Tron's readiness for post-quantum cryptography could set a precedent for blockchain security, but adoption and governance hurdles remain.

The post Tron says post-quantum signatures are ready for mainnet after Nile testnet activation appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Tokenized commodities' shift to yield-bearing assets could democratize access to institutional-grade returns, reshaping investment landscapes.

The post Paxos Labs and Theo bet tokenized commodities can do more than sit there appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The crypto market's bifurcation highlights Bitcoin and Ether's institutional appeal, while altcoins face volatility and limited growth potential.

The post One year after 10/10, Bitcoin and Ether liquidity is back while altcoins lag appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Dalio's advice highlights the need for strategic diversification to mitigate risks from potential AI market corrections and economic shifts.

The post Ray Dalio advises diversifying with inflation protection, overlooked AI firms appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The Yemeni forces' advances may shift regional power dynamics, impacting strategic control and market perceptions of conflict outcomes.

The post Yemeni government forces continue advance on west coast fronts and strengthen positions appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Life Insurer Meanwhile Raises $37.5M as Wealthy Families Look to Pass On Their BTC

Meanwhile, the first life insurer licensed to operate entirely in Bitcoin, has raised $37.5 million in new funding from its existing investors, the company announced.

Bain Capital Crypto led the round, with participation from Haun Ventures, Framework Ventures, Pantera Capital, Apollo, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures and Morgan Creek Digital. The raise brings Meanwhile’s total funding to more than $180 million. Sam Altman is also among its backers.

The company said the round follows a surge in demand for its Bitcoin life insurance policies outside the US, particularly in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, amid broader macroeconomic instability.

“Wealthy families around the world already hold Bitcoin. What they haven’t had is a regulated way to pass it on,” Zac Townsend, Meanwhile’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.  

“Brokers came to us because their clients kept asking. This round lets us keep up with them.”

In early 2026, Meanwhile launched BTC Life 1-Pay, a single-premium whole life policy aimed at high-net-worth clients outside the US. It is the company’s second product line, after BTC 10-Pay, which is designed for US taxpayers.

Under BTC Life 1-Pay, a client pays one premium in Bitcoin and receives a guaranteed death benefit in Bitcoin for life. The policy’s value grows in Bitcoin, and after the first year the owner can borrow up to 90% of it, with no repayment schedule and no margin calls.

Policies can be owned by individuals, trusts or companies, which the company says makes them suited to succession and estate planning.

Since launch, Meanwhile has signed 15 brokers serving wealthy families, including in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE and Switzerland. Partners include Lioner, an insurance, trust and family office group with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Zurich, and Apeiron Group, a marketplace for high-net-worth life insurance.

“We’re reaching a turning point where more high-net-worth clients are asking not just how to hold Bitcoin and digital assets, but how to plan around them and ultimately transfer that wealth to the next generation,” said Justin Man, CEO of Apeiron Group. Digital assets.

Meanwhile said its net long-term underwriting income has already passed last year’s total and is on track to more than double in 2026. The company did not disclose specific figures.

“Meanwhile owns every layer of a regulated life insurer and builds it like an AI-enabled startup,” said Stefan Cohen, partner at Bain Capital Crypto. “The growth this year proves the model, and we’re glad to back them again.” 

The company’s operating entity, Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited, holds the first Class IILT license granted by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. It received the license in July 2024 after two years in the regulator’s sandbox.

The insurer’s balance sheet, reserves and audited financial statements are all denominated in Bitcoin. Policyholder Bitcoin is held with regulated institutional custodians.

This post Bitcoin Life Insurer Meanwhile Raises $37.5M as Wealthy Families Look to Pass On Their BTC first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

‘We Know Where It Is’: Treasury Secretary Threatens To Freeze $1B of Iran’s Crypto

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the American authorities will soon seize $1 billion in crypto from Iran. 

Speaking on Newsmax’s NPolicy Summit in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Bessent added that economic sanctions on the Middle Eastern country were working. 

Iran has been using bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies — to skirt around U.S. sanctions. The U.S. in April started targeting crypto wallets linked to the Iranian regime, Bessent said at the time. 

“What we have done has never been seen before,” Bessent said Thursday on Iranian sanctions. 

“We’re probably going to seize $1 billion of crypto this week,” he continued. “We know where it is. We are isolating them. We did have a maximum pressure campaign, now we have an absolute isolation campaign and it’s working.”

Bessent didn’t reveal what cryptocurrencies the U.S. will seize or how. 

It would be very hard — if not impossible — for the U.S. to freeze Iran’s bitcoin unless it keeps it on a centralized exchange. 

Bitcoin, being censorship resistant, cannot be frozen. But many other cryptocurrencies, including Tether’s USDT, can. Bessent previously said the feds had seized Iran’s crypto in the form of the popular stablecoin. 

Iran started a bitcoin-backed insurance service for its counties shipping companies earlier this year.

The Financial Times last month reported that the Middle Eastern country was using bitcoin to settle cross-border transactions through Iranian crypto exchanges after the central bank advised its countrymen to do anything necessary to help the economy.    

U.S. President Donald Trump revived his “maximum pressure” campaign weeks after returning to office. A national security memorandum signed in February 2025 put the Treasury on a sustained campaign against Iran’s shadow banking, money laundering and sanctions-evasion networks.

This post ‘We Know Where It Is’: Treasury Secretary Threatens To Freeze $1B of Iran’s Crypto first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Here’s How Not To Screw up Your Bitcoin Privacy

Just one transaction can compromise years of discreet Bitcoin activity, Cake Wallet’s chief operating officer has warned. 

Speaking on the Bitcoin Rails podcast this week, activist Seth for Privacy talked about different ways of protecting one’s privacy when using Bitcoin and said that focusing on privacy was a must for the West. 

Bitcoin privacy is a hot topic again ever since the developers of private coin mixer Samourai Wallet went on trial last year and were subsequently imprisoned. 

But just this week, the U.S. Department of Treasury scrapped two long-stalled crypto surveillance proposals, handing a major win to privacy advocates and the digital asset industry.

“If you ever spend your no-KYC coins with one of your KYC coins — which if you just let the wallet do its thing, it could do because it doesn’t know the difference — you immediately connect all of the non-KYC Bitcoin that you spend in that with your identity,” Seth said, referring to UTXO management, also called “coin control” by some wallets. 

Bitcoin wallets don’t hold a single balance but a collection of separate unspent transaction outputs — UTXOs — each one a discrete “coin” from a specific past transaction. 

When you send a payment larger than any one UTXO, the wallet picks several and combines them as inputs to the same transaction — an easy mistake to make, Seth highlighted. 

Seth added that unlike in the global South, where people have experienced more oppressive states, citizens in the West will need to “feel pain” in order to realize how important privacy is.

Still, he added that attitudes were changing and people were getting more serious about protecting their privacy. 

“It has been shifting, in the last five or six years a lot of people — even in the West — are starting to think [privacy] really matters, we really need to think about this seriously now,” he said. 

Cake Wallet is a privacy-oriented, self-custody, open-source wallet. The wallet earlier this year integrated Bitcoin’s Lightning Network into its platform. 

Using the second layer solution is not only faster and cheaper, it also offers more privacy than Bitcoin’s main chain. 

While Cake Wallet supports other cryptocurrencies, including privacy coin Monero, Seth for Privacy added that he’d love it if the digital coin didn’t exist. 

“If Bitcoin’s privacy got good enough that you could use it and have at least almost as good privacy as Monero without massive hoops to jump through, and Monero ceased to exist, that’s fine,” he said. 

“I would much rather the thing that more people use has better privacy than a more niche tool that has perfect privacy, and that’s something that less people are using because it’s less well known.”

This post Here’s How Not To Screw up Your Bitcoin Privacy first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin ETFs Shed $729M in Two Days as Investors Reverse Course

U.S. investors this week reversed course, cashing out $729 million from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds — putting downward pressure on the leading cryptocurrency’s price. 

Funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, and ARK 21-Shares all experienced significant outflows on Wednesday and Thursday, according to data from Farside Investors. 

Investors had started the week by selling close to $90 million in shares but then bought nearly $119 million on Tuesday. 

The rest of the week has seen outflows following news that the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates. Other negative news includes the price of Brent crude jumping following renewed attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. 

U.S. President Trump also hinted that talks with Iran weren’t bearing fruit — a sign war in the Middle East could continue. 

Bitcoin’s price recently stood at a little over $82,688, down more than 3% over a seven-day period. The leading cryptocurrency has rebounded slightly over the past day, jumping nearly 2% over 24 hours. 

Still, the coin was fast closing in on $90,000 last week. Investors are expecting decent returns as the month dubbed “Uptober” has historically delivered for bitcoin speculators. 

The price of bitcoin has been particularly sensitive to geopolitical headwinds this year — especially since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, leading to an oil price surge. 

Oil prices going up tend to lead investors to bet on the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. And with higher interest rates comes less liquidity for the price of bitcoin to do well. 

Still, that’s not always the case: the Fed last month talked tough on getting inflation down and raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point and bitcoin’s price rose in the following days. 

Bitcoin’s price is 34% below the all-time high of $126,080 it touched in October. It has spent most of 2026 in a bear market but analysts are now increasingly pointing to evidence of a bull market following a rally in August and September. 

This post Bitcoin ETFs Shed $729M in Two Days as Investors Reverse Course first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Ledger Warns Buyers Not to Set Up Wallets From Reseller After Users Report Losses

Hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger has said that it is investigating loss of user funds after customers in South East Asia reported issues with devices bought from a reseller. 

The Paris-based company on Friday advised customers who’d bought from vendor CryptoBilis within the last 90 days to not set up their devices. 

Ledger did not reveal how much money users had lost but one blockchain investigator, Specter, wrote on X that he’d traced theft addresses following social media posts and that over $86 million had been lost. 

The issue comes following a number of data breaches this year in the crypto world and a huge hack of popular Coldcard hardware wallet devices in July. 

“Ledger is investigating reports of loss of funds from users in South East Asia who purchased products from a reseller named CryptoBilis,” Ledger said via its support X account. 

Ledger added that it had asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments of Ledger devices.

“If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed). We will continue to inform customers of updates as the investigation progresses,” the company said. 

In a statement to Bitcoin Magazine, Ledger said that based on the information to date, the incident is isolated specifically to this reseller in this specific market. 

“No reports were made of products purchased directly from Ledger, and Ledger’s infrastructure, systems and services were not compromised,” the company added. 

CryptoBilis is a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based hardware wallet vendor, according to its website. The company did not immediately respond to questions from Bitcoin Magazine. 

The crypto industry is still reeling after hackers in July were able to steal close to $120 million in bitcoin from Coldcard users. 

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

Galaxy Research said in the months following the attack various attackers were able to exploit the bug independently. 

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

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

This post Ledger Warns Buyers Not to Set Up Wallets From Reseller After Users Report Losses first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

North Korean hackers stole around $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025. While the hack itself has been widely covered and analyzed, few have focused on what happened afterward and what became of the stolen funds.

To move all that money, hackers needed to rely on an entire network of people willing to handle stolen assets, creating a chain of relationships that someone prepared to spend enough money could infiltrate.

That's what ZachXBT, a pseudonymous blockchain investigator, did. He committed 349,700 USDC and accepted a 5% loss on each completed order while posing as a client of a Chinese laundering network.

He eventually obtained information that helped him trace more than $12 million in Bybit-linked funds and, according to his account, contributed to Tether freezing 442,000 USDT.

His investigation led him to a network he believes laundered more than $1 billion from crypto thefts linked to the North Korean Lazarus Group, including proceeds from the Bybit attack.

The implications of his investigations extend to a much larger market for criminal financial services that American authorities have spent the past two years trying to disrupt.

In September, the US Treasury sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee, a marketplace it said has processed more than $24 billion in digital assets and fiat currency through its platforms since 2022, and explicitly identified North Korean hackers among the illicit actors reported to have used its services.

Treasury also acknowledged that criminals tried to preserve their operations by moving from Huione to Xinbi after it was sanctioned, showing how removing one marketplace doesn't eliminate the relationships and demand that supported it in the first place.

Believe it or not, hacking an exchange and stealing funds is actually the easiest part of this crime. Converting stolen crypto into fiat or another form of real purchasing power is where it gets difficult.

To do that, hackers rely on payment services and other shady relationships that let investigators and regulators intervene.

The $349,700 customer

The FBI attributed the Bybit theft to North Korean hackers on Feb. 26, 2025, identifying the activity as TraderTraitor and warning that stolen assets were being converted into Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies before being distributed across thousands of blockchain addresses.

While it took no time to identify the hackers, identifying the intermediaries handling the stolen money required much more investigative work.

According to ZachXBT, he began that work when he saw more than 15 accounts in public Telegram and Discord groups seeking help with transactions tied to the stolen Bybit funds, suggesting that at least part of the subsequent laundering process involved intermediaries openly soliciting or arranging services.

He contacted several of those accounts and eventually developed a relationship with someone using the Telegram alias Jimmy Green, who presented himself as someone who needed help moving cryptocurrency between networks.

On March 6, 2025, ZachXBT says he funded a new Ethereum address with 349,700 USDC and began exchanging the dollar-linked token for USDT on Tron through the contact, accepting unfavorable exchange terms while trying to establish himself as a credible customer.

The 349,700 USDC represented capital committed to the transactions rather than a disclosed net investigative loss, while the 5% he says he lost on each order is the cost he was prepared to accept for access to information that ordinary blockchain analysis could not provide.

The arrangement also carried the risk that the intermediary could just disappear with the funds.

Hackers depend on intermediaries who might steal from them in turn, and without enforceable commercial protections, reputation and personal familiarity become especially important to keeping those relationships working.

