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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…

In brief Developer Brandon Thomas released WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, free open-source clones of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint written in Rust with help from Anthropic’s Claude. WordCraft covers 88% of Word’s ribbon features and GridCraft handles 513 of Excel’s 523 worksheet functions, but the team rates them only 50% to 60% ready for real work. The release follows Thomas’ ArtCraft clones of Adobe’s apps and targets a Microsoft 365 subscription that costs $99.99 a year for a single user. You have two options: Pay $100 every year for Microsoft Office online, or pay nothing for the vibe-coded “Office” clone…

In brief Coinbase, which says it custodies roughly 5% of all Bitcoin, urged developers to start preparing for the quantum threat now, warning that consensus changes and migration “can take years.” It laid out technical requirements—backing a flexible “container” design like BIP-360, a staged “1-of-2” classical-plus-quantum spending path, and compatibility with the MPC key-splitting custodians rely on. The exchange said dormant, lost, and Satoshi-era coins are a separate governance problem. Coinbase is pressing Bitcoin’s developers to begin preparing for the quantum-computing threat before it’s too late, laying out a detailed technical wish list for how the network should harden itself…

In brief Standard Chartered launched direct Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for affluent UAE clients on Wednesday after receiving licensing approval from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. Eligible Professional Investor clients can buy and sell BTC and ETH through their existing bank accounts, with the bank handling custody and settlement in a closed-loop model built with SC Ventures-backed Zodia Markets. The bank called the service a global first for Standard Chartered and plans to expand it to other markets, though it gave no timeline. Standard Chartered will now let its wealthier clients in the United Arab Emirates buy and sell Bitcoin…

In brief U.S. consumer prices rose 3.7% year over year in September, above the 3.6% forecast, as gasoline jumped 9.1% in a single month. Odds of an October Fed rate hike roughly doubled from 22% after the report, and the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to about 5.3%. Bitcoin fell 1.5% to $82,142 and is holding the $81,847 to $82,305 Fibonacci golden zone, with $81,603 as the next support. Bitcoin fell 1.5% to $82,142 on Wednesday after U.S. inflation came in hotter than expected, dragging most of the crypto market down with it. Ethereum dropped 2.8% to $2,440, Solana lost 1.9%…

Bitcoin miners face a projected 5.68% difficulty increase around Oct. 16, putting equipment with thin electricity cushions under pressure. If Bitcoin’s price, block subsidy and average fees per block stay unchanged, expected revenue per unit of computing power would fall 5.37%.Startmining’s network dashboard, captured at 07:02 UTC on Oct. 14, put difficulty at 132.72 trillion and hashprice at $39.77 per PH/day. Hashprice measures expected daily revenue from one petahash per second of computing power, before expenses.For illustrative equipment using 20 joules per terahash and paying 8 cents per kWh, electricity costs $38.40 daily per PH/s. Its $1.37 cushion at the…

In brief Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, is buying Saldo Bank, an EU-licensed lender based in Lithuania, the Financial Times reported. Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said customers will be able to borrow and lend against their assets without selling them, in an undisclosed deal expected to close in 2027. The deal comes as a U.S. community bank lobby sues the federal bank regulator over the trust charters it has granted to crypto firms. Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, is buying Lithuania-based Saldo Bank as it expands into lending and card issuing, the Financial Times reported…