Releasing oil reserves may sway voter sentiment, impacting Senate races and highlighting energy policy's role in political strategy.

The post Trump taps heating oil reserve to curb prices before 2026 midterms appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Apple's appeal could impact investor sentiment and stock performance, highlighting ongoing regulatory challenges and market uncertainty.

The post Apple to appeal Australian court ruling on iOS app store access appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The integration enhances AI agents' access to reliable crypto data, potentially transforming automated systems with verified information.

The post CoinGecko API lands on API3’s AirnodeHub marketplace for AI agents appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Rising AI costs challenge banks to balance innovation with profitability, prompting strategic spending controls and efficiency measures.

The post Wall Street banks put a meter on AI as computing bills climb appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

The surge in trading-card sales highlights the growing influence of digital collectibles, potentially reshaping investment and hobby landscapes.

The post Collector Crypt reports $24.3 million in trading-card pack sales in a single day appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Bitcoin Magazine

Three Companies Have Notified the SEC of Intention To Start Tokenized Stocks Trading

Three companies have notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of their plans to operate tokenized securities venues following a new rule, according to the top regulator. 

Tokenized Stock Venue, Perpetuals.com, and OKX have all submitted plans to operate by allowing trading of tokenized stocks, the SEC said in a Wednesday announcement. 

Along with the Intercontinental Exchange, crypto exchange OKX was the first to file with the regulator to debut tokenized securities trading on a new platform, OKXICE. 

The SEC in September said it was offering a five-year exemption to platforms that facilitate trading of tokenized stocks. Regulators like the SEC are pushing ahead with regulating the crypto space despite lawmakers blocking major digital asset legislation in September. 

Tokenized stocks are the latest example of firms wanting to utilize Bitcoin’s underlying technology to help upgrade traditional finance. By putting stocks on the blockchain, traders can operate 24/7, according to proponents. 

The SEC said Wednesday that just because the firms are on the list, doesn’t necessarily mean they meet all the requirements for the rule. 

Wall Street’s top regulator is now very pro-crypto under U.S. President Donald Trump. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said the regulator wants to “update” how it watchdogs securities, and “modernize them in the age of blockchain and crypto assets.”

Atkins has said that the regulator wants the U.S. to be on track to be the “crypto capital of the world.” 

Under the previous Democratic Joe Biden administration, the SEC was hostile towards the crypto industry and hit major companies — including Coinbase and Kraken — with lawsuits. The regulator attracted criticism for so-called regulation by enforcement. 

But under Trump, that has changed: the Republican campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space and has signed a number of laws and executive orders aimed at helping the digital asset space. 

Traditional finance titans like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton for years have used blockchain rails to tokenize money funds.

In January, the S&P 500 gave crypto platform Trade[XYZ] the green light to debut a new derivative contract on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, giving traders the ability to trade the stock index 24-7. 

This post Three Companies Have Notified the SEC of Intention To Start Tokenized Stocks Trading first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Standard Chartered Signs Agreement To Acquire Crypto Custodian Zodia Custody

British multinational Standard Chartered will buy digital asset custodian Zodia Custody, months after signing an agreement. 

A statement from London-based Zodia Custody on Wednesday said that the deal will see the company’s service integrated into Standard Chartered’s existing digital asset custody activities. 

Standard Chartered is expanding its crypto-related offerings worldwide. Earlier this month, it said it had plans to offer crypto custody services for institutional clients in Singapore. It already offers the service in the UAE, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong. 

“As institutional adoption of digital assets accelerates, custody is increasingly becoming part of the global banking landscape,” Zodia Custody CEO Richard Clark said. 

He added: “Zodia Custody has built a strong business with the specialist expertise and capabilities to meet the needs of institutional clients. 

“Bringing that expertise together with Standard Chartered’s global reach and established banking platform will strengthen its digital asset custody offering and provide institutions with greater access to trusted, regulated custody services worldwide.”

Ying Ying Tan, global head of securities services and digital assets at Standard Chartered, added that the deal “further deepens our digital asset custody portfolio and reinforces our position as a leading provider of digital asset services globally.”

Zodia Custody shareholders in May approved Standard Chartered’s offer to buy the company. 

The company works to custody bitcoin and other digital assets for institutional and asset managers. 

Standard Chartered has delved deeper into the crypto space in recent years. In 2025, the bank set up a trading desk for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in London, making it one of the first global banks to enter spot cryptocurrency trading.

It has since debuted custody and trading services in countries around the world. 

Top banks worldwide are debuting or planning to debut crypto custody services, with State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citigroup all committing to direct crypto custody over the past 18 months.

Crypto custody is often a starting point for banks moving into the digital asset space. BNY Mellon in 2022 became the first major U.S. bank to offer digital asset custody services.   

This post Standard Chartered Signs Agreement To Acquire Crypto Custodian Zodia Custody first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Bitcoin Magazine

Beyond HODLing: How Bitcoin-Backed Loans Can Unlock New Financial Opportunities

For long-term Bitcoin holders, accessing capital has traditionally presented a difficult choice: sell a portion of their holdings or leave that value untouched.

Bitcoin-backed lending offers another option, allowing holders to borrow against their Bitcoin while maintaining exposure to the asset.

In a recent video shared on X, SALT Lending highlighted how borrowers can use Bitcoin-backed loans for more than simply accessing cash, outlining several ways liquidity can support broader financial goals.

Turning Bitcoin Holdings Into Financial Opportunity

Rather than selling Bitcoin to fund a major purchase or investment, borrowers can pledge their holdings as collateral to access capital while preserving their long-term position.

One potential use case is real estate. Bitcoin holders looking to purchase property may be able to leverage their holdings for liquidity instead of liquidating Bitcoin to fund the transaction.

Business expansion presents another opportunity. Entrepreneurs and business owners can potentially use Bitcoin-backed loans to fund operations, hire employees, or pursue growth opportunities without selling their Bitcoin or giving up equity in their businesses.

SALT Lending also pointed to investment diversification as another possible application. Borrowers may use loan proceeds to access other markets or investment opportunities while retaining exposure to Bitcoin.

Another consideration is tax planning. Selling appreciated Bitcoin can trigger capital gains taxes, while receiving proceeds from a properly structured loan generally does not constitute a taxable sale. However, individual tax circumstances vary, and borrowing introduces additional financial risks.

A Strategic Approach to Bitcoin Liquidity

The broader takeaway from SALT Lending’s video is that Bitcoin-backed borrowing should be viewed as a financial planning decision rather than simply a way to access cash.

Real estate purchases, business investments, and other opportunities all require borrowers to weigh the potential benefits of liquidity against borrowing costs, repayment obligations, and the risks associated with Bitcoin’s price volatility.

Because Bitcoin-backed loans are secured by a volatile asset, significant price declines can increase loan-to-value ratios and potentially require additional collateral or trigger liquidation, depending on the loan terms.

For borrowers with a clear financial strategy, however, the ability to access capital without immediately selling Bitcoin creates another avenue for putting their holdings to use.

SALT Lending provides Bitcoin-backed lending solutions designed to help eligible borrowers access liquidity while maintaining their long-term Bitcoin exposure.

As Bitcoin continues to evolve beyond an asset primarily associated with buying and holding, lending may play an increasingly important role in how holders manage their finances and pursue opportunities without necessarily selling their Bitcoin.

SALT Lending is the Official Liquidity Sponsor of BMTV. Learn more about borrowing against your bitcoin and explore SALT’s BMTV offer at https://saltlending.com/bmtv/?utm_source=bmtv&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=52783658-BMTV%20article&utm_term=BMTV.

Disclaimer: SALT Lending is a paid sponsor of BMTV and serves as BMTV’s Official Liquidity Sponsor. This article is sponsored content and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Bitcoin Magazine. The information provided is for promotional purposes and should not be considered financial advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before making any investment decisions related to Bitcoin or other financial products mentioned herein.

This post Beyond HODLing: How Bitcoin-Backed Loans Can Unlock New Financial Opportunities first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Josh Plischke.

Bitcoin Magazine

Kalshi Pushes Deeper Into Crypto Derivatives With Bitcoin-Backed Margin Loans

Kalshi is doubling down on its bid to become the regulated U.S. home for crypto perpetual futures, pairing a new bitcoin-backed lending arrangement with digital-asset custodian BitGo alongside a distribution deal that will put its perpetual contracts in front of Webull’s more than 6 million customers.

Bloomberg first reported Wednesday that customers of Kalshi Prime, the company’s U.S.-registered futures commission merchant, will be able to borrow against digital assets held at BitGo and use the proceeds to fund margin positions on perpetual futures traded on Kalshi’s main exchange. 

Under the tri-party structure, loans will be issued by Kalshi Katalyst, a lending affiliate of Kalshi Prime, and secured against assets held at BitGo Bank & Trust, the firm’s federally chartered trust bank.

Eligible collateral will include bitcoin, ethereum and stablecoins deemed compliant with the GENIUS Act, with additional custodians expected to join Kalshi’s network over time. 

Prime CEO Jeff Bandman told the outlet the product was designed with crypto-native traders in mind, including those already active on unregulated offshore perpetuals venues and large holders who would rather not sell their bitcoin to fund futures positions. 

He also pointed to unexpected demand from businesses, such as Latin American firms that run their operations on U.S. dollar stablecoins.

The move targets a segment where the company has acknowledged a structural disadvantage against Polymarket, its offshore, blockchain-based rival, which has long catered to crypto whales and trading firms that prefer to keep their capital in digital assets. The two platforms have been racing to build out perpetuals since the spring.

Webull debuting crypto-linked perpetual futures via Kalshi rails

The BitGo arrangement landed a day after Webull announced Tuesday that eligible U.S. customers will be able to trade perpetual futures on its platform beginning in November, starting with bitcoin and a handful of other crypto assets. 

The contracts will trade on KalshiEX LLC, Kalshi’s CFTC-regulated designated contract market, and clear through Kalshi Klear LLC, its derivatives clearing organization. Access will initially be limited to customers already approved for futures trading through existing Webull Futures accounts, with broader availability expected before year-end.

Webull Group President and U.S. CEO Anthony Denier said in the company’s release that perpetual futures saw more than $90 trillion in global volume in 2025 and that American investors should be able to access them through a regulated platform. 

These two announcements extend a product buildout for the company, which secured CFTC clearance for the first U.S.-regulated bitcoin perpetual in late May and went live with the contract in early June, before adding gold and silver perpetuals in September and a US500 stock index perpetual earlier this month. 

The expansion comes amid mounting state-level legal pressure, with Utah becoming the latest state to sue Kalshi on Monday over what it alleges is illegal sports gambling, following New York’s similar action against Polymarket last month.

This post Kalshi Pushes Deeper Into Crypto Derivatives With Bitcoin-Backed Margin Loans first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Micah Zimmerman.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin Nears $85,000 as SpaceX Earnings Reignite Risk Appetite

Bitcoin’s price rose above $84,500 on Wednesday as investors flooded back into risk-on assets — particularly tech-related stocks. 

The leading cryptocurrency was recently priced at $84,461 after rising nearly as high as $84,588 earlier on Wednesday morning in New York. 

Over a 24-hour period, the coin is up 2%. Zooming out over a seven-day timeframe and it is up 3%. 

Bitcoin’s rise comes as SpaceX reported surging revenue growth in its third quarter, and its owner, Elon Musk, talked of a potential SpaceX-Tesla merger.

SpaceX — which debuted in June on the Nasdaq in the biggest initial public offering ever — reported third-quarter revenue on Tuesday of $14.6 billion, up 161% from the previous year and smashing estimates. 

Technology stocks rallied on the news. Bitcoin has in the past risen with risk assets and been correlated with the Nasdaq. 

