abobka

“Support” that messages you first isn’t support. That’s exactly what Chainalysis’s 2025 scam report is about.

Impersonation scams, where a fraudster pretends to be support, an exchange, or a government agency, grew by more than 1,400% compared with 2024. And you’re the one who transfers the money.

The report is back in the news because of an ad: ACAMS and Chainalysis expanded their paid training on crypto crime, with “$17 billion in scams in 2025” on the shop window.

But $17 billion is a forecast. At least $14 billion has been confirmed on-chain, and the figure could be higher if more wallets are found.

Even fraud gets sold using the most sensational version.

And protection against impersonation is free: nobody from support messages you first or asks you to make a transfer “for verification.”

#scam #CryptoSecurity

2024 — UAE. 2026 — Luxembourg. Now Singapore

That’s how Standard Chartered is building crypto custody under its own name. In Singapore, the bank wants to custody crypto, stablecoins, and tokenized assets, but only for institutional and accredited corporate clients.

The route, step by step:
- UAE: DFSA license, starting with $BTC and ETH
- Luxembourg: MiCA and an EMI license, a hub for Europe
- Plus, it’s buying the Zodia Custody business; the deal is awaiting regulatory approval

In Singapore, it’s still only “planning”: no date, no list of coins

Here’s what I take from this: big banks don’t want to be clients of crypto custodians. They want to be the custodians.

Retail investors won’t be affected either way. Funds will have someone to talk to once the plan becomes a service.

#StandardChartered #Singapore

“Successful stablecoin payment test” in Korea took place without a named stablecoin. And without any money.

Gwangju Bank and Toss ran a proof of concept: paying with a stablecoin via QR code. The details:
- a test environment separate from the live service
- a virtual store
- no customer data or real assets
- no launch date

Essentially, they tested the flow: bank app → Toss → QR code on a Toss Place terminal, with payment and settlement completed at the moment of transfer.

Next comes a second phase, and they’re hoping to reach an agreement with real stores.

But there’s still no law. The FSC chair says the framework is ready and final consultations are underway, but they haven’t decided who can issue a won-denominated stablecoin. Review is expected in November.

They showed the button. There’s nothing to pay with yet.

Would you pay with a stablecoin at the checkout if your bank offered that button, or is paying by card easier?

#SouthKorea #Stablecoins

The European Parliament resolution has 39 points, and only two of them are about crypto

On 8 October, MEPs backed a document on the EU’s first anti-corruption strategy. In the news feed, it sounds alarming. The text itself is more measured.

What’s actually in it:
- The resolution is non-binding; it’s a position, not a law
- They voted by a show of hands, without a roll-call vote
- Crypto is mentioned alongside opaque ownership schemes, encrypted messengers and AI
- The bulk of it is about conflicts of interest, money in politics, protecting journalists and whistleblowers, and recovering assets

See “390 votes in favour” anywhere? That was a July resolution on digital assets: 390 in favour, 86 against, 134 abstentions. It has nothing to do with the October resolution.

No new obligations for exchanges. But it’s clear what they’re looking at: who the real owner is and where the assets ended up.

#Eu #AntiCorruption

Polkadot launched its stablecoin. At launch: $2.5 million in USDT for minting and $2.5 million in DOT for the pool

dotUSD has been live on mainnet since October 8, and it has no issuer. There’s no company issuing it, no bank holding reserves, and no regulatory approval either. DOT holders are in charge

First phase: mint 1:1 against USDT, with a cap. In other words, to get dotUSD, you bring USDT

So it works out like this:
- The USDT risk remains
- Smart contract risk is added on top
- And the word “native” is used for marketing

Minting via USDT doesn’t add demand for $DOT; DOT is only in the $2.5 million pool. On launch day, it traded at around $1.032

As long as there’s only USDT inside, it’s a wrapper, not a new dollar

#Polkadot #Stablecoin

Hashi “launched with $500 million”? No mainnet, and none of that money is in it yet

Hashi is BTC infrastructure on $SUI
The mainnet will roll out in stages later in October
The $500 million-plus is commitments from those launching alongside Hashi. CoinDesk says the same: commitments, not deposits
There are already more than 20 partners in the project

