The upgrade enhances Solana's transaction efficiency, potentially increasing validator revenue and influencing transaction ordering dynamics.

The post Jito upgrades Block Assembly Marketplace, cuts bundle delays by about 50ms appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The US dominance in data center financing underscores its pivotal role in AI growth, but reliance on tax incentives poses potential risks.

The post ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood says nearly 90% of data center financing is in the US appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Increased funding highlights the GOP's strategic focus on securing pivotal seats, reflecting broader electoral stakes in the 2026 midterms.

The post Senate Republicans boost Ricketts funding by $8M in tight Nebraska race appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The incident underscores the growing intersection of AI development and national security, highlighting vulnerabilities in tech firms.

The post US charges Saudi OpenAI engineer over alleged office bugging appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

TRON settled $2.2126 trillion in stablecoins in Q3 2026, with supply hitting $93.88 billion and a 23.2% share of stablecoin card spending.

The post TRON settles $2.2 trillion in stablecoins in Q3 as onchain payments grow appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

The Amount of Bitcoin on Exchanges Is Shrinking. Is a Rally Imminent?

Bitcoin’s price could be due a move upwards as the supply of the leading cryptocurrency on exchanges shrinks. 

That’s according to a researcher at data firm CryptoQuant, who wrote in a Monday report that bitcoin on exchanges has dropped to 2.67 million from 2.8 million since February. 

The price of bitcoin was recently $83,485, unmoved over a 24-hour period but up 8% over the past 30 days after having its best quarter in years. Its surge in August and September has led a number of analysts to declare the bear market is over.  

“If buying demand continues to improve while exchange supply remains low, BTC could benefit from a supply-demand imbalance, creating favorable conditions for a longer-term upward trend,” the report by on-chain researcher Rei Researcher read. 

It added: “More importantly, in recent weeks, bitcoin has recovered from its lows while exchange reserves have continued to decline. This is a notable development, suggesting that the supply readily available for trading is decreasing even as the market recovers.”

The report further noted that it was possible investors were taking bitcoin off exchanges to put in cold storage solutions. 

Bitcoin’s price was mostly trading under $65,000 for the first half of 2026. The coin spent most of this year in a bear market following the all-time high of $126,080 it hit in October 2025. 

But that all changed in August. News that the U.S. Treasury would double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations, weakening the dollar but strengthening bitcoin and other non-yield bearing assets. 

Now, the so-called debasement trade — where investors throw money at an asset to hedge against a currency losing its value — is hot again. Bitcoin is benefiting from the trade, analysts say, as it did in 2024 and 2025. 

Bitcoin’s price is still more than 30% below its record. 

This post The Amount of Bitcoin on Exchanges Is Shrinking. Is a Rally Imminent? first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Trezor Reduces Number of Resellers Following Ledger Drainage Incident 

Hardware manufacturer Trezor has said it has reduced the number of resellers it works with following supply-chain incidents related to its competitor Ledger. 

The Prague, Czech Republic-based company added in a Tuesday post on X that it was in the process of checking which vendors it works with. 

It added that there were no reports of any issues with Trezor devices. “Let us be very clear: there is not a single piece of evidence that Trezor devices have been compromised,” the company wrote. 

“This is a preventive step, taken out of an abundance of caution.”

Signing device manufacturer Ledger last week said it had started an investigation after customers in South East Asia reported they’d lost funds after buying from Malaysia-based reseller, CryptoBilis. 

Ledger then said that one of the impacted users’ devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant. 

More reports of what appear to be tampered devices have since surfaced on social media but Ledger said Tuesday that only devices sold through CryptoBilis have been linked to lost funds. 

It added that it had only confirmed an unauthorized hardware implant in one affected user’s device. The implant, according to Ledger, was able to read a seedphrase when it appeared on the device. 

Ledger did not reveal how much money had been lost but blockchain investigator Specter said $86 million had been drained from devices. 

“We have not confirmed the total number of affected users or the total value lost,” Ledger added on X. “Figures circulating online come from third parties and Ledger has not fully verified them.”

Ledger did not respond to Bitcoin Magazine’s questions. 

CryptoBilis has also stopped selling devices, Ledger added, and advised customers who bought from CryptoBilis to not set up their devices and contact the Ledger support team. 

Criminals have been targeting hardware wallets this year. Hackers in July were able to steal close to $120 million in bitcoin from Coldcard users due to a firmware bug in the devices. 

Canadian company Coinkite, which makes the popular products, said that the bug led to faulty seed generation, allowing hackers to guess investor seedphrases. 

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

Scammers earlier this year were able to get hold of customer information via crypto wallet Ledger’s payment processor Global-e to send phishing emails.  

This post Trezor Reduces Number of Resellers Following Ledger Drainage Incident  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Strive Buys More Bitcoin, Crosses 30,000 BTC Mark 

Nasdaq-listed Strive isn’t slowing down with its bitcoin buys.

The company now has more than 30,000 BTC after buying 3,311 coins last week, according to a Tuesday filing. 

Strive now holds 32,773 coins worth $2.7 billion at today’s prices, keeping its position as the  fifth biggest publicly traded bitcoin company, according to Bitcoin Treasuries. 

Strategy, Twenty One, Metaplanet, and MARA all hold more bitcoin than Strive.  

Strive’s stock (ASST) was trading slightly lower on Tuesday. Unlike other treasuries, though, Strive shares are up significantly this year: year-to-date, ASST has risen by close to 60%. 

A number of top bitcoin treasuries have seen their stock plummet this year since the price of bitcoin took a hit. Some top treasuries have had to sell bitcoin or rethink their model altogether. 

Dallas, Texas-based Strive debuted as an official bitcoin treasury last year, following in the footsteps of software company Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of bitcoin. 

Unlike Strategy, though, Strive hasn’t used debt to buy the cryptocurrency. CEO Matt Cole has described the company as debt-free with zero margin requirements and zero encumbered bitcoin.

Like with other digital asset treasuries, the idea is that investors can get amplified returns from Strive’s stock. 

In January 2026, it completed the acquisition of Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal — the first instance of a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company acquiring another such company. 

The company was founded by former Ohio gubernatorial candidate and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. 

This post Strive Buys More Bitcoin, Crosses 30,000 BTC Mark  first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Alex Gladstein: How The Bitcoin-AI Convergence Impacts the Fight for Freedom

Is the biggest AI risk really the end of humanity? Alex Gladstein says no: the real danger is AI centralized in the hands of dictators, governments, and a few large corporations. In this interview, the HRF Chief Strategy Officer explains why “AI will kill us all” claims are largely propaganda, and why local AI on your own laptop and phone could be a huge win for human rights. Tune in to hear his vision for AI that’s in our control.

Chapters:
0:00 – Alex Gladstein on Freedom AI vs. Corporate AI
1:26 – How HRF Trains Human Rights Activists to Use AI
2:57 – The Freedom Stack: Encrypted Inference, Open Weights and Local AI
5:45 – The Real AI Risk: Centralization in the Hands of Dictators
8:20 – HRF and Bitcoin Park Hackathons for Activists
9:57 – Why CBDCs Are a Tool of Repression
12:35 – Living on Bitcoin in Kenya With Tando and M-Pesa
15:25 – Building Your Own Freedom Tech With AI Agents
17:39 – Venezuela After Maduro and Bitcoin as a Lifeline
20:25 – What “Freedom Money” Really Means

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

This post Alex Gladstein: How The Bitcoin-AI Convergence Impacts the Fight for Freedom first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Bitcoin Magazine

Matt Dines: Why a Rising Dollar is Bullish for Bitcoin

The dollar is rising, and so is Bitcoin. Matt Dines says that’s a bullish signal. The Build Asset Management CIO explains how capital is leaving the old post-World War II offshore dollar system for a new U.S.-led Western Hemisphere financial system. He makes the case that Bitcoin is part of that system’s future, and covers what the DXY is really telling investors right now.

Chapters:
0:00 – Matt Dines on France’s Bond Crisis and the ECB’s Pontes CBDC Bridge
2:11 – How the Strait of Hormuz Disruption Rewired Global Trade
3:22 – French-German Spreads and European Contagion Risk
4:23 – Bank of England’s Digital Gilt and Tokenized Sovereign Debt
5:54 – Why Dollar Up, Bitcoin Up Is a Bullish Signal
7:47 – Signals to Watch Before Pressure Hits Bitcoin
10:25 – Treasury Buybacks and the Coming Bond Market Repricing
12:50 – Why Treasury Is Buying Back Old, Illiquid Bonds
14:28 – How Buybacks Pull Capital Into the Dollar and Bitcoin
15:40 – Why the Buybacks Aren’t QE and What It Means for Bitcoin

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

This post Matt Dines: Why a Rising Dollar is Bullish for Bitcoin first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.

Trezor is cutting authorized resellers after a hardware-implant attack against rival Ledger exposed vulnerabilities in cryptocurrency wallet distribution.

In an Oct. 13 letter, Trezor Chief Commercial Officer Danny Sanders said selected partners would lose their authorization on Jan. 1, 2027, as the company tightens oversight of its supply chain.

The decision marks an escalation in the commercial fallout from the Ledger investigation, which has raised questions about how attackers can introduce malicious components into hardware wallets before they reach customers.

Trezor said it found no evidence of compromised devices within its network, describing the restructuring as a preventive measure.

Trezor sacrifices retail reach for tighter supply-chain controls

Sanders said the company could no longer adequately inspect every partner in its existing distribution network, prompting a review of which retailers should remain authorized. He wrote:

“A hardware wallet is only as safe as the path it travels to reach its owner.”

The company evaluated individual markets based on revenue, distribution coverage, and its ability to reach customers before deciding which partnerships to terminate.

Affected retailers will receive no additional inventory but can continue selling existing stock through the Black Friday and Christmas shopping seasons. Trezor will also remove them from its authorized reseller directory on Jan. 1.

The company did not disclose how many businesses would lose authorization or which markets would be affected.

Sanders acknowledged that the decision could have significant financial consequences for smaller retailers that have built their businesses around Trezor products.

However, he stressed that the restructuring did not reflect wrongdoing by the affected partners or concerns about the safety of their existing inventory. He said:

“This is not a verdict on your business or on the safety of the devices you sell.”

For retailers retaining their authorization, Trezor plans stricter contractual requirements and additional inspections covering how devices are sourced, stored, and handled.

The changes could increase compliance obligations across its remaining distribution network while giving the manufacturer greater control over inventory before it reaches customers.

Ledger investigation raises questions about authorized retail channels

Trezor's decision follows Ledger's confirmation that attackers installed an unauthorized electronic component inside a wallet sold by CryptoBilis, an official reseller operating in Southeast Asia.

Ledger's Donjon security team found that the implant could capture the 24-word recovery phrase displayed during wallet setup and transmit the information through an LTE connection using an embedded eSIM.

The component operated separately from the device's Secure Element and operating system, allowing attackers to obtain recovery credentials without interfering with normal transaction-signing functions.

Ledger confirmed the discovery on Oct. 10 and said all verified thefts connected to the incident involved devices purchased through CryptoBilis, which has since stopped selling its products.

However, investigators are now examining reports involving additional authorized retailers.

On Oct. 13, Ledger confirmed that MediaMarktSaturn had suspended sales of its hardware wallets across physical stores and online platforms following a report of an implanted device purchased in Germany.

The company said it had not reported any financial losses in connection with the German case.

Separately, former Mt. Gox chief executive Mark Karpelès reported discovering a spying implant inside a Ledger Flex purchased from a MetaPod outlet at Singapore's Changi Airport.

CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost also flagged a reportedly tampered Ledger Flex purchased from Challenger's VivoCity store in Singapore.

Those findings have not been independently confirmed by Ledger or linked to the CryptoBilis attack.

Darkfost subsequently expanded a watchlist of authorized retailers across Southeast Asia and Europe based on potential distribution exposure, while cautioning that inclusion did not establish compromise.

The growing number of reports has intensified scrutiny of where the devices were modified and whether the incidents share a common distribution channel.

Independent blockchain investigators have linked suspected losses approaching $93 million to the broader incident, although Ledger has not verified the total value stolen or the number of affected customers.

The manufacturer maintains that its internal systems and services remain uncompromised.

Ledger's Donjon team is examining additional submitted devices as it works to establish the source and extent of the tampering.

The post Ledger’s crypto wallet implant scare triggers Trezor reseller crackdown as security fears spread appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Bitcoin rebounded above $83,000 on Tuesday despite a sharp Asian stock selloff, as cryptocurrency liquidations exceeded $800 million.

BTC recovered after briefly slipping below $81,000, while semiconductor shares continued a deepening rout that sent South Korea's benchmark KOSPI index down 6%.

South Korea's AI stock collapse exposes concentrated market risks

Reports noted that South Korea's KOSPI plunged up to 7.4% before recovering some losses to close at 6,035.35. The decline briefly pushed the index below 6,000 and triggered a sell-side trading curb as the country's largest semiconductor manufacturers extended their losses.

Samsung Electronics fell 7.39%, while SK Hynix declined 10.09%, marking a fifth consecutive session of losses for both companies.

Together, the two memory-chip manufacturers account for approximately half of the KOSPI's market capitalization, leaving the broader index particularly sensitive to changes in the outlook for AI infrastructure spending.

Foreign investors sold approximately 4.5 trillion won ($3.35 billion) of Korean equities during Tuesday's session, extending a series of withdrawals that have weighed heavily on the country's technology sector.

Investment research firm Paradis Labs said the decline reflected a sustained retreat by foreign institutions from Samsung and SK Hynix.

The firm characterized the prevailing institutional strategy as “Sell Korea, Buy US,” while noting that domestic investors had largely remained patient, with some capital rotating from memory-chip manufacturers into financial stocks.

Paradis Labs also said the deterioration had been building for several sessions, pointing out that recent comments from Broadcom Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan had intensified an existing selloff.