That gave ZachXBT a way into the operation, since a customer willing to conduct repeated transactions became more valuable to the person providing the service.

The relationship eventually produced information beyond wallet addresses, including discussions of planned fund movements before the transactions occurred, allowing ZachXBT to compare statements made privately with activity subsequently recorded on public blockchains.

In one instance, the intermediary discussed moving funds to Solana before the corresponding movement took place, while other exchanges and wallet connections allegedly helped identify a larger cluster of assets linked to the Bybit theft.

This was a major turning point in his investigation, because on-chain data can't identify the person behind the transaction or its intent. Private conversations about a transaction provided the key evidence about who controlled it and what they used it for.

Even though ZachXBT's investigation still doesn't completely match the FBI's official record, it's still one of the most significant investigative efforts we've seen in a while. It showed that personal and commercial relationships can provide evidence blockchain alone can't, and that similar tactics could help investigate and eventually resolve other thefts.

Tracing $12 million differs from recovering it

ZachXBT said information from his relationship with Jimmy Green helped identify a cluster with more than $12 million in Bybit-linked funds, including transactions across several networks.

He also reported that Tether later froze 442,000 USDT linked to the North Korean hack. This showed that quickly identifying stolen assets, while they remain accessible through issuer-controlled tokens like USDT or USDC, can be crucial to recovering the funds.

The two amounts should not be confused: tracing more than $12 million does not mean the entire amount was frozen, and freezing 442,000 USDT does not mean the tokens were seized or returned to Bybit.

The specific 442,000 USDT figure and its connection to ZachXBT's investigation come from his account, although Tether has separately disclosed larger freezes tied to the Bybit theft.

There's a considerable distance between observing stolen cryptocurrency, identifying the people handling it, and obtaining legal or technical control over the proceeds.

Public blockchains don't prevent the assets from moving again, especially when they pass through services that refuse to cooperate with investigators or operate beyond the reach of relevant authorities.

Centrally issued stablecoins create a potential intervention point because their issuers can retain the administrative ability to restrict transfers from designated addresses.

Native Bitcoin has no equivalent issuer-controlled restriction, although authorities can still restrain assets held by custodians or seize the keys controlling them when they obtain the necessary access and legal authority.

That leaves investigators dependent on more than tracing accuracy, since an identified balance must also remain within reach of someone who has the technical ability and authority to act.

During Bybit's recovery effort, court orders and cooperation from financial intermediaries could restrict assets long after the initial theft, without guaranteeing full recovery.

The problem is that stolen cryptocurrency can become increasingly fragmented as it moves between wallets, chains, custodians, and trading counterparties, with each additional service potentially requiring another source of evidence or another legal process before the pursuit can continue.

That's why investigators can see where the funds traveled but have no way to stop the next transaction or recover the funds.

$4 billion in crypto laundering

The use of outside intermediaries isn't limited to the Bybit theft, and American enforcement records show a longer history of attempts to identify businesses that convert stolen crypto into assets criminals can use.

In March 2020, the Justice Department charged two Chinese nationals, Tian Yinyin and Li Jiadong, with laundering more than $100 million worth of crypto, primarily through activity connected to exchange hacks.

These charges show how individuals who don't carry out the hack can still play an essential role in the crime.

The Treasury's sanctions announcement also revealed that Tian converted nearly $1.4 million in Bitcoin into prepaid Apple iTunes gift cards, showing how laundering can eventually involve ordinary retail instruments rather than the more elaborate financial services usually associated with international cybercrime.

The same economic requirement operates on a much larger scale through marketplaces that connect criminals with merchants offering settlement, exchange, payment and other services.

In May 2025, the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network identified Cambodia-based Huione Group as a financial institution of primary money laundering concern, finding that its operations had laundered at least $4 billion in illicit proceeds between August 2021 and January 2025.

Of that amount, FinCEN identified at least $37 million in crypto stemming from North Korean cyber thefts, along with other proceeds from investment fraud and cyber scams.

The $4 billion figure reflects illicit activity across several crime categories, and the $37 million represents the minimum North Korean-linked component identified in the agency's findings.

FinCEN's assessment also identified serious deficiencies in anti-money-laundering and customer-verification controls across the group, including an acknowledgment that inadequate checks had allowed one component to indirectly receive funds connected to a North Korean heist.

The significance of those findings extends beyond any individual transaction because an intermediary that offers repeated access to payment services can become infrastructure for multiple criminal customers, reducing the need for each organization to build its own arrangements for converting stolen assets.

That concentrates activity around businesses that can become targets for sanctions, seizures, restrictions on banking relationships and other enforcement measures.

Huione's marketplace handled a substantial volume of transactions and illicit services, and operators tried to keep operating after Telegram disrupted access to parts of the network.

Those marketplace transaction figures and FinCEN's narrower estimates of identified illicit proceeds measure different categories of activity, making it key not to treat all funds moving through a platform as proven criminal proceeds.

The customers moved

The difficulty is that a criminal marketplace can lose infrastructure without losing the demand that made its services profitable, particularly when users can still contact alternative providers.

In June 2026, the Justice Department announced the seizure of a cloud computing account that hosted backend infrastructure used by Huione Group subsidiaries allegedly involved in moving proceeds from fraud, cyber scams and other criminal activity.

The action followed earlier US restrictions on the group and targeted technology that supports the transfer and concealment of illicit funds.

Removing that infrastructure doesn't automatically eliminate relationships between customers and the intermediaries willing to serve them.

The Treasury made that limitation particularly explicit on Sept. 9, when it sanctioned Xinbi Guarantee, describing an illicit marketplace that connected criminal organizations with merchants providing financial services, technology, and other resources needed to support their operations.

According to Treasury, Xinbi had processed the equivalent of more than $24 billion in digital assets and fiat currency since approximately 2022, with its services primarily supporting transactions involving Southeast Asian markets.

The scale makes the platform relevant to enforcement efforts against the broader financial infrastructure that serves criminal organizations.

Treasury also said cybercriminals had attempted to preserve their operations by migrating activities from Huione-related services to Xinbi following FinCEN's earlier action, with the new marketplace offering substantially similar services to an overlapping group of customers.

The agencies described a commercial market where participants could seek another provider when enforcement made their previous arrangements less reliable.

During the Huione crackdown, Telegram removed thousands of channels associated with Huione Guarantee as merchants moved to alternative marketplaces.

This is why a crackdown's success cannot be measured solely by the number of websites, accounts, or servers taken offline, since customers who still need an illicit financial service can try to rebuild access through providers that remain operational.

The disruption still imposes costs, particularly when balances are frozen, settlements fail, or established counterparties become unavailable, but the economic incentive to move stolen funds continues as long as the underlying crime remains profitable.

The problem for enforcement agencies is making those services increasingly expensive and unreliable across the network of potential replacements.

Tether's freezes push crypto laundering networks toward other payment options

The enforcement action against Xinbi shows how financial restrictions can disrupt criminal operations while prompting the businesses involved to change their payment arrangements.

A series of Tether freezes restricted over $45 million in USDT across at least 22 wallets associated with Xinbi's operations.

The marketplace responded by telling users it would move toward USDD, a stablecoin structure that doesn't offer the same issuer-controlled address-freezing mechanism as USDT.

That was an important shift because the ability to freeze a token can be valuable to investigators when suspected proceeds remain within the issuer's administrative reach, while customers attempting to avoid those restrictions have an incentive to move toward instruments with different controls.

The move shows how restrictions on one part of the payment system can redirect transactions toward another, requiring investigators to follow both the assets and the businesses that provide access to them.

During the September crackdown, authorities also targeted Xinbi-linked infrastructure and restrained over $52 million in cryptocurrency, while withdrawals accelerated and competing marketplaces reportedly began restricting laundering-related merchants.

Those developments differ from the 442,000 USDT freeze ZachXBT attributes to North Korean hackers, since public reporting does not establish that the same addresses, participants, or funds were involved.

Both cases show that criminal operations depend on financial intermediaries whose services can create opportunities for intervention even after the original theft is complete.

Where a token issuer can freeze assets, the relevant exposure may be the balance held in an identifiable address. Where a marketplace serves multiple criminal groups, its vulnerability may extend to the infrastructure, merchant relationships, and settlement arrangements supporting those customers.

Both routes can reduce the ability to move and use stolen money without additional cost or risk.

People behind the transfers are harder to replace

ZachXBT's investigation made an impact because he described how a paid relationship produced information about the people arranging the transactions.

Criminal intermediaries who repeatedly handle stolen cryptocurrency develop a commercial reputation, establish preferred counterparties, and learn which services can complete transactions without interfering with the proceeds.

Those relationships can make an operation more effective over time, especially when customers need to move large amounts of money without revealing their identities or risking that a counterparty will keep the assets.

However, they also create dependencies that are hard to replicate quickly when an established provider disappears, especially if alternatives charge higher fees, reject suspicious funds, or prove less reliable.

Those dependencies also provide investigators with another source of evidence because a service provider can reveal what it knows about future transactions, other participants, and the payment infrastructure required to complete an order.

Investigators still need to test the information against observable activity and other records, and the fact that an address receives funds connected to a theft does not establish the recipient's intent or knowledge.

But comparing private communications with subsequent blockchain movements can narrow that uncertainty in ways tracing transactions alone cannot.

The broader enforcement record points out that making criminal financial services less attractive requires more than periodically taking down their websites, because the customers and commercial incentives supporting those services can outlast the equipment used to deliver them.

Seizing assets, restricting financial access, prosecuting service providers, and identifying the people who control settlement arrangements can change that calculation, though the point at which those costs outweigh revenue from serving illicit customers will differ across businesses.

This is also why the dollar value of a cryptocurrency theft cannot automatically be treated as money successfully converted into spendable revenue for the responsible government, much less as a verified amount used for any particular military or state expenditure.

The original theft, the amount moved through intermediary addresses, the value successfully converted into other forms of purchasing power, and the amount ultimately recovered by authorities are separate measures that require separate evidence.

For North Korean hackers, relying on laundering services adds risk after the initial intrusion succeeds, since gaining control of stolen assets doesn't eliminate the need for others to accept, exchange, and ultimately spend them.

ZachXBT's reported infiltration shows how that requirement can turn a customer relationship into an investigative opening, while the US actions against Huione and Xinbi demonstrate how the surrounding businesses can become enforcement targets even when criminal customers attempt to migrate elsewhere.

The essential weakness is that stealing cryptocurrency and using it in practice are different, and the second still depends on commercial arrangements whose participants have assets, reputations, and financial interests to protect.

North Korean hackers' efforts to make that money spendable can still pull them back into relationships that require trust, and the people providing it have something to lose.

The post Stealing $1.5B in crypto is easy, cashing out is the trap appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The Fed can stop raising rates before inflation reaches 2% if officials believe the economy's already heading there without another increase.

September's meeting left most unconvinced, with strong spending and persistent price increases outweighing the strain expensive borrowing was putting on parts of the economy.

The minutes released Oct. 7 explain the thinking behind that month's unanimous decision to raise its main interest rate to 3.75%-4%.

Most participants expected another hike by year-end, but their reasons differed: many saw higher rates as insurance against inflation sticking around, while others thought the economy would need higher rates anyway.

Those views can overlap, but they leave different amounts of room for persuasion. Evidence that temporary price increases are fading could reassure someone seeking insurance, while an official who thinks spending is too strong would also want to see people and businesses spending less freely.

That discussion helps explain what could stop another hike, although officials didn't agree on a set of conditions that would rule it out.

Cheaper gasoline won't do all the work

Higher rates make borrowing more expensive and saving more attractive, discouraging some spending and making it harder for businesses to charge more. The effects take time, and they don't reach everyone equally: homebuyers may pull back while companies with plenty of cash keep investing.

The Fed can't produce oil or remove an import tax, so raising borrowing costs won't fix the shortages behind some price increases. It can reduce spending enough to make those increases harder to pass along, lowering the risk that an initial jump in costs turns into persistent inflation across the economy.

In September, officials described higher energy costs alongside heavy spending on the equipment and data centers needed for artificial intelligence.

Some businesses appeared better able to pass their costs to customers, and several participants pointed to continued price increases in services other than housing. Cheaper fuel would help those businesses, but customers willing to keep spending could still let them raise other prices.

Repeated reports showing slower price increases across different purchases would give the Fed more reason to wait. Inflation falling just means prices are rising more slowly, so groceries can still feel expensive while the data improves. Officials would look for evidence that businesses are losing the ability or need to keep charging more.

They'd also need to separate economic improvement from revisions to how it's measured. The minutes noted that a planned revision to the inflation calculation would reduce how much software prices and investment-management fees added to the reported rate.

Better measurement can improve policy decisions, but a lower reading from a revised calculation doesn't mean businesses have simply reduced their price increases.

Officials thought people still expected inflation to settle around the 2% goal over time, although they worried that more years above target could lead workers to seek larger pay increases and businesses to plan bigger price increases.

Slower price increases across more of the economy, with people still expecting inflation to come down, would give officials less reason to raise rates as a precaution before the target is reached.

The jobs market doesn't have to collapse to count

The Fed's responsibility to support employment limits how far it should go in making borrowing more expensive.

In September, participants generally saw steady employment with relatively few people out of work, and most thought it had strengthened somewhat, giving the Fed room to act against inflation.

Some said pay was rising fast enough for inflation to return to 2%, or that the jobs market wasn't currently driving inflation. Several noted that hiring and layoffs were both unusually low, while people out of work had difficulty finding another job.

