Decrypt

Strive Buys $335 Million in Bitcoin After Investors Pour In $369 Million

Jose Antonio Lanz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:46:05 GMT

Strive, a Nasdaq-listed company that holds Bitcoin as a treasury asset, bought 4,045 BTC between October 12 and 16, according to a regulatory filing published Monday.

The average price was about $82,803 per coin, meaning the stash was worth about $335 million, and the purchase lifts its holdings to 36,818 BTC, up from 32,773 a week earlier. That’s a total just north of $3 billion worth of Bitcoin at today’s prices.

Myriad: How high will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction.

The money comes from a Wall Street machine that has become a steady source of Bitcoin buying: public companies sell shares to investors, then put the cash into Bitcoin. Their stock gives investors exposure to Bitcoin’s price through an ordinary brokerage account.

This week’s cash came from warrants, contracts that let holders buy new shares at a fixed price. On October 12 and 13, investors exercised 273,493,909 of them for 13,674,703 new Class A shares, raising about $369.2 million. The leftovers expired unexercised on October 13, and the filing says no traditional warrants remain.

Class A shares outstanding rose from 101.2 million to 114.8 million in a week, about 13.5%. That shrinks each existing shareholder’s slice of the company unless the new cash earns it back. Strive ended the week with $317.5 million in cash, up $7.2 million.

Strive began in 2022 as an anti-ESG asset manager co-founded by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. It adopted Bitcoin as a treasury reserve in May 2025 as it moved to merge with a listed company called Asset Entities, then agreed that September to buy Semler Scientific, a medical device maker holding about 5,000 BTC, in an all-stock deal valued at about $1.3 billion.

When Semler shareholders approved the deal in January, the combined company held roughly 12,800 BTC, so holdings are up almost 3X since. Strive’s previous purchase was 3,311 BTC, about $280 million, at roughly $84,500 per coin, a week before this one. The last 1,223 coins in this week’s batch, bought October 14 to 16, averaged about $81,734.

Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, also bought last week: 267 BTC for about $22.1 million at roughly $82,900 each, bringing its total to 848,517 BTC. It also spent $193.1 million repurchasing its own STRC preferred stock, a security of which Strive holds 505,000 shares, and it increased its preferred-stock buyback program from $2 billion to $3 billion.

MSCI, the index provider whose benchmarks many funds are built to track, finalized a rule on October 15 targeting “non-operating companies.” Companies that fail a screen for substantial operating assets and a follow-up financial test would be dropped from its indexes as of the close of November 30.

Strategy’s Michael Saylor had called the proposal discriminatory in a September letter, and MSCI will publish the final list of affected companies on November 11.

Strategy Buys $22M in Bitcoin, Buys Back $193M of STRC

Across the digital asset treasury space, Tom Lee’s Bitmine added 12,535 ETH, about $30 million, and now holds 6,041,481 ETH, or 4.9% of Ethereum’s roughly 122.1 million tokens. Lee has said buying will stop once the firm hits 5%, and he cited a broad risk-off shift (investors pulling back from risky assets), AI funding worries, U.S.-Iran tensions, midterm election jitters, and rising bond yields.

Strive meanwhile priced an upsized offering on October 15 of 7 million shares of a new 15% Series A Perpetual preferred stock, called SATS, at $90 each, for expected gross proceeds of about $630 million.

Preferred stock pays a set dividend when the board declares it, similar to a bond’s interest but not guaranteed, and “perpetual” means it has no maturity date. The dividend here is 15% of the $100 stated amount, or $15 a year, about 16.7% for buyers paying $90.

The dividends are cumulative, meaning any that go unpaid keep accruing. Strive plans to park $22.50 per share in a reserve for the first 18 months of dividends. The offering is scheduled to settle on October 20, and regular dividend dates start November 9.

Anthropic Gives 5% of Itself to the Public. Musk Answers by Giving Away SpaceX Shares

Jose Antonio Lanz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 21:15:04 GMT

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, said Sunday it will commit 5% of its shares to a new Public Benefit Fund. On Monday, Elon Musk answered by promising one SpaceX share to every child in the United States next year.

“The Anthropic Public Benefit Fund will have increased flexibility and scale, enabling us to pursue our mission in new ways: for example, we might explore large donations to traditional nonprofits or direct distributions to specific populations,” Anthropic said. The company has already committed $200 million to studying that.

Myriad: Which company will have the best AI model? Click to make your prediction.

Americans are uneasy about how fast AI is moving: an AP-NORC poll in late September found that 64% of U.S. adults say the technology is developing too fast, and 8% say too slow.

Anthropic is preparing an IPO, meaning it would sell its shares to the public on the stock market, as soon as November at a reported valuation of around $2 trillion. At that price, 5% of the company would be worth about $100 billion on paper, though that is the value of the shares, not cash sitting in an account.

The fund is set up as a wholly owned LLC rather than a nonprofit, which Anthropic says gives it room to switch between types of giving. The board can add another 2% of shares each time the company's value rises 50% above a baseline that has not been disclosed, and none of the fund's equity can be used for lobbying or political donations.

The co-founders' pledge to donate 80% of their equity and a matching program for employee donations, and Anthropic says roughly 20% of its shares will be dedicated to the public good. The company has not said how the fund will be taxed or what it will disclose publicly, as a traditional charity must.

Musk, never one to leave the spotlight to someone else, pushed for Universal High Income (as opposed to Universal Basic Income) writing on X that he will give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America. "This will be the first of many," he added.

His first reply to Anthropic, recommending "giving the shares directly to the public" instead of routing them through a fund, came Sunday night, and the pledge for kids followed early Monday, less than a day after Anthropic's announcement.

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.

This will be the first of many.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026

With roughly 72 million children in the country, the pledge comes to about $10.5 billion at SpaceX's price of roughly $147 a share. That is just over 1% of the 6.42 billion shares Musk held as of June 30, per an SEC filing, and about the same slice of a fortune estimated at $908.5 billion that has crossed $1 trillion several times this year.

The Treasury Department recently let companies and charities donate individual company shares to Trump Accounts, tax-advantaged savings accounts for children, with donated stock generally held for five years. This is likely the option Musk is going for instead of Anthropic’s path of creating a fund, which he more or less confirmed in a reply post on X.

Thanks for helping enable this

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026

The Anthropic giveaway comes from a company whose CEO wrote in January that "we are considerably closer to real danger in 2026" and which is known to preach the gospel of AI doomerism while maxing out accelerationism, releasing the most powerful AI models on the market.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman accused Anthropic in April of using fear-based marketing to promote Claude Mythos, and Anthropic is now giving away a slice of itself ahead of a stock market debut.

Two days before the fund, Anthropic had quietly presented lawmakers with its own draft AI safety bill. It would let the government block the release of a model posing a foreseeable, imminent risk of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people or causing over $1 billion in damage, through a bioweapon, an AI slipping beyond human control, or a cyberattack.

A block would have to run through the Commerce Department and a federal court order, and developers would publish safety frameworks and transparency reports for new models. Anthropic says the bill reflects its Advanced AI Framework, promoted to lawmakers since June, the month CEO Dario Amodei called for binding rules on frontier models, meaning the most powerful AI systems.

