Jack Dorsey's Block has agreed in principle to pay $764 million to settle a Justice Department investigation into anti-money-laundering controls at Cash App, and the number is worth sitting with for a second. The deal, reached in October and disclosed in the company's quarterly filing on November 3, is bigger than the $566 million profit Block reported for the third quarter. Block made less money in three months than it has now agreed to hand over for compliance failures that go back years. The settlement is not final yet, and Block disputes the government's case, but the money is already set aside on the books and the company has warned the final bill could be higher.

A Fine Bigger Than the Quarter

The deal takes the form of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement. Under it, the Justice Department would hold off on a criminal charge accusing Block of failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program under the Bank Secrecy Act, and if Block meets the terms for three years, the charge gets dismissed. The gross figure is about $964 million, cut to $764 million after credits for earlier regulatory settlements, and Block has accrued the full amount as of September 30. The company says it cannot guarantee a final agreement will be reached on those terms, or at all, and that losses above the amount set aside are reasonably possible. It is the same path Binance took in 2023, when it paid $4.3 billion to settle its own money-laundering case.

It Started With a Short Seller

The investigation goes back to March 2023, when short seller Hindenburg Research published a report alleging that Cash App inflated its user numbers by counting duplicate and fraudulent accounts and that weak identity checks let criminals use the platform for scams and money laundering. Block called the report inaccurate and misleading at the time, and it still disputes the basis and methodology of the government's assessment. The Justice Department and the SEC opened inquiries anyway, and while the SEC closed its side in March of this year without recommending enforcement action, the Justice Department kept going. State regulators moved first, and the list of what they found is long.

New York's financial regulator fined Block $40 million in April 2025 after finding a backlog of suspicious-activity alerts that grew from about 18,000 in 2018 to more than 169,000 by 2020. The same review found a screening system that did not block bitcoin transfers to wallets linked to terrorism financing until exposure passed 10 percent. A multistate settlement added $80 million in January 2025, and 46 states took another $45 million in July over Cash App fraud protections. Those payments account for part of the $200 million credit against the Justice Department figure.

Bitcoin Was the Only Part That Shrank

The settlement landed on top of a quarter that was otherwise strong, which makes the bitcoin numbers stand out even more. Block's total gross profit rose 22 percent to $3.24 billion, with Cash App up 27 percent to $2.07 billion and Square up 14 percent to $1.16 billion. Bitcoin went the other way. Gross profit from the bitcoin business fell 50 percent to $52 million, down from $104 million a year earlier, and bitcoin revenue dropped 11 percent to $1.8 billion.

Block says the drop was its own choice, the result of cutting fees on certain Cash App bitcoin transactions as part of a push to turn bitcoin into something people spend rather than something they trade. The company auto-enabled about 1 million Square merchants for Lightning payments in May, waived processing fees on bitcoin through 2026, and launched a national ad campaign in October built around spending bitcoin instead of holding it. Right now, though, it means bitcoin is the smallest and weakest part of Block's business, even as the company asks regulators to trust it with a bank charter. Block is pursuing an industrial bank charter for a unit it calls Builders Bank, which would offer custody and fiduciary services for bitcoin, and regulators weigh compliance history when they decide those applications. A $764 million settlement is not the kind of history that helps.

So the scoreboard reads like this. Block is a healthy company that just had a strong quarter, and it is also a company that agreed to pay more than that quarter's profit to make a criminal charge go away, for problems regulators say go back years. The bitcoin business is shrinking on purpose, the compliance bill is growing by accident, and the bank charter Block wants will be judged partly on how it handles both. Traders who use Cash App to buy bitcoin do not need to do anything differently today, but they should know what kind of company is holding the other end of the trade.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 

A digital bank used by nearly half of Paraguay just collapsed, and the fallout has already claimed a central bank chief and nearly a president. Ueno Bank, which claimed around 3 million customers in a country of roughly 7 million people, was seized by Paraguay's central bank this week after regulators found its solvency ratio had fallen below half of the legal minimum. Customers woke up locked out of their accounts, unable to withdraw or move their money, and the government had to rush emergency laws through Congress to start paying them back.

All this has served as a motivation behind crypto quickly becoming popular there - as Paraguayans have been paying a premium for USDT and Bitcoin on peer-to-peer markets, just to hold money that no bank can freeze.

The bank half the country used

Ueno grew fast after launching as a digital lender in 2021, and by this week it held around $850 million in public funds, including roughly $380 million from state pension and healthcare programs. The central bank's board voted unanimously on November 2 to put the bank into resolution, and the seizure was announced the next day, after adjustments to Ueno's financial statements pushed its capital below half of what the law requires. The freeze left millions of people, pensioners among them, unable to reach their savings, and it put about 9% of the country's banking system deposits in limbo. Congress passed an emergency law on November 4 requiring the deposit guarantee fund to start repaying customers within five business days, and the first payments are going to people with balances of up to 10 million guaraníes. The law also lets the fund advance up to 40 months of minimum wage to each eligible customer, worth about 121.76 million guaraníes, or close to $19,800.

The president tried to quit. Congress said no.

President Santiago Peña announced his resignation on November 5, saying he wanted to protect national stability, but lawmakers refused to accept it. The Chamber of Deputies voted 78 to 0 to impeach him instead, and the Senate summoned him to defend himself the next day, because accepting his resignation would hand him a lifetime Senate seat and the legal immunity that comes with it. Peña had previously invested in Grupo Vázquez, the business group that controls Ueno, and lawmakers have accused him of a conflict of interest over the bank, though he denies wrongdoing and says he sold his stake in March 2025. The attorney general has ordered three criminal investigations into the collapse, prosecutors have charged 27 people connected to the bank with breach of trust and financial fraud, and eight executives were detained on November 3. The head of the central bank, Carlos Carvallo, resigned the same day the seizure was announced.

Paraguayans are paying extra for crypto

With bank accounts frozen and the guaraní sliding, people in Paraguay started paying more than the going rate for digital dollars. The retail price of a US dollar rose from 5,900 guaraníes on October 30 to 6,500 by November 5, a jump of about 10%, and on peer-to-peer markets the median of the ten best offers for USDT stood near 6,399 guaraníes, roughly 4% above the central bank's reference rate. One seller on Bybit even asked 6,942 guaraníes per USDT, about 13% above the official reference, though that was a single asking price rather than the market rate. Bitcoin showed the same pattern, with peer-to-peer buyers paying around 498 million guaraníes, about $76,983, or roughly 1.7% above the international price of $75,716 on November 6. Searches for Bitcoin in Paraguay started climbing on October 23 and peaked on October 30, days before the seizure was announced. Crypto leaders were quick to make the case, with Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer saying crypto assets like Bitcoin need no trust in third parties, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov saying Bitcoin matters now more than ever.

This is the story Bitcoin was built for. Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis and stamped the genesis block with a newspaper headline about banks needing a second bailout. Eighteen years later, three million people in Paraguay learned the same lesson the hard way: money in a bank is only yours until the bank says it is not. The premiums Paraguayans are paying for USDT and Bitcoin are the price of money nobody can lock away, and right now that price looks cheap to them.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 

Two of the biggest names in bitcoin mining just told investors they are done mining bitcoin. IREN and Core Scientific both said this week that they expect to wind down their mining operations by December 31, and from January they will be AI data center companies instead. This is not a side project or a slow pivot. Mining now brings in less than a tenth of the money at either company, while renting out power and floor space to AI customers brings in the rest. The machines that used to chase bitcoin blocks are being pulled out to make room for GPUs, and two companies that helped define the mining industry are walking away from it on purpose.