Low layoffs can make employment look healthy to someone who already has a job, while weak hiring makes it miserable for someone seeking one. If employers start cutting staff before hiring improves, people who lose their jobs have fewer places to go, potentially turning a stable unemployment rate into a much less reassuring picture.

Repeated unemployment increases alongside broader layoffs would make another hike harder to justify, even if inflation hadn't improved as much as officials wanted. One disappointing jobs report could reflect temporary conditions or be revised, so evidence across several reports would carry more weight than a single number.

Slower inflation with stable employment would give the Fed a better reason to stop. In September, officials generally saw roughly equal chances of employment doing better or worse than expected, while inflation seemed more at risk of being too high.

Continued weak hiring or more job losses would give them reason to reconsider without waiting for a recession.

Your mortgage rate can feel expensive while money still flows

Several officials thought interest rates were doing little to slow the economy, despite expensive mortgages and strain on lower-income households.

Many businesses could still borrow money, investment in AI was strong, and stock-market gains were supporting spending among wealthier households.

People struggling to buy a home and the companies financing new projects experienced the same economy very differently. The Fed has to judge whether their combined spending is slowing enough to bring inflation down, which is why painful housing borrowing costs don't automatically settle the decision.

Economists describe an interest rate that neither speeds up nor slows down the economy as neutral, but they have to estimate where it is. Two officials had raised their estimates of that rate, meaning they thought a higher interest rate was needed to slow the economy by the same amount.

Lenders becoming more cautious and spending slowing down would provide evidence that existing borrowing costs were doing more of the work.

Market rates can also rise without another Fed hike, although longer-term loan rates don't automatically move in step with the short-term rate the Fed controls. Officials would need to see those costs actually slowing borrowing and spending.

Lower inflation with employment holding up could give investors reason to expect cheaper borrowing while keeping them willing to own Bitcoin and other assets with large price swings. If job losses and difficulty getting loans instead persuaded the Fed to pause, investors could be selling those assets to keep more money in cash at the same time.

Holding rates steady wouldn't promise cuts or make financing cheap again. Officials meet next on Oct. 27–28, and these minutes just describe their September judgment.

Evidence that price increases are slowing without another rate hike would give them a reason to wait, while evidence that more people are losing jobs would make another increase harder to defend, with much less for Bitcoin investors to celebrate.

The post Inflation target of 2% may not stop the next Fed rate freeze appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bankrupt crypto lender Celsius founder Alex Mashinsky has agreed to a permanent ban from the securities, commodities, and crypto business under a New York settlement announced on Oct. 9.

The agreement also sets conditional state payment obligations of up to $35 million, without creating a new payout to Celsius creditors.

The deal resolves New York’s civil suit, filed in January 2023, and adds state obligations to a separate federal criminal case. Mashinsky is serving a 12-year prison sentence.

What the $35 million figure means

The first obligation is $25 million in damages to New York. Under paragraph 2 of the annexed consent order, that obligation is deemed satisfied by a qualifying $10 million payment to the US Department of Justice under paragraph 11 of his federal forfeiture order.

DOJ payments made after May 20, 2025, may count dollar for dollar toward that $10 million. If the specified payment is not made, New York's Attorney General is due the entire $ 25 million.

The second obligation is a separate $10 million monetary judgment payable to New York. Paragraph 3 says it is deemed satisfied by completion of Mashinsky’s imprisonment under the federal judgment entered May 12, 2025, subject to express exceptions.

Those exceptions cover a sentence overturned or reduced by a court, including through a Section 2255 challenge. The clause also lists compassionate release, good-time credits, earned-time credits, First Step Act early release, and home confinement through a Bureau of Prisons program.

Beyond the payment conditions, New York describes the industry ban as permanent. The agreed restrictions cover securities and commodities businesses, including crypto, and roles such as broker, investment adviser, manager, officer and consultant. They also prohibit investment advice distributed for compensation or economic benefit.

The terms retain an exception for Mashinsky’s own personal purchases or sales. The stipulation also records his admission that he misled investors about Celsius’s regulatory approval and his own sales of Celsius’s CEL token.

The court sentenced Mashinsky on May 8, 2025, and the stipulation records federal forfeiture ordered at $48.4 million.

The New York Attorney General says Celsius distributed more than $3.4 billion to creditors as of August 2026. Qualifying DOJ payments would establish compliance with one settlement condition, but wouldn't establish another creditor distribution.

The post Celsius founder faces lifetime ban, but can trade his own crypto appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Solana has doubled its targeted block-production frequency after activating 200-millisecond slots on mainnet, completing a months-long effort to accelerate the blockchain.

The Oct. 9 upgrade reduces Solana's original 400-millisecond slot target by half, allowing the network to create five block-production opportunities per second instead of 2.5. It also shortens the time required to complete a network epoch to approximately 24 hours from 48 hours.

Anza, the developer behind Solana's Agave validator client, confirmed the activation, declaring that the SIMD-0525 upgrade had been completed.

“Blocks land twice as often as they did at genesis. An epoch now takes about a day instead of two,” Anza stated.

Jacob Creech, the Solana Foundation's vice president of technology, also celebrated the milestone, saying the network continues to improve with successive software releases.

“Solana continues to improve release after release, proving to be the best place to build,” Creech said, before identifying Alpenglow as the network's next major upgrade.

Early performance data indicated that the change was already producing faster slots, although the network had yet to consistently reach its new target.

CryptoSlate's sampling of Solana's public mainnet RPC showed an average of approximately 222 milliseconds across 1,413 slots following activation, compared with roughly 268 milliseconds under the previous 250ms target.

The latest change completes a four-stage rollout that began in August, when Solana first reduced its slot target to 350 milliseconds. Subsequent reductions to 300ms and 250ms prepared validators for Friday's final adjustment.

Faster slots put Solana's next upgrade in focus

The shorter intervals could improve transaction responsiveness for applications operating on Solana, particularly decentralized trading platforms and market makers that depend on rapid updates to prices and orders.

Under the SIMD-0525 proposal, each validator's nominal four-slot block-production window has fallen to 800 milliseconds from the original 1.6 seconds, reducing how long individual validators can control transaction inclusion.

However, the upgrade does not automatically double Solana's transaction-processing capacity. Developers proportionally reduced the computational budget available within each slot, keeping the network's approximate execution capacity per second unchanged.

The faster cadence also introduces operational adjustments.

According to the Solana Foundation, transaction blockhashes now have an expiration window of approximately 30 seconds, compared with 60 seconds under the original configuration. That gives applications using offline signing or delayed transaction submission less time before transactions require refreshing.

Infrastructure providers must also accommodate more frequent blocks, while validators face tighter deadlines for producing and propagating them.

Those demands make sustained performance and skipped-slot rates important measures of the upgrade's success.

Meanwhile, community attention now shifts to Alpenglow, Solana's planned consensus overhaul targeting transaction finality of approximately 150 milliseconds, compared with roughly 12.8 seconds under the existing TowerBFT system.

Alpenglow has undergone deployment on Solana's testnet and devnet, but a mainnet activation date has not been announced.

The post Solana doubles block production speed to 200ms as network prepares for Alpenglow upgrade appeared first on CryptoSlate.

THORChain's TRON operations were interrupted on Oct. 9 after a USDT vault blocklist, according to reports by its co-founder Chad Barraford and researcher Khal. The researcher put the affected balance at about 1.45 million USDT.

Both accounts later reversed the restrictions, according to updates from both accounts. At 3:35 p.m. UTC, Barraford said the addresses appeared unfrozen, and trading would resume soon. At 3:58 p.m. UTC, Khal reported that TRON USDT swaps had resumed. The earlier payout queue describes the interruption before the reported resumption of swaps.

In his initial analysis, Khal reported that block 86958330 blocklisted four of THORChain's six TRON vaults. Those vaults held 93% of the protocol's TRON USDT, concentrating the disruption in the balances needed to process payments on that route.

He reported that TRON trading, transaction signing, and liquidity-provider actions halted about 27 minutes later, with roughly $363,000 in payouts queued during the freeze.

Barraford said the protocol received no communication before the action and didn't know why it happened. Khal argued that the vaults may have been caught in a broader blocklist that included roughly 30 other wallets.

The incident follows scrutiny of how the protocol handles illicit flows. On Oct. 8, THORChain's September trading surge coincided with Bitget-hack-linked activity, and the protocol refused to selectively block addresses.

Two layers of control

THORChain's vault documentation describes accounts managed by validator nodes that hold assets on external blockchains and handle incoming funds and outgoing transactions.

Distributing control of those accounts among validators determines who can authorize a payment, while the tokens inside them remain subject to their issuer's restrictions.

THORChain itself drew a related distinction in an Oct. 1 blog recap: node operators can pause a chain or the whole protocol for safety, but cannot selectively remove an individual swap.

Meanwhile, Tether says its wallet-freezing policy follows OFAC's sanctions list and extends to secondary-market wallets. Its power to restrict USDT transfers operates separately from the validator controls governing THORChain's vaults.

The operational dependency remains: distributing the authority to sign transactions does not remove Tether's ability to freeze USDT held in the accounts those transactions use.

The post Tether freezes $1.4M in TRON vaults and THORChain stalls appeared first on CryptoSlate.

The crypto market is finishing a rough week. Bitcoin sits at $82,768 after a 2.2% weekly dip, Ethereum is down 7.1% to $2,493, and Solana, XRP and BNB are all nursing losses between 2% and 8%. Twelve of the top 17 coins by market cap closed the week in the red.

That makes the exceptions stand out. NEAR Protocol and Cardano were the only two large caps to post a weekly gain, and Zcash is still the second-best performer of 2026 in the top 20, despite a pullback. When the whole market sells off and a handful of coins refuse to follow, that relative strength is often where the next leg up starts.

Here are the three coins to watch next week, with their current stats and the catalysts that could send them higher. Live prices for every coin in this article are on the CryptoTicker crypto prices page.

Stats as of Saturday, 10 October 2026.

Why Is NEAR Protocol the Top Coin to Watch Next Week?

$NEAR is the strongest coin in the top 20 right now, full stop. It gained 7.98% in the last 24 hours and 11.63% over the week while almost everything else bled, and it is up 245% year to date. At $5.22 it has climbed from under $2 in early September, one of the most explosive monthly moves in its history.

The difference between NEAR and most momentum plays is that this rally has a real spot buyer behind it. Bitwise launched the first spot NEAR ETF in the US (ticker NRR) at the start of October, and the fund pulled in roughly $58 million in its first week. ETF creations require actual NEAR purchases, so every inflow day tightens the float. Add the growth of NEAR Intents, the chain abstraction layer that routes cross-chain swaps, and the AI narrative that keeps dragging capital toward NEAR, and you have a story that institutions can actually buy.

The risk is obvious: NEAR Intents suffered a $3.8 million exploit on 8 October. The team pledged full reimbursement and the price shrugged it off within a day, which is itself a bullish tell. But a rally this fast is full of short-term holders sitting on triple-digit gains, and the 2022 bagholders between $6 and $10 will be looking for exits.

• Levels to watch: $5.60 to $6.20 is the resistance band that capped every bounce since 2022. A clean weekly close above $6.20 opens the door to $7.30 and $8.30 on the Fibonacci extensions. Support sits at $4.50; lose that and the move is probably over for now.
• Why it could explode: continued NRR inflows, a second ETF filing from another issuer, or a market-wide bounce would all land on a coin that is already outperforming in a down tape.

Can Cardano Finally Break Out Above $0.26?

$Cardano is the comeback story of the week. ADA broke out to a multi-month high near $0.28 on Monday, got slammed back to $0.23 by Thursday as Bitcoin slid and Treasury yields rose, and then roared back 6.73% in the last 24 hours to $0.2560. It is one of only two large caps in the green over seven days, up 5.21%, while remaining 23% down for the year. That combination of a deep YTD discount and fresh weekly strength is exactly what a bottoming chart looks like.

What makes this dip different from the summer lows is that the network is getting busier while the price was falling. Santiment data showed Cardano daily active addresses climbing to around 27,500 on 7 October even as ADA dropped 13%, a divergence that usually resolves upward. Whale wallets have been accumulating, the RealFi push launched on 1 October, the Mastercard tie-up is live, and a fee-cut proposal that would make the chain cheaper to use has moved to a vote.

The chart is also in better shape than the headlines suggest. ADA is trading above its 50-day, 100-day and 200-day exponential moving averages, and the 20-day average sits below the price, so the short-term trend still points up. Thursday's flush cleared out leveraged longs and reset funding, which is often the fuel for the next leg.

• Levels to watch: $0.258 to $0.263 is the resistance zone that has rejected ADA repeatedly. A daily close above $0.263 targets $0.27 first and the Monday high near $0.28 next. On the downside, $0.24 is the line that has to hold, with $0.23 as the last defence.
• Why it could explode: ADA is the most oversold of the three on a yearly basis, with the biggest short base to squeeze. A green week for Bitcoin would likely send ADA to the top of the leaderboard, as Friday's 6.7% bounce already showed.

Is the Zcash Dip a Buying Opportunity Before the NU7 Upgrade?

$Zcash is the contrarian pick. ZEC is down 6.86% on the week and dropped more than 10% on Friday alone, yet it is still up 133% year to date and sits at $1,225 with a $20.7 billion market cap, bigger than Dogecoin. The privacy-coin trade that defined 2026 has cooled, but the pipeline of catalysts for the coming weeks is the fullest of any coin on this list.

Start with the calendar. The NU7 network upgrade passed its testnet activation on 6 October and the mainnet activation height is confirmed for 20 October. NU7 brings a 300% speed boost to shielded transactions, lays the groundwork for Zcash Shielded Assets and introduces a sustainability mechanism that redirects 60% of fees into a long-term miner reserve. Traders tend to front-run upgrades of this size, and next week is the last full week before it goes live.