But this year, the OG cryptocurrency has moved with gold as the so-called debasement trade becomes hot again. The trade is when investors buy certain assets to hedge against currency being devalued. 

The dollar slid in value in August after the U.S. Treasury Department said it would more than double the size of its government debt repurchases. Bitcoin had its best quarterly run in three years and third best August ever.   

U.S. investors this week have piled back into spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, too. On Monday and Tuesday, the funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale, and others received new investment of over $549 million, according to Coinglass data. 

Bitcoin’s price is still over 30% below its all-time high of $126,080 — reached in October 2025 — but analysts are saying the cryptocurrency is now back in a bull market after spending most of this year in a bear. 

This post Bitcoin Nears $85,000 as SpaceX Earnings Reignite Risk Appetite first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Mathew Di Salvo.

Existing US issuers awaiting OCC approval need discretionary relief to keep issuing from Jan. 18, 2027; filing alone is insufficient.

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The net receipt reached an address Arkham labels a Coinbase Prime deposit, a destination also used in July and August.

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Xaman’s hypothetical return example puts fee recovery near 15 months for 100 XRP, while current vault terms differ.

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Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla and SpaceX are exploring a merger that could combine their existing Bitcoin holdings under one company. Speaking during SpaceX's Oct. 20 earnings call, Musk said both companies had established special committees of independent directors to evaluate a potential combination. Musk described the merger as a good idea but said he…

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The manager wants usable Form TR filings, while Hyperliquid Policy Center challenges mandatory public analysis and seeks earlier protection.

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PancakeSwap is voting on the proposal titled “The Flip” until Saturday, October 24, 2026, 08:07 UTC. If it passes, liquidity providers on protocol versions v3 and Infinity keep 88 percent of swap fees instead of around two thirds, and the number of CAKE created each day falls in two stages from 22,500 to 7,000. That leaves 15,500 fewer CAKE a day at the end of the path, and a good 5.7 million fewer a year.

Two points matter now. First, the voting window runs only until Saturday morning, and only holders who have locked their CAKE as veCAKE may vote. Second, the proposal is currently heading for clear rejection at the primary source: 97.8 percent of the voting weight cast is against it, from just 21 votes cast. With that few votes a single large address can still turn the result, which is exactly why not a word here predicts the outcome.

CAKE trades at $2.27 on Tuesday evening, giving it a market capitalisation of roughly $720 million and rank 92 among all cryptocurrencies. Just under 317.8 million coins are in circulation. The token is no nano cap, then, and the emissions question hits a holding that many German investors have carried for years.

The Flip proposal: 88 percent of swap fees go to liquidity providers

Behind the proposal stands “The Kitchen”, PancakeSwap's core team. It raises the liquidity providers' share of every swap fee to 88 percent across all eleven supported blockchains. The remaining 12 percent flows into the treasury as a protocol fee, and the part of it that does not arrive in stablecoins continues to fund CAKE buybacks.

Liquidity providers are users who deposit two tokens into a pool so that others can trade there; they earn from the fee on every swap. The swap is the trade itself, and the protocol fee is the share of each fee that stays with the protocol rather than with the liquidity providers. How a swap on PancakeSwap works in practice is set out in our guide to PancakeSwap.

The shift varies by fee tier:

Version v2 stays at 68 to 32 because its fees are fixed in the contract code. That keeps v2 the most important burn engine for CAKE, still routing 23 percent of swap fees into the burn. Nothing changes in the fee tiers for traders: anyone swapping pays the same rate as today.

From 22,500 to 7,000 CAKE a day: the emission path in two stages

The second part of the proposal is the more important one for holders. Because liquidity providers would keep 88 percent of the fees, the protocol argues it needs fewer newly created CAKE to attract liquidity. Emissions therefore fall in stages that follow the migration plan.

In stage one the daily amount drops from 22,500 to 11,000 CAKE. Stage two follows only once CAKE has reached the target from Tokenomics 3.0, and brings the daily amount to 7,000. Those 7,000 CAKE go into “the Pantry”, a growth fund from which the team pays for marketing, partnerships and seed liquidity for new pools. Running trading fees, rather than new coins, are meant to carry growth.

The supply target itself is older than this proposal. Tokenomics 3.0, agreed in April 2025, aims to cut total supply by around 20 percent by 2030. Eighteen months on, supply stands at 329,915,408 CAKE, 11.5 percent below the 372,837,045 of April 2025; the 2030 target is about 298.3 million.

Eleven blockchains, one a week: the schedule from November 2026

If the community adopts the proposal, migration begins within two weeks, so in November 2026. One blockchain is then switched over per week until all eleven are done after roughly three months: BNB Chain, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Solana, Robinhood, Monad, Arc, zkSync, Linea and opBNB.

The order is not arbitrary. The proposal starts with the blockchains that contribute least to the CAKE burn and leaves the most important burn sources on today's rate until the final step. That final step is tied to the 20 percent target and is expected roughly twelve months after stage one.

97.8 percent of the veCAKE votes cast are against the proposal

The voting window opened on Tuesday at 08:07 UTC and closes on Saturday at the same time. On Tuesday evening, 999,486.88 veCAKE sat on “Against” and 22,201.52 veCAKE on “For”, together roughly 1.02 million units of voting weight from 21 votes. That is 97.83 percent against versus 2.17 percent in favour. The quorum stands at one unit of voting weight and was met long ago.

These figures are a snapshot, not a result. Because voting weight depends on the amount and the lock duration of the CAKE deposited, one large address can reverse the balance within a single transaction. The current state and the full text of the proposal are on the PancakeSwap voting page.

veCAKE: how voting weight works at PancakeSwap

veCAKE is locked CAKE: you deposit your coins for a fixed term and receive voting weight that rises with the amount and the remaining term of the lock. Unlocked CAKE on an exchange or in a wallet carries no voting weight and cannot take part in this vote.

For many German holders that creates a practical limit. If your CAKE sits at an exchange, you cannot vote by Saturday, because the coins would first have to be withdrawn and locked; a new lock also does not work retroactively. Voting is therefore an option for those who have already locked. How locked positions and running income compare across providers is shown in our overview of staking platforms.

Existing Infinity pools: the total fee falls, the LP share stays

One detail of the proposal cuts the other way and appears in no German report. In Infinity pools that already exist, the LP fee is fixed when the pool is created. The lower protocol fee therefore does not raise the liquidity providers' share there; it lowers the pool's total swap fee instead.

The proposal does the arithmetic itself: a pool with a 1.00 percent fee becomes roughly 0.76 percent, of which 0.67 percentage points go to the liquidity providers and about 0.091 percentage points to the protocol. Providing liquidity in an existing Infinity pool therefore earns no more per trade than before, but leaves you with a cheaper pool that can attract more volume.

For new pools and for all v3 positions, the higher share applies automatically as soon as the relevant blockchain has been switched over. Nothing has to be claimed, locked again or moved. On 2025 volumes, the proposal puts the additional income for liquidity providers at around $62 million a year once all eleven blockchains are migrated. Per $1,000 of a pool's swap fees, liquidity providers would then keep $880 instead of $660 to $680.

CAKE holders without a liquidity position: buybacks instead of emissions as support

If you only hold CAKE, you provide no liquidity and earn nothing from the 88 percent. For this group the proposal hangs on two other figures. One is the lower issuance: 15,500 fewer CAKE a day means less supply that can weigh on the market. The other is the smaller protocol fee that funds the buybacks; 12 percent instead of 32 leaves less there.

Which of the two prevails depends on trading volume and cannot be predicted. The proposal itself puts the supply reduction first and explicitly ties the final migration step to the 20 percent target so that the burn is not thinned out too early. No price statement follows from this, and this article makes none. For context on earlier market phases, our look back at the CAKE price move of March 2025 carries the state of play at the time and is not a forecast for today.

CAKE in Germany: trading venues and MiCA authorisation

CAKE is tradable in Germany through several centralised exchanges, with daily turnover just under $55 million. Since the European MiCA regulation applies in full, providers targeting customers in the EU need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider; our overview of the MiCA obligations sets out what that entails. Before a first purchase it is therefore worth checking whether your chosen provider holds that EU authorisation and what fees it charges; our exchange comparison puts both side by side.

The vote itself runs through the protocol's governance rather than an exchange, and requires a wallet with locked CAKE. Keeping the two apart helps: the trading venue decides at what cost you buy or sell CAKE, governance decides the protocol's rules.

Holding period and tax: what applies to sales and fee income

The vote is not a taxable event in itself: voting alone sells nothing. Tax becomes relevant when you sell or swap CAKE. Under Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, the sale of other assets is a private disposal if no more than one year lies between acquisition and sale. The same section exempts gains as long as the total gain from private disposals stays below 1,000 euros in the calendar year.

For fee income from a liquidity pool the classification is less clear-cut and disputed case by case; running income and disposal gains do not belong in the same tax box. If you provide liquidity, record each inflow from the outset with date, amount and value, and settle the classification with a tax adviser. Tools that capture inflows automatically and assign them to holding periods are listed in our comparison of tax software.

The risk in the proposal: the second step hangs on the 20 percent target

The proposal describes the second stage through a condition rather than a date: the step comes once CAKE reaches the target of a 20 percent supply reduction. That is expected roughly twelve months after stage one. If supply stays on a slower path, the jump to 7,000 CAKE a day moves back with it.

That yields the figure you can watch as a holder without relying on a forecast: total supply. It stands at 329,915,408 CAKE, with the 2030 target at around 298.3 million. Keeping an eye on that number reveals the progress of the migration long before the second step is announced.

Two further questions stay open: how the treasury manages on 12 percent of protocol fees instead of 32, and whether the growth fund really replaces the seed liquidity for new pools that used to come from new coins. Both appear in the proposal as intent, not as a verifiable commitment.

The CAKE vote: only locked veCAKE counts until Saturday 08:07 UTC

Until Saturday morning the position is clear; after that, either migration begins or the proposal is rejected. Three steps make sense now:

1. Check whether you are eligible to vote at all. Only CAKE locked as veCAKE carries voting weight; if your holding sits at an exchange, you are not. Whether your provider offers CAKE locking and what it costs is shown in our crypto exchange comparison.
2. Look at your liquidity positions. On v3 and new Infinity pools your fee share rises to 88 percent; on existing Infinity pools the total fee falls instead. How the income from locked positions looks at other providers is set out in our overview of staking platforms.
3. Set up your records before the income arrives. For the holding period under Section 23 EStG and for running fee income, every single inflow counts. A tax tool from our comparison captures them automatically and assigns them to the deadlines.

(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

NEAR Protocol trades at around $5.28 on Tuesday evening, between 6.0 and 6.2 percent above its level of 24 hours earlier depending on the venue. Bitcoin managed a little over 2 percent in the same window, Ether just under 1.8 percent. The gap is the story: NEAR ranks among the three strongest of the 25 largest cryptocurrencies today, and in the background a US fund has been buying tokens for three trading sessions in a row.

NEAR price today: $5.28 after a $4.88 session low

The day started weakly. The low was $4.88 and the high $5.45, a span of 11.6 percent. NEAR currently trades at about $5.28, closer to the high than to the low. Over a week it is up roughly 9 percent; over a month the price is close to flat.

Market capitalisation stands at just under $6.9 billion, rank 22 among all cryptocurrencies. The all-time high of $20.40 from January 2022 remains about 74 percent away. Anyone holding NEAR since that peak is still sitting on a clear loss, good day or not.

The figures differ slightly between venues because each sets its own 24-hour reference point. The 6.0 to 6.2 percent range is therefore more precise than a single smoothed number.