How it works:
You deposit BTC into Hashi, and hBTC is minted for you on Sui
The bitcoin itself doesn’t leave the Bitcoin network, but it’s held under a 2-of-2 multisig: signed by Hashi validators and a guardian

So the hBTC in your wallet is a claim on whoever holds that multisig. You have to trust more than just Bitcoin

I’m not on $BTC
right now, so I don’t have any BTC to deposit into Hashi

When the mainnet launches, I’ll see how much of that $500 million actually comes in and post here

#Hashi #SUİ #BTCFi

The news about Ripple and leveraged ETFs has everything except $XRP

According to the WSJ, Ripple Prime is financing the Tradr 2X Long SNDK fund, which delivers twice the daily movement of Sandisk stock. The fund pays Ripple the overnight bank funding rate plus four points, which works out to about 8% annually.

A normal prime brokerage business. 593 leveraged ETFs hold over $256 billion—there’s plenty of room to grow.

But:
- Ripple hasn’t disclosed its revenue
- It hasn’t said how much of this runs through XRP or the XRP Ledger
- There’s no indication anywhere whether RLUSD or XRP is involved in these deals

I don’t own XRP, so I’ll say it plainly: when a company grows like a bank, that doesn’t automatically mean the token will grow too. They’re separate balance sheets.

#Ripple #ETF

How many people know you own crypto? After Pattaya, I’d consider that risk number one.

On October 6, three armed men broke into a foreigner’s home at night.
They forced him to open the safe and transfer about $820,000 in crypto from his wallet.
They also took cash and three Rolexes.
No arrests have been made, and the crypto was reportedly sold right away.

Chainalysis estimates that violent attacks on crypto holders took more than $30 million in the first half of 2026. And attackers are increasingly showing up at people’s homes: home invasions accounted for 37%, compared with 14% in 2025.

A cold wallet and a seed phrase kept somewhere safe can protect you from hackers. In this story, the safe was opened at gunpoint.

There’s something else that can protect you from someone with a gun in your home: the fewer people who know about your money and your address, the less likely they are to come specifically for you.

#CryptoSecurity #WrenchAttack

$215 million for a quantum computer. Of that, $2.5 million is in the FY 2026 budget

The rest, as the DOE itself says, depends on whether Congress provides the money

On October 8, the White House released a fact sheet on more than $6 billion in science initiatives, and crypto media captioned it: “a quantum plan amid crypto fears”

I reread it. The word “cryptography” isn’t in there. Neither is Bitcoin. The $215 million is for the DOE Quantum Genesis Q competition, announced back on September 17, with applications due by October 19

The actual document on the quantum threat to keys is the order from June 22. Key exchange in U.S. critical infrastructure is to move to a quantum-resistant standard by 2030, and signatures by 2031

The government set itself a deadline. The order doesn’t say a word about $BTC and blockchain

This week, Vitalik, Drake, and Hoskinson debated what AI does to keys. The quantum part of the same story is simpler: who will set a deadline for Bitcoin?

#quantumcomputing #bitcoin

996.105 BTC moved from a MARA Miner wallet to Galaxy Digital and another address. According to Lookonchain and Arkham, that’s about $81.13 million.

The blockchain shows a transfer. It doesn’t show a market sale, and no one has provided proof of one.

Here’s what MARA’s Q2 report actually says:
- 35,577 BTC as of June 30
- They sold 2,213 BTC during the quarter, having mined 2,422

And in August, they took out loans from Coinbase and Two Prime, backed by 18,750 BTC as collateral—almost 53% of those holdings.

So a transfer from a wallet like that could mean three things: a sale, collateral, or a loan-related movement. The blockchain only sees “went from A to B.”

They’re not shy about selling; they’ve said themselves they’ll sell when it makes sense. But saying they “dumped” it without proof is speculation.

Personally, $BTC
I’m not holding any right now, so I’m looking at this without getting worked up.

How do you read it: sale or collateral?

