BaFin's denial exacerbates Bitcoin Group SE's financial instability, prompting urgent strategic shifts and impacting Germany's crypto market dynamics.

The post BaFin denies MiCAR license to Bitcoin Group SE’s futurum bank, leaving bitcoin.de in limbo appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

AI-driven tech stock surges highlight market reliance on a few giants, posing risks if earnings or interest rates shift unfavorably.

The post S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit record highs as AI-driven tech stocks surge appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Marvell's ambitious revenue targets highlight AI's transformative potential but underscore the risks of market dependency and execution challenges.

The post Evercore ISI raises Marvell price target to $433 after Investor Day appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Tesla's Cybercab debut in Europe highlights regulatory challenges and potential shifts in the ride-hailing market towards autonomous models.

The post Tesla showcases Cybercab robotaxi at Paris Motor Show starting Oct. 12 appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising leveraged loan distress signals potential instability in corporate debt markets, with tech firms particularly vulnerable to refinancing risks.

The post Leveraged loan distress hits its highest level since the pandemic appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Real Estate Market Is Dead in Spain. Long Live Bitcoin.

Spain has just shown every property owner in Europe that the rules around their asset can be rewritten by decree. Bitcoin is the one asset where that cannot happen.

I direct the Masters in Bitcoin at the Universidad de las Hespérides. My field focuses on how people build wealth over decades, not weeks. In Spain, for generations, the answer to long-term family wealth was land and property until now. 

Last week the government made that path close to impossible. I am not writing to dismiss real estate. I am writing because Spain has just threatened one of the few long-term wealth-building tools ordinary families had, and they will need another one.

Two decrees, one message

On 29 September, the Spanish government approved two emergency decrees on housing. They took effect within days, and a planned hearing in Congress was on Friday, October 2, and the decree didn’t pass, though it was a very close vote. 

Spain’s government did not pass these rules as a normal law. On 29 September, it approved two emergency decrees (reales decretos-ley). The Constitution reserves this tool for cases of “extraordinary and urgent need”. A decree-law takes effect immediately, and Congress then has thirty days to validate or repeal it. The government split the reforms into two so each could be voted on separately, rather than one controversial measure sinking everything.

The first decree capped rent rises until the end of 2027. A rent already above the maximum set by the official reference-price index could not rise at all. In every other case, the parties could agree to an update, and without a new agreement, the increase could not exceed 2%. Spain’s inflation in September was 4.9%, according to the national statistics institute, so an owner’s real income would shrink every year by law.

The second decree went further. At the end of the minimum term, if neither side has given notice, the lease renews compulsorily in successive five-year periods, or seven if the landlord is a legal entity. A landlord who ends a contract without a reason listed in the law must compensate the tenant. The payment is calculated, where possible, on the state rent-reference system, and can never be less than one month’s rent for each year the tenant has lived in the home. In practice, owners lose much of their freedom to recover their own property or re-let it at current prices.

The rules also apply to contracts that are already signed, from their next renewal date (Provivienda summary). This is why many consider the decrees unconstitutional. Critics argue that they retroactively rewrite private agreements that both sides signed under different rules, which Article 9.3 of the Constitution bars for measures restricting individual rights.

Congress never settled that question. On 2 October it rejected the first decree by 178 votes to 172 and the second by 184 to 166. Sánchez then called general elections for 29 November.

On Tuesday the Council of Ministers approved both decrees again, introducing only technical changes, and sent them to the Diputación Permanente of Congress, where Junts’s vote is not needed. This is the reduced body that replaces the full chamber once Congress is dissolved. Sánchez said the second decree, on automatic renewals, would only take effect if that body validates it, rather than on publication in the BOE. Jurists consulted by one newspaper consider the move borderline abuse of law.

Investors can live with strict rules. What they cannot price is a rule that changes after they have committed. That last point is the one every property owner in Europe should read twice.

The market answered in hours

The owners did not wait for the vote. A Spanish TV programme reported that around 2,900 rental listings were pulled from property portals in roughly four hours (EDATV). In Madrid, listings reportedly fell about 20% in under 24 hours, from 11,815 to 9,398 (LaBandera). These are early, unaudited counts. The direction is still clear.

None of this is new. We have run this experiment many times, and it keeps giving the same result.

• Berlin, 2020: the city froze rents for five years. Studies at the time found the supply of regulated flats roughly halved, while unregulated rents rose. The constitutional court struck the law down in 2021.
• San Francisco, 1994: a Stanford study by Diamond, McQuade and Qian found that expanded rent control helped sitting tenants stay, but landlords cut regulated supply by about 15% and citywide rents rose by about 5%.
• Catalonia, 2024: rent caps in stressed zones slowed price growth, but rental listings fell 22.2% in Barcelona, while they rose 3.9% in Madrid (Fedea, via idealista).
• Spain itself, 1946 to 1985: forced, near-permanent lease extensions froze old rents for decades. Owners stopped maintaining buildings and city centres decayed, until the 1985 Boyer decree ended the system.

The new automatic-renewal decree is, in its logic, a return to that old Spanish model.

The real problem is not landlords

Spain does not have a landlord problem. It has a housing shortage. In 2025, around 240,000 new households formed while only about 92,000 homes were completed. The Bank of Spain puts the accumulated deficit for 2021 to 2025 at roughly 750,000 homes (Cantabria Económica).

The same report names the obstacles: scarce buildable land, slow urban development, and rigid planning. Economists such as my colleague Daniel Fernández Méndez argue that restrictive land rules and ever-stricter building standards have made construction unprofitable, even at today’s prices (Hespérides).

So the state restricts what can be built, then caps what can be earned from what already exists. Supply shrinks from both ends.

The people who pay are not established owners. They have options: they can sell, wait, or leave a flat empty rather than risk a tenant who never leaves. Renters pay. With fewer flats on offer, the rent on the ones that remain will rise, and more people will end up in informal arrangements with no contract and no protection, on the edge of the grey economy.

Buying is no way out either. Spaniards cannot afford to buy for the same reason they cannot afford to rent: there are too few homes, and these decrees do nothing to change that. Some landlords will be pushed to sell, but that will barely move prices. Sales adjust far more slowly than rentals. An owner whose mortgage is larger than what the flat would fetch cannot sell at all. Many others will simply wait and hope for a change of government, leaving their apartments empty. The result is that more people will be unable to rent or buy. Tenants lose, small investors lose, and the housing shortage stays exactly where it was.

An asset no decree can rewrite

The biggest risk in real estate is not the market. It is that the rules around your asset can be changed by a government at any time, and you cannot move the asset somewhere else. A building sits in one jurisdiction forever.

Bitcoin is the opposite on every one of those points.

• Fixed rules: the supply is capped at 21 million, and that rule has not changed in seventeen years. Arguably all Bitcoin infrastructure is built precisely to avoid that from happening. No minister can cap its yield, freeze it, or extend someone else’s claim on it.
• Real ownership: held in your own wallet, it has no tenant who can stop paying, no squatter who can move in, and no court that has to approve its sale.
• Portable: it does not sit in any one country. If the rules where you live turn hostile, your savings do not have to stay there.
• Open to small savers: buying property takes a deposit, a mortgage, a notary and years of commitment. Bitcoin can be bought a few euros at a time, on a regular schedule, by anyone.

For most Spanish families, property is almost all of their wealth. This week showed how much of that wealth depends on politics.

The long-term picture shows both the reward and the price of it. Bought just after the 2017 peak, a bitcoin stake lost almost three-quarters of its value within a year, then outgrew Spanish housing several times over.

Past performance does not predict future returns. Bitcoin is highly volatile, and its value can fall sharply. The housing line shows price change only and excludes rental income, taxes, maintenance, and purchase costs. This is not investment advice.

Long Live Bitcoin

Families will always need a place to live, so they will keep buying or renting homes. What has changed is the second flat, property as an investment. For a small investor, the risk now outweighs the return, and that removes one of the few ways ordinary Spaniards had to build wealth over a lifetime.

Bitcoin can fill that gap, if it is treated the way property always was: as a long-term holding, not a lottery ticket. Its price is volatile and can fall sharply in the short term. Anyone who holds it should think in years, buy regularly instead of trying to time the market, and never put in money they will need next year.

Property gives you an asset whose rules can be rewritten. Bitcoin gives you price swings but rules that stay put. After this week, many more Spaniards will be asking which of those risks they would rather carry with their savings.

Whatever Congress decides, Spain’s property owners have learned that their contracts can be changed after they sign them. That lesson will not be voted away. The rental market as Spain knew it is gone. Long live bitcoin.

This post The Real Estate Market Is Dead in Spain. Long Live Bitcoin. first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Kristyna Mazankova.

Bitcoin Magazine

OKX Gets New Funding From Circle, Standard Chartered at $25B Valuation

Crypto exchange OKX has raised new funding at a $25 billion valuation, the company said on Tuesday, revealing investment from top digital asset companies. 

The crypto exchange said in an announcement that stablecoin giant Circle, fintech firm Ripple and British bank Standard Chartered’s investment arm, SC Ventures, all participated in the fundraise. 

Earlier this year, the Intercontinental Exchange invested in the digital asset firm in a move to accelerate tokenization. The two’s joint venture, OKXICE, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Sunday to launch a tokenized securities platform ​for around-the-clock trading of U.S. ​stocks. 

“Through strategic investment and partnership, OKX is aligning some of the most critical builders of financial infrastructure behind its vision for the next generation of onchain markets,” OKX said in a statement. 

OKX CEO and founder Star Xu said that the capital would help the company tokenize real-world assets. 

“The exchange was our starting point, and we are evolving into a broader global financial technology platform,” he added. 

A number of top Wall Street firms are increasingly interested in the technology that powers Bitcoin. While traditional finance titans like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton for years have used blockchain rails to tokenize money funds. Tokenization has become a bigger buzzword on Wall Street since the U.S. elected pro-crypto president Donald Trump. 

The president has appointed regulators that have taken a more friendly stance toward watchdogging the crypto space. The SEC in September approved tokenized stock trading. 

Other big deals between TradFi and the crypto space include the S&P 500 in January giving crypto platform Trade[XYZ] the green light to debut a new derivative contract on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, allowing traders to trade the stock index 24-7. 

This post OKX Gets New Funding From Circle, Standard Chartered at $25B Valuation first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

BlackRock Says AI Agents Could Be the Next Big Driver of Crypto Demand

Artificial intelligence and digital assets are beginning to converge, with AI models showing a preference for bitcoin and stablecoins, according to research cited by BlackRock . 

In a new report, the $15 trillion Wall Street giant said that card networks and automated clearing houses involve human-driven onboarding, fees that make tiny payments uneconomic and slower settlement and finality.

The report, “The Machine-Native Economy”, is a bet that the next big source of crypto demand won’t be human investors but software. As AI agents begin booking travel, buying data and renting computing power on their own, BlackRock argues, they will need payment systems that run around the clock and can handle transactions worth fractions of a cent.

“As AI agents become more capable and as their real-world applications expand, they increasingly demand payment and asset infrastructure designed natively for machine-speed commerce,” the report read. 

“Crypto-native blockchain rails are particularly well suited to high-frequency, sub-cent, machine-to-machine transactions that take place around-the-clock, including API calls, on-demand data, and consumption based compute.”

It added that the Bitcoin Policy Institute research found that “controlled simulations generally favored stablecoins for everyday payments and bitcoin for long-term value preservation.”

“As AI adoption broadens and agentic systems become more capable, digital

assets could become increasingly integral to AI’s economic infrastructure, expanding utility across stablecoins, tokenized RWAs, and native cryptoassets that support blockchain settlement,” the report noted. 

BlackRock has long praised Bitcoin and other crypto apps that utilize its technology, like the tokenization of assets. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 approved BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, 

which has since attracted the most investment and trading volume out of all U.S. bitcoin ETFs. The fund had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs and now manages over $67 billion in assets. 

BlackRock has previously said that Bitcoin is in an asset class of its own, and that investors are buying it to hedge against any potential debt crises.

This post BlackRock Says AI Agents Could Be the Next Big Driver of Crypto Demand first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Treasury Drops Crypto Surveillance Proposals 

The Treasury Department is scrapping two long-stalled crypto surveillance proposals, handing a major win to privacy advocates and the digital asset industry.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network filed notices Monday withdrawing its 2020 “unhosted wallet” rule and a 2023 plan to brand international crypto mixing a “class of transactions of primary money laundering concern.” Both notices are set to appear in the Federal Register on Tuesday.

In a Monday statement, the Washington crypto policy group Coin Center said the news was “a significant victory for financial privacy.” 

“The definition of mixing was extraordinarily broad, sweeping in common techniques used by ordinary cryptocurrency users to preserve their privacy,” Coin Center said. 

“And because FinCEN acknowledged the difficulty of determining where a mixing transaction occurred, we argued that risk-averse financial institutions would inevitably report even purely domestic transactions, with potentially severe collateral consequences for innocent users, including account restrictions or closures.”

The wallet rule would have required banks and other financial institutions to report certain crypto transactions above $3,000 and $10,000 when customers held the assets in unhosted wallets. 

The mixing proposal cast an even wider net. It defined mixing as anything that obscured the source, destination or amount of a crypto transaction, sweeping in pooled funds, split transfers, single-use wallets and even swaps between assets. FinCEN said commenters warned the definition “could have a chilling effect on legitimate activity” and would bury institutions in paperwork.

Institutions would have had to hand over wallet addresses, transaction hashes, IP addresses and customer identity details.

The reversal also tracks White House policy. A July 2025 report from the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets said “the Trump Administration supports the ability of lawful users of digital assets to privately transact on a public blockchain,” and urged the Treasury to reconsider the rule. 

The report acknowledged that criminals use mixers to launder funds but noted that lawful users rely on them for financial privacy.

FinCEN isn’t giving mixers a free pass. The agency said illicit actors “continue to use mixers and other tools and methods to hinder law enforcement investigations.” 

It added that it will keep watching for money laundering and terrorist financing and may act in the future.

This post Treasury Drops Crypto Surveillance Proposals  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Ecash Ecosystem Rises to Challenge in the Defense of Decentralized Custody

BTC++, Berlin, and breakthroughs in advancing Bitcoin custody

A few weeks ago, I argued that the Bitcoin ecosystem kept asking the wrong question, tending to frame everything as “trusted” or “trustless.” Instead, I urged people to ask “How many independent things have to go wrong before you lose your money?”

This is a guest post by Obi Nwosu, Co-Founder of Fedi and Fedimint. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Look at Liquid or, weeks before that, Coldcard. Matt Corallo expressed the issue in the most succinct terms: run the same software, suffer the same bugs.

That critique applied to Fedimint, too, and I’m the first to say it. We built it to remove single people and single institutions as points of failure. But there was just one implementation of the protocol — a software monoculture below federations of humans. Not secure enough. 

And so I’m happy to say that Fedimint developers have already responded.

At Ecash Hackday in Berlin, the Fedimint team got a single federation running across three independent implementations, with Cashu’s thesimplekid building one of them.

Three separate codebases, one federation, holding funds together. Developers have begun to create a solution to the monoculture I called out a few weeks ago. And the team’s response was to ask who builds the fourth, which is exactly the spirit I was hoping for.