The numbers made the decision for them

Core Scientific was once one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world, and its third-quarter results show how little of that business is left. Mining brought in just $17.5 million of the company's $232.9 million in quarterly revenue, about 7.5 percent, while colocation services brought in $215.4 million. Self-mining revenue fell to $12.3 million from $57.4 million a year earlier, and the company had nearly half as many miners running at the end of September as it did at the end of 2025. Chief financial officer Jim Nygaard told investors on Thursday's earnings call that the company expects to complete the wind-down during the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a pure-play, high-density colocation provider. The pivot started in 2024 with hosting deals for CoreWeave, and Core Scientific now counts CoreWeave and AMD as customers under agreements covering roughly 1.1 gigawatts of capacity. The company also took $266.5 million in mining asset impairments in the first quarter of this year, a sign of how fast the old equipment lost value once the strategy changed.

IREN's numbers tell the same story from the other side of the world. The Australian-founded company reported $200 million in AI cloud revenue for the quarter, up 182 percent from the previous quarter and nearly 88 percent of its $228 million in total revenue. Mining revenue fell 58 percent to $28 million over the same period. IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion cloud contract with Microsoft in November 2025 and has built up a $20.3 billion backlog of AI work, and it aims to have the switch substantially complete by December 31, with only limited mining continuing into 2027. The company pushed back its target for reaching $4 billion in annual AI revenue from late 2026 to January 2027, and it still needs to raise about $6 billion of the $15 billion in spending planned through the end of fiscal 2027. Even so, the direction is clear, and the mining rigs are not coming back.

The AI trade giveth and taketh away

There is a twist in the timing that the two companies will not enjoy. Their shares fell hard on Thursday, IREN by about 17 percent and Core Scientific by about 11 percent, as part of the same AI stock selloff that dragged bitcoin below $76,000. The fear driving that selloff is that the AI data center boom may be slowing, which is exactly the business these two companies are betting their futures on. TeraWulf, another miner turned AI host, reported this week that its bitcoin mining revenue fell 69 percent while its AI leasing income surged, and Riot Platforms signed a $28 billion lease with Anthropic and is selling its mined bitcoin to pay for the build. Across the industry, public miners wrote down about $1.1 billion in asset value in the first half of the year as they restructured toward AI. The whole sector is making the same bet at the same time, and Thursday showed what happens to that bet when Wall Street gets nervous about AI spending.

What it means for bitcoin

For bitcoin itself, the departures are less dramatic than they sound. Mining is spread across many operators around the world, and the network keeps running no matter which companies decide to stop. What changes is the shape of the industry around it, because the public miners were the ones with cheap power, big facilities, and access to capital markets. Those assets are now being pointed at AI, and the companies that remain pure miners will be smaller and more specialized. The irony is hard to miss. Bitcoin miners spent years arguing that their power contracts and data centers were valuable in their own right, and they were right. The value just turned out to be bigger for training AI models than for mining bitcoin, and the market is now pricing them on that basis. Anyone holding shares in a mining company should check what business they actually own today, because the name on the ticker may no longer describe the work being done.

Two giants of bitcoin mining are quitting by New Year, not because mining failed but because AI pays several times more for the same power and the same buildings. The network will be fine, and the miners that stay will keep mining. The bigger story is that the AI boom has now swallowed the industry that grew up around bitcoin, and the companies that made the switch first are the ones that will live or die on whether the AI buildout keeps going.

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Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 The list of companies that want nothing to do with OKXICE's tokenized stock platform hit 67 this week, and two of the biggest names in tech just joined it. Apple and Meta both filed formal objections to having their shares traded as tokens on the new venue, a joint project from crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. The count stood at 50 when we last covered this story on Monday, and it has grown by 17 in four days. Of the 62 companies OKXICE originally picked for its lineup, 56 have now objected, which is about 90 percent of the whole list. The only names left standing are six companies that already live and breathe crypto.

The week the no’s piled up

The objections arrived in waves all week. A notice dated November 2 pushed the total to 56, adding Tesla, Amazon and Netflix to the list of objectors. The next day brought Apple, Home Depot and GE Vernova, taking the count to 59. Thursday added Nebius, Boeing and ServiceNow, and Friday finished the week with five more: Meta, Palantir, S&P Global, KLA and Super Micro Computer. Eleven of the 67 objectors were never on OKXICE's original list at all, which means companies are objecting before they are even asked, just to make sure their shares stay off the platform. The deadline for the companies named in the October 4 notice passed this week, and venues have up to five business days to publish objections, so the public list can lag behind the decisions companies have already made.

Why a simple objection is enough

The objections work because of the SEC's Innovation Exemption, issued on September 17. Under that order, a qualifying platform can trade tokenized stocks without registering as a traditional exchange, but it has to notify each company first and give it 30 calendar days to object in writing. A company that objects in time keeps its shares off that venue, and OKXICE has to leave those securities out of its lineup. The block applies only to OKXICE and only to tokens issued by an unaffiliated third party, so it does not stop a company from tokenizing its own shares or working with a different platform. OKXICE will not issue the tokenized securities or hold customer assets itself, and it plans to offer round-the-clock trading through permissioned liquidity pools on XLayer, OKX's own blockchain, with stablecoins used for settlement.

What is left on the menu

That leaves six names without a disclosed objection, and every one of them is a crypto company: Strategy, Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, Securitize and BitGo. Securitize and BitGo had already said they did not plan to object, and none of the six has given any sign of changing its mind. It is worth remembering that not objecting is not the same as endorsing the project, and there is no guarantee any of the six will actually be trading when the venue opens. The bigger problem for OKXICE is what the lineup now looks like. The whole pitch was the chance to trade shares of famous companies around the clock on a blockchain, and the famous companies have almost all walked away. Demand for tokenized stocks elsewhere has been thin too: a Dune report found the median decentralized trading pool for tokenized equities held just $92 as of August 31. A venue that launches with only crypto stocks on it is a very different product from the one OKXICE announced, and it is not clear who it is for.

Four days ago this looked like a setback with 50 objections. Now it looks like a rout, with 90 percent of the original lineup gone and the two biggest tech companies in the world among the latest to say no. Tokenized stocks are still coming, and the SEC has made room for them, but the companies whose shares traders actually want are not rushing to join in. OKXICE can still launch with the names that remain, yet the lineup will look nothing like the one it first promised, and the market will decide whether a tokenized stock exchange that only lists crypto companies is worth trading on at all.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Zcash had a very good day yesterday. The privacy coin jumped close to 12 percent to about $1,318, with more than $1.2 billion changing hands in a single day, and it muscled its way back into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market value. Unfortunately those were short lived and the market had reversed them by the following day. 

But what will hold are the legitimate improvements Zcash devs have been working on, as they are about to switch on its biggest network upgrade in years, an upgrade called NU7, and traders spent the day positioning for it. The upgrade is expected to activate around Thursday, November 5, once the chain reaches block 3,543,405, and it will make Zcash blocks three times faster.