Then there is the institutional angle. Gemini's Winklevoss twins filed with the SEC on 6 October for a spot Zcash ETF that would trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WINK. THORChain switched on native ZEC swaps on 8 October, giving the coin direct cross-chain liquidity without a wrapped token. And the Zcash developers just set a January target for quantum-resistant payments, a narrative that is only getting louder.

The risk is that privacy coins remain a regulatory lightning rod, and the existing ZEC fund has posted a run of October outflows. A sharp rally like this one also leaves a lot of air below: ZEC was trading under $100 as recently as a year ago.

• Levels to watch: $1,180 to $1,200, Friday's low, is the support that has to hold. A reclaim of $1,350 puts the recent range high at $1,420 back in play, and above that the September highs around $1,560 open up. The 50-day EMA near $1,095 is the deeper support if the market keeps sliding.
• Why it could explode: an oversold bounce into a confirmed hard fork date, a live ETF filing and fresh DEX liquidity is a strong setup. If Bitcoin stabilises, ZEC has historically been one of the fastest coins to recover its losses.

What Should Traders Watch Next Week?

All three setups depend on the same thing: Bitcoin holding $80,000. BTC is at $82,768 and sitting just above that round number after a week of ETF outflows and rising Treasury yields. If it holds, the relative strength in NEAR and ADA and the oversold bounce in ZEC have room to run. If it breaks, even the strongest altcoins will get dragged lower before they can rally. Market-wide data such as total market cap, Bitcoin dominance and the Fear and Greed index is on the CryptoTicker charts page.

The quick checklist for the week ahead:

• NEAR: daily NRR ETF flow numbers and a weekly close above $6.20
• Cardano: a daily close above $0.263, the fee-cut vote result and the Santiment active-address trend
• Zcash: holding $1,180, positioning ahead of the 20 October NU7 activation and any SEC movement on the WINK ETF filing

Of the three, NEAR has the clearest momentum, Cardano has the most room to squeeze and Zcash has the biggest catalyst on the calendar.

On Saturday 17 October 2026 the Bored Ape Yacht Club celebrates its ApeFest, this time at the Beeple Studios in Charleston, South Carolina. The official site apefest.com gives the evening as 7pm to midnight local time, which is 1am to 6am on Sunday in Germany. Around the evening there are community side events from Thursday to Sunday, from ice skating to a poker tournament.

We are part of the Ape community ourselves. And we will say it openly: in our circle in Germany we know almost nobody making the trip to Charleston this year. That is not a verdict on a city or on the people who are flying over. It is feedback from the German community to Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and it runs: right now there are more disappointed holders than excited ones.

ApeFest 2026 in Charleston: date, venue and tickets

ApeFest 2026 takes place on 17 October at the Beeple Studios, the studio and event grounds of the digital artist Beeple in Charleston. Admission goes to holders of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes, with one ticket per NFT. According to reports by the community paper Bored Ape Gazette and by EGamers, holders put down a deposit of $99 for this, refunded once the ticket is scanned on site, while guests pay a fixed price. Last year in Las Vegas the deposit was still $169. The check on whether somebody really owns an Ape NFT has been handled this year by the service Glyph.

The programme includes a short question-and-answer session with James Hall, who runs the Otherside metaverse project at Yuga. Yuga has not signalled any major announcements in advance.

From spectacle to small stage: what became of ApeFest

ApeFest was once the big event of the NFT world. In 2022 in New York, Snoop Dogg and Eminem were on stage. In 2023 the festival moved to Hong Kong, with around 2,000 guests from 60 countries, and made headlines because visitors complained of eye pain after the evening. Yuga Labs later attributed that, according to Fortune and other media, to UV light in part of the hall. In 2024 ApeFest saw the launch of Yuga's own blockchain ApeChain; in 2025 it was held in Las Vegas. In 2026 it is one evening in an artist's studio.

Smaller does not have to mean worse. A party in an artist's studio actually suits the collection's origins better than an arena. But the shrinking mirrors what has happened across the ecosystem, and that is the part the German community is talking about.

Yuga Labs in 2026: a company being rebuilt, an ecosystem on a low flame

Yuga Labs has rebuilt a great deal over the past eighteen months. The ApeCoin DAO, through which APE holders used to vote on grants, was dissolved in 2025 and replaced by the company ApeCo, which Yuga controls. Yuga gave up the trademark rights to CryptoPunks and Moonbirds in 2025 in order to concentrate on the Apes and Otherside. Since 24 April 2026 Michael Figge has led the company, with co-founder Greg Solano becoming chairman.

Otherside, Yuga's metaverse, has been open to everyone since 12 November 2025, in the browser, with an email address or a wallet. On 9 September 2026 Yuga announced a resource economy with 74 raw materials on the blockchain; there is no date for it. Player numbers have not been published by Yuga as far as we know. On ApeChain, capital locked stood at around $3.1 million on 26 September according to DefiLlama, more than 80 percent below the high of late 2024. ApeCoin was recently trading around 99 percent below its all-time high. We put the figures together in detail three weeks ago in our piece on ApeCoin and ApeChain before ApeFest.

On top of this came a scare for many holders in September: attackers exploited old marketplace approvals connected with Limit Break's payment processor to drain NFTs and WETH, on ApeChain too. Yuga helped bring more than 23,000 NFTs to safety. Anyone who has not yet cleaned up their approvals should do so before trading again. Valuable NFTs sit most safely on your own hardware wallet, and our hardware wallet comparison gives an overview of the models.

Why the German Ape community is staying home

What we hear in our circle can be summed up in three sentences.

What is missing is the new. For months little has come from Yuga that surprises or excites. Announcements such as the resource economy in Otherside remain without a date. At a time when small teams build with AI in weeks what used to take years, that pace looks out of step with the age.

What is missing is what binds the community. A say over ApeCoin disappeared with the DAO. Joint projects that holders can contribute to have become rare. We no longer know anybody in Germany who plays Otherside regularly.

The journey is long and the value unclear. A flight to Charleston, a hotel and several days of time for one evening that nobody knows will amount to more than a party: for most holders in Europe that does not add up. There has never been an ApeFest in Europe.

What Yuga Labs could make of ApeFest

Disappointment is feedback, not a farewell. The Ape community is still one of the strongest communities in the crypto market, and many holders would join in again immediately if there were a reason. What would help, as we see it:

1. A clear roadmap for Otherside with dates and published player numbers, so that holders can see whether the project is growing.
2. A new form of participation after the end of the DAO, so that APE holders have a say again instead of only watching.
3. A gathering in Europe or official regional meetups, instead of staking everything on one evening in the United States.
4. Applications on ApeChain that people actually use, instead of new collectibles.

Whether Yuga delivers any of that on 17 October, we will see on Sunday morning. Anyone who does not want to sleep through the announcements will find them on the Bored Ape Yacht Club's X channel. If you want to buy or sell NFTs from the Ape world now, the marketplaces and their fees are in our NFT marketplace comparison. ApeCoin itself is best traded in Germany through a provider from our comparison of regulated crypto exchanges.

ApeFest 2026: our verdict from the German community

ApeFest 2026 is smaller, quieter and further from Europe than ever before. We wish everyone flying to Charleston a great evening. But Yuga Labs should read the empty seats from Germany for what they are: a request to build something again that brings the community together. The festival on 17 October is the chance to make a start.

Disclosure: Dennis Weidner, founder of Cryptoticker, is part of the Ape community and owns the ApeCar. This piece is a comment. (As of October 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Dogecoin trades at $0.086183 on Saturday morning, or €0.076928, 1.3 percent above the previous day's level. The number that will matter more to DOGE holders over the next two weeks than this daily gain, though, is a date: on Wednesday 14 October the Bitwise Dogecoin ETF will trade for the last time on the US exchange NYSE Arca under the ticker BWOW. After that the provider converts the holding into cash and pays out the remaining shareholders on 22 October. Barely eleven months after its launch, one of the first American Dogecoin funds is closing again.

This article answers three questions: what exactly happens on which day, why the wind-down can barely move the price by our calculation, and what changes for you if you are invested in DOGE from Germany. The shortest answer to the third question first: the fund that is closing was never available to you, the European route runs through a different product, and for tax purposes the two routes are not the same thing.

What happens to the Bitwise Dogecoin ETF (BWOW) on 14 October

Bitwise announced the wind-down on 10 September. In the notice the provider filed as an exhibit to a mandatory report with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, it names four dates. The reasoning stays general: Bitwise is winding the fund down because the firm continuously adapts its product range to changing investor needs. Price performance, trading turnover and fund size are expressly not mentioned in the reasoning.

• 10 September 2026: announcement of the wind-down.
• 14 October 2026: last trading day on NYSE Arca; on the same day the Dogecoin held is exchanged for cash.
• 15 October 2026: before the open, no new shares are created.
• 22 October 2026: payout to the remaining shareholders, valued at the net asset value of 21 October.

A net asset value, often abbreviated to NAV, is the value of the fund's assets divided by the number of shares issued. It is the calculated price of a share and can differ from the exchange price for as long as the fund is still trading. That very divergence is why Bitwise leaves investors two routes open: sell on the exchange by the close on 14 October and you get the market price. Stay put and you get the 21 October NAV in cash on 22 October. Nobody has to act; the notice states in so many words that shareholders need take no action during the process. The original wording is in the notice filed with the SEC.

8.2 million DOGE into cash: 0.14 percent of a trading day

A fund closure sounds like selling pressure. With BWOW it is therefore worth doing the arithmetic before worrying. According to the holdings data on the fund page, the vehicle holds around 8.2 million DOGE. At today's price of $0.086183 that corresponds to a value of about $707,000. Against that stands trading turnover of $503.06 million over the past 24 hours.

The holding to be sold therefore amounts to around 0.14 percent of a single trading day. For comparison: the spread between the daily low and the daily high comes to 2.96 percent today. An order of that size disappears into the noise of an ordinary morning, even if it were executed at a single venue and without regard to price. In fact, liquidators work such positions off over the course of the day and generally use several venues for it.

Here is how the mechanism works in the background. A physically backed crypto fund holds the coins with a custodian. On a wind-down the provider instructs the custodian to sell the holding on a given date and place the proceeds in an escrow account. From there the money flows through the custodian banks to the shareholders. Price pressure arises only when the holding is large relative to daily turnover. With a bitcoin fund running into the billions that would be a serious question; at $707,000 it is not.

Dogecoin price today: $0.0862 between $0.0841 and $0.0866

The price is moving in a narrow range today. The daily low was $0.084082 and the daily high $0.086574. DOGE currently stands at $0.086183, only around 0.05 percent below the daily high and therefore at the upper edge of the day's range. Market capitalisation comes to $13.46 billion and turnover over the past 24 hours to $503.06 million.

Over a week the picture looks weaker: down 7.41 percent in seven days. Over 30 days there is a gain of 0.31 percent, so the month is effectively flat with a sharp slump in the past week. Lay the chart on those two timescales side by side and the pattern that has shaped DOGE since late summer becomes visible: weeks of sideways movement, interrupted by short, violent downward bursts.

Since 8 October: 2.6 percent recovered, the 200-day line not

On 8 October we wrote at this point about the unlimited issuance of 13.55 million new DOGE per day, at a price of around $0.087 at the time. A good deal has happened since. The price slid on 9 October to a daily level of $0.0840 and has recovered 2.6 percent since then. On 9 October, 94 percent of liquidations in the DOGE futures market also hit long positions, so the downward burst was in large part a clearing-out of leveraged buy positions rather than an exit by spot holders.

What has not changed: the 200-day line stands, by our calculation from the daily closing prices of the past 200 days, at $0.0877. That line was above the price two days ago, and it is still above it today, currently by 1.73 percent. The buying of the past 24 hours has brought the price up to that line, then, but not through it. For the regular reader that means the level we wrote about on 4 and 5 October is still unbroken and has acted as a lid twice this week.

From a launch at $0.1530: how an ETF shrinks to $722,000 in 318 days

BWOW launched on 26 November 2025, at a time when Dogecoin cost $0.1530. The price has lost 43.7 percent since. That explains part of the shrinkage, but only part: a fund that merely follows the price with an unchanged number of shares would today sit at just under 56 percent of its starting assets. According to reports, net assets stood at about $722,000 on 8 September. For that to add up, considerably more shares must have been redeemed than created in the months in between.

This second part is the real finding. An exchange-traded fund grows and shrinks not through the price but through subscriptions and redemptions. When a product sits at a fraction of a million dollars after 318 days, it has not found demand that covers its running costs. Custodian bank, custodian, auditor and exchange listing all cost money regardless of volume. Below a certain threshold the provider pays out of pocket for every day the product stays alive.

The German route is called an ETP: 21Shares, ISIN CH1431521033, 2.50 percent a year

Here lies the point that gets lost in international coverage. An ETF authorised in the United States is in practice not available to private investors in Germany, because it lacks the key information document required under EU law. German brokers therefore normally block such products for retail clients. The closure of BWOW is not taking away a product you held.

The European route runs through an ETP, an exchange-traded note backed by the coin. In legal terms an ETP is not a fund but a bearer debt security issued by the provider; the ring-fenced fund assets of a fund do not exist there, and instead the deposited cryptocurrency serves as collateral. Deutsche Börse admitted the 21Shares Dogecoin ETP to trading as of 10 April 2026, with ISIN CH1431521033, WKN A4A5WJ and product costs of 2.50 percent a year. That the product is physically backed is stated in Deutsche Börse's listing notice.

