Bitcoin's volatility has dropped a lot. Even so, CoinDesk counts 10 unusually large trading days so far in 2026, and those extreme moves are happening more often than they did in 2018. If you size risk off one average volatility figure, you're missing those days. The market is more institutional now, and a run of quiet sessions makes it easy to forget how hard the tail can hit.
Robinhood Chain is also cooling down. Since mid-September, daily transactions have fallen from 10.8 million to 6.2 million, a drop of more than 40%. That's happening while Robinhood still pays the network fees on customer swaps. If paying users' fees can't keep activity up, then cheap swaps weren't the main reason people showed up.
The CFTC is proposing a formal rule that would classify certain event contracts, like the ones traded on Kalshi, as swaps that fall under its oversight. The move comes while the legal fight over these products is still going.
The NFL is pushing the other way. In an amicus brief, the league asked the Supreme Court to take up New Jersey's case, arguing that Kalshi's sports contracts are gambling and shouldn't be treated as swaps regulated by the CFTC.
So the open question is which label sticks. If the swaps reading holds, a single federal regulator controls the market. If the Court hears the case and accepts the gambling argument, New Jersey and other states get a much stronger hand. That last part is my read, not something either filing claims. For anyone trading prediction markets, whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case matters more than the rule text itself.
Anthropic has opened an opt-in service that sends projects vulnerability reports generated by its strongest AI models, including Claude Mythos. Crypto projects are already applying, Cointelegraph reports.
The demand makes sense. On-chain code holds user funds directly, and a bug that slips past review can be costly once it ships. A frontier model scanning a codebase before launch gives teams one more pass at catching what humans missed.
I'd still read those reports as leads to check. Before anyone trusts this over a human audit, I want to know how many of the flagged issues turn out to be real. If that number holds up, I expect an AI scan to become a routine step before mainnet.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a top Democrat among Senate investigators, has sent Cantor Fitzgerald a letter with questions about its relationship with Tether. Cantor is Tether's main U.S. financial partner. If Washington wants answers from the stablecoin issuer, Cantor is the easiest place to apply pressure.
The letter comes after a report from Democratic investigators last month. It alleged that Tether's dollar token has become a working tool for Iran's shadow banking network. A report makes headlines and then stalls. A letter to the firm handling Tether's U.S. business forces someone to answer on the record.
Democrats are gaining ground in their bid to retake the Senate. If they win the majority, inquiries like this would carry committee power behind them. Anyone with stablecoin exposure should watch how Cantor responds. $ETH $OGN $RLC
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says the industry’s heavy Republican support pushed Democrats away. His ask is simple: fund both parties if you want a federal crypto bill to move.
Congress is split. A one-party donor base makes it easier for the other side to walk. Cuomo’s read is that balanced political spend is part of getting legislation through, not a branding exercise.
Whether the industry listens is another fight. The pitch itself is clear enough: federal rules need Democratic votes too.
Cointelegraph is seeking a buyer after a sharp drop in web traffic.
The company has not disclosed how much it wants. For crypto media, shrinking reach can quickly turn into a business problem, especially when audience attention moves fast across platforms.
The sale search puts a clear question on the table: can a crypto news brand rebuild traffic before finding a new owner?
Coinbase plans to relaunch Coinbase Pro by year-end. For a chunk of the market, that name still means the exchange's more serious trading product.
The Deribit integration is complete. Coinbase is calling the result Coinbase Global Exchange.
Pro gets its brand back on a firm timeline. Deribit now sits inside Coinbase's global exchange setup. How they route users between the two is the open question after launch.
The CFTC opened rulemaking on leveraged and margined retail crypto trading. The proposal includes Regulation CTX and CAM, plus a new crypto asset market exchange category.
Better Markets says investors would get less protection under that setup than under the SEC, and that retail crypto oversight should not sit with the CFTC.
Retail leverage is getting a federal rulebook. The open fight is which agency writes it.
Solana launched an open-source DvP settlement program built with input from J.P. Morgan. It lets institutions settle trades atomically on-chain, with finality in seconds rather than the multi-day windows still common off-chain.
In parallel, Payward, the operator of Kraken, teamed up with Singapore Gulf Bank on a 24/7 institutional crypto settlement service. The first rollout targets select clients in Asia and the Gulf, with U.S. dollar settlement available around the clock.
Banks and venues are clearly chasing the same gap: settlement that does not sleep when the market moves.
Russia’s Finance Ministry has paid wages in digital rubles for the first time.
The Bank of Russia and the Finance Ministry are also working on integrating the digital ruble into the budget process. Government payroll gives the project a direct use case as that work continues.
The Independent Community Bankers of America has sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency over its approach to crypto trust charters.
The group says the regulator exceeded its legal authority by granting these charters. The case adds another challenge to how crypto businesses can fit within the U.S. banking system.
South Korean crypto exchange operating profits dropped 78% in the first half of 2026. Trading volume, market cap, and customer deposits all moved lower with it. The local spot business is thinner than it looked a year ago.
At the same time, the financial regulator floated detailed rules for tokenized securities ahead of a 2027 rollout: capital requirements, OTC trading licenses, and caps on what retail can buy. So the brokerage side is bleeding while the policy shop is still wiring the next product lane.
If you’re watching Korea, the near-term signal is quieter flow. The longer one is whether tokenization actually opens a new fee line before volumes recover.
NEAR Intents lost about $3.8 million to a bug in deposits and withdrawals on its cross-chain swap system. Swaps are frozen. The contract is patched, but deposits and withdrawals stay disrupted across 11 networks. The company says it will repay every affected user.
The hit came shortly after the team refused large swap volume tied to the Bitget theft. That Bitget attacker has since moved about $3.8 million into a Zcash privacy pool.
Alex Shevchenko, NEAR Intents' general manager, says the team has identified who drained them and gave the person 48 hours to respond. $NEAR $ZEC $GTC
Bitcoin Policy Institute just published a paper on MSCI’s proposed “non-operating company” rule. Under that standard, Strategy and Metaplanet risk getting cut from MSCI indexes.
BPI also flags an “invisible committee” behind the proposal and links it to an earlier crypto treasury review. Same idea, tighter wording: hold too much Bitcoin on the balance sheet and you may no longer count as a normal operating company for index purposes.
If it sticks, passive funds that track those indexes would have to sell. The paper does not settle the politics. It does put a clear price tag on the rule for the biggest public Bitcoin holders.
The CFTC sent the White House two proposed rules meant to lock down how it treats prediction markets. One would classify event contracts as swaps. The other would carve out casino-style gambling products from that frame.
The point is jurisdiction. If event contracts count as swaps on regulated venues, the agency has a cleaner case for exclusive federal oversight. That matters because several states are already suing prediction-market operators and calling the products gambling.
White House review is the next gate. Until those definitions land, the state-versus-federal fight over who polices these markets stays unresolved.
A voluntary accord linked to Trump asks tech firms to police their own frontier AI.
Most of the work of managing those risks sits with the developers. The companies shipping the models also carry the oversight load under this deal.
Soft pledges travel fast in markets that live on policy headlines. The open question is how much real constraint the labs accept when the framework stays voluntary.