Three Times Faster, Same 21 Million

The headline change in NU7 is speed. Under a change known as ZIP 218, the target time between blocks falls from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, which means a first confirmation arrives in about a third of the time it used to take. An exchange that waits for three confirmations before crediting a deposit would see the wait drop from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, assuming it keeps the same requirement. Faster blocks do not mean more new ZEC flooding the market, because the reward paid out per block falls by a factor of three at the same time, so daily issuance stays the same and the 21 million supply cap and the four-year halving schedule do not change. The upgrade also introduces a Network Sustainability Mechanism that puts 60 percent of transaction fees into a reserve for future mining rewards while miners keep the other 40 percent, with payouts from that reserve not starting until around February 2031. Old version 4 transactions stop working at activation, which means any ZEC still sitting in the original Sprout pool becomes unspendable, so anyone holding coins there needed to move them before the switch flipped.

Privacy Is Back in the Spotlight

Zcash has had a remarkable year even before this week, with the token up roughly 170 percent since January, and part of that run comes from privacy moving back to the center of the conversation. A spot Zcash exchange-traded fund from Grayscale started trading in August, which gave regular investors a simple way to buy exposure without touching a wallet or an exchange. The election added another layer to the story, because a policy memo posted on the Zcash forum this week warned that financial privacy and illicit finance could face greater scrutiny once the incoming Democratic majorities take office in January. Some traders read that as a reason to own the one major coin built around encrypted payments that hide the sender, the recipient and the amount, while others simply saw a coin with a dated catalyst and a chart pointing up. Either way, the move was not just a rising tide lifting every boat, because ZEC bounced even while several other large tokens sat flat or lower, which suggests traders were buying Zcash for Zcash reasons.

What to Watch Next

The first test comes the moment NU7 activates, because upgrades that look great on paper have a habit of producing surprises when real software meets a live network, and node operators were told to install compatible software ahead of time. The next test is whether the price holds above the recent highs, because ZEC is still about 60 percent below its all-time high of $3,191.93 even after this week's run, and traders are watching the $1,350 area where the rally stalled on Wednesday. There is also unfinished business inside the community, because Zcash Community Grants withdrew a proposal this week that would have moved 98,000 ZEC toward mining rewards, and a rival plan backed by two community groups would send future funding into a development and legal-defense lockbox instead. None of that changes what NU7 does on day one, but it will shape how the network pays for its own future once the upgrade is behind it.

Zcash spent years as the coin everyone respected and few people traded, and this week it reminded the market why it still matters. The upgrade makes the network faster without printing a single extra coin, the privacy story is only getting louder, and the token is back in the top 10 after a 170 percent run this year. If NU7 flips on cleanly and the price holds its gains, the next question will not be whether privacy coins are back, but how far this one can run.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 The group behind the biggest crypto heist in history is not done, and it is getting better at its job. The FBI blames North Korea's TraderTraitor unit for the $6.3 billion theft from Binance on October 29, and a new report from Bloomberg says the group is now using artificial intelligence to pick its targets. The unit may have only around a dozen members, according to experts cited in the report, but it hunts what cybersecurity researchers call "big game": large crypto companies with deep wallets, not individual investors. Its previous record was the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in 2025, and the Binance job smashed that record in about 20 minutes.

TraderTraitor does not break in through the front door. It studies a target company, learns how its systems and payment flows work, and then goes after the people who hold the keys. The group is known for approaching employees with access to sensitive systems and luring them with lucrative fake job offers, a tactic that ends with a compromised laptop or a clicked link. Binance has said its own initial investigation found a compromised laptop belonging to an engineer as the point of breach. Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator at TRM Labs, told Bloomberg that novel techniques used by the group suggest it is making ample use of AI in its recent hacks, and Park Seong-su, a threat researcher at Zscaler, said the new tools have lowered the barriers to carrying out advanced operations while speeding them up tremendously. Carlsen added a detail worth remembering: for all the talk of AI, the group's bread and butter is still the human part.

The scale of the operation is hard to overstate - North Korea is believed to be responsible for 89 percent of reported crypto hack losses in 2026

That's according to Chainalysis figures cited by Bloomberg, and the $6.36 billion taken from Binance is worth nearly 20 percent of North Korea's estimated annual economic output. United Nations experts said in 2024 that the country's cyber thefts and illicit financial activity could be funding about 40 percent of its banned weapons programs. Crypto has now overtaken the old revenue streams. Where Pyongyang once smuggled cigarettes and forged dollar bills, its hackers now bring in billions in pure profit from a single successful heist, and the money is increasingly flowing into conventional military spending as well, from new naval vessels to drone technology.

But the full story may be more complicated, because while Bloomberg's sources say AI is helping TraderTraitor find and compromise its targets, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic says it has found no evidence that AI directed the laundering of the stolen Binance funds. The laundering was automated, with about 20 automated services moving the money through decentralized exchanges, lending protocols and cross-chain bridges in less than three days, but Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said the pattern fits scripts written and supervised by people, not an AI agent making its own decisions. The numbers behind the cleanup are still staggering. In under four days the hackers used about 12,000 wallets across 11 blockchains, roughly one new wallet every 25 seconds, and more than 40,000 transactions. About $2.85 billion, or 44 percent of the stolen funds, has been frozen or seized, while the hackers still control about $3.28 billion spread across more than 950 wallets. Elliptic also found about $16 million sent to addresses holding proceeds from September's Bitget exploit, which suggests the same laundering operation is handling funds from more than one attack.

For anyone holding crypto on an exchange, the lesson is uncomfortably simple. Your money is only as safe as the least careful employee with access to the systems that move it, and the people trying to find that employee now have AI helping them search. Exchanges are beefing up security around staff with key access, but TraderTraitor has already shown it can get past the defenses of the biggest exchange in the world. Self-custody is not a slogan here, it is the one defense that does not depend on a stranger's laptop staying clean.

The AI angle is real, but it is worth keeping it in proportion. The evidence so far says AI helped the hackers choose and reach their target, while the laundering that followed looks like old-fashioned automation run by human hands. That distinction matters less than it sounds, because either way the group is faster, richer and harder to stop than it was a year ago, and it has now shown it can take $6.3 billion from the largest exchange on earth in less time than a lunch break. The next target is probably already being picked.

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Author: Ren Nakamura, Asia Newsroom, GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Two months ago, a bug in the software behind the Liquid Network let an attacker mint about 4,000 LBTC tokens backed by nothing at all, then swap them for real bitcoin worth roughly $320 million. Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain run by a federation of companies led by Blockstream, and it exists to move bitcoin faster and more privately than the main chain allows. The attack drained the federation wallet from about 4,205 bitcoin down to 197, leaving the tokens that traders and exchanges rely on backed by almost nothing. On Monday, the Liquid Federation announced the hole is closed and every LBTC is backed one-to-one again, which is good news for anyone holding the token. The part that deserves a closer look is how the hole got closed, because the attacker never gave all the money back.