Anthropic critics include investor and former White House AI czar David Sacks, who responded to the company’s pledge with his own post on X: “You’ve put 20% of your equity in an LCC. Whether it serves the public good remains to be seen.”

Anthropic says it will release the fund's governance structure and valuation thresholds in the coming months, and its IPO could come as early as November.

XRP Ledger Repairs Its Lending Protocol Before It Goes Live

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:46:05 GMT

The XRP Ledger is patching its new lending feature before a single loan has been written on it, adding a second code amendment to repair the system while it waits in the network’s approval queue.

The ledger’s lending protocol, a DeFi building block that enables on-chain, fixed-term, uncollateralized loans drawn from pooled funds, was introduced through an amendment called LendingProtocol that is still open for validator voting.

Myriad: Where does Solana go next? Click to make your prediction.

Rather than wait for that version to go live and then fix it, developers have published a follow-up, LendingProtocolV1_1, that corrects issues in the original before it ever takes effect. The documentation now lists both amendments as requirements for the feature, meaning the network would adopt the repaired version from the start.

The approach reflects how changes reach the XRP Ledger. New features and fixes ship as amendments that must earn support from at least 80% of trusted validators over a two-week period before activating.

Because the original lending code hasn’t cleared that bar yet, patching it with a second amendment avoids launching a known-flawed system onto the live network, then scrambling to repair it afterward.

The protocol itself is built for institutional-style credit rather than the collateral-and-liquidation model common in DeFi. It relies on off-chain underwriting to vet borrowers and uses “first-loss capital,” a buffer a loan broker puts up to absorb the initial hit from defaults, in place of automated on-chain collateral. Issuers retain compliance tools, including the ability to freeze accounts or claw back funds.

The caution follows a close call elsewhere in the ledger’s code. Developers recently disclosed and fixed a critical bug in the XRP Ledger’s payment engine that could have let an attacker mint counterfeit XRP, a flaw that sat dormant for roughly a decade before a researcher flagged it. Fixing the lending code pre-launch fits a more cautious posture around new functionality.

The lending feature is part of a broader buildout of credit and DeFi capabilities on the XRP Ledger, which has been adding the financial-market plumbing Ripple and others have long said it lacked.

Hackers Are Running Apple's iOS on Android Phones for the First Time

Jose Antonio Lanz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 19:46:04 GMT

Hobbyists are booting Apple’s iOS, the software that runs iPhones, on Android phones just to prove that they can, and video demonstrations are going viral on social media.

One clip of iOS 16 on a Redmi Note 12 has passed 2 million views on X, and another developer posted a build running on a Nothing 3a.

Myriad: Which company will have the best AI model? Click to make your prediction.

iOS, the operating system that runs everything on an iPhone from the touchscreen to the apps, is built to run only on Apple’s own hardware. Choosing a phone has meant choosing its software, and the reverse. If that wall cracks, cheap and old phones could one day run software they were never sold with.

Android has run on iPhones before: a project called iDroid let early iPhones boot it in April 2010. A decade later, security firm Corellium launched Project Sandcastle, which put Android 10 on iPhones with Apple’s A10 chip.

Nobody has been able to make it the other way around—until now.

WTf, Running real iOS on Android hardware.

HackiOS is attempting a full code rewrite to run actual iOS on Android hardware.

They’re in the final polishing stage.
If it works, the project will be completely free and open no paywalls, no premium tiers. pic.twitter.com/oQywSdi9Y5

— Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ (@0x0SojalSec) October 16, 2026

Users are achieving good results with a combination of tools. The closest public code is an open-source project on GitHub, the site where developers share code, called ios-sweet, built for the Redmi Note 10 Pro.

It takes XNU, the kernel Apple publishes openly (the core of an operating system, which talks to the chip, memory and storage), and patches it to run on that phone’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G chip. Unmodified iOS 16.7.16 files from an iPhone X then sit on top.

The “readme” file from its developers calls the project an “experimental bring-up, not a usable phone OS,” and says the Redmi Note 10 Pro reaches the lock screen, home screen, Control Center and Settings, with touch and the buttons responding. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, mobile data, audio and the camera do not work, the gesture to leave an app does nothing, and with no graphics driver the processor draws the screen at roughly 20 to 30 frames per second.

A separate group calling itself OOSexGang says its HackiOS project runs iOS 16.5 on a Poco X5 Pro, using a custom UEFI (the firmware that starts a device) and the XNU kernel. The researcher sharing the demo notes there is no public source code or independent verification. In a newer clip, Safari downloads an Android app file from APKMirror and then fails to open it, which, to be fair, is what iOS has always done with Android apps.

iOS 16.5 just Running on an Android phone hardware.

and it can’t open Apk because of iOS,
Safari pulls an APK from APKMirror, then fails to run it.

New HackiOs/OOSexGang demo it can be soon public release https://t.co/Iv3FDwuXyK pic.twitter.com/TGclBWllxp

— Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ (@0x0SojalSec) October 19, 2026

The idea of running things where they shouldn’t has been gaining enthusiasts with the advent of AI and the ability to ship code—and improve it—extremely fast. Just days ago. the security firm Calif.io jailbroke an iPhone 18 Pro on stage at the Hexacon conference in Paris, and the root access survived a reboot. Jailbreaking removes Apple’s restrictions to give a user deep control of the phone.

Another major tool that sparked the movement is REA, short for Reverse Engineer Anything, a free toolkit that lets AI coding assistants pick software apart, with examples that included a developer’s demo of GTA V running on iOS.

For now, the practical ceiling of a Redmi Note 10 Pro running iOS is looking at the iOS home screen. Wi-Fi, mobile data, and audio don't work, the screen is drawn by the processor at roughly 20 to 30 frames per second, and the first boot takes four to five minutes on the Apple logo.

Anyone tempted to try it should know the install wipes the phone's Android user data, leaves security protections mostly switched off, and that the devs themselves say not to keep anything personal on the device.

Mastercard Brings Its Fraud-Fighting Tools to Stablecoin Payments

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 19:16:04 GMT

Mastercard is extending its fraud-fighting playbook to stablecoins, launching a tool that lets financial institutions scan dollar-pegged token payments for fraud, scams, and sanctions exposure before the money ever moves on-chain.

Unveiled Monday at the Money20/20 conference in Las Vegas, the product, called Stablecoin Security, combines Mastercard’s payment intelligence with blockchain analytics to assess risk across the full life of a transaction, from the moment a payment is initiated through its movement on a public ledger.

Myriad: Where does Solana go next? Click to make your prediction.

The company launched it with two initial program participants, Borderless.xyz and Keyrails, both alumni of its Start Path blockchain accelerator.

The pitch addresses a growing blind spot as stablecoins move into cross-border and business-to-business payments. Mastercard cited a Bank for International Settlements study of 593 million stablecoin transfers in 2025 that found nearly 60% were complex, multi-step transactions rather than simple one-to-one payments, making it harder for institutions to gauge risk across the whole journey.

Delivered through a platform-agnostic API, the tool analyzes signals like where funds originated, exposure to restricted parties and scam indicators, generating a risk score before a payment settles that slots into existing compliance and fraud workflows.

