io on October 2, 2026.

For the prediction the process is less dramatic than the headline sounds. A fund with $801,400 converting its holding into cash sells Dogecoin worth less than one thousandth of daily turnover. The wind-down day is a date in the calendar, not a supply shock.

14.4 million new DOGE a day: the supply side of the Dogecoin price prediction

Anyone dismissing the demand side as too small has to count the supply side in honestly. Dogecoin knows no halving. Since 2015 the protocol has paid out an unchanged 10,000 DOGE per block, and a block arises on average every minute. That gives 14.4 million new coins a day and 5.256 billion a year.

At the current price of $0.09368 the daily issuance equals a value of around $1.35 million. In September some 432 million DOGE worth a good $40 million came to market by that route. Against it stood $3.71 million in fund inflows. In the best month of the year the ETF channel therefore absorbed barely 9 percent of the newly created supply.

The percentage expansion of supply falls from year to year because the denominator grows. At 156.18 billion coins in circulation the annual rate currently stands at 3.37 percent. Five years ago it was noticeably higher; in five years it will be below 3 percent. That is the slow, calculable part of the Dogecoin price prediction, and it works more reliably than any inflow report.

Dogecoin price in euros: 0.0831 euros and 86.2 percent below the 2021 record

For you as an investor in Germany the dollar price is only half the calculation. In euros DOGE traded at €0.0831 on Sunday afternoon. The all-time high of May 7, 2021 was €0.601466, so the current price is 86.2 percent below it. In dollars the distance to the record of $0.731578 is 87.2 percent.

The difference of one percentage point comes from the exchange rate and is a good example of why you should calculate your position in the currency in which you pay tax on it. Anyone noting entry prices in dollars and filing a tax return in euros builds in a source of error that reappears at every disposal.

Over the month DOGE is up 10.0 percent, over the week down 4.6 percent. The coin has thus lately run weaker than the broad market, while the fund inflows had their best month since January over the same period. That divergence too argues against the ETF channel as an explanation for how the price is formed.

The ETF channel as a price signal: where its explanatory power ends

An inflow figure works as a signal when it is large enough to tie up supply and steady enough to form a trend. Neither is the case with Dogecoin. A daily figure of $879,000 equals, at the current price, around 9.4 million DOGE and therefore two thirds of what the protocol newly creates on the same day.

There is a threshold at which that would change. For the funds to absorb the daily new supply in full, they would have to collect around $1.35 million a day on a lasting basis, that is roughly $40 million a month. The best month of the year brought $3.71 million. A factor of eleven is missing up to that threshold.

That factor is the actual yardstick you can keep an eye on. If monthly net inflows rise above $40 million and hold that level for several months, the channel becomes a figure that belongs in a prediction. As long as it sits a double-digit multiple below it, it is a footnote.

A one-year holding period and the 1,000 euro threshold for DOGE gains

The lever with the greatest effect on your result lies not in the market but in tax law. Gains from the sale of crypto assets count in Germany among private disposals under section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If more than twelve months lie between acquisition and sale, the gain stays tax-free.

Below that period a threshold of 1,000 euros per calendar year applies, raised with effect from the 2024 assessment period. Threshold means this: if the sum of all private disposal gains in a year reaches 1,000 euros or more, the entire amount is taxable and not only the excess part. At a gain of 999 euros you pay nothing; at 1,001 euros you pay tax on 1,001 euros at your personal rate.

From that follows a concrete check you can carry out today. Look into your transaction history and note the acquisition date for every DOGE position. Positions bought before October 4, 2025 are tax-free on a sale today. Positions from the current year fall under the threshold, and whether you dispose of them before or after the turn of the year decides in which year the gain counts. A portfolio tracker with a tax report for the German market takes the allocation under the FIFO method off your hands.

Buying route under MiCA: spot market, ETP or direct custody

The American spot ETFs whose inflows this article revolves around are in practice not accessible to you as a retail investor in Germany. Those funds lack the key information document required by the PRIIP regulation, which European brokers demand for distribution to retail clients. So you read their flow figures as a market indicator but as a rule do not buy them.

In practice two routes remain. The first runs through a trading platform authorised under the European regulation on markets in crypto-assets, which has applied in full since the end of 2024. Our overview of regulated trading venues for the German market shows which providers hold a permission and how their fee models are built. The second route runs through an exchange-traded product in a European wrapper that you buy in an ordinary securities account.

With the European wrapper it is worth looking at the ongoing fee. We worked through this cost side on October 3, 2026 in a separate analysis of the ETP fee and the holding period on cryptoticker.io. For placing these products in a securities account in general, our overview of crypto ETFs and ETPs in Germany applies, which also keeps the tax treatment of the different wrappers apart.

Anyone buying directly and holding custody themselves loses the convenience of the securities account and gains control over the keys. For amounts you want to hold over years, a hardware solution is the safer route, because the private key never leaves the device.

Levels above and below: 0.0878 dollars on the moving average, 0.10 dollars as the ceiling

Two price areas structure the coming weeks. Below sits the 200-day average at $0.0878, around 6 percent under the current price. A moving average is the mean of the closing prices of the last 200 days in each case and serves as a rough dividing line between a medium-term uptrend and downtrend.

Above stands the round level of $0.10. That threshold is psychologically charged and was, over the past weeks, repeatedly the point at which the price turned. Between the two lines lies a range of a good 13 percent, within which DOGE has been moving for weeks.

A prediction that leaves this range needs a trigger outside the ETF channel, because its order of magnitude demonstrably does not suffice for that. Candidates are a move in the overall market, a protocol event, or an inflow of institutional size that bridges at least the factor of eleven named above.