The white hat who kept $47 million

The attacker called themselves a white hat and left a message in a Bitcoin transaction saying exactly that, then returned about 3,400 bitcoin the day after the attack, once Blockstream said the bridge nodes had been patched. What stayed behind was roughly 600 bitcoin, worth about $47 million at current prices, and the attacker wanted a 10 percent bug bounty in exchange for handing it over. Blockstream said no, and said it plainly: taking assets without authorization and refusing to return them is a crime, not responsible disclosure, and this is theft, not white-hat behavior. The company refused to pay a ransom for the remaining coins, and the money stayed gone. That refusal is the reason the federation had to find about 600 bitcoin somewhere else to make LBTC whole again.

Blockstream wrote the check

The money came from Blockstream itself, according to Samson Mow, a Liquid Federation board member, who identified the company as the source of the deposits that closed the gap. The deposits arrived in pieces, with about 50 bitcoin landing on October 28, then 300 bitcoin and a final 250 bitcoin on November 2, and the federation announced full backing the same day. Adam Back, the chief executive of Blockstream, posted a screenshot of the network dashboard showing assets matching liabilities at 100 percent, with a reserve deficit of exactly zero. SideSwap, one of the federation members, reported about 4,270 bitcoin in reserve against the same amount of LBTC on November 3. The bug itself was fixed quickly, with a patched version of the Elements software released on September 9, three days after the exploit, and Blockstream said no private keys were lost and none of the network operators were hacked.

What is still not back to normal

Full backing does not mean everything is back to the way it was, because direct withdrawals from the federation are still restricted, and users have had to swap bitcoin and LBTC through participating providers for weeks instead of using the network's own peg-out path. The federation has not said when those restrictions will lift, and the announcement this week did not address it either. There is also the question of who exactly paid for what, since the blockchain shows the deposits arriving but does not name the people behind them, and only Mow has pointed at Blockstream in public. For LBTC holders, the practical result is the same either way: the token is backed again, and the sidechain survived an attack that took about 95 percent of its reserves in a single day. For everyone else, the story is a reminder that the words white hat and hacker can describe the same person on the same day, and the difference between a rescue and a robbery can come down to how much money comes back.

Liquid is whole again, and that matters, because a sidechain that loses its backing and never gets it back is finished. Blockstream paid roughly $47 million to make that happen, refused to call a thief a white hat, and got its network back to full backing in about two months. The lesson for anyone holding tokens on a sidechain or a bridge is simple enough: the peg is only as strong as the people standing behind it, and this time the people behind it paid up. The attacker, meanwhile, is still holding about 600 bitcoin, and nobody knows who they are.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Tuesday night changed the math for crypto in Washington. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, according to projections from CBS, NBC, CNBC and the Associated Press, and the result puts the crypto industry's most important piece of unfinished legislation on a countdown clock. The CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would finally settle which regulator oversees which tokens, now has until January 3 to get through the current Congress, or it dies and has to start over from scratch in a Congress run by the other party. Bitcoin did what it usually does when Washington throws it a curveball: it fell first and asked questions later, dropping to about $75,600 overnight before climbing back above $78,000 by morning.

The bill that was already stuck

The CLARITY Act passed the House back in July 2025 by 294 votes to 134, with 78 Democrats voting for it, and then it hit a wall in the Senate. On September 15, the Senate voted 49 to 50 on a procedural motion just to open debate, 11 votes short of the 60 needed to move forward, and every one of the 49 yes votes came from a Republican. The bill stalled on two issues that had little to do with the technology itself: ethics rules about federal officials holding crypto, and language about stablecoin yield that regional banks said would drain their deposits. Senator Mark Warner said Congress could not pass the bill while the president was allowed to profit from crypto personally, and Senator Elizabeth Warren said the ethics language could not be enforced against him. Senator Thom Tillis filed a motion to reconsider after the vote, which keeps a revote possible during the lame-duck session, but it would still need 11 more yes votes than the bill got in September.

The new bosses in town

The election also reshuffles who runs the committees that matter most to crypto. Warren is in line to chair the Senate Banking Committee, and Maxine Waters is in line to chair the House Financial Services Committee, which would handle any new version of the bill. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown defeated Republican Senator Jon Husted, who had voted for the CLARITY Act in September, and the crypto industry's main political action committee, Fairshake, had committed $30 million against Brown. Brown could also end up chairing the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Not every result was bad news for the industry: in Texas, James Talarico won his Senate race after campaigning for crypto rules aimed at curbing fraud while allowing innovation. TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg, who follows Washington for Wall Street, offered the gloomiest read of the night, saying a Democratic sweep could end the bill's chances for two years and predicting investigations into President Donald Trump's crypto ties. Senator Angela Alsobrooks, one of the bill's negotiators, still says a deal is possible before January, and Warren has said she favors bipartisan crypto legislation, just not the version senators saw in September.

What does not change on Wednesday

For all the drama, the election does not change a single rule overnight. Stablecoins remain governed by the GENIUS Act, which is already law, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC can keep writing rules without any new legislation from Congress. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt has said regulators would not wait around for the lame-duck session. The market reaction told the same story: Bitcoin slid from about $77,300 late Tuesday to a low near $75,600 in the early hours of Wednesday, then recovered past $78,000 by the morning, with ether up about 2 percent and DeFi tokens leading the rebound. About $469 million in leveraged positions were liquidated over 24 hours, according to Coinglass, a sign traders were guessing at headlines rather than trading on facts. Nothing in the results changes the value of a single token, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

The real deadline is January 3, when the new Congress convenes and every unfinished bill, including the CLARITY Act, has to be reintroduced from the beginning. That gives the current Congress a lame-duck session of about two months to find 11 more Senate votes for a bill that could not find them in September, under a Democratic majority that will write the next version on its own terms if this one fails. The industry spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars getting this bill to the edge of the finish line, and it now has 60 days to close the deal or start over with a very different set of people holding the pen.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Bitcoin spent Tuesday night falling and Wednesday getting even. The largest cryptocurrency dropped to about $75,600 in the early hours of Wednesday as midterm election results showed Democrats winning control of both chambers of Congress, and by the early evening it had climbed all the way back above $80,000, briefly topping $81,000 along the way. The swing turned one of the ugliest nights of the year into one of the sharpest reversals, and the traders who bet against it paid for most of it. More than $300 million in bitcoin short positions were liquidated over 24 hours, according to CoinGlass data cited by CoinMarketCap, with about $222 million of that bought back within a single hour as the price ripped higher. Ethereum did even better, jumping more than 6 percent to $2,421, a two-week high, while Solana added about 2 percent to just under $95.

The shorts got squeezed

A short seller borrows bitcoin and sells it, planning to buy it back cheaper later and pocket the difference. That plan works until the price moves the other way, and then the exchange closes the position for them by buying bitcoin back at the market price. That forced buying feeds the rally, which forces more shorts to close. CoinGlass data show about $222 million in bitcoin short positions were closed within the hour to about 10:25 a.m. ET, and nearly all of the bitcoin liquidations in that hour were shorts getting wiped out. Glassnode found traders had piled into shorts all week as the price fell, with the largest cluster of forced buying sitting near $87,000, close to bitcoin's September high.

Options traders saw it coming before the spot market did. On election day, about $660 million in bitcoin options blocks changed hands on Paradigm, more than double the day before, and roughly $420 million of that was traders buying call options, which pay off when the price rises, against only about $105 million in puts sold. Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, told CoinDesk before the break that bitcoin looked oversold on momentum indicators and could climb toward $82,000, and by the evening the price was already most of the way there. Open interest in bitcoin futures also rose through the day, which Glassnode reads as traders opening fresh longs rather than just closing old shorts. The squeeze was only part of the story, because new money was also deciding the dip was worth buying.