Tan compared speculative AI investment to gambling, adding to concerns that the industry's enormous capital commitments might not generate sufficient returns.

Those remarks coincided with a technological announcement from China's ChangXin Memory Technologies, which said it had developed a DRAM architecture capable of reducing memory-cell area by approximately 30%.

The company plans to introduce products incorporating the technology by the end of 2026, raising concerns about potential competition for South Korean memory producers. Its ability to manufacture the technology commercially at scale remains unproven.

Bitunix analysts said the broader correction reflected growing sensitivity to the financing risks and concentrated investor positioning supporting the AI industry.

The analysts noted that strong semiconductor earnings had not prevented heavy selling, with reduced leveraged exposure and diminished support from share buybacks potentially amplifying the decline.

The pressure has also influenced broader institutional positioning. BlackRock downgraded US equities from overweight to neutral and increased its preference for short-term Treasuries as concerns about AI-related volatility and higher borrowing costs intensified.

Meanwhile, Paradis Labs warned that South Korea's dependence on imported crude oil created another vulnerability as tensions involving Iran escalate. Sustained energy-price increases could compound inflation pressures and weaken confidence in the country's equity market.

The semiconductor weakness has already spread beyond Korea, as the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index declined 2.7% on Monday, while Japan's Nikkei 225 fell 1.8% Tuesday.

Bitcoin's recovery faces pressure after $813 million liquidation wave

Bitcoin's rebound contrasted with sharp losses in Asian equities, but it followed a derivatives market shakeout that wiped out hundreds of millions of dollars in leveraged positions.

According to CoinGlass data, cryptocurrency liquidations reached $812.9 million over 24 hours, affecting 170,209 traders. Bullish positions accounted for $686.72 million, or 84.5% of the total, compared with $126.19 million in bearish bets.

Bitcoin recorded the largest losses at $192.14 million, with long positions accounting for nearly 74% of the total. Ethereum followed with $180.5 million, while Solana saw $60.85 million in liquidations. The largest single liquidation was a $9.65 million Bitcoin long position on Binance.

As Bitcoin declined, forced long-position closures added selling pressure and accelerated the downturn. The subsequent recovery also caught bearish traders off guard, with short liquidations contributing to the sharp reversal.

Yet underlying trading activity suggests that buyers have struggled to regain control despite the price recovery.

CryptoQuant analyst JA Maartunn reported that Bitcoin's Net Taker Volume turned negative again, indicating that aggressive selling in derivatives markets outweighed buying activity.

The reading points to continued selling pressure even as Bitcoin recovers, so passive buying and the closure of bearish positions may be supporting prices without a sustained increase in aggressive demand.

That leaves Bitcoin's recovery exposed to another test if the equity selloff deepens or leveraged traders rebuild positions ahead of Wednesday's US inflation report.

The post Bitcoin defies $800 million crypto wipeout as South Korea’s AI stock market crashes appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Ethereum Name Service has proposed activating ENSv2 without requiring existing .eth domain holders to migrate to the new system.

The Oct. 11 proposal would let users keep their current names indefinitely, as long as they keep renewing them, while offering a permanent migration option for those who want access to upgraded features.

Once activated, ENSv2 would handle all new .eth registrations, replacing the existing registration infrastructure. Holders who migrate would permanently transfer management of their domains to the new system, with no mechanism for returning their original tokens.

The proposal remains subject to approval by the ENS decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), whose Oct. 12 governance bulletin listed the vote as pending. ENS has not announced a launch date.

ENSv2 introduces permanent migration and higher registration fees

The upgrade would replace ENS's existing registry, introduced in 2017, with a hierarchical structure that allows individual domains to maintain separate registries for their subdomains.

The changes would give owners more flexibility in assigning permissions, letting businesses and decentralized applications delegate responsibility for specific names or records without giving up broader control.

During the migration, an owner's existing ENSv1 token would move into a smart contract known as the Graveyard, which cannot return or transfer the tokens it receives.

However, users who choose to remain on ENSv1 would keep access to their domains and continue renewing them through a dedicated contract that also preserves their ENSv2 reservations.

The transition would introduce changes to registration costs.

According to ENS's official guidance, annual fees for names containing five or more characters would rise 60% to $8 from $5, while prices for three- and four-character names would remain unchanged.

ENSv2 would also introduce discounts for longer registrations, reducing annual costs by approximately 44% for users purchasing six or more years.

Registration and renewal payments would use stablecoins, including USDC and DAI, replacing ETH-denominated payments and keeping fees fixed in dollar terms.

Domain expiration rules would also change.

The existing 90-day grace period would shrink to 28 days for migrated names. To compensate, ENS would extend registration expiry dates by 62 days, preserving the original deadline when names become available to others.

Names remaining on ENSv1 would retain their 90-day grace period, while domains already expired beyond that window would not receive reservations in the new registry.

The activation process presents additional operational challenges.

ENS expects to temporarily suspend new registrations while developers synchronize existing records and activate the new infrastructure, a process expected to take several hours.

The proposal includes conflicting provisions on renewals during that interval, leaving uncertainty about whether existing holders can renew names before ENSv2 becomes operational.

Wallets and applications integrating ENS must also update their resolution infrastructure to support the new system.

Following approval, ENS Labs would complete the final synchronization, activate ENSv2 registration and resolution, and transfer its remaining administrative permissions to the DAO.

The timing of those steps, along with clarification on renewal availability during the transition, remains unresolved ahead of the governance vote.

The post Ethereum Name Service plans major .eth overhaul with one irreversible catch for domain holders appeared first on CryptoSlate.

Australia's markets regulator proposed extending retail leverage restrictions to crypto-settled derivatives amid mounting losses among investors trading risky financial products.

On Oct. 12, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) announced it wants to expand its existing contracts-for-difference (CFD) rules to cover qualifying derivatives settled through digital assets, closing a regulatory gap that lets economically similar products face different restrictions.

The proposal follows ASIC's finding that 68% of retail CFD clients lost money during the 2023–24 financial year, with combined losses exceeding A$458 million ($325 million), including A$73 million in fees. The figures cover CFD trading across asset classes, rather than cryptocurrency derivatives alone.

The Australian regulator is also seeking to extend its existing investor protections for another decade, keeping them in force until 2037, subject to government approval.

Australia targets leveraged crypto products and margin practices

Under ASIC's existing framework, CFDs are generally covered when transactions are settled in cash or through offsetting obligations between counterparties.

However, some derivatives with similar characteristics can settle through transfers of digital assets, potentially placing them outside the current product intervention order.

ASIC wants to eliminate that distinction by extending the definition to qualifying digitally settled contracts, regardless of whether their underlying exposure is linked to cryptocurrencies, traditional assets, interest rates or market indices.

The change could force affected brokers and derivatives platforms to comply with existing leverage restrictions, standardized margin close-out arrangements, negative balance protections and limits on promotional incentives.

For CFDs referencing cryptocurrencies, the current maximum retail leverage is 2:1, meaning investors must provide at least half the value of their positions as initial margin.

Other contracts face different limits depending on the underlying asset, ranging from 5:1 for shares to 30:1 for major currency pairs.

The proposed expansion would therefore depend on a derivative's underlying exposure and contractual structure, rather than automatically imposing the cryptocurrency leverage cap on every product settled using digital assets.

Some fixed-expiry crypto futures and options would remain outside the framework.

ASIC Commissioner Alan Kirkland said existing restrictions had materially reduced investor harm, particularly by limiting excessive leverage.

During the first six months after the protections took effect in March 2021, aggregate quarterly retail losses declined 91%, from A$372 million to A$33 million.

The regulator also recorded an 87% reduction in quarterly margin close-outs, although subsequent reviews showed that most retail CFD investors continued losing money.

ASIC's latest proposal would tighten how brokers calculate initial margin, following a sector-wide investigation that identified firms offsetting customers' opposing trading positions to reduce collateral requirements.

Under the proposed clarification, brokers must calculate the minimum margin separately for each CFD, preventing them from using one position to reduce the initial collateral required for another.

The regulator said its intervention over margin-netting practices led 28 issuers to refund more than A$36 million to affected retail customers.

Additional changes target CFDs linked to options, where investor losses have been particularly severe.

ASIC found that 85% of retail clients trading CFDs over options lost money during 2023–24, prompting proposals to clarify margin requirements and examine whether some products should remain available to ordinary investors.

The regulator is specifically seeking evidence on contracts that could expose traders to losses exceeding the options premium, including structures with potentially unlimited downside exposure.

It has yet to decide whether those products should face further restrictions or an outright prohibition.

Australia's ASIC also wants tighter conditions for promotional discounts, requiring permitted offers to be available on substantially equal terms to retail customers and prominently displayed on brokers' websites and trading platforms.

The proposals would require firms to retain records of qualifying discounts for seven years after the offers end, while ensuring educational and research tools are not used to encourage prohibited trading activity.

The existing CFD intervention order expires on May 23, 2027. ASIC argues that a further 10-year extension would give firms greater regulatory certainty while preserving the regulator's ability to revoke the restrictions earlier.

However, the amendments remain under consultation, and industry feedback could change their final scope.

ASIC is seeking submissions from brokers, trading platforms and consumer groups by Nov. 9, including information about which digitally settled products would be affected, expected compliance costs and whether firms would need a transition period.

The post Australia moves to close crypto derivatives loophole after retail traders lose A$458 million appeared first on CryptoSlate.

A London judge rejected Chinese fraud victims' bid to use English law to claim more than 61,000 seized Bitcoin.

In an Oct. 12 ruling, High Court Justice Mark Turner sided with British prosecutors, determining that Chinese law must govern ownership claims over the cryptocurrency, currently worth approximately $5 billion.

“The applicable law is Chinese law,” Turner wrote in the judgment, rejecting arguments that English property and trust principles should determine the investors' entitlement.

The decision leaves thousands of victims facing a potentially difficult recovery battle, as proving they lost money to the fraud does not automatically establish ownership of the Bitcoin acquired with its proceeds.

How a Chinese investment fraud became a $5 billion Bitcoin dispute

The case stems from investment schemes operated by Zhimin Qian through Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology and associated businesses between 2014 and 2017.

According to the judgment's agreed factual background, the schemes collected approximately 40.23 billion yuan (£4.1 billion) through at least 128,409 investment contracts.

However, the court cautioned that the number of contracts should not be mistaken for the number of individual victims.

The records also revealed substantial repayments to some participants. Approximately 34.1 billion yuan (£3.4 billion) flowed back to investors during the scheme's operation, although others received nothing.

Qian converted part of the proceeds into Bitcoin, including purchases of more than 100,000 BTC through an account on cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, alongside over-the-counter transactions conducted in China.

After fleeing China in 2017, she relocated to Britain, where authorities subsequently seized devices, private keys and other assets linked to more than 61,000 Bitcoin.

The recovered cryptocurrency became the subject of civil recovery proceedings initiated by Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.

Chinese investors later sought to establish ownership of the coins, arguing that English legal principles could let them trace their stolen investments into the cryptocurrency Qian acquired.

They argued that fraudulent investment contracts could be rescinded, creating trust-based ownership interests that followed the money into Bitcoin.

British prosecutors opposed that approach, maintaining that the original transactions and alleged acquisition of ownership rights occurred in China.

Turner agreed, finding that the investors, perpetrators, payments and cryptocurrency purchases were overwhelmingly connected to China.

The judge also rejected the argument that Bitcoin's eventual presence in Britain should determine which country's property laws applied.

Instead, he focused on the legal relationships established when the investors collected the investments and later converted them into cryptocurrency.

That conclusion defeated the investors' attempts to rely on English law or combine English and Chinese legal principles to establish their claims.

Victims must now prove ownership as recovery battle enters next stage

The next proceedings will determine whether Chinese law recognizes the ownership interests investors assert in the recovered Bitcoin.

Under Section 281 of Britain's Proceeds of Crime Act, claimants must establish a proprietary interest in assets targeted for recovery, rather than merely demonstrate that criminals owe them compensation.

Turner emphasized that the provision “does not create any broader compensation scheme” for people who suffered financial losses through criminal conduct.

Consequently, investors may need to establish how Chinese law treats fraudulent investment contracts, whether ownership rights survive the conversion of stolen funds into cryptocurrency and whether those rights extend to the particular assets held by British authorities.

The scale and structure of Qian's operation could complicate those proceedings. The scheme involved multiple bank accounts, investment arrangements and repayments, leaving individual claimants with potentially different financial histories.

The judgment also leaves the precise operation of Chinese law unresolved.

Although Turner decided that Chinese law governs the underlying claims, the court has yet to receive evidence establishing its relevant provisions or the factual basis of each investor's asserted ownership.

The victims advanced an alternative argument that English law should apply until Chinese law was formally established.

Turner rejected that submission, distinguishing the choice of governing law from the evidence needed to establish its contents.

“The two should not be conflated,” he wrote.

The litigation also involves receivers appointed to Tianjin Lantian Gerui at the initiative of one alleged victim. Those receivers have asserted separate claims over assets held by British prosecutors.

Turner described the validity of that route as “a question for another day,” leaving another potential complication for the eventual distribution of the cryptocurrency.

Lawyers representing the fraud victims plan to appeal the ruling, according to the Financial Times, potentially prolonging the dispute over the seized assets.

For British authorities, the decision removes one proposed route investors sought to use to establish ownership under English law. It does not determine how much Bitcoin, if any, will ultimately remain available for government recovery.

Turner said he would hear further submissions on the precise order implementing his judgment.

The court will need to establish the applicable Chinese property rights and examine individual claims before it can determine which portions of the cryptocurrency belong to successful applicants.

The post A $5 billion Bitcoin fortune is at stake, but UK court says being defrauded isn’t enough to claim it appeared first on CryptoSlate.