Calle took the same principle and ran with it in his own direction. At bitcoin++ he unveiled Federated Cashu, which is designed in a way that no single operator stands alone behind a user’s funds. Any four or five keep the federation going, on a new blind signature scheme.

Two teams. Two approaches. One shared goal: ecosystem resilience, advanced within weeks.

Fault tolerance does not come from trustworthiness alone, however good your audits, formal verifications, and your security culture are. It comes from independent failure domains. No single bug, no single vendor, no single jurisdiction able to take everything at once.

I’ll be clear about the layers, because the distinction matters. Fedimint is the open-source protocol. Fedi is what we build on top of it. When the protocol grows a second and a third implementation, every federation gets more resilient and no member has to change a thing about how they use their wallet. Guardians can run different software while serving the same people.

I laid out five layers where independence has to hold, and I’ll hold myself to them:

• Multiple implementations of every protocol that holds funds. 
• Multiple wallet implementations. 
• Keys generated on hardware from different vendors. 
• Multiple independent, trustworthy people, whose privacy is protected, behind every system that holds money.
• Distribution across geographies and jurisdictions, because a jurisdiction’s rules can change overnight. 

The developers who worked on this in Berlin moved those five closer to reality.

Thank you to everyone who continues to focus on building and sharing their proof-of-work. And to the rest of us, myself included: we are not done. Our ecosystem needs to start demanding independence at every layer. Software, hardware, humans, jurisdictions — all the way down.

That is how we maintain users’ confidence in Bitcoin as we enter this new age of AI-assisted threats to our ecosystem.

This post Ecash Ecosystem Rises to Challenge in the Defense of Decentralized Custody first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Obi Nwosu.

Bitcoin's estimated US mining footprint shrank as Russia's grew, with little change in top-three country concentration.

Hashrate Index's Oct. 5 country estimates put the US at about 335 EH/s, down from 345 EH/s in the previous edition, while Russia rose from 162 to 170 EH/s.

The US, Russia and China still account for roughly 66% of the estimated network. Their combined share slipped by about 0.8%, even as the global hashrate estimate stayed almost flat.

That is a modest change in geographic concentration, with a clearer shift in the balance between the two largest mining locations.

Luxor Technology's mining data platform Hashrate Index labels the report its fourth-quarter update, but the figures describe observations from the preceding third quarter. Its July 16 comparison edition described June estimates.

The October publication is neither a completed fourth-quarter result nor a live census of where machines are operating on Oct. 6.

A smaller US share leaves the same three leaders

The comparison separates absolute mining activity from network share. Estimated US hashrate declined as its share fell from 36.7% to 35.6%, while Russia gained both estimated hashrate and share, rising from 17.2% to 18.1%. China's estimate declined from about 115 to 110 EH/s.

The network total is a 30-day simple moving average of hashrate, the computing work devoted to mining.

The provider's methodology summary describes a weighted combination of pool data, ASIC trading flows, and firmware adoption trends.

Cambridge's separate mining-map methodology warns that a pool sample may be unrepresentative and that VPNs or proxies can distort inferred location.

Hashrate Index's October comparison puts the top three countries' combined share at 65.4%, down from 66.2%. Calculating from the rounded EH/s inputs reproduces approximately that 0.8% decline. The resulting balance leaves the US with a smaller share and Russia with a larger one, while the same three countries remain dominant.

July's printed country shares add to 66.1%, while the rounded EH/s figures reproduce the provider's 66.2% aggregate after rounding. These differences are distinct from sampling or estimation error, and the comparison provides no confidence range to demonstrate statistical significance.

A smaller estimated US share reduces the portion attributed to that jurisdiction, while a larger Russian share increases the portion attributed to Russia. Those movements change exposure to particular locations without showing that the network has acquired many more independent sources of mining capacity.

Machines switching off in one country and other machines switching on elsewhere can change the distribution without the same equipment moving between them. The country totals do not establish a transfer from the US to Russia.

Location leaves ownership and operating status unresolved

A country's mining share describes where computing activity is estimated to occur, and beneficial ownership asks who ultimately owns that equipment.

Pool control asks who coordinates mining work and selects the transactions proposed for blocks. Treating these as interchangeable would turn a location estimate into a claim about decision-making power.

The Bitcoin developer guide's pooled-mining explanation separates the miners supplying hashing work from the pool that coordinates it and distributes rewards. In its legacy Stratum example, miners receive the information needed to construct block headers without being able to inspect or add transactions to the block.

That arrangement makes transaction selection independent of the machines' physical location. Spreading hardware across more countries does not show that more independent parties choose block contents.

Equally, a pool coordinating work is not automatically the beneficial owner of all the equipment contributing to it.

Stratum V2's transaction-selection design allows miners to choose a transaction set optionally, a capability that does not establish how widely it is used today.

A fuller assessment would need ownership information and contemporaneous evidence about pool participation and block-template selection. The quarterly country figures establish neither improved ownership diversity nor unchanged pool concentration.

Geography also leaves open what is happening at individual sites. Luxor attributes some regional mining declines to the switch toward artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. Individual company disclosures show that conversion activity is real.

In its Aug. 10 operational disclosure, Keel Infrastructure said it had completed decommissioning all its US Bitcoin mining operations in preparation for HPC construction.

Core Scientific's July 28 results described an ongoing process of repurposing its remaining mining facilities for high-density colocation services as circumstances allow. That is a different operating status from a completed mining exit.

These examples substantiate particular companies' actions. Reports on miners' AI commitments examined the execution question before this country comparison appeared.

Temporarily idled equipment may resume work if the conditions that caused curtailment improve. A site being reconstructed or committed to another workload faces a different path back. A hashrate decline alone does not tell readers what happened or how durable it will be.

Luxor also describes an Ethiopian power restriction in explaining that country's decline. Such explanations need their own evidence: a country delta cannot establish the contribution of power rationing, seasonal conditions, or policy. The geographic estimates and the proposed causes remain separate claims.

The network estimate barely changed, from about 940 to 941 EH/s. That aggregate can coexist with lower US activity because gains elsewhere offset losses, saying little about whether US miners have recovered operating capacity or improved their own economics.

The next useful evidence is specific to the mining risk being assessed: repeated country observations for persistence, company disclosures distinguishing actual conversion from curtailment, and ownership and pool data for control. A single nearly flat network total cannot answer all three.

For now, geographic exposure has shifted within a still concentrated mining network. Establishing broader decentralization gains requires evidence about who owns and coordinates the capacity, as well as where it sits.

The post 3 countries control 66% of Bitcoin mining, but 1 rival is gaining appeared first on CryptoSlate.

US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) announced on Oct. 5 that it is withdrawing a reporting proposal for crypto mixing, the use of techniques that obscure a transaction’s source, destination, or amount.

The plan reached beyond dedicated mixing services and would have required financial institutions to report information about covered transactions and their customers.

The agency is withdrawing both its 2023 finding that international crypto mixing is a class of transactions of primary money laundering concern and the proposed recordkeeping and reporting rule.

The withdrawal notice lists Oct. 6 as its scheduled Federal Register publication date and states that withdrawal will take effect upon publication. FinCEN cited commenters’ concerns that the expansive definition could chill legitimate activity and impose a large reporting burden.

The proposed definition applied regardless of the protocol or service used. Examples included pooling funds, coordinating transactions with code, splitting transfers, routing funds through a series of single-use wallets, exchanging between crypto assets, and introducing user-initiated delays.

The proposed obligation applied when a covered domestic financial institution knew, suspected or had reason to suspect that a crypto transaction by, through or to it involved mixing within or involving a jurisdiction outside the US.

The definition also excluded certain internal processes used to execute transactions at banks, broker-dealers and money services businesses, provided they retained source and destination records and supplied them when legally required.

For wallet users, the proposed privacy exposure came through institutions’ reports. These would have included wallet addresses, transaction hashes, IP addresses, and customer identity information in the institution’s possession. Institutions would also have had to document compliance.

Compliance checks remain

Under FinCEN’s existing guidance, covered crypto money transmitters remain subject to registration, risk-based anti-money-laundering programs, applicable customer checks, recordkeeping and suspicious activity reporting. Qualifying transfers also remain subject to the Funds Travel Rule.

The guidance distinguishes an anonymizing service that accepts and retransmits value from a supplier of anonymizing software. Supplying a tool alone does not make someone a money transmitter, although operating a transmission business can.

An unhosted-wallet user paying for goods or services on their own behalf is not a money transmitter on that basis.

FinCEN’s announcement also covers the separate unhosted-wallet proposal published in December 2020. That proposal was already listed as withdrawn on April 12, 2024, in the Spring 2024 regulatory agenda. The new notice says the agency will take no further action.

FinCEN says it will continue monitoring crypto mixing for money laundering, terrorist financing, and other illicit activity, and may take further steps. Financial institutions’ existing obligations remain relevant when assessing privacy-related transactions.

The post FinCEN drops crypto mixing proposal as backlash kills rule appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Federal prosecutors are using a new Bitcoin Fog appeal to defend trying two counts against Roman Storm in New York. Their Oct. 5 letter asks Judge Katherine Polk Failla to reject his venue challenge on the money-laundering and money-transmission conspiracy counts. Storm co-founded Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer that obscures transaction trails.

The filing arrived as Treasury moved to withdraw a broad mixer-reporting proposal. The continuing case turns on prosecutors' allegation that Storm knowingly participated in criminal activity, while the policy changes recognize lawful privacy and limit particular charging decisions. Whether his software work crossed that criminal boundary remains disputed.

Storm, posting as @rstormsf, described potential imprisonment as punishment “for writing code” and contrasted the case with Treasury's retreat. His criticism captures the stakes for privacy developers, but the latest filing concerns where the case can be tried.

Storm already has an August 2025 conviction on one money-transmission conspiracy count carrying a statutory maximum of five years. An Aug. 25, 2026 court order scheduled his retrial for April 26, 2027, citing his pending acquittal motion and requested continuance.

Southern District of New York prosecutors rely on the D.C. Circuit's Sept. 25 decision in United States v. Sterlingov, involving Bitcoin Fog, a different cryptocurrency mixer. Prosecutors cite its venue holdings as persuasive authority for Storm's pending challenge.

Their argument centers on a Manhattan customer, Shakeeb Ahmed. They say his deposits helped enlarge the anonymity pool, making funds harder to trace, even though the money remained there only briefly. They also argue that serving a customer in the district supports venue for the money-transmission count.

Why the crypto policy shift has not ended the case

Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is withdrawing its 2023 finding and proposed enhanced reporting and recordkeeping measure for international cryptocurrency mixing. The withdrawal notice, filed Oct. 5 for Oct. 6 publication, cites concerns about a “chilling effect on legitimate activity” and burdens on financial institutions.

FinCEN recognizes lawful financial privacy while retaining monitoring for money laundering, terrorist financing and other illicit activity. The withdrawal addresses an administrative reporting proposal. It does not repeal criminal offenses or decide Storm's case.

DOJ's own shift contains a similar boundary. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's April 7, 2025 memo directed prosecutors away from targeting mixers for their users' conduct or unwitting regulatory violations and called for review of ongoing cases.

But the memo expressly excludes section 1960(b)(1)(C), concerning funds known to come from crime or intended for unlawful activity, from its regulatory charging restriction.

In August 2025 remarks, DOJ official Matthew Galeotti added protection against new charges under that provision for qualifying software: it must be truly decentralized, solely automate peer-to-peer transactions, and leave the third party without custody and control over user assets. Other charges could remain appropriate where criminal intent exists.

That conditional promise about new charges did not set aside Storm's existing conviction.

DOJ described Storm's conduct as building, maintaining and profiting from a service despite knowing it transmitted criminal proceeds. Storm contests criminal treatment of his developer activity.

The April 9, 2026 hearing exposes the breadth of the government's theory. Prosecutor Ben Arad argued that legitimate deposits helped conceal criminal funds, supporting his case against the developers. He expressly distinguished innocent depositors' knowledge and perspective from that of Storm and his alleged coconspirators.

The dispute therefore centers on the developers' responsibility for running and improving a service used by criminals.

Failla challenged whether the broader theory established willful conduct. Arad later emphasized active steps to maintain and improve the service, rather than merely leaving its pools operational. The judge scrutinized the government's theory.

Why Ulbricht's pardon is different

The comparison with Ross Ulbricht raises a separate question of individual clemency. Trump's Jan. 21, 2025 pardon granted individual clemency to Ross Ulbricht for specified convictions. It did not extend to Storm or establish a general exemption for crypto developers.

The next consequential developments are judicial decisions on the challenges and any changes to that schedule. Washington's support for lawful crypto privacy has not itself settled the contested criminal case.

The post DOJ presses Tornado Cash prosecution as Treasury drops mixer reporting plan appeared first on CryptoSlate.

OKX brought Circle, Ripple and Standard Chartered’s venture arm onto its cap table as the crypto exchange broadens its push into stablecoin-based financial services.

On Oct. 6, the exchange's Chief Executive Officer, Star Xu, confirmed that the company completed a strategic investment from Circle, Qube Research & Technologies, Ripple and SC Ventures by Standard Chartered at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, extending a March round led by Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. OKX did not disclose how much it raised in the latest transaction.

The valuation was unchanged from March, when ICE invested about $200 million. The new round instead adds shareholders whose businesses overlap with OKX’s expansion into stablecoins, payments, institutional liquidity and tokenized assets.

Xu said the exchange chose the new investors for their strategic fit rather than because it needed additional financing, pointing to its longer-term ambitions across payments and financial infrastructure.

He stated:

“We didn’t raise capital because we needed it. We chose to bring in strategic partners who share our long-term vision for stablecoins, payments, institutional markets, and the next generation of financial infrastructure.”

Stablecoin firms move onto OKX’s cap table

The investor lineup gives OKX closer ties to companies already supplying infrastructure across its platform.

Circle issues USDC, which is integrated across OKX. Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin is available through the exchange’s unified order book, while QRT is a major institutional counterparty that provides liquidity and risk capacity. Standard Chartered, meanwhile, acts as custodian for BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund used in an institutional collateral framework developed with OKX.

Those relationships make the fundraising more than a conventional capital injection. Ripple said the investment could deepen cooperation with OKX across stablecoins, payments and institutional markets, while Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire described the transaction as an extension of the companies’ existing relationship around USDC and onchain market infrastructure.

QRT’s participation adds an institutional trading component. The quantitative investment manager already works with OKX on liquidity and new markets, while SC Ventures gives the exchange another link to a global bank as crypto companies compete to bring traditional financial assets and payment flows onto blockchain networks.

The composition of the round also helps explain why OKX accepted new investors without securing a higher valuation seven months after ICE bought in. The company is effectively adding partners positioned across several layers of the financial stack it wants to build, from stablecoin issuance and custody to liquidity and payments.

OKX Money targets users beyond crypto trading

That expansion moved into consumer payments on Tuesday with the launch of OKX Money, a standalone app designed to let customers save, send and spend dollar-backed stablecoins.

According to OKX, users in participating markets can fund accounts using more than 50 supported currencies and hold USDG, USDC or USDT.

The app combines stablecoin balances with global transfers and virtual or physical cards, while OKX says it charges no foreign-exchange fee or conversion markup when customers make purchases in another currency.

Eligible customers can also earn up to 10% annually on qualifying USDG balances without staking or lockups, while a loyalty program offers up to 10% cashback on eligible card purchases. Availability, rates and features vary by market and customer eligibility.