More than twice as strong as Bitcoin: the day in numbers

To document the gap to the wider market, we lined up the 25 largest cryptocurrencies side by side, excluding stablecoins and wrapped or staked derivatives. cryptoticker.io compiled this comparison itself on October 21, 2026.

Of those 25 assets, 22 are in positive territory. NEAR sits third with a little over 6 percent, ahead of XRP at 3.9 percent, Chainlink at 2.9 percent and Bitcoin at roughly 2 percent. That puts NEAR 2.6 to 3 times Bitcoin's move, depending on the venue. Only Zcash was stronger on the day.

A lead like that says little in itself about the quality of a project. It does say something about who is buying: when a mid-sized asset beats the market this clearly, there is usually a specific trigger behind it rather than general market sentiment.

The Bitwise NEAR ETF: a third straight inflow session on October 19

The concrete trigger sits on Wall Street. A US spot fund on NEAR has been trading since September 29, 2026. In the October 19 session it took in net inflows of roughly $5.4 million according to the industry service Tokenpost, the third inflow session in a row. Net inflows since launch add up to about $88.5 million on those figures.

That number comes from a single source so far and could not be cross-checked. Treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a verified balance. What does hold up is the direction: the fund took in money on three consecutive days instead of paying it out.

A spot ETF actually buys the tokens its shares represent. Every net inflow therefore lands in the order book as real demand. For an asset with just under $6.9 billion in market capitalisation, a double-digit million sum shows up far more clearly than at Bitcoin, where the same amount disappears into daily volume.

As a route to buying, the fund is out of reach for investors in Germany, since a US ETF is not available here through regular channels. It matters as a source of demand that did not exist before September 29.

What has changed since October 19: emission stays at 2.5 percent

The most recent NEAR article on cryptoticker.io dates from October 19 and covered the decision on the emission rate. NEAR traded a little above $5 at the time. Governance had to decide whether annual new issuance would fall from 2.5 to 1.6 percent. It does not fall; 2.5 percent stays.

Two things have happened since. The price defended the $5 mark, gave way to $4.88 once and won it back. And the fund's run of inflows began, reaching its third day on October 19.

The higher emission remains the counterweight to the price gain: 2.5 percent of new tokens enter circulation every year. Holders who do not stake are diluted pro rata.

NEAR Intents: $10.4 billion of volume in the third quarter

NEAR Intents is a service for swapping tokens across blockchains without executing the individual steps yourself: you specify the outcome you want, and executing providers compete to settle it. The technical term for this design is intent-based execution.

According to the quarterly report from Nansen, the service settled around $10.4 billion in the third quarter of 2026. Its confidential variant, Confidential Intents, held about $160 million in deposited capital at quarter-end, up roughly 463 percent on the previous quarter.

That is the usage side behind the price. It does not explain a 6 percent daily move, but it does explain why a fund provider classes the project as investable at all.

Post-quantum signatures since version 2.13: ML-DSA in a NEAR account

Protocol version 2.13 went live on mainnet on July 20, 2026. It brings account keys using the ML-DSA scheme, also known as Dilithium. Post-quantum cryptography describes encryption methods that even a sufficiently large quantum computer cannot break in any reasonable time.

In practical terms: you can add a quantum-resistant access key to your existing account without changing account or balance. That does not yet apply to validator consensus, where the roadmap names the end of 2027 as a target, explicitly subject to further research.

For holders, nothing changes on its own for now. The quantum-resistant key has to be added actively; an existing account does not migrate by itself.

The route to buying in Germany: MiCA authorisation and spot rather than leverage

Since the EU's MiCA regulation took effect, providers targeting customers in Germany need authorisation as a crypto-asset service provider. That is your first filter. An exchange without it may not market to you here through regular channels, and if something goes wrong you have no route to the supervisor.

The second filter is the product type. Spot means you actually buy the token and then own it. Derivatives only track the price. For NEAR the same applies as for any mid-sized asset: the spread between buying and selling price is wider than at Bitcoin, and on a day like this it widens further. Comparing fee models pays off before the purchase rather than after, for instance via our overview of the best crypto exchanges.

If you would rather track the price through an exchange-traded product, our overview of crypto ETFs and ETPs lists the routes available in Germany. The US fund in this article is not among them.

Leverage and liquidation: why an 11.6 percent daily range gets expensive

There are 11.6 percentage points between the session low and the session high. That number is why leveraged products are dangerous on days like this. A liquidation is the forced closure of a leveraged position once the collateral posted no longer covers the loss.

At tenfold leverage, a 10 percent move against you is enough on paper to wipe out that collateral. Today's range was wider than that. Anyone short near the low this morning, and anyone long near the high last night, felt it regardless of direction.

There is also a second cost block: the funding rate. It is the balancing payment between the long and short side in perpetual futures, and it falls due several times a day. When a price rises quickly, the long side usually pays. If you use these markets, know the terms before you enter them.

Holding period: one year decides the tax on the gain

In Germany, cryptocurrencies count as other assets. A gain from a sale within one year of purchase is taxable at your personal income tax rate. After one year has passed, it is tax-free.

For gains inside that window there is an exemption limit of 1,000 euros per calendar year. The word limit is literal: exceed it by one euro and you pay tax on the entire gain, not on the excess.

The order of your purchases comes first. For fungible tokens the applicable method is generally first in, first out, under which the units bought first count as sold first. If you have bought repeatedly over the year, keeping track of the deadlines by hand becomes close to impossible.

Custody and staking: 2.5 percent emission, hardware wallet or validator

NEAR runs on proof of stake. Tokens are delegated to validators that produce blocks, and delegators receive a share of the reward. Because 2.5 percent of new tokens appear every year, staking here is less a yield than an offset to dilution.

Tax treatment is no side issue for staking. Running rewards count as other income and must be recorded in the year they accrue, whether or not you sell them. The one-year holding period then applies to the tokens received from the moment they arrive.

On custody you choose between convenience and control. Leave the tokens on the exchange and you hold a claim against the company. Keep them in your own wallet and you hold the keys, along with responsibility for backing up the recovery words. If you want to stake and still self-custody, you need a wallet that supports delegating to a validator.

Levels above and below: $5.45, $4.88 and $20.40

On the upside, the session high at $5.45 is the next documented level. Above it lies uncharted ground for this move. Some market observers point to $5.43 as the point where today's advance first stalled; that is an observation from the session, not a price target.

On the downside, the session low at $4.88 is the level the market has already defended once today. Below it sits the round $4.50 zone from last week. The all-time high of $20.40 from January 16, 2022 has no bearing on the current move; it only puts the orders of magnitude in context.

What decides the coming days is less a single level than whether the fund's run of inflows gets a fourth session. If it does not, the move loses the demand that has carried it this far.

NEAR at $5.28: without fresh ETF inflows the move lacks fuel

The situation breaks down into three steps:

1. Settle the route to buying. Check whether your provider holds MiCA authorisation for Germany and whether you are buying spot or a derivative. Fee models are set out in our overview of the best crypto exchanges.
2. Record the holding period and the exemption limit. Note the purchase date and purchase price while you still have them. Whether your gain is tax-free after a year hangs on that date; tax tools and portfolio trackers handle the bookkeeping.
3. Decide on custody. Settle whether the tokens stay on the exchange or move into your own wallet, and in the second case back up the recovery words offline. The devices are listed in our hardware wallet comparison.

(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The documented position: the bank network for which Quant is supplying the technology is to process its first real transactions in the second quarter of 2027. That is 163 days away. This article sets out which stages have to be ticked off by then, which of them already stand, and what the timetable has to be measured against. Anyone holding Quant (QNT), or thinking about it, gets something more concrete than a year. Our own assessment follows in a separate section below.

The Clearing House roadmap: four steps to the second quarter of 2027

David Watson, president and chief executive officer of The Clearing House, described the sequence publicly in early August 2026, seven weeks before it was even settled who would build the technology. He named four steps: first the selection of the technology partner, then joint work with the banks on design and connectivity in the autumn, in the first quarter of 2027 the preparation of the first institutions and their customers, and in the second quarter of 2027 live transactions.

That sequence is useful for a simple reason: the plan makes the timetable verifiable. An organisation that says only "first half of 2027" keeps its cards hidden to the end. An organisation that names four stages delivers interim markers at which any delay shows up early. It is along exactly that grid that the position in October 2026 can be read off.

One qualification belongs right next to it. Neither the June release nor the September one names a list of the institutions taking part at launch, a price, or a regulatory approval. The September release says expressly that further detail on participation and use cases will be announced as development progresses. That is the soft spot of the whole undertaking, and it remains so for now.

Stage one is ticked off: the choice fell on Quant on September 24

On September 24, 2026 The Clearing House announced in a release that Quant is supplying the technology for the On-Chain Money Initiative. The role is narrowly drawn in the release: Quant provides the layer for interoperability, orchestration and transaction management through which the clearing and settlement of tokenised deposits is coordinated, plus the connection to the existing payment systems. Named there are RTP for real-time payments and CHIPS for settling large amounts between banks.

Sal Karakaplan, chief strategy officer of The Clearing House, justified the choice in the release with a sentence that sets the bar for the coming months: "Building interbank infrastructure for tokenized deposits requires proven technology that can scale." Gilbert Verdian, founder and chief executive officer of Quant, spoke of a decisive step in the global transition to programmable money.

For context, what matters is what this mandate is not. It is a supplier decision by an operator that, by its own account, has 25 of the country's largest financial institutions as owners. It is not a commitment by any individual bank to take part at launch, and it says nothing about remuneration. The June release does at least name 17 participating institutions, among them Bank of America, BNY, Citi, HSBC, J.P. Morgan Payments, PNC Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo.

Stage two is under way: design and connectivity with the banks in autumn 2026

This is exactly the stage the project is at today. On Watson's sequence, The Clearing House has been working with the banks on design and connectivity since the autumn. That is the phase in which it is decided whether the rest holds, and at the same time the phase from which least reaches the outside world: integration work between core banking systems produces no press releases.

It can be checked all the same, just indirectly. Between the selection of the partner on September 24, 2026 and the start of the second quarter on April 1, 2027 lie 189 days. In that half-year a supplier decision has to become a network that connects banks to two existing payment systems and reconciles entries between them. If the preparation of the first institutions does not become visible in the first quarter, the second quarter is no longer tenable.

What the network is meant to do is in the release of June 5, 2026, and it is more demanding than a plain transfer: automated workflows, richer transaction data and round-the-clock settlement. The use cases it names include programmable treasury, real-time liquidity management, cross-border payments and digital asset settlement.

Stages three and four: preparation in the first quarter, transactions in the second quarter of 2027

For the last two stages Watson names the order but no volumes. In the first quarter of 2027 the first banks and their customers are to be prepared, and in the second quarter transactions are to run. Who goes first is, on his account, not an open question: the demand comes from the treasury departments of large corporates, above all those running accounts at many institutions at once.

His example makes the purpose tangible. A company shifts $100 million from a tokenised deposit at Citi to one at J.P. Morgan. Today such a shift hangs on cut-off times and reconciliation runs. In a shared network it would be a single entry that both sides see at the same moment. Watson drew a clear line against stablecoins: those are serviceable for international person-to-person payments and for moving into and out of crypto assets, but unwieldy for large corporate flows because they tie up liquidity.

What Sibos in Miami showed: an unwind in the middle of a repo

From September 28 to October 1, 2026, Quant demonstrated at the Sibos banking conference in Miami, together with the software house Murex, what such an entry can look like. What was shown was a repo trade in US dollars against a tokenised US Treasury, with the cash leg running over tokenised deposits. Murex and Quant have been working together since March 2026; clients of the MX.3 trading platform reach the issuance of tokenised deposits and digital bonds through it.