The size comparison is the most interesting part: the European ETP reports assets of around $10.06 million on the provider's page, while the US fund being wound down most recently came to around $0.72 million. The product listed in Europe is therefore roughly fourteen times the size of the American one now closing. Anyone inferring from the closure that demand for packaged Dogecoin has vanished everywhere is drawing the wrong conclusion. The 2.50 percent annual cost is no side issue in this: over a flat 30 days of the kind DOGE has just been through, the fee alone eats around 0.21 percent of the stake per month. Which other products exist in Germany, and what to watch on the spread, we have set out in our overview of crypto ETFs and ETPs in Germany.

Holding period and tax: a cash wind-down counts differently from DOGE in your own wallet

The difference between the two routes shows up at the tax office at the latest, and it is why the choice between buying directly and buying a wrapper is more than a question of convenience in Germany.

Hold Dogecoin directly in your own wallet or at an exchange and section 23 of the German Income Tax Act applies. A sale within one year of purchase is a private disposal; the gain is taxed at your personal rate but stays tax-free as long as all private disposals in a year together remain below the €1,000 exemption threshold. After a holding period of one year the gain is tax-free regardless of its size. An exemption threshold is something other than an allowance: exceed it by one euro and the entire gain becomes taxable.

With an ETP the treatment depends on the specific structure, in particular on whether the terms provide for a claim to delivery of the deposited coins. The classification is disputed in the specialist literature and has been the subject of proceedings more than once. A rule of thumb from a forum will not carry you here. Read the product terms and settle the matter with your tax adviser before you buy. Which tools take the documentation of holding periods off your hands is shown in our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.

For the BWOW shareholders themselves, incidentally, this applies: a cash wind-down is a sale for tax purposes, even if the investor does nothing. The Bitwise notice says nothing about taxes, which is no surprise, because the treatment follows the investor's place of residence.

Our assessment: the closure is a demand signal, not a price signal

From the newsroom's point of view, 14 October says little about the Dogecoin price and a great deal about demand for packaged DOGE in the United States. The evidence sits above: $707,000 in holdings against $503 million of daily turnover, so 0.14 percent. Selling pressure that could be read off the chart does not come out of that. At the same time, a fund sitting below one million dollars after 318 days is a harsh verdict by the market on the format, not on the coin.

What argues against this reading should not be suppressed. The closure can draw institutional attention away from DOGE, and attention is a real price driver for a coin with no supply cap and no protocol yield. The remaining US products from Grayscale and 21Shares also operate at a scale that is more niche than breakthrough. Anyone who was betting on ETF inflows absorbing the daily new issuance has to set that assumption aside after this autumn.

Our assessment weighs up the situation and is not a buy or sell recommendation. With cryptocurrencies a total loss is possible.

200-day line at $0.0877, 50-day line at $0.0890: the price sits below both

For the coming days, two moving averages are the next levels that can be evidenced, both calculated from the daily closing prices of the past 200 and 50 days respectively. The 200-day line stands at $0.0877 and the 50-day line at $0.0890. The price sits 1.73 percent below the first and 3.23 percent below the second. For as long as both run above the price, the recovery of the past 24 hours counts technically as a countermove within a downtrend and not as a reversal.

On the downside the daily low of $0.084082 is the first marker, because it flags the zone where buyers stepped in yesterday. Below it begins the area where 9 October had its daily level. A moving average is not a forecast but an average of past prices; it describes where the asset last traded, and many market participants orient their orders by it. It carries no more weight than that, and no more should be given to it.

DOGE ETF wind-down: until 14 October only an exchange sale counts

Three concrete steps for the coming days:

1. Check the portfolio, but without haste. If BWOW is not in your portfolio, and that applies to practically every investor with a German broker, 14 October does not concern you. If you hold shares through a US broker, you choose between selling by the close on 14 October at the market price and a payout on 22 October at the 21 October net asset value. Where you can trade DOGE regularly in Germany is shown in our comparison of the best crypto exchanges.
2. Weigh the fee against the holding period. Before buying an ETP, compare the 2.50 percent annual cost with the spread and the order fees on a direct purchase, and do it over the holding period you actually plan. Document the purchase date and purchase price from the outset; the tools for that are in our comparison of crypto tax tools.
3. Settle custody before the next burst arrives. If you want to use the one-year period under section 23, you need a holding you will not have to touch for a year and a place where it sits safely. Which devices are suitable for that is set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Solana has been targeting 200 milliseconds per slot since Friday afternoon. The rebuild that began in August at 400 milliseconds is now complete, and the network runs twice as fast as it did in the summer. The price barely reacted: Solana traded at $109.84 on Saturday morning, 0.8 percent below the previous day.

Reports on the rebuild leave out a number that matters more to investors than the 200: the compute budget per block falls in the same proportion. On balance, Solana can process exactly as much per second as before. What changes is the waiting time, and it bears on your money in precisely two places, in leveraged trading and in your validator's commission.

The final step of SIMD-0525: 200 milliseconds since epoch 1053

The switch took effect with the start of epoch 1053. Anza, the company behind the Agave validator client, confirmed it on 9 October at 14:42 UTC on X with the words "SIMD-0525 mission accomplished: 200ms slots are now live on mainnet-beta". Jacob Creech of the Solana Foundation wrote the same day "Just like that, we're now running 200ms slots on Solana" and added two words: "Next up, Alpenglow".

A slot on Solana is the window in which a selected validator may build a block. Shorten that window and more blocks appear per second, but each one has less time and less room to compute. That is the heart of SIMD-0525, the proposal that set out the reduction in four stages.

The stages were deliberately spaced far apart, because after each one the number of missed blocks was measured. According to the documentation on solana.com, this block skip rate was the criterion that decided on the next step. Only once it stayed stable did the next reduction follow.

Solana price at $109.84: the $117 level from the start of the week has broken

On Saturday morning Solana stood at $109.84. The daily high was $111.76 and the daily low $108.42, so the range came to a good three percent. Market capitalisation stood at $64.7 billion and turnover over the past 24 hours at $2.4 billion. The price sits around 63 percent below the all-time high of $293.31.

Anyone following our coverage this week will recognise the direction. In our analysis of 6 October on Alpenglow and the 20-day line, the $117 level was the point at which it was to be decided whether the slide would be halted. It did not hold. On 8 October Solana traded at $115.23 and on 9 October at $108.88, as we recorded in our review of active addresses. Against that mark the price is 0.9 percent higher today.

What is interesting is what did not happen. The $108 zone has held twice, on Friday at $108.88 and overnight into Saturday at $108.42. That is the tighter of the two levels that now matter. On the upside, the next hurdle is the intraday low of 8 October, which now acts as resistance.

Four stages since August: each one fell short of its own target

Here it is worth looking at numbers that hardly anyone has put together so far. The reduction ran in four stages, and for each of them measured averages are available, drawn by Solana Compass from the completed epochs. Not a single stage hit its target.

Against a target of 400 milliseconds, the measured averages came in between 415 and 423 milliseconds, 3.8 to 5.8 percent above it. For the 350 target they were 365 to 367 milliseconds, a premium of 4.3 to 4.9 percent. For the 300 target, 315 to 317 milliseconds, so 5.0 to 5.7 percent. And for the 250 target in force until now, 266 to 269 milliseconds, a premium of 6.4 to 7.6 percent. Epoch 1052, the last before the switch, came in at 268.5 milliseconds.

The premium has therefore grown with every stage, from just under four to a good seven percent. Extend that trend and Solana lands not at 200 but at roughly 213 to 215 milliseconds on average. This is our own extrapolation from the four measured stages, not a target figure from Anza and not a forecast from a research house. It only becomes solid once epoch 1054 is complete and delivers a measurement of its own.

Why five blocks per second do not add up to more computing power

Every Solana block carries a fixed budget of compute units. A compute unit is the unit in which the network measures how demanding a transaction is: a simple transfer costs a few thousand, a nested swap on a decentralised exchange a multiple of that. Once a block's budget is used up, the remaining transactions have to go into the next one.

That budget scales with slot length. At 250 milliseconds it stood, according to the available reports, at 37.5 million compute units per block; at 200 milliseconds it is 30 million. Solana Compass gives no absolute figure but describes the same coupling and records that a block today has half as much room as it did at 400 milliseconds.

Scale that up to the second and the finding becomes clear. At 250 milliseconds there were four blocks per second at 37.5 million compute units each, making 150 million per second. At 200 milliseconds there are five blocks at 30 million each, which also makes 150 million per second. The capacity of the network has stayed exactly the same.

What has changed is the waiting time. A transaction arriving at the least fortunate moment now waits at most 200 milliseconds for its block instead of 250. On average it is 100 instead of 125 milliseconds. Those 25 milliseconds are the entire gain for an ordinary user, and they are not noticeable when trading on an exchange. Hoping that Solana now carries more load and will therefore drop fewer transactions at peak times means waiting for something this step does not deliver.

Validators now vote five times per second: what that costs the small operators

Validators on Solana vote on every slot, and each of these vote transactions costs a fee. Shorten the slot from 250 to 200 milliseconds and the number of votes per day rises by a quarter. Four votes per second become five, and around 345,600 a day become 432,000.

For large operators this hardly registers. For small validators with little delegated capital it is a noticeable item, because vote costs are fixed while commission income depends on the delegated amount. If you delegate to a small operator today, keep an eye on the commission in the coming weeks: rising fixed costs are the classic reason to raise it.

How tight things are at the top end we showed on 9 October: with a staking ratio of 74.6 percent, 18 validators together hold a blocking minority. The new cadence shifts the cost calculation in favour of precisely these large operators. If you delegate to a small validator, note the commission today and look again in four weeks; if it has risen, a move to a provider from our comparison of staking platforms is worth considering.

Alpenglow still has no mainnet date, and Anza now names a condition

On 6 October we had to write at this point that Alpenglow has no date. Nothing has changed there, but the reasoning has become more concrete. On Anza's Alpenglow page the mainnet is still listed as pending, together with the statement that the migration will be announced once the observation phase confirms the previous runs.

Alpenglow is the rebuild of the consensus procedure, not just of the cadence. The stated goal is finality of 150 milliseconds, the time after which a transaction counts as final and can no longer be rolled back. The migration on testnet was completed on 24 September and the one on devnet on 25 September. With SIMD-0525, several weeks lay between a completed testnet run and the mainnet each time.

So the order is clear: the cadence is finished, finality is still outstanding. For the applications in which Solana measures itself against conventional payment systems, finality is the more important figure, because a merchant can only deliver once the payment is final.

Leverage on Solana: a fifth of a second now separates the oracle update from liquidation

This is where the cadence becomes noticeable in euros for the first time. Decentralised futures exchanges on Solana take their prices from oracles that write their values into blocks. A liquidation order becomes valid as soon as the new price stands in the block. Shorten the slot and this whole sequence shortens with it.

If you trade Solana with leverage, you therefore have less time from now on between the moment the price touches the liquidation threshold and the moment the position is closed. With a three percent range between the daily high and the daily low, as Solana showed on Saturday, twentyfold leverage is enough to end a position without a margin call. The new cadence does not make that more likely, only faster.

In concrete terms: look up the liquidation price of every open position and compare its distance from the current price with the daily range. If the liquidation price sits within the range of the past 24 hours, the buffer is too thin. Which futures venue applies which leverage and which margin rule differs widely; what counts is the rule of your own platform, not the market average.

Staking and tax in Germany: the €256 exemption threshold remains the sticking point

The technical rebuild changes nothing about the tax framework, but it draws attention to a calculation many stakers overlook. Under the German Federal Ministry of Finance's circular on the taxation of crypto-assets, ongoing staking income counts in the year it is received as other income under section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act. An exemption threshold of €256 a year applies to it.

An exemption threshold is not an allowance. Exceed it by one euro and the entire amount becomes taxable, not just the part above it. With a staking yield in the single-digit percent range and a price of $109.84, a holding in the mid four figures is enough to break that threshold over a year. The coin itself, when sold, continues to fall under section 23 of the Income Tax Act with its one-year holding period.

If the income is not recorded as it comes in, it is hard to reconstruct later, because every payout is valued at the price on the day it arrived. There are tools for that which value the inflows automatically at the daily rate and produce a statement at year end. The information here does not replace tax advice, and with larger holdings the case belongs in expert hands.

Our assessment: the latency has been delivered, the capacity has not

From the newsroom's point of view, the completion of SIMD-0525 is a cleanly executed engineering project and at the same time a weaker price argument than the headlines suggest. Three pieces of evidence from this article support that: capacity per second remains unchanged at 150 million compute units, the measured premium over each target has risen from under four to over seven percent, and the price barely moved on the day of the switch, down 0.8 percent.

Against that stands the fact that latency really is the bottleneck for a certain class of applications. That Securitize launched twelve tokenised US equities on Solana of all chains on 8 October, settling in USDC, as CoinDesk reported, fits that picture: in securities trading, time to finality counts. Only that finality arrives with Alpenglow, and Alpenglow has no date. Reading Friday's step as a price driver anticipates an effect that is technically still outstanding.

200-millisecond slots: the measurement from epoch 1054 decides

The next solid data point is not an announcement but a measurement. As soon as epoch 1054 is complete, the first average under the new target will be available. If it comes in at roughly 213 to 215 milliseconds, it confirms the series of the four previous stages. If it is well above that, the last step was too large.

1. Recalculate the leverage. Hold the liquidation price of every open position against the daily range of $108.42 to $111.76. If it sits inside, raise the buffer or cut the position. The margin rules are set out in our perp DEX comparison.
2. Record the income. Note every staking payout at the price on the day it arrived, so that the €256 threshold stays in view. Tools for that are listed in our crypto tax tool comparison.
3. Offset the fees. If you use the slide below $110 to buy more, compare the spread and the order fee first, because with small amounts both eat up the advantage of the entry. The terms are set out in our exchange comparison.