The target market extends well beyond existing exchange users. OKX said roughly 70% of the people it wants to reach through Money have never used a crypto application, prompting the company to keep the underlying blockchain infrastructure largely out of the user experience.

That puts OKX into a different competitive arena from the exchange business that built its global customer base. Stablecoin providers, crypto platforms and fintech companies are increasingly competing for consumers who want dollar exposure, cross-border transfers and card payments without necessarily wanting to trade digital assets.

OKX is initially focusing on participating markets where currency volatility, banking access and foreign-exchange costs can make holding or spending dollars difficult. The company said it will expand gradually rather than make the service immediately available across all of the more than 30 jurisdictions where it operates under regulatory frameworks.

The commercial test will be whether OKX can turn an infrastructure advantage and a large crypto customer network into everyday financial activity. Winning users who have never touched crypto requires different distribution, compliance and customer-support capabilities from running a trading venue.

That challenge also raises the stakes for the new investors. Circle and Ripple want broader stablecoin distribution, QRT benefits from deeper institutional markets, and Standard Chartered has been expanding its exposure to digital-asset infrastructure. OKX now has to show those relationships can generate payment volumes and customer adoption beyond the trading activity that built the exchange.

The post Ripple and Circle backs OKX as it targets the next wave of stablecoin users appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum’s institutional demand is weakening around the same time derivatives positioning shows traders are selling aggressively without yet breaking the broader price structure.

US spot ETH exchange-traded funds recorded $50.76 million of net outflows on Oct. 5, extending their losing streak to five consecutive sessions, according to SoSoValue data. The products have shed $205.88 million since Sept. 29, reducing cumulative net inflows to about $13.75 billion.

The streak followed a $17.1 million inflow on Sept. 28 and has coincided with ETH trading near $2,711, leaving one of the market’s major sources of incremental demand in retreat.

Yet the pressure has not spread uniformly across Ethereum’s investor base.

Blockchain analytics firm Santiment said Ethereum’s Age Consumed metric surged to 580 million token-days on Sept. 30, roughly nine times its September weekday average and the highest reading since June 2. The indicator tracks previously dormant coins moving onchain, weighted by how long they had remained untouched.

Large spikes can signal that long-term holders are repositioning assets and, in some cases, preparing to sell. Aggregate exchange balances, however, barely changed across Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.

Ethereum held on exchanges rose by only about 18,000 ETH on Sept. 30 before falling roughly 21,000 ETH the next day, against approximately 5.9 million ETH held on trading venues. When Age Consumed last registered a larger spike on June 2, exchange balances increased by more than 140,000 ETH.

That contrast leaves open the possibility that the September activity reflected custody transfers, staking movements or wallet reorganizations rather than broad distribution by older holders.

ETH derivatives traders lean bearish without forcing a breakdown

The more immediate pressure is showing up in the derivatives markets, though signals there are also unusually mixed.

CryptoQuant data shows Ethereum’s Estimated Leverage Ratio has fallen to 0.66, its lowest level in seven months, indicating that open derivatives exposure has declined relative to ETH reserves held on exchanges. The ratio stood near 0.68 on Binance and 0.64 on OKX after trending lower in recent weeks.

CryptoQuant contributor Arab Chain interprets the decline as weaker appetite for heavily leveraged positions as ETH trades around $2,700, potentially easing liquidation pressure.

On Binance, ETH open interest remains near $3.3 billion, up from about $2.3 billion on Aug. 6, a roughly 43% increase, CryptoQuant data shows. At the same time, Cumulative Net Taker Volume, or CVD, has swung sharply in the opposite direction.

Binance ETH CVD fell from $1.94 billion on Aug. 21 to -$1.36 billion on Oct. 5, a $3.30 billion reversal and its weakest reading since Aug. 6. The metric captures the balance between aggressive market buying and selling, with the negative reading showing sellers increasingly crossing the spread to execute trades.

Ethereum, however, remains roughly 44% above its Aug. 6 level, meaning the surge in aggressive selling has yet to unwind the broader price advance.

That divergence is reinforced by the relationship between CVD and open interest. CVD has continued to make lower lows while open interest lows have generally moved higher, a pattern consistent with substantial outstanding derivatives exposure as aggressive sellers take a larger role in order flow.

The combination can become constructive if ETH continues absorbing that supply. Heavy taker selling alongside resilient prices can indicate that buyers are absorbing aggressive sell orders.

A short squeeze remains a conditional scenario, with funding rates providing additional evidence about positioning. If funding turns persistently negative while ETH holds its range, short sellers would increasingly pay long positions to maintain exposure, raising the potential for covering to become an additional source of demand.

For now, three forces are pulling the market in different directions. ETF investors are withdrawing capital, dormant coins are moving while aggregate exchange balances remain little changed, and derivatives traders are selling more aggressively while maintaining substantial exposure.

The next break in that balance could come from either side.

Continued ETF withdrawals, paired with a meaningful rise in exchange balances, would broaden selling pressure beyond financial products. But if exchange reserves stay contained and ETH continues absorbing negative derivatives flow, traders running short exposure could become increasingly vulnerable to any recovery in institutional demand or a shift in funding conditions.

The post Ethereum bears keep selling but ETH price stays near $2,700 as US spot ETFs record $206M in outflows appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The US derivatives regulator CFTC did not issue any new rules for leveraged crypto trading on October 5, 2026. It asked questions. The paper that made the rounds on Monday is a consultation: 109 pages, 60 days for comments, not a single binding sentence in it. Many reports read differently on Tuesday, talking about a registration requirement and about a duty to prove reserves. Neither of those appears in the document in that form.

For you as an investor in Germany, that is the more important half of the news. What governs your portfolio, your leverage and your tax return is called MiCA and the BaFin general administrative act, and nothing about that changed on October 5. It is still worth reading the paper, because it shows quite precisely which questions a regulator asks before it allows leveraged crypto trading for retail clients. You can measure your own platform against that list, wherever it is based.

Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: what the CFTC set in motion on October 5

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC for short, is the US supervisor of futures and derivatives markets. On October 5, 2026 it published press release number 9307-26 together with a document under file reference RIN 3038-AF80, which prepares amendments to parts 1, 38 and 39 of title 17 of the US Code of Federal Regulations.

The decisive line is the one missing from most reports. Under “ACTION” the original reads: Advanced notice of proposed rulemaking. An Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, ANPRM for short, is the earliest stage of a US rulemaking procedure: the agency announces that it intends to develop rules and asks for feedback beforehand. Only after that comes the actual draft rule, the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, and only after a second comment round the final rule. Between Monday's paper and an applicable regulation there are therefore at least two further procedural steps.

CFTC chairman Michael S. Selig is quoted in the release as follows: “The American people deserve clarity, reliability and consumer protection in the markets for crypto assets, and the agency is determined to deliver that by bringing transactions in crypto assets into its uniform national regulatory framework.” Elsewhere he calls the project a step meant to prevent rather than to prosecute after the fact, pointing to the collapse of FTX.

What the document expressly does not do, it states itself: it does not set any final rules and it does not create any specific obligations. Without an act of Congress it also does not force anyone to trade crypto assets on a venue registered with the CFTC.

Section 2(c)(2)(D) and the 28-day rule: why leveraged spot trading counts as a future

The legal core is older than any crypto exchange. Section 2(c)(2)(D) of the Commodity Exchange Act covers transactions with retail clients that are offered on a leveraged basis, on margin or with other financing, and it does so expressly even where the offer is not accepted. Such transactions count in principle as futures contracts and therefore have to run on an authorised exchange.

There are exceptions, and one of them matters most to crypto exchanges. A purchase contract drops out if it leads to actual delivery within 28 days. Actual delivery means in this context that the buyer receives the asset in reality and can dispose of it freely, and that control over it does not remain with the dealer. Whether a leveraged crypto platform falls under futures market law has hung on exactly that question for years.

The document describes these exceptions as the only exits from the exchange requirement. It also makes clear how the agency views a case that occurs constantly in practice: if a retail client declines a leverage offer and buys fully paid, the agency's jurisdiction does not automatically fall away on this reading. The transaction remains subject to the law until one of the statutory exceptions applies.

Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM: the two building blocks of the draft

The paper carries two working titles that you will read more often in the coming months. Regulation CTX stands for Crypto Asset Transactions and concerns the transactions themselves, meaning the interpretation of terms such as “offer” and “actual delivery”. Regulation CAM stands for Crypto Asset Market and describes a new cut of trading venue: a sub-category of the Designated Contract Market, the classic US futures exchange.

For this new cut the document lists six blocks of topics on which the agency requests feedback. They concern listing standards for individual crypto assets and their susceptibility to manipulation, position limits, the reporting and retention of trading data, the execution of transactions, operational risks including system security, and finally the custody of client assets.

Those six blocks are the real news. They show what a regulator measures a trading venue against when retail clients are to trade there with leverage. Anyone choosing an exchange today can use the same six points as a grid, even without any agency prescribing them. Which platforms in Germany hold a licence at all is shown in the overview of the best crypto brokers.

Proof of reserves appears in the document as a question, not as a duty

Several reports wrote of a duty to prove reserves. In the document the section sits under the heading “Proof of Reserves”, and it consists of two requests for comment.

The agency first describes current practice: crypto exchanges hold client assets in pooled accounts, so-called omnibus accounts, maintained for the benefit of clients. On this it asks for comments on all risks arising from that custody practice. It then notes that individual market participants have already introduced safeguards for segregated client assets, under which the custodian has an external auditor confirm that the reserves cover all liabilities towards clients. In everyday language that is called proof of reserves. On this too the agency expressly invites proposals on which practices it should take into account.

Between “we request proposals” and “we prescribe” lies about a year and two comment rounds in a US rulemaking procedure. For you that means a published reserve attestation remains a voluntary promise by the exchange for the time being, in the United States as in Europe. MiCA requires authorised crypto service providers to hold client funds and crypto assets separately from their own assets. A published reserve audit by a third party, of the kind the CFTC puts up for discussion, is not required by the European regulation.

No leverage cap in the paper: the margin regime stays open

The most striking blank space concerns the figure everyone looks for first. The document names an upper limit for leverage nowhere.

Instead it describes a model: the new trading venue is to allow retail clients to obtain financing from a suitable provider, an eligible leverage provider. The terms of that financing are to be set out in the venue's rulebook, following the principle that a futures exchange must inform accurately about its terms. The document lists what would have to be governed there: purchase price, margin requirements, collateral, fees and financing costs, procedures for forced liquidation and disclosures to clients.

How high the margin requirements turn out, the agency leaves open. It places two paths side by side: the existing mechanism in which the clearing house sets the rates, or a stricter approach in which the agency sets requirements itself. It asks whether the determination should be delegated to the self-regulatory National Futures Association, as already happens with foreign exchange dealers, and how quickly rates could be adjusted in periods of stress.

One point deserves particular attention because it makes the difference in liquidations. The agency asks whether certain crypto assets should be excluded as collateral, and names as a possible criterion a minimum market capitalisation and a minimum trading volume, so that the asset survives a sale under stress. Anyone who posts a thinly traded position as collateral today already carries exactly that risk, only without a rule. How forced liquidations run on derivatives platforms is explained in the overview of the best perp DEX.

A 60-day comment period: when the clock starts running

At the place where the deadline will be stated, the document still carries a placeholder line: comments must be received within 60 days of publication in the Federal Register, the official gazette of the US federal agencies. The press release of October 5 therefore does not start the period yet.

Submissions go through the Regulations.gov portal, or alternatively by post to the agency in Washington. Comments must be written in English or include an English translation, and they are published unreviewed, including any personal details someone writes into them. The procedure is open to everyone, including filers from Europe.

In practical terms for the timetable: the deadline will not expire before December 2026, after which comes the evaluation, then the actual draft rule with a further comment round. Anyone who reads in reports that a new framework for leveraged trading now applies in the United States is reading something that can be true in 2028 at the earliest.

What the US framework changes for investors in Germany

Today, nothing. A Crypto Asset Market would be a US trading venue under US supervision, and retail clients from Germany generally cannot open an account there anyway. The market reaction also failed to appear: bitcoin traded at $85,698 at around 6:50 pm German time on October 6, 2026, roughly half a percent above the previous day, according to CoinGecko price data. How the levels have developed since then is covered in the bitcoin price prediction.

Indirectly the matter is relevant all the same. Large trading venues do not build their rulebooks country by country but once, and then adapt them. If a US regulator enforces listing standards for crypto assets, position limits and external reserve attestations, that reaches platforms serving European clients too. The reverse route has been more common in recent years: European requirements from MiCA became the benchmark because nobody wanted to maintain two products in parallel.

MiCA, the BaFin general administrative act and the limits for retail clients in Germany

Anyone betting on crypto assets with leverage in Germany moves within two separate sets of rules, and many people confuse them. Trading in crypto assets itself falls under the European MiCA regulation, which makes crypto service providers subject to authorisation and obliges them, among other things, to segregate client assets. Which duties that brings for providers is broken down in the overview of the MiCA licence.

Leveraged trading via contracts for difference, by contrast, falls under securities law. Here the BaFin general administrative act of July 23, 2019 applies. It prohibits the marketing, distribution and sale of contracts for difference to retail clients in Germany unless four conditions are met: a guaranteed initial margin protection, which the regulator itself describes as a leverage limit, a mandatory margin close-out protection, a mandatory negative balance protection, called a ban on additional payment obligations by BaFin, and a ban on bonus incentives. The negative balance protection is the part that saves your assets in an emergency: with a supervised provider you cannot lose more than the capital you put in.

The leverage limit is tiered by underlying asset class, and crypto assets sit in the strictest tier. An assessment of October 2, 2026 on cryptoticker.io on the classification of perpetual futures puts that tier at leverage of 2:1 and explains why perpetual futures contracts run in the same direction. Between that 2:1 and what platforms without a European licence offer lies the real difference, and you should know about it before opening any position.

Spot or derivative: the holding period under section 23 EStG splits the tax paths

The difference between a directly held coin and a leveraged derivative on it is above all a tax matter in Germany, and it turns out considerably larger than most people expect.

If you buy a coin and hold it in custody, the sale is a private disposal under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. After one year of holding the gain stays tax-free, below that your personal tax rate applies, and there is an exemption limit. If you instead trade a derivative on the same coin, such as a contract for difference or a perpetual futures contract, the result lands in investment income under section 20 of the German Income Tax Act. There is no holding period there and no tax exemption after a year, but there is the separate tax rate and its own rules for offsetting losses.

This split has an unpleasant side effect. Anyone who hedges a spot position via a derivative shortly before the one-year deadline expires may destroy that deadline, depending on how the hedge is structured. This is no edge case but the most frequent error in mixed portfolios. A tool that keeps both pots cleanly apart is half the battle; the comparison of crypto tax tools gives an overview. For the assessment of an individual case there is no way around tax advice.

Offshore platforms remain the real gap

The CFTC paper describes a trading venue that places itself under federal supervision voluntarily. It obliges nobody to do so as long as Congress passes no law. That is exactly where the problem sits which neither Washington nor Brussels has solved so far.