“Stablecoins are creating new possibilities for value exchange, but financial institutions need the right intelligence and controls to participate with confidence,” said Ann Johnson, Mastercard’s executive vice president of security solutions, framing the tool as an extension of the company’s fraud capabilities into digital assets.

The launch is the latest sign of Mastercard weaving stablecoins into its core business. The company recently rolled out a Global Money Platform with BVNK, the stablecoin infrastructure firm it acquired in August, letting businesses hold and move fiat and stablecoins through a single connection.

Why Some of America’s Biggest Companies Are Objecting to Tokenized Shares

It has also secured a New York BitLicense covering stablecoins and tokenized deposits, moved to enable AI-agent payments alongside Coinbase and Ripple, and expanded stablecoin settlement to include Circle’s USDC and Ripple’s RLUSD.

Mastercard said Stablecoin Security builds on existing tools like Crypto Credential and Crypto Secure, and that it plans to extend the product’s reach in 2027, including through BVNK. The solution is launching first in North America, with worldwide availability expected next year.

Why Some of America’s Biggest Companies Are Objecting to Tokenized Shares

Decrypt Staff — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:46:05 GMT

Wall Street’s push to put stocks onchain is running into an unexpected obstacle: the companies behind the stocks.

Nine issuers, including Verizon, Broadcom, and UnitedHealth Group, have objected to having their shares offered on OKXICE TSV, according to an Oct. 15 public notice from the venue.

Myriad: Where does Ethereum go next? Click to make your prediction.

OKXICE TSV is a planned tokenized stock platform from crypto exchange OKX and NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange. The other objecting companies are Cerebras Systems, AppLovin, Applied Digital, Rocket Lab, CoreWeave, and Applied Optoelectronics.

The notice didn’t say why the companies objected or whether the objections will keep their shares off the platform.

Nasdaq is also keeping its distance. The exchange operator, which isn’t among the nine, has said it would opt its own shares out of the SEC’s framework. A spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal that Nasdaq doesn’t want its stock trading on a venue that doesn’t show the best prices in real time or report trades to the consolidated tape. That’s notable given that Nasdaq won SEC approval earlier this year for its own tokenized securities pilot.

The venue is the first major test of the SEC’s innovation exemption, which the agency unveiled in September after the Clarity Act stalled in the Senate. The exemption lets qualifying platforms trade tokenized U.S. stocks without registering as exchanges. OKXICE plans to run around the clock using Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX’s XLayer blockchain, with trades settled in stablecoins such as USDC and USDT.

The tokens are created by a third party, not the companies themselves. That outside “tokenizer” holds actual shares one-for-one through a registered broker-dealer, and token holders are supposed to receive the same dividends and voting rights as regular shareholders, according to the notice.

The notice also lays out what users give up. OKXICE isn’t registered with the SEC, isn’t subject to Regulation NMS rules designed to ensure investors get the best displayed prices, and doesn’t have to provide fair access to all participants. Trading is capped at a small slice of each stock’s normal volume, and administrators can upgrade the venue’s smart contracts without advance notice.

OKX and ICE first teamed up on tokenized securities earlier this year before announcing the 24/7 venue this month. In terms of appetite from traders and investors for tokenized stocks, the International Monetary Fund recently found real demand for tokenized stocks—especially outside of traditional market hours—but warned that the market remains volatile and illiquid.

US Orders Civilian Agencies to Rip DeepSeek Out of Government Systems

Jose Antonio Lanz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 18:16:04 GMT

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ordered civilian government agencies on Monday to remove DeepSeek, China’s best-known AI chatbot, from their computer systems and to stop buying it, along with any outside service built on top of it.

DHS says the models pose “multiple threat vectors,” meaning several separate ways things can go wrong. Using them “may result in the transfer of sensitive data to the PRC”—the People’s Republic of China—if government employees or vendors use them, and could produce “actionable intelligence on U.S. persons and/or government agencies.”

Myriad: Which company will have the best AI model? Click to make your prediction.

Deepseek is an open source model that can run locally or hosted by any provider, not just China based. For example, Perplexity runs its own servers located in the United States. That said, the developers host a version in servers located in China for those using Deepseek.com’s services.

The ban reaches past DeepSeek’s own app to third-party services developed using it.

A July DHS memo, made public Monday, had already told agencies to monitor traffic flowing in and out of government websites for DeepSeek-related risks. The Commerce Department and the Navy previously banned DeepSeek on government devices, and New York, Tennessee and Virginia have taken similar steps. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not immediately comment.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup, became a household name on Jan. 27, 2025, when its open-source model, built for under $5 million, knocked Nvidia’s stock down 16% and erased about $600 billion of the chipmaker’s value. U.S. tech as a whole lost an estimated $1 trillion that day, because Deepseek proved to be similarly capable than America’s best models while costing a fraction of the price, with the possibility of running for free on the appropriate infrastructure.

Italy’s data protection authority also ordered DeepSeek to block its chatbot days later, calling the company’s answers to its privacy questions “totally insufficient.” In April 2025, a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party alleged that DeepSeek secretly sends American user data to the Chinese government..

The same committee said DeepSeek may have used about 60,000 Nvidia chips, including 20,000 restricted under U.S. export controls, the rules that bar selling the most advanced AI chips to China.

DeepSeek has kept shipping since: the preview of its V4-Pro model, released in April, is priced about 98% below OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Pro and is free to download and modify under an MIT license, and this week it released an updated version of its V4.1-Flash model aimed at efficiency with big quality gains.

The notice lands in the middle of a wider federal push against Chinese technology as the Federal Communications Commission votes on October 29 on barring all Chinese labs from testing electronics for U.S. use.

JPMorgan's JPM Coin Arrives on Ethereum, Putting Bank Dollars on a Public Blockchain

Jose Antonio Lanz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:31:04 GMT

JPMorgan Chase is putting JPM Coin on Ethereum, which gives its biggest clients a way to move dollars in seconds on a Sunday night as easily as on a Tuesday morning.

A normal wire between banks only moves during business hours and can take days to land, which is why JPMorgan started experimenting with blockchain technology. The idea is using JPM Coin to cut that wait to seconds.

Myriad: Where does Ethereum go next? Click to make your prediction.

The token is a deposit token, so each unit stands for a dollar already sitting in a JPMorgan account, and the bank's site says clients can redeem it for dollars at any time with no lock-up. A stablecoin, by contrast, is a token pegged to the dollar by a private company that holds the reserves somewhere else.

Only vetted, approved counterparties can hold JPM Coin, so this is not a coin anyone can buy on an exchange.

JPMorgan first put the token on Base, a cheaper and faster network built on top of Ethereum and incubated by Coinbase, in November 2025. That followed months of testing with Mastercard and Coinbase, and holders can now move the token between the two networks.

In January, the bank also said it would bring JPM Coin to Canton Network, a privacy-focused blockchain built for financial markets. It has also issued two tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum, in December 2025 and May 2026, which are funds holding short-term debt that are represented as tokens.

Emma Landriault, global head of Kinexys Labs at JPMorgan's blockchain unit, pointed to the money and tokenized assets (traditional investments such as shares, debt and funds, issued as blockchain tokens) already circulating on Ethereum, where about $50 billion sits in applications, according to DefiLlama.

Crypto firms are expected to use the token for payments, while financial institutions can use it to pay for trades in tokenized assets or to post collateral, meaning a guarantee against a deal.