On Friday, October 16, the Bitcoin network will make itself more expensive. At around 14:00 UTC the blockchain reaches height 971,712, and the next mining difficulty adjustment takes effect. On Tuesday afternoon's reading, it comes out at 5.49 percent to the upside. That is the third-largest increase of this year, and it hits an industry whose product trades 33.8 percent below its record of $126,080.

This is not a technical footnote for investors. Difficulty determines how much computation a new Bitcoin costs, and with it the floor below which a miner would rather sell its coins than hold them. This article works through how much more expensive production becomes on Friday, which levels the price has behind it, and what you can check before the date.

132.72 trillion: what mining difficulty is showing right now

Mining difficulty is a number the Bitcoin network resets every 2,016 blocks. It governs how hard it is to find a valid block, and so keeps the average block time at ten minutes. When computing power on the network rises, difficulty follows it up. When computing power falls, difficulty falls.

It currently stands at 132.72 trillion. The last adjustment on October 3 was effectively a non-event at minus 0.03 percent. Since then, miners have brought too much power to the network: blocks are arriving every 9.49 minutes on average instead of every ten, roughly half a minute too fast. That half minute is exactly what the protocol takes back on Friday.

On Tuesday afternoon, 438 of the current period's 2,016 blocks were still outstanding, with 78.3 percent of the window elapsed. The further a period has run, the more stable the estimate becomes. At 78 percent, experience suggests the expected figure moves only by a few tenths of a percentage point, as long as no large mining fleet is switched off.

Friday at around 14:00 UTC: how the 5.5 percent figure comes about

On reaching the target height, the protocol compares how long the past 2,016 blocks actually took with the 20,160 minutes they should have taken. The ratio between the two gives the new difficulty. If blocks ran 5.2 percent fast, difficulty rises by roughly 5.5 percent.

The date itself does not depend on the clock but on the block counter. The estimated time of 13:59 UTC is a projection from the current block speed. If the remaining blocks arrive faster, the date moves half an hour forward; if they arrive more slowly, it slips back. That is not a timetable, but it is a reliable order of magnitude.

$82,500 did not hold: where things stand since Monday

Our Bitcoin forecast from Monday centred on the $82,500 level, together with the inflation print on October 14 and the rate decision on October 28. That level did not hold at the low. Over the past 24 hours the price fell as far as $81,018, almost $1,500 below it, and then came back.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bitcoin trades at $83,412. Against Monday's close of $81,795 that is 2.0 percent higher. Over one week the price is still down 2.7 percent, over 30 days up 8.2 percent. The move back below $82,500 was therefore not a break in the uptrend, but it shows that this line is softer than it looked on Monday.

What has been added since is Friday's date. On Monday it was not yet firmly in view, because the current period was only half elapsed and the estimate was swinging accordingly.

1.00 zettahash per second: the computing power behind the adjustment

Behind the increase sits a figure the network reached only recently: computing power stands at 1.00 zettahash per second. One zettahash is 1,000 exahash, a one followed by 21 zeros in computing operations every second. Averaged over the past three days, the figure ranged between 0.999 and 1.029 zettahash.

That power is the actual reason for the adjustment. Miners have switched on machines over the past two weeks even though the price has given ground since the start of October. This is the classic pattern after a hardware delivery: new machines go online because they were ordered and paid for, not because the price argues for it right now.

Why revenue per terahash falls by 5.2 percent

Here is the mechanism that links the technology to your portfolio. The network pays out a fixed amount per block, currently 3.125 Bitcoin plus fees. The difficulty adjustment does not change that amount. What changes is the number of competitors for the same pot.

If difficulty rises by 5.49 percent, a miner with unchanged hardware receives only the reciprocal of that, 94.80 percent of its previous share. Its revenue per terahash of computing power falls by 5.20 percent. Its electricity bill stays the same. A miner sitting just above its costs before Friday sits below them afterwards.

That is where the selling pressure discussed around such dates comes from. A miner that can no longer cover its bill out of current revenue has to sell coins from its holdings or switch off machines. If it switches off, computing power falls, and the adjustment after next comes out to the downside again. This feedback loop has run since 2009, and it is the reason the network keeps going even after heavy price losses.

450 Bitcoin a day against $32 billion of turnover

The scale belongs in the picture, however, or real cost pressure turns into an overblown price story. The network produces roughly 450 Bitcoin a day from the block subsidy, about $37.5 million at $83,412. Trading turnover in Bitcoin over the same 24 hours came to $32.4 billion.

Even if miners sold their entire daily output immediately, that would be around 0.12 percent of daily turnover. The cost pressure from the adjustment is existential for the companies affected; for a single day's price it is a small quantity. Fund flows weigh far more heavily at the moment: according to Farside Investors data cited by CoinDesk, Bitcoin funds saw net outflows of $65.4 million on October 12, and roughly $681 million in the week to October 9.

Reading the adjustment as the sole explanation for the price therefore overstates it. Ignoring it means missing a cost threshold that shows up in the quarterly numbers of the listed miners.

The third-largest increase of the year: every 2026 adjustment compared

Whether 5.5 percent is a lot only becomes clear in hindsight. We read out every adjustment of this year from the block data at mempool.space and set them against each other.

Only two increases were larger in 2026: 14.7 percent on February 19 and 7.2 percent on June 27. Friday follows with 5.5 percent, ahead of the 4.2 percent on September 19. The downside swings were sharper: minus 11.2 percent on February 7 and minus 10.1 percent on June 14.

Across the past 26 adjustments, a good year, difficulty rose 11 times and fell 15 times. On balance, the network lost power rather than gained it in 2026. Friday runs against that trend, and that is what makes it notable: computing power is growing into a weak price.

$81,018 and $84,074: the levels for the coming days

For the price, that yields clear checkpoints. On the downside sits the daily low of $81,018. Below it comes the 50-day line at $81,110, which the price currently sits 2.8 percent above. The two levels are so close together that they form a zone rather than two separate lines. If the price breaks through there, the next demonstrable stop is the monthly low of $75,590.

On the upside stands the daily high of $84,074, and above it the monthly high of $86,597. The 200-day line sits far below at $72,123: the price has 15.7 percent of headroom above it. As long as that gap holds, the long-term uptrend is intact, even with the short-term lines under pressure.

Friday's adjustment does not create any of these levels. The date concerns costs, not the price. Deriving levels from it means measuring the wrong thing.

Savings plans and fees: what a €100 instalment really costs

For investors in Germany, the practical question on a date like this is rarely whether to buy, but at what cost. There is a lever here that you control, unlike the price itself.

An example: on a monthly instalment of €100, an instant purchase through an exchange's trading window costs between 0.99 and 1.49 percent depending on the provider, so 99 cents to €1.49. The same instalment placed in the order book of the same exchange often costs 0.1 to 0.4 percent, so 10 to 40 cents. Over twelve months that is a difference of around €13 on €1,200 committed. That is more than most price moves of a single week come to on that amount.

You can check this in three places: your provider's fee schedule, the statement from your last savings-plan execution, and the spread, the gap between the buy and sell price at the moment of execution. Which providers run which models is in our comparison of Bitcoin savings plans; if you place the instalment in the order book yourself instead, the fee tiers are in our overview of crypto exchanges.

A second point concerns the execution day. Many providers let you choose it freely. A fixed day is preferable to trying to dodge dates such as Friday: the cost advantage of a well-chosen day cannot be demonstrated, whereas the disadvantage of a skipped instalment can.

How to check the next adjustment yourself

You do not need a paid data source for this. The block data is public, and the route takes less than a minute.

Open the mining overview at mempool.space. Four figures there add up to the picture: current difficulty, the expected change in percent, the number of remaining blocks and the estimated time to the date. If remaining blocks are below 500, the estimate is reliable. If they are above 1,500, the period is still near its start, and the percentage can halve or double.

The fifth figure you work out yourself: divide 1 by the factor of the change. At plus 5.49 percent, 1 divided by 1.0549 gives 0.948. Revenue per unit of computing power falls by those 5.2 percent. The same calculation works for a decrease and then gives a plus.

From the editorial team's view: the adjustment raises production costs, it does not turn the price

Our read on Friday is sober. Three pieces of evidence support it: daily production of 450 Bitcoin equals 0.12 percent of the $32.4 billion in daily turnover; the previous week's fund outflows, at $681 million, were many times larger; and across the past 26 adjustments the price has shown no discernible regularity around these dates.

One argument runs the other way, and we will not play it down: if the increase meets a stretch of persistently weak prices, the miners with the highest electricity costs come under pressure, and their sales land in an already thin market. That effect is real, but it shows up over weeks in the holdings of mining companies, not on a Friday afternoon in the candle chart.

In short: October 16 is a cost date for an industry, not a turning point for the price. Positioning a portfolio around it confuses the production side with the demand side. If you want to know how solid the network is, rising computing power is a strong argument in its favour.

Mining difficulty: October 16 makes every new Bitcoin more expensive

Friday's adjustment lifts production costs by a good five percent while the price sits a third below its record. Three steps follow from that:

1. Keep an eye on the zone between $81,018 and $81,110. The daily low and the 50-day line sit almost on top of each other there. If that zone holds, Monday's picture stands. If you want to place a buy order there, the fee models are in our comparison of crypto exchanges.
2. Recalculate your own purchase costs. Instant purchase and order book are around one euro apart on a €100 instalment, roughly €13 over a year. The models are in our overview of Bitcoin savings plans.
3. Review leveraged positions before October 28. Two weeks with several scheduled events lie between Friday's adjustment and the rate decision. If you work with leverage, the terms are in our comparison of crypto brokers.

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

A new trading venue lost roughly $1.28 million from its own liquidity pool within eight hours on October 10, 2026, and nobody had to find a security hole in its code to do it. Moving the price the platform used to settle its trades was enough. The Papertrade case shows how sensitive leverage of 1,000 becomes once the reference price comes from outside and the capital behind it is thin.

Papertrade launched with 1,000x leverage, and the counterparty was a protocol-owned liquidity pool

Papertrade is an exchange for perpetual futures, known as perpetuals, and runs on HyperEVM, the Ethereum-compatible execution layer of the Hyperliquid blockchain. Trading opened on October 10, 2026 at 10 a.m. Eastern time. The venue advertised leverage of up to 1,000, meaning a position a thousand times the size of the capital committed.

Before the launch, DefiLlama figures put deposits in the protocol at roughly $85.3 million. Accounts of the later figure diverge: one analysis cites $118 million, another $138 million from 11,465 addresses. We report the range as the sources give it rather than declaring one of those numbers a fact.

The decisive piece of the design is not the size of the leverage but the question of who stands on the other side of a trade. On a conventional futures exchange, every buyer finds a seller. At Papertrade, every position runs against a pool the protocol holds itself. Winners are paid out of that pool, and losers pay into it. According to the provider's documentation, this removes the funding payments normally exchanged between the long and short sides, and no matching futures contract trades on Hyperliquid itself. The trades are synthetic.

The execution price came from the midpoint of the Hyperliquid spot order book

Settling a synthetic trade requires a price. Papertrade took the midpoint between the best bid and the best offer in Hyperliquid's spot order book, the mid of the BBO, or best bid and offer. That single sentence is the heart of the whole episode: whoever shifts the quotes on the Hyperliquid spot market shifts, directly, the price at which Papertrade values and closes positions.

A midpoint price is a clean choice in itself, because it splits the spread between buy and sell side neutrally. It does assume, however, that the market it comes from is deep enough not to be moved by a single order. On launch day, someone tested that assumption.

6,060 Ether on the spot market and a three-dollar price move

The sequence, described independently by several trade publications, followed a simple pattern. First, one address opened a large position on Papertrade. The same address then bought and sold Ether repeatedly on the Hyperliquid spot market. A purchase of roughly 6,060 Ether lifted the price there by about three dollars, according to the available figures.

Three dollars sounds like nothing against an Ether price in the region of $2,500. It is around 0.12 percent. At leverage of 1,000, however, a 0.12 percent price move turns into a change in committed capital many times over. Leverage is not a side issue here; it is the amplifier that translates an economically trivial move into a seven-figure sum. If you trade Ether, our Ethereum price prediction tracks the current picture and the levels that matter.

$52,000 in fees, $1.28 million out of the liquidity pool

The back and forth on the spot market was not free. According to the available reports, the address paid roughly $52,000 in trading fees and moved Ether worth about $231 million that day. Against that stood a withdrawal from Papertrade's liquidity pool that most sources put at $1.28 million; one analysis cites $1.54 million. Sources also disagree on whether that figure is the gross withdrawal or the net profit.

The address is no casual participant. Available data show it trading on Hyperliquid since February 2025, starting with roughly $2 million, reaching total volume of $14.2 billion and a net profit of $13.1 million. One report also cites a later loss of around $450,000 after a short position on Ether opened with 660x leverage was liquidated. Leverage cuts both ways, including for the side that believes it has mastered it.

Ten billion dollars of open interest against $54 million of cover

The second number that explains this case is open interest, the sum of all open positions. Analyses of blockchain data cite a peak of $10.1 billion for October 10; another source puts it at roughly $11 billion, against only $54 million of cover. Even at the low end of that range, open positions and posted capital stand in a ratio of about 185 to 1.

A pool carrying that much position volume has to absorb every move in the reference price. That is why a three-dollar shift was enough to displace a seven-figure sum. After the incident, open interest fell by 88 percent, according to the reports.

Papertrade's statement: loose exposure limits, not an overlooked bug

Papertrade has addressed the episode publicly. The provider confirmed attempts to move the reference prices for Bitcoin and Ethereum and said it had already tightened position limits. It rejected the charge of an overlooked bug: the initial caps on risk exposure, it said, had been set deliberately wide to give the launch room. The provider also said the trader had returned most of the profit to the liquidity pool. According to the outlets reporting it, that claim could not be verified independently, and we therefore carry it as the provider's statement rather than an established fact.