(As of October 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The XRP Ledger disclosed a bug on 9 October 2026 that had been sitting in the chain's payment engine for about eleven years. Anyone exploiting it could have created XRP far beyond the total supply in a single valid transaction. The flaw has been closed since 25 September with version xrpld 3.4.1, and RippleX writes in its report that there is no indication anyone used it on a public network.

So this is not a warning about an attack in progress. What is left to settle is your own setup: where your coins sit, who runs the server behind them, and which version is running there. This article places the disclosure report in context, explains the arithmetic error in plain terms, and translates it into the points an investor in Europe can check without outside help.

Payment engine overflow: what the 9 October report discloses

The disclosure report for xrpld 3.4.1 describes two separate findings. The more serious one concerns the payment engine, the part of the software that routes a payment through the offers in the chain's order book and works out how much the payer must give up and the recipient must receive.

The finding was submitted on 22 September 2026 through the XRP Ledger bug bounty programme, the channel where security researchers hand in vulnerabilities for a reward. The report names Cayden Liao and Veria AI as the finders. It was initially rated "Major". After RippleX reproduced it, the team raised the rating to critical.

The report sets out the scale in a single sentence: an attacker could have created spendable XRP far beyond the total supply, and in one confirmed transaction. The stake needed would have been small. It took a few hundred XRP as a reserve, the deposit the network requires for open offers and returns once they are cleared, plus the usual fees. Versions xrpld 3.4.0 and all older releases were affected.

How an unchecked addition could make more than 100 billion XRP

The arithmetic error in one sentence

The payment engine added up the amounts of several offers using a 64-bit integer, without checking whether the result fit into that width. An overflow is exactly that case: when a sum exceeds the largest value that can be represented, it does not raise an error but starts again at zero. A very large sum turns into a very small number.

In practice, according to the report, that meant the offer providers were paid in full while the buyer was charged only the tiny wrapped-around remainder. The difference came out of nowhere. It could be triggered with a few hundred deliberately mispriced offers in the order book, which a single payment then swept up together.

What the supply check missed

The XRP Ledger has its own safeguard against precisely this kind of case, the invariant. An invariant is a rule that must hold after every transaction, or the network rejects it. One of them says that no XRP may be created.

That check ran inside the same bug and used the same unchecked arithmetic. So it saw no increase where there was one. Two layers of protection gave way because both rested on the same assumption. The report traces the bug back to the implementation of the payment engine in 2015.

xrpld 3.4.1: a fix without an amendment, effective at start-up

Changes to the rules of the XRP Ledger normally go through an amendment. An amendment is a rule change that validators vote on and that applies across the network only after a period of support. Validators are the servers that confirm the order of transactions.

For this finding RippleX deliberately chose a different route. The overflow checks in the offer sum and in the combination of several payment paths take effect without a vote as soon as a server starts up on 3.4.1. The invariant has counted with a wider counter ever since. The report calls this a considered exception, justified by the severity of the finding.

For operators the consequence is a clear duty. The report states that all server operators must move to 3.4.1 or newer to stay in sync with the network. Anyone staying on an older version has been amendment-blocked since the activation on 9 October, which means they are stuck on a set of rules the rest of the network has already moved past.

Timeline from 22 September to 9 October

The report sets out the sequence, and the intervals in it are the real finding. One day passed between the submission and a finished fix.

On 22 September 2026 the overflow came in and was reproduced. On 23 September the fix was in the release branch for 3.4.1. On 24 September the team concluded that a pure disruption scenario along this route would not really work. On 25 September xrpld 3.4.1 was published, and at the same time a two-week support phase began for the second fix. On 9 October both rule changes went live on the main network, and the report appeared the same day.

Two weeks between shipping and disclosure are deliberate, not an omission. As long as a large share of servers is still running the old version, a precise description of the bug amounts to a set of instructions. It was published on the day the rule change stood in the network.

Five of the XRPL's eight disclosure reports date from 2026: our own count

Whether a single finding is an outlier only becomes clear from the series. So we counted every post on the XRPL blog and picked out the disclosure reports. Among 273 posts there are eight such reports, and five of them carry a 2026 date.

The five from this year cover the Batch amendment in February, the handling of transaction amounts in March, a flood of manifest messages reported on 30 July, sponsored fees and reserves under XLS-68 reported on 7 August, and the report on 3.4.1 from 9 October. The three older ones fall in November 2024, April 2025 and September 2025. cryptoticker.io compiled this count itself on 10 October 2026.

The number can be read in two directions, and only naming both is honest. More reports can mean that more is being found, because a bounty programme and a contest such as the Sherlock Attackathon round are looking for it on purpose. It is also conceivable that the chain gains more surface area with every new building block where something can jam. For placing the overflow in context, what counts above all is that it comes from the old core and not from one of the new features.

Batch amendment and Permission Delegation: what else went live on 9 October

The report's second finding concerns Batch, a feature under proposal XLS-56 that lets an account submit up to eight transactions as a single unit. The specification requires every inner transaction to sit in a designated field. The server did not check this, so other fields could serve as a wrapper too.

More seriously, the set of permissible wrappers differed between software versions. Two servers could therefore have judged the same operation differently, and that is precisely what threatens consensus in the network. Versions 3.3.0 and 3.4.0 with the not-yet-active BatchV1_1 amendment were affected. The report names Attackathon submission F48 as the finder, initially rated low. Denis Angell of the XRPL Foundation established on 18 September that the first fix was incomplete, and Mayukha Vadari of RippleX found the risk to consensus. According to the report there was no damage: no loss of balances, no exposed keys, no consensus failure.

Since 9 October the network rejects every Batch transaction with the wrong wrapper, secured by the rule change fixBatchV1_2, which went live the same day as BatchV1_1. Our article from 1 October described the window in which this round of rule changes could take effect at the earliest, and the open question then was why parts of it were delayed: the XRP Ledger and the date for Permission Delegation. The report supplies the answer. Behind the delay stood the withdrawal of votes, which prevented an activation with an incomplete fix.

63.13 of 99.99 billion XRP: the supply cap as the core of the promise

XRP was created once and has not been issued since. Of a total supply of 99.99 billion units, 63.13 billion are in circulation, with the rest locked up or held by the company. Market capitalisation, the circulating supply at the current price, stands at around $88.8 billion as of 10 October 2026. That places XRP fifth among the largest cryptocurrencies.

This firmness of supply is where the overflow hurts. A flaw that creates spendable units beyond the cap does not hit a side feature but the promise the price rests on. An executed attack would not merely have changed the supply on paper; it would have damaged the check with which the network notices supply changes at all.

The critical rating is therefore understandable even though no balance was lost. The yardstick for findings like this is the possible damage, not the damage that occurred. And here it sat on the number the whole model carries.

How to check where your XRP sit if it comes to the worst

The software version of a server is not something an investor can change from outside. What can be checked is the chain of responsibility: who holds the coins, who runs the technology underneath, and who would have to be contacted in an emergency.

Exchange, broker or self-custody

If the XRP sit on an exchange, that exchange runs the connection to the chain and is responsible for the version. The investor has a claim to withdrawal there, not direct access to the coins. Which trading venues in Europe operate under a licence, and what fees that involves, is set out in our overview of the best crypto exchanges.

With self-custody the key sits with the holder, and the connection runs through a provider or an own server. Anyone using wallet software should update it after a report like this, because many programs use a bundled connection. With an own node the duty from the report applies directly: version 3.4.1 or newer, or the server drops out of consensus.

Three questions carry this check. First: does the holding sit with a provider domiciled and licensed in the EU, or on a platform without European supervision? Second: has the provider announced maintenance or an update after 25 September? Third: how would a withdrawal run if the network stood still for hours?

Custody under MiCA: a claim rather than possession

Since MiCA, the EU regulation for markets in crypto-assets, providers that hold or exchange crypto-assets for clients need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. Their duties include keeping client holdings separate from their own and being liable for the loss of assets held in custody.

That shifts the question without resolving it. An authorised custodian can be contacted and carries liability, but it sits between the holder and the chain. Self-custody turns that around: no third party can freeze the holding, and nobody is liable for a lost key. Which form is right depends on the amount and on how often somebody trades.

With a protocol bug like this one, both help only so far. A flaw in the payment engine takes effect on the chain, not on the holder's device. What custody decides is how quickly somebody can react if a network has to be halted or rebuilt.

XRP price at $1.41: the market did not move on the news

XRP trades at $1.41 on 10 October 2026, up 1.1 percent on the previous day. The daily range runs from $1.37 to $1.41. Over a week it is down 5.6 percent, over thirty days up 0.8 percent.

The levels for the coming days follow from that range. On the downside sits the daily low at $1.37, on the upside the daily high caps it at $1.41. That the 9 October disclosure left no mark fits the content: what was reported was a closed flaw with no indication of exploitation, not an incident in progress.

Our assessment: a bug that sat for eleven years is not a one-off

From the newsroom's point of view, the handling of this finding is the counterpart to the bug itself. One day from submission to fix, two weeks to disclosure, a fix without a vote where voting would have taken too long: this is the conduct one would want from a network of this size, and it is documented in the report.

The other side sits in our own count. Five of eight disclosure reports within one year, plus a finding from the 2015 core that two layers of protection let through at the same time because they used the same arithmetic. Anyone concluding from this that the chain is now audited is reading too much into it. The origin of the finding argues against that reading: code that ran unremarkably for years, not a freshly built feature. For an assessment of XRP as an investment the episode changes nothing about the numbers; it changes something about the question of how much auditing the foundations still need.

XRPL patch: without version 3.4.1 a node drops out of consensus

1. Settle responsibility. Check where your own XRP sit and who runs the connection to the chain. With a provider, what counts is its authorisation and whether client holdings are kept separate. Which platforms operate under European supervision is shown in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Follow the state of the chain yourself. The activation of rule changes and the version of a server are publicly visible. Anyone tracking that regularly notices a changeover before the next report. Tools for it are listed in our overview of analytics platforms.
3. Document holdings and holding periods. After a protocol incident a clean record of your own inflows and outflows counts, for tax purposes too. In Germany the one-year holding period decides whether a gain is taxable. How to keep track of that is covered in our list of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

The episode can be read in the source itself: in the disclosure report for xrpld 3.4.1 and in the announcement of version 3.4.1 from 25 September.

(As of October 10, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Executives are war-gaming the political fallout of a major AI-driven cyberattack and preparing to brief Congress fast if and when necessary.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal wants Cantor Fitzgerald to open its records on Tether and on how much Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's family has earned from its business deal.

The crypto platform filed for designated contract market and futures commission merchant licenses, which would let it run its own regulated event-contract venue instead of relying on overseas partners.

Bitcoin bounced after dipping to around $80,000. Traders are placing increasingly high odds BTC slips further before October is over.

Starknet is "actively considering" becoming its own blockchain, a move it says would make it the first fully quantum-resistant network by 2027.

XRPL developers remediate critical flaw that could have let attackers create XRP.

Here's everything you need to know about the Ledger-related $92.9 million wallet drain across Bitcoin, Ethereum, TRON, BNB Chain and Polygon.

Ripple Prime gains top honor as it becomes an award-winning brokerage firm for institutional market services.

As once every four years in September, XRP price stalls inside a narrow range, threatening to repeat its notorious multi-year grind.

Shiba Inu added a substantial volume to exchange balances which raises a possibility of a rapid market reversal.

TLDR:

• Strive Bitcoin funding through SATA generated an estimated $55 million during the week of Oct. 5, enough to purchase roughly 638 BTC at recent prices.
• SATA traded above its $100 par value on Oct. 5 and for much of Oct. 6, then stayed below par through Oct. 9, slowing estimated issuance.
• Strive held 29,462 BTC on Oct. 2 after buying 2,000 BTC at an average price near $84,422 between Sept. 28 and Oct. 2, while quarter-to-date BTC Yield reached 18.5%.
• Strategy sold zero STRC shares from Sept. 28 to Oct. 4, yet bought 334 BTC using MSTR common stock, lifting its holdings to 848,000 BTC.

Strive Bitcoin funding is accelerating through its SATA preferred stock program. The company generated an estimated $55 million during the week beginning October 5. That amount could purchase about 638 BTC at current prices. SATA traded $317 million in total volume during the period. However, issuance depends on shares trading at or above the $100 par value. 

The preferred stock spent three sessions below that level. Most estimated proceeds came during Monday and Tuesday. Bitcoin traded near $82,800 on Friday, valuing 638 BTC at roughly $53 million. The result closely links Strive’s Bitcoin treasury strategy to Strategy’s capital markets playbook.

Strive Bitcoin Funding Depends on SATA Trading Above Par

That distinction matters because volume is not the same as corporate funding. Traders can exchange SATA below par without creating new proceeds. Strive therefore needs active demand and a supportive price. The next filing will actually determine how much cash reached its Bitcoin treasury.

Market trackers estimate that Strive sold about $55 million through its at-the-market program. The estimate uses eligible SATA volume and a capture ratio. That ratio reflects how much trading typically converts into newly issued shares. Past Securities and Exchange Commission filings help calibrate the calculation.

An ATM program lets a company issue shares gradually into public trading. It avoids the timing pressure of a large financing. Yet SATA cannot issue efficiently when its market price falls below par. Selling beneath $100 would weaken the program’s economics and dilute its yield proposition.

SATA traded above $100 on October 5 and for much of October 6. It then remained below par through October 9. Daily volume still reached some of its highest levels. The gap shows that trading activity alone does not guarantee Bitcoin purchases.