A platform without a licence in the European Union and without registration in the United States is subject to neither set of rules. There is no negative balance protection there, no leverage limit, no duty to segregate client assets and no supervisor you can turn to. Double-digit to triple-digit leverage is everyday business there. BaFin maintains the list of authorised providers itself, and it can be read through in a few minutes; that look costs less time than any attempt to unwind a trade.

That the CFTC puts listing standards, susceptibility to manipulation and reserve attestations at the front of its paper is in that sense an indication of which three questions a regulator considers the riskiest. You can put them to your platform before an agency does.

Leveraged trading: How to proceed now

1. Clarify the licence. Check whether your provider holds a MiCA authorisation or an investment services licence for contracts for difference in the European Union. Without either, neither negative balance protection nor a leverage limit applies to you. The comparison of the best crypto brokers offers an entry point to the provider landscape.
2. Work through the liquidation logic. Have your platform's rulebook show you at which price a position is closed, which collateral is recognised and which financing costs accrue per day. Those are exactly the points the CFTC puts up for discussion in its paper. How this looks on derivatives platforms is shown in the overview of the best perp DEX.
3. Separate the tax pots. Keep spot holdings and derivatives separate so that the one-year deadline under section 23 EStG stays documentable. Which programmes manage that without manual work is covered in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

The key points in brief

The CFTC opened a consultation on October 5, 2026, it did not issue a rule. The document runs to 109 pages and the comment period is 60 days from publication in the Federal Register. It names no upper leverage limit, and the reserve attestation appears in it as a question. For investors in Germany, MiCA and the BaFin general administrative act of July 23, 2019 remain decisive, and for tax purposes section 23 EStG still separates the directly held coin from the derivative.

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

Sources: CFTC, press release 9307-26 of October 5, 2026 and BaFin, general administrative act on contracts for difference of July 23, 2019.

Ripple plans to use XRP as collateral for short-term payment credit from 2027. The technology for that does not sit in a contract but in the protocol of the XRP Ledger, and there it has not been approved yet. The amendment responsible for it, LendingProtocolV1_1, stood at 14 of 35 validator votes on Tuesday afternoon. Twenty-eight are needed. Two other updates, by contrast, are on the verge of activation. For any XRP forecast that means a clear split: the calendar for the next 72 hours is reliable, the credit plan is not.

XRP price today: $1.50 and €1.34 on Tuesday evening

XRP traded at $1.5024 and €1.3351 on Tuesday evening, measured against the closing prices of the XRP/USD and XRP/EUR pairs on Kraken. Over the preceding 24 hours the range in dollars ran between $1.4869 and $1.5238, in euros between €1.3280 and €1.3535. The daily gain is therefore less than one percent, and anyone who looks at the chart without the numbers beside it sees a sideways move.

Over a longer horizon the picture is more mixed. According to CoinGecko market data, XRP stood 0.74 percent above the previous day on Tuesday, 2.64 percent below its level a week earlier and 6.7 percent above its level 30 days ago. Market capitalisation was around $94.6 billion, trading turnover over the past 24 hours around $1.54 billion. That leaves the price almost 59 percent short of the all-time high of $3.65 reached on July 17, 2025.

The weekly comparison within the large tokens puts that in context. Bitcoin gained 2.46 percent over seven days and Solana 0.41 percent, while Ethereum lost 0.24 percent and Dogecoin 0.04 percent. At minus 2.64 percent, XRP sits at the bottom of that group. This is no slump, but it is the weakest week among the six most searched tokens, and it explains why attention has moved away from the chart towards what is happening inside the protocol.

Ripple's credit plan: XRP as collateral in lending pools from 2027

At the XRP Seoul event on October 3, 2026, Ripple president Monica Long said, according to matching reports from the conference, that Ripple is preparing a credit service. Customers are to be able to pledge XRP deposited in lending pools as collateral in order to finance short-term payment obligations. The launch is planned for 2027, with a pilot on the decentralised exchange of the XRP Ledger running before it. The statement comes from the event and not from a mandatory company filing, so it is a declaration of intent and not a date.

A lending pool is a shared pot into which several holders deposit the same token and from which borrowers draw against collateral and interest. The difference from the payment business so far is considerable. In a bridge payment a service provider holds XRP for seconds, after which the token is free again. As credit collateral it is tied up for the full term of the loan. That is exactly where the economic expectation hangs that some market participants attach to the plan.

Anyone who wants to test that expectation measures it against the size of the market. At a daily turnover of around $1.54 billion, substantial amounts would have to be locked up permanently before any of it shows up in the price. A comparison helps: the Nasdaq vehicle approach we covered in the Evernorth treasury with 473 million XRP ties up tokens permanently and is still only one building block among many. A declaration of intent for 2027 is a weaker building block than a balance sheet that has already been filled.

The lending amendment in the XRP Ledger: 14 of 35 validators, 28 are needed

An amendment is a rule change to the XRP Ledger that the validators of the network vote on before it applies. A validator is a server that checks transactions and confirms blocks; the jointly evaluated default list currently covers 35 such servers. For an amendment to pass it needs the approval of 80 percent of that list, which means 28 votes, and it needs that majority continuously for two weeks.

The voting status for the credit technology is clear and sobering. LendingProtocolV1_1, introduced with version 3.4.0 in September, stood at 14 votes on Tuesday. The older LendingProtocol reached 17, the accompanying SingleAssetVault 19. None of these three amendments has ever reached the majority, so no two-week clock is running either. Even if all three crossed the threshold tomorrow, the earliest activation would be two weeks after that.

Batch and Permission Delegation: October 8 and October 9 are in the calendar

While the credit technology lags far behind, three other amendments are close to the finish line. Permission Delegation, in its patched version PermissionDelegationV1_1, allows an account to hand narrowly defined signing rights to another account without giving up control of the key. Batch, as BatchV1_1, bundles several transactions into a single operation that is either carried out in full or not at all. Both returned with version 3.3.0 after earlier versions had been pulled from the vote over security flaws.

All times in this table are German time, and they are lower bounds rather than appointments. The network activates an amendment at the first ledger close after the deadline has expired, and that can shift by minutes. We have already broken down the sequence of these three activations in the XRP price prediction on the XRPL updates from October 8; the voting status has not turned since.

The two-week rule in the XRP Ledger: 80 percent of validators, 14 days in a row

The mechanism behind it is the reason these dates can be predicted at all. When an amendment reaches 80 percent approval for the first time, the network records that moment. From then on a two-week deadline runs. If approval falls below the threshold during that time, the record is deleted and counting starts again from the next majority. That is the one way in which the dates on October 8 and 9 can still move.

How thin that buffer is depends on the individual amendment. fixBatchV1_2 carries all 35 votes and therefore has seven votes of room. BatchV1_1 sits two above the threshold with 30 votes, PermissionDelegationV1_1 exactly one with 29. With Permission Delegation a single operator withdrawing approval is enough to reset the clock to zero. This is not a hypothetical risk: these two functions in particular were pulled from the vote in earlier versions after security findings.

You can look up this status yourself, and it is the most useful check this article offers. The public amendment overview in the XRPL explorer shows the vote count, the threshold and the time of the majority for each amendment. Anyone who looks on Wednesday evening and still sees 29 votes at PermissionDelegationV1_1 knows the activation is on track. If the number drops to 27, the date is off the table.

Supply and demand: locked XRP in pools against $1.54 billion in daily turnover

The bridge from the protocol to the price is shorter than it looks and at the same time weaker than the headlines suggest. Batch lowers costs and the risk of error for transactions that belong together, and Permission Delegation makes third-party custody cleaner to model. Both are infrastructure for institutional users. Neither of them locks a single XRP out of circulation.

The credit plan would do exactly that, which is why the economic expectation hangs on it and not on the two updates of this week. Work through the order of magnitude: at around $1.54 billion in daily turnover, one percent of the daily volume comes to roughly $15 million. For a permanent lock-up of tokens to become visible in the price, it would have to reach a multiple of that figure and stay there. Volumes of that size do not come out of a pilot.

Anyone looking for yield on existing holdings should also compare the terms before depositing tokens anywhere. Which platforms offer which payouts and which lock-up periods is something we have set side by side in our comparison of staking and yield platforms. Every form of lending trades availability for return, and when you lend you also carry the default risk of the counterparty.

XRP price prediction: the levels analysts name for October 2026

Price targets belong to those who set them, not to this editorial team. A technical assessment by Coin Edition from September 30 sees XRP above $1.37 in a narrowing triangle and names $1.65 as a first and $1.70 as a second target. The same analysis lists $1.51, $1.65 and $1.70 as resistances and $1.46, $1.37 and $1.31 as supports; the apex of the triangle sits at around $1.60 towards the end of October. Other model calculations, such as the average values compiled by 24/7 Wall St., are considerably lower with a range of $1.12 to $1.16.

That spread is the result, not the error. Between $1.12 and $1.70 lie around 52 percent, and smoothing it over conceals the uncertainty instead of showing it. What can be documented are the levels from trading itself: $1.4869 as the daily low, $1.5238 as the daily high, and below those the round number of $1.50, at which the price has turned several times since the end of September.

For the coming days the only hard metronome is the calendar of the protocol. If Permission Delegation and Batch go live as calculated, the XRP Ledger gains two functions that institutional users have been asking for over a long period. If the activation fails to happen because an operator drops out, that is the more tangible piece of news, and the worse one.

Holding period and tax: one year of holding, a €1,000 exemption limit

For investors in Germany the tax framework is often a bigger lever than any price target. Crypto assets held as private assets fall under private disposals under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. The holding period is one year: anyone who holds XRP for more than twelve months and then sells realises a tax-free gain. Within that period the gain is taxable at the personal income tax rate.

On top of that comes the exemption limit of €1,000 per calendar year. An exemption limit is not an allowance. If the sum of all gains from private disposals in the year comes to €999, it stays untaxed; if it comes to €1,001, the entire amount is taxable and not only the euro above the line. Anyone who has already realised gains this year works out where they stand before the next sale.

In practice that means two things. First, you need the date and the purchase price for every additional buy, otherwise the period cannot be documented later on. Second, swapping XRP for another token also counts as a disposal, not only the sale into euros. Anyone who has bought several tranches at different prices cannot avoid keeping clean records; the common tax tools and portfolio trackers read in the trading data from the exchanges and allocate the tranches on a first-in, first-out basis.

Buying route and custody in Germany: licence, exchange or your own wallet

Since the European regulation on markets in crypto assets came into force, service providers addressing customers in the EU need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. In Germany, BaFin supervises these providers. For you that is above all a selection criterion: before buying, check whether the provider can show authorisation for the German market, and compare the trading costs before you place an order. The fee models differ more than the prices themselves, and when trading small amounts the spread often weighs more heavily than the stated order fee.

Two routes part ways when it comes to custody. If you leave XRP on the exchange, you hold a claim against the company rather than the token itself. If you hold it yourself, you hold the private key and carry the responsibility for securing it. On the XRP Ledger one peculiarity is added that many only notice on their first transfer: every account must keep a minimum reserve in XRP that cannot be spent as long as the account exists. Check the current reserve value before you try to withdraw a remaining balance in full.

Permission Delegation touches exactly this area, even if at first glance it looks like pure institutional plumbing. The function makes it possible to hand over individual rights on an account in a targeted way, for example the right to sign one particular type of transaction. Service providers can use it to build custody models that today either do not work at all or work only with full access to the key. For self-custodians nothing changes for the time being.

The counter-check: three points that can slow the plan down

First, the vote. Without LendingProtocolV1_1 and the associated vault amendments there are no lending pools on the XRP Ledger into which Ripple could deposit anything. At 14 of 35 votes the threshold of 28 is not within reach, and the two-week deadline only begins after it has been crossed.

Second, the timeline. An announcement for 2027 leaves more than a year of room for market conditions, regulation and business decisions. Ripple has announced products in the past whose scope had shifted by the time they launched; a declaration of intent from a stage is not a commitment with a date.

Third, the order of magnitude. For locked tokens to carry the price, they would have to matter in relation to daily trading volume. A pilot on a decentralised exchange moves in a different league to begin with. That is no argument against the plan, but it is an argument against the expectation that it will work quickly.

XRP price prediction: How to proceed now

1. Look up the voting status and get your buying route ready. Open the amendment overview of the XRPL explorer before October 8 and note the votes at PermissionDelegationV1_1 and BatchV1_1. If they stay at 29 and 30, the deadlines keep running. If you want to trade afterwards, compare spread and order fee first in the overview of crypto exchanges, because with a daily range below three percent the side costs weigh in noticeably.
2. Set out your holding period and your annual gain. Pull together the purchase date and the purchase price for each tranche and check where you stand against the €1,000 exemption limit for the current year. The tax tools and portfolio trackers in comparison allocate the tranches on a first-in, first-out basis.
3. Do the maths on the terms before you lend. If the credit idea appeals to you, read the lock-up periods and the default rules before you deposit tokens. The terms of the staking and yield platforms sit side by side in the comparison, and on the XRP Ledger itself there is no pool at all until the lending amendment is activated.

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

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade has been live on the Sepolia test network since Tuesday afternoon. The fork started at 13:53:36 UTC, exactly at the time the developers had announced three weeks earlier. Anyone holding Ethereum gets a rare opportunity from this: the network that is also meant to carry the mainnet in a few weeks or months is running out in the open right now and can be measured.

That is precisely what we did, and the result departs from the headline. One number stood at the centre of the reports of recent days: a gas limit of 200 million, more than three times the previous 60 million. On Sepolia the gas limit stood at 64,238,034 on Tuesday afternoon, a good hour after the fork. That is no contradiction of the announcement, but it is not the same thing either, and the difference explains why a mainnet date is still missing.

Glamsterdam on Sepolia: the fork ran at 13:53:36 UTC in block 11,856,337

The Ethereum Foundation had set the fork on September 17 for epoch 353,024 and slot 11,296,768, which converts to October 6, 2026 at 13:53:36 UTC. That slot has indeed become the first block of the new rules; on the execution layer it carries the number 11,856,337.

You can recognise this by two fields that did not appear in the block header before. One is called blockAccessListHash and belongs to the Block-Level Access Lists, the other is a declared slotNumber. The first block with these fields carries exactly slot number 11,296,768 from the announcement. A fork is therefore not merely asserted but readable on the chain.

A block header is the header record of a block: a short list of key figures that every node checks before it accepts the block. When a field is added there, all the programs involved have adopted the same new rule. That is exactly what test networks are for.

This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on October 6, 2026. It is based on the block headers of the public Sepolia test network; 24 blocks between 13:29 and 14:49 were counted, along with the blocks immediately around the fork.

The Sepolia gas limit: 60 million before the fork, 64.2 million an hour later

Before the fork the gas limit on Sepolia sat at a round figure for hours: 60,000,000, identical block after block. That is the normal case when the validator operators have all set the same value.

With the fork the number starts to move. Five minutes afterwards it stood at 60,647,496, after forty minutes at 62,568,310, after barely an hour at 64,238,034. Across 218 blocks a good four million gas was added, on average around 18,600 per block.

Two things stand out in this. First, the number does not run evenly but in steps, occasionally even a little backwards. Second, several of the counted blocks were brim full: one used 60,611,247 of 60,647,496 gas, a later one 63,827,010 of 63,925,416. Those are fill levels above 99 percent. On a test network that is not chance but intent. Anyone wanting to test a higher limit has to load it up as well.