The revealing part of the demonstration was not the completion but the abort. By its own account, Quant deliberately interrupted the transaction mid-execution to show that the process can be fully unwound without a half-booked state being left behind. For banks that is the real test. A network that works in the normal case is worthless if an abort leaves money suspended between two firms. That this case was demonstrated publicly is a signal to the risk departments, not to the crypto market.

The qualification that goes with it: a demonstration at a conference is not operation at real volumes. What is shown is that the process can be represented technically, not that it will hold at 25 institutions simultaneously in 2027. How the technology underneath is built we took apart in our explainer on Overledger and Fusion.

The British precedent: seven banks, two remortgages, one marketplace purchase

On that same September 24, 2026, the industry body UK Finance reported that seven British banks had completed the first real customer transactions with tokenised sterling deposits. Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest and Santander took part. The shared platform is called Great British Tokenised Deposits, GBTD for short, and was likewise built by Quant.

Two kinds of process were shown. In two property-loan remortgages the money was locked and released automatically on completion, which on UK Finance's account reduces manual checks and delays in settlement. In a purchase on a consumer marketplace the buyer's money stayed locked until the goods had changed hands. Jana Mackintosh, responsible for payments and innovation at UK Finance, read that as evidence that tokenised deposits give customers more control over their money. Further pilots are to link tokenised customer money with digital assets.

That precedent is the strongest reason to take the US timetable seriously. The supplier has already brought a comparable platform as far as a real customer transaction, with seven firms that otherwise compete.

The arithmetic that makes the timetable tight: 388 days for a handful of payments

That same British precedent also supplies the strongest counter-argument, and it sits in the intervals. UK Finance had announced the GBTD pilot in September 2025; around 388 days passed before the first real customer transactions. The result after a good year was individual transactions at seven banks, building on the groundwork of the Regulated Liability Network.

Now the counter-calculation for the United States: from the announcement of the initiative on June 5, 2026 to the start of the second quarter of 2027 it is 300 days. In that shorter span the plan is not a pilot with a handful of transactions but a network that, per the June release, is to be open to institutions of every size in the United States, connected to two existing payment systems. Britain took longer for less, and that in a smaller banking market.

This arithmetic does not refute the timetable. All it shows is where it breaks, if it breaks: not on the technology demonstrated in Miami, but on the number of firms that have to be connected at the same time. A launch in the second quarter of 2027 with three or four institutions would be on time and still a long way from what the June release promises.

RTP and CHIPS: connecting to the old rails is the hardest part

The part of the mandate that sounds least like blockchain is probably the most laborious. RTP and CHIPS have been running in production for years and handle the payment traffic of large US banks. A new network that settles tokenised deposits is only serviceable for the parties involved if money moves back and forth between the two worlds without a break.

The mechanism behind it is the reason banks want tokenised deposits at all. A tokenised deposit remains a claim against the bank that holds the balance. The balance does not leave the balance sheet, unlike money a customer exchanges into a private issuer's stablecoin. The payment becomes programmable without the institution losing deposits. What is missing is the shared layer over which such balances can be moved between firms, and that layer is precisely the mandate.

What is running in parallel in Europe: the ECB's Pontes has been live since September 21

For investors in Germany the obvious question is what of this arrives here. Directly, nothing at first: The Clearing House network is a project of the US banking sector and geared to US payment systems. In the euro area, development runs separately and on a different kind of money.

The European Central Bank brought Pontes into operation on September 21, 2026. Pontes connects market DLT platforms with the TARGET services so that trades on such platforms can be settled in central bank money. Under the ECB's rules, access is open to, among others, entities with access to T2, authorised central securities depositories and operators of settlement systems under the DLT pilot regime. German banks therefore reach Pontes through their existing T2 access.

The difference is not only geographical. In the United States a network for tokenised commercial bank money is being built, in Europe a bridge to central bank money. Both solve the same task for different kinds of money, and both will decide over the medium term which infrastructure banks use for tokenised securities. For the German market the regulatory position is clearer than often portrayed: a tokenised deposit is a deposit in supervisory terms and therefore does not fall under the rules that apply to stablecoins. What applies to crypto asset service providers in the EU we have set out in our overview of the MiCA obligations.

Does the token earn from the business? The question is still open

This is the point at which an article about Quant has to be honest. The Clearing House mandate went to the company Quant and its software. Whether and how the QNT token shares in it economically is not apparent from either release. The September release names Quant as the technology provider and does not mention the token.

The connection is documented elsewhere: the licence fee for Overledger is payable in QNT. What is not documented is to what extent running a network at The Clearing House triggers that fee, and whether the gap between software revenue and token demand turns out large or small. Equate the price move with the mandate and you are buying an expectation, not a demonstrated payment flow.

The price action since our last update shows how strongly that expectation is now priced in. On September 26, 2026, shortly after the announcement, QNT traded at $104.88. On October 20 the price stands at $195.43, or €173.92, a gain of 86.3 percent in a good three weeks. Market value is around $2.85 billion, rank 39. The record high of $427.42 from September 2021 remains a long way off. Data services differ on the circulating supply; CoinGecko reports 14,556,178 QNT. Since our article on the Fusion rollup of October 18 little has happened to the price, with a loss of 4.3 percent over seven days.

Our assessment: the timetable is plausible, the launch scale is not

From this newsroom's point of view, the roadmap to the second quarter of 2027 holds up. Three evidenced points support that: stage one was completed on September 24, the supplier demonstrated with GBTD on the same day that it can bring seven competing banks onto one platform, and the Sibos demonstration in late September showed the failure case rather than just the normal case. Against it stands the question of volume: 300 days from announcement to target date is less than Britain needed for a smaller undertaking, and to this day there is no list of the institutions taking part at launch. What is likely, therefore, is an on-time launch with a small cast, not the network for institutions of every size from the June release. For the token little follows from that: the link between network operation and QNT demand has still not been publicly quantified. A total loss is always possible with any single crypto asset.

QNT in Germany: trading venues, licensing and the holding period

Anyone wanting to buy QNT in Germany will find euro pairs at Kraken, Bitvavo and Bit2Me among others; at most other venues trading runs against US dollars or stablecoins. Before a first purchase it is worth looking at the provider's licence: since the European crypto regulation, service providers need an authorisation, which can be read up at the provider itself. Which firms hold that authorisation is shown by our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.

For tax, section 23 of the German Income Tax Act continues to apply to private individuals in Germany: a sale within a year of purchase is a private disposal, and after a year has passed the gain remains tax-free. Because that period is currently the subject of political work, it is worth checking the current state of the reform before deciding. The exemption threshold for other private disposals is €1,000 per year; exceed it and the entire gain is taxable.

Tokenised deposits: without a participant list, 2027 stays a date

The timetable stands, the cast does not. Three steps help in reading the coming months rather than reacting to headlines:

1. Wait for the interim position in the first quarter of 2027. If the preparation of the first institutions and their customers does not become public by the end of March, the second-quarter date is in danger. Anyone intending to buy crypto assets in that period anyway should compare the costs of the crypto exchanges first.
2. Watch the participant list, not the technology. The decisive number is how many of the 25 owner banks are booking at launch. Judge the provider by its authorisation, not by its reach; the regulated exchanges are listed in the comparison.
3. Document your own holding period. Anyone holding QNT in expectation of the launch should record the purchase date and purchase price cleanly, because the one-year period decides the tax. The tax tools and portfolio trackers in the comparison help with that.

(As of October 20, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The documented position: you only need an exemption order for crypto if your coins sit in a German securities account as a security, that is as a crypto ETN or ETP. For Bitcoin on an exchange or in your own wallet, taxation runs through a different section of the law, and an exemption order has no effect there. Both routes work with an amount of €1,000, and that alone produces the costliest mix-ups in German tax law on crypto assets. Our own assessment follows in a separate section below.

The difference is not a detail for tax advisers. Under one variant the bank deducts tax immediately as long as no order is on file. Under the other, nothing at all happens until the tax return. Get the two confused and you either hand up to €264 of liquidity to your custodian bank or wait for relief that never comes.

What an exemption order is and which crypto products it reaches

An exemption order is an instruction to your bank not to withhold tax on investment income up to a certain amount. The legal basis is section 44a paragraph 2 sentence 1 number 1 of the German Income Tax Act: the condition for refraining from the tax deduction is that the party obliged to deduct the tax holds an exemption order in the officially prescribed form. Without that order the bank remits tax to the tax office from the first euro of income, even if you stay well below the allowance at year-end.

The decisive question is therefore whether your crypto exposure produces investment income at all. It does if you go through a securities account. A crypto ETN is legally a debt security, that is a claim against the issuer. Such paper falls under other capital claims of any kind under section 20 paragraph 2 number 7 of the Act. Your custodian bank is then the paying agent, it withholds the tax, and an exemption order takes effect.

If instead you buy the coin itself, at an exchange or through a broker that credits you with real crypto assets, there is no paying agent remitting tax. You alone are responsible for the declaration, via the Anlage SO schedule of the tax return.

Saver's allowance: €1,000 for single filers, €2,000 for jointly assessed couples

The first of the two thousands is called the saver's allowance and appears in section 20 paragraph 9 of the Income Tax Act. The wording is terse: in determining income from capital, an amount of €1,000 is to be deducted as income-related expenses. For jointly assessed spouses a combined saver's allowance of €2,000 applies.

Two properties of this amount are rarely explained. First, it rules out deducting actual income-related expenses. Custody fees, specialist literature or software cannot be claimed on top for investment income; the allowance replaces them entirely. Second, under section 20 paragraph 9 sentence 4 it may not exceed the investment income offset against it. So it creates no loss you could use elsewhere.

How it works matters: the allowance is a deductible amount. If you have €1,400 of income from crypto ETNs, €1,000 stays free and only €400 is taxed. The amount lapses with the calendar year and cannot be carried into the next one.

The exemption threshold under section 23: €1,000 that vanishes entirely one euro above

The second thousand looks the same and works completely differently. For directly held coins, section 23 paragraph 3 sentence 5 of the Act applies, and it reads: gains remain tax-free if the total gain realised from private disposals in the calendar year amounted to less than €1,000.

The word "less" carries the whole weight. At a gain of €999 you pay nothing. At a gain of €1,000 the entire amount is taxable, not just the euro above the threshold, and at your personal income tax rate. An exemption threshold knows no partial relief; it tips. This error is so widespread that we devoted a separate article to it: the €1,000 exemption threshold and the most common misconception about crypto gains.

The two amounts side by side

With the saver's allowance, €400 of €1,400 in income stays taxable. With the exemption threshold under section 23, all €1,400 of a €1,400 gain are taxable, provided you held the coins for less than a year. The amounts are equal, the consequences differ by a factor of three and a half. On top of that the two pots stay separate: an unused saver's allowance does not help you with a coin sale, and an unused exemption threshold does not reduce your flat-rate withholding tax.

How to steer your burden through product choice is clear from a look at our comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers: anyone holding both worlds in a securities account needs a report that states section 20 and section 23 separately.

Crypto ETNs in a securities account: 25 percent withholding tax instead of a one-year holding period

A fixed rate applies to investment income. Section 32d paragraph 1 sentence 1 of the Act provides that income tax on income from capital is 25 percent. Together with the solidarity surcharge you land at 26.375 percent, and higher with church tax. That rate applies regardless of how long you held the paper.

With crypto ETNs, that removes the advantage many investors take for granted with crypto assets: a holding period of more than a year does not make the gain tax-free here. Conversely the rate is capped. Anyone on a high personal tax rate who sells within a year is better off with the ETN than with the directly held coin.