One further point from the same documentation is worth knowing: protocol governance can halt new positions, freeze markets and change fee parameters. For a venue acting as the counterparty to its own pool that is understandable, and it also limits what you can rely on if things go wrong.

Spot price manipulation: 32 cases and $68.65 million this year

Papertrade is not an isolated case but the latest entry in a group that has grown steadily through 2026. The basis is DefiLlama's public incident list with 1,301 entries, from which we counted all 294 incidents dated in 2026. cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 13, 2026.

This year's 294 incidents add up to $2,245 million. Forty-two of them are classified as oracle manipulation, together $74.65 million. After access control with 53 cases and accounting errors involving shares and tokens with 50 cases, that is the year's third most frequent category. Within that group, the technique also described at Papertrade carries the label spot price manipulation: 32 cases, together $68.65 million.

Two figures put the scale in context. The median case in this group stands at $0.40 million, the largest at $18.40 million, recorded on April 16, 2026 for Rhea Lend. At $1.28 million, Papertrade sits a good three times above the typical case and far below the record. The pattern has become routine this year; the amounts have not.

What stands out is the shift in the attack surface. The spring cases mostly hit lending protocols, where a shifted price made a position appear wrongly overcollateralised. Papertrade, by contrast, was hit at settlement, not at collateralisation. Both times the cause was the same: a price from outside whose market was shallower than the leverage behind it.

A pool as counterparty bears the risk differently from an order book

The design is worth a look, because it decides who ends up paying. On a perp DEX with an order book, other traders provide the other side. One loses, another wins, and the protocol mediates. When a price breaks down there, insurance funds and automatic deleveraging step in, as we set out for several providers in our comparison of the best perp DEXs.

What a protocol-owned pool changes for you

With a pool on the other side, all traders together are positioned against that pool, and its depth is the hard ceiling on any payout. Two things follow. First, risk is decided by the ratio between open positions and posted capital, not by the level of leverage on offer. Second, a successful attack on the reference price hits the pot every other trader draws profits from, rather than a single opponent. Traders in profit at Papertrade on October 10 were hanging on the same pool the $1.28 million flowed out of.

That gives you a yardstick for a venue before you deposit capital: where does the price come from, how deep is the market behind it, and how far may open interest rise relative to cover? Papertrade answered the third question only after the incident.

A 2:1 leverage cap and 25 percent tax: the framework for investors in Germany

Leverage of 1,000 is out of reach for retail investors in Germany through regulated channels, and that is no accident. The European Securities and Markets Authority, ESMA, capped leverage on contracts for difference by underlying in its 2018 product intervention measures and applied the strictest tier to cryptocurrencies. The cap covers retail clients; professional clients fall outside it. In Germany, BaFin has carried those requirements over into permanent national measures. Our assessment of leverage caps on perpetuals from October 3, 2026 describes how this breaks down across the individual product types: perpetuals and the MiFID leverage cap.

A venue such as Papertrade sits outside that framework because it does not operate as an authorised investment firm in the EU. For Hyperliquid itself, we noted on September 15, 2026 that no MiCA authorisation is in place. In practice, that means neither a deposit guarantee nor a German complaints body applies when a pool runs dry. If you are looking for leveraged products inside the regulated framework, the route runs through authorised providers; which houses set which leverage and costs is in our overview of the best crypto brokers.

On tax, the difference from buying coins is substantial. Under our breakdown of October 12, 2026, the tax office treats profits from perpetuals and futures as investment income at 25 percent plus the solidarity surcharge, and does so from the first trade onwards. The one-year holding period for cryptocurrencies does not apply here. The details, including loss offsetting, are in our piece on tax on crypto futures and perps.

Our assessment of Papertrade's launch day

From the editorial team's point of view, the episode is less an attack than a pricing question asked too late. Three pieces of evidence support that: the reference price came, per the documentation, from the midpoint of a spot order book; open interest reached $10.1 billion against $54 million of cover, according to blockchain data; and the provider itself describes its initial risk limits as widely set. Tie leverage of 1,000 to a market that 6,060 Ether move by 0.12 percent, and the real ceiling sits in the order book, not in the leverage figure.

Against that, the mechanism worked as intended: the pool paid, the limits were tightened, open interest fell by 88 percent. No balance was lost to a software bug. Whether the profit was in fact returned remains open as long as only the provider confirms it. None of this is an assessment of the platform as an investment, still less a recommendation to buy or sell.

Papertrade's limits: 185 to 1 was the real problem

Three steps put the situation in order for you:

1. Read the price source and the market depth together. With any leveraged venue, ask which order book the settlement price comes from and what volume it takes to move it by a tenth of a percent. Which providers average their prices across several sources and which hang on a single one is in our comparison of the best perp DEXs.
2. Set open interest against cover. A ratio such as 185 to 1 is a warning sign regardless of the advertised leverage. Inside the regulated framework, leverage for retail clients on cryptocurrencies stays on ESMA's strictest tier; which houses charge what is shown in our overview of the best crypto brokers.
3. Settle the tax position before the first trade. In Germany, perpetuals count as investment income at 25 percent plus the solidarity surcharge, with no holding period and with their own rules on loss offsetting. Anyone settling a lot of trades needs clean records; you will find tools for that under crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

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

NEAR costs around $5.09 at midday on October 13, putting it 11.7 percent lower than 24 hours earlier. Bitcoin shed 0.3 percent over the same period and Ether 2.3 percent. At its intraday low NEAR stood at $4.90, below the round five-dollar mark; the jump a report from New York set off on Sunday has been given back in full. Nasdaq-listed SVRN, Inc. has bought FastNEAR, the operator of the servers through which practically every NEAR wallet and every NEAR app talks to the blockchain.

The details of the acquisition are in the Form 6-K that SVRN filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 9. What it says is more concrete for holders than any price figure, because it concerns the route by which your balance appears on the display at all.

What SVRN bought with FastNEAR: RPC servers, archive nodes and the NEARDATA service

RPC stands for remote procedure call and denotes the interface through which a wallet or an app asks something of a blockchain node or hands it a transaction. An RPC provider therefore runs the servers that hold a current copy of the blockchain and answer on behalf of users.

According to the press release in the SEC filing, FastNEAR operates three things: a fleet of such RPC servers, an archive infrastructure holding NEAR's complete transaction history, and NEARDATA, a data service developers use. SVRN cites more than 3.5 billion requests a month and more than 100 terabytes of data. FastNEAR has been a wholly owned subsidiary since October 8; co-founders Evgeny Kuzyakov and Mike Purvis have moved to SVRN. The company does not name the purchase price.

SVRN chief Sal Ternullo justifies the purchase in the release by saying that everything built on NEAR depends on infrastructure most people never see. When a wallet shows a balance or an application submits a transaction, something has to answer, fast and correctly, every time. The company announces that it will invest in reliability and capacity; for existing customers the services are meant to continue without interruption.

Why buying an RPC operator moves the NEAR price

The mechanism behind it is simpler than the technology sounds. SVRN holds NEAR on its own balance sheet and thereby gives its shareholders exposure to the token. Until now it was a pure holding company with staking. FastNEAR adds an operating business that has revenue of its own from paying customers and whose value does not depend on the NEAR price. For the market that means a listed buyer is binding itself more deeply to a network it can no longer exit cheaply without damaging its own business.

That fits what SVRN writes in the same release about its other role. The company stakes its holdings with validators that secure the network and takes part in governance; it co-authored the programme that has paid operators of MPC nodes according to performance since February 2026. A buyer that bundles technology, voting rights and balance sheet in the same network is a different signal for investors than a fund that merely collects tokens.

NEAR, Bitcoin and Ether over 24 hours: minus 11.7 against minus 0.3 against minus 2.3 percent

Over one day the gap is clear. NEAR lost 11.6 to 11.7 percent depending on the data provider, Bitcoin 0.3 percent, Ether 2.3 percent. Over a week the picture reverses: NEAR is down around 3.2 to 4.2 percent, just behind Bitcoin, which shed around 2.9 percent, but ahead of Ether at around 7.5 percent. The daily loss hits NEAR considerably harder than the broad market; measured over seven days Ether is the weakest of the three. NEAR's trading volume over those 24 hours came to around $1.28 billion.

Market capitalisation stands at around $6.65 billion, trading volume over the past 24 hours at $1.04 to $1.14 billion. On the ranking the providers diverge: CoinGecko lists NEAR in 21st place, Coinpaprika in 24th. Anyone reading a figure such as "top 20" should therefore know that it depends on the chosen provider and not on any official list.

NEAR Intents: $33.57 billion in total volume and $122.8 million in a day

The second reason that comes up in reporting on the NEAR rally is NEAR Intents. It is a swap system in which users declare a desired swap and competing service providers execute it, instead of tokens being locked across a bridge and minted anew. According to DefiLlama data the system has turned over $33.57 billion in total.

That sum is a cumulative figure since launch and says nothing about what is happening there today. The current values are smaller: $122.8 million over 24 hours, $1.15 billion over seven days, $4.74 billion over 30 days. The daily figure is therefore around 20 percent below the previous day's, even though the price rose. Read the 33 billion as current volume and you overestimate demand by more than twentyfold. In the autumn part of the volume came from Zcash swaps, that is, from a single fashion that can ebb away again.

What changes for NEAR holders: wallet, RPC endpoint and custody

The sale of FastNEAR changes nothing about your coins. Your keys remain your keys, and the balances still sit on the blockchain. What changes is the ownership of one of the routes by which you reach the blockchain. In practice that means three things.

First: in many wallets you can see and change the RPC endpoint in the settings. Take a look there at which provider is entered. An endpoint is interchangeable, and knowing several providers is the simplest safeguard against the failure of a single one.

Second: an RPC server sees which address asks what and when. A wallet that sends all requests through one provider leaves a movement profile there. That is not a theft risk, but it is a data protection point that takes on a different quality with a listed owner than with a small team.

Third: anyone holding larger balances separates custody from access. The keys sit on a hardware wallet, and which server queries the blockchain is then purely a question of convenience with no access to the assets. That separation is the real protection, not the choice of provider.

Staking and validators: 412 nodes secure NEAR, and FastNEAR is not among them

This gets confused often, so here is the clear distinction: validators produce blocks and secure consensus, RPC servers answer requests. Those are two separate layers. NEARBlocks currently counts 412 nodes online, block time is 0.6 seconds, and more than 5.46 billion transactions have been processed in total. The acquisition has changed nothing at that layer.

That is the most important framing of the day: whoever buys FastNEAR buys access, not control over the network. A buyer could raise prices, discontinue services or log requests. It could not forge a transaction, roll back a block or take anyone's coins away. Anyone who sees SVRN staking and infers influence over consensus from it is confusing the balance sheet with the technology; the staking confers voting weight in the network, the RPC purchase does not.

MyNearWallet closes on October 31: the key migration is still running

Independently of the acquisition, a deadline is running in the NEAR orbit that is more concrete than any price level. MyNearWallet is ceasing operation as of October 31. If you hold your NEAR there, you have to move the keys into another wallet beforehand, otherwise the familiar access is gone after the cut-off date. Cryptoticker covered the shutdown in detail on October 8.

Both processes have the same core, even though they have nothing to do with each other: access to a blockchain runs through services that can change owner or close. The blockchain itself remains, the access does not. That is exactly why a look into the wallet settings pays off now and not on October 30.

Buying NEAR in Germany: which route is open under MiCA

NEAR is available in Germany through regulated trading venues. Since the EU's MiCA regulation took effect, providers addressing retail customers in the EU need authorisation as a crypto asset service provider; a BaFin licence, or one from another member state used in Germany, is the minimum to look for in a buying route. Which venues carry NEAR and what fees they charge is shown in our crypto exchange comparison.

In the purchase itself, after a day with almost 12 percent of movement, the order type makes the difference. A market order in a thin order book buys at the next available price and can be filled well above the price you last saw. A limit order names your maximum price and may not be filled at all. With a daily range of $4.90 to $5.76, those are not rounding errors.

If you want not just to hold NEAR but to earn on it, you end up at staking. The proceeds are income and depend on the validator you delegate to; the lock-up period when you withdraw belongs in the calculation. Which platforms quote which terms is set out in our overview of staking platforms.

Tax on NEAR gains: holding period, exemption limit and the exchanges' reporting duty

In Germany, gains from the sale of crypto assets count as private disposals. After a holding period of one year the gain is tax-free; before that it counts towards your other income. The exemption limit for such gains is 1,000 euros in the calendar year and falls away entirely as soon as it is exceeded. Staking proceeds are valued at the time of receipt and have to be considered separately.

Documentation is what matters. Anyone rearranging a portfolio after a jump like the one from Friday to Sunday creates transactions whose acquisition data has to remain traceable next year. A tax tool or portfolio tracker takes over the logging; the duty to file correctly stays with you. The fact that trading venues pass data on to the tax authorities does not make clean records of your own unnecessary, it makes them more important.

The levels after the break below five: $4.90 below, $5.76 above

Three values are well founded for the coming days. Below sits the intraday low at $4.90: that is where the price slipped under the round five-dollar mark during October 13 before pulling back to around $5.09. The mark has therefore failed once and now sits just below the current price. Above sits the intraday high at $5.76, around 18 percent above the low. Whether the return above five dollars holds will show in whether the price leaves Tuesday's low untouched.

For context on the upside: the all-time high of $20.44 dates from January 2022. From today's price that is more than 70 percent away. The last time Cryptoticker wrote about NEAR, on October 10, the price stood at $4.93. The intraday low of October 13 at $4.90 was even below that, so the level around 5 dollars discussed then has been worked through. You will find the state of play at the time in the article on the volatility range of October 10.