One 1,024th per block: how the gas limit climbs towards 200 million

The gas limit is not a number somebody sets with a switch. Each block proposal may change the limit of the preceding block by at most one 1,024th, upwards as well as downwards. At 64 million that is around 62,500 gas per block, so with a twelve-second block time roughly half a million per minute as a theoretical ceiling.

The measured 18,600 per block lie well below that, because not every proposer has set the new target value yet. Extrapolated to the 136 million gas that were still missing on Tuesday afternoon up to the 200 million mark, that works out at roughly one day. With more validators switched over it can go faster, with fewer it takes longer, and the value can also come to a halt along the way.

Important for context: the figure of 200 million appears in the Ethereum Foundation's announcement as a configuration recommendation for the validator programs Prysm and Teku, not as a value written into the upgrade specification. So the number describes what is to be tried out on the test network, and not what will apply on the mainnet. The details are in the Ethereum Foundation's test network announcement.

EIP-7928 and EIP-7732: Block-Level Access Lists and ePBS are in the header

Glamsterdam implements two large changes. EIP-7928 introduces Block-Level Access Lists: a block states in advance which accounts and storage slots it touches. This lets nodes execute transactions in parallel instead of strictly one after another. That is the precondition for a markedly higher gas limit, because without parallel processing a block three times the size would simply overwhelm the machines.

EIP-7732 is called Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, ePBS for short. Until now block building and block proposing run through external relays, that is, through intermediaries that are not part of the protocol. With ePBS this division of labour moves into the protocol itself. For investors that is above all a point of reliability: the less a network depends on voluntary intermediaries, the lower the risk that an outage there slows block production.

On top of that come adjustments to gas prices that make accesses to network storage more expensive and some computing steps cheaper. This redistribution is the reason why a higher limit does not automatically mean transfers three times cheaper.

Sepolia against mainnet: what a test network fork tells Ether holders

Sepolia is a test network. The Ether moved there has no value, the validators are run by a manageable circle, and a mistake costs nobody money. For exactly that reason Tuesday's fork does not serve as evidence that the mainnet is ready.

What it does prove is something else, and well worth having: the programs of the various developer teams have agreed on the same new rules and are producing blocks together. When a test network fork fails, the roadmap almost always slips by weeks. When it goes through, the next stage is due.

That next stage is the Hoodi test network, and only after it comes the mainnet. For both there is no date so far. Anyone who read in recent weeks that the upgrade was coming in October has confused a test network activation with the main network.

For you as a holder that means you have to do nothing. There is no exchange of coins, no new coin, no deadline. Anyone with Ether sitting on an exchange or in their own wallet normally notices nothing of a fork. It becomes relevant for everyone running a node or a validator themselves, and for the cost side in everyday use.

Ethereum price at $2,712 and €2,410: the level that decides October

On Tuesday afternoon Ether was quoted at around $2,712 and thus €2,410, a gain of 0.25 percent within 24 hours. Over the week there is a loss of 0.75 percent, over the month a gain of 8.6 percent. Market capitalisation stands at around $331 billion.

The daily band was tight: $2,680.92 as the low, $2,721.34 as the high. Those two values are the nearest levels below and above. Beyond them lies the round zone around $2,800, at which Ether failed several times in September. From the all-time high of $4,946.05 on August 24, 2025, the price is a good 45 percent away.

An upgrade on a test network does not move the price in itself, and Tuesday's price reaction was correspondingly small. The technical roadmap only becomes interesting for the price once a mainnet date is fixed. We described the situation on that in our assessment of the Glamsterdam mainnet date of September 30; it holds unchanged in substance.

If you still want to build up Ether, the calculation depends less on the upgrade than on the fees of your buying route. Under MiCA only a licensed provider may broker or hold crypto assets in Germany; the crypto exchange comparison shows which platforms hold that licence and what trading and withdrawal cost there.

Mainnet in the fourth quarter: a roadmap without a confirmed date

The official roadmap still names the fourth quarter of 2026 for Glamsterdam on the mainnet and says expressly that the date is not confirmed. For Hoodi and the mainnet the announcement says the activation times will be made known as soon as the developer teams have decided them.

From that follows a plain rule of thumb for your own schedule. Between test network fork and mainnet there were usually several weeks in past Ethereum upgrades, because after Sepolia a second test network is due and an observation phase follows after that. A date in October would be unusually fast; a date in November or December fits the pattern. Anyone tying a buying decision to the upgrade should therefore count in weeks and not in days.

The staking queue: 1.46 million ETH entering, a 25-day wait

Alongside the technical roadmap runs a development that is more concrete for your planning than any fork. The staking queues are long on both sides. In the entry queue there were recently around 1.46 million Ether with a waiting time of about 25 days, in the exit queue 786,275 Ether with a good 13 days and 16 hours. In total around 43.7 million Ether are staked, so about 35.8 percent of the circulating supply, at an estimated yield of 2.63 percent a year. Coindesk compiled the figures on October 5 from ValidatorQueue data.

The practical consequence is a deadline that appears in no calendar: anyone who wants to stake today only commits their Ether in a good three weeks, and anyone who wants to exit waits around two weeks for release. Both happen independently of the price. If the market falls in that time, you cannot react at once.

A long exit queue is not an automatic sell signal in this. Part of the Ether being freed up goes straight back into staking, for instance when providers rebuild their infrastructure. For now the number shows only one thing: how long the way out currently takes.

Holding period, threshold, staking rewards: what the tax office in Germany requires

For German investors there is a second calculation attached to staking. Gains from selling crypto assets are tax free after a holding period of one year; that is governed by section 23 of the Income Tax Act. If you sell earlier, a threshold of €1,000 per calendar year applies to all private disposal transactions together. Threshold means: at €999 of gain everything stays tax free; at €1,000 the entire gain becomes taxable, not just the part above the line.

The rewards from staking itself fall into a different drawer. In the view of the Federal Ministry of Finance they regularly count, when held privately, as income from services under section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act, with a threshold of their own of €256 a year. They are valued at the moment of receipt, that is at the rate that applied when the reward was credited.

The important point, the one about which false claims circulate most often: staking does not extend the one-year holding period for the coins used. Ether that was already held for a year before staking remains sellable tax free afterwards. Anyone who bought several tranches at different prices does, however, need clean documentation of every inflow as proof.

Gas costs, layer 2 and hardware: what it means for your coins

A higher gas limit initially means only that more computing work fits into a block. For fees that is favourable as long as demand does not rise to the same degree: more space at the same demand pushes the base fee down. This is noticeable first and foremost with layer 2 networks, which store their data in bundled form on Ethereum and currently take up the largest part of the space.

The simultaneous redistribution of gas prices works in the other direction. Accesses to network storage become more expensive, because permanently growing storage raises the costs of every node operator. For a simple transfer of Ether little changes as a result; for complex contracts the calculation can swing either way depending on their construction.

Anyone running a node themselves should watch the progress on Sepolia. A block with 200 million gas demands more memory, more disk throughput and more bandwidth than one with 60 million. That is exactly what the step-by-step increase is for: only it shows at which value the first nodes drop out. That the validators on Sepolia are turning the number up slowly rather than jumping straight to the target is therefore not hesitation but the procedure.

Glamsterdam on Sepolia: what to take away

1. Separate test network and mainnet. The fork of October 6 concerns Sepolia. For Hoodi and the mainnet there is no date; the roadmap names only the fourth quarter of 2026. If you tie a buying decision to it, count in weeks. Where you buy decides more about your return than the upgrade does: the hardware wallet comparison shows what custody in your own hands costs.
2. Factor in the waiting time before you stake. Around 25 days to activation and barely 14 days to release are the normal case right now. Anyone wanting to sell in that time cannot. Which providers offer which yield and which exit routes is in the comparison of staking platforms.
3. Document every inflow. For a sale the one-year period with the €1,000 threshold counts; for staking rewards, the separate €256 threshold at the rate of the day of receipt. Without complete records neither can be documented later; you will find the tools for it in the comparison of crypto tax tools.

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

Setting up MetaMask takes less than ten minutes, and in those ten minutes you make the two decisions that determine what happens to your balance: where you get the software from, and what happens to the twelve words the setup wizard shows you once. Almost everything else you can change later. Those two points you cannot.

This text walks you through the setup and explains the terms you meet in the wizard without being told what they mean there: recovery phrase, password, network, chain ID, approval. By the end you will know which steps are one-off, which ones you repeat regularly, and at which points the tax office and the regulator come into play in Germany.

What MetaMask is and what the software does not keep for you

MetaMask is a self-custody wallet, also called a non-custodial wallet. That means the software generates a key pair on your device and encrypts it there. Nobody at the maker holds a copy, nobody can reset access, and there is no hotline that unlocks your account. The difference from an exchange is exactly this: at an exchange you have an account, here you have a key.

Everything else follows from that. A wallet in this sense is not a container holding coins. The coins sit on the blockchain, and the wallet is the tool with which you prove they are yours. If you delete the software, the coins stay where they are. If you lose the key, the coins also stay where they are, except that nobody can reach them any more, you included.

Extension or app

MetaMask comes as a browser extension for the desktop and as an app for Android and iOS. Both fall back on the same recovery phrase when you import it, and then show the same addresses. One version is enough to start with. Anyone using both has not thereby created a backup copy, but two points of access to the same key.

Installing MetaMask: only two sources are genuine

The most dangerous minute of the whole setup comes before your first click in the wizard. Fake wallet extensions turn up regularly in the browsers' own official extension directories, often under names like "Ethereum Wallet" and with an icon resembling the real one. Fakes like these are not waiting to steal something from you later. The recovery phrase is skimmed at exactly the moment the wizard generates it, or the moment you import an existing one, and from there it travels outward unnoticed.

One habit guards against this: you install the extension only through the download button on the maker's site metamask.io, never through a search result, never through a link in a message, a video or a forum post. On a phone you download the app from the official store and check beforehand who publishes it and how many installations it carries. An extension with a few hundred users is a warning sign for a wallet of this size.

That things can go wrong at the maker itself was shown in early October by a confirmed security incident in parts of the MetaMask infrastructure, in which affected Ethereum validators were pulled from the network. What exactly happened there and who it concerned is in our report on the MetaMask security incident. For the setup that changes nothing about the rule, it only sharpens it: the fewer places that know your key, the fewer places that can lose it.

Twelve words from a random generator: the Secret Recovery Phrase

On first launch MetaMask generates a sequence of twelve words and calls it the Secret Recovery Phrase, formerly also seed phrase. These twelve words are not a memory aid and not a password. The private key is calculated from them. Whoever has them has the wallet, on any device, in any country, without you noticing a thing. The maker puts this just as plainly in its guide to creating a new wallet: nobody at MetaMask can restore the phrase once it is gone.

The phrase therefore belongs offline. A sheet of paper is better than a file, a metal plate is better than paper because it survives water and fire. What you never do: photograph it, type it into a notes app, put it in a password manager that lives in the cloud, or read it out to someone posing as support on the phone. There is no case in which a genuine employee needs those words.

Two slips of paper in two places

One copy in a single place is a total loss waiting for a burst pipe. Two copies in two physically separate places, neither of them the home of an acquaintance with access, are the usual compromise. Anyone holding larger amounts does not split the phrase into halves, because that reduces security more than it insures against loss.

Token approvals: what an unlimited spending cap means for your balance

The point at which most losses arise only comes after the setup, and it appears on no welcome screen. As soon as you use a decentralised application, it asks for an approval, in English also token approval or spending cap. With it you permit a contract to move a certain amount of a certain token out of your address. That is not a flaw in the system but the precondition for swapping, depositing or staking to work at all.

The decisive part is the amount. Many applications propose an unlimited approval, because it is convenient and saves fees on every further use. The permission then stays in place until you revoke it, months later too, even when you have long forgotten the application. If the contract is taken over later, or was no good from the start, that old permission is enough to empty your balance without anything having to be confirmed again.

In the setup window you can overwrite the proposed amount and set it to what you are actually moving right now. You can see approvals you have granted later in MetaMask's portfolio view and withdraw them there; the maker describes the route in its guide to revoking approvals. This is supported for the Ethereum mainnet, Polygon, the BNB Chain, Optimism and Base, among others. A revocation is itself a transaction and costs a network fee. What a signature looks like when it is in truth a power of attorney is something we took apart using the example of wallet drainers and their signatures.

The password unlocks this device only

Straight after the phrase the wizard asks for a password. Beginners regularly confuse two things here. The password decrypts the key store on exactly this browser or this phone. So it protects against someone who sits at your computer briefly sending money. On a new device it is no use to you at all, because there MetaMask does not ask for the password but for the twelve words.

In practice that means the password may be long and sit comfortably in a password manager; the recovery phrase never may. If you forget the password, you set the wallet up again with the phrase and assign a new one. If you forget the phrase, the password does not help you.

Adding networks: Ethereum, Solana and the chain ID as forgery protection

After the setup your account initially stands on the mainnet of Ethereum. Alongside that, MetaMask now brings multichain accounts: one account covers not only the EVM networks but also chains such as Solana, whose addresses are derived from the same recovery phrase under the BIP-44 derivation standard. You do not need an additional phrase for that.

Further networks you enter by hand. MetaMask asks for five details: name, RPC address, chain ID, symbol of the network currency and the address of a block explorer. The chain ID is the actual protection: an identifying number assigned uniquely to each chain, and two networks with the same one cannot exist. A fraudulent site offering you an "official" network to set up fails at this number as soon as you compare it with the figure in the chain's documentation.

Where the RPC address comes from

The RPC address is the point of access through which your wallet speaks to the chain. Whoever provides it sees which addresses you query and which transactions you send, and could in case of doubt show you false balances. So take it from the official documentation of the network or from a provider where you hold an account yourself, and not from a collected directory that some unfamiliar site puts in front of you.

The fee on a swap inside the app is 0.875 percent

MetaMask itself costs nothing. The wallet earns its money on the built-in swap function: every swap inside the app carries a service fee of 0.875 percent, regardless of the network. It is disclosed in the quote that appears before you confirm.

On top of that come two further items that do not go to MetaMask. The network fee you pay to the chain you are travelling on; it fluctuates with load and has nothing to do with the swap amount. And the trading venues through which the swap actually runs take a fee of their own and, depending on the depth of the market, deliver a worse rate than the display initially suggests. With small amounts on an expensive network, the network fee can make up the largest part of the costs.

For recurring purchases the route via an exchange with a euro account is therefore usually cheaper, and the wallet becomes the destination rather than the place of purchase. How the various software wallets fare for that is set out in our software wallet comparison.

Hardware wallet instead of browser: the private key never leaves the device

From an amount whose loss would hurt, the next step is worth it. MetaMask can be connected to a hardware device, and then the division of roles changes: the wallet remains the interface through which you operate applications, but the private key sits on the device and never leaves it. Every transaction you have to confirm there with a button. Malware on the computer can then prepare a transaction but not sign it.

In the browser extension MetaMask supports Ledger, Trezor and Lattice among others, and in the mobile app Keystone, Ledger and NGRAVE ZERO among others. Two limitations are worth knowing before you buy a device: from Ledger only EVM accounts can be integrated, and the Trezor connection works exclusively with the BIP-44 derivation path. Both are in the maker's help pages, and both only become apparent once the device is already in the house.