Wall Street did the heavy lifting

The rebound gathered pace once US markets opened, with megacap tech stocks leading an early rally while Treasury yields and oil prices fell, and crypto rode the same wave of relief. Traders had priced in a Democratic win for weeks: Polymarket had the odds of a Democratic sweep above 75 percent for a while, according to Nicolas Quatravaux, head of EMEA at crypto derivatives network Paradigm. "The result itself wasn't really a surprise," he told CoinDesk, adding that overnight was less about the outcome and more about the uncertainty going away. Dick Lo of TDX Strategies said the same: bitcoin dropped at first on the sweep, then recovered once a clear outcome removed the uncertainty. Once the market knew the result, it stopped worrying and started buying.

The buyers who matter most have not shown up yet

For all the fireworks, there are reasons to keep the excitement in check. The Coinbase Premium, a gauge of US demand for bitcoin, stayed below zero through Wednesday's jump, which means American buyers were not the ones driving the move. Spot bitcoin ETFs lost more than $500 million over the two trading sessions through Tuesday, according to Farside data, and total outflows have now passed $1 billion over the recent stretch. Giottus chief executive Vikram Subburaj told CoinDesk that if bitcoin holds above $78,000 while ETF redemptions continue, it would show buyers elsewhere are absorbing the supply. Until ETF flows turn positive, the rally is running on derivatives and momentum rather than the steady spot buying that sustains a real trend.

Glassnode puts support between $73,000 and $76,000, where newer buyers' average cost, the 200-day average and a block of long liquidations all meet, and the firm says holding that zone would mark a healthy reset inside the uptrend that started in August. A break below $73,000 would point to a longer consolidation instead. The next test comes Friday, when the US jobs report lands and traders get fresh data on the economy and interest rates. For now, the scoreboard is simple: bitcoin fell below $76,000, climbed back above $80,000, and the shorts lost about $300 million in a day.

Bitcoin went from below $76,000 to above $80,000 in about a day, and the traders who bet against it paid roughly $300 million for the privilege. The squeeze can keep feeding itself if the price keeps climbing toward the shorts waiting near $87,000, but the rally will need real buyers to last, and so far the US spot market and the ETFs have stayed on the sidelines. Friday's jobs report gets the next say, and until the flows turn, this is a sharp bounce inside a market that is still more than a third below its highs, not a victory lap.

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Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

The FBI has asked the people who run THORChain to stop North Korea's hackers from cashing out, and the answer so far has been no. The agency, along with the Secret Service and IRS Criminal Investigation, published a list of 608 Ethereum addresses, 19 Bitcoin addresses and one Solana address tied to the $6.3 billion Binance theft and asked THORChain node operators, exchanges and DeFi services to refuse transactions connected to them. THORChain is the cross-chain swap protocol that moved a large share of the $1.5 billion Bybit haul in 2025, and the hackers are using it again. About $48 million in stolen funds has already passed through its swaps, according to on-chain tracking, and the token that powers the network is paying the price.

THORChain is not a company with a compliance department, and that is exactly the problem. It is around 100 nodes run by roughly 50 people, and blocking an address would take a vote of more than a third of them. Co-founder Chad Barraford said on X that node operators have "zero information that isn't already public" and made no pledge to block anything. Co-founder JP Thor went further, writing that if node operators took the protocol offline or started filtering transactions because a government asked them to, "the experiment is over." His argument is that THORChain is a neutral settlement layer, and once it stops being neutral for one group it stops being decentralized at all. It is a principled stand, and it is also a stand taken while the network is moving money for the most sanctioned regime on earth.

The market is not waiting for the philosophy debate to settle. RUNE fell about 20 percent over the past day and briefly traded below $0.50, making it the biggest loser in the CoinDesk 100. The selling is not hard to understand. Traders see a protocol caught between two bad outcomes: cooperate with the FBI and give up the permissionless pitch that makes THORChain what it is, or refuse and risk becoming the network that helped a sanctioned regime launder billions. The stakes are not theoretical. Security researcher Taylor Monahan warned node operators on X that the FBI request is a warning shot and that claiming technical inability may not shield them from legal risk, pointing to the Tornado Cash case as the precedent. The FBI has already shown it is willing to go after the people behind supposedly unstoppable code.

Meanwhile the money keeps moving. The hackers have been converting stolen Solana into Bitcoin through the swap service Relay, moving about 486,970 SOL worth roughly $46.4 million, according to blockchain investigators. Other stolen funds reached the centralized exchange Gate, which said it froze two linked accounts. THORChain itself briefly halted swaps after a block reorganization bug, and that accidental pause slowed the hackers down more than any policy decision has so far. As of Sunday afternoon, trading from the Tron chain remained halted, which left a chunk of the loot stuck in place while the debate about what to do next went on without it.

This is the fight crypto has been circling for years, and it finally has a name, a dollar figure and a deadline. THORChain's founders are betting that neutrality is the whole point of the protocol and that giving it up once means giving it up for good. The FBI is betting that the people running the nodes will decide that helping North Korea move $6.3 billion is not the hill to die on. RUNE holders are caught in the middle, watching a token fall while its operators argue about what decentralization is actually for. Whichever side wins, the answer will shape how every decentralized protocol deals with the next hack, and there will be a next hack.

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Author: Dorian Fenwick, Silicon Valley Newsroom, GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Bitcoin spent Sunday trading just above $78,000, which would have been a strange sight after the week it just had.

United States spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange traded funds lost a combined $798.9 million on Friday, October 30, in a single session that wiped out four days of buying. Bitcoin was at $78,052.39 on Coinbase at about 09:18 UTC on November 1, up 0.95 percent over the rolling 24 hour window, while Ether was at $2,270.70, up 1.27 percent. Those are spot prices from a weekend when the ETF market was closed, so the two sets of numbers cover different windows. The funds were selling hard on Friday and the coins were still standing on Sunday, and that gap is the part worth paying attention to.

Friday wiped out a week of buying

Farside Investors put net outflows from United States spot Bitcoin ETFs at $643.2 million on October 30, the largest daily withdrawal since June. That came after $440.8 million in net inflows across the four sessions from October 26 to October 29, so one Friday session took out all of that and left the week with a net outflow of $202.4 million. BlackRock's IBIT accounted for $233.7 million of the Friday exit, Fidelity's FBTC lost $201 million and ARK 21Shares' ARKB lost $129.5 million. Those three funds accounted for $564.2 million, or about 87.7 percent, of the day's total, which means this was not a broad panic across every product. It was concentrated selling in the biggest names, on the last trading day of a month that had already been rough for crypto.

Ether has had a worse month than Bitcoin

Ether funds did not get a break at any point last week. They lost $155.7 million on Friday, which took their weekly total for October 26 to October 30 to $431.4 million, and every one of those five sessions was negative. October as a whole added up to about $1.61 billion in net outflows from Ether ETFs, and Glassnode put the run at 23 consecutive trading days of net outflows through October 30. That is the longest losing streak since these funds launched in July 2024. BlackRock's ETHA led Friday with $76.6 million out, followed by $34.1 million from Grayscale's Ethereum Mini Trust and $21.5 million from its ETHE product. That steady drain lines up with the price, because Ether has fallen from near $2,700 in late September to about $2,300. Bitcoin also closed October down 7.3 percent at $77,424, its weakest October in at least ten years.

