Germany's largest bank is now officially in the Bitcoin business. Deutsche Bank said Wednesday that its Digital Asset Custody service has gone live for paying institutional and corporate clients in Europe, five years after it first floated the idea of holding crypto for customers. The service lets clients store and move Bitcoin, Ethereum and three stablecoins, with the bank holding the wallets and the private keys on their behalf. For a bank that spent years circling crypto from a safe distance, this is the moment it finally stepped in.

What clients actually get

For now the offering is deliberately narrow. Clients can store and transfer Bitcoin, Ether, Circle's USDC and EURC, and EURAU, the euro stablecoin from AllUnity. The bank manages the wallets and keys, with hardware-based key protection, multi-person approvals, and separate warm and cold storage. There is no trading, no exchange, and no tokenized securities yet, though tokenized financial instruments are on the roadmap. Access runs through Autobahn, the bank's corporate banking platform. The target audience is the bank's corporate and investment banking clients: corporations, asset managers, hedge funds, custodians, brokers and sovereign institutions. Retail customers are not included, and the bank has not named any of its first customers or said what it charges them.

A five-year road

The launch caps a long buildup. Deutsche Bank began readying a crypto custody and trading platform back in 2021, applied for a digital asset custody license in Germany in 2023, and last year reports said it was building the service with technology from crypto exchange Bitpanda alongside its longtime partner Taurus. The formal announcement came on September 16, and the go-live followed authorization from German regulator BaFin under the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation, dated October 12 in the ESMA register. MiCA requires crypto service providers to be licensed, and that authorization passports across the 30 EEA member states, so the bank can serve eligible clients across Europe from its German base. The bank also plans to expand the custody service into Asian financial centers during 2027. The bank was careful to add the usual warning: custody does not protect clients against price swings, fraud, or failures by other market participants, and crypto assets are not covered by deposit-guarantee schemes.

The bigger play behind the custody launch

Custody is only one piece of Deutsche Bank's crypto bet. The same day, the bank signed a memorandum of understanding with Deutsche Asset Management, the majority-owned money manager formerly known as DWS, to explore tokenized money market funds, crypto exchange-traded commodities and stablecoins on the new platform. That manager oversaw about 1.22 trillion euros as of September 30. Separately, Deutsche Bank is one of 21 global lenders, including Goldman Sachs and Citi, behind a joint stablecoin venture known internally as Project Faro. Bloomberg reported on November 10, citing people familiar with the matter, that the group has committed about $270 million to fund five years of operations for a new company expected to be incorporated in the US, targeting a dollar-denominated stablecoin in the first half of 2027, with a euro version next in line. The banks have not publicly confirmed their individual contributions, so that figure is reported rather than confirmed, but the direction is clear enough. The world's biggest banks are no longer debating whether crypto belongs in mainstream finance. They are building the plumbing for it, one regulated product at a time.

The service itself is a modest start: custody and transfers only, for institutions, with no trading yet. It will not move the price today. The signal is in who is doing it and how. A bank whose asset management arm oversees 1.22 trillion euros is now offering regulated custody under MiCA, with tokenized funds and a bank-backed stablecoin on the horizon. Five years ago this was a press release about an idea. Now it is a live service with paying clients. That is the kind of slow, boring, institutional progress that tends to matter more than any single day's price chart.

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Author: Sebastian Marrow
European Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

The biggest Bitcoin miner in America just sold a huge chunk of its Bitcoin, and it is not done yet. MARA Holdings sold 13,597 Bitcoin for about $1.1 billion in the six weeks after September 30, according to its third-quarter shareholder letter, filed on Monday. That is roughly 40 percent of the 34,012 Bitcoin the company held at the end of September, sold in about six weeks. The company says it plans to keep selling. For a firm that pledged in July 2024 to hold every Bitcoin it mined, that is quite a reversal. MARA sold six times as much Bitcoin in those six weeks as it mined during the entire third quarter, which tells you this was not about clearing out a little extra inventory. This was a deliberate change of strategy, and it says a lot about where the mining business is heading.