Dogecoin price prediction: How to proceed now

1. Put inflow reports in context instead of taking them at face value. Set every headline about fund inflows against the daily turnover of lately $381 million to $854 million. Anything under $40 million a month is a marginal figure for how the price is formed. Where to get reliable market data in euros for that is shown by the overview of regulated trading venues.
2. Sort your acquisition dates before the turn of the year. Check which positions have already passed the twelve-month period under section 23 EStG and which gains of the current year together push against the 1,000 euro threshold. A tax tool with FIFO allocation works that out for the German assessment period.
3. Match custody to the holding duration. What you want to hold beyond the one-year period does not belong permanently in a trading account. Which devices keep the private key offline and what they cost is in the hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

If you want to buy Bitcoin with a credit card, it takes less than five minutes. That very convenience makes it the most expensive buying route available in Germany. You do not pay one fee but two: the card surcharge of the trading venue, and a second surcharge from your own bank, which frequently does not book the purchase as a purchase at all. On €100 of card spending that adds up to €9.94 in the most expensive case and €1.80 in the cheapest. Paying in the same amount by SEPA transfer costs nothing at any of the large providers.

Bitcoin traded on Sunday at around €75,660, or $85,201, and was thereby 0.4 percent above the previous day. For the question of what the purchase costs, the price is irrelevant: the fees attach to the payment route, not to the price level. This article works through both items separately, shows how to recognise the expensive clause in your own card contract, and says when the card is nonetheless the right choice.

Buying Bitcoin with a credit card: these two fees are charged separately

The decisive point is overlooked in almost every guide. Two companies are involved in a card purchase of Bitcoin, and both charge fees of their own.

The first item is the deposit or card fee of the trading venue. That is the surcharge an exchange or a broker takes for the fact that you pay by card rather than by transfer. It appears in the provider's fee schedule and shows up on screen before you confirm.

The second item is the fee charged by your card issuer, that is, the bank that issued the card. This item appears nowhere in the purchase process. It lands on the credit card statement, usually weeks later, and many buyers take it for an error.

A note on the terms: a crypto credit card is the opposite of this process. With one of those you pay in a shop and sell crypto assets in doing so. What is at stake here is the reverse route, buying Bitcoin with an ordinary Visa or Mastercard. If you want to compare the card products themselves, the terms are in our comparison of crypto credit cards; beyond the words credit card they have nothing to do with the subject of this article.

The provider fee: 1.80 to 3.99 percent on the card amount

The card fees of the trading venues available in Germany sit, according to their own published schedules, in a narrow range, and that range is consistently far more expensive than a transfer. Bitpanda states 1.80 percent, Binance 1.99 percent, BISON 2.49 percent, Kraken 3.75 percent and Coinbase 3.99 percent. At all five providers the SEPA deposit is free.

These percentages are pure deposit or instant-buy fees. The trading fee for the purchase itself is added on top at some providers; at others it sits inside the displayed price. A spread is the difference between the price at which a provider buys and the price at which it sells; it works like a fee but appears in no fee table. Which provider comes out ahead in which constellation is set out in our overview of crypto exchanges.

Two points for context. First, providers change these rates without notice, which is why nothing replaces a look at the fee page before buying. Second, almost all trading venues apply a minimum amount for card purchases, often ten euros, and a weekly limit that is lower on new accounts than on long-standing ones.

Quasi cash: how banks settle a card purchase like a cash withdrawal

This is the item that tips the calculation. Card issuers classify transactions by merchant category codes. If a merchant falls into a group that counts as cash-like, the issuer treats the transaction like a withdrawal at an ATM and not like a purchase. The technical term for it is quasi cash: a card transaction in which the cardholder receives, in economic terms, money or something close to money rather than goods.

How expensive that becomes is spelled out in the banks' price lists. In its schedule of prices and services dated September 30, 2026, TARGOBANK lists for the credit card "transactions at casinos, lottery companies, betting shops, money transmitters and e-money providers (quasi cash)" and charges 3.5 percent of the transaction amount, a minimum of €5.95, plus debit interest. For the same bank's Visa debit card it is a flat €5.95.

Two words in that clause are decisive for crypto purchases. "Money transmitter" and "e-money provider" describe exactly the role in which a payment service provider acts when it collects card money on behalf of an exchange. Whether your purchase falls under the clause is therefore decided by the payment service provider through which the exchange settles, and not by the exchange itself. You do not see that provider's category code beforehand.

The calculation for 100 euros: 9.94 euros in the most expensive case

Now both items can be added up. The calculation takes €100 of card spending and applies the highest of the rates named above for the exchange and the TARGOBANK clause for the bank.

• Provider fee: 3.99 percent of €100 comes to €3.99. That leaves €96.01 for Bitcoin.
• Bank fee: 3.5 percent of €100 would be €3.50. Because the bank demands at least €5.95, the minimum applies and it becomes €5.95.
• Total: €9.94 on an outlay of €100, that is 9.94 percent. Debit interest comes on top, its size depending on the card's interest rate.

In the cheapest case the same calculation looks entirely different. Take Bitpanda's 1.80 percent and a card whose price list does not classify crypto transactions as cash-like, and €1.80 remains. Between the two ends lies a factor of five, and both ends are reachable with the same two clicks.

One detail makes the matter particularly unfavourable on small amounts. The minimum of €5.95 works like a flat charge: on an outlay of €50 that is 11.9 percent, on €20 already 29.75 percent. Only above roughly €170 does the rate of 3.5 percent apply instead of the minimum. Anyone wanting to start with small sums therefore pays the most, proportionally, on a card purchase.

Debit interest from the booking date: the item with no line of its own in the fee table

The three words "plus debit interest" at the end of the quasi-cash clause are easy to read past and often cost more in the end than the fee itself. On a normal card payment you have an interest-free period until the monthly statement. On a cash withdrawal, and on everything the bank treats like cash, that period falls away. Debit interest is the rate the bank charges on a card transaction not yet settled, and on cash-like transactions it runs from the day of booking.