The device does not replace the phrase

A hardware device brings a recovery phrase of its own, and that one then applies to the accounts on this device. Your old MetaMask phrase is untouched by it and continues to secure the accounts the browser created. Anyone moving over shifts the balances explicitly to the new addresses and treats both phrases as equally valuable afterwards.

Does a self-custody wallet need a BaFin licence?

No, and the reason is in the European crypto regulation MiCA itself. What gets regulated are service providers that hold or administer crypto assets for others. Software where only you hold the key and the maker merely supplies the program keeps nothing for anyone and therefore does not fall under the licensing requirement. That applies to MetaMask as much as to other pure self-custody wallets and to hardware devices without custody services of their own.

The line runs where a wallet offers additional services. Anyone holding crypto assets for customers, running an exchange against euros or executing orders is providing a crypto-asset service and needs a licence from BaFin in Germany for it, or a valid notification from another member state.

For you as a user that has an uncomfortable flip side. Because no supervisor stands behind it, there is also no deposit protection, no complaints body and no claim to compensation if something goes wrong. The freedom of self-custody and the complete absence of a safety net are the same coin.

Tax in Germany: moving to your own wallet is not a sale

Sending coins from an exchange to your own MetaMask address is not a disposal transaction. You swap nothing and realise no gain, you merely change the place of storage. The acquisition data carries on, and with it the period that matters.

Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act applies. If you sell within a year of buying, the gain is taxable; after a year has passed it is tax free. For short-term gains there is a threshold of €1,000 per calendar year, and the word threshold is to be taken literally: stay below it and you pay nothing; reach it and you pay tax on the entire gain, not just the part above the line.

Two things your own wallet makes harder than an exchange account. First, you have to carry the acquisition data yourself, because no provider sends you a statement at the end of the year. Second, network fees arise with every transfer, and their treatment is not self-explanatory. A swap inside MetaMask, by contrast, very much is a tax-relevant event, because in it you give up one crypto asset and receive another.

Phishing tricks around the recovery phrase

Attacks on wallet users almost never target the technology but the moment in which somebody is under pressure. Five patterns come up again and again:

• A supposed support message in a chat or forum, shortly after you asked a question there, requesting "verification" of your wallet.
• A form that looks like the genuine setup wizard and asks for the twelve words because your wallet supposedly has to be "synchronised".
• A phone call in which somebody poses as an employee and speaks of a "security incident" requiring immediate action.
• An airdrop page that demands a signature rather than an approval, with text nobody reads.
• A second browser extension that presents itself as an add-on or security check for your wallet.

The counter-rule is the same in all five cases and simple enough to remember: the twelve words get entered at exactly two points, when setting up for the first time and when restoring on a new device. Every other request is an attack, without exception and regardless of how convincing the page looks. Anyone who is unsure closes the window and starts again through a bookmark they set themselves.

MetaMask compared with Trust Wallet and Phantom

MetaMask is the most widely used software wallet in the Ethereum world, and that reach is its biggest practical advantage: almost every decentralised application supports it, guides exist for every special case, and hardware devices are compatible throughout. The price is that it is also the most frequent target for fakes and phishing pages.

Trust Wallet comes from the phone side and covers more chains out of the box, while the desktop extension feels less mature. Phantom has its strength in the Solana world and is often the more convenient choice there, even though it now supports further networks. For someone travelling mainly on Ethereum and the networks built on it, MetaMask remains the obvious starting wallet, and a switch pays off more when the centre of gravity shifts for good.

MetaMask: how to proceed now

1. Set the wallet up on a quiet evening, not between two appointments. Download the extension exclusively through the maker's site, write the twelve words on paper or metal and store two copies in separate places. From which amount a device is worth it instead is shown by our hardware wallet comparison.
2. On first contact with an application, set the approval down by hand to the amount you are moving right now. Put a fixed date in your calendar each quarter on which you withdraw old approvals. Which software wallet suits your focus is in the software wallet comparison.
3. From the first transfer onwards, note the date, the quantity and the acquisition cost. Without those details the one-year period cannot be documented later, and that period is exactly what decides the tax. Tools that carry this along automatically are in the comparison of tax and portfolio tools.

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

The Solana price stands at $120.36 on Tuesday midday, which is €106.86. Against the previous day almost nothing has moved, 0.09 percent lower. The interesting number of the day is therefore not the price itself but what sits beneath it: the 20-day moving average runs at $117.32, less than three percent below the current level. Above it, the high of the past 90 days waits at $122.08. Solana has been wedged between those two marks for days, while in the background the largest rebuild the network has ever had is under way, and nobody is saying when it arrives.

This article puts both together: where the price really stands, which three levels bound it, what the Alpenglow consensus switch means for holders in Germany, and which deadlines you need to know before you react to a move.

Solana price on October 6: $120.36, €106.86 and a daily range of 2.1 percent

The day's range ran from $118.97 to $121.51. That is 2.13 percent between low and high, an unusually tight day for Solana. Trading volume over 24 hours came to roughly $2.48 billion, market capitalisation to $70.8 billion. That puts Solana seventh among the largest crypto assets by market value. There are 588,385,318 SOL in circulation.

Depending on the period you pick, the same price tells three different stories. Over the week there is a gain of 0.77 percent, which is effectively a flat line. Over 30 days it is up 12.87 percent, with the price coming from $106.49. Over one year, by contrast, it is down 48.25 percent. And from the all-time high of $293.31, set on January 19, 2025, the price is still 58.96 percent away.

Anyone calculating in euros gets a slightly different figure, because the euro-dollar rate moves alongside. We worked through this gap between the euro view and the dollar view in a separate piece on October 5. For your tax return only the euro value counts, not the dollar price in the app.

In brief: Market capitalisation is the price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation. That figure says what all existing SOL would currently be worth together, not how much money has flowed into the network.

The three Solana price levels above and below: $122.08, $117.32 and $106.50

Levels are not an oracle. They are prices at which a striking amount was traded in the past, and therefore places where supply and demand tend to meet. Three of them are cleanly measurable on Solana right now.

$122.08 on the upside. That is the highest daily close of the past 90 days. The price has run at this zone several times in recent days and has stayed below it every time. A daily close above it would be the first signal that the sideways phase is ending.

$117.32 on the downside. That is the average of the past 20 daily closes. This line has run below the price since the middle of September and has caught it more than once. A break of this line would end the short-term uptrend.

$106.50 as the second step. That is the average of the past 50 daily closes and at the same time almost exactly the level of 30 days ago. If the price falls back there, the entire monthly gain would be handed back.

For context on the downside: the low of the past 90 days was $71.89, and the 200-day moving average runs at $86.27. Both are far away. The medium-term uptrend is therefore intact, even if the price is making no headway at the moment. How far the range on Solana can spread out in an October historically is something we recalculated in our review of previous years.

Will the $117.32 level hold? The honest answer is that nobody knows in advance. What you can do with it is another matter. You now know three concrete prices at which you can decide beforehand what you will do, instead of deciding in the moment of the move. That is exactly what levels are for.

Alpenglow: what the consensus switch changes technically

Alpenglow is the name for the largest intervention in the heart of Solana since launch. It sits in client version Agave 4.3, and the project's overview page lists it under Network Upgrades with the status "In Development" and the window October 2026.

In brief: Consensus is the procedure by which all computers in a network agree on which transactions are valid and in what order they stand. Replacing the consensus means replacing the foundation everything else rests on.

Two building blocks are being swapped out. Votor takes over the role of TowerBFT, the voting logic used so far. Rotor replaces Turbine, through which new blocks are distributed across the network. The intended result is stated on the project page: around 150 milliseconds to final confirmation of a transaction, instead of 12.8 seconds today.

For operators the cost calculation changes markedly. So far a validator pays ongoing fees for its voting transactions, up to about one SOL per day according to the analysis by infrastructure provider Helius. Alpenglow replaces these individual votes with a bundled certificate procedure, and the running fee falls away. Helius therefore puts the minimum stake at which running your own validator pays off at around 450 SOL in future, instead of roughly 4,850 SOL today. That is the analysis's figure, not a commitment from the project.

Alpenglow without a fixed date: September 28 passed with no switch

At the end of September it circulated on social networks that Alpenglow would go to mainnet on September 28. The developer team Anza explicitly contradicted this, and the switch did not take place that day. In early October the mainnet is still running under the old procedure.

The project still names only the October 2026 window and no date. For you as a holder that is less irritating than it sounds, but it has one practical consequence: a date that can arrive any day cannot be planned around. Anyone making their reaction depend on noticing the switch beforehand is planning on information that may only be available afterwards.

The sober reading: Alpenglow is an improvement in the technology, not an event that has to move a price mechanically. Experience with network switches points in both directions, and anyone translating the switch into a particular price today is working with a number that does not exist.

Frankendancer ends: your validator and the client question

In brief: A client is the software a validator runs to take part in the network. Several independent clients are considered a security advantage, because a bug in one of them then does not paralyse the whole network.

Alongside the standard client Agave, Frankendancer has been running since 2024, an interim solution from Jump Crypto. This client combines the fast networking part of the Firedancer client with the consensus logic of Agave. That consensus logic is precisely what Alpenglow replaces. Jump Crypto has therefore announced that it will discontinue support for Frankendancer with the activation and concentrate its efforts on the full Firedancer client.

If you have delegated SOL, this affects you indirectly. Your delegation sits with a specific validator, and that operator has to carry out the change. In your wallet's explorer you can see which validator your delegation goes to, how high its commission is and how reliably it has worked recently. That is a detail worth looking at once before a network switch, and before the switch runs rather than after. Anyone staking their SOL through a provider instead of delegating themselves will find the details on commission and payout rhythm at the respective service; our overview of staking platforms sets the terms side by side.

Epoch 1050 is 71 percent through: how long deactivating a delegation takes

Here lies the deadline that matters most in everyday use and that the fewest people know. Solana counts in epochs. One epoch covers 432,000 slots. The network currently stands in epoch 1050 at slot 307,080, so roughly 124,920 slots are still open. At the current roughly 400 milliseconds per slot, that corresponds to just under 14 hours.

The point of it: anyone who deactivates a delegation is not free immediately. The deactivation takes effect at the end of the current epoch, and only after that can the balance be withdrawn and sold. Between your click and the moment you can actually trade there is therefore half a day to a full day on average, depending on when in the epoch you decide.

If you take your levels from the second section seriously, a clear consequence follows: a staked holding is not a tradable holding. Anyone who wants to sell at $117 but only starts deactivating at $117 sells at a different price. Network inflation in the current epoch stands at 3.62 percent a year according to the network query, and that yield is the price you receive for the reduced mobility. Whether the trade is worth it to you depends on whether you were going to leave the holding untouched anyway.

Solana staking taxes in Germany: the €256 threshold and section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act

For tax purposes, price gains and staking income in Germany run through two different sections, and many people confuse the two.

With passive staking, the ongoing staking rewards generally count as income from services under section 22 no. 3 of the German Income Tax Act. A threshold of €256 per calendar year applies to it. Threshold means: stay below it and the amount is tax free. Exceed it by even one euro and the entire amount is taxable, not just the part above the line. That is the difference from an allowance, where only the portion above it counts.

What counts is the euro value at the moment of receipt, meaning the day the reward is credited to your account. On Solana that happens epoch by epoch, so several times a week. These many small inflows are the reason why keeping records by hand gets confusing fast with staking; tax and portfolio tools read the inflows automatically and convert them into euros at the rate of the respective day.

The holding period stays at twelve months: the German finance ministry letter of March 6, 2025

Section 23 of the Income Tax Act applies to the sale of the SOL themselves. If you sell within twelve months of buying, the gain is taxable, with a threshold of €1,000 a year for all private disposal transactions together. After twelve months have passed, the gain is tax free regardless of its size.

For a long time it was disputed whether this period extends to ten years if the coins are staked in the meantime. The Federal Ministry of Finance has rejected that. In the letter of March 6, 2025, which replaces the version of May 10, 2022, it expressly remains at twelve months even if the crypto assets were used for staking or lending in the interim.

In practice that means staking does not extend your holding period. It does create a second stream of income that has to be recorded on an ongoing basis, and the rewards received this way start their own holding period from the day they arrive. The letter also stresses the duties to cooperate and keep records: anyone declaring income has to be able to document it.

This section is no substitute for tax advice. With larger holdings, where there is proximity to a commercial activity, or with staking through foreign providers, a visit to a specialist is worthwhile.

Buying and holding Solana: costs, custody and the route through an exchange

If you want to add to a position or get in for the first time after this article, three items decide your result more than any price forecast does.

First, total costs. The advertised trading fee is the wrong number to go by. What decides your result is the sum of fee, spread and deposit costs. The spread is the gap between the buying and selling price and appears in no fee table. In a tight market like Solana it is small, but with small amounts it still carries weight. Which providers in Germany let you trade on which terms is set out in our exchange comparison.

Second, custody. If the SOL sit on the exchange, the keys belong to the provider. For small amounts that is defensible; for a holding you want to keep for years, your own wallet is the cleaner solution. Anyone holding and delegating themselves also keeps the free choice of validator from the section above.

Third, record keeping. Every purchase needs a date, a quantity and a euro equivalent, otherwise the twelve-month period cannot be documented later. At the moment you buy, that is a matter of seconds; two years later it is a matter of hours.

Solana price and Alpenglow: how to proceed now

1. Write down the three levels. $122.08 on the upside, $117.32 as the first step down, $106.50 as the second. Decide beforehand what happens at which daily close. If you want to change provider while you are at it, compare the total costs first in the exchange comparison.
2. Look at your delegation. Which validator, which commission, which client. And build the just-under-14 hours to the end of the epoch into your plan before you set a level as a selling point. The providers' terms are in the staking overview.
3. Check your €256. Add up what has reached you in staking rewards this year, in euros at the rate of each day of receipt. If you are close to the threshold, it is a decision before the end of the year and only a declaration afterwards. A tax tool takes the adding up off your hands.

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

The payments firm alleges Tether froze its treasury wallet on its own initiative over a Brazilian investigation it has no connection to—and has profited from the reserves while refusing to release the funds for more than a year.

The face of the "Don't Die" movement now says retouching beats therapy for looking young. His transformation over the summer may explain why.

The proposed fund would hold ZEC directly, trade on Nasdaq under "WINK" with Gemini as custodian, and add the Winklevoss twins to a wave of institutional interest in the privacy coin.

Paris-based Mistral launched Large 4, a model nicknamed after a June internet joke. It tops GPT-6 Astra on one finance test, but trails Claude on others.

Bitcoin and Ethereum barely moved today, but Zcash and Monero are leading the largest coins over the last 24 hours.

Ripple has joined Circle, Qube Research & Technologies and Standard Chartered’s SC Ventures in backing crypto exchange OKX at a $25 billion valuation.

XRP Ledger beats Ethereum in commodity tokenization growth, capturing $2.2B in year-to-date inflows.

Wintermute reports the crypto bull cycle is early, explaining why top alts like NEAR, XRP, and ARB have suddenly stalled.

Trading activity has intensified in the XRP derivatives market as its futures volume hits its highest level in six months.

XRP Ledger validators reach 100% consensus ahead of fix update.