#MARA #bitcoin

About 2.75M PYTH in March. About 669662 in August

That’s how much Pyth DAO bought back each month under the old rules. So now everything DAO receives from Pyth products goes toward $PYTH
. Buybacks are being brought back not because of a surplus, but because they were drying up

What actually changed:
- DAO revenue from products goes into the PYTH reserve; stablecoins are exchanged on the market
- And the DAO only sees 60% of revenue, not all of it
- Purchased tokens aren’t burned; they’re held in reserve. They can only be sold through a separate vote
- $25000 transaction limit and 5% slippage

PYTH up 15.8% in 24 hours

ARR of $11.5M in September, up 86% quarter over quarter, but the project itself is reporting this

In short, it’s a good rule, but who knows how much money will be under it

#PythNetwork

what does "tokens in lock-up" mean if they can be transferred to an exchange? that's what this lawsuit against BitGo is about right now

plaintiffs - DWF Maas and Falcon Digital, both from the orbit of DWF Labs. they filed in the High Court of London and are seeking $141M

story:
- BitGo received tokens through private deals $FF
and ESPORTS
- the condition was a three-month lockup and vesting
- according to the plaintiffs, BitGo transferred them to exchanges about two months before the first unlock

what amuses me here is the role reversal. usually market makers get caught dumping, but here the market maker is going to court because they got dumped)

BitGo declined to comment, the court has made no decision, and $141M is only the claim

a lock that is held by contract, not by code, is not a lock. lol

#BitGo #Tokenomics

How will Netflix portray CZ? I’m betting he’ll be background for SBF, not the main character

On November 19, Netflix will drop all eight episodes of The Altruists. It’s a series about Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, but CZ is in it too — played by Terry Chen

In the trailer, Ellison says "Lying isn't bad for a good cause". The Justice Department says SBF took more than $8 billion from FTX customers

And SBF himself isn’t sitting still either:
- On September 10, he filed a petition to the Supreme Court, including the confiscation of about $11.02 billion
- He’s also asking Trump for a pardon

So the series will come out while the ending is still being written

My $BNB
is sitting in Simple Earn Flexible, so I do care about CZ on screen. On November 19 I’ll watch it and break down here how they portrayed him. If you don’t want to miss it — hit follow

#FTX #Netflix

Yesterday I wrote that Vitalik advises against rushing wallet migration. And I missed a number from his own text, which is now the cause of a spat.

Vitalik: if AI delivers “50 years of math in 2 years,” keys might need to be increased by as much as tenfold.

Hoskinson replied (according to Coinpedia): the 10x rule is “numerology,” and Vitalik himself is “bag-holding” hash cryptography. Against a slightly better attack, he says, keys about a quarter larger should be enough.

Funny, because last December Hoskinson himself explained: hashes are Ethereum’s bet, lattices are Cardano’s bet. So both are bag-holding—$ETH with one, $ADA with the other.

The only thing AI has actually found against lattice-based cryptography is Anthropic’s attack on HAWK. There, keys need to be doubled; NIST’s other candidates weren’t affected.

Doubled. Not tenfold, and not by a quarter.

The argument is loud, but for now the proof is still with a third party.

#PostQuantum #Cardano

From $600M to about $10B since Trump returned. That’s how Senator Blumenthal estimates Cantor Fitzgerald’s stake in Tether.

They say Cantor owns five percent of Tether. The senator got that figure from other articles; there’s no official Tether valuation behind it.

At the end of September, I wrote about a report by his own subcommittee: 84% of 846 sanctioned Iranian wallets transacted almost exclusively in USDT.

Now the next step. The letter went not to Tether, but to the custodian that holds its assets. They’re asking:
- how much Cantor earns from custody (the senator says tens of millions a year)
- how they monitor sanctions involving Iran and Russia

For now, this is just a piece of paper from one senator—not a court case or a verdict. Tether has its own figure on Iran: about $550M in frozen assets.

I keep my USDT and USDC in Simple Earn Flexible on Binance; I’m not moving anything because of senators’ letters.

His deadline is October 23. I’ll see what Cantor says and write about it here.

#Tether #Cantor

JPMorgan: $50 billion has flowed into crypto since the start of the year

Nice figure. Now for the fine print from the same report.

$50 billion in less than a year works out to an annual pace of around $66 billion. About half of last year’s total.

And their ETF tally since the October 10, 2025 crash is still in the red.