“We’ve clearly been in a year of further convergence between Wall Street and crypto,” Landriault told Bloomberg. Matthew Dawson, co-founder of Ethereum Institutional, called the move “a clear signal that institutional finance is moving onto public, verifiable infrastructure.”

Tom Lee’s Bitmine Adds $30 Million in Ethereum as Buying Nears Its Finish Line

The bank is also fighting for the same customers as stablecoin issuers. A consortium of more than 100 companies including Visa, Stripe, and Mastercard launched its own dollar stablecoin last month, while Kinexys co-head Naveen Mallela has said deposit tokens are “a compelling alternative” to stablecoins because they “can be yield-bearing,” meaning they can pay interest.

Kinexys, the unit behind the token, has handled more than $4 trillion in cumulative transactions and averages about $7 billion a day, against roughly $12 trillion a day across JPMorgan's wider payments business.

JPMorgan, Citigroup and other large banks plan to launch a shared 24/7 tokenized deposit network as early as the first half of 2027.

Abandoned Bitcoin? Wallet Targeted by Noah Doe Lawsuit Moves $33 Million

Decrypt Staff — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:46:05 GMT

Another long-sleeping Bitcoin whale has stirred, and this one is named in a lawsuit claiming its coins were abandoned.

An address beginning with "13Coop" that had never sent a single coin since it was first funded on Sept. 11, 2013, moved 411.45 BTC, worth roughly $33.4 million, on Sunday, according to Galaxy Research. Arkham data shows the coins landed in a single new address, where they remain.

Myriad: How high will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction.

When the wallet was funded, Bitcoin traded around $130, according to Arkham, meaning the stash cost about $54,000. Galaxy put the holder’s average cost basis near $127 and the paper gain at more than 64,000%. It’s unclear whether the owner plans to sell, since the transfer went to an unlabeled address, not an exchange.

Galaxy tagged the sending address as “Noah Doe #970,” marking it as one of 39,069 dormant addresses named in a New York lawsuit filed this year by a pseudonymous plaintiff called Noah Doe and two Wyoming companies.

🏚️ 💤 Address awakened — dormant 13+ years — 411.45 BTC sent

This address had never sent coins (first funded 2013-09-11, 13.1y ago); it just spent 411.45 BTC ($33.44M) in block 972,036

Address: 13Coop8xFbYj9JR9WyF5EqzGa9GiZmxs7C

Coins moved: 411.45 BTC in 2 UTXOs — all held…

— Galaxy Research (@glxyresearch) October 18, 2026

The plaintiffs argue that the wallets, which hold about 3.8 million BTC, qualify as abandoned property under the state’s lost-and-found law, even though they hold none of the private keys.

Galaxy also flagged the address as one of those “dusted” in a 2025 campaign that sent tiny amounts of Bitcoin carrying embedded messages to dormant wallets, which Galaxy has described as groundwork for the abandonment claim. Arkham’s data shows a string of those dust deposits, some labeled as phishing.

Each move chips away at the lawsuit’s premise. Spending coins requires the private keys, which suggests at least some of the targeted wallets are anything but abandoned. Galaxy head of research Alex Thorn has said the pace of dormant “Noah Doe” coins moving onchain has been accelerating month over month.

The wallet joins a growing list of old coins on the move. Bitcoin’s oldest coins have been waking up at an unusual clip in 2026, according to Galaxy Research data.

Just a little over a week ago, a Satoshi-era wallet mined in 2010 moved for the first time in 16 years. In late September, about $161 million in decade-old Bitcoin was transferred over the course of roughly two weeks. And just last week, a whale moved a whopping $377 million after holding through every major market crash since 2020.

Bitcoin Tests Key Support as Oil and AI Fears Squeeze Markets

Jose Antonio Lanz — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:05:09 GMT

Bitcoin continues to defy seasonal ‘Uptober” expectations, as macroeconomic factors weigh heavily on the digital asset.

Bitcoin is hovering around $82,000 on Monday, up about 1% on the day, after tagging $83,000 early and handing some of it back.

Myriad: How low will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction.

Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, trades near $108 a barrel after weekend attacks on Persian Gulf tankers and Russian crude facilities. Pricey oil raises the cost of fuel and freight, which feeds inflation. The consumer price index (CPI), what households pay, rose 3.7% in September from a year earlier, while the producer price index (PPI), what businesses pay, jumped 6.3%, the biggest annual rise since 2022.

That likely pushes the Federal Reserve toward raising interest rates, which makes borrowing costlier. Markets see roughly a 15% chance of a quarter-point hike next week. You can see it in Treasury yields, the return investors earn lending to the U.S. government: when hike bets rise, bond prices fall and yields climb. The 10-year sits at 5.08% and the 2-year at 4.72%, CNBC data shows.

A near risk-free 5% competes with stocks and crypto for the same money, and it raises the debt costs of the AI giants that borrowed heavily for data centers. Bitcoin trades with that risk basket, so AI selloffs tend to drag it down.

The pain was concentrated in companies paying for the AI buildout with borrowed money. The Nasdaq Composite fell more than 2% on Friday and closed its worst week since June, with AMD down 6% and Micron down 5.6% on the day. CoreWeave, a so-called “neocloud” that rents out AI computing power, lost about 24% over the week, and it funds much of its data center spending with debt and new share sales rather than cash flow.

Hotter inflation and higher yields make that kind of debt costlier to carry, so the stock selloff and the bond market are really the same story.

Bitcoin price: technical analysis

Bitcoin trades at $82,164 on the daily chart, up 0.18% in today’s forming candlestick, sitting right on the 0.236 Fibonacci retracement at $81,603. Fibonacci levels mark where pullbacks tend to pause, and 23.6% is the shallowest, so holding it keeps the climb from the $87,422 high intact. The bounce is weak, though: a week of small candle bodies says neither side is in control.

Bitcoin price data. Image: Tradingview

Bitcoin’s current price is also inside the $81,847 to $82,305 "golden zone" of the recent $80,365 to $84,246 swing, where buyers often show up.

The 50-day exponential moving average, or EMA, weights recent prices more heavily and sits at about $80,548, above the 200-day EMA at about $75,932, with current price above both. That formation, known as golden cross, reads bullish because short-term buyers are paying more than long-term holders.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine Adds $30 Million in Ethereum as Buying Nears Its Finish Line

The Average Directional Index, or ADX, measures trend strength, and currently reads 21.6. Below 25 means no firm trend and more false breakouts. The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, is at 49.3, basically dead neutral with neither bulls nor bears dominating the market.

So, without a clear trend, the Squeeze Momentum Indicator has been "on" for 13 days, meaning volatility is compressed like a spring. Momentum at -1.42 leans mildly down.

A daily close below $81,603 opens $81,196 and the 50-day EMA. Bulls need closes above $83,330 and $84,246, ideally with a rising ADX. The Fed meeting next week and major earnings calls (like Meta and Tesla) this week are the next catalysts to follow.

The views and opinions expressed by the author are for informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice.