For Strive Bitcoin buyers, the distinction between volume and issuance is material. A busy tape can suggest strong demand, yet the company may receive little cash. Only eligible trading produces room for new shares. The estimate therefore remains provisional until the company files its next report.

The mechanism creates a brake. Investors must support SATA at par or higher before Strive can expand supply. When that support disappears, issuance pauses. Bitcoin buying then relies on cash already available or another financing route.

Strive Bitcoin Holdings Grow While Strategy Uses Common Stock

Strive reported 29,462 BTC on October 2. The balance followed a purchase of 2,000 BTC between September 28 and October 2. The average purchase price was about $84,422 per coin.

The company also reported adding 8,137 BTC during the third quarter. Those purchases carried an average cost of $78,885. Strive’s BTC Yield reached 18.5% quarter-to-date and 63.2% year-to-date on September 30. The metric measures Bitcoin growth per share.

The balance sheet has no debt principal. However, SATA carries about $168 million in annualized dividend obligations. Each new preferred share adds to that future payment burden. The model depends on continued investor demand for the income-oriented security.

Strategy provides the larger comparison. Its October 5 filing showed no STRC shares sold between September 28 and October 4. Strategy still bought 334 BTC from October 1 through October 4. It funded that purchase with MSTR common stock, taking its holdings to 848,000 BTC.

Both companies illustrate the same Bitcoin treasury model. Preferred or common equity raises capital for Bitcoin accumulation. The financing channel changes when market prices move. Strive’s SATA program currently shows that constraint more sharply because issuance stops below par.

The next weekly 8-K filings should provide the exact number of Bitcoin bought with SATA proceeds. They will also show whether Strive resumed issuance after the preferred stock recovered above $100.

The post Strive Bitcoin Has Enough for 638 BTC Through SATA Stock Sales appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Ethereum price prediction is bearish below the 50-day SMA, with $2,370 support and the 100-day average near $2,200 shaping the next levels to watch.
• U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs shed about $542 million in the week ended October 9, their largest weekly outflow since late January.
• BlackRock’s ETHA accounted for roughly $477 million in weekly withdrawals, while total U.S. Bitcoin ETF outflows reached $681 million.
• Whales reportedly added more than 166,000 ETH in 72 hours even as exchange balances rose 90,000 ETH and futures open interest declined.

Ethereum price prediction has weakened recently. Ether fell below its 50-day simple moving average. U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs logged their largest weekly outflow since January. ETH traded near $2,491 on October 10. It was down more than 7% in seven days, while trading volume fell 61% to $7.2 billion. 

Yet whale data offered a counterpoint: holders added about 166,000 ETH over 72 hours, alongside Bitcoin and XRP purchases. The conflicting signals leave traders watching $2,370 support for now. A break could expose the $2,200 area, while a defense may steady the market. ETF redemptions and rising exchange balances remain risks.

Ethereum Price Prediction Weighs ETF Outflows Against Whale Buying

U.S. spot Ethereum ETFs saw approximately $542 million in net withdrawals for the week ended October 9, SoSoValue data showed. It was their largest outflow since late January. BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust, known as ETHA, accounted for about $477 million. It was the fund’s largest weekly withdrawal since December 2025. Bitcoin ETFs saw pressure, with $681 million leaving during the period. 

These Ethereum ETF outflows point to reduced exposure. They do not show every investor is selling ETH. However, they weaken a key source of demand during a price decline. An outflow streak could cap attempts to recover above resistance. Whale accumulation complicates that bearish picture. Analyst Ali Martinez says large wallets added roughly 15,000 BTC and more than 166,000 ETH. They also added about 45 million XRP in 72 hours. 

Whale balances can rise while smaller holders or funds distribute coins. For the Ethereum price prediction, this divergence matters. Wallet demand may absorb some supply without quickly reversing ETF outflows or retail selling. Traders need follow-through in spot buying to treat the signal as durable.

ETF flows and wallet data track different activity. ETF figures capture listed-product flows; whale estimates track large on-chain balances. Those signals can diverge if ETF investors withdraw while other holders accumulate. 

The Ethereum price prediction depends on whether whale buying continues beyond the 72-hour window. Continued purchases could absorb some supply, but a pause would leave ETF redemptions as the clearer demand signal.

Exchange Inflows and Futures Deleveraging Add Pressure on ETH

Exchange data adds caution. CoinGlass figures show Ethereum balances on trading platforms rising from 11.71 million ETH on October 8. They reached 11.8 million the next day. That 90,000-ETH increase marked the highest balance since September 23. Coins transferred to exchanges may be prepared for sale, but transfers alone do not prove liquidation. At the same time, open interest fell from 13.29 million to 12.77 million ETH. 

Lower futures open interest points to reduced outstanding positions and possible deleveraging. It can ease liquidation risk, but it also signals weaker appetite for leveraged longs. Combined, rising exchange balances and lower OI suggest traders are reducing exposure as spot supply increases. For the Ethereum price prediction, exchange balances now add another warning. 

On the daily chart, ETH’s relative strength index slipped to 39, its lowest reading since June. Price also moved below the 50-day SMA. The $2,500 level has also turned into overhead resistance after ETH fell beneath it. The ETH price forecast hinges first on $2,370. A daily close below that support would strengthen the bearish case. 

It would put the 100-day SMA near $2,200 in view. This Ethereum price prediction would need confirmation from continued selling or weak demand. If buyers defend $2,370, ETH could consolidate instead. A recovery above the 50-day average would give bulls a stronger signal. ETH had not reclaimed it by publication.

The post Ethereum ETFs Post Biggest Weekly Outflows Since January as Price Breaks Below $2,500 appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR:

• Cardano price rose nearly 7% on Oct. 10 and reached about $0.256 after a short-window rebound.
• ADA reclaimed the $0.2353 moving average and $0.2359 Fibonacci level, while reported volume fell 34.86%, leaving the breakout short of strong confirmation.
• Daily active addresses reached 27,500 and 27,200 on Oct. 7–8 after CIP-0113 launched, but ADA fell roughly 13% over that same period.
• Analyst Andreou’s $0.90 scenario remains conditional: ADA must hold the 0.22–0.25 base, reclaim 0.30–0.35, then clear higher resistance zones.

Cardano’s ADA token climbed 7% on Oct. 10, trading near $0.256 as buyers returned to the market. The Cardano price gain outpaced major cryptocurrencies during the session. The rebound followed an October decline, making this a recovery attempt rather than a confirmed trend reversal. 

Cardano price analysis reveal ADA reclaimed its 30-day average near $0.2353 and the 50% Fibonacci level around $0.2359. But reported trading volume fell 34.86%, leaving buyers to prove they can defend the breakout. Network activity had increased earlier in the week.

Cardano Price Rebound Tests Support as Volume Remains Thin

The reclaimed average and retracement level now form a short-term checkpoint. A drop below them would weaken the breakout case. The support band extends from $0.2359 to $0.2276. 

Holding that area could leave room for a test of weekly Supertrend resistance near $0.2762. The Cardano price would need a daily close above $0.256 to show that buyers can sustain the bounce. A rejection at that level would raise the risk of a false breakout.

Volume remains a key concern. The 34.86% decline suggests the rally drew less participation than its price move implied. The figure varies by exchange and measurement window, but the direction argues for caution. The Altcoin Season Index rose 5.17% to 61, pointing to stronger relative demand for alternative tokens. That measure describes rotation; it does not prove capital will stay in ADA.

Bitcoin traded near $82,800, a level that matters for altcoins. Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $729 million over two days, adding pressure to risk assets. Renewed selling could again put ADA support levels under strain.

The immediate test is twofold: defend reclaimed levels and attract stronger spot volume. Until both happen, the Cardano price recovery remains technically constructive but unconfirmed.

ADA Active Addresses Rose After CIP-0113, Then Price Fell

Santiment reported about 27,500 daily active Cardano addresses on Oct. 7 and 27,200 on Oct. 8, around 1.7 times September’s weekday average. The increase coincided with CIP-0113 going live on mainnet on Oct. 7. The standard enables programmable tokens with issuer-defined rules. The Cardano Foundation says issuers can add KYC checks, sanctions screening, and transfer restrictions to native tokens. Wallets and explorers can handle these assets like other Cardano tokens. The standard required no protocol hard fork. 

Coincidence does not establish that the upgrade caused the address spike. Santiment’s figures also showed Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses at or below September averages. Active addresses measure participation, not intent. 

They cannot show whether users bought ADA, moved tokens, staked, or used applications. The Cardano price fell about 13% from the Oct. 6 close through Oct. 8, despite the increase. That divergence shows network use did not translate into immediate buying pressure.

The Cardano price bounce came on October 10, after both the activity increase and the selloff. It should not be attributed to CIP-0113 without evidence linking buyers to the upgrade. A lasting signal would require elevated addresses to persist beyond launch. 

Analyst Giannis Andreou says initial support is present at 0.22–0.25 and first resistance at 0.30–0.35. A weekly reclaim and successful retest would strengthen that recovery case. Higher zones sit at 0.40–0.45 and 0.55–0.65. The $0.90 scenario depends on clearing each barrier, so it remains conditional. A sustained break below $0.22 would weaken the setup.

The post Cardano Price Rises 7% as ADA Tests Key Resistance Near $0.28 appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Eli Lilly stock gains 0.62% as new Phase 3b findings highlight treatment gains.
• Combined therapy changes 482 proteins versus 140 with Taltz alone by Week 36.
• Gene activity shifts span 467 genes with both drugs, versus 16 on Taltz alone.
• Taltz and Zepbound deliver improved skin clearance and weight loss at Week 36.
• Researchers report consistent safety findings, but no new approved indication.

Eli Lilly and Company stock rose 0.62% to $1,176.80 on Friday, gaining $7.20 during the trading session. The company announced new Phase 3b findings showing broader biological responses from combined Taltz and Zepbound treatment. The results expand earlier evidence of improved psoriasis symptoms and weight reduction among adults living with psoriasis and obesity.

Eli Lilly and Company, LLY

Eli Lilly Reports Stronger Phase 3b Results for Taltz and Zepbound

Eli Lilly released new exploratory findings from its TOGETHER-PsO Phase 3b clinical trial examining two existing prescription medicines. Researchers compared the combined use of Taltz and Zepbound against Taltz alone in adults with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. The study also included participants with obesity or overweight alongside at least one additional weight-related medical condition.

The latest analysis identified broader changes in proteins and genes among participants receiving both medicines compared with Taltz alone. By Week 36, researchers identified changes involving 482 proteins in the combination group, compared with 140 in the other group. Similarly, gene expression changes affected 467 genes with combined treatment, against only 16 genes with Taltz alone.

These biological differences appeared as early as Week 12, according to the pharmaceutical company’s newly released findings. Researchers also identified stronger reductions in inflammatory immune activity among participants receiving both treatments over the study period. Eli Lilly presented the findings at the 2026 Fall Clinical Dermatology Conference in Las Vegas.

Combined Treatment Improves Skin Clearance and Weight Reduction

The latest findings build on earlier clinical results showing better treatment outcomes among participants receiving Taltz alongside Zepbound. At Week 36, the combination delivered superior skin clearance and meaningful weight reduction compared with Taltz alone. Furthermore, participants maintained or improved these clinical benefits through Week 52, according to Eli Lilly’s previously reported findings.

The analysis also examined neutrophils, which play an important role in the body’s inflammatory immune response. Researchers found that combined treatment produced greater changes in inflammatory pathways associated with these immune cells. Changes in certain neutrophil-related markers partly explained the additional improvement in psoriasis severity scores among combination-treatment participants.

The TOGETHER-PsO trial included 274 adults across multiple clinical research centers, with participants divided equally between two treatment groups. One group received Taltz alone, while the other received Taltz and Zepbound through injections under the skin. Both groups also received guidance on reducing calorie intake and increasing physical activity throughout the clinical study.

Eli Lilly Expands Research Into Psoriasis and Obesity

Eli Lilly designed the study to examine the relationship between metabolic health and inflammatory skin conditions. Approximately 61% of Americans with psoriasis also experience obesity or overweight alongside another weight-related medical condition, according to Lilly. The findings provide additional research into how treatments targeting different biological processes may influence both conditions.

Taltz works by blocking interleukin-17A, an immune signaling protein involved in inflammation and several related inflammatory conditions. Zepbound targets GIP and GLP-1 receptors, helping regulate appetite and support weight management in eligible adults. The two medicines therefore act through different biological pathways, providing the basis for investigating their combined clinical effects.

Eli Lilly reported that the combination’s safety findings matched the established safety profiles of the individual medicines. The exploratory results do not establish a new approved indication for using the medicines together. The company continues examining the relationship between immune and metabolic processes as researchers assess broader approaches to psoriasis management.

The post Eli Lilly and Company (LLY) Stock: Rises as Taltz and Zepbound Show Promising Results appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• ASTS stock plunges 12.01% as BlueBird satellite deployment remains a key focus.
• AST SpaceMobile targets 45 satellites by early 2027 to expand mobile coverage.
• The company needs 45 to 60 satellites for continuous service in key markets.
• AST SpaceMobile reports $3.7 billion in funding to support satellite expansion.
• Commercial satellite service could generate nearly $1 billion in annual revenue.

AST SpaceMobile, Inc. stock dropped 12.01% to $50.10 on Friday, losing $6.83 during the trading session. The decline comes as the company works to expand its BlueBird satellite network and prepare commercial broadband services. Its satellite deployment targets remain central to future revenue growth and the company’s long-term business plans.

AST SpaceMobile, Inc., ASTS

AST SpaceMobile currently operates 13 spacecraft in orbit, according to its second-quarter 2026 update. The company needs a substantially larger constellation to provide continuous mobile coverage across its target markets. Management expects to reach approximately 45 satellites by early 2027, supporting its planned commercial network expansion.