TLDR

• RCL rises 4.81% as Silversea unveils 103 voyages across 56 countries.
• Silversea adds 29 new ports across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
• Caribbean deployment includes 38 voyages across 34 destinations.
• Silver Nova will operate a 75-night Grand South America journey.
• Asia expansion adds eight new ports and new turnaround points.

Royal Caribbean Group (RCL) traded at $288.25, up 4.81%, as Silversea unveiled a major global voyage expansion. The luxury cruise brand announced 103 voyages covering 219 destinations across 56 countries for its 2028-2029 collection. The program also adds 29 new ports and expands Royal Caribbean’s reach across several major cruise regions.

Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., RCL

Silversea Expands 2028-2029 Global Voyage Collection

Silversea will operate the new program from September 2028 through May 2029 across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. The collection includes Mediterranean, Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand, South America, and Asian itineraries. General sales open October 8, following an earlier preview for Venetian Society members.

The Mediterranean schedule includes 17 voyages aboard Silver Nova and Silver Dawn between October 2028 and March 2029. Those sailings will reach 53 destinations across 12 countries, including new calls at Brindisi and Imperia. Several itineraries will also include overnight stays in Venice, Istanbul, Naples, Genoa, Valletta, and other major destinations.

Silversea is also expanding its S.A.L.T. Culinary Voyages with programs focused on regional food and seasonal travel. Three Wine and Truffle voyages will cross Italy and Spain, while four Asian Markets sailings connect Singapore and Hong Kong. These itineraries include local markets, vineyard visits, food experiences, and chef-led destination programs.

Caribbean and South America Sailings Broaden Royal Caribbean Reach

Silversea will deploy four ships across the Caribbean and Central America between November 2028 and March 2029. Silver Ray, Silver Nova, Silver Spirit, and Silver Shadow will operate 38 voyages across 34 destinations in 21 countries. The season also introduces La Romana in the Dominican Republic as a new port.

Round-trip Caribbean departures will operate from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and San Juan, adding flexibility across several major embarkation markets. Silversea will also introduce a destination experience at Canouan in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. The program combines a local Carnival-style welcome, live music, food, drinks, and a private beach event.

Silver Nova will also operate a 75-night Grand South America voyage beginning January 13, 2029, from Fort Lauderdale. The itinerary includes the Panama Canal, Antarctic Peninsula scenic cruising, and overnight calls across several major South American cities. The ship will return to Fort Lauderdale on March 29 after completing the continental journey.

Asia and Australia Add New Ports and Seasonal Events

Silversea will expand its Australia and New Zealand schedule with 10 voyages aboard Silver Moon. Those voyages will cover 42 destinations across three countries between October 2028 and March 2029. New stops include Batemans Bay and Phillip Island, while Sydney will host an overnight New Year’s Eve call.

Silver Moon and Silver Muse will also operate 26 Asian voyages between September 2028 and May 2029. The schedule covers 62 destinations across 11 countries and adds eight new ports to Silversea’s regional network. New turnaround points at Kobe and Bali will also expand the available itinerary combinations for guests.

The wider rollout supports Royal Caribbean Group’s broader strategy across cruise brands, destinations, and land-based vacation experiences. Royal Caribbean operates 71 ships through Royal Caribbean, Celebrity Cruises, Silversea, and its TUI Cruises joint venture. The group is also expanding private destinations and plans to enter river cruising with Celebrity River Cruises in 2027.

The post Royal Caribbean Group (RCL) Stock: Surge as Silversea Launches Major Global Voyage Expansion appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Ondo Finance introduced Ondo Private Markets, enabling tokenized exposure to pre-IPO companies
• The debut offering tracks an undisclosed artificial intelligence firm preparing for public markets
• These digital notes provide value exposure but exclude equity ownership, voting privileges, or dividend payments
• A British Virgin Islands-based special purpose vehicle issues the securities, separate from the underlying company
• Access is restricted to qualified non-US individuals under SEC Regulation S requirements

Ondo Finance has introduced a new service named Ondo Private Markets. The platform provides pathways for investors to participate in the value growth of private enterprises before they transition to public exchanges.

The inaugural offering consists of a blockchain-based note. Its value tracks an artificial intelligence business whose identity remains undisclosed.

These instruments differ fundamentally from traditional equity. Their performance correlates with the potential valuation of the underlying company’s shares during a future liquidity event rather than granting direct ownership.

Token holders receive no corporate ownership stake. Voting rights and dividend distributions are also absent from this structure.

Structure and Mechanics of the Token Notes

Returns materialize through a “qualifying liquidity event.” Such events include initial public offerings or corporate acquisitions.

Participants maintain custody of the digital tokens in their personal wallets. Secondary market trading operates continuously around the clock without traditional market hour restrictions.

According to Ondo, the initial notes should commence trading within the current week. Additional offerings referencing companies in robotics, cybersecurity, biotechnology, and infrastructure development will follow in subsequent launches.

Ondo Global Markets (BVI) Limited serves as the issuing authority for these financial instruments. This entity operates as a distinct legal structure established in the British Virgin Islands.

This arrangement is significant because purchasers depend on this intermediary entity for payment fulfillment rather than maintaining direct claims against the private company’s actual shares.

Ondo’s pre-existing offering, Ondo Stocks, operates through a different mechanism. That service provides blockchain versions of publicly traded equities and exchange-traded funds supported by authentic securities.

Ondo Stocks currently manages over one billion dollars in total value locked. The platform features access to more than 450 tokenized equities and investment funds.

Eligibility Requirements for Token Purchases

The recently launched private market notes are distributed through SEC Regulation S frameworks. This regulatory pathway limits availability exclusively to qualified individuals residing outside United States borders.

American retail investors face restrictions preventing them from purchasing, maintaining custody of, or redeeming these digital tokens under existing regulations.

Ian De Bode, currently serving as acting leader of Ondo Finance, observed that retail investors predominantly access investment opportunities in publicly traded corporations. He noted that 87 percent of American companies generating over 100 million dollars in annual revenue operate as private entities.

Ondo contends this regulatory landscape excludes numerous technology-focused enterprises developing innovative solutions before pursuing stock exchange listings.

Several other financial institutions have pursued comparable strategies for private company exposure this year. A venture investment vehicle associated with Robinhood allocated 75 million dollars toward OpenAI common stock earlier in the year.

That transaction provided retail investors with indirect participation through a publicly traded investment vehicle.

Citi received media coverage earlier this year regarding development of a blockchain-based marketplace designed for private company equity transactions.

Existing platforms including Hiive and EquityZen currently facilitate private share transactions for accredited investors. Hiive achieved a valuation of 650 million dollars in late 2025. EquityZen operates under Morgan Stanley ownership.

Both platforms encounter operational delays stemming from regulations granting companies rights of first refusal before external share sales proceed.

Ondo asserts its note structure circumvents these constraints through unrestricted transferability on blockchain infrastructures.

The comprehensive market for tokenized real-world assets currently stands near 39 billion dollars in valuation, based on data compiled by tracking platform rwa.xyz.

Ondo intends to broaden its private market note offerings across additional industry sectors throughout upcoming months, beginning with the singular AI-referenced product launching this week.

The post Ondo Finance Opens Platform for Blockchain-Based Private Company Investment Access appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq notched fresh all-time highs this week even as the 10-year Treasury yield holds above 5%.
• Corporate earnings are projected to grow more than 30% compared to the prior year, providing support despite elevated borrowing costs.
• Nvidia’s valuation is approaching the $6 trillion mark, propelled by continued investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
• Tuesday’s trading session saw gains across every S&P 500 sector, indicating the advance extends well beyond mega-cap technology stocks.
• Market strategists remain divided, with projections ranging from the S&P 500 climbing to 10,000 by 2030 to potentially retreating to 5,000 by 2027.

Financial markets hit new milestones this week despite government bond yields hovering near their highest levels in more than two decades. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both registered record closes on Tuesday, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average also advanced.

Meanwhile, the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield continues trading above the 5% threshold, recently climbing to levels last witnessed in 2002.

Under typical market conditions, elevated bond yields create headwinds for equity valuations. When Treasury securities offer attractive risk-free returns, investors have less incentive to allocate capital toward volatile stocks. Growth-oriented technology companies generally feel this pressure most acutely.

Yet the current environment is proving different.

Robust Profit Growth Provides Market Support

The primary factor sustaining the equity rally is corporate earnings momentum. Wall Street analysts are forecasting that S&P 500 constituent companies will deliver profit growth exceeding 30% on a year-over-year basis.

Artificial intelligence companies are leading this expansion. Nvidia’s stock price climbed again during Tuesday’s session, bringing the semiconductor giant’s total market capitalization within striking distance of $6 trillion.

Additional chipmakers also posted gains as market participants continue anticipating sustained investment in data center capacity and AI computing resources.

The market’s strength extends well beyond a handful of technology titans. Every one of the S&P 500’s 11 sectors posted advances on Tuesday. Utilities and real estate names performed particularly well as Treasury yields pulled back modestly from recent peaks.

The Significance of Rising Treasury Yields

The 10-year Treasury yield recently climbed to approximately 5.34%, marking its highest reading in roughly 24 years. This increase reflects market concerns about persistent inflation, expanding government debt levels and economic resilience.

Elevated yields present a challenge for equity markets. When investors can secure returns above 5% from government-backed securities, the relative attractiveness of stocks diminishes.

Rising rates also increase financing costs across the economy for corporations, households and government entities. This dynamic particularly affects growth stocks, whose valuations rely heavily on profit projections extending years into the future.

As interest rates climb, the present value of those anticipated future earnings decreases. Until now, powerful earnings growth has been sufficient to offset this valuation pressure.

Some market observers are now questioning whether 6% yields, rather than the current 5% level, might represent the true tipping point where equities face meaningful headwinds.

Expert opinions about the market’s trajectory diverge dramatically. With the S&P 500 trading near 8,000, certain strategists project the index could climb to 10,000 before the decade ends.

Conversely, other analysts paint a more cautious picture. Panmure Liberum recently published research suggesting the S&P 500 might retreat to approximately 5,000 by late 2027 if inflation remains sticky and interest rates stay elevated.

This divergence in professional forecasts underscores the delicate balance characterizing current market conditions.

Market participants will closely monitor upcoming third-quarter earnings releases, Federal Reserve policy signals, inflation readings and Treasury market movements in coming weeks. Continued strong earnings combined with moderating yields could propel the S&P 500 well beyond 8,000.

The greater risk scenario involves disappointing corporate results coinciding with further yield increases.

For the moment, record equity valuations signal that investors maintain confidence that corporate profit growth will continue outpacing the burden of higher financing costs.

The post S&P 500 Defies 5% Treasury Yields With AI-Fueled Rally to New Records appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Major U.S. indexes reached all-time highs as declining oil prices and softening Treasury yields boosted investor sentiment.
• Nvidia’s market capitalization edged closer to the $6 trillion milestone amid sustained AI enthusiasm.
• Uber Technologies announced a $2.3 billion cash acquisition of corporate catering service ezCater.
• Constellation Energy shares rallied over 13% following a landmark 3.59-gigawatt electricity supply pact with Google.
• Brent crude oil dropped approximately 2% to roughly $98.50 a barrel, reducing inflation pressures.

American equity markets surged to unprecedented levels on Tuesday. Declining energy costs combined with retreating bond yields provided a favorable backdrop for the rally.

Ongoing enthusiasm surrounding artificial intelligence technologies further fueled the advance. The S&P 500 index rose to approximately 7,841 points.

The Nasdaq Composite also established a new all-time peak. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added more than 350 points throughout the trading session.

Every one of the 11 S&P 500 sector groups posted gains on Tuesday. Market participants demonstrated widespread confidence spanning multiple industries beyond technology alone.

Nvidia Approaches $6 Trillion Market Cap

Nvidia continued to anchor the market’s upward momentum. The stock advanced approximately 1% during Tuesday’s session.

The gain brought the semiconductor giant’s total market capitalization within striking distance of $6 trillion. Nvidia has emerged as the defining symbol of AI infrastructure investment.

Technology corporations continue allocating substantial capital toward processors and computing facilities. Demand for advanced computing capabilities remains robust throughout the sector.

The technology sector overall benefited from optimistic earnings projections. Wall Street analysts anticipate S&P 500 company profits will surge more than 30% compared to the same quarter last year.

Artificial intelligence spending represents a primary catalyst for that anticipated expansion. Market observers are awaiting confirmation through forthcoming quarterly results.

Uber Acquires ezCater in $2.3 Billion Deal

Uber Technologies captured attention with a major acquisition announcement on Tuesday. The ride-sharing and delivery giant reached an agreement to purchase American corporate catering service ezCater for $2.3 billion in an all-cash transaction.

The acquisition bolsters Uber’s competitive standing in workplace meal delivery services. ezCater processed over $2.5 billion in total gross bookings during the preceding twelve months.

The typical business catering order placed through ezCater’s platform surpasses $400. Uber intends to integrate ezCater’s operations with Uber Eats and Uber for Business divisions.

The acquisition represents an effort to narrow the competitive distance with DoorDash in the American food delivery market. Delivery services accounted for approximately 37% of Uber’s total revenue during the second quarter.

The ezCater transaction provides Uber with an additional revenue stream. The move arrives as market participants also monitor how autonomous vehicle technology might reshape Uber’s core ride-hailing operations in coming years.

Constellation Energy Rallies on Landmark Google Power Agreement

Constellation Energy emerged as one of Tuesday’s most impressive performers. The stock jumped over 13% following announcement of a substantial contract with Google.

Google committed to purchase 3,590 megawatts of electrical power from Constellation. The agreement ranks among the most significant power purchase contracts executed in the United States grid infrastructure market.

Approximately 890 megawatts of supply will originate from enhanced nuclear generation facilities. Constellation has committed to investing more than $4.3 billion toward expanding output capacity at atomic power stations located in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

An additional 15-year supply contract encompasses another 2,700 megawatts of generation capacity. The agreement highlights an emerging investment theme across financial markets.

Artificial intelligence is evolving into an energy infrastructure story alongside its semiconductor narrative. Massive data processing centers require reliable, continuous electrical supply.

This dynamic generates demand for utility operators and nuclear power plant companies. Energy infrastructure businesses are capturing investor interest parallel to chipmakers.

Declining Crude Oil Prices Support Market Rally

Softening energy commodity prices provided additional momentum for equities on Tuesday. Brent crude declined nearly 2% to settle around $98.48 per barrel.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate benchmark crude retreated to approximately $88 per barrel. Petroleum prices have weakened as Middle Eastern crude oil shipments normalize.

G7 nations are simultaneously preparing a coordinated emergency release from diesel and crude petroleum reserves. This initiative has contributed additional downward momentum to energy prices.

Declining oil prices carry significance for equity markets because energy expenses directly influence inflation dynamics. Falling crude costs can alleviate financial pressure on households and corporations.

Lower energy prices may also provide the Federal Reserve with greater flexibility regarding monetary policy decisions. Investors will continue monitoring petroleum price movements carefully in upcoming weeks.

The post Constellation Energy Soars 13% on Record 3.6-Gigawatt Google Power Agreement appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Infleqtion stock rises 0.95% after announcing a quantum photonics breakthrough.

• Honeywell fabricates the new optical cavity using silicon nitride chip technology.

• The design could shrink quantum sensors while improving laser stability and scale.