And this week looked like this:
- On October 7, Bitcoin ETFs saw $484.9M in outflows, the most since June 25
- ETH funds have posted outflows for seven sessions in a row, now totaling around $569M
- $1.19 billion in liquidations on Thursday, with over $1 billion in longs

$BTC
It then dipped from around $83,200 to $80,400. It bounced back to around $82,200 after Trump said the US wouldn’t strike Iran before the midterm elections.

$ETH got hit roughly six times harder than Bitcoin in those liquidations, adjusted for size.

“Momentum into Q4” looks more like momentum out for now.)

I don’t hold either BTC or ETH, so I’m watching from the sidelines.

#JPMorgan #CryptoETF

USDT has not been banned in the EU. What’s being taken away is something else: exchanges’ right to work with non-MiCA stablecoins

On October 8, ESMA issued an opinion. It’s addressed to regulators in every EU country. The gist is simple:
- licensed exchanges can’t provide any services involving non-MiCA stablecoins
- custody is included
- there’s a three-month grace period for existing balances; Cointelegraph calculates the deadline as January 8, 2027

During the transition, you can sell, convert, withdraw, transfer, and keep holding what you already have until you exit. You won’t be able to buy more

And ticking “I understand the risks” won’t save you—ESMA explicitly says disclaimers don’t count)

ESMA didn’t name a single token. Coinbase did: USDT and PYUSD. Withdraw them by October 30, or it will convert any remaining balance itself into $USDC

This doesn’t affect your own wallet; it only applies to exchanges

My stablecoins are in Simple Earn Flexible on Binance, and I’m not touching them because of this opinion

Has your exchange contacted you yet, or is it still quiet?

#ESMA #MiCA

I said I'd check XRPN's first day as the merged Evernorth today. there is no first day today

the 8-K dated October 6 moved it
closing on or about October 9, Evernorth shares on Nasdaq on or about October 12
Evernorth's own explanation: "an administrative delay". that's it

the ticker kept trading as the SPAC, Armada Acquisition Corp. II:
🔸 October 5 close 38.65
🔸 October 6 close 19.20, -50.32%
🔸 October 7 close 25.01, +30.26%

wild week. so the stock has had its whole drama before the company even exists, and approximately 473 million $XRP
at closing is still a plan on paper

I don't hold XRP or XRPN. October 12 I'll look again and put the numbers here, follow if you're watching this one

#xrp #Evernorth #SPAC

Where does Hyperliquid live? The company says: Singapore. The Singapore regulator says: not with us

Hyperliquid Labs confirmed its registered headquarters in Singapore, where the team of about 11 people moved in back in 2024

MAS responds to FT: "We are not aware that Hyperliquid is regulated in any major jurisdiction". And, according to the press, it does not consider its platform a regulated one because it is decentralized

On June 26, MAS added Hyperliquid to the Investor Alert List—an alert, not a ban. And starting June 30, 2025, the Singapore firm that serves only clients abroad cannot operate without a license

In my opinion, this is the most honest answer about Hyperliquid: there is no regulator over it anywhere. For everyone holding $HYPE or trading on it—while it all works, it’s convenient. When it breaks, there will be no one to complain to. For you, is "decentralized" here an honest word or a convenient excuse?

#Hyperliquid #MAS #регуляція

5% from October 2021

Jamie Coutts calculated: this is how many top-200 crypto assets he gave. a market-cap-weighted index, from Bitformance

sounds like a verdict. but Coutts himself draws the opposite:
- new tokens used to add 26.5% of the supply per year; now it’s 3.3%
- “supply ate the demand”, dilution consumed the demand
- the market is roughly 35% below its long-term trend
- and he calls the current phase “payback era”

“from October 2021” — from what day? $BTC back then, in the same October, it opened at 43820.01 and closed at 61299.80. now it’s 82820, meaning above both points, and how much depends on the start

and he labeled the continuation of the trend on his chart as not a forecast

I don’t hold bitcoin myself, so I’m more interested in something else: if dilution has really calmed down, altcoins no longer need to run just to stand still, and I’d now be looking at issuance rather than the chart

#altcoins #Токеноміка #крипторинок