Tom Lee’s Bitmine Adds $30 Million in Ethereum as Buying Nears Its Finish Line

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 15:13:42 GMT

Bitmine Immersion Technologies kept its weekly Ethereum buying streak alive, adding 12,535 ETH worth about $30 million, even as a market-wide selloff battered crypto prices and the firm closed in on the end of its accumulation.

The NYSE-listed company said Monday its holdings now total 6,041,481 ETH, valued at roughly $14.3 billion at a reference price of $2,365 per coin. That represents 4.9% of Ethereum’s 122.1 million token supply, leaving Bitmine, by its own count, 99% of the way to its goal of owning 5% of the network, a target it calls the “Alchemy of 5%,” reached in just 15 months.

Myriad: Where does Ethereum go next? Click to make your prediction.

The purchase extends a run that hasn’t paused since Bitmine launched its treasury strategy on June 30, 2025, buying Ethereum every week since. Chairman Tom Lee has said the company is nearly finished stacking and will stop once it hits the 5% threshold. (Disclosure: Tom Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)

This latest buy lands with the firm underwater on paper, a consequence of accumulating much of its stash last year at higher prices, with ETH now trading well below its highs.

Lee pinned the recent weakness on a broad contraction in risk appetite, citing anxiety over AI funding and model safety, escalating U.S.-Iran tensions, midterm-election jitters, and rising global bond yields.

He argued that selloffs in AI and semiconductor stocks in markets like Korea and Taiwan, where crypto is widely held, spilled over into digital assets, and framed the dip as a historically attractive risk-reward entry when fundamentals stay strong.

Counting cash, other tokens and what it calls “moonshot” investments, Bitmine’s total holdings reached $15.1 billion as of Oct. 18, including 215 Bitcoin, $582 million in cash and marketable securities, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $74 million position in Eightco Holdings, which it bills as a rare public proxy for indirect OpenAI exposure.

Strategy Buys $22M in Bitcoin, Buys Back $193M of STRC

Bitmine remains the world’s largest Ethereum treasury and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, trailing only Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which holds about 848,250 BTC.

Strategy recently added another $22 million in Bitcoin while buying back preferred stock. Bitmine has 5,067,309 ETH, about 84% of its holdings, staked through its MAVAN platform, with projected annualized revenue of roughly $309 million.

Strategy Buys $22M in Bitcoin, Buys Back $193M of STRC

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:04:48 GMT

Strategy bought 267 BTC for $22.1 million last week and repurchased $193.1 million of its STRC preferred stock, the company said on Monday.

The Bitcoin treasury firm paid an average of $82,900 per coin, including fees, between October 12 and 18, according to an SEC filing. That compares with $86,194 a coin for the 250 BTC it bought the week before, Decrypt reported. Strategy now holds 848,517 BTC, acquired for a total of $64.02 billion at an average of $75,446 per coin.

Strategy has repurchased $193M of $STRC and acquired 267 $BTC. As of 10/18/26, we hold 848,517 BTC and $5.3B of USD Assets. We have also increased the size of our Digital Credit Securities Repurchase Program from $2.0B to $3.0B. $MSTR https://t.co/4o0bQBaTb0

— Strategy (@Strategy) October 19, 2026

The purchase is in line with last week's $21.5 million buy, and a fraction of the $142.7 million Strategy spent on Bitcoin in the last week of September.

Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor had hinted at the purchase in a tweet on Sunday, writing: "We found room for more orange."

Strategy paid for the purchase with $22 million raised by selling 140,872 shares of its MSTR common stock through its at-the-market offering program, plus $0.1 million of cash. It sold none of its preferred stock during the week.

The company bought back 1,938,780 shares of STRC, its variable-rate Stretch preferred stock, using $193.1 million of what it calls USD Cash, money set aside for general purposes including buying Bitcoin.

Myriad: Will Strategy hold over 1M BTC before 2027? Click to make your prediction.

Strategy's board also raised the total authorized under its digital credit securities repurchase program, which covers its preferred stock, to $3 billion from $2 billion. Last week's buyback had left $354.8 million in the program; after this week's purchases and the increase, $1.16 billion remained available as of October 18. A separate program to buy back MSTR common stock has $1 billion left.

The company also used $45.5 million from its USD Reserve, which is meant to cover preferred dividends and interest on its debt, to pay dividends. As of October 18, the reserve held $4.83 billion and USD Cash $447.3 million, down from $4.88 billion and $640.5 million a week earlier.

Strategy and the MSCI rules

The repurchase extends a run of weekly STRC buybacks. Strategy bought back $192.4 million of the stock the previous week, and $176 million the week before that, as it bought $29 million in Bitcoin and posted a $21 billion third-quarter gain. In the last week of September, it repurchased $151.7 million of STRC as it took its holdings to a then-record 847,666 BTC.

Bitcoin Treasury Giant Strategy Faces Index Removal Under Finalized MSCI Rules

The company is also facing possible removal from MSCI's widely tracked equity indexes. On October 15, the index provider finalized a rule that treats "non-operating companies," those whose balance sheets are dominated by a single asset, as ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes from the close of November 30. MSCI will publish the list of affected companies on November 11.

Removal would force funds that track the indexes to sell the affected shares. Saylor had urged MSCI to drop what he called a "discriminatory" rule.

Morning Minute: Crypto Rebounds as 'Black Monday' Looms

Tyler Warner — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:19:39 GMT

Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt. And check out our daily news show 'FOMO HOUR' covering all of the top stories and market action.

GM!

Today’s top news:

Crypto majors rebound despite Black Monday fears; BTC at $82k
Bitcoin ETFs see $228M in net outflows this past week; ETH ETFs lost $320M
Circle plans to expand into 40 emerging market countries
Papertrade leads onchain protocols in revenue on week with $30M
Trenches index hits “cold” for first time since April

📈 Crypto Rebounds as Black Monday Looms

Thirty-nine years ago today, the Dow fell 22.6% in a single session. Nobody saw it coming, and the notorious “Black Monday” turned into trading history.

Crypto enters that anniversary bruised but not broken. Bitcoin sits at $82,161, down just 1.4% on the week and actually up about 1% over the last 30 days. That’s the good news and it’s nearly the only good news.

Everything else got hit harder. Ethereum fell 5.3% to $2,415. BNB dropped 3.3%, Solana 6.2%, XRP 7.2%, Dogecoin 9.4%, Hyperliquid 8.6%, Zcash 13.2%. Across the majors, the average decline outside Bitcoin was 7.5%—roughly five times what BTC gave up.

Further out it gets ugly. Starknet lost 45% on the week, LayerZero 24%, Pump.fun 22%, Ethena 20%, Fetch 20%, Midnight 19%, Canton 18%, Jupiter 18%, Filecoin 17%, Raydium 18%. The top twelve weekly losers averaged losses of more than 20%. And all of this happened in just seven days.

The ETFs bled out as well. Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $228.4 million across the week, Ethereum ETFs $320.1 million, for a combined $548.5 million. For October, the two complexes have now bled $1.86 billion. Ethereum’s situation is the more fragile one: $14.5 billion in net assets against $12.9 billion of cumulative inflows leaves barely $1.6 billion of cushion before the entire product line is underwater on a mark-to-market basis.