Why the price did not follow the money out

It is tempting to read Friday as a verdict on Bitcoin itself, but the flow data does not prove why investors redeemed their shares. The selling came a day after the Binance hack on October 29, when about $6.3 billion was taken from the exchange, and nerves were already high across the market. Some of that money may have been investors cutting risk after a shock, and some may have been month end rebalancing. What the data does show is that the selling was real and it was large, and it still did not push Bitcoin below $77,000 on Sunday. United States spot Bitcoin ETFs have taken in more than $57 billion in net inflows since they launched in January 2024. IBIT alone finished October with $932.1 million in net inflows even after its $233.7 million Friday loss, while its smaller rivals lost about $1.45 billion between them in October.

The next test comes on Monday, when ETF trading opens again and the first November flows print. If the outflows continue into a second week, the story changes from a bad Friday to a shift in how big investors are treating crypto after a rough October. If the money comes back, Friday will look more like a sharp reaction to a bad week than the start of a longer retreat. Either way, the weekend gave traders a useful piece of information. A $643.2 million exit from Bitcoin ETFs and a $155.7 million exit from Ether ETFs was enough to erase a week of inflows in a day, and it was not enough to break Bitcoin's hold above $78,000. That does not mean the selling is over, and it does not mean the bottom is in. It means the market absorbed a very large institutional sale and kept trading, and for now that is the most important fact in the room.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Binance is promising to absorb a roughly $6.3 billion hack, but customers are still waiting for the withdrawal button to work again.

The attack struck on October 29, and the exchange's October 30 updates describe an investigation that has expanded beyond an initially suspected compromised laptop. Binance says it has reserved more than $6.34 billion of company funds to cover the stolen assets. About $5 billion is already held in the affected tokens, with purchases of the remainder underway. In his latest video transcript, co-CEO Richard Teng said the rebuilt withdrawal service would reopen only after rigorous testing. He said the Sunday deadline remained on track, while expressing hope that users could withdraw sooner.

That is a target, not a reopening announcement. Binance's latest written service notices say deposits are operating normally while withdrawals remain paused. Teng also committed to a full Proof of Reserves report by Monday, November 2, with an initial view hoped for earlier. The Sunday he referred to is November 1. Those dates give customers concrete milestones against which to judge the company's assurances, rather than another open-ended promise that everything is fine. A visible account balance and an operational withdrawal service remain different things.

Billions reserved, billions frozen - different things

The money Binance says it has reserved is separate from approximately $3 billion in assets it says partners have frozen. Its earlier funding update explicitly excluded frozen or protected assets from the $6.34 billion commitment. Those assets still require recovery and verification. Binance says it is buying the missing token quantities through markets and over-the-counter trades, and warns that limited liquidity and settlement times can slow that work. Setting aside a dollar amount therefore does not mean every replacement token has already arrived. The company has pledged to cover the losses, but its promised reserve disclosure is still ahead.

Independent Elliptic analysis, updated at 13:10 UTC on October 30, estimated the theft at $6.43 billion and verified $2.84 billion frozen onchain. That is its own snapshot, rather than Binance's final accounting. Elliptic calls this the largest crypto theft on record, far exceeding the roughly $1.46 billion Bybit theft last year. Most of the frozen value is in stablecoins whose issuers can restrict transfers. Bitcoin and native ether have no issuer with that same freeze switch, leaving investigators dependent on tracing and intervention when funds reach services. Freezing a token also does not by itself put it back in Binance's wallet.

More than a laptop, and an attribution still under scrutiny

The technical explanation is still developing. Binance first described a possibly compromised DevOps engineer's laptop and said it had found no evidence of wallet private-key leakage. It subsequently disclosed additional breach points, without laying out the complete attack path. TRM Labs' investigation says the Ethereum portion involved EIP-7702, a feature that lets a wallet delegate execution to smart-contract code. The attacker used signed authorizations to install malicious behavior on a hot wallet, while wallets on other chains sent ordinary signed transfers. TRM interprets that wider pattern as evidence of compromised signing infrastructure. Teng's newer account says the delegation bypassed normal approval controls and that attackers destroyed tooling and traces; those remain the company's findings pending a full technical report.

TRM attributes the attack to North Korea's TraderTraitor group with high confidence, while Elliptic considers North Korean involvement likely. Elliptic also cautions that a shared laundering address does not prove the same hackers carried out separate thefts. Its report says no government or law-enforcement agency has confirmed attribution. For customers, the immediate questions are whether withdrawals actually reopen, whether the promised reserves match affected assets, and what the final investigation establishes about the failed controls. Teng says the review now covers devices, cloud infrastructure, key management and signing systems across the company. The next meaningful update is evidence that those repairs and replacement purchases are complete, not simply another repetition of the compensation pledge.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

The company behind the New York Stock Exchange wants to bring Hyperliquid-based perpetual futures into a regulated U.S. market.

Intercontinental Exchange announced its agreement with Trade[XYZ] on October 29. ICE is taking a minority stake in the company and would operate its regulated markets. The planned venue targets retail traders seeking exposure around the clock. Regulatory approvals still stand between the announcement and a product Americans can actually use.

The division of work matters. Hyperliquid supplies the underlying technology, while Trade[XYZ] designs and implements markets, according to The Block's reporting on the agreement. ICE supplies the regulated exchange and clearing structure. Contracts are intended to reference assets including cryptocurrencies, equities, commodities and foreign exchange. This would put an established exchange operator around technology that has attracted traders to onchain derivatives, rather than make every existing Hyperliquid market available in America overnight.

A route through brokers, with identity checks

ICE's announcement describes access through participating futures commission merchants after approval. Those are the intermediaries that handle customer futures accounts. Customers would undergo identity and anti-money-laundering checks. Distribution is also expected through ICE's joint venture with OKX, which needs its own approvals. The companies must obtain permission for the proposed leveraged trading as well, so the announcement does not establish what borrowing limits or account conditions customers will eventually face.

Perpetual futures have no scheduled expiry date. As Decrypt reported, Trade[XYZ] already offers eligible users outside the United States continuous trading in contracts referencing stocks, indices, commodities and currencies. The proposed American venue would bring that style of exposure into a different legal and operating structure. A contract referencing a share is still a derivative, rather than direct ownership of that share. Investors evaluating a future offering will need its actual contract terms, rather than assume it works like buying stock in a brokerage account.

The agreement is real; access is still ahead

HYPE rose sharply after the news, with both Decrypt and The Block reporting double-digit percentage gains during the morning. Those snapshots are a market reaction, not evidence that approval has been granted. ICE says the retail business would sit separately from its institutional futures and clearing operations. Its existing participation is more than 99% institutional, according to the company. The planned separation reflects how different a continuously traded retail product can be from markets used by commercial hedgers over longer periods.