That has a consequence reaching beyond the question of cost. Buying on credit means you are paying for a fluctuating asset with borrowed money. If the price falls, the bill stands in full and the interest keeps running. Anyone who buys Bitcoin without settling the card transaction in full within the same month has stacked two risks on top of each other instead of one.

Two price lists, two outcomes: how to recognise the clause in your own contract

The quasi-cash clause is not an industry standard: it is in some card contracts and absent from others, and the difference can be read up in a few minutes.

DKB words it more narrowly in its schedule of prices and services dated September 15, 2026. For the Visa credit card it demands a surcharge of 3.00 percent of the transaction expressly only "at lotteries, casinos, betting shops and other providers of games involving a stake". That line does not name money transmitters or e-money providers. Two institutions, two wordings, two different bills for the same purchase.

This is how to check your own contract: open the schedule of prices and services for your card, not the marketing leaflet, and search for the words quasi, cash advance, money transmitter, e-money, lottery and gambling. If you find "money transmitter" or "e-money provider", your crypto purchase is very probably affected. If only gambling appears there, you have a good chance that only the provider fee applies. In the end only the first statement after a small test purchase gives certainty.

When the card is declined: four causes and the order in which to check them

Declined cards are the rule rather than the exception on crypto purchases, and in most cases the trading venue is not the reason. You cover these four causes fastest in this order.

1. The bank blocks crypto transactions outright. Some issuers do not permit the merchant category at all. Barclaycard took that step in June 2025, as we reported at the time; the assessment and the consequences are in our piece on the Barclaycard crypto ban. A release through customer service is rarely possible in those cases.
2. The confirmation from the security procedure is missing. 3-D Secure is the procedure by which you authorise an online payment in your bank's app or with a one-time passcode; without that authorisation the purchase breaks off. The notification often arrives late, and the purchase runs into a timeout.
3. The billing address does not match. The name and address in the trading account have to agree with the data the bank holds for the card. A differing first name or an old address is enough for a decline.
4. A limit bites. That can be the card's monthly limit, a daily limit for online payments, or the trading venue's weekly limit. Prepaid and some debit cards are, in addition, not enabled for these transactions at all.

A declined attempt can leave a pending authorisation on the card account that stays visible for several days even though no purchase came about. Repeating it several times in quick succession only raises the number of those pending entries and triggers a precautionary block at some banks.

Tax: the purchase itself triggers nothing, the holding period starts on the day of purchase

Buying Bitcoin is not a taxable event in Germany. Only the sale, or the exchange into another crypto asset, becomes relevant for tax. The holding period is the span between purchase and sale after which a gain from a private disposal stays tax-free; for crypto assets it runs for one year and starts on the day of the purchase.

For a card purchase that means two things. The card fees reduce a later gain only to the extent that they count as incidental acquisition costs of the purchase; your own bank's fee for a cash-like transaction is a cost item of the credit agreement and not of the purchase. And what counts for the period is the purchase date at the trading venue, not the card's statement date, which can lie weeks later.

On top of that comes a date that matters for purchases made this quarter. Under the German finance ministry's draft bill, which we reported on October 3, 2026, the one-year holding period is to apply only to holdings bought up to December 31, 2026; the details and the state of the procedure are in our piece on savings plans, lump sums and the tax cut-off date. As long as the draft has not been adopted, that remains a planned rule and not one in force.

SEPA transfer instead of a card: the buying route without a deposit fee

For comparison it is worth looking at the alternative that costs nothing at all the providers named above. A SEPA transfer to the trading account is free, and a SEPA instant transfer is by now free at many German banks and arrives within seconds. The card's time advantage shrinks to a few minutes, while the cost difference stays at several percent.

Anyone buying regularly does better still with a savings plan, because the deposit there runs by direct debit. What a series of monthly instalments actually delivers against a single purchase is something we calculated on September 19, 2026 across twelve monthly instalments; the calculation and the counter-test are in our piece on the cost-average effect on Bitcoin.

Three situations remain in which the card is worth its price. You have no account at a bank offering SEPA instant transfers and do not want to wait two days. You want to put in a very small amount to try a provider once, and accept the flat charge knowingly. Or you are abroad with no access to your current account. In every other case you are paying with the card for minutes you do not need.

MiCA authorisation: which trading venues may serve German customers at all

Ahead of the fee question stands a question that matters more: may the provider serve you at all? MiCA is the EU regulation on markets in crypto-assets, which requires authorisation for the trading, custody and intermediation of crypto assets. Since the beginning of 2026 only authorised providers may supply those services in Germany.

In practical terms that means a provider without authorisation is not a cheap alternative for you but a risk, regardless of how low its card fee looks. The authorisation can be checked through the public register of the European securities authority, which consolidates the notifications of the national supervisors, for Germany those of BaFin. A provider that offers you a card payment but appears in no register is a reason to break off.

A second point concerns the card payment itself. Authorised providers work with payment service providers that are themselves supervised, and that is precisely why their transactions appear at your bank with a proper merchant category code at all. Transactions that land with an opaque intermediary are declined more often.

Chargeback: a card purchase of Bitcoin can hardly be reversed

On goods that fail to arrive you can initiate a chargeback through your bank. On a crypto purchase that route generally does not apply. As soon as the Bitcoin have been credited to your trading account, the service has been rendered, and a chargeback of the card transaction would be a claw-back on a service you received.

It gets tighter still if you then move the Bitcoin to a wallet of your own. A wallet is the software or the device that keeps your private keys and thereby access to your coins; a transfer on the blockchain cannot be reversed once confirmed. Anyone who has paid in a fraud case has taken two irreversible steps one after the other.