But for context, what turned a bad Friday into Black Monday back then was automated selling feeding automated selling, with no circuit breakers to interrupt it. Equities have those now, and Korea’s Kospi actually tripped one last week. Crypto has none. It trades through the weekend, through the open, through everything, and we already watched what that looks like on October 10, 2025 when the liquidation cascade repriced the whole market in hours.

The setup today is the opposite of a cascade. Slow bleed, orderly exits, Bitcoin holding while the tail gets cut off—and over the weekend, a modest bid returning across the board. And there is broad concern for a “Black Monday” occurring today. Which very likely in itself means it won’t happen. Crashes don’t occur when everyone is expecting them and ready with cash on the sidelines.

The bears may want a Black Monday, but they are very unlikely to get it. At least today…

🌎 Macro Crypto and Markets

Crypto majors are flat on the day but rebounding from a Sunday selloff; BTC even at $82.4k; ETH even at $2,422; SOL +1% at $105; HYPE even at $79; ZEC +1% at $1,146
Top alt movers include RAY (+8%), ARB (+8%), VVV (+6%) and PEPE (+6%)
Oil +4% at $101; Gold +0.4% at $4,200
Stock futures are green after news of a Putin peace summit incoming; DOW -0.1%, Nasdaq +1.1%
Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley all told third-quarter earnings calls that tokenization is a growth opportunity rather than a threat, with David Solomon comparing it to the shift to electronic stock trading and Wells Fargo revealing its tokenized-deposit payments system is already in production
Nine companies including Broadcom, Verizon and UnitedHealth have objected to having their shares traded on the OKX-ICE tokenized stock venue, an early test of the SEC’s five-year Innovation Exemption
Crypto super PAC Fairshake has now spent about $46.66 million trying to keep Sherrod Brown out of the Senate, adding a $5.2 million media buy and a second $1.95 million buy this month in Ohio
A federal judge refused to let the CFTC walk away from its own $5 million settlement with Gemini, rejecting a joint request from the agency and the exchange to vacate the 2025 consent order and ruling that shifting enforcement priorities and internal misconduct allegations aren’t enough to undo a deal Gemini signed voluntarily three weeks before trial
Circle plans to expand into roughly 40 emerging and developing countries, with CEO Jeremy Allaire telling the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok that organic demand across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East is pulling stablecoins out of the early-adopter phase
Nine organizations launched the Quantum Alliance, an open standards body modeled on the IETF

Crypto Super PAC Fairshake Pours Millions More Into Defeating Sherrod Brown

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

The Bitcoin ETFs saw $228M in net outflows this past week; the ETH ETFs lost $320M in net outflows

Meme Coin Tracker

Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE even, SHIB even, PEPE +5%, PENGU +1%, TRUMP -2%, SPX -4%, BONK -1%
Robinhood chain leaders fell over the weekend; Pons -20% to $176M; AI -30% at $80M; Cashcat -10% at $105M; Orbio +10%, Boner +13% and Torch +78% led top movers
Solana top movers included Dacity +150%, Weft +550% and Pierre +29x

💰 Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

Papertrade led onchain protocols in revenue on the week with $30.56M, followed by Hyperliquid at $16.4M and Pump.fun at $14.26M
BNB Chain burned about 1.646 million BNB worth roughly $1 billion in its 37th quarterly Auto-Burn, destroying 1.65% of the token’s eventual 100 million supply target in a single quarter
The unofficial trenches index hit “cold” for the first time since April, after reaching Euphoric conditions in August-September

🚚 What is happening in NFTs?

NFT leaders were mixed; Punks even at 31 ETH, BAYC +6% at 5.6 ETH, Pudgy -2% at 2.4 ETH
Hypurr (+24%) and Checks (+15%) led top movers

‘Terrifying Precedent’: Dutch Hand US Data From Seized Anti-Fascist Server

Ryan Gladwin — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:07:46 GMT

A Dutch-based server belonging to an anti-fascist political group was seized by police in Amsterdam last week. It followed a request from U.S. authorities, the NL Times reported Saturday, after the Trump administration designated the group as a "global terrorist" organization.

The seized server belonged to Italian internet service provider Autistici/Inventati (A/I), an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist group which offered free email and web-hosting services for organizations and activists. Police seized the server from a data center in Amsterdam's eastern district, and Dutch authorities are now handing its data over to the U.S.

Privacy advocate Harry Halpin told Decrypt that "politically motivated server seizures" set a "terrifying precedent." And one legal expert questioned whether the Dutch considered their legal right to refuse.

‘Leave’: Crypto Backlash Over French Proposal to Report Wallets Over $112K

Halpin, CEO of privacy infrastructure firm Nym, told Decrypt, argued that the targeting of Autistici/Inventati servers by the Trump administration was "due to their political beliefs," adding that, "The fact that the Dutch authorities co-operated with them to shut down a server means that the Netherlands is nothing more than a colony of the United States."

The U.S. designated Autistici/Inventati as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" in August, claiming that it operates the "digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants."

The designation prevents U.S.-based people and organizations from doing business with them. In turn, Autistici/Inventati disbanded as its users and donors faced potential repercussions.

One legal expert said the designation has no standing in the Netherlands and that another legal power was exercised.

"An FBI agent in Amsterdam has roughly the powers of a tourist," Yuriy Brisov, lawyer and partner at Digital & Analogue Partners, told Decrypt. "So states ask each other permission. For the United States and the EU states, the rulebook for asking is a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty, or MLAT, signed in The Hague in 1981."

Brisov explained that everything is done "under Dutch law, by Dutch officers, with Dutch powers," but entirely at the request of the U.S. For that reason, he said, Dutch authorities seized the server and not the U.S.

Sam Altman's World Takes Proof-of-Human IDs to Banks, Citing $40B AI Fraud Risk

Prosecutors operate on a “trust principle,” the legal expert told Decrypt, meaning they don’t assess whether the seizure is proportionate or whether the U.S. investigation actually needs the material.

However, Brisov said, the Dutch could choose to refuse the request if it "harms its essential interests, concerns a political offence, or amounts to double jeopardy." Seizure is also only allowed if the alleged conduct is a crime in both countries carrying more than a year in prison.

It is important to note that designating a group as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist doesn't require a conviction or a court to hear the case, Brisov added, and neither the Dutch government nor the European Union followed the U.S. designation.

Myriad: How high will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction.

"Here is the Dutch problem: Washington's label underpins the request, and the Netherlands does not share it," Brisov told Decrypt, questioning whether "anyone in The Hague asked the political-offence question" that Dutch law reserves for Minister of Justice and Security David van Weel personally. "Internet hosts are not normally liable for what their users do," Brisov noted, adding that the rule is written into both U.S. law and EU law through the Digital Services Act.

Halpin told Decrypt that the request should have been scrutinized due to its political nature.

"Any country that believes in sovereignty should push back against politically motivated server seizures," he said. "This shows that only a multi-jurisdictional setup with true decentralization, as attempted by many blockchain projects, is the only way to resist nation-state-level attacks on digital infrastructure."

Sam Altman's World Takes Proof-of-Human IDs to Banks, Citing $40B AI Fraud Risk

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:40:40 GMT

World co-founder Alex Blania has unveiled World ID for banking and finance, a suite of tools that lets financial institutions confirm a real person is behind transactions, trades and customer requests, the company said on Sunday.