The Loans Are Gone, and So Is the Old Strategy

The main reason for the sale is simple: MARA had debt, and it wanted it gone. The company used $750 million of the proceeds to repay all of its Bitcoin-backed term loans, releasing 17,477 coins it had pledged as collateral. Less than 5 percent of MARA's remaining Bitcoin is now lent out or pledged, down from 57 percent at the end of September. Those loans were taken out in August to help fund the planned purchase of Long Ridge, a natural-gas power business that MARA expects to close in the coming weeks. The rest of the money is earmarked for AI infrastructure, more debt repayments and a possible share buyback, and MARA has already authorized a $500 million buyback program. The shareholder letter is blunt about the plan: "We intend to continue using bitcoin to build cash for purposes such as AI infrastructure opportunities."

The numbers behind the quarter help explain why. Third-quarter revenue fell 35 percent to $164 million, down from $252.4 million a year earlier. MARA still reported a $632 million profit for the quarter, but that was driven by an $885 million gain on the value of its Bitcoin holdings, not by the mining business itself. Mining is getting harder and less profitable, while power assets and data centers look like the better bet. MARA sold 26,984 Bitcoin in the first nine months of 2026, worth about $1.9 billion, and the post-September sales bring its total for the year to more than 40,000 coins. After the latest sale, MARA holds about 20,415 Bitcoin.

MARA Is Not the Only One Selling

The wider picture makes the MARA sale look less like a one-off and more like a trend. Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain reported on November 10 that 14 publicly traded companies have sold a combined 108,247 Bitcoin so far in 2026, worth about $8.08 billion. MARA leads the list with 40,581 coins sold, worth about $3.03 billion, followed by Riot Platforms with 20,264 coins worth about $1.51 billion and Bitdeer Technologies with 10,553 coins worth about $787 million. Miners account for most of the selling, which makes sense: they are the companies sitting on the biggest stockpiles, and many of them are now chasing the same AI data center opportunity that MARA is.

What It Means for Bitcoin

For traders, the obvious question is what all this selling does to the price. Bitcoin was trading around $73,700 on Tuesday, down about 41 percent from its all-time high near $126,000, and it has been under pressure for weeks. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have now lost money for four straight days, and BlackRock's IBIT has posted seven straight sessions of redemptions. A steady stream of miner selling is one more source of supply hitting a market that is already short of buyers. 

MARA sold its coins at an average of about $81,039, well above the current price, which means it sold into strength rather than panic. And the company is not exiting Bitcoin. It still holds more than 20,000 coins, and it is using the cash to buy power assets and build data centers that could make the company worth more in the long run.

The takeaway is that the biggest Bitcoin miners are no longer acting like Bitcoin holders. They are acting like companies with bills to pay and a new business to build, and they are willing to sell their Bitcoin to do it. That is a real change from the hoarding era, and it is one more headwind for a market that already has plenty of them. If you hold Bitcoin, the miners selling is not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to pay attention. The people who create the supply are telling you, in plain numbers, that they would rather have cash right now.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 It is official. MSCI confirmed on Wednesday evening that Strategy is being removed from its global stock indexes, and the market did not waste any time passing judgment. Shares of the company formerly known as MicroStrategy fell about 7 percent on Thursday to around $114, the lowest level since August 20, after the index provider said the removal takes effect at the close on November 30. The decision had been expected for months, and Strategy itself said in its November 2 quarterly filing that it saw it coming. Expected or not, the bitcoin treasury model has lost its seat at the table of the world's most tracked indexes, and the stock is about 20 percent below its November 4 close.

What MSCI actually decided

MSCI's November review lists Strategy's Class A shares for deletion from the MSCI USA Index and its other Global Investable Market Indexes, with the rebalanced indexes going live on December 1. It is the first removal under new rules for non-operating companies that MSCI finalized on October 15, and the review names five other deletions under the same rules, including Tokyo-listed Metaplanet and Upexi. Under the screen, MSCI first checks whether a company has substantial operating assets, and companies that fail that check face five financial tests. Existing members get removed if they fail the screen in both of their two most recent annual filing periods.

Strategy fought the rule from the start. The company argued that its bitcoin business qualifies as an operating segment under U.S. accounting standards, and executive chairman Michael Saylor and chief executive Phong Le called the treatment of digital asset treasury companies discriminatory in a September letter to MSCI. The message is blunt either way: in MSCI's view, a company whose main business is holding bitcoin looks more like an investment fund than an operating business, and investment funds do not belong in its equity indexes.