Our assessment: a Nasdaq company at the access point, not at the blockchain

In the editorial team's view the acquisition is positive for NEAR over the medium term and overdrawn in the short term. Positive, because a listed owner brings money and accountability into an infrastructure that a small team ran at low prices until now; SVRN expressly announces investment in reliability and capacity. Overdrawn, because the network's daily figures were already not keeping pace on October 12: $122.8 million of daily volume at NEAR Intents stood against a cumulative total of $33.57 billion, and the token's trading volume of around $1.04 to $1.14 billion did not support a ten percent jump in a quiet overall market. The price path of October 12 has confirmed that reading.

Something else argues against it: the purchase price was not disclosed. Without it there is no judging whether SVRN bought cheaply or whether its own share price carried the cost. Assessing the acquisition as a piece of business is not possible with the figures published; assessing its direction is. Crypto assets can fall to a total loss; this assessment is not a recommendation to buy or sell.

NEAR's RPC plumbing: a Nasdaq company serves 3.5 billion requests

1. Open the wallet settings and note the RPC endpoint. If larger balances sit with a single provider, separate custody from access and put the keys on a device from the hardware wallet comparison.
2. Check the venue and the order type before buying. Authorisation under MiCA, NEAR on offer, a limit order rather than a market order after a day with almost 12 percent of movement: the terms are in the exchange comparison.
3. Weigh the lock-up period against the yield when staking. The proceeds are taxable on receipt, and withdrawing takes time; you will find the terms at the staking platforms.

The primary source on the acquisition is the SEC Form 6-K from SVRN, Inc. of October 9, 2026. The volume figures for NEAR Intents are at DefiLlama.

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

Binance is switching off its mining pool. On November 10, 2026 at 07:00 UTC the exchange will cut the connections to Binance Pool, the stratum URLs and mining endpoints will go offline, and any hash rate arriving after that will be neither accepted nor credited. Pool Savings, Cloud Mining and the Transaction Accelerator go with the pool, along with the Telegram hash rate alerts, the email notifications and the mining pool APIs.

The date you actually need to remember, though, is a different one. The same announcement carries a second deadline, seventeen hours later: by November 10, 2026 at 23:59 UTC you are meant to have completed everything needed for outstanding rewards, balances, refunds and statements to be able to reach you, identity verification expressly included. If you have only 07:00 in mind, you will think the matter is settled by midday and let the second edge pass in the evening.

Then there is a third cut-off, the one most likely to catch up with you years later: from November 24, 2026 at 07:00 UTC the pool pages will be permanently unreachable. That also takes away the statements you need as evidence for your tax return. This article walks you through all three deadlines, through the switch to another pool, and through the German obligations attached to it.

What Binance switches off on November 10, and what disappears with the pool

The Binance announcement names a whole product group, not a single offering. Binance Pool itself, Pool Savings, Cloud Mining and the Transaction Accelerator are all being retired. Added to that are the features built around the pool: hash rate alerts via Telegram, email notifications, and the mining pool APIs that many operators run their monitoring through.

Four of these terms affect different people. A mining pool combines the computing power of many participants; when the pool finds a block, it distributes the reward according to the submitted shares. Cloud mining is the counterpart: here you own no hardware but rent computing power for a term. Pool Savings was an interest product into which mining proceeds could be deposited. The Transaction Accelerator, finally, could push a stuck Bitcoin transaction into a block ahead of others.

Two terms will accompany you through the rest of this text. The hash rate is the speed at which your hardware works through computing operations, measured in hashes per second; it determines what share of the pool's proceeds you can claim. Shares are the evidence of that work: partial solutions your device submits to the pool, which the pool counts to determine your portion of a block it finds. Together the two describe what actually gets paid for in crypto mining, and what runs into nothing from 07:00 UTC on November 10.

If you are a cloud mining customer, you need to reconfigure no machine; the product simply falls away for you. Anyone running their own ASICs, the hardware specialised in Bitcoin, has real work ahead: select a new pool, switch each device individually to the new stratum address, reassign worker names and replace the monitoring that currently hangs off the Binance APIs. As of this week a Bitcoin costs around $83,300 and a mined block currently brings 3.125 BTC plus fees, so the switch is not about small change.

The Binance Pool shutdown in sequence: 07:00 UTC, 23:59 UTC and November 24

November 10, 07:00 UTC. Binance begins cutting the mining connections. The stratum URLs and the mining endpoints are deactivated. Hash rate submissions and mining shares arriving after this point will, in the wording of the announcement, no longer be accepted, processed or credited. Product access closes at the same time, and no new rewards, earnings or benefits accrue. On the same day all references to Binance Pool disappear from the exchange's home page.

November 10, 23:59 UTC. This line is the least conspicuous and the most consequential. Binance asks that by then you make sure your account can actually receive outstanding rewards, refunds or statements, and expressly names all required identity verification steps in that context. An incompletely verified account is precisely the case in which a payout stalls. Those most affected are users who opened their account years ago and have barely touched it since.

November 24, 07:00 UTC. For fourteen days the pool pages remain reachable so that you can view historical data, account records and the status of your payouts. After that they are permanently unavailable.

One restriction takes effect even earlier but affects no German users: for customers in Brazil, Binance is limiting access to several services including Binance Pool from October 27, 2026. The trade outlet CryptoBriefing attributes that step to new requirements from the country's central bank. Binance itself draws no connection between the two in its announcement.

The second deadline at 23:59 UTC and the role of identity verification

Close reading pays off here, rather than drama. Binance does not say that outstanding amounts lapse after 23:59 UTC. The announcement is more careful: eligible outstanding rewards, balances, refunds or statements will continue to be processed after November 10 as well, subject to the respective product rules, account status, risk controls, compliance checks and applicable law. The 23:59 UTC is named as the point by which the necessary steps should be done in order to allow prompt handling.

In practice that means the deadline is not a trapdoor with total loss, but it marks the point from which you can no longer rely on swift processing. Four things therefore belong done beforehand.

• Complete identity verification. This is the only point Binance names explicitly. If your verification is incomplete or an identity document has expired, the payout stands still.
• Check payout details. Stored addresses and bank details have to be current and confirmed.
• Clear up account status. An active security lock or an open support query is exactly the account status the announcement refers to.
• Close out Pool Savings positions. This point has an uncertainty of its own, more on that shortly.

Shares, rewards and the final settlement: what still counts before 07:00 UTC

One detail takes the pressure off: mining shares you submit before 07:00 UTC on November 10 still feed into the final calculation of rewards under the applicable Binance Pool rules. The work of the last hours before the shutdown is therefore not lost. Binance also writes that the pool should keep running under normal conditions until the stated times.

What comes afterwards, by contrast, really is wasted work. A device still pointing at the old address at 08:00 UTC on November 10 computes into the void: the shares it submits are no longer counted, and the electricity runs all the same. On a current large machine drawing three to four kilowatts, that is roughly 72 to 96 kilowatt hours a day for which not a single reward is credited any more.

That is why the switchover date is not a point but a window. If you are responsible for several devices, allow a day of lead time, test the new address on a single machine and only then move the rest across. One thing matters when comparing pools: the settlement models differ. Under PPS you get a fixed payment per submitted share; FPPS, or full pay per share, adds a proportional share of the transaction fees on top; PPLNS only distributes after a block is found and therefore fluctuates more. Which model you choose changes your proceeds noticeably.

Pool Savings: close it out, even though no separate time is named

At this point the announcement stays vague, and that deserves saying. On Pool Savings it only says that you should review your active positions and cancel or redeem them before the service ends. Binance names no separate time for it.

Because Pool Savings appears in the same list as the pool itself, 07:00 UTC on November 10 is the moment you should plan for. A separate, later deadline for Pool Savings is nowhere documented, and nobody should stake their balance on an undocumented deadline.

Our measurement: Binance Pool recently found 47 of 4,419 blocks

Why does one of the largest companies in the industry close its mining pool? Binance is among the largest crypto exchanges in the world, and the closure hits a service the company has run since 2020. Binance gives only the ongoing review of its own product range as the reason. The numbers are more explicit.

We counted the blocks found per pool, on the basis of data from the block explorer mempool.space. Over the past three years Binance Pool accounted for 4,366 of 159,250 blocks, that is 2.74 percent and ninth place. Over the past year it was 1,080 of 52,380 blocks, 2.06 percent, still ninth place. And in the past month: 47 of 4,419 blocks, 1.06 percent, thirteenth place. Its share has more than halved in three years.

At the top, the same month looks like this: Foundry USA came to 25.6 percent, AntPool to 20.7 percent, F2Pool to 16.2 percent. The three largest mining pools thus share around 62 percent of the blocks found between them. A pool with a one percent share finds a block every day and a half on average, and it is exactly that rarity that makes proceeds uneven for the miners connected to it.

Our assessment: the crypto mining business has become a side matter for Binance, and the closure follows from that. The halved block share supports it, as does the slide from ninth to thirteenth place within a year and the fact that the entire product family is going rather than a single service. Little stands against it, apart from the timing: the restriction in Brazil taking effect two weeks earlier can be read as regulatory pressure. That connection is not documented, and Binance does not draw it itself. In any case the reason changes nothing about the three cut-off dates.

Mining income in Germany: section 15 or section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act

Now to the part the reports on the shutdown leave out. Anyone mining in Germany has taxable income, regardless of whether the pool continues to exist or not.

The Federal Ministry of Finance assigns block creation to two income categories in its circular on crypto assets of March 6, 2025. If you mine on a sustained basis and with the intention of making a profit, it is income from a trade or business under section 15 of the Income Tax Act; block reward and transaction fees then count as business receipts. If the activity remains occasional, other income from services under section 22 no. 3 of the Income Tax Act applies. There an exemption limit applies: if this income stays below 256 euros in the calendar year, it is tax-free. If the limit is exceeded, the full amount is taxable, not just the excess.

What is decisive is the value at the time of receipt: the relevant price is the one on the day the reward was credited to your account, not the price at a later sale. How the line between trade and occasional activity falls in an individual case is broken down at length in our guide to crypto mining and tax.

What section 147 of the Fiscal Code demands of your mining records

That makes November 24 the real tax date of this shutdown. The German Fiscal Code sets out in section 147 which records have to be kept in order and for how long.

For mining that means concretely: monthly statements, payout receipts and the transaction history are accounting documents or at least other records of relevance for taxation. Section 147 paragraph 3 of the Fiscal Code sets staggered periods for them: books and annual financial statements ten years, accounting documents eight years, other records six years. The period only begins at the end of the calendar year in which the document arose, and it does not expire while the assessment period for the tax concerned is still open.

A statement from 2026 can therefore stay with you well into the 2030s. The provider, however, only keeps it available until November 24, 2026. Whatever you have not downloaded by then you will later have to reconstruct, and without access to the source.

A complete export rather than a sample therefore makes sense: all monthly statements, the full payout history with the destination addresses, the entries on Pool Savings and Cloud Mining, and the receipts for fees. If you want to record your proceeds on an ongoing basis, the crypto tax software and portfolio trackers include programs that value mining receipts at the daily rate and output them as a report. You still have to secure the raw data yourself: a tool is no substitute for a receipt, and the provider's pages are unreachable from November 24.

What the tax office learns about crypto accounts from 2026 anyway

The records also matter more because the authorities are seeing more in parallel than they used to. With the Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act, Germany has implemented the EU directive DAC8; the law has applied since January 1, 2026. Providers of crypto asset services have to report details of their users and their transactions to the Federal Central Tax Office, which passes the data on to the local tax offices and to partner authorities in the EU. The first reporting year is 2026, with the report due the year after.

For you as a miner that amounts to a plain arithmetic task: what the exchange reports should match what stands in your return. An account whose statements you can no longer call up makes exactly that reconciliation harder. That is the second reason to pull the records before November 24, even if you moved to another pool long ago.

Switching pools: stratum address, worker names and the monitoring

The technical part is manageable as long as you do not leave it to the last day. Three steps are enough for one device.

1. Open an account with the new pool and store a payout address. Check the minimum amount from which payouts are made and at what intervals. On small setups that threshold determines whether you see money regularly at all.
2. Enter the stratum address and worker names. In your device's interface you replace the previous pool URL with the new one and assign a worker name following the new provider's scheme. Set up a second address as a backup at the same time, so the device does not sit idle if there is a fault.
3. Rebuild the monitoring. Alerts that rely on the Binance APIs or the Telegram notifications stop working on November 10. Many miners notice their monitoring has failed only once the hash rate has long been at zero. The replacement belongs in place beforehand, otherwise you notice an outage only from the payout that fails to arrive.

Four things count when choosing the new provider. First, size: large mining pools find blocks more often and therefore pay out more evenly, but they also concentrate the network's computing power on a few addresses. Second, the supported cryptocurrencies: some services settle only Bitcoin, others serve several blockchains, which pays off if your hardware is not fixed on BTC. Third, the fee, which depending on the provider sits between around one and four percent of proceeds. Fourth, the location of the servers, because high latency between device and pool costs rejected shares and therefore hard cash.

Where your rewards land afterwards is a separate decision. On an exchange they stay conveniently tradable but sit in third-party custody. If you are building up larger holdings, you withdraw them into custody of your own. One thing should be clear in all this: mining proceeds are not secure income. Falling prices, rising difficulty and electricity costs can make an operation unprofitable, and a total loss of the capital deployed is possible.

Binance Pool: the statements stay available until November 24

Three steps, in this order:

1. By November 10, 07:00 UTC: move the hash rate. Choose a new pool, switch each device individually, compare settlement model and payout threshold. Where the payouts go afterwards is best settled in advance: the comparison of crypto exchanges and their fees shows what deposits and withdrawals in euros cost where.
2. By November 10, 23:59 UTC: make the account ready to receive. Complete identity verification, update payout details, close out Pool Savings positions. For larger holdings you then want to keep in your own custody, the hardware wallet comparison is worth a look.
3. By November 24, 07:00 UTC: secure the records. Download all monthly statements, the payout history and the fee receipts, and file them so that you can still find them in eight years. A tax tool with a portfolio tracker then takes over the valuation at the daily rate.