Bain Capital, OpenExchange, Outtake, Pantera Capital and VanEck Funds are initial design partners, according to World.

The offering is built on three cryptographic proofs available through the World ID app. Proof of Human establishes that someone is a real and unique person through a one-time visit to one of World's Orb devices. Proof of Presence uses a selfie liveness check on a phone, while Proof of Attributes confirms details such as nationality or age from a government ID, revealing only the requested information.

Banks could use the proofs to require a verified human to approve ACH and wire transfers, or to recover an account, without collecting documents or storing other personal data, World said. AgentKit, a developer toolkit still in beta, lets users delegate certain proofs to AI agents so they can transact on a person's behalf.

Myriad: Who IPOs first—OpenAI or Anthropic? Click to make your prediction.

The suite also includes World ID for Zoom, which builds on the project's earlier integrations with Zoom and Tinder. Participants verified at one of the project’s Orb devices get a "Human Badge" on their video tile after a live selfie check, and hosts will soon be able to require verification in the waiting room before a call.

Sam Altman's World Teams With Zoom, Tinder to Better Verify Humans in the AI Age

World pointed to the case of an employee at engineering firm Arup who wired about $25.6 million in early 2024 after a video call in which every other participant was a deepfake. Deloitte forecasts that AI-enabled fraud losses in the U.S. could reach $40 billion by 2027, up from $12.3 billion in 2023, the company noted.

More than 18 million people hold a Proof of Human ID, according to World, with the World Foundation raising $52.5 million this year to scale the network.

In 2024, an employee at engineering firm Arup transferred $25.6 million after joining a video call where every other participant was a deepfake. Since then, AI has advanced significantly and is making impersonation increasingly convincing, causing challenges for financial… pic.twitter.com/J06gnULw8H

— World (@worldnetwork) October 19, 2026

World and privacy regulators

World's iris-scanning model has faced pushback from regulators around the world over its handling of biometric data.

Hong Kong's privacy watchdog ordered the project to stop its iris-scanning operations in 2024, while later that year South Korea's privacy regulator fined the project $830,000. That December, Spain's data protection agency told it to delete all iris scan data.

Brazilian Regulator Denies Worldcoin Appeal to Lift Ban

Last year, a Kenyan court ordered it to delete biometric user data, and Brazil's data protection authority denied its appeal against a ban.

UK Trio Jailed Over Home Invasion in Failed Crypto Theft Attempt

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:31:09 GMT

Three men who forced their way into a man's home in Bristol, England, and assaulted him in a failed attempt to steal cryptocurrency have been jailed, Avon and Somerset Police said on Friday.

Terroll Paul, 31, Mohamed Samagassi, 37, and Pierre Madzou, 30, broke into the victim's home in the early hours of May 15, assaulted him and demanded he hand over a large amount of digital currency. He was hit over the head, suffering a substantial injury that required hospital treatment.

Three men who broke into a man's home in Bristol and threatened him in a failed attempt to steal cryptocurrency have been jailed.

Terroll Paul, 31, Mohamed Samagassi, 37, and Pierre Madzou, 30, were sentenced yesterday (15 October).https://t.co/gQf1FuZiY6

— Avon and Somerset Police (@ASPolice) October 16, 2026

The victim's teenage sister alerted police, and all three men were arrested at the scene.

They pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary in August, and were sentenced at Bristol Crown Court on Thursday. Paul, of Barking in London, received six years in prison, Madzou, also of Barking, five and a half years, and Samagassi, of no fixed address, five years.

The victim's sister showed "extreme bravery," said PC Gemma Childs, the investigating officer, adding that her actions led directly to "the apprehension of the offenders and preventing her brother from further harm."

In a statement read in court, the victim said the break-in had changed him. "Before, I was bubbly, talkative and outgoing but now I would describe myself as tense and apprehensive," he said.

The police did not say how much cryptocurrency the men demanded.

Myriad: How high will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction.

Crypto "wrench attacks"

The case is the latest in a run of so-called "wrench attacks" in the UK, in which criminals target crypto holders in person. In February, three teenagers were jailed over a $4.3 million wrench attack robbery caught on police video in London, while last month a $10,000 reward was offered after a West Midlands couple was attacked in a crypto home invasion.

£10K Reward Offered After UK Couple Attacked in Crypto Home Invasion

Wrench attacks cost victims $124 million globally in the first six months of 2026, a twelvefold increase year-on-year, according to blockchain security firm CertiK.

Zcash Developer Zakura Proposes Fix to Stop Quantum Computers Linking Shielded Swaps

Decrypt Agent — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:11:21 GMT

Zakura, a developer of Zcash full node software, has proposed a way to stop a future quantum computer from linking users' private Zcash payments, in an engineering post by Zakura developer Adam Tucker announced on Sunday.

The approach needs no network upgrade, Zakura said in a tweet introducing what it called "post-quantum unlinkable swaps for Zcash."

Post-quantum unlinkable swaps for Zcash, no network upgrades required.https://t.co/hzBkdo1AHJ

— Zakura (@ZakuraZcash) October 18, 2026

Zcash's shielded transactions hide the sender, recipient and amount. Each shielded account has a single incoming viewing key behind all of its addresses, which its wallet uses to find and decrypt payments sent to any of them.

A classical computer cannot recover that key from an address. But a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm could, according to the post, and would then be able to see the value and memo of every payment the account has received and tie them together.

"Until Tachyon ships, there is a glaring hole: a single published shielded address lets a quantum attacker link every payment that address's key has ever received," Tucker wrote, referring to the proposed scalability upgrade for Zcash that its developers say would also deliver full post-quantum privacy.

The biggest risk comes from swaps through NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service, according to the post. Each swap out of ZEC writes one of the user's shielded addresses to NEAR's public chain as a refund address, whether or not a refund is ever made. The addresses look different, but they all belong to the same account, so breaking one would expose all of them.

Around $600 million to $700 million had flowed through Zcash's NEAR Intents route by May, Zcash Open Development Lab CEO Josh Swihart said at the time.

Zcash Targeting Post-Quantum Crypto Milestone by 2027

Zakura's fix derives a separate incoming viewing key for each address that has to be published, while leaving the account's spending key untouched. A quantum attacker who breaks one posted address would learn only about the payments to that address.

"If a quantum computer ever breaks a posted swap address, it will not be able to link this to any other transaction," Tucker wrote in a Twitter thread.

To stop the extra keys slowing down restores from a seed phrase, the wallet looks up NEAR's payouts using private information retrieval, a technique that lets it query a server without revealing which addresses it is asking about.

Zcash's quantum roadmap

The proposal follows Zakura's plan for quantum-safe transparent addresses earlier this month, which also uses private information retrieval and said post-quantum signature opcodes were expected in Zcash in January. Swihart said in May that Zcash was aiming for full post-quantum status within 12 to 18 months.

Concern over the cryptography that secures crypto wallets is growing, with Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin warning that AI could break it before quantum computers do.

Myriad: Best AI model? Click to make your prediction.

Wallets using Zakura's open-source libraries, such as Vizor, will be able to integrate the one-time keys for software wallets in the coming weeks, and hardware wallets will follow once their firmware supports it, the post said.

ZEC was trading at $1,165 Monday morning, up 3.6% on the day per Decrypt data.