The announcement does not give a launch date. It also leaves the eventual contract menu and customer terms for later disclosures. Those details will determine how much the proposed venue changes practical access to these markets. The next meaningful milestones are regulatory decisions and concrete information from participating brokers. Until then, the agreement shows a major exchange operator committing to the business, while the ability to trade through it remains a future step.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

CoinDCX has put a nearly $16 million price tag on a wallet incident its CEO initially dismissed as a false alarm.

The Indian exchange confirmed the loss in an October 25 update. It says the missing 15.99 million USDT came from retired infrastructure. The company says it has absorbed the cost and customer balances remain unaffected. Those assurances come from CoinDCX, rather than an independent assessment of its reserves.

The public reversal is a central part of the story. According to The Block, CEO Sumit Gupta initially rejected breach reports before the exchange acknowledged losses. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT challenged that account. The publication connects the affected infrastructure to CoinDCX's roughly $44 million hack in July 2025. That history makes the distinction between retiring a wallet and eliminating its remaining exposure especially important.

How a retired wallet still held money

In its official update, CoinDCX dates unusual activity to October 21 and irregular fund movement to the following day. It says some users continued depositing to old addresses. Customer accounts received credits when those transfers arrived. A separate sweeping process was supposed to move the tokens into secure wallets. The company says that process failed for a period, allowing funds to accumulate.

That explanation separates two things customers can easily mistake for the same event. A balance appearing in an exchange account does not, by itself, demonstrate that the underlying tokens have reached their intended storage location. Here, the exchange describes a gap between crediting balances and moving assets. Closing that gap requires operational controls as well as instructions to use new addresses. Calling infrastructure retired offers little comfort if it can still receive valuable deposits.

The questions the loss leaves behind

CoinDCX says trading, deposits and withdrawals continued normally. It also says user assets are held in separate cold wallets and acknowledges that its communication could have been more proactive. The update does not establish who carried out the theft. Nor does a statement about uninterrupted services independently resolve the security investigation. Customers need a clear account of the failed process, the length of the exposure and the checks introduced to prevent a repeat.

For users making another deposit, the exchange's immediate instruction is to check the current address in its app or website every time. An address saved from an earlier transfer can outlive the system that was meant to handle it. The broader issue is whether CoinDCX can demonstrate that obsolete infrastructure no longer leaves money exposed. Its promised absorption of the loss addresses who pays for this incident. A detailed explanation of the controls that failed would address why customers should expect a different outcome next time.

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Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

HSBC is putting its first stablecoin inside an app millions of Hong Kong residents already use to pay people.

The bank announced RedCoin, ticker RCHKD, on October 23. It is denominated in Hong Kong dollars and launches through PayMe. HSBC says more than 3.3 million users will be able to activate a stablecoin wallet over the coming days. That is a potential audience, not a count of people already holding or spending the token.

The initial uses are straightforward: sending money to friends and paying merchants. HSBC's launch announcement says payments will reach more than 100,000 merchants through PayMe. The bank tested wallet activation, minting and live transfers with nearly 100 staff before launch. HSBC Digital Assets Custody provides safekeeping for RedCoin. The practical appeal is giving an existing payments audience access to stablecoins without first persuading it to adopt an unfamiliar app.

A licence becomes a consumer product

This launch follows a regulatory decision made months earlier. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority granted licences to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial on April 10. At that point, the regulator said the firms intended to prepare their businesses for launch in the following months. Receiving permission and having a usable product were separate milestones. RedCoin's October rollout is the consumer-facing step that turns HSBC's earlier plan into something customers can start using.

When HSBC announced its licence in April, it said the coins would be fully backed by high-quality liquid assets in segregated accounts. That is the bank's stated reserve arrangement. It is a more specific promise than simply saying a token is backed by a famous financial institution. The same April announcement put PayMe and the Hong Kong mobile banking app at the centre of the plan. Friday's release makes clear that those channels are arriving on different schedules.

Payments first, investments later

The HSBC HK Mobile Banking App is due to gain stablecoin wallet functionality later this year. The bank also plans to let customers subscribe to tokenised investments with RedCoin. A new share class of its HKD money market fund is among the planned products. Those features are future additions, rather than services confirmed available at this launch. Users should distinguish the payment wallet they can activate from the investment offering still to come.

The important test now is what customers actually do with this access. An established app and a large merchant network give HSBC distribution, but neither proves repeat stablecoin use. Wallet activations and sustained payment activity would tell readers more than the size of the eligible audience. For now, the confirmed development is a bank-issued HKD token reaching everyday payments through PayMe. The next milestones are the wallet rollout and whether HSBC delivers the promised banking-app and investment features.

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Author: Ren Nakamura
Asia Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Standard Chartered has signed a deal to take full ownership of Zodia Custody, bringing another piece of crypto's infrastructure closer to a major bank.

The October 21 announcement moves the transaction from an accepted non-binding offer to definitive agreements. Standard Chartered I H Limited would acquire 100% of Zodia Custody Limited. Regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions still stand between signing and completion. The distinction matters: this is a binding deal announcement, not confirmation that the custody operations have already moved.

Standard Chartered is technically British, it's roots going back to 1853 United Kingdom, when starting a bank required direct approval from Queen Victoria herself.  Since then they've grown into a multinational finance company covering everything related to banking and investing. 

Zodia supplies some of the behind-the-scenes tools and services used in the finance industry when a company or firm decides to expand in to the crypto market. Standard Chartered was one of those companies, but why just buy the software when you can own the company that makes it?

Under the bank's announced plan, the regulated custody business will join its existing digital asset custody activities within Securities Services after completion. The parent being acquired owns regulated operating entities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, the United Arab Emirates and Luxembourg. Standard Chartered says existing custody clients continue to receive service as usual. It expects no disruption from the transaction. Those are the bank's assurances about the transition, rather than an independent assessment of how integration will unfold.

Custody and software will take different paths

The transaction also separates two businesses that can easily get bundled together in a crypto headline. Zodia's software and professional-services assets are set to move to Zodia Solutions, an independent entity to be established under SC Ventures. Standard Chartered would be one of the institutions using its technology. The bank identifies a group of supporting investors that includes Northern Trust, NAB Ventures and Emirates NBD. Buying the custody company therefore does not mean folding every technology activity into the same operating unit.

The Block reported that financial terms were not disclosed. Its account places the signed agreements five months after shareholders and noteholders accepted the earlier non-binding offer. It also reports that earlier targets had contemplated definitive agreements by late June and completion by late August. Those dates have plainly given way to a later process. The fresh announcement still makes completion conditional, so treating an old target as a current closing promise would overstate what is known.

A bigger bank offering, not a new retail wallet

The acquisition fits a broader expansion that was already under way. In an October announcement, Standard Chartered outlined plans for Singapore custody services covering selected cryptoassets, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. The intended customers are institutions and accredited-investor corporate clients. That service remains subject to applicable regulatory requirements. The bank described it as complementing traditional asset servicing and tokenization, rather than replacing those activities with a separate consumer crypto app.

For ordinary investors, the immediate significance is the business structure around institutional safekeeping. This agreement does not establish that a new wave of customers has bought bitcoin or that assets have already migrated. It shows a bank committing to consolidate custody operations while keeping a separate technology supplier in the picture. The next concrete milestones are regulatory approvals, closing and details of the integration. Until those arrive, the most useful reading is that the deal has advanced substantially, with execution still ahead.