From that follows a plain rule for practice: use the card only with a provider you have checked beforehand, and only for an amount whose total loss you can bear. Bitcoin can lose a great deal of value, and a total loss is possible with any crypto asset.

Buying Bitcoin with a credit card: What to take away

The card purchase is the fastest and at the same time the most expensive route to Bitcoin, and the larger part of the cost sits in your own card contract rather than at the trading venue. Three steps take you further from here.

1. Read the quasi-cash line of your card contract before you pay. If you find "money transmitter" or "e-money provider" there, the purchase costs at least €5.95 extra, which on small amounts is proportionally a great deal. Which buying routes exist alongside it is shown in our overview of buying Bitcoin.
2. Record the purchase date, not the statement date. The one-year holding period starts on the day of the purchase at the trading venue. Anyone making several purchases needs a clean record; suitable tools are in our comparison of tax and portfolio tools.
3. Move the Bitcoin after the purchase into custody you control yourself. Whoever holds the key holds the coins, and that applies all the more when the purchase ran through a payment route you cannot claw back. The differences between the programmes are in our comparison of software wallets.

(As of October 4, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

President Trump named a new "Super Intelligence Force" to coordinate federal AI policy, with Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton at the helm. As SEC chair, Clayton launched crypto lawsuits including the agency's case against Ripple.

The Independent Community Bankers of America argues the OCC's national trust charters give crypto firms a "side door into the banking system" without the safeguards that bind traditional banks.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs took in $134.4 million over the first two trading days of October, rebounding from a Sept. 30 outflow as a weak jobs report cooled Fed rate-hike bets.

Near Intents said the roughly $3.8 million drained in an exploit on Thursday was returned in full, a day after the team said it had identified the attacker and gave them 48 hours to return the funds.

The firm says the Sept. 24 breach pushed North Korea's 2026 crypto haul past $1 billion, and detailed how it used in-house AI to trace the stolen funds across four blockchains in a race against the attackers.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) has expanded to Solana through Wormhole Labs-powered Sunrise.

XRP traps price in a tight 4-hour triangle under $1.53 resistance as largest holders pause all market activity.

Dogecoin bulls have one key level to clear as compression builds.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin tests three-layer privacy model for frontier AI.

As MSTR trades at a 14% premium, Michael Saylor hints at a massive new Bitcoin maneuver for Strategy.

TLDR:

• Solana logged $3.06B in daily spot DEX volume, topping Ethereum, L2s and Hyperliquid combined on October 3.
• Solana captured over 36% of global spot DEX volume in H1 2026, nearly twice Ethereum’s share in the period.
• DefiLlama showed about $78B in 30-day Solana DEX volume, versus roughly $42B recorded on Ethereum overall.
• Memecoin volume fell to 16% from 40%, while stablecoin swaps rose to 19% from 6% over the same period.

Solana overtook Ethereum, its Layer 2 networks and Hyperliquid combined in spot decentralized exchange volume on October 3, according to Blockworks Research data. The comparison, shared by SolanaFloor on October 4, placed Solana at the top of the latest completed daily session.

Blockworks’ dedicated dashboard recorded $3.06 billion in previous-day spot DEX volume and $4.51 billion in DEX liquidity. The result stands out as the benchmark combines Ethereum mainnet with L2s and adds Hyperliquid, creating a wider measure of competing onchain trading activity.

Solana Extends Its Lead Across Spot DEX Markets

The October 3 result follows a broader shift in decentralized spot trading. Research from 21Shares found that Solana handled more than 36% of global spot DEX volume during the first half of 2026.

That share was roughly double Ethereum’s, even though Solana represented about 9.5% of the smart-contract blockchain market capitalization measured in the report.

DefiLlama data also placed the network among the largest decentralized trading ecosystems. Its recent rankings showed about $78 billion in 30-day Solana DEX volume, compared with roughly $42 billion for Ethereum.

However, provider totals differ as tracking methods are not identical. Blockworks only counts trades where both assets appear in its token database. That filtering is designed to remove artificial activity involving unidentified or thinly traded tokens. As a result, Blockworks totals can sit below raw blockchain volume.

Spot Trading Mix Shifts Toward Stablecoins and Tokenized Assets

The trading mix has also changed. According to 21Shares, memecoins accounted for 16% of Solana spot volume in H1 2026, down from 40% one year earlier. Stablecoin swaps moved in the opposite direction, rising from 6% to 19% over the same period.

That shift shows a larger share of activity moving beyond purely speculative tokens. Tokenized equities have also become part of the network’s trading base. Blockworks Research ranked Solana second behind Binance in median weekly spot volume among measured venues during 2026.

Even so, Solana DEX volume remained below 1% of either Nasdaq or the NYSE by dollar value, keeping the scale comparison in perspective. Trade count tells a different story. Solana recently processed about 208 million weekly spot DEX trades, above roughly 189 million NYSE transactions in a separate comparison.

Together, the October 3 lead, higher 30-day volume and changing asset mix show Solana strengthening its position in onchain spot execution. Ethereum, L2s and Hyperliquid still remain major competitors.

The comparison also highlights how dollar volume and transaction counts measure different dimensions of market activity across trading venues. On October 3, however, the daily dollar-volume ranking placed Solana ahead of the combined benchmark formed by Ethereum, L2s and Hyperliquid in this session.

The post Solana Flips Ethereum as DEX Volume Tops L2s and Hyperliquid Combined appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• DOGE trades at $0.09524, up 2.33% in 24 hours, with daily trading volume reaching $472,416,387.
• Ali Charts says DOGE is consolidating inside a descending triangle that is nearing its apex.
• A 4-hour close above $0.095 could confirm a bullish breakout and trigger a rally toward $0.106.
• DogeOS launched a public testnet to bring Ethereum-style apps to DOGE, while a golden cross nears.