What else the product brings with it we set out using one major bank's offering, namely around 50 crypto ETNs in ING's securities account. The tax classification is only one of several cost questions there.

The delivery claim is part of the answer, and the literature disagrees about it

This is where it becomes contentious, and it is more honest to say so openly. Many crypto ETNs are physically backed with real coins, and some grant the investor a claim to delivery of those coins. It is precisely that delivery claim that unsettles the clean allocation to section 20.

The tax guide from software provider Buhl assigns crypto ETNs with a delivery claim to directly held coins and applies the one-year speculation period and the exemption threshold to them. Products without physical backing are treated by the same guide as investment income subject to flat-rate withholding tax regardless of the holding period. Other guides do not separate ETNs and spot holdings at all and say only that the saver's allowance applies to investment income and not to private crypto gains.

For you that produces a concrete task no calculator can take off your hands: your ETN's product terms state whether a delivery claim exists. Which of the two thousands counts for that paper depends on it. And because in practice the custodian bank withholds flat-rate tax even where the classification is disputed, a differing view leaves only the route via the tax return.

A second uncertainty lies in the legislative process. The future of the one-year holding period is under political negotiation, and the position changes in weeks, not years. How far the process has got we recorded on October 16, 2026 in our piece on the status of the crypto holding-period reform. For the current year, the legal position described above applies.

Directly held coins on an exchange: an exemption order has no effect here

Anyone holding their coins at a crypto exchange cannot lodge an exemption order there, and that is no failing on the exchange's part. An exemption order is addressed to a body obliged to deduct tax. A crypto exchange withholds no tax on disposal gains from private disposals, so there is nothing it could refrain from.

An exception arises when the same platform also offers you a securities account. Two regimes then run under one login, and keeping them apart becomes a chore. What that looks like we described using the case of a securities account at a crypto exchange, where investment income tax suddenly arises.

The official form and the tax identification number

The law requires the order in the officially prescribed form. In practice that means you use your bank's form, usually found in online banking under taxes or exemption order. Three details make it effective, and most orders fail on one of them.

• Your tax identification number. Without it the order stays ineffective and the bank keeps withholding.
• The amount you assign to this bank.
• For spouses, the decision whether to file a joint order. That has consequences going beyond the allowance.

Several accounts, one allowance

You may split the allowance across any number of banks, but the sum of all orders must not exceed €1,000, or €2,000 for spouses. So anyone with three securities accounts can assign €500, €300 and €200. Splitting is worth the effort only where income actually arises. An order for €600 at a bank paying you €40 in interest ties up €560 of exemption volume that your ETN account then lacks.

The spouses' joint order works at a second point too, and that one is almost always overlooked. Section 43a paragraph 3 sentence 2 of the Act provides that within the calendar year the bank offsets negative investment income up to the level of positive income, and: where a joint exemption order exists, a joint offset is made. The bank then sets one spouse's losses against the other's gains. Without a joint order each is left with their own result.

December 15 under section 43a paragraph 3 and its irrevocable application

Plenty of cut-off dates circulate at year-end, and most of them are banks' house deadlines. The law names only one, and it does not apply to the exemption order. Section 43a paragraph 3 sentence 5 of the Act puts it this way: the irrevocable application for issue of the certificate must reach the paying agent by December 15 of the current year.

What is meant is the loss certificate. With it the bank confirms a loss it could not offset itself, so that you can set it against gains at other banks in your tax return. The word "irrevocable" is in the statute, not in the small print: once filed, the application cannot be withdrawn.

For the exemption order itself the law names no cut-off date. It takes effect for the calendar year in which it is on file, and banks process it into December, often up to December 15 and sometimes later. Only your own bank's statement is binding on that. The legally hard deadline is the one named above, and it concerns something else.

The loss certificate can cost you the automatic loss carry-forward

Here is the point where well-meant year-end haste costs money, and it sits in two consecutive sentences of the statute. Section 43a paragraph 3 sentence 3 says: the unoffset loss is to be carried forward to the next calendar year. Sentence 4 says the bank issues a certificate of that loss on request, and adds: the loss carry-forward is forfeited in that case.

So the bank carries your loss into the next year of its own accord and offsets it there against your gains. Apply for the certificate and you give up that automatic mechanism. You trade an offset that runs without any action from you for a document you then have to claim yourself in your tax return.

The application makes sense only if you have gains at another bank that the loss can be set against. With only one securities account you take on work and gain nothing. Because the application is irrevocable, the step cannot be corrected either. Which deadlines run in detail we broke down in our piece on the loss certificate for crypto ETNs and its deadline.

Too late for 2026: the Anlage KAP schedule recovers the allowance

If the year is over and no order was on file, the allowance is not lost. The bank has remitted tax and you recover it through your tax return. For that you enter the investment income and the tax withheld in the Anlage KAP schedule; the tax office then grants the saver's allowance on assessment.

The outcome is no different whether the order was on file or you declare. The timing is: with an exemption order you keep the money straight away. Without it you lend the exchequer up to €264 interest-free for up to eighteen months. At €1,000 of income and a rate of 26.375 percent, that is the order of magnitude at stake.

Our assessment of the position on crypto ETNs

From this newsroom's point of view, the exemption order is the most poorly used lever available to investors holding crypto assets through a German securities account. Three evidenced points support that: the order costs nothing, it takes effect under section 44a immediately once on file, and without it the custodian bank withholds from the first euro. The only thing against it is the case where your exemption volume is already committed elsewhere, and that can be checked in a single online-banking session.

We stay cautious on the question of which section applies to a physically backed paper with a delivery claim. Expert opinions diverge, we know of no clarifying judgment, and the product terms differ from issuer to issuer. Anyone needing certainty here will not get it from a guide but from a binding ruling or a tax adviser. A total loss is possible with every product named here, including backed ETNs, because the claim is against the issuer.

Exemption order: without an application the allowance stays with the bank

Three steps take you from the rule to putting it into practice:

1. Establish the product type. Check your account statement for whether you hold crypto ETNs or real coins, and for ETNs whether a delivery claim exists. Which report states both regimes separately is shown by the comparison of crypto tax tools and portfolio trackers.
2. Lodge the order and split it. Assign the volume to the bank where the income arises, and keep the sum of all orders at €1,000, or €2,000 for spouses. Which providers run a securities account with crypto ETNs is in the comparison of crypto brokers.
3. Look at your loss position before December 15. Apply for a loss certificate only if you have gains at a second bank. Anyone who instead self-custodies and trades directly will find the venues in the crypto exchange comparison.

(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

The documented position: the Zcash project's official upgrade page answers the most important question about Zcash this Wednesday in a single sentence: "The activation height for NU7 has not yet been set." That is notable, because October 20 was the day on which, according to the public schedule, the developers intended to decide on precisely that height. The deadline has passed and the number is still missing. Our own assessment follows in a separate section below.

Meanwhile a specific block number is circulating, and the price has risen sharply. On the Kraken exchange one ZEC traded at $1,277.14 over the course of October 21, after a daily low of $1,133.43 — a gap of 12.7 percent between the low and the current level within 24 hours. The number named as the activation height is block 3,543,405. It appears in a proposal, not in the project documents, and that difference decides whether November 5 is a date or a goal.

What the Zcash upgrade page says today

The page z.cash/upgrade/nu7 is where the project records the status of every upgrade. There, NU7 is described as "planned to be the ninth major network upgrade for Zcash", and above the whole section sits the note that the activation height has not yet been set. Under "Current Status" the page links to four things: a draft ZIP for the deployment, feature-branch testnets, an accelerated NU7 proposal from Shielded Labs, and the index of candidate NU7 ZIPs.

Since October 21 a specific number has been in circulation. According to a report by Cointelegraph, developers agreed on block 3,543,405 at a ZIP editors' meeting, proposed in a pull request by Sean Bowe and expected around November 5. The report says the upgrade's specifications must first be finalised before the proposal is adopted, and that an activation date is not confirmed. That is exactly the point here: an understanding reached in a meeting and an open pull request are a different thing from a number that sits in the deployment ZIP and ships in the node software.

Activation height means the block number from which the new consensus rules apply. With Zcash it is the actual commitment: a calendar date is only an estimate derived from the block number and the average block time. As long as the height is not in the deployment ZIP and built into the node software, there is no binding point in time, only a target.

For comparison: for the last anchored upgrade, NU6.3, the ZIP index names a specific number, mainnet block height 3,428,143. That is what a fixed date looks like. The equivalent number for NU7 is still missing from the ZIP index.

NU7 at a glance: 25 seconds between blocks instead of 75

The largest single piece of NU7 in substance is ZIP 218. The draft, written by Dev Ojha and Evan Forbes and filed on March 13, 2026, calls for a change in the so-called block target spacing from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. Block target spacing is the time between two blocks that the network's difficulty adjustment works towards.

For users that primarily means shorter waiting times. The draft's abstract states that user-visible latency falls by a factor of three, and it expressly names the case of someone needing only one or two confirmations, for instance for small payments. ZIP 218 also introduces caps on actions per shielded pool, separately for Sapling, Orchard and Ironwood.

Alongside it, the project index lists four further ZIPs for NU7: ZIP 235 removes 60 percent of transaction fees from circulation, ZIP 237 arranges issuance so that the halving schedule is preserved, ZIP 2003 bans version 4 transactions, and ZIP 2008 updates an address list for the funding streams. Which of these ZIPs actually end up in NU7 is settled by ZIP 259.

All six NU7 ZIPs sit at "Draft": the count from October 21

On October 21, 2026 we pulled the ZIP index on zips.z.cash and noted the status recorded there for every ZIP the project itself lists for NU7. The basis was the five NU7 ZIPs from the "NU7 ZIPs" list plus deployment ZIP 259, so six entries checked. The result is uniform:

• ZIP 218, 25-second block spacing: Draft
• ZIP 235, 60 percent of fees out of circulation: Draft
• ZIP 237, halving-preserving issuance: Draft
• ZIP 2003, banning version 4 transactions: Draft
• ZIP 2008, updating the address list: Draft
• ZIP 259, deployment of NU7: Draft

None of the six entries carries the status "Proposed" or "Final". The ZIP process describes Draft expressly as "works-in-progress" that have yet to become "Proposed" or else be withdrawn, rejected or superseded. The two revisions NU7 would make to existing ZIPs also sit at Draft there: revision 2 of ZIP 207 on the funding streams and revision 3 of ZIP 214 on the development fund.

cryptoticker.io compiled this analysis itself on October 21, 2026. It says nothing about whether NU7 is coming or not, and it is no substitute for an announcement by the developers. It only shows what was recorded in the project documents the day after the deadline.

Why ZIP 2003 is decisive for old Sprout balances

Of all the NU7 building blocks, ZIP 2003 is the one that can touch balances directly. It bans version 4 transactions. Old holdings in the long-superseded Sprout pool, Zcash's first shielded pool, can only be moved using such older transaction formats. If that format disappears, moving those balances becomes awkward at the very least.

How serious this is for you depends on where your ZEC sit. If you hold them on an exchange, pools are no concern of yours: the operator manages the keys there, and the switch happens without any action from you. If, on the other hand, you have been running your own wallet with shielded holdings for years and never migrated them, do not let the time until activation slip away. We described that case in more detail back in September in our article on the Zcash NU7 upgrade.

How to check which pool your ZEC sit in

You can tell which pool applies from the address format your balance is tied to. Addresses starting with zc belong to the old Sprout pool. Addresses starting with zs belong to Sapling. Unified addresses, which start with u1, cover the more modern pools, Orchard among them. Transparent addresses start with t and behave as they do with Bitcoin, that is without shielding.