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Author: Sebastian Marrow
European Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Stablecoin issuers now have a final OCC rulebook, but submitting an application will not necessarily be enough to keep issuing coins after January.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced its GENIUS Act final rule on October 21. It takes effect on January 18, 2027. The agency also laid out a waiver process for existing issuers still awaiting a decision when that date arrives. For people holding stablecoins, the transition deserves attention because an issuer's application, approval and permission to continue operating are different things.

The OCC's rule summary covers reserve assets and redemption, along with risk management, custody and supervision. It also addresses capital and an operational backstop. Its reach includes relevant banks, nonbank issuers and foreign issuers under the agency's jurisdiction. Certain state-qualified issuers fall within that scope as well. This is a completed OCC rulemaking, a meaningful step beyond the industry requests for clarification that have dominated much of the recent stablecoin debate.

The deadline and the application queue...

The regulator's separate waiver guidance identifies a practical timing problem. An existing issuer could submit a substantially complete application on time and still be waiting for approval in January. Continuing to issue without a waiver could then breach the prior-approval requirement. The OCC generally expects to grant qualifying existing issuers relief from that requirement unless stronger reasons support a denial. Each request still needs a decision, so an application receipt should not be read as permission.

That relief has limits. The statutory waiver period can run no longer than 12 months from January 18, and the OCC expects to allow only the time needed to address the reason for granting it. The agency does not identify a general reason to waive other requirements for everyone. It also generally expects prospective issuers that are not already operating in the United States to wait for approval before starting. Those distinctions make a blanket claim of a one-year extension misleading.

What to watch for next...

The October 21 announcement did not open the application window. The OCC says it will announce that step separately after the relevant information collection receives final approval from the Office of Management and Budget. Its final rule also leaves Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering and sanctions provisions for a separate rulemaking with Treasury. Other agencies have their own implementation responsibilities. The arrival of this rule therefore does not mean every part of the federal stablecoin framework is finished.

For holders, the next useful updates will be specific to the issuer behind the token. A company's statement that it plans to apply provides less certainty than a confirmed approval or granted waiver. The final rule is also not a finding that any particular coin has satisfied every requirement. Issuers' public explanations of their transition plans will help show how they expect to handle the deadline. The practical question is whether the company can document its status clearly, rather than simply point to a new law and call the job done.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Moving crypto without copying a wallet address sounds like a small improvement until you remember what a wrong transfer can cost.

Zerohash just announced their new feature "AUTH" - account linking for transfers involving crypto, stablecoins and tokenized securities. Its launch announcement describes a system that removes manual address entry and blockchain selection from the customer experience. Users choose a supported account or wallet, authenticate and authorize the movement. The pitch is straightforward: make moving assets feel more like choosing an account than operating a blockchain.

Basically, you'll enter your wallet info once, or link an exchange account by logging in, and from that point onward the process resembles a bank transfer more than a typical crypto transaction. 

The process is outlined in this graphic posted by ZeroHash:

The company says its connection network spans more than 600 custodial accounts and self-custody wallets. It names services including Coinbase, Gemini, Robinhood, MetaMask and Phantom. Those connections do not establish that every customer can use every route inside every app. Zerohash lets integrating platforms decide which accounts, assets and transfer types to enable. Its claimed reach of roughly 250 million users describes the connected services' audience, rather than a disclosed count of active AUTH customers.

A simpler interface still has rules behind it

The current product documentation places AUTH inside account-funding and crypto-transfer flows. In the funding flow, a crypto deposit can become a fiat balance on the receiving platform. In the crypto-transfer flow, the balance stays in crypto. Customers still review and approve the transfer, while the integration handles the network routing in the background.

The October announcement also follows an earlier beta, rather than marking the first appearance of the technology. Zerohash's release notes dated August 3 already described AUTH for its Account Funding SDK. Existing clients could add it to their setup, and new integrations could include it. That release also described exchange-account linking and access to hundreds of non-custodial wallets. The distinction helps put the new announcement in context: this is a broader launch of a product that had already been available in beta.

Arriving onchain and becoming available are different steps

Zerohash's current control documentation explains why a cleaner transfer screen does not settle every question about access to funds. Platforms can configure name matching between their customer records and information from an external account. One approach checks after a deposit arrives but before the balance is credited. Another handles exceptions after crediting through reporting. The timing therefore depends on the platform's chosen configuration, so an onchain arrival alone does not establish that a deposit is ready to use.

Platforms can also request a control that withholds ordinary availability for deposits initiated outside AUTH. The documentation tells them to plan how they will explain the status and direct customers toward recovery options. For a user, that makes the receiving application's supported funding route an important part of the transaction. The useful questions are which assets and accounts it accepts, whether a deposit converts into cash, and when the balance becomes available. Removing address copying can make the process easier, but clear transfer status and recovery instructions will determine how comfortable it feels when something needs checking.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News

Bitcoin funds just had a strong day, but almost all the good news came through one door.

Data reported on October 20 shows BlackRock's IBIT attracted $665.2 million on Monday, October 19. Across U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs, the combined net inflow was a smaller $526.7 million, according to Farside Investors. Fidelity's FBTC lost $83.6 million and Grayscale's GBTC lost $54.9 million. The other products in Farside's table recorded zero net flows. That makes this a story about concentrated demand, rather than a wave of buying across every fund.

I mention this because the it's an important distinction - a overall total for a segment of the market can conceal very different experiences for individual products. IBIT's intake exceeded the entire group's net gain because withdrawals elsewhere offset part of it. Those withdrawals totaled $138.5 million. This does not establish that investors moved money directly from Fidelity or Grayscale into BlackRock. The figures show the totals entering and leaving each product, not the identities or intentions of the people behind them.

A big day does not explain every buyer

Using SoSoValue's data, The Block reported that Monday was IBIT's strongest daily intake since October 7, 2025. Its more precise IBIT figure was $665.16 million, while its combined fund total was $526.6 million. Those small differences reflect the separate data series, and this article uses Farside's rounded figures consistently. The report also put IBIT's net assets at $66.37 billion. Assets under management and daily inflows measure different things: one is the size of the fund, while the other tracks net subscriptions over a period.

Presto Research's Min Jung told The Block that the exact reason for the inflows was unclear. He suggested investors could be positioning for bitcoin to catch up with other risk assets. That is an analyst's possible explanation, not something the flow table proves. A fund subscription cannot reveal whether the buyer plans to hold for years or is using a more complicated trading strategy. Nor does the size of a subscription tell readers what bitcoin's next price move will be.

Watch whether the demand spreads

The useful follow-up is whether other funds begin attracting money alongside IBIT. A broader run of subscriptions would provide different evidence from a single standout product carrying the total. Continued withdrawals elsewhere would leave that distinction intact, even if the headline number stayed positive. Repeated observations also help separate a persistent change from a particularly large session. For now, the verified development is a substantial intake at BlackRock with weaker demand elsewhere in the same group.

Readers should keep the trading date attached to these numbers. They describe October 19 activity, reported the following morning, rather than completed October 20 flows. Farside's October 20 row was still unfilled when reviewed. Its automatic table can also be updated, so an empty entry should not be read as a final zero. Monday's result is a meaningful demand signal, but the next few sessions will show whether that signal broadens or remains concentrated.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
Breaking Crypto News