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In brief Mastercard and BVNK launched the Global Money Platform, a modular infrastructure layer letting businesses embed multi-currency accounts holding fiat and stablecoins side by side. It ties into Mastercard Move for local-currency payouts and lets users spend stablecoin balances across Mastercard’s merchant network, with Nuvei and Marqeta among first integrators. Mastercard framed it for a “multi-money” future, with planned support for agentic commerce and tokenized deposits. Mastercard is folding stablecoins into its sprawling payments empire, launching a platform that lets businesses hold, move, and spend traditional currencies and digital dollars side by side through a single connection.Unveiled Thursday, the…

In brief Ledger has announced Atom, a touchscreen Android device that incorporates a Secure Element running Ledger OS. Solana Mobile named Ledger as its first hardware expansion partner, with its Seeker app and Solana dApp Store preinstalled on Ledger’s new Atom device. The launch comes as Ledger investigates hidden implants found in hardware wallets sold through a reseller in Southeast Asia. Ledger’s new Atom device will ship with Solana’s Seeker app preinstalled, the companies announced on stage at Ledger’s Op3n conference in Paris on Thursday.Billed as a “signer” rather than a hardware wallet, the Atom is an Android-powered touchscreen device…

Ethereum staking could get faster exits under EIP-8061, but new validators would still have to wait for capped entry before earning rewards.Validator Queue displayed 1,282,776 ETH waiting to enter staking and an estimated wait of 22 days, 6 hours when checked on Oct. 15. Its Oct. 14 snapshot, recorded at 21:17 UTC, showed 1,260,628 ETH and an estimated 21 days, 21 hours.For a direct depositor, the delay postpones native staking income. A liquid staking pool such as Lido can give a new holder exposure to rewards from validators already working. The incoming ETH can still be waiting to activate, leaving…

In brief The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Virtual Currency Unit, working with the FBI, disrupted 112 servers and 241 web domains used in a crypto investment scam. The operation targeted Russian-speaking Americans through Facebook ads, and prosecutors estimate it stole tens of millions of dollars, some of it victims’ entire life savings. Prosecutors have seized about $300,000 in stolen funds so far and say they are working to recover more. Brooklyn prosecutors have dismantled the online infrastructure of a multinational crypto investment scam that targeted Russian speakers in the U.S., seizing and disrupting 241 web domains and 112 servers, District Attorney…

In brief Alpenglow activates on Solana mainnet in epoch 1064, which starts on Wednesday, October 21, at approximately 15:00 UTC, according to the Solana Foundation. The upgrade replaces TowerBFT and targets transaction finality of roughly 150 milliseconds, down from about 12.8 seconds today. Vote transactions will leave blocks, so Solana’s headline transaction counts and TPS figures will drop sharply without any drop in real activity. Solana has locked in October 21 for Alpenglow, a full replacement of the system its validators use to reach consensus. The switch is tied to epoch 1064, which the Solana Foundation expects to begin around 15:00…

In brief The Bank of Russia added Sberbank to its register of crypto exchange operators on October 12, six days after listing it as a digital depository. Sberbank plans to launch its first crypto products on December 1 inside SberBank Online, SberInvestments and SberBusiness, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT. Retail buyers face a 300,000 ruble annual cap per intermediary and a mandatory knowledge test, and paying for goods with crypto remains illegal in Russia. The Bank of Russia has added Sberbank to its register of organizations authorized to exchange digital currencies, clearing the country’s largest lender to buy and…

In brief Autonomous AI agents have made over 138 million crypto payments through Coinbase’s x402 protocol on Base, per Chainalysis, as “agentic commerce” emerges as one of crypto’s fastest-growing use cases. The payments are tiny—87%+ fell between a hundredth of a cent and 10 cents—the kind of micro-transactions stablecoins handle but card rails can’t. The boom rides maturing infrastructure from Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and Google, though earlier research suggests much agent activity may be scripts, not genuine agents. AI agents are beginning to spend real money, and increasingly they’re paying in crypto.That’s the picture from a new Chainalysis report, which…

In brief 420 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, signed an open letter published Tuesday urging AI labs to airgap cyber-capable models by default. The letter follows a summer in which models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Moonshot AI escaped their test sandboxes, several of them hacking real companies. Signatories want an international body to set containment standards and log every containment failure, with reports eventually made public. More than 400 scientists—including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI, and Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Award in 2018—want the most dangerous AI models cut off…