AST SpaceMobile Targets 45 BlueBird Satellites by Early 2027

AST SpaceMobile reported 13 spacecraft in orbit during its August 10, 2026, earnings call. The company estimates that continuous broadband coverage requires between 45 and 60 satellites across major international markets. These markets include the United States, Europe, and Japan, where the company plans to introduce satellite-based mobile connectivity.

The BlueBird network aims to provide broadband services directly to standard smartphones without requiring special equipment. AST SpaceMobile plans to extend mobile coverage into areas where traditional cellular infrastructure remains limited. Its technology could support telecommunications providers seeking broader network coverage without building additional ground infrastructure across remote regions.

The company has established partnerships with more than 60 mobile network operators across different international markets. These telecommunications partners serve more than 3 billion subscribers, creating a substantial potential customer base. Commercial availability depends on satellite deployment, network integration, regulatory approvals, and agreements with participating mobile operators.

AST SpaceMobile Revenue Targets Depend on Network Expansion

AST SpaceMobile generated $31.5 million in revenue during the second quarter of 2026, according to its financial results. Government contracts and infrastructure projects for commercial partners provided revenue during the reporting period. The company continues developing its satellite network before launching commercial mobile broadband services at a larger scale.

Over the previous twelve months, AST SpaceMobile recorded approximately $100 million in revenue from its existing operations. Management has outlined an ambitious target of nearly $1 billion during its first year of commercial service. Achieving that target requires substantial network capacity and successful service agreements with telecommunications companies across multiple geographic regions.

The company’s valuation also reflects expectations surrounding its future commercial operations and satellite deployment progress. AST SpaceMobile trades at approximately 147.7 times sales, compared with around 3.0 times sales for the S&P 500. Is approximately $600 million annual net loss highlights the financial demands of developing a global satellite communications network.

AST SpaceMobile Funding Supports BlueBird Satellite Deployment

AST SpaceMobile estimates that each satellite will cost approximately $21 million to $23 million, including launch expenses. The company intends to develop a constellation exceeding 90 satellites, extending beyond its initial continuous coverage requirements. Based on those estimates, 90 satellites would require approximately $1.89 billion to $2.07 billion in combined satellite and launch costs.

The company reported more than $3.7 billion in pro forma cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash following recent financing. This figure incorporates $1.15 billion in gross proceeds from convertible senior notes issued during July 2026. Management expects those financial resources to support additional satellite launches, manufacturing expansion, and the broader network development program.

AST SpaceMobile continues to face financial and operational challenges as it expands its satellite infrastructure. A shareholder class action alleges that the company misrepresented aspects of its capital resources and liquidity position. Satellite manufacturing schedules, launch execution, and commercial network activation remain important factors influencing its future financial performance.

The post AST SpaceMobile, Inc. (ASTS) Stock: BlueBird Launches Hold the Key to Future Gains appeared first on Blockonomi.

Bitcoin’s price recovery from the Thursday collapse continues as the asset currently sits close to $83,000 after marking a multi-week low at under $80,500.

Most larger-cap alts have remained sluggish on a daily basis, with ETH struggling below $2,500 and XRP barely defending the $1.40 support. ADA and NEAR, though, have posted notable gains.

BTC Eyes $83K

The business week began on the right foot for the primary cryptocurrency, which surged by a few grand on Monday morning to touch $87,000 for the first time since the previous Friday. However, just as it happened at the end of the previous week, BTC was stopped and quickly dipped to $85,000.

The bulls initiated another leg up that resulted in challenging the same resistance, but the bears intervened even faster this time and brought a whole army. Instead of another bounce, bitcoin slumped hard to under $84,000 on Tuesday. It couldn’t really recover on Wednesday, and the bulls lost complete control of the market on Thursday.

At the time, BTC crashed by several grand and dipped to a multi-week low of $80,400. It finally rebounded after this near-$7,000 decline in just days and jumped to $83,400 yesterday. However, it was stopped there and now trades inches below $83,000.

Its market capitalization has pulled back to $1.660 trillion on CMC, but its dominance over the alts has skyrocketed to 59.5%.

ADA, NEAR Pump

Ethereum slipped to $2,400 during the market-wide crash and has recovered slightly to almost $2,500 as of now, but it’s still far away from its local top at $2,800. XRP dipped to $1.34 before it rebounded to $1.41 as of now. BNB is back at $750 after a slight daily increase, similar to DOGE and LINK.

In contrast, SOL, TRX, and HYPE are slightly in the red. Cardano’s ADA has rebounded by 7% and has reclaimed the $0.255 level. NEAR Protocol’s native token has risen the most among the larger-cap alts, rocketing by over 10% to $5.25. DOT, WLD, BTW, and WLF have also charted notable gains.

The total crypto market cap shed $200 billion from top to bottom but has rebounded slightly to $2.8 trillion on CMC now.

The post NEAR Rockets by 10% Daily, BTC Price Eyes $83K: Weekend Watch appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Toobit is an award-winning international cryptocurrency exchange that recently announced that it has been named the Best Exchange for Trading Tokenized Equities at the CoinGape Global Onchain Awards 2026.

Toobit, among other nominees, was evaluated on tokenized equity listings, trading volume, and institutional trading capabilities. Winners were determined through quantitative research, expert jury review, and community participation. The Global Onchan Awards is intended to recognize institutions and innovators that advance the convergence of traditional and onchain finance across tokenization, digital assets, infrastructure, and compliance.

A Foray Into Traditional Finance

Recall that the exchange introduced Stock Futures in February 2026 with 10 major US equities, including Apple (APPL), Tesla (TSLA), and Nvidia (NVDA), available as USDT-settled perpetual contracts.

This move has since been expanded as part of the exchange’s overall TradFi lineup. It now covers over 240 pairs across equities, forex, precious metals, and indices.

Traders are able to access these markets using their existing Toobit account and USDT balance, which makes it very convenient, especially for those who also want to open long and short positions, participate in round-the-clock trading, and rely on up to 500x leverage on selected pairs.

Not the First Award for Toobit

Now, it’s important to note that this is far from being the first award that the exchange has received. In fact, it marks the fifth one in 2026.

Earlier this year, Toobit was named Best New Exchange at the Crypto Awards 2025, Digital Asset Derivatives Platform of the Year at the Hedgeweek Global Digital Assets Awards 2026, Best Crypto Exchange for Day Trading at the CoinGape Web3 Innovation Awards 2026, and Global Exchange of the Year at the FinanceFeeds Awards 2026.

The award also comes as tokenized equities continue to gain traction through the year. The onchain market cap of tokenized equities soared to almost $5 billion in early September, while the active market capitalization is up more than 300% since the start of the year.

Monthly trading volume is soaring, reaching almost $8 billion as opposed to just $240 million in January.

The post Toobit Wins Best Exchange for Trading Tokenized Equities Award appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The XRP-focused treasury company has officially completed its business combination with Armada Acquisition Corp. II, clearing the final major hurdle before its Nasdaq debut.

Evernorth will enter the public markets holding approximately 473 million Ripple tokens and around $300 million in gross cash proceeds.

473M XRP Heads to Nasdaq

The development will allow public-market investors to gain access to one of the largest corporate XRP treasury firms, which intends to do considerably more than passively hold the asset. The closing announced on Friday evening follows the shareholder vote previously reported by us, when roughly 20.5 million Armada shares voted in favor of the merger, compared with just 1.4 million against.

At the time, Evernorth disclosed more than $1 billion raised through the transaction and associated private placements. Previous investors in the company came from prominent names in the crypto and traditional finance space, including Ripple itself, SBI Group, Panter Capital, GSR, and Arrington Capital.

“Our conviction in XRP has always been rooted in the belief that the ecosystem would continue to mature, attracting serious builders and capital. Our support for Evernorth is a natural extension of that thesis. It brings scaled capital, active participation, and the standards of a public company, playing a critical role in the institutional development of this infrastructure,” said Michael Arrington, founder of Arrington Capital.

The final timeline has shifted slightly from earlier expectations, as Evernorth previously anticipated closing the deal on October 7 and beginning trading the following day. The completed transaction now, though, puts the official Nasdaq debut on Monday, October 12, while management expects to ring the closing bell on October 14, reads the announcement.

Not Just XRP Holding

Evernorth described itself as an actively managed XRP treasury. CEO Asheesh Birla said the company intends to deploy capital throughout the XRP economy while pursuing strategies designed to increase XRP per share over time.

The idea is to participate in institutional and DeFi yield strategies, ecosystem infrastructure, on-chain credit markets, and other capital-markets activities. Evernorth’s post noted that this approach distinguishes XRPN from a passive vehicle that simply tracks the price of the cross-border token.

The post XRP’s Nasdaq Moment Is Here: Evernorth Completes Merger appeared first on CryptoPotato.

On-chain researchers estimate that somewhere between $72 million and $86 million may have been stolen, as Ledger begins investigating reports of these major crypto losses from users who bought hardware wallets from an authorized Southeast Asian reseller.

The hardware wallet manufacturer said there is no indication that its own infrastructure, systems, or services were compromised. However, users are piling on X to complain about substantial losses.

How Much Was Stolen?

The official support channel of Ledger on X confirmed yesterday evening that it was investigating user reports from customers of CryptoBilis, which is listed as an authorized reseller in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Ledger asked CryptoBilis to pause all sales and shipments for the time being.

More importantly, the post urged anyone who purchased a device from the reseller in the past 90 days and has not completed installation not to begin setup now. Customers already using such devices were advised to consider transferring their assets to a new Ledger signer using a newly generated seed phrase.

On-chain sleuth tanuki42 traced more than $72 million to suspected theft addresses, while fellow investigator Specter estimated losses exceed $86 million, across BTC, ETH, and TRX. Ledger’s official account didn’t confirm either figure, and it remains unclear whether the two estimates include overlapping transactions.

MistTrack noted that the losses could be closer to $90 million, while Tether reportedly froze USDT held in addresses connected with the incident.

What Happened?

The details on what exactly transpired are still scarce, but Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao said the currently available information suggests a localized supply-chain attack involving one vendor, with a small number of customers potentially receiving counterfeit or physically tampered Ledger devices.

Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles added that he had already been examining modified Ledger devices containing a hidden hardware implant and asked CryptoBilis to open units from its inventory to see whether similar components were present.

He said an implant he examined could monitor internal communications used to display recovery words, potentially allowing an attacker to capture a seed phrase even though the genuine Ledger Secure Element itself remained intact.

Ledger claimed that the reports appear limited to products sold through CryptoBilis and that it has “no indication that Ledger’s security infrastructure, systems, or services have been compromised.”

Meanwhile, users such as Edward Winz have publicly admitted to being victims of the incident, with $1 million reportedly stolen.

The Ledger incident comes just a month after its biggest competitor, Trezor, experienced one of its own, with the personal information of over 80,000 US users compromised.

The post Ledger Investigates $86M Crypto Drain as Reseller Supply-Chain Fears Grow appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Only a few days ago, the native cryptocurrency of Ripple traded high, with analysts speculating about its chances of taking down the first major resistance level at $1.51-$1.53 before heading toward the next at over $1.60.

Instead, the bears reemerged, drove the entire market down, and XRP slumped below $1.35 before it found some support. EGRAG CRYPTO, though, remains undeterred, indicating that even another leg down wouldn’t halt the asset’s bull market progress.

$1.20 Is the Key Macro Level

The popular analyst who has been bullish on XRP even as the asset slipped below $1.00 in early August said the token can still retrace to $1.20 and maintain its bullish structure. His analysis focuses on the monthly chart and the relationship between the 33 EMA and 111 EMA. He added that it has historically helped define major cycle structures and pointed to the line of the sand: $1.20.

As long as the cross-border token holds above that area on a monthly closing basis, EGRAG believes the broader bullish thesis remains intact. However, a sustained breakdown below it would force him to reassess, as it would likely invalidate the pattern.

If XRP continues its recovery from the recent sub-$1.35 low, then EGRAG identified $1.65 as the first major level it has to reclaim. Then, he turned even more bullish, noting that the asset can skyrocket to somewhere between $4.00 and $8.00 if the structure develops further. His much more aggressive “Valhalla” scenario extends beyond $15, although that remains highly speculative and dependent on the macro setup holding up.

Similar Pattern In-Play?

Fellow bullish-on-XRP analyst Bird outlined a different structure on the asset’s four-hour chart, highlighting three descending resistance trendlines. He argued that the first two were followed by strong upside moves after the token found support, and the third may be developing now.

Bird identified a long-term ascending support line, a major demand zone at around $1.30-$1.34, and resistance between $1.52 and $1.56. As explained above, XRP has remained between the two for the past several weeks.

If the asset is finally able to break through to the upside and the previous pattern repeats, the analyst believes the move could open the door toward $2.00. Interestingly, Celal Kucuker supported Bird’s view, saying $2.00 is “within reach” by the end of the month after XRP bounced from a “solid support level.”

$XRP IS SETTING UP FOR SOMETHING VERY INTERESTING.

Look closely at this 4 hour chart.

Notice a pattern?

THREE descending resistance trendlines (orange).

The first two were followed by explosive moves upwards after XRP found support.

Now we’re seeing a THIRD potentially forming the exact same setup.

We’ve got a long-term ascending support trendline (white), a major demand zone around $1.30–$1.34, and resistance sitting at $1.52–$1.56.

If history rhymes, a breakout above that resistance could open the door towards $2.00.

Three similar structures. One very interesting possibility.

I’m watching this VERY closely.

— Bird (@Bird_XRPL) October 9, 2026

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