If you find an address of the first kind in your wallet with a remaining balance, that is the holding at issue. The way forward is open in both directions: you can move it into a unified address in the same wallet or, if you want to retire the wallet anyway, transfer it to current software. A move between your own addresses stays a move, not a sale.

Either way the precondition is that you hold the keys yourself. If you want to switch to a device for that, the common models and how they differ are set out in our hardware wallet comparison.

Zcash price: $1,277 and a daily range of $163

The price figures diverge depending on the data source and the measurement window, and in this case that is not a rounding error but the consequence of a very deep daily low. Kraken reports a price of $1,277.14 for ZEC/USD, with a daily high of $1,296.00 and a daily low of $1,133.43. Against the level 24 hours earlier, $1,256.46, that gives a gain of 1.7 percent; against the daily low it is 12.7 percent. Daily turnover there came to around 23,259 ZEC.

CoinGecko arrives at $1,277.80 for October 21 and reports a 24-hour gain of 12.37 percent and 3.66 percent over the week. The spread of 1.7 to 12.4 percent for the same day is explained by the point in time each source compares against. In euro terms ZEC stood at €1,136.54 on Kraken at the same moment. That places Zcash tenth among the largest cryptocurrencies, with a market value of $21.7 billion.

Worth noting for context: the price is well below where it stood at the end of September. Our article of October 13 described the slide from $1,315 to $1,185 ahead of the decision that was then still expected. Since then the price has fallen below $1,100 and come back above it. The levels that now decide the question are the daily low at $1,133 on the downside and the daily high at $1,296 on the upside.

The switch from zcashd to Zebra concerns node operators only

One point on the upgrade page is regularly read more broadly than it is meant. It states that NU7 is not supported by the old reference software zcashd and that a switch to the Zebra node is necessary, an independent Zcash implementation by the Zcash Foundation written in the Rust programming language. That is addressed at people who run a full node themselves.

For ASIC miners the page expressly records that no separate step is needed: they do not validate the consensus rules themselves and depend on the mining pool, which has to update its nodes. And anyone simply holding ZEC in a wallet or with a provider runs no node and has nothing to do about software.

Holding period and tax: what a move between pools triggers

When moving your own holdings, investors in Germany regularly face the question of the one-year period. Under German income tax law, selling cryptocurrencies after a holding period of more than a year is tax-free; within the year, the taxation of private disposals applies, with an exemption threshold of €1,000 per year.

A transfer between two addresses that both belong to you is not a disposal. The holding period continues to run and the acquisition data stay the same. What matters is that you can evidence it: if you pull holdings from an old wallet into a new one, record the date, the amount and both addresses so the period remains traceable if questioned. The tools in our overview of tax tools and portfolio trackers help with that, recognising transfers as such rather than booking them as a sale. For larger amounts or an unclear history, a visit to a tax adviser remains the safe route.

Buying in Germany: MiCA licensing and the ban from July 2027

Anyone wanting to buy or sell ZEC here will find the coin at a good many providers, but not at all of them. Shielded cryptocurrencies are on a timetable of their own in Europe: the EU anti-money-laundering regulation provides for restrictions on anonymity-enhancing crypto assets from July 2027, which we wrote about in our article on Zcash trading and the EU framework. Some exchanges have already removed privacy coins from their European offering ahead of that.

In practice that means: before placing an order, check whether your provider still lists ZEC for customers in Germany at all, and whether it holds a licence under the EU regulation on markets in crypto assets. Which trading venues meet that and what they charge in fees is set out in our overview of the best crypto exchanges. If you work with leveraged products on ZEC, keep in mind as well that a price covering 15 percent between low and high in a single day triggers liquidations very quickly where collateral is thin.

Our assessment: a draft ZIP is not yet a date

From this newsroom's point of view, the picture is less clear-cut than the October 21 headlines putting a fixed height front and centre suggest. The evidence is in the open: the project's upgrade page lists the activation height as not set on October 21, and all six NU7 ZIPs sit at Draft, including deployment ZIP 259, which is meant to define the upgrade's scope. A date that appears in no document as a block height is a goal, not a commitment.

Against that, the technical groundwork is well advanced: according to reports by Cryptobriefing and Cryptotimes, the testnet has been running NU7 since October 4 at block 4,465,026, and a coinholder vote has backed the roadmap. So anyone expecting the height to be set in the coming days has good reason to. What we will not do is infer a decision from today's price gain. In either direction, a total loss remains possible with crypto assets; this text weighs the evidence and recommends neither buying nor selling.

Zcash NU7: without a set height, November 5 remains a target

Fifteen days before the stated target date the number exists as a proposal; it is not in the deployment ZIP. That changes nothing about what there is to do on your side, only how much time you probably have for it.

1. Classify your holdings. Look in your wallet to see whether an address beginning with zc still carries a remaining balance. Only that old Sprout holding is genuinely affected by ZIP 2003. If you want to hold keys yourself, the hardware wallet comparison helps with choosing a device.
2. Review your trading venue. Establish whether your provider lists ZEC for German customers and is licensed under the EU regulation before you move anything. The terms side by side are in the exchange overview.
3. Document the periods. For every transfer, record the date, the amount and both addresses so the one-year period stays provable. A tax tool handles that on an ongoing basis.

(As of October 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)

Citadel's founder says investors are almost certainly in an AI bubble, warns a chip glut could crash prices like empty airline seats, yet expects the survivors to lead for decades.

Nvidia's OpenShell Reference Architecture pairs a software sandbox on Vera CPUs with Sentry monitoring on BlueField-4 chips, aiming to let companies run autonomous agents while enforcing limits agents cannot reach.

OpenAI says its models found PHP2Shell and led a two-month coalition to fix it. It's the same AI that broke into Hugging Face and an Australian government portal this year.

Both boards are now studying a tie-up that would put Grok, X, Starlink, orbital data centers, a chip megafactory and Optimus robots under one roof—and under one man's control.

Bitcoin is back near $84,500 as XRP and Zcash lead a broad crypto rebound from October's slide, putting "Uptober" back on the table.

NEAR, ZEC, DOGE and ETH are all rebounding on green daily candles, but each still needs to clear key resistance to confirm the next move higher.

Legendary trader John Bollinger has discovered a hidden Bitcoin-themed arcade game on CoinMarketCap that challenges players to navigate BTC's historical price movements while staying within his famous Bollinger Bands.

Cardano has achieved a major real-world adoption milestone, with 100,000 Indian farms now registered on its blockchain.

Ripple's prime brokerage platform has expanded its services to institutional clients following the launch of 24/7 stock trading.

Official Dogecoin X account sets social networks on alert by backing a massive new ecosystem consolidation project under 'Dogecoin Labs' monicker.

TLDR

• APLD shares surge 8.54% as Applied Digital takes control of a Texas AI project.
• Applied Digital gains a 51% stake in Soluna’s planned 50 MW Texas data center.
• Soluna brings land and power assets, while Applied Digital funds development.
• ChronoScale eyes a lease for the Texas AI facility, pending final agreements.
• Texas AI data center deal targets wind and grid power as APLD stock rallies.

Applied Digital Corporation (APLD) stock surged 8.54% to $20.98 as the company announced a major Texas AI data center partnership. The shares gained $1.65 during regular trading, reflecting strong market interest in the company’s expanding infrastructure business. However, APLD stock slipped 0.49% to $20.88 in after-hours trading following the sharp daily advance.

Applied Digital Corp., APLD

Applied Digital Secures 51% Stake in Texas AI Data Center Project

Applied Digital has signed a definitive agreement with Soluna Holdings to develop a 50-megawatt AI data center in Texas. The companies will establish a joint venture to oversee development at Soluna’s Project Dorothy 3 site near Silverton. Under the agreement, Applied Digital will control 51% of the venture, while Soluna will retain 49%.

Soluna will contribute land and power-related assets from its existing development site to support the planned facility. Applied Digital will provide capital to advance construction and establish the infrastructure required for intensive computing operations. The partnership combines Soluna’s energy resources with Applied Digital’s experience in developing and operating high-performance data centers.

The companies expect to complete the transaction before the end of 2026 after meeting several closing requirements. These include local tax abatement approval, corporate authorizations, property documentation, and final agreements covering power and leasing. Additionally, both companies must finalize the joint venture’s operating agreement before completing the transaction.

Project Dorothy 3 Targets Growing AI Computing Demand

Project Dorothy 3 will operate near Soluna’s existing Dorothy 1 and Dorothy 2 developments in Briscoe County. The proposed facility will sit alongside Briscoe Wind, a wind farm with 150 megawatts of generation capacity. Furthermore, the first development phase will support 50 megawatts of critical information technology equipment.

The facility plans to use electricity from both the nearby wind farm and the regional power grid. This arrangement will connect renewable generation with the substantial electricity requirements of AI and high-performance computing systems. The project will expand Applied Digital’s infrastructure portfolio through a new Texas development site.

Energy availability remains a central consideration for companies developing large computing facilities across the United States. AI data centers require substantial electrical capacity to operate advanced processors, cooling systems, and supporting equipment. Consequently, access to established power resources plays an important role in selecting sites for new developments.

ChronoScale Plans Lease as Applied Digital Expands AI Infrastructure

ChronoScale Holdings has signed a nonbinding letter of intent to lease the proposed Dorothy 3 data center. Applied Digital holds a majority ownership position in ChronoScale, which provides computing infrastructure for demanding AI workloads. However, the companies must negotiate and execute a definitive lease before establishing binding rental commitments.

The proposed lease would connect the Texas facility with ChronoScale’s accelerated computing operations and future infrastructure requirements. Additionally, the arrangement would create a potential customer relationship within Applied Digital’s broader group of affiliated businesses. The current letter outlines the proposed leasing arrangement but does not guarantee a completed contract.

Applied Digital’s latest agreement adds another development initiative to its growing AI and high-performance computing infrastructure business. The planned joint venture brings together project financing, available land, renewable power access, and potential computing demand. Meanwhile

The post Applied Digital (APLD) Stock: Soars on 51% Stake in Soluna’s 50 MW Texas AI Data Center Project appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• SAP stock gains after quarterly revenue crosses €10 billion for the first time.
• Cloud revenue jumps 26% as SAP’s cloud backlog climbs 28% to €24.1 billion.
• SAP’s operating profit rises 18%, with non-IFRS earnings reaching €3.03 billion.
• Cloud ERP Suite revenue surges 29%, reflecting strong enterprise cloud demand.
• SAP targets the high end of its 2026 cloud revenue range after a strong Q3.

SAP SE (SAP) reported strong third-quarter 2026 earnings as cloud revenue growth and higher operating profit supported its financial performance. The German software company exceeded €10 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time, marking a major financial milestone. Meanwhile, SAP stock gained during regular trading and extended its advance after hours following the earnings announcement.

SAP shares climbed 1.64% to $232.73 during regular trading, adding $3.75 to their previous closing price. After the closing bell, the stock advanced another 1.01% to $235.09. The gains followed continued growth across SAP’s cloud business and stronger quarterly profitability.

SAP SE, SAP

SAP Cloud Revenue Jumps 26% as Backlog Reaches €24.1 Billion

SAP reported a 26% increase in cloud revenue during the third quarter, reflecting continued demand for its enterprise software services. At constant currencies, cloud revenue grew 25%, demonstrating growth across its subscription-based business. Meanwhile, Cloud ERP Suite revenue increased 29%, supported by companies moving business operations onto cloud platforms.

The company’s current cloud backlog reached €24.1 billion, representing a 28% increase from the previous year. At constant currencies, backlog growth reached 26%, reflecting demand for contracted cloud services. This backlog provides SAP with visibility into future revenue from existing customer commitments.