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

Dogecoin costs $0.0848 on Tuesday afternoon. Market capitalisation stands at $13.2 billion, roughly a third above that of Chainlink, which sits at $9.97 billion on the same day. Even so, the emerging index launched at the end of August by CME Group and CF Benchmarks lists Chainlink as a member and Dogecoin not. The reason is not in the price but in the rulebook: the index excludes memecoins and additionally measures how much value sits in the applications on a blockchain. On that second yardstick Dogecoin fails, and that explains more about the coming months than any single day's move.

The CME index takes ten coins, and Dogecoin is not one of them

CME Group and CF Benchmarks launched two benchmarks on August 31, 2026. One, the CME CF Crypto Market Index, covers twelve assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum. The other, the CME CF Emerging Crypto Index, leaves out the two large ones and bundles ten assets: BNB, XRP, Solana, Hyperliquid, Chainlink, Stellar, Sui, Uniswap, Avalanche and Aave. The indicative weights from the CF Benchmarks study of August 13 put BNB at 32.0 percent, XRP at 27.6 percent, Solana at 18.5 percent and Hyperliquid at 14.6 percent. For the remaining six assets, Chainlink included, 7.3 percent is left in total. Weighting follows free-float market capitalisation, with a review every six months on the first business day in June and December.

An index on its own is just a number. It matters once products are built on it. That is exactly why a futures exchange constructs such benchmarks: indices like these are the basis for futures contracts, for certificates and for funds that track a group of assets rather than individual coins. Anything not in the index does not appear in those products. Single-asset products on Dogecoin are unaffected; basket products are not. crypto.news has written up the details of the composition and the launch.

Chainlink is smaller than Dogecoin and still in

Comparing the two assets shows that size alone does not carry. Dogecoin sits at $13.2 billion in market capitalisation on October 13, Chainlink at $9.97 billion. The gap in daily turnover is similar: $780 million for Dogecoin against $404 million for Chainlink. On the two figures investors look at first, Dogecoin would be the stronger candidate.

The admission rules, however, ask for something else. First, memecoins are expressly excluded, and Dogecoin is the oldest and largest of them. Second, a coin has to be custodiable in a way that lets institutional houses hold it. Third, and this is the point that can be measured, the value held in the applications on a blockchain is set against the token's fully diluted market capitalisation. The rulebook names no public threshold for this, but the direction is unambiguous.

The usage filter: what sits on a blockchain is what decides

A simple idea sits behind the third criterion. A blockchain that carries lending, that issues stablecoins and that hosts trading venues ties up capital. The industry calls that tied-up capital total value locked, or TVL: the sum of all funds deposited in the applications on a blockchain. Set it against the token's market capitalisation and you get a measure of how much of that market value rests on actual usage and how much on expectation.

Chainlink supplies price data to a large number of applications and, with its staking offering, features in that calculation itself. Solana and Avalanche carry application ecosystems of their own, Aave is a lending market, Uniswap a trading venue. Dogecoin has none of this, and for a reason that was never meant to be a shortcoming: the Dogecoin blockchain cannot execute programs. It transfers value, and has done so reliably since 2013. For a metric designed to measure tied-up capital, that leaves close to nothing.

How to check the admission criteria yourself

The three points can be followed without a data service. For the memecoin criterion a project's own description is enough: Dogecoin was launched in 2013 explicitly as a joke project, and nothing about that has changed. For the custody criterion you check whether regulated custodians carry the coin, which they do for Dogecoin. For the usage criterion you look up the blockchain's TVL and divide it by the token's market capitalisation. If the result sits close to zero because the blockchain cannot carry applications, the filter is the reason for a no, not the size.

A sober expectation for December follows from that. The first regular review of members falls on the first business day in December. As long as the rules apply unchanged and the Dogecoin blockchain runs no applications, nothing changes in the composition as far as Dogecoin is concerned. Anyone betting on inclusion is betting on a rule change, not on a price path.

The Dogecoin blockchain in numbers on October 13

How little happens on the blockchain itself can be put in figures. The data below comes from the public statistics at Blockchair, queried on October 13 at 14:44 UTC. Over 24 hours, 1,375 blocks were found and 19,853 transactions processed. That is about 14 transactions per block. In the mempool, the queue of transfers not yet confirmed, 20 transactions totalling 5,127 bytes were sitting at that moment. A blockchain under load looks different.

The remaining figures round out the picture. Network hash rate came to 3.51 petahashes per second and the number of reachable nodes to 494. The largest single transfer of the past 24 hours was worth $46.6 million, which shows what the blockchain is used for: large transfers between a few addresses, not many small operations inside applications. Newly minted in the same period was Dogecoin worth around $1.17 million, roughly 13.7 million coins, because issuance continues with no cap.

These numbers are not a criticism of the design. Dogecoin was built as a means of payment, not as a platform. But they explain why a metric looking for tied-up capital finds nothing at Dogecoin. And they mark the difference from the project that starts precisely here.

DogeOS is built to close exactly this gap

On September 30 the team behind the MyDoge wallet opened a public testnet for DogeOS. It is an application layer on top of Dogecoin, technically a zero-knowledge rollup: a second layer that executes transactions itself, bundles them and then posts a cryptographic proof of the result on the Dogecoin blockchain. The layer understands the Ethereum programming environment, and fees are paid in DOGE. The base blockchain stays unchanged.

Several applications were named at launch, among them Barkswap as a liquidity engine, Superposition Finance for lending, Derps for perpetual futures, Split Markets for options and USDoge as a collateralised stablecoin. According to the report, the project was funded with $6.9 million in a round led by Polychain Capital in May 2025. Timothy Stebbing, a director of the Dogecoin Foundation, said of it: “L1 ledger purity must stay intact while we introduce utility one layer above, and that is what DogeOS represents to me.” Unchained has gathered the particulars.

For the index question the timing is what counts, and it is open. There is no date for the launch of the live network. Founder and chief executive Jordan Jefferson said only that the timetable would be communicated along with the next development steps. A testnet ties up no capital, and as long as no main network runs, the metric the index looks at does not move.

The bridge hangs on validators and a TEE signer

Anyone who later wants to move real DOGE onto this second layer should know what security there depends on. According to the developer's statements to The Block, the bridge requires three things at once: valid zero-knowledge proofs, signatures from a majority of DogeOS validators, and the signature of a so-called TEE signer, that is, a shielded execution environment. For now the order of transactions is set by a permissioned sequencer, not an open market.

The most important point comes at the end of that list. The Dogecoin blockchain itself does not verify these proofs. That would require a new opcode called OP_CHECKZKP, proposed since July 2025 and not implemented so far. Until that happens, whoever sends value across the bridge is relying on the validators and the shielded environment, not on the blockchain. That is not a warning about the project but a description of the trust model. In the testnet it has no consequences, because no real value sits there. At the launch of the main network it will be the first question.

The ETF channel stands at zero in October

The index is not the only route through which institutional money reaches a coin. For single-asset funds on Dogecoin, though, things look no better at present. According to an evaluation by 24/7 Wall St. based on data from the provider SoSoValue, there was not one trading day in October through the 12th of the month with a net inflow or net outflow. Shares were traded only between investors. Total net assets across all Dogecoin funds came to around $14.9 million, against $15.6 million paid in since launch.

On Monday, October 12, the first flow figure of the month then arrived, as an exit: FXStreet reports $399,460 of outflows from the Dogecoin funds. Measured against spot turnover of $780 million a day, that is not a number that moves a price. As an indication of interest on the product side it is telling.

There is also a date. Bitwise is halting trading in its Dogecoin fund BWOW on NYSE Arca after October 14, so tomorrow. Anyone keeping shares receives a cash payout on October 22 based on the net asset value of October 21. The net assets of that fund stood at about $684,000 on October 8. We reported on the process itself and on the distribution of the remaining holdings across two custodians on October 12, in Dogecoin custody: 144.8 million DOGE across two custodians.

What has changed since the report of October 12

Two things have been added since that article. First, October 12 is the first flow day this month, and it came out negative. Second, the price has barely moved, but the day's range is instructive: Dogecoin fell as far as $0.080215 on October 13 and rose as far as $0.085368, trades at $0.0848 in the afternoon and is therefore 0.28 percent below the previous day. The intraday low of $0.080215 is the level that has been added since; the concentration of fund holdings with two custodians, the subject of October 12, is unchanged.

Over longer horizons it sorts out like this: over seven days Dogecoin is down 11.72 percent, over 30 days it is up 1.64 percent. The distance to the high of $0.731578 from May 2021 is 88.41 percent. The figures come from CoinGecko, as of October 13, 14:44 UTC.

Holding period, buying route and custody in Germany

The index exclusion changes nothing about the legal framework in Germany; it only shifts expectations about inflows. The three points that actually affect your return stay the same.

For tax purposes Dogecoin counts, like other crypto assets, as an other asset. A sale within a year of purchase is a private disposal under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act and is taxed at the personal rate, above the annual exemption limit of 1,000 euros. After a year has passed the gain is tax-free. If you want to use the one-year rule you need unbroken records of the purchase date and purchase price, and that is exactly where most returns come apart. Which tools keep this history is covered in our overview of crypto tax software and portfolio trackers.

On the buying route, what counts since MiCA came fully into force is the provider's authorisation. Venues licensed as crypto asset service providers in the European Union are subject to supervisory duties and must keep client holdings segregated. Whether a provider holds that licence is recorded in the register of the competent supervisor. Then there is the cost side: on small amounts, the spread between instant buy and order book is a bigger item than any one day's price move. Which venues work on which terms is broken down in our crypto exchange comparison.

On custody, the situation with Dogecoin is simpler than with many altcoins, because the blockchain knows nothing beyond transfers. A wallet of your own is enough, and it makes you independent of what a fund provider or a trading venue decides. If you want to hold a balance for years, separate it from the trading venue. That applies all the more if a second layer does eventually launch: the bridge to it is an additional trust relationship, and part of your holding need not enter into it.

The editorial team's assessment

Our assessment: the exclusion from the emerging index carries more consequences for Dogecoin than the small number of affected products suggests, but it is also not a verdict on the coin. The facts in this text support that: the criterion Dogecoin fails is the usage filter, and that measures something Dogecoin was never designed to deliver. Against that stands the fact that the filter cannot be argued with. It is a number, it sits close to zero, and the six-month review in December will not change that as long as no main network for applications runs. Anyone holding Dogecoin should therefore not count on institutional inflows via basket products. What remains are the single-asset funds with around $14.9 million in combined assets and a month without a net inflow. That is the picture, and it is measurable.

Dogecoin in the index: the December review decides on inclusion

Three steps make sense now, and none of them depends on the day's price.

1. Check your purchase records for completeness and note the purchase date for every holding, so that you can actually prove the one-year rule under section 23 of the German Income Tax Act. Which tool keeps the history is shown in our comparison of tax tools.
2. Look up whether your trading venue is licensed as a crypto asset service provider in the EU and what a purchase in the order book costs you there compared with an instant buy. The providers' terms are in the crypto exchange comparison.
3. Separate the part of your holding you want to keep for years from the trading venue and move it into custody of your own. The devices and how they differ are in the hardware wallet comparison.

The next date on the calendar is the first business day in December, when CF Benchmarks reviews the members of both indices. Until then it is not Dogecoin's market capitalisation that decides, but the question of whether anything sits on the blockchain that can be counted as tied-up capital.

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

The chatbot app once valued at $1 billion is up for sale in a Delaware court, two weeks after launching new models. If nobody buys it, it shuts down.

Binance will discontinue Binance Pool, Pool Savings, Cloud Mining, and other related services in a retreat from mining infrastructure.

A wallet that received 4,581 BTC in March 2020, worth about $40 million then, moved its stash today when it was worth about $377 million.

The Nasdaq-listed asset manager bought the Bitcoin at an average of about $84,500 during a rough week for the market, lifting its total stash to 32,773 BTC.

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says many AI researchers have taken up smoking to signal their faith in AI.

Ripple has partnered with Stripe-owned Privy to bring AI-powered payments to the XRP Ledger, expanding its push into agentic commerce.

Hardware wallet giant Trezor is severing ties with a significant portion of its authorized resellers following the massive Ledger supply-chain security scare, introducing stricter controls to protect customers from potential attacks.

SEC report exposes who really owns Nasdaq's new XRP stock, revealing massive stakes held by Chris Larsen, Ripple, and SBI Holdings.

Tesla still boasts nearly a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin years after Elon Musk directed the electric vehicle maker to invest $1.5 billion in the leading crypto asset.

Ripple has minted another 19.6 million RLUSD on Ethereum amid heightened treasury activity, with the latest transactions coinciding with a major institutional custody breakthrough.

TLDR

• Walmart stock gains 0.25% as AI chatbot recommendations boost retail visibility.
• UBS research shows Walmart leads AI shopping suggestions for everyday products.
• Gartner finds 34% of US consumers willing to use AI for holiday gift shopping.
• Walmart’s strong retail presence supports its position in AI shopping results.
• High stock valuation remains a challenge despite new AI-driven growth prospects.

Walmart Inc. rose 0.25% to $113.36 during Tuesday’s intraday trading, gaining $0.28 as shares advanced modestly. The increase came as UBS research highlighted Walmart’s strong position in artificial intelligence-powered shopping recommendations. Analysts identified the retailer as a frequent recommendation across AI chatbots, creating another potential channel for attracting customers.

Walmart Inc., WMT

UBS Research Highlights Walmart’s Strength in AI Shopping

UBS analysts examined how leading AI chatbots recommend retailers when consumers search for everyday products and shopping advice. The research covered several shopping categories, including groceries, household supplies, and other essential consumer goods. Results showed Walmart frequently appeared among the leading recommendations, reflecting its established retail presence and competitive pricing.