Dogecoin price stands at $0.09524 at the time of publication, marking a 2.33% increase over the past 24 hours. The token also recorded $472,416,387 in trading volume during that same period.

Meanwhile, analysts are tracking a descending triangle pattern that continues to tighten on the chart. A public testnet has also launched to bring Ethereum-style apps into the ecosystem. Together, these developments are drawing attention to DOGE as traders watch for the next price move.

Descending Triangle Approaches Its Apex

Crypto analyst Ali Charts shared a technical outlook for DOGE in a post on X. The post opens with the phrase “Dogecoin breakout ahead,” which sets its bullish tone.

According to the analyst, the token continues to consolidate inside a descending triangle. As a result, the pattern is becoming increasingly compressed. Ali Charts noted that a breakout could be getting closer as price approaches the apex.

The analyst identified $0.095 as the key level to watch in this setup. A 4-hour close above that mark could confirm a bullish breakout. In that case, the move could trigger a rally toward $0.106.

That target sits roughly 11% above the current Dogecoin price. The two levels, $0.095 and $0.106, therefore define the range in the analysis. Until then, the descending triangle remains intact on the chart.

Market data adds context to the setup. The Dogecoin price sits just above the $0.095 level at the time of writing. Over the past seven days, however, the token has declined 1.17%.

The compression described by Ali Charts has built up while weekly performance stayed slightly negative. Traders are watching how price reacts around that zone.

DogeOS Testnet and Golden Cross Setup

Separately, Giannis Andreou pointed to a new development within the Dogecoin ecosystem. In a post on X, he said DogeOS has launched a public testnet.

The testnet is designed to bring Ethereum-style apps into the DOGE ecosystem. According to Andreou, this gives DOGE an entirely new application layer. Because the testnet is public, wider participation is possible during this early phase.

He said the added functionality could expand DOGE far beyond payments and meme trading. The post describes payments and meme trading as the current focus of DOGE activity.

Support for Ethereum-style apps would therefore add a new category of use. In his view, utility is growing across the ecosystem. The testnet launch is the development he cited to support that view.

Andreou also pointed to the price chart, where DOGE is approaching its first golden cross of 2026. The golden cross has not yet formed, according to the post. He suggested that momentum may follow as utility continues to grow across the ecosystem.

At the same time, Ali Charts remains focused on the $0.095 level and a possible breakout. Together, the two posts describe both technical and ecosystem factors tied to the Dogecoin price.

The post Dogecoin Price Eyes $0.106 Rally as Triangle Nears Breakout Point appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ki Young Ju says the Bitcoin bear market ended this summer and a new cycle is in its early stage. 
• Inflows to Accumulation Addresses have risen sharply, and the 30-day average has also turned higher. 
• MVRV has stayed far below the 4 to 5+ peaks of past cycles, pointing to milder euphoria and capitulation. 
• Bitcoin is shifting from a retail and OG whale market toward ETFs, institutions and custodians. 

Bitcoin bear market conditions ended this summer, according to CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju. He shared the view on Bitcoin Magazine’s YouTube program BMTV.

Ki said the market has entered the early stage of a new cycle. He expects a rise of three to five times from the lows.

According to him, fresh capital is entering, early whale selling is easing, and large futures traders have rebuilt long positions near the bottom.

On-Chain Signals Behind the Outlook

During the program, Ki Young Ju pointed to three on-chain signals behind his Bitcoin bear market outlook. He said the PnL Index 365-day moving average remains soft for now. Even so, he noted that broader profitability and valuation metrics are approaching important inflection points.

Next, Ki discussed Accumulation Addresses. He said inflows to these addresses have risen sharply. In addition, he observed that the 30-day average has also turned higher.

Together, these readings point to fresh capital entering the market. Ki described this rise as a clear sign that new buyers are arriving.

Ki then addressed the MVRV ratio. He explained that it looks far less extreme than in earlier cycles. Previous peaks reached 4 to 5 or higher.

By contrast, he said this cycle has stayed much lower. As a result, Ki believes both euphoria and capitulation are becoming milder.

He also spoke about large holders. According to Ki, selling by OG whales is easing. Meanwhile, he said large futures players have rebuilt long exposure near the bottom. Taken together, he cited these developments as support for the end of the Bitcoin bear market.

Market Structure Shifts Toward Institutions

On the subject of ETFs, Ki said flows are improving. However, he stated that the identity of the end buyers remains unclear.

For that reason, he argued that custodial flows matter more at this stage. Without clear buyer data, he sees custodial flows as a key reference point.

Beyond the data, Ki described a broader change in market structure. He said Bitcoin is moving away from a market led by retail traders and OG whales.

Instead, ETFs, institutions, and custodians increasingly shape the market. Ki added that macro conditions and regulation also play a growing role.

Earlier cycles were driven mainly by retail participants and early holders. Today, Ki says a wider group of participants shapes the market.

Consequently, he places more weight on custodial flows than before. ETF inflows and custodian balances therefore receive closer attention.

Ki framed the discussion around three questions. Who is buying? Who has stopped selling? Is fresh capital still coming in? He treats these as the main points to watch after the Bitcoin bear market.

The post CryptoQuant CEO Declares Bitcoin Bear Market Over, Eyes 3-5x From Lows appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• BlackRock built three model portfolios, covering high income, diversified growth, and high growth. 
• Ondo turns each strategy into one token, so investors skip managing and rebalancing separate positions. 
• Tokenized real-world assets near $9 billion in market cap, with equities growing fastest in holders.
• Partners like Mirae Asset in Korea and SBI in Japan widen access across Asia, Europe, and Australia. 

BlackRock tokenized portfolios are now entering the onchain market through a collaboration with Ondo Finance. BlackRock built three model portfolios focused on high income, diversified growth, and high growth.