• UC Santa Barbara research supports the prototype and its commercial production path.

• The technology targets navigation, atomic timing, data centers, and telecom systems.

Infleqtion (INFQ) stock rose 0.95% to $12.78 after the company announced a quantum photonics breakthrough with Honeywell Aerospace. The stock eased from an intraday move above $13.10 as the market assessed the new technology announcement. Infleqtion said the development could help shrink quantum sensors into smaller and more practical systems.

Infleqtion Inc, INFQ

Infleqtion and Honeywell Develop Chip-Scale Optical Cavity

Infleqtion worked with Honeywell Aerospace and UC Santa Barbara researchers to develop a new integrated optical cavity. The teams built the prototype on a silicon nitride chip at Honeywell Aerospace’s photonics foundry. The device reduces the space needed to stabilize lasers inside quantum computers, clocks, and sensing systems.

The design uses semiconductor manufacturing methods that already support commercial production across established fabrication facilities. This approach could make quantum hardware smaller while keeping the laser stability required for precise operation. It also gives the partners a clearer route toward producing the technology at larger volumes.

Optical cavities help lasers maintain stable performance inside sensitive quantum systems and precision timing equipment. Traditional versions often require large and fragile tabletop hardware, limiting their use outside controlled research environments. The new prototype shifts that function toward chip-scale production and could support broader field deployment.

Quantum Sensor Design Targets Navigation and Timing

Infleqtion said smaller optical cavities could support precision navigation, atomic timing, data centers, and telecommunications infrastructure. The technology could also strengthen quantum sensors that need stable lasers inside compact and durable equipment. These uses provide a practical path from university research into commercial systems across several industries.

UC Santa Barbara’s OCAQπ Group designed the prototype with Infleqtion’s engineering team. Honeywell Aerospace then fabricated the device using its established silicon nitride photonic integration process. The project combined academic research, quantum engineering, and commercial manufacturing capabilities in one development program.

Professor Daniel Blumenthal’s research group has spent more than a decade shrinking cold-atom quantum systems. Its work focuses on moving complex optical experiments from large laboratory setups toward chip-based platforms. The latest prototype extends that effort by connecting research designs directly with commercial fabrication methods.

Infleqtion Builds on SiNoptiq and UCSB Research

UC Santa Barbara’s technology office managed intellectual property that supported the photonic technology behind the project. The university filed more than a dozen patent applications tied to research that later supported SiNoptiq. Professor Blumenthal founded SiNoptiq before Infleqtion acquired the photonics startup in 2024.

The acquisition added silicon photonics expertise and technology developed through long-term university research. It also strengthened Infleqtion’s ability to combine neutral atom systems with smaller photonic components. The current project shows how that research base can support devices designed for commercial manufacturing.

Infleqtion continues developing quantum computing and sensing systems around neutral atom technology. The optical cavity adds a manufacturing-focused component to its effort to reduce system size and complexity. Honeywell Aerospace also provides a commercial fabrication route that could support higher production volumes as deployments expand.

The post Infleqtion (INFQ) Stock: Rises After Major Quantum Photonics Breakthrough With Honeywell appeared first on Blockonomi.

Analyst Dennis Liu, who posts on X as VirtualBacon, says altcoin season has not started, because the average altcoin is only about 10% ahead of BTC since the primary cryptocurrency’s bottom.

According to him, a handful of strong coins are making the market feel hotter than the data supports.

Most Altcoins Still Trail Bitcoin

Liu’s argument rests on relative performance rather than a few eye-catching rallies. He pointed to the Total 2-to-Bitcoin ratio, which compares the market value of cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin with BTC, and described the chart as “very flat.”

Since Bitcoin’s bottom, the average altcoin has gained 10% more than BTC, he noted. That is far removed from the kind of broad outperformance associated with previous alt seasons.

The coins that are ahead make a short list. Zcash has done well since the start of the year, while Venice and Quant have also outperformed more recently. The privacy coin is up more than 726% over a year, and Quant jumped 530% within days, from $59 to $370, before settling near $255, but Liu stressed that these are isolated examples.

Not even XRP has outperformed Bitcoin, while Ethereum, Solana and BNB are barely ahead.

“That’s why I say altcoins are actually still very cheap. And we are not confirming a full-on alt season type of scenario yet. We are just barely getting started,” Liu explained.

Asked how far off it was, the analyst answered “nowhere close.”

Bitcoin itself has been stuck. It was rejected at $87,000 on Monday, bounced off $85,000 and has moved sideways between that level and $86,000 since, with a market cap of $1.72 trillion and a nearly 58% share of the total crypto market.

Larger altcoins have been sluggish over 24 hours. ETH holds above $2,700 and XRP sits at $1.50. BNB, Solana, Dogecoin and Chainlink are slightly lower, and RAIN was one of the biggest losers in 24 hours, dropping over 7%, while FIL and ZRO gained 8% and 10%, respectively.

Why Isolated Rallies Can Be Misleading

Liu also warned traders against waiting for Bitcoin to reach a new all-time high before looking at altcoins. He noted that this pattern worked in 2017 and late 2020, but failed in 2024 when Bitcoin broke its previous record while many altcoins continued to lose ground against it. His approach is therefore to trade individual altcoin rallies rather than wait for a broad signal.

In a separate video, the market watcher called $83,000 Bitcoin’s daily pivot, with a break below that possibly sending it toward bull market support at $78,000, while holding above leaves room to move past $87,000.

The post Altcoins Are Rallying, But Analyst Says Alt Season Has Yet to Begin appeared first on CryptoPotato.

OKX announced Tuesday that Circle (CRCL), Ripple, Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), and SC Ventures by Standard Chartered have invested in the exchange at a $25 billion valuation.

The exchange said the round extends the stake NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) took in March, and it described this week’s valuation as pre-money, before counting the new capital.

Each Investor Already Works With OKX

Each of the four firms already supports one layer of its business, from stablecoin issuance to liquidity, collateral, and custody. QRT, a multi-strategy investment manager, is an institutional counterparty that supplies liquidity and risk capacity to the exchange.

Meanwhile, Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin trades across OKX’s unified order book. RLUSD went live on more than 280 OKX trading pairs in April, including against XRP.

“Our investment reflects our conviction in what they’re building and opens the door to deepen our work together across stablecoins, payments and institutional markets,” said Jack McDonald, SVP of Stablecoins at Ripple.

Standard Chartered’s link runs through BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized Treasury fund. On April 28, OKX, BlackRock and the bank launched a framework that lets VIP and institutional clients post BUIDL as trading collateral. The bank holds those fund shares in custody off the exchange while the clients trade on OKX Middle East.

Tokenized Stocks and a Dollar App

The round landed two days after OKXICE, the joint venture between OKX and ICE, filed with the SEC to offer 63 tokenized NYSE stocks to US users on October 4. Those tokens must carry the same dividend and voting rights as the underlying shares. Listed companies have 30 days to opt out before trading can begin.

OKX also launched OKX Money on Tuesday, a standalone app for saving, sending and spending dollar stablecoins. OKX Money users can fund accounts in more than 50 currencies and hold USDG, USDC or Tether’s USDT. Qualifying customers can earn up to 10% a year on eligible USDG balances, with no staking or lockup. Those USDG rewards, like the app itself, are available only in select regions for now.

Founder and CEO Star Xu said the new capital will help OKX keep growing and tokenize real-world assets.

“The exchange was our starting point, and we are evolving into a broader global financial technology platform,” Xu said.

The post OKX Adds Circle, Ripple, QRT, and SC Ventures as Investors at $25B Valuation appeared first on CryptoPotato.

XRP is consolidating around $1.50 after a strong rebound from the $1.00 area. The broader structure has improved considerably, but the latest price action suggests that buyers are struggling to push through the overhead resistance zone. The key question now is whether the asset can break the $1.70 resistance, or whether another pullback toward support develops.

Ripple Price Analysis: The USDT Pair

The daily chart shows a major structural recovery from the $1.00 support zone. XRP broke sharply higher in August and subsequently reclaimed both the 100-day and 200-day moving averages. The 100-day MA is now around $1.25, while the 200-day MA is around $1.28, with the 100-day average aggressively approaching the other for a potential bullish crossover. This is a constructive development from a medium-term perspective.

The main resistance is located between $1.60 and $1.70. XRP has already tested this area twice in recent weeks, with the latest attempt in September failing to break out. A daily close above $1.70 would represent a significant structural improvement and could open the door toward the next major resistance around $2. Above that, the next resistance zone sits around $2.40, which coincides with a major high formed early this year.

On the downside, the $1.25-$1.30 region has become particularly important. It contains the 100-day and 200-day moving averages and coincides with a marked demand zone. As long as XRP remains above this support area, the broader recovery structure remains intact. A deeper decline back toward the $1.00 area would become more relevant if this support is decisively lost, which would reverse all the recent gains and put the market under immense pressure once more.

The 4-Hour Chart

The 4-hour chart shows XRP trading inside a tightening structure beneath a descending trendline. The trendline currently acts as dynamic resistance, with XRP repeatedly failing to establish a decisive move above it. At the same time, buyers have continued to defend the green support zone around $1.45, creating a relatively well-defined consolidation range.

The immediate resistance is around $1.70, followed by the significant $2 supply zone. A breakout above the descending trendline and subsequent move through $1.70 would strengthen the bullish case and could bring the $2 level into play.

Conversely, a loss of the $1.45 support zone would weaken the short-term structure. In that scenario, XRP could retrace toward the $1.30 area, which is a clear demand zone that buyers should defend at all costs in the short term. Otherwise, a bearish reversal scenario would materialize, which could once again send XRP back toward the $1 area, and potentially lower this time. Still, the current structure is better viewed as consolidation, with a higher probability of a bullish breakout, rather than a bearish reversal forming.

The post Ripple Price Analysis: Is XRP Consolidation Almost Over as the Range Tightens? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Ethereum is holding near $2.7K after a strong recovery from the summer lows, but the latest price action suggests that momentum has cooled. ETH is now compressed inside a narrowing structure at the 2.7K-2.8K resistance area, while the taker buy/sell ratio has weakened, pointing to more cautious short-term positioning.

Ethereum Price Analysis: The Daily Chart

On the daily timeframe, ETH remains in a constructive broader structure. The recovery from the June low around $1.5K established a series of higher lows, followed by a decisive move above the $2.4K area in late August. Since then, price has been consolidating rather than giving back the breakout.

The most important near-term resistance is the 2.7K-2.8K zone. ETH has repeatedly struggled to establish a sustained move above this region, with the latest candles continuing to trade around $2.7K. A daily breakout above $2.8K would likely strengthen the bullish structure and expose the next major resistance zone around 3.0K.

The broader trend remains supported by the major moving averages. The 100-day moving average is around $2.2K, while the 200-day MA is near $2.1K, with both positioned well below the current price and sloping upward. These averages have also printed a bullish crossover, which keeps the medium-term structure bullish despite the ongoing consolidation.

The chart also shows an ascending trendline connecting the summer low and subsequent higher lows. As long as this trendline and the $2.4K support area remain intact, the broader recovery structure appears healthy.

ETH/USDT 4-Hour Chart

The shorter-term chart shows ETH trapped inside a tightening structure between roughly $2.6K and $2.8K. The descending upper trendline and rising lower trendline are converging, creating a compression pattern that should eventually produce a directional breakout.

ETH is currently trading around $2.7K, close to the lower half of this range but still above the ascending support line. The immediate bullish trigger is therefore a clean move through the $2.8K area. Such a breakout would confirm that buyers have absorbed the supply that has repeatedly appeared near the recent highs.

On the downside, the rising trendline currently provides short-term support around the $2.7K mark. A break below it would increase the probability of a move back toward the $2.4K demand zone, which is the more significant structural support visible on the chart.

The 4-hour RSI is around 46.8, reflecting neutral-to-soft momentum. It is neither oversold nor showing a strong bullish impulse, which fits the current consolidation. In other words, the market is waiting for a catalyst rather than displaying a clear directional advantage.

On-Chain Analysis

The Ethereum taker buy/sell ratio provides a more cautious signal. The metric has fallen considerably from the elevated readings seen during the July-August advance, and the latest reading is below the 1.0 level, indicating that aggressive selling pressure is currently outweighing aggressive buying pressure across exchanges.

This suggests that the recent ETH consolidation is not being accompanied by a strong increase in futures market taker demand. The decline in the ratio is particularly notable because ETH is still holding around $2.7K rather than breaking down sharply.

That divergence could mean that spot and derivatives participants are becoming more cautious while passive demand continues to support price. For the bullish scenario to strengthen, a recovery in the taker buy/sell ratio back toward and above 1.0 would provide confirmation that aggressive buyers are returning.

For now, the futures market signal argues for caution rather than an outright bearish reversal. ETH remains technically above its major daily moving averages and structural supports, but the lack of strong taker buying leaves the potential $2.8K breakout as an important confirmation.

The post Ethereum Price Analysis: ETH Loses Steam at Key Resistance – Is a Pullback Coming? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

[PRESS RELEASE – Hong Kong, Hong Kong, October 6th, 2026]

ASICID Inc. has released its IDMINER Series, a new lineup of cryptocurrency mining systems designed for Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Dogecoin mining.

The series includes the IDMINER HomeRack, IDMINER 2 and IDMINER 1, with configurations ranging from 1,150 TH/s to 9,600 TH/s of Bitcoin hashrate and from 350 GH/s to 3,200 GH/s of Litecoin and Dogecoin hashrate.

The three models are designed for different mining setups, from individual and home miners to professional and larger-scale operators.

IDMINER Series Specifications

IDMINER HomeRack

• Bitcoin hashrate: 9,600 TH/s
• Litecoin/Dogecoin hashrate: 3,200 GH/s
• Power configuration: 4 × 1,300W
• Estimated monthly mining revenue: up to $25,590*

IDMINER 2

• Bitcoin hashrate: 2,400 TH/s
• Litecoin/Dogecoin hashrate: 800 GH/s
• Power consumption: 1,300W
• Estimated monthly mining revenue: up to $6,390*

IDMINER 1

• Bitcoin hashrate: 1,150 TH/s
• Litecoin/Dogecoin hashrate: 350 GH/s
• Power consumption: 700W
• Estimated monthly mining revenue: up to $2,790*

*The revenue figures are estimates based on network conditions, cryptocurrency prices, and mining difficulty at the time of publication.

Designed for Simpler Deployment

The IDMINER systems are delivered pre-configured and tested before shipment. Users can connect the miner to power, connect via WiFi or Ethernet, enter their preferred mining pool information, and begin mining.

The systems support major mining pools and also provide access to ASICID’s Zero-Fee Mining Pool option.

Other features include thermal management and hardware testing before shipment.

Built for Bitcoin, Litecoin and Dogecoin Mining

ASICID develops and manufactures its mining hardware through an integrated production process that includes research and development, hardware engineering, assembly, thermal testing, and quality assurance.

The company is headquartered in Hong Kong with additional operations in the United States and serves individual miners, professional mining businesses, and institutional operators.

With the IDMINER Series, ASICID is targeting miners looking for high-hashrate hardware with straightforward deployment and power requirements suited to ongoing mining operations.

For more information about the IDMINER Series, users can visit www.asicid.com.

The post New Generation of Crypto Miners Released by ASICID appeared first on CryptoPotato.