The analysts tested 12 shopping questions across New Jersey, New York, and Minnesota to evaluate different recommendation patterns. They examined responses from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Muse to identify which retailers appeared most frequently. Walmart performed strongly across multiple categories, while Costco and Aldi also gained recognition for their respective retail strengths.

The findings highlight how artificial intelligence could influence where consumers begin their shopping journeys. Chatbots help users compare products, identify retailers, and narrow purchasing decisions without reviewing multiple websites. Walmart could attract additional customer interest as more households incorporate these tools into everyday shopping activities.

Gartner Survey Shows Growing Demand for AI Shopping Tools

A Gartner survey found that 34% of American consumers expressed strong willingness to use AI for holiday gift recommendations. Researchers surveyed 1,004 consumers in August 2026 to examine changing shopping habits ahead of the holiday season. The findings indicate growing acceptance of automated product suggestions, particularly among consumers seeking faster purchasing decisions.

Traditional shopping channels continue playing a central role despite increasing interest in artificial intelligence. Gartner found that 77% of respondents planned to shop in physical stores during the holiday period. Additionally, 75% expected to purchase products through Amazon, highlighting continued demand for established retail platforms.

Walmart’s extensive store network gives the company an established position across both physical and online retail markets. Its product selection covers groceries, electronics, clothing, household goods, and other frequently purchased consumer products. Customers can combine online searches with store visits, pickup services, and home delivery options.

Walmart Stock Valuation Remains a Key Growth Challenge

Despite the potential benefits of AI recommendations, Walmart shares have delivered relatively modest gains during 2026. The stock has advanced approximately 2% this year, trailing the broader market despite the company’s established retail operations. Its valuation exceeds 40 times trailing earnings, placing greater emphasis on future revenue and profit growth.

Walmart generated more than $730 billion in revenue over the preceding 12 months, reflecting its substantial operating scale. However, that size also means incremental sales from AI referrals may produce limited changes in overall growth. The company would need significant additional spending from customers to produce a meaningful improvement in its revenue trajectory.

Walmart continues developing its digital operations while maintaining its position in the competitive US retail market. Its broad product selection and established reputation for affordable goods support its visibility across emerging shopping platforms. The UBS findings identify another potential source of customer traffic, although they do not establish additional sales or earnings.

The post Walmart Inc. (WMT) Stock: AI Chatbot Recommendations Fuel Growth Potential appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• UnitedHealth stock rises 0.25% as management outlines stronger growth for 2027.
• UnitedHealth raises its 2026 earnings forecast following stronger Q3 results.
• Management targets 13% to 16% long-term earnings growth as operations improve.
• AI tools reduce clinical review times by 33% as UnitedHealth cuts paperwork.
• Optum expands pharmacy services while Medicare and Medicaid reforms advance.

UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (UNH) rose 0.25% to $379.47 on Tuesday following its third-quarter 2026 earnings announcement. The healthcare company raised its annual earnings outlook and outlined plans for stronger financial performance in 2027. Management emphasized operational improvements, artificial intelligence adoption, and medical cost controls as major drivers of future growth.

UnitedHealth Group Incorporated, UNH

UnitedHealth Group Raises Earnings Outlook After Strong Q3 Performance

UnitedHealth Group reported third-quarter revenue of $112.7 billion, while operating earnings reached $6.6 billion during the reporting period. Adjusted earnings reached $4.69 per share, exceeding Wall Street expectations as the company improved its cost management. Management raised its full-year 2026 adjusted earnings guidance to at least $20.50 per share.

The company also reduced its medical care ratio to 88.4%, compared with 89.9% a year earlier. Management attributed the improvement to pricing discipline, benefit adjustments, and stronger coordination across its healthcare operations. Specialty pharmacy expenses and higher treatment intensity continued to pressure medical spending across several business segments.

UnitedHealth expanded its operational modernization efforts across UnitedHealthcare and Optum to improve service delivery and efficiency. Approximately 40% of employed clinicians now use AI-powered documentation tools, reducing medical record review times by 33%. The company plans to eliminate 30% of prior authorization requirements by year-end to simplify patient access.

Management Targets Stronger Earnings Growth in 2027

UnitedHealth management expressed confidence in reaching the lower end of its long-term adjusted earnings growth target for 2027. The company maintains a growth framework of 13% to 16%, supported by stronger execution and operational improvements. Chief Financial Officer Wayne DeVeydt also indicated that current analyst earnings estimates may underestimate the company’s recovery potential.

The company’s Medicare Advantage strategy prioritizes health maintenance organizations and specialized plans serving patients with complex medical needs. These offerings include Chronic Special Needs Plans and Dual Special Needs Plans, which support targeted healthcare management. UnitedHealth expects its quality improvement programs to strengthen its competitive position across government-sponsored insurance markets.

Management also expects Optum Insight to advance its technology offerings through new AI-focused products during 2027. The company anticipates further expansion in 2028 as these services gain commercial traction across healthcare organizations. Optum Rx continues developing transparent pharmacy services, with external customers accounting for more than half its membership.

Medical Costs and Regulatory Reforms Shape Recovery

Despite improving operating performance, UnitedHealth continues managing medical expenses and regulatory requirements across its insurance businesses. Medicaid margins remain under pressure, although management expects them to reach their lowest point during 2026. The company targets stronger profitability by 2028 through reimbursement negotiations and improved care for patients with complex needs.

Management identified the No Surprises Act arbitration process as another source of elevated healthcare costs. The company reported that related disputes account for up to 6% of medical spending in certain regions. Consequently, UnitedHealth continues advocating regulatory changes while improving its internal claims management and payment processes.

UnitedHealth also expects 75% of its Medicare Advantage membership to enter plans with ratings of four stars or higher. The target applies to 2028 ratings and reflects continued spending on service quality and patient outcomes. Separately, the United Health Foundation committed $1 billion toward rural healthcare, workforce education, and broader community health programs.

Management expects fourth-quarter performance to reflect seasonal medical spending alongside additional investments in technology and clinical operations. The company will continue expanding administrative automation while strengthening its healthcare delivery network and insurance offerings. These initiatives form part of UnitedHealth’s broader plan to improve operating margins and support earnings growth beyond 2026.

The post UnitedHealth Group Incorporated (UNH) Stock: Climbs as Management Targets Strong 2027 Growth appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Applied Materials (AMAT) stock plunges 8.19% despite strong demand for AI chips.

• Applied Materials targets over two percentage points of market share gains by 2030.

• Applied Materials expects its eBeam equipment revenue to reach $2 billion in 2026.

• Applied Materials projects semiconductor service revenue above $12 billion by 2030.

• Applied Materials plans to more than double its research and production capacity by 2030.

Applied Materials (AMAT) stock plunged 8.19% to $456.77 during Tuesday’s intraday trading, losing $40.76 despite strong demand for AI chips. The decline followed the company’s presentation of ambitious semiconductor equipment growth targets through 2030. Meanwhile, Applied Materials outlined expansion plans across advanced manufacturing, research facilities, and semiconductor services.

Applied Materials, Inc., AMAT

Applied Materials Targets Stronger Growth in AI Chip Equipment

Applied Materials presented its long-term growth strategy during the 2026 SEMICON West Investor Breakfast on Tuesday. The company expects expanding AI infrastructure to support sustained demand for wafer fabrication equipment. Its strategy focuses on advanced chip production, memory technology, and semiconductor packaging.

CEO Gary Dickerson identified AI infrastructure development as a major driver of future semiconductor equipment spending. He emphasized the company’s leadership in technologies that improve computing performance, energy efficiency, and production costs. Applied Materials expects broader AI adoption to increase demand for advanced silicon manufacturing.

The company projects three semiconductor segments will generate approximately 75% of wafer fabrication equipment growth between 2025 and 2030. These segments include leading-edge foundry logic, DRAM memory, and advanced packaging technologies. Applied Materials aims to increase its equipment market share by more than two percentage points during this period.

Applied Materials Expands Semiconductor Services and eBeam Technology

Applied Materials expects its electron-beam inspection equipment business to generate $2 billion in revenue during calendar 2026. The technology helps semiconductor manufacturers identify production defects and improve yields during advanced chip manufacturing. Additionally, its imaging systems support faster production processes and more efficient factory operations.

The company also expects its semiconductor services revenue to increase more than 20% during 2026. Management projects annual services revenue will exceed $12 billion by 2030, supported by a mid-teens compound growth rate. These services help semiconductor manufacturers improve equipment performance, factory productivity, and manufacturing efficiency.

Chief Financial Officer Brice Hill outlined plans to strengthen profitability while expanding research and development spending. According to Hill, previous technology investments have established the company’s position across important semiconductor manufacturing processes. The company now plans to increase operating leverage as semiconductor equipment demand expands.

Applied Materials Plans Major Manufacturing Expansion Through 2030

Applied Materials plans to more than double its research laboratory and manufacturing capacity by 2030. The expansion supports expected growth in semiconductor production and demand for advanced manufacturing equipment. The company continues investing in facilities that support collaboration with semiconductor manufacturers.

On Monday, Applied Materials unveiled its Equipment and Process Innovation and Commercialization Center in Silicon Valley. The new facility supports joint research into semiconductor process technology and equipment development. The company has already announced 15 partnerships involving chipmakers, technology companies, equipment manufacturers, and universities.

Applied Materials has also expanded its manufacturing infrastructure across several international locations. These facilities include operations in Austin, Texas, Singapore, and Treviso, Italy. The investments support the company’s long-term production strategy as semiconductor manufacturers expand capacity for increasingly complex computing applications.

The post Applied Materials (AMAT) Stock: Sinks 8% Despite Strong AI Chip Demand appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• BigBear.ai (BBAI) stock climbs 3.83% as new government awards surpass $225M.
• BigBear.ai secures over 25 generative AI awards across major U.S. agencies.
• FBI, NASA, and the Coast Guard join BigBear.ai’s growing government client base.
• BigBear.ai expands defense operations with new military and intelligence awards.
• BigBear.ai reports a $270M backlog, with only 29% funded as of June 30, 2026.

BigBear.ai Holdings (BBAI) stock rose 3.83% to $2.3877 during Tuesday’s intraday trading, gaining $0.0877. Shares stabilized after an early surge above $2.50, following developments in the company’s government business. BigBear.ai announced more than $225 million in awards across several U.S. agencies since July.

BigBear.ai Holdings, Inc., BBAI

BigBear.ai Secures $225 Million in New Awards

BigBear.ai reported new business and renewals across homeland security, defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies. The agreements support its expansion in national security, trade, and travel technology markets. The latest wins also strengthen its relationships with existing customers while expanding its government presence.

According to the announcement, BigBear.ai secured more than 25 new generative AI awards. Customers include the FBI, NASA, U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Energy, and Department of Veterans Affairs. These projects cover specialized technology services for law enforcement, security operations, and civilian applications.

CEO Kevin McAleenan identified customer retention and new agency relationships as major drivers of the company’s recent activity. He highlighted continued work with Customs and Border Protection alongside new partnerships with security organizations. The developments reflect broader adoption of advanced technology across government operations.

BigBear.ai Expands Defense and Intelligence Operations

BigBear.ai also secured agreements supporting U.S. Central Command, U.S. Southern Command, and classified intelligence operations. These projects extend its services into additional military and intelligence environments. Meanwhile, demand for secure AI platforms continues to shape the company’s product offerings.

Its generative AI products provide access to models and automated tools from leading technology providers. Government teams can select available systems according to their operational requirements and security standards. The platforms also support disconnected networks and restricted environments that require tighter data controls.

BigBear.ai retained important work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection through two competitive renewals. The company supports border operations involving traveler screening, cargo movement, and customs security. Its technology helps personnel assess shipments, process information, and make operational decisions.

BigBear.ai Reports $270 Million Backlog

BigBear.ai reported approximately $270 million in total backlog as of June 30, 2026. The company identified only 29% of that amount as funded at the reporting date. This distinction separates secured financial commitments from the broader value of outstanding business.

The announced $225 million includes potential award values, unexercised options, and maximum contract limits. Consequently, actual revenue will depend on government funding decisions, project execution, and exercised options. Agencies also retain the authority to modify agreements, reduce spending, or terminate work.

The post BigBear.ai Holdings (BBAI) Stock: Gains on $225M Federal AI Contract Wins appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Goldman Sachs (GS) stock rises 0.27% as Q3 revenue jumps 23% to $18.68 billion.
• Goldman Sachs reports $5.29 billion in Q3 profit as earnings reach $17.01 per share.
• Equities revenue surges 72% as stronger financing and derivatives lift results.
• Investment banking fees climb 21% as mergers and underwriting activity rebound.
• Goldman Sachs returns $4.49 billion to shareholders and declares a $5 dividend.

Goldman Sachs Group (GS) stock rose 0.27% to $896.36 during Tuesday’s intraday trading, gaining $2.41 after retreating from earlier highs. The bank reported third-quarter revenue growth of 23% to $18.68 billion, driven by stronger trading and investment banking activity. Meanwhile, net earnings reached $5.29 billion as its major business divisions delivered improved annual results.

The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., GS

Goldman Sachs Reports Strong Q3 Earnings Growth

Goldman Sachs reported diluted earnings per share of $17.01, up from $12.25 during the same quarter last year. However, earnings declined sequentially from $20.98 per share in the second quarter. The bank recorded an annualized return on average common shareholders’ equity of 18.7%.

For the first nine months of 2026, the company generated $56.24 billion in revenue and $17.55 billion in earnings. Its book value per common share also increased 4.2% during the period to $372.64. These results reflected stronger banking operations and improved profitability compared with 2025.