SAP continues to expand its cloud portfolio as businesses modernize their financial, operational, and data management systems. Its cloud ERP products support companies seeking integrated platforms for managing daily operations. SAP’s Business AI services form part of its broader strategy to automate enterprise processes.

SAP Q3 Revenue Exceeds €10 Billion as Operating Profit Rises 18%

SAP generated €10.27 billion in total third-quarter revenue, an increase of 13% from the previous year. At constant currencies, total revenue increased 12%, supported by continued cloud expansion. The result marked the first time SAP exceeded €10 billion in quarterly revenue.

IFRS operating profit increased 18% to €2.93 billion during the quarter, reflecting stronger business performance. Meanwhile, non-IFRS operating profit also rose 18%, reaching €3.03 billion for the first time. SAP attributed its profitability gains to revenue growth, operating scale, and disciplined cost management.

Chief Executive Christian Klein highlighted customer adoption of SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise strategy during the quarterly earnings announcement. The strategy combines cloud infrastructure, business data, and artificial intelligence to support enterprise operations. Meanwhile, Chief Financial Officer Dominik Asam emphasized the company’s ability to expand revenue and operating profit simultaneously.

SAP Updates 2026 Cloud Outlook Following Strong Q3 Results

SAP updated its full-year 2026 cloud revenue outlook following the third-quarter performance. The company now expects cloud revenue near the upper end of its €25.8 billion to €26.2 billion range. This forecast represents expected constant-currency growth of 23% to 25% compared with 2025.

SAP also expects cloud and software revenue near the upper end of its €36.3 billion to €36.8 billion range. The company maintained its broader focus on cloud migration, business applications, and AI-supported enterprise services. These areas remain central to SAP’s strategy for expanding recurring revenue and supporting customer transformation.

The quarterly results showed continued growth in cloud subscriptions alongside higher operating earnings. SAP’s expanding backlog also highlighted the role of long-term customer contracts in its business model. Together, these developments strengthened the company’s third-quarter performance and supported its updated full-year revenue expectations.

The post SAP SE (SAP) Stock: Climbs as Q3 Revenue Tops €10 Billion and Cloud Growth Hits 26% appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• IBM shares surged 3.94% to $251.46 after strong third-quarter earnings data.
• IBM’s revenue reached $17.1 billion as software sales jumped 8% year over year.
• IBM’s net income rose 26% to $2.2 billion, while operating EPS climbed 11%.
• Free cash flow hit $3.0 billion, up $700 million from the year-ago quarter.
• IBM raised its full-year cash flow target while keeping revenue guidance intact.

IBM shares surged 3.94% to $251.46 on Wednesday as the company reported higher third-quarter revenue and profit. Revenue reached $17.1 billion, rising 5%, while net income jumped 26% to $2.2 billion. Shares gained 1.41% to $255.00 after hours, despite retreating from a post-earnings spike near $270.

International Business Machines Corporation, IBM

Software Growth Lifts IBM’s Quarterly Revenue

IBM reported 6% revenue growth at constant currency, supported by gains in software and infrastructure. Software generated $7.8 billion, an 8% increase from the same quarter last year. Red Hat revenue rose 11%, and data revenue grew 19%.

Transaction processing sales increased 9%, while automation revenue fell 3% during the quarter. Consulting generated $5.3 billion, matching last year’s revenue, although constant currency sales increased 2%. Strategy and technology consulting grew 2%, while intelligent operations revenue declined 2%.

Infrastructure revenue climbed 4% to $3.7 billion, helped by 31% growth in distributed infrastructure. However, IBM Z revenue dropped 20%, and infrastructure support sales declined 3%. Financing contributed about $200 million in revenue, down 4% from last year.

Earnings Rise as IBM Expands Cash Flow

IBM reported GAAP diluted earnings of $2.31 per share, a 26% increase. Operating earnings reached $2.95 per share, up 11%, while operating net income grew 12% to $2.8 billion. However, the GAAP gross profit margin slipped 50 basis points to 56.8%.

Operating gross margin declined 20 basis points to 58.5%, despite stronger earnings. In contrast, operating pretax margin improved 70 basis points to 19.3%. Operating pretax income rose 9% to $3.3 billion as IBM continued productivity efforts.

Operating cash flow totaled $4.0 billion, increasing $900 million from a year earlier. Free cash flow reached $3.0 billion, improving by $700 million from last year. Through September, IBM generated $11.8 billion in operating cash and $7.8 billion in free cash flow.

IBM Maintains Revenue Outlook and Raises Cash Target

IBM maintained its 2026 forecast for constant currency revenue growth between 4% and 5%. However, management raised its free cash flow outlook to growth exceeding $1 billion from 2025. The company expects exchange rates to have a neutral effect on annual revenue growth.

IBM held $11.1 billion in cash, restricted cash and marketable securities at quarter-end. Meanwhile, total debt reached $63.8 billion after IBM invested $11.4 billion in acquisitions during 2026. Cash holdings declined $3.4 billion from the end of 2025.

The board declared a quarterly dividend of $1.69 per common share. Shareholders of record on November 10 will receive the payment on December 10, 2026. IBM paid $1.6 billion in third-quarter dividends while funding acquisitions and business needs.

The post IBM (IBM) Stock: Surges 3.94% as Q3 Revenue Hits $17.1 Billion and Profits Jump 26% appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• Meta stock jumps 3.57% after hours as earnings and Muse AI launches draw attention.
• Meta’s revenue hits $64.6B as ad prices rise 14% and impressions jump 10% yearly.
• Zuckerberg rolls out Muse AI models as Meta targets personal superintelligence.
• A $9.89B legal charge cuts Meta’s operating margin to 20% from 40% in Q3 2026.
• Meta spends $34.91B on capital projects as free cash flow turns negative in Q3.

Meta Platforms (META) shares surged after hours as third-quarter revenue reached $64.60 billion and management highlighted new AI models. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg also highlighted the launch of new artificial intelligence models. However, a major legal charge reduced operating profit despite strong advertising growth.

Meta Stock Rallies as Zuckerberg Highlights New AI Models

Meta stock rose 0.47% to $697.52 during Wednesday’s regular session, before the company released its third-quarter earnings. Following the earnings release, shares advanced 3.57% to $722.42 in after-hours trading. The stronger late move followed the company’s latest update on earnings and technology.

Meta Platforms, Inc., META

Zuckerberg outlined the recent launches of Muse and Muse Wonder as Meta expanded its ambitions in frontier AI development. He linked the new technology to the company’s goal of delivering personal superintelligence. Meta presented these developments alongside progress across its core business and technology operations.

Meta’s family of applications averaged 3.64 billion daily active people in September, up 3% from September 2025. Meanwhile, advertising impressions increased 10%, and average prices per advertisement climbed 14%. Together, those gains reflected growth in advertising activity and prices across Meta’s platforms.

Meta Revenue Climbs 26% as Operating Costs Surge

Quarterly revenue increased 26% from $51.24 billion in the comparable period last year. Meta reported the same growth rate on both reported and constant currency bases. Advertising trends helped explain the sales performance as the company expanded its technology efforts.

Total costs and expenses jumped 68% to $51.61 billion from $30.71 billion, including the litigation-related charge. Consequently, operating income dropped 37% to $12.99 billion from $20.54 billion. Meta’s operating margin fell to 20% from 40% in the year-earlier period.

Net income rose 264% to $9.86 billion from $2.71 billion a year earlier. Meanwhile, diluted earnings per share grew 265% to $3.83 from $1.05. Meta reported a 24% effective tax rate, compared with 87% last year.

Meta Faces $18.59 Billion Legal Settlement as Capital Spending Grows

In August, Meta reached an agreement with 52 attorneys general over teen mental health and social media litigation. The agreement calls for payments of up to approximately $18.59 billion. Meta included a $9.89 billion related charge in its third-quarter costs and expenses.

Excluding that charge, operating income would have totaled $22.88 billion, Meta calculated. Diluted earnings per share would have reached $7.40 instead of the reported $3.83. The company’s adjusted calculation also lowered its effective tax rate to 17%.

Meta spent $34.91 billion on capital expenditures, including finance lease principal payments. Operating cash flow reached $32.79 billion, while free cash flow totaled negative $2.12 billion. Meta held $82.45 billion in cash and marketable securities, paid $1.36 billion in dividends, and reduced headcount 15% to 66,775.

The post Meta Platforms (META) Stock: Jumps as Zuckerberg Unveils AI Breakthroughs and Revenue Hits $64.6B appeared first on Blockonomi.

TLDR

• QuantumScape shares surge 13.57% after unveiling its new 100 MWh battery plan.
• Muehlbauer joins QuantumScape to develop automated battery assembly equipment.
• QuantumScape targets 2028 to begin cell production at its planned 100 MWh line.
• The Eagle Line pilot facility provides a foundation for larger battery output.
• AI data centers, aerospace and defense drive QuantumScape’s expansion plans.

QuantumScape Corporation (QS) announced plans for a 100 megawatt-hour solid-state battery production line, targeting operations in 2028. The announcement sent QuantumScape stock surging 13.57% to $4.52, gaining $0.54 during after-hours trading. The company also partnered with Germany’s Muehlbauer Group to develop manufacturing equipment for large-scale battery production.

QuantumScape Corporation, QS

QuantumScape Expands Solid-State Battery Manufacturing Plans

QuantumScape’s latest announcement marks another step in its efforts to establish large-scale solid-state battery manufacturing. The planned facility will produce lithium-metal battery cells for several industrial markets beyond conventional electric vehicles. These markets include artificial intelligence data centers, aerospace operations, and defense applications requiring advanced energy storage systems.

The expansion builds on QuantumScape’s existing technology development and manufacturing activities in San Jose, California. The company has focused on developing solid-state batteries that offer advantages over conventional lithium-ion technology. Its approach uses solid electrolytes instead of traditional liquid materials to support improved energy storage performance.

QuantumScape aims to establish manufacturing processes that can support commercial production across multiple industries. The project will combine automated production systems with engineering improvements from its existing pilot operations. This approach supports the company’s broader effort to move solid-state battery technology toward high-volume manufacturing.

QuantumScape Partners With Muehlbauer Group for 100 MWh Battery Production Line

QuantumScape selected Germany-based Muehlbauer Group to provide specialized equipment and manufacturing expertise for its planned production line. The partnership will focus on developing automated cell assembly systems that support higher production volumes. Additionally, both companies will build on manufacturing processes already demonstrated at QuantumScape’s San Jose facility.

The company’s Eagle Line pilot facility currently demonstrates automated production processes for its solid-state battery cells. Muehlbauer examined these processes and identified engineering improvements that could support larger manufacturing operations. As a result, both companies have started developing equipment and processes capable of handling greater production volumes.

Muehlbauer brings extensive experience in industrial automation, equipment engineering, and manufacturing system integration. Its involvement will help QuantumScape develop production systems for the planned 100 MWh manufacturing capacity. Meanwhile, the companies will continue engineering work before the targeted production launch in 2028.

QuantumScape Targets 2028 Production as Solid-State Battery Applications Expand

QuantumScape expects its planned production line to serve markets beyond the electric vehicle industry. AI data centers represent one potential market because operators need dependable energy storage for demanding computing infrastructure. Similarly, aerospace and defense applications create opportunities for advanced batteries with demanding performance requirements.

The 100 MWh project represents another step toward QuantumScape’s broader goal of gigawatt-hour-scale battery manufacturing. Its existing Eagle Line provides the technical foundation for developing more efficient automated production systems. The Muehlbauer partnership adds manufacturing expertise as QuantumScape works to increase production capacity.