Ondo then converted each strategy into a single token. The portfolios combine stocks, bonds, and Bitcoin ETFs. Holders can trade the tokens around the clock, including outside traditional market hours. The launch comes as tokenized real-world assets near $9 billion in market capitalization.

How the Ondo Tokenization Model Works

Tokenization so far has centered on individual assets. Stocks, bonds, Treasuries, and funds have each been placed onchain separately.

This launch takes a different route by tokenizing a complete investment strategy. As a result, investors can hold one token rather than several separate positions.

Coin Bureau described the structure in a post on X. According to the post, BlackRock designs the portfolio while Ondo turns access into an onchain token.

Therefore, investors avoid managing and rebalancing multiple positions by hand. Each token represents one of the three BlackRock strategies.

Because the BlackRock tokenized portfolios exist on blockchain rails, the tokens can move between wallets and platforms. They can also connect with other financial applications. Holders may use them as collateral in onchain apps. This feature extends the use of the tokens beyond simple holding.

Coin Bureau added that this move points toward tokenizing asset management itself. Model portfolios held roughly $9.8 trillion in assets as of June, according to Broadridge.

Consequently, asset managers could distribute full strategies through blockchain infrastructure if part of that market moves onchain.

Market Growth and Global Expansion

The launch comes as tokenized real-world assets near $9 billion in market capitalization. Among these assets, equities have seen the fastest growth in holders and trading volume.

Ondo’s portfolio tokens enter this market as a new category of product. BlackRock tokenized portfolios therefore join a market that is already expanding.

Ondo has also secured partnerships across Asia, Europe, and Australia to widen access. In Asia, Mirae Asset in Korea and SBI in Japan are among the partners.

The partnerships expand access to the tokenized portfolios in those regions. Together, these partners broaden the distribution of the tokens.

The Coin Bureau post also looked at what could come next. AI could eventually build personalized portfolios around an investor’s goals, risk tolerance, and tax situation.

Tokenization would then provide access to a much wider range of assets. This scenario remains a possibility rather than a confirmed development.

The post also summarized the progression in three steps. Stablecoins brought cash onchain, while tokenization brought assets onchain.

Now BlackRock and Ondo are bringing entire portfolios onchain. According to Coin Bureau, blockchain could become part of global asset management infrastructure rather than only a settlement layer.

The post BlackRock Tokenized Portfolios Debut Onchain Through Ondo Finance appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• AI investment has created over 750,000 U.S. jobs since 2023, with data centers fueling hiring growth.
• Data annotators added 282,000 roles, while data centers and AI engineers contributed 222,000 more jobs.
• Typical AI job postings offer about $177,000 annually, compared with roughly $80,000 for non-AI positions.
• U.S. AI-literacy job demand rose 70% year over year, even as September payroll growth slowed to 29,000.

Artificial intelligence investment has created more than 750,000 U.S. jobs since 2023, even as broader hiring has weakened. The expansion is visible beyond software development. Data annotation, engineering, and data center construction are turning AI spending into employment across digital and physical infrastructure.

LinkedIn estimates cited by The Wall Street Journal show data annotators produced about 282,000 positions between 2024 and 2026. Data centers added roughly 117,000 jobs, while AI engineers contributed another 105,000.

AI Job Boom Adds 750,000 Roles Across U.S. Hiring

Together, those three categories account for about 504,000 positions, representing most of the reported AI-related employment created since 2023. The hiring mix also includes about 29,000 Head of AI roles and 15,000 forward-deployed engineer jobs.

Those positions reflect growing demand for leadership and business implementation. LinkedIn’s August research found U.S. AI job postings have roughly doubled since 2023. Pay levels also remain substantially above compensation advertised for typical non-AI roles.

The typical AI posting lists about $177,000 in annual compensation, compared with approximately $80,000 for a typical non-AI position. AI engineer has also overtaken machine-learning engineer as LinkedIn’s most common AI occupation.

Forward-deployed engineer ranks third, while VP of AI postings increased roughly sixfold. Demand is widening beyond specialist positions. LinkedIn reported that U.S. jobs requiring AI-literacy skills increased 70% year over year.

That shift indicates employers are increasingly seeking workers who can use AI tools, even when their primary jobs are not centered on building models.

Data Centers Deepen AI’s Labor-Market Footprint

Physical infrastructure is becoming another major employment channel. LinkedIn said the global data center workforce has doubled since 2017 as computing capacity expands. The Wall Street Journal cited economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh estimating U.S. data center and related AI infrastructure investment could reach $10.3 trillion between 2025 and 2032.

That total would average about 3.6% of U.S. GDP annually, showing how capital spending on AI infrastructure now reaches far beyond technology companies. The jobs surge also stands out against slower national hiring.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported only 29,000 new nonfarm payrolls in September. Unemployment, on the other hand, stood at 4.2%, while July and August payroll figures were revised lower by a combined 60,000 jobs.

However, access to AI employment remains concentrated. LinkedIn found 91% of AI workers hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Women represented only 26% of U.S. AI hires in 2025, showing that rapid job creation has not translated into equally distributed participation.

The post AI Job Boom Adds 750,000 U.S. Roles as Data Centers Fuel Hiring appeared first on Blockonomi.

The spot Bitcoin ETFs managed to turn the tables for the year as the net flows finally turned green, but there are some concerning signs.

Meanwhile, the funds tracking the largest altcoin ended the previous week in the red. This became the second such week out of the last three.

BTC ETFs Green, But There’s a Catch

Recall that the spot BTC ETFs had their best five-day trading performance in nearly a year during the last full week of September when they attracted roughly $2.4 billion in net inflows. This helped flip the YTD numbers green, which was difficult to imagine just a few months ago when the funds bled out heavily, with $2.43 billion leaving in May and a whopping net withdrawal of $4.5 billion in June.