Operating expenses increased 20% annually to $11.31 billion, primarily due to higher transaction costs and employee compensation. Meanwhile, provisions for credit losses reached $368 million, reflecting impairments related to wholesale loans. Despite these costs, the bank improved its nine-month efficiency ratio to 59.4% from 62.1%.

Investment Banking and Equities Support Revenue Growth

Global Banking & Markets generated $13.46 billion in quarterly revenue, representing a 32% increase from the previous year. Investment banking fees climbed 21%, supported by higher completed merger transactions and increased underwriting activity. Stronger initial public offerings and secondary share sales also contributed to the division’s performance.

Equities revenue surged 72% annually, supported by stronger financing operations and derivatives trading. Meanwhile, fixed income, currency, and commodities revenue remained largely unchanged despite mixed performance across trading products. Higher currencies and commodities revenue helped offset weaker mortgage, credit, and interest rate activity.

Asset & Wealth Management revenue increased 14% from the previous year, supported by higher management and incentive fees. Increased average assets under supervision contributed to stronger recurring fee income during the quarter. However, weaker investment returns and private banking revenue partly offset the division’s growth.

Goldman Sachs Announces Dividend and Capital Returns

Goldman Sachs declared a quarterly dividend of $5.00 per common share on October 12, 2026. The company scheduled payment for December 30 to shareholders of record on December 2. The announcement followed continued capital distributions through dividends and share repurchases.

During the third quarter, the bank returned $4.49 billion to common shareholders through its capital return program. Share repurchases accounted for $3 billion, while common stock dividends represented the remaining $1.49 billion. The company also maintained its shareholder payout strategy alongside increased investment banking activity.

Meanwhile, average global core liquid assets increased to $574 billion from $555 billion in the previous quarter. Headcount also rose 3% sequentially, reflecting the timing of new graduate recruitment. However, the investment banking backlog declined from the second quarter despite stronger completed transactions.

The post Goldman Sachs Group (GS) Stock: Gains as Q3 Revenue Jumps 23% and Profit Hits $5.29B appeared first on Blockonomi.

A UK High Court judge has ruled that Chinese law, not English law, must govern the claims of victims to more than 61,000 BTC recovered from a multibillion-pound fraud.

But while the decision settles an important preliminary legal question, it does not determine whether the victims can establish ownership of the cryptocurrency or how much, if anything, they may recover.

How Qian’s Fraud Led to the High Court Dispute

This case arises from investment scams arranged by Zhimin Qian in China from 2014 until July 2017. They involved about 10 schemes via the company known as “Tianjin Lantian Gerui Electronic Technology” and others, which included digital currencies, elderly care services, and consumer products. The company lacked authorization to offer financial products and Qian confessed that there was a need for such an authorization under Chinese law.

According to an audit, there were at least 128,409 investment contracts related to the scams; however, as per the court, the number of contracts is not equal to the number of people who were victims of this crime. The total amount of funds collected was approximately 40.23 billion yuan, which is almost £4.1 billion, or over $5 billion.

Most of these funds were used to pay off the previous investors in the schemes whereas some of them were converted into assets, including Bitcoin. More than 100,000 BTC were purchased through a Huobi trading account before Qian left the country in July 2017, crossing into Myanmar to evade arrest.

She arrived in London that September and, together with her associate, Wen, started converting the Bitcoin into other assets. However, she later came under investigation by the Metropolitan Police, who seized four separate devices containing more than 61,000 BTC found in a safety deposit box and a property where the two accomplices were living at the time.

As CryptoPotato reported in October last year, Qian pled guilty at Southwark Crown Court of having possession of criminal property in the form of cryptocurrency. The case established the background to the subsequent dispute over who has the legal right to the recovered assets.

Victims instituted a civil proceeding under Section 281 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which allows claimants to ask a court to declare the recovered property is theirs, with Justice Turner’s judgement addressing a preliminary question: whether those claims should be assessed under English law, Chinese law, or a combination of both.

Why Chinese Law Matters to Victim’s Claims

According to the judge, Chinese law applies, and he rejected four arguments advanced by applicants seeking to rely on English legal principles. He found that the contracts, investor payments and Bitcoin purchases were rooted in China, and that the location of the cryptocurrency in England did not change which law governed the underlying rights.

Justice Turner also rejected the suggestion that English law should apply by default because the content of Chinese law had not yet been presented in court. As he explained, identifying the applicable law comes before establishing what the law says. The judgement states that applicants’ claimed proprietary rights “must be assessed by reference to Chinese law.”

That distinction matters because Section 281 requires victims to establish an ownership interest in the property, rather than simply show that they lost money in the fraud. The court has not yet determined whether individual applicants have such rights under Chinese law, nor how much they might recover.

The post UK Judge Says Chinese Law Applies to Claims Over £4B Bitcoin Fraud appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The SHIB Army, the collective term for Shiba Inu holders, supporters, traders, and enthusiasts, has once again found itself in the crosshairs of scammers.

Such schemes can lead to painful losses, so here’s how users can protect themselves.

‘This is a Drainer’

Recently, an X account falsely claimed a Shiba Inu airdrop was “back,” telling users they were eligible for the dubious campaign after they completed a supposed wallet verification check. The mysterious person or entity also provided a link, but people should not click it, as it was flagged as a scam.

Long-time Shiba Inu community member Marzael.shib warned that no such token distribution exists, calling the development “a drainer.”  “They are flooding the timeline; recommend not clicking and report,” they added.

The X account BSCN also sounded the alarm on the matter. The team said the real danger comes when users connect their wallets and sign malicious approvals.

“Those permissions can allow scammers to transfer tokens without stealing a victim’s password,” the warning reads.

The popular meme coin boasts a vast and devoted community, making it a frequent target for scammers. Earlier this year, Shibarium Trustwatch (an X account dedicated to warning Shiba Inu users about potential threats) warned about numerous fraud attempts involving the SOU NFT.

Its team clarified that users will never receive the non-fungible token in question, and that eligible users can claim it only through Shiba Inu’s official website.

“Do not click on shared, shortened, or copied links. Scammers often create fake websites that look identical to the real one in order to steal funds. Always type the official address directly into your browser and verify you are on the correct domain before connecting your wallet. Never share your private keys or seed phrase with anyone under any circumstances,” it added.

Prior to that, the same X account warned that bad actors created a malicious website impersonating Shiba Inu’s official platform. The fake site includes “special” promotions and false claims of collaborations and presale bonuses, designed to lure people into connecting their wallets.

SHIB Price Outlook

The meme coin’s price has plunged by nearly 12% over the past week. However, the main reason for the drop appears to be the overall decline in the cryptocurrency market during that period, not the scam warning that could have spread panic across the community.

As of this writing, SHIB trades around $0.000005163 (per CoinGecko), down 95% from its late-2021 all-time high. Analysts have been relatively silent on the token lately, yet certain technical indicators may help traders identify the next potential move.

Today (October 13), Shiba Inu coins stored on crypto exchanges fell to a near one-month low of roughly 87.2 trillion. This can be interpreted as a bullish signal since it reduces immediate selling pressure.

The post Critical Shiba Inu (SHIB) Warning: Here’s the Latest Threat appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Blur will shut down its frontend on November 12, 2026. But the NFT marketplace won’t disappear. Its protocol will keep running on-chain, and the BLUR token will still control the fee switch.

The same date also marks a change for Blend, Blur’s lending platform. It will stop matching new loans, giving borrowers until then to repay or risk default. Users who still have assets on Blend will get a withdrawal tool after the deadline, according to the announcement.

What Happened to Blur?

Blur raised $11 million in seed funding in March 2022 and emerged as a major rival to OpenSea, targeting professional NFT traders. After launching in October, it attracted users with zero marketplace fees, bulk trading tools, and token rewards. Its BLUR token launch in February 2023 brought a wave of activity, while Blend later expanded Blur into NFT-backed lending. By December 2023, it commanded 80% of the NFT market’s share.

Blur still maintained its lead in Q1 2024 after recording $1.5 billion in volume. However, falling NFT activity and declining lending demand gradually weakened its position. By 2025, OpenSea was recovering market share, while Blend went in the opposite direction. In April 2026, KuCoin removed BLUR cross-margin trading. Two months later, Binance placed the token under its “Monitoring Tag.”

Shutdowns in 2026

2026 has seen several crypto and Web3 platforms announce shutdowns or wind-downs. NFT platform Nifty Gateway and social collecting app Rodeo announced plans to wind down, while Foundation announced its closure in April after a sale fell through. Meanwhile, Blur’s news comes less than a fortnight after Blast announced it would close on October 2.

Interestingly, both projects were created by Blur founder Tieshun Roquerre, better known as Pacman, and developed by the same team. Blast, an Ethereum scaling network, also revealed it was ceasing operations just over two years after launch. It said that “the economics of operating the chain no longer make sense.” Activity on the network had faded, which left it unable to cover its running costs.

The post Blur Is Pulling the Plug on Its Frontend, but the On-Chain Protocol Lives On appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The November 2024 election, which saw Donald Trump become America’s 47th president, triggered a major cryptocurrency rally. After all, the Republican presented himself as a strong supporter of the industry throughout his campaign, promising to make the USA a global crypto hub, promote innovation, establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve, ban the creation of a CBDC, and implement a more favorable regulatory framework for digital assets.

During his nearly two years in office, he fulfilled several promises, but other decisions have increased geopolitical tensions and negatively affected financial and crypto markets. With that in mind, we asked three of the most widely used AI-powered chatbots to assess how Bitcoin might react if the Republicans lose the midterms next month. Here’s what they had to say.

Pullback on the Way?

According to ChatGPT, if Republicans lose control of Congress (especially both chambers), BTC could face short-term selling pressure. Specifically, OpenAI’s platform expects a 5-10% drop immediately after the potential news, while a 15% fall was described as “a stress scenario.”

At the same time, ChatGPT said this would not mark the start of a new bear market and would likely be followed by a substantial rebound. It also claimed that if the result is already priced in, BTC might barely move south.

The latest polls suggest Democrats have the upper hand ahead of the November 3 midterm elections. Prediction market Kalshi, for instance, currently assigns Republicans less than a 30% chance of winning Congress despite Trump’s promises for a $5,000 payment if they maintain control.

Perplexity shared a similar view, expecting that a possible loss for Trump’s party could lead to a short-term correction in Bitcoin and not automatically trigger a crypto crash.

Meanwhile, the chatbot warned that a collapse is not completely out of the question and may occur only if election results align with falling ETF inflows, higher interest rates from the Federal Reserve, or a major deleveraging event.

Google’s Gemini agreed with the thesis, estimating that a short-term correction after a Democratic midterm victory is a realistic possibility.

“However, unless accompanied by a major macroeconomic shock (like hawkish Federal Reserve pivots or liquidity contractions), such a pullback would represent a temporary price adjustment rather than a fundamental trend reversal,” it added.

The Historical Data

Not long ago, popular analyst Ali Martinez noted that the US midterm elections have historically preceded a major drop in Bitcoin’s price. He reminded that after the 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022 elections, the cryptocurrency fell 72%, 65%, 52%, and 27%, respectively.

At the same time, Martinez doesn’t think this could stop BTC’s overall bullish move, viewing a potential drop after the elections as a perfect buying opportunity.

The post What Will Happen to BTC if Trump Loses the US Midterms? (3 AIs Analyze) appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Jameson Lopp has argued that no type of Bitcoin loss is solved by handing the asset to a third party.

It led to a spat with analyst Willy Woo and other X users over whether professional custodians are safer in practice than individuals holding their own keys.

A Custody Argument Plays Out on X

In a post on the social platform, Lopp took aim at the claim that an ETF removes the worry of losing BTC.

“There is objectively NO type of loss that can be solved by giving your bitcoin to a third party,” he wrote. “Third party custody is exposed to every self custody risk PLUS MORE!”

A user named Dima conceded that custodians carry every individual risk plus counterparty risk, but countered that most people are undone by their own mistakes, such as lost seed phrases and phished wallets. Furthermore, some ETF custodians now offer bankruptcy-remote segregation, meaning customer assets are kept apart from the firm’s own, which exchanges once lacked.

Lopp rejected the idea that most people can’t self-custody, suggesting they just aren’t willing to put in the effort, and said that segregation “doesn’t do jack if the underlying asset is lost.” He used his firm, Casa, as an example, noting that it has many older clients and consultants who do the work for them.

Woo then posted the numbers: 1.57 million BTC lost through self-custody, 1.51 million on exchanges and none through custodians of spot ETFs. The figures came from a December 2025 report by River. A modern regulated custodian, he wrote, does a better job than “moms and pops at home.”

The security advocate replied that ETFs haven’t existed long enough to suffer a catastrophe, and that nearly all of them use the same custodian. He then asked if Woo would rather have risk spread across thousands or millions of amateur custodians, or concentrated with one professional.

Coinbase Custody, which most spot ETFs use, has gone more than eight years without losing coins, Woo pointed out, while self-custody lost 136,000 BTC and exchanges 13,000 BTC in that time. He called the choice a false one: a person’s own self-custody and a professional custodian each depend on a single party doing its job, and the custodian wins because of lower risk of physical coercion through acts like wrench attacks.

Coinbase’s Record Is Contested

Lopp’s next reply called the never-lost-coins claim one that “seems to be in dispute,” pointing to Ari Paul’s recent allegation against Coinbase.

As CryptoPotato reported in September, the BlockTower Capital founder posted on X that Coinbase had “lost” $25 million belonging to his firm years ago and later alleged that it had covered up repeated hacks, affecting at least a dozen other firms and more than $1 billion.

However, Paul’s claims are unproven, and he says multiple legal processes regarding it are ongoing. Coinbase Support also replied under his post that it had messaged him directly to look into the issue.

The post Do Bitcoin ETFs Remove Custody Risk? Analysts Disagree appeared first on CryptoPotato.