QuantumScape has not announced a specific commissioning date beyond its 2028 production target. The company also has not disclosed the project’s total investment cost or expected commercial revenue. The manufacturing plan establishes a defined capacity target and expands its industrial partnership network ahead of production.

The post QuantumScape (QS) Stock: Surges 13.57% on 100 MWh Solid-State Battery Production Plan for 2028 appeared first on Blockonomi.

Kazakhstan is moving to restrict access to six unlicensed crypto platforms after a court-backed action by the Astana Financial Services Authority (AFSA).

On September 15, the Astana International Financial Center (AIFC) Court granted AFSA’s claims against the operators of BingX, Bitcoin.com, Huobi Global (HTX), BitMart, Coinbase and WEEX.

Crypto Licensing Crackdown

The order bars these platforms from providing, offering, or advertising digital asset services within the AIFC without the required license. It also covers the distribution of mobile apps used to offer these services. LBank was initially included in the ruling, but the court removed it on September 18 after its operator independently blocked access to its services in Kazakhstan.

The decision also involves Google and Apple, which operate the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. Both companies are subject to the court’s order regarding geographic restrictions on access to the named platforms.

AFSA said the legal action comes after months of efforts to tackle crypto services operating without authorization. The regulator began issuing written warnings to more than 20 platforms in 2025, and explained the rules under the AIFC regulatory framework. In early 2026, it took the matter to court against platforms that continued operating without a license.

According to AFSA, nine crypto platforms voluntarily restricted access to their apps in the country through the two app stores. The regulator then withdrew its claims against those operators. Another seven platforms said they intended to apply for an AFSA license to operate digital asset trading facilities. The remaining six are now subject to the court-ordered restrictions.

Kazakhstan Crypto Market

Kazakhstan introduced a digital asset framework in May, which covered stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets and digital versions of traditional financial instruments. The rules also set requirements for exchanges and other service providers. Two months later, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed a decree to develop the industry further. The plans include regulated stablecoins for some cross-border payments, tokenized securities as well as incentives to bring digital assets onto local regulated platforms.

More recently, Tether began exploring a stablecoin tied to the Kazakh tenge under an agreement with the National Bank of Kazakhstan and Alatau City authorities. As reported by CryptoPotato earlier this month, the parties will study issuance models and prepare a pilot proposal. No issuer, blockchain, or launch date has been announced.

Meanwhile, Kazakhstan’s government has approved a 65-measure plan that includes up to $60 million in tokenized Alatau projects by the end of 2026.

The post Coinbase and HTX Among Six Crypto Platforms Facing Restrictions in Kazakhstan appeared first on CryptoPotato.

President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to spotlight his administration’s efforts against foreign criminal networks that lure Americans into fraudulent crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters.

His own family, meanwhile, is heavily involved in soliciting crypto investments.

Cabinet Officials Set to Attend Scam Event

Cybercrime prevention more broadly is the theme of the session, and the president and members of his cabinet are expected to point to the government’s seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites, the official explained. Efforts to stop online impersonation scams are also on the agenda.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are expected to attend, the official added.

According to an FBI report, Americans filed more than a million complaints about internet scams last year, a 17% increase from 2024. The same report noted that Americans who filed complaints reported the highest losses.

Trump’s family has gotten heavily tied to crypto, with the president’s annual financial disclosure showing that most of the $2.2 billion he made last year came from digital currencies. This includes about $600 million from World Liberty Financial (WLFI) and $636 million more from the sale of Trump-branded meme coins.

The president defended the earnings, saying there was nothing illegal or wrong about them, even as critics like political commentator John Oliver accused him of giving investors access to the White House in exchange for them putting money into his crypto businesses. The White House has said neither the president nor his family have engaged or will engage in conflicts of interest.

Investor Losses Tied to Family Crypto Venture

As CryptoPotato reported earlier, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen estimated that investors in crypto ventures tied to the president and his family are at least $4.7 billion underwater since 2022. Most of those losses remain unrealized, meaning investors still hold the assets and have not sold at a loss.

The TRUMP meme coin accounted for an estimated $3.2 billion of that figure, and the token has lost more than 97% of its value since hitting an all-time high of $73 in January 2025, although at the time of writing it had jumped more than 7% in 24 hours to take its price to around $1.82. WLFI investors are at least $1 billion underwater by the same estimate.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal asked SEC Chair Paul Atkins in August to investigate the meme coin. They suggested that it may have allowed fraud or unfairly enriched people at the expense of everyday investors.

Per Public Citizen’s report, the president continues to own and control his businesses. His stakes, including the meme coin and World Liberty Financial’s two tokens, sit in a revocable trust in which he is the sole donor and beneficiary, and his eldest son is the sole trustee.

The post Report: Trump to Address Foreign Crypto Scams at White House Event appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The crypto market is back in the green on Wednesday, as several major assets have posted gains.

According to Santiment, XRP and Dogecoin are showing potential buying opportunities.

Historically Favorable Zones

The latest 365-day Market Value to Realized Value (MVRV) data puts DOGE at around 0.74, which suggests that holders who bought over the past year are sitting on significant unrealized losses. XRP is also in negative territory, as its MVRV hovers near 0.92. Santiment explained that both assets are in historically more favorable, lower-risk zones compared with periods when holders hold large profits.

Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Chainlink, however, tell a different story. The 365-day MVRV readings of these three tokens range from 0.97 to 1.04, which places average holders close to breakeven.

This points to a more neutral market position for the three assets. MVRV helps traders assess whether investors are sitting on profits or losses. High readings can indicate rising profit-taking risk, while low readings mean selling pressure is nearing exhaustion. However, these signals do not guarantee a price rebound.

Macro Headwinds

Despite the recent uptick, Bitcoin and the wider crypto market continue to face growing pressure from geopolitical tensions and interest-rate uncertainty. According to Bitunix, the standoff between Washington and Tehran has added fresh uncertainty over oil supplies, with the US midterm elections set for November 3.

Higher oil prices could keep inflation elevated and give the Federal Reserve less room to ease monetary policy. While economists expect rates to hold at 3.75%-4.00% at the October meeting, all 100 respondents in a Reuters poll expect another hike in December.

Markets are also showing mixed signals. The S&P 500 remains relatively close to its record high, but the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has dropped around 14% since October 6. For the crypto market, Bitunix said that the key test is whether energy costs, interest-rate expectations, and AI investment risks begin deteriorating at the same time.

“If they do, markets may need to reprice growth expectations, financing costs, and capital allocation, increasing the potential for volatility across risk assets.”

The post XRP and DOGE Look Undervalued by MVRV Measures, but Will Traders Take Notice? appeared first on CryptoPotato.

Cardano’s ecosystem continues to evolve, with the team introducing several advancements that have drawn the crypto community’s attention.

ADA, the project’s native token, is up 4% on a daily basis, yet a combination of bearish factors suggests it may soon head south again.

The Latest Updates

Earlier this week, several sources revealed that Charles Hoskinson (Cardano’s founder) has started building a brand-new programming language for the protocol. According to X account BSCN, the language will be “the first of its kind, enabling intents and PCD via Groth16 proofs” and is co-developed by Input Output engineer Lucas Rosa.

TMA | The Money Ape also commented, claiming that the goal is to make transactions smarter, more secure, and verifiable without revealing private data.

Besides the new programming language, Hoskinson recently introduced Quinelings, an experimental project that turns programs into self-replicating digital creatures.

Each creature blends executable code with mathematics, making its calculations easy to inspect and reuse. They can tackle tasks such as finding roots or measuring water volume, with results that users can verify themselves. At this stage, Quinelings run only on local machines with simulated effects, and the package has not yet been released on npm.

Midnight’s Progress

Midnight is Cardano’s privacy-focused partner chain, designed to let users keep sensitive data private without sacrificing security or compliance. The network’s mainnet launched in March 2026, with NIGHT serving as its utility token.

Earlier this month, Hoskinson said that he’s working on a concept that only Midnight can bring to the cryptocurrency space that “solves most of the problems.”

“Almost have all of it designed conceptually. It’s the magnum opus of my career,” he added.

Several X users commented on the post, with one asking if Cardano is fully completed. Hoskinson said that after the Leios upgrade, the protocol has everything he wanted:

“Decentralized consensus, governance and development, EUTXO, plutus, infinitely scalable, secure, built with formal methods, multiple independent nodes, recursively self-improving, and millions of people hold ADA.”

Just recently, Hoskinson welcomed Tron to Midnight.

ADA Price Outlook

Cardano’s native cryptocurrency experienced substantial volatility over the past month, hovering between roughly $0.20 and nearly $0.28. It currently trades near $0.226, up 4.6% for the day.

Several hours ago, popular analyst Ali Martinez identified several worrying factors that could signal a potential pullback in the near future. First, he revealed that the total amount of coins held by whales has dropped from around 2.9 billion at the start of October to around 2.75 billion. He also noted that their total holdings have been relatively flat for the past 10 days, and so far these large investors aren’t showing a clear directional bias.

He then moved to ADA’s SuperTrend indicator, which has flipped bearish, and cautioned that this development has preceded a 46% correction in the past. Martinez described $0.21 as a level that could confirm a deeper decline, predicting that a daily close below it could trigger a crash to $0.17.

Shortly after, the analyst noted that ADA’s whale activity has increased, with transactions worth more than $1 million rising from 24 to 51. He said the spike coincided with the asset’s price uptick from $0.21 to nearly $0.23.

The post Important Cardano News and ADA Price Update: October 21 appeared first on CryptoPotato.

The cryptocurrency market has staged an evident resurgence over the past 24 hours, with Zcash (ZEC) once again among the top performers.

Many analysts believe this marks the start of a major new rally, while some whales opened long positions worth millions of dollars.

Explosion to $2,000 Comes Next?

As of this writing, ZEC is worth just over $1,330 (per CoinGecko), up 13% for the day. By comparison, Bitcoin (BTC) has rebounded by 3%, while Ethereum (ETH) has risen by 4% within the same period. The privacy coin’s market capitalization stands at over $22 billion, solidifying its spot among the 10 biggest cryptocurrencies and widening the gap with Hyperliquid (HYPE), which ranks 11th.

The most likely catalyst for ZEC’s latest price increase is the green wave sweeping the sector, but there may be more to it. The X account BSCN revealed that Zcash plans to triple its block production speed, with developers targeting November 5 for the NU7 upgrade.

“The upgrade would cut block times from 75 seconds to 25 seconds. It would also temporarily remove 60% of transaction fees from circulation. The existing mining reward halving schedule would remain unchanged. The activation height still needs to be incorporated into node software before the upgrade can take effect,” the disclosure reads.

Besides gaining 13% on the day, ZEC has also climbed 22% from its local bottom of around $1,050, registered just a few days ago. On that note, X user Lucky said:

“ZEC is bouncing back beautifully. Tell me you bought the dip.”

Token Talk and Nehal also weighed in. The former argued that, to maintain its bullish structure, the price would need a healthy consolidation period instead of printing another candle straight to the upside. For his part, the latter predicted that ZEC is gearing up for an explosion toward $2,000.

The Whales’ Activity

Looknochain revealed that two major investors recently bet heavily on ZEC’s further upside. One opened an $18.6 million long position with 10x leverage, whereas the other entered an $18.9 million long under the same conditions.

Such a development is generally considered bullish because it shows strong conviction from large investors, which can encourage smaller players to jump on the bandwagon and distribute fresh capital into the ecosystem.

Nonetheless, heavy leverage also raises the risk of a long squeeze, and if ZEC suddenly reverses course, cascading liquidations of overly risky positions could intensify selling pressure and accelerate the decline.

The post Zcash (ZEC) Rises to a 9-Day High as Whales Bet on Further Gains: Details appeared first on CryptoPotato.