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In brief Ethereum, XRP, and Solana have all dropped in value on the day, with “outsized drawdowns” compared to Bitcoin. Experts point to Wednesday’s consumer price index coming in at 3.7% and expectations of an October interest rate hike as major macro pressures. The slide is also a natural hangover from altcoins’ “strength and momentum” over recent months. Altcoins have taken a hit over the past 24 hours, with major tokens seeing “outsized drawdowns” compared to Bitcoin. Experts say that this has largely been prompted by macro pressures pushing prices down.With the market cap of all cryptocurrencies dropping by 2.5%…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: Stablecoin issuer Tether has participated in a funding round for AI infrastructure startup AIsa, bringing the startup’s cumulative fundraising above $9 million. The company is working on payment and access systems for autonomous software agents. Tether is exploring another possible market for digital-dollar payments: software that buys services for itself. The stablecoin company participated in a seed extension round for AI infrastructure startup AIsa, which said its total funding had exceeded $9 million. AIsa is developing tools that let autonomous AI applications discover computing resources, access…

In brief Crypto liquidations reached $948.22 million in 24 hours across 177,440 traders, with long positions accounting for 90.6%, per CoinGlass. Bitcoin fell 2.6% and broke support after hotter-than-expected CPI and PPI data revived bets on another Fed rate hike. Bitcoin now trades roughly 2% below the average cost of U.S. spot ETF holders near $82,300, putting those buyers back underwater. Bitcoin fell below $80,000 on Thursday for the first time in over a month, extending Wednesday’s inflation-driven slide and wiping out nearly $1 billion in leveraged crypto bets. It’s currently trading just about $82,000 after several hours of increased…

In brief Google DeepMind found no statistically significant acceleration in the pace of its AI progress after April 1, 2026; its capability index has climbed a steady 0.1 points a month. Most production code at the lab is now more than 75% AI-written, but about 88% of code changes still need humans to steer the AI or write code themselves. Gemini 4 Argon solved roughly half of the internal research engineering tasks it finished, far below the 90% score DeepMind treats as a red flag for full automation. Google DeepMind went looking for proof that AI is speeding up the…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: Security researcher Joe Grand says he warned Ledger about signs of physically modified devices months before a wider hardware-wallet supply-chain attack came to light. The dispute concerns communications and product distribution, not proof that Ledger’s core cryptography was defeated. Ledger is facing questions about how it handled earlier warnings after reports of cryptocurrency thefts involving physically altered hardware wallets. Security researcher Joe Grand says he contacted the company in March after inspecting a suspicious Ledger Nano X obtained through an online marketplace in Thailand. The device…

In brief Hardware wallets are physical devices that keep crypto private keys offline, signing transactions internally so the keys never touch an internet-connected device. They are not hack-proof: a Coldcard firmware bug and tampered Ledger devices sold through a reseller both led to major losses in 2026. Wallet manufacturers are looking to future-proof their devices for a future of agentic finance and quantum computing. There’s an old saying in crypto: “not your keys, not your coins.” When you leave Bitcoin, Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency on an exchange, the exchange holds the private keys that control those funds. If it gets…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: HEX and PulseChain founder Richard Heart was reportedly detained in Istanbul in connection with a Finnish tax investigation. The reported legal proceedings are separate from his earlier US securities dispute, and no conviction is established by the detention. Richard Heart, the prominent and controversial founder of HEX and PulseChain, has reportedly been detained by Turkish authorities following a request connected to legal proceedings in Finland. Heart, whose legal name is Richard James Schueler, has faced allegations involving Finnish tax obligations. Reports of the detention emerged in…

In brief Nine blockchain organizations launched the Quantum Alliance, an open standards body to define what “quantum-ready” means and create a common way to test and verify quantum-resistance claims across networks, wallets and infrastructure. The group warns that elliptic-curve signatures leave roughly 6.04 million BTC (~30% of supply) quantum-exposed, citing forecasts pointing toward the late 2020s. Modeled on the IETF, it will work in four groups—migration, zero-knowledge systems, wallet security and cross-chain compatibility. A group of crypto companies is trying to settle one of the industry’s murkiest questions: what it actually means for a blockchain network to be safe from…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: Pirate Chain developers disclosed a vulnerability linked to roughly 39.8 million unauthorized ARRR tokens. The incident raised urgent questions about network supply and how an attack can be investigated when transactions use strong privacy protections. Privacy-focused cryptocurrency Pirate Chain faced a major security crisis after developers reported that unauthorized tokens had been created through a validation flaw. The incident, discussed publicly in mid-October, involved approximately 39.8 million ARRR. That amount was substantial relative to the currency’s existing supply. The project’s privacy features made it difficult to…

In brief A new FEC filing shows Fairshake affiliate Defend American Jobs disclosed spending to oppose the Ohio Democrat has increased to about $46.66 million—the industry’s most expensive 2026 target. Brown, a longtime crypto skeptic, chaired the Senate Banking Committee before losing in 2024, a race Fairshake spent ~$40 million to influence. The blitz follows Fairshake’s Oct. 5 move to back 32 House incumbents with $6 million committed to six. Crypto’s biggest political spender is turning up the pressure on one of the industry’s fiercest critics. Fairshake has reported fresh spending to defeat Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, pushing…

In brief StepFun launched the STEPX Neo on Oct. 13, a 3,999-yuan phone, about $560, running its Step AOS 1.0 operating system with a built-in AI agent called Amoo. Pre-orders opened on JD.com, Tmall and Douyin, and the price includes 12 months of AI access at 100 billion tokens a month. Nearly 100 partners including Alipay and Tencent have signed on, after ByteDance’s Doubao phone agent drew blocks from major Chinese apps in December. StepFun, a Chinese AI startup backed by Tencent, launched the STEPX Neo, a phone whose AI agent is built into the operating system itself instead of…

Trusted Editorial content, reviewed by leading industry experts and seasoned editors. Ad Disclosure TL;DR: Solana Mobile has announced Ledger as its first external hardware partner, bringing its software to Ledger’s Atom device. The move extends Solana Mobile’s strategy beyond its own Saga and Seeker smartphones. Solana Mobile is expanding beyond branded smartphones through a new partnership with hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger. The agreement, announced at Ledger’s October event in Paris, will bring Solana Mobile’s Seeker application and access to the Solana dApp Store to Ledger’s Atom device. The aim is to give users another way to interact with Solana applications…

Miners connected to Binance Pool need to redirect their equipment before 07:00 UTC on Nov. 10, 2026, when Binance will shut the service and stop crediting new mining work.Binance set out the timetable in an Oct. 13 closure notice. The shutdown also covers Pool Savings, Cloud Mining and Transaction Accelerator, alongside Telegram hashrate alerts, email notifications and mining-pool API services.Binance will disable its Stratum URLs and mining endpoints at the cutoff. Later hashrate submissions and mining shares will not be accepted, processed or credited.Eligible shares submitted before the deadline will still enter the final reward calculation under Binance Pool rules.…

In brief Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s top models cost 100 times more per token than their smallest ones, yet many users default to the flagship for everything. Usage leaderboards at Meta, Amazon, and Uber pushed AI bills up, and Uber burned through its 2026 AI tools budget in about four months. Routing tasks to the right model, trimming context, caching and batching cut costs sharply, but there are other techniques to save money. Meta employees burned through 60 trillion AI tokens in 30 days earlier this year, chasing spots on an internal leaderboard nicknamed “Claudeonomics.” Tech columnist Gergely Orosz estimated the…