September 28 began with another $31.07 million in net inflows, followed by $66.19 million on Tuesday. The tables turned on Wednesday as investors pulled out $148.69 million. This was rather surprising since the PCE data came out on that day and showed that inflation was lower than expected.

Nevertheless, the net inflows returned on Thursday with $102.67 million, according to SoSoValue. FarSide shows that another $31.7 million entered the financial vehicles on Friday, ending the week at around $83 million. This makes the past four weeks quite interesting and different.

$83 million in the past week was not all that impressive, especially when compared to the $2.39 billion a week before. However, that record-setting five-day trading period followed a very modest $6.21 million inflow week. The one before that was even stranger, with $462.73 million leaving the funds.

ETH ETFs in the Red Again

The spot Ethereum ETFs also started the business week on the right foot, but their momentum quickly faded. After the $17.10 million in net inflows on Monday, withdrawals took charge with $2.81 million on Tuesday, $59.58 million on Wednesday, $55.37 million on Thursday, and another $17.3 million on Friday.

Consequently, the week ended with net outflows of approximately $114 million. The concerning part is that this is the second such week out of the last three, in which withdrawals have dominated. The positive side is that the one that was in the green saw notable net inflows of almost $690 million.

Still, the cumulative total net inflows have declined slightly from the recent local peak of $13.94 billion to $13.80 billion.

The post Bitcoin and Ethereum ETF Weekly Flows: The Good, the Bad, and the Concerning appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Bitcoin enters the final quarter of the year after a powerful recovery in the third quarter, but analysts warn against expecting another straight-line rally. Instead, they pointed to some key factors that could impact BTC and the overall market in the following three months.

Some of them include the Federal Reserve, Treasury-market liquidity, ETF flows, geopolitics, and BTC’s ability to clear $87,500, which remains its most significant obstacle on the path forward.

Q3 May Be Hard to Repeat

Although Q3 began with another leg down to under $58,000, which became BTC’s lowest price tag in a year and a half, the subsequent three months were a lot more positive. The cryptocurrency rebounded immediately and broke out in mid-August to over $80,000. Its rise continued and managed to close the quarter with a massive 43% surge.

Iliya Kalchev, Nexo Dispatch Analyst, described the three-month period as both a recovery phase and a breakout milestone. He argued that the most important catalyst arrived from the bond market after the US Treasury increased the size of its long-end bond buyback operations in August.

The asset indeed jumped by 7% on August 19 and rocketed by over 20% in the following several days. Spot Bitcoin ETF flows immediately turned positive and even flipped into the green on a year-to-date basis. Meanwhile, relatively subdued perpetual funding suggested the rally was driven more by spot demand than excessive leverage, Kalchev added.

Nevertheless, the analyst cautioned against assuming Q4 will simply extend Q3’s pace. Although the cryptocurrency has finished Q4 higher in nine of the past 15 years, the median gains are only around 9%, while the much larger average has been distorted by spectacular years such as 2013 and 2017.

Alex Kozenko, CMO at WhiteBIT, issued a similar warning:

“Today, the market structure is different: institutional participation has become more prominent, and flows through regulated investment products have become yet another source of influence on market dynamics. Over the next three months, I would primarily focus on liquidity, institutional activity, and the overall macroeconomic environment.”

Fed and $87.5K

Although the overall market situation changed slightly after the weaker-than-expected US jobs report from Friday, Lacie Zhang, Research Analyst at Bitget Wallet, told CryptoPotato that she still believes the Fed will hike rates again by 25 basis points on October 28. This would put the target range at 4.00%-4.25% after the September increase, which was the first in over three years.

Kalchev also highlighted the Fed as the biggest Q4 variable, although the latest softer core PCE reading, alongside the aforementioned jobs report, reduced some of the immediate pressure for additional tightening. Geopolitical developments, though, could complicate the picture further, especially if energy prices keep feeding inflation.

According to Zhang, $87,500 remains the most crucial obstacle in BTC’s path to a broader recovery. A break above it could increase the likelihood of a short squeeze. In contrast, she identified the $82,000-$82,500 support range as the key downside zone, and losing it could accelerate a move below $80,000.

The post What Could Decide Bitcoin’s Q4? The Fed, Bond Yields, and One Crucial Price Level appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Own assets or be left behind — this is what the analysts at the Kobeissi Letter argued, highlighting the major discrepancy between those who do and those who stay on the sidelines.

Bitcoin fits surprisingly well into this distorted economy, but treating it as a cure for the destruction of the middle class would be a bit of an overstatement.

Own Assets or Get Left Behind

There are roughly 134.8 million households in the States, according to the analysts. However, around 1.4 million of them, also known as the wealthiest 1%, control more than $60 trillion in net worth. Since 2020 alone, their wealth has grown by more than $30 trillion. The bottom 50%, or 67.4 million households, collectively hold a fraction of that amount.

The reason isn’t simply that rich households earn larger salaries; the bigger divide is asset ownership, the Kobeissi Letter said. Total US household wealth has exploded from roughly $101 trillion six years ago to $185 trillion today, but that massive increase has been distributed very unevenly.

Americans who already owned stocks, businesses, property, and other appreciating assets benefited disproportionately as their prices rose. Meanwhile, inflation steadily eroded the value of income and cash savings. The analysts separately calculated that the greenback has lost roughly 23% of its purchasing power since 2020.

In other words, someone whose savings or assets increased by 30% over that period has made only a relatively modest actual gain after accounting for the decline in purchasing power. Inflation has also remained well above the Fed’s 2% target for 60 consecutive months.

Food, housing, transportation, and other necessities have become more expensive, while the assets needed to escape that erosion, mostly homes and stocks, can also become harder to afford. The analysts added that borrowing has offered little relief, as mortgage rates recently climbed toward the mid-7% range. At the same time, Treasury yields surged, raising the barrier to homeownership even further.