MapQuest Now Shows Drivers Where Flock Cameras Are Watching

Decrypt Staff — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:31:03 GMT

MapQuest, the mapping service many Americans last used to print driving directions, now wants to show drivers who’s watching the road.

The company announced on Bluesky that its app includes a “Surveillance Layer,” a toggle in Map Options that plots known automated license plate readers from Flock Safety.

Myriad: Which company will have the best AI model? Click to make your prediction.

The layer also covers cameras from Motorola Solutions’ Vigilant, Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo’s ELSAG, Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada and other outdoor surveillance systems. “The Roads Have Eyes!” the company wrote.

A demo video showed a dense cluster of eye-shaped icons around Los Angeles’ Marina del Rey neighborhood, each paired with a red cone marking the direction a camera faces. MapQuest didn’t say in its post where the location data comes from.

License plate readers photograph passing vehicles and convert their plates into searchable data. Flock’s AI-powered cameras go further, logging details like make, model, color and even bumper stickers.

These surveillance cameras can be networked so agencies across the country share access, and critics say that allows warrantless tracking of ordinary drivers. Flock is also developing an AI tool that helps police track drivers without the need for license plate data or even a name.

The new Mapquest feature lands amid a growing bipartisan backlash. Earlier this month lawmakers, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, introduced the Ban Flock Act, which seeks to prohibit federal agencies from using the technology. The move followed Sanders’ earlier call in late August to “stop Flock and AI mass surveillance.”

Also in late August, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state agencies to stop funding Flock cameras after the Texas Tribune found that a state agency had steered at least $30 million toward the network.

In response to the mounting public backlash, Flock CEO Garrett Langley asked Americans to compromise on privacy in exchange for safety. President Donald Trump, breaking his silence on the topic in mid-September, has praised the company’s cameras.

Flock CEO Asks Americans to 'Compromise' on Privacy as Camera Backlash Grows

The cameras have also become a cultural target. A Grand Theft Auto mod lets players destroy Flock cameras in-game.

Drivers who switch on MapQuest’s layer can try to plan routes around known cameras. But the map only reflects devices that have been identified, and many destinations may be impossible to reach without passing one. Still, the feature puts a mainstream navigation brand squarely in the middle of the surveillance debate.

Bitcoin ETFs Shed Nearly $1 Billion in Two Weeks as Uptober Stays Red

Decrypt Staff — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:01:04 GMT

Bitcoin ETF investors spent another week heading for the exits.

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $82.4 million on Friday, according to Decrypt’s ETF tracker, capping a week in which outflows outweighed inflows on three of five trading days.

Myriad: How low will Bitcoin go? Click to make your prediction.

The funds lost a net $228.6 million for the week, according to SoSoValue, following a $681.1 million drain the week before. Over the two weeks, about $910 million has left the funds.

It was a choppy stretch. A $175.7 million inflow on Tuesday was wiped out a day later by $261.4 million in redemptions, the week’s worst session. Thursday brought a modest $5.1 million inflow before selling resumed Friday.

Wednesday’s selling coincided with a hot inflation print. The consumer price index showed prices up 3.7% year over year in September, above the 3.6% forecast. A hotter-than-expected producer price reading followed Thursday, reviving bets on another Federal Reserve interest rate hike.

Bitcoin ETF flows. Image: Decrypt

Bitcoin briefly slipped below $80,000 on Thursday, and nearly $950 million in leveraged crypto positions were liquidated over 24 hours, about 90% of them bullish longs, according to CoinGlass. The drop also pushed Bitcoin below the average ETF holder’s estimated cost basis near $82,300, Nexo analyst Iliya Kalchev told Decrypt.

When inflation runs hot, the Fed tends to keep raising rates, pushing up Treasury yields and making a nearly risk-free return of around 5% a tough competitor for riskier bets like Bitcoin. Higher rates also make borrowing costlier and lift the dollar, squeezing the cheap credit that leveraged crypto traders depend on.

The back-to-back red weeks have dragged October deep into negative territory. After opening the month with roughly $293 million in inflows, the funds are now down about $615 million for October, based on Decrypt’s tracker. The slide began in earnest on Oct. 7, when a $484.9 million exit marked the funds’ worst day since June. Ethereum and Solana ETFs have also been in the red this month.

Spot Bitcoin ETFs are exchange-traded funds that hold actual Bitcoin. They trade on stock exchanges like ordinary shares, giving investors exposure through a regular brokerage account without buying or storing the asset themselves.

Since launching in January 2024, they’ve drawn $57.3 billion in cumulative net inflows, according to Decrypt’s tracker, making them a fixture of Wall Street’s crypto exposure. Because issuers report flows daily, and institutions and financial advisers account for much of the money, the figures have become a closely watched gauge of investor sentiment.

Total net assets stand at $104.29 billion, according to SoSoValue, while Decrypt’s tracker puts the figure at $100.2 billion. Bitcoin closed Friday near $81,590, down from about $82,337 a week earlier.

Banks Hold a Lever Over Stablecoin Adoption, BIS Economists Say

Decrypt Agent — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 13:01:04 GMT

Banks worried about losing customers to stablecoins may already have a counterweight: the interest rate on a savings account.

That’s the takeaway from a new working paper published by the Bank for International Settlements, the Basel-based bank for central banks. Using weekly U.S. data from January 2019 through June 2025, BIS economist Iñaki Aldasoro and Rashad Ahmed of the Andersen Institute for Finance and Economics found that stablecoin growth slows when banks raise deposit rates.

Myriad: What will the Fed do next? Click to make your prediction.

Stablecoin market capitalization grew by about 15% over a typical 10-week span in the sample used by the researchers. A one-basis-point bump in deposit rates, a sizable weekly move for slow-moving savings rates, cut that to roughly 12% under the authors’ baseline estimate. Under a second method designed to isolate cause and effect, it fell to about 6%. Stablecoins kept growing, just more slowly.

To separate cause from coincidence, the authors relied on a quirk in bank behavior. Lenders barely raise savings rates until the federal funds rate passes about 3%, and then they reprice much faster.

The link was stronger for Circle’s USDC than for Tether’s USDT, which the authors attribute to USDC’s closer ties to U.S. users. The paper concludes that banks “retain some influence over the pace of that adoption through deposit pricing.”

The findings come with caveats. Working papers reflect the authors’ views, not necessarily the BIS’s, and the sample spans a single high-rate cycle in which stablecoins paid holders no interest.

The authors said regulators should weigh whether stablecoin issuers may pay holders yield, along with the trade-offs of requiring issuers to keep part of their reserves in bank deposits.

That debate is live in Washington. Banks have lobbied to keep stablecoin yield off the table, a fight that loomed over the Clarity Act’s failed Senate vote. Meanwhile, the OCC, FDIC, and Treasury are writing rules to implement the GENIUS Act, which takes effect in January. The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Donald Trump in July of last year, essentially legalized stablecoins in the United States and set rules of the road for their issuance, use, and custody.

The BIS has long scrutinized stablecoins and the cryptocurrency space more broadly. In 2021, it argued the rise of blockchain-based digital dollars made central bank digital currencies more urgent, and a 2023 BIS survey warned they could threaten financial stability if widely adopted.