Consequently, they concluded something simple and obvious: “Own assets or be left behind.”

Does BTC Fit Here?

Bitcoin matters in this macro dynamic, even though it’s not as simple as saying it can somehow save the middle class. BTC addresses one specific part of the argument above quite well: its supply can’t expand in response to government spending, deficits, elections, wars, or monetary policy. There will ultimately be no more than 21 million units, making it fundamentally different from cash, whose purchasing power can and probably will decline as the monetary base expands.

It’s also unusually accessible compared with many traditional wealth-building assets. You don’t need a down payment required for a house or enough capital to purchase an entire BTC. If the fundamental problem is that people who hold appreciating scarce assets are pulling increasingly far ahead of people saving exclusively in depreciating currencies, bitcoin offers another way to get onto the asset-owning side of that divide.

On the contrary, bitcoin remains very volatile, which is not ideal for inexperienced investors. It can lose 50% or more during severe downturns in just months. In general, simply holding it generates no cash flow and offers little help to someone whose income is already consumed by rent, food, healthcare, and debt.

It can’t magically make housing more affordable, raise real wages, reduce healthcare costs, improve taxation, or redistribute existing wealth. As such, it’s safe to say that BTC cannot rebuild the American middle class. However, a scarce asset that virtually anyone can own and has no central authority behind it can provide individuals with one additional way to get exposure in an economy where asset ownership increasingly determines who preserves and grows wealth.

The post America’s Middle Class Is Getting Crushed: Where Does Bitcoin Fit? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

After Friday’s enhanced volatility following the US economic news, bitcoin’s price inched higher during the weekend and now sits above $85,000.

However, it almost feels like a familiar trap. History has shown that fluctuations ramp up on Monday morning after an eventful weekend in terms of new developments on the Middle East front.

The New Tension

Reports emerged yesterday claiming that US President Donald Trump’s top national security officials met at Camp David on Friday in a meeting that lasted hours and focused on the war against Iran. It was described as a “highly unusual meeting” that was not announced by the administration. However, one official claimed that “things were decided.” It was chaired by VP JD Vance, and some of the other attendees included CDI Director Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Caine.

The last similar meeting was in June 2025, just a few days before Israel attacked Iran. Asked about the meaning of the meeting and the US’s potential next move, the POTUS said, “If I told you, you would have a major story. But you will see.”

Later on, The Hormuz Letter added that Iran is “preparing for a fresh US bombing campaign greater than the last one.” One senior official warned that any new attack coming from US forces, whether by air or ground, will be treated as “all-out war and met with the ‘hardest’ response.”

The US has recently deployed nearly 10,000 troops, including 2,000 US Marines, to the Middle East aboard a third aircraft carrier and an amphibious landing group. It should arrive by November, while the midterm elections are scheduled for November 3. Trump previously said that new waves of attacks are likely to follow after the midterms.

Thirdly, Yemen’s Houthis struck a Saudi Aramco facility in Riyadh with ballistic missiles for the first time in over four years.

Calm Before the Storm?

All of these developments took place in the past 36 hours or so. Within this timeframe, BTC’s price has remained relatively calm and has increased slightly to over $85,000. However, history shows that the cryptocurrency tends to feel the actual consequences of escalating tension on Monday morning.

The latest such example was last week, when the POTUS rejected Iran’s peace deal offer on Saturday. Bitcoin stood still when the news went live but dumped by $2,000 on Monday morning when most traditional markets started to open.

The post Is Bitcoin’s $85K Consolidation the Calm Before the Storm Amid Rising Middle East Tensions? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The OG meme coin was rejected even before it had the chance to truly challenge the $0.10 resistance earlier this week, but it has rebounded from the subsequent multi-day low.

Popular analyst Ali Martinez noted that a breakout might indeed be brewing, but the asset would have to overcome a key resistance level to do so. However, the ETF inflows do not support this thesis.

14% Move Next?

Recall that Dogecoin surged to $0.104 during the market-wide rally on September 22-23 before the bears stepped up and pushed it south hard. In the span of just several hours, the meme coin slumped to $0.92. Since then, it has tried to take down to $0.10 resistance on several occasions, but to no avail.

The latest rejection came on Friday amid the market-wide crash that drove BTC down by over $3,500. DOGE, on the other hand, dipped from $0.098 to $0.091 before it rebounded to $0.092-$0.093 during the weekend.

Martinez noted that the asset’s consolidation phase inside a descending triangle continues on the 4-hour chart. Dogecoin would have to overcome $0.095 decisively and close above it on the same timeframe, which would confirm a bullish breakout. The popular analyst, who last week outlined that DOGE whales had scooped up over 1.14 billion tokens in 4 days, predicted that a 14% surge to $0.106 would be next if the meme coin reclaims the aforementioned resistance.

“As price approaches the apex, the structure is becoming increasingly compressed, and a breakout could be getting closer,” he added.

ETF Flows Suggest Caution

The last full business week of September brought something Dogecoin fans hadn’t seen — an actual interest in the spot exchange-traded funds tracking its performance. The total net inflows hit a new record of nearly $2.90 million. Although this amount is nowhere near as impressive as the inflows into the BTC, ETH, XRP, or SOL ETFs, it was still a record for the meme coin.

This was seen as bullish at the time, but the next five-day trading period couldn’t maintain the momentum. Data from SoSoValue shows that the interest evaporated on Monday, but the inflows returned on Tuesday with $878,790. However, investors took out $551,430 a day later, and there were no reportable inflows on October 1 and 2.

As such, Dogecoin’s institutional side remains fragile, but the asset has never been driven by such large players, as retail often dominates its price moves.

The post Analyst Explains What Can Trigger DOGE’s Next Double-Digit Surge appeared first on CryptoPotato.