The selling nobody can agree on

The first question is how much forced selling this creates, and the estimates are all over the place. Strategy's own math puts it at about 13 million shares, or 3.1 percent of its basic shares outstanding, held by funds tracking the affected indexes. At Wednesday's closing price of $122.35 that is worth roughly $1.59 billion, and Strategy notes it is less than one day of average trading volume. JPMorgan estimated in November 2025 that exclusion could trigger about $2.8 billion in outflows, rising to $8.8 billion if other index providers adopt similar rules, but that estimate was based on MSCI's earlier proposal rather than the final rules, so the two numbers are not measuring the same thing.

The stock closed 1.06 percent higher at $122.35 on Wednesday before MSCI released its decision, then slipped about 2.4 percent in extended trading. Thursday's drop to around $114 suggests the market is pricing in more than just the mechanical selling. Funds that track the affected indexes have until the close on November 30 to sell their Strategy shares and rebalance. Bitcoin did not help, falling to around $72,500 on Thursday, its weakest level since August 20.

The real risk is the buying machine

The forced selling is a one-time event. The bigger worry is what losing index demand does to the machine that made Strategy famous. Strategy funds its bitcoin purchases by selling shares and convertible notes at a premium to the value of its bitcoin, a premium measured by mNAV, the multiple of net asset value. That premium has already compressed from a peak of 3.4 times in November 2024 to about 1.08 times, which means each new share now sells for barely more than the bitcoin backing it. Near 1 times, issuing new shares adds almost nothing, and below 1 times it dilutes existing holders.

The shift is already visible in how Strategy spends its money. A filing for the week ended November 8 showed the company raised $283.8 million by selling 2.05 million common shares, but only $81.9 million of that went toward buying 1,036 bitcoin. The bulk, $188.3 million, went to buying back its STRC preferred stock. Strategy still holds 850,364 bitcoin, worth about $62.6 billion, and reported no bitcoin sales. The company is not in trouble, but it is running a different business than it was a year ago, one where the stock no longer trades at a fat premium to its bitcoin.

Not everyone thinks this matters much. Markus Thielen, founder of 10x Research, told CoinDesk the outcome was widely expected and mostly priced in, and he does not expect any spillover into bitcoin itself. Independent bitcoin analyst Derin Olenik was blunter, calling the exclusion good riddance and saying companies should stop merely stacking coins and start putting them to work, in what he calls Treasury 2.0. The MSCI decision may force that conversation faster than any critic could.

None of this delists Strategy from Nasdaq, and nothing in MSCI's decision forces the company to sell a single bitcoin. What it does is draw a line: the index world has decided that holding bitcoin is not the same as running a business, and Strategy now has to prove its model works without the passive bid that helped carry it this far. Watch whether other index providers follow MSCI, and watch the Nasdaq 100, where Strategy's place is now an open question. If the company can show its bitcoin can earn a return instead of just sitting there, the MSCI exit will look like a footnote. If it cannot, it will look like the day the easy money stopped.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Tonight, shortly after 5 p.m. ET, index provider MSCI will publish its November index review, and the crypto world will be watching one name above all others: Strategy. The company that turned itself into the largest corporate holder of bitcoin expects to be kicked out of MSCI's global stock indexes, which would force the index funds tracking those benchmarks to sell their Strategy shares before the market closes on November 30. JPMorgan analysts have estimated the forced selling could reach about $2.8 billion. Strategy itself puts the number lower, at around $1.57 billion, but either way tonight is the night the bitcoin treasury era gets its first real verdict from traditional finance.

The $2.8 billion question

Here is how the money works. MSCI's indexes are the benchmarks that trillions of dollars in passive funds track, so when a stock leaves an index, every fund that mirrors that index has to sell it. Strategy disclosed in its third-quarter report that it expects its Class A common stock to be excluded, and the company says index funds hold about 13 million of its shares, or 3.1 percent of the shares outstanding, worth roughly $1.57 billion. JPMorgan analysts have put the upper end of the forced selling higher, at about $2.8 billion, with as much as $8.8 billion more if other index providers follow MSCI's lead. The selling would not hit all at once, since funds have until the close on November 30 to rebalance, but traders have already started pricing it in, with MSTR closing at $121.07, down 3.6 percent on the day and about 6.4 percent below its November 5 close of $129.30.

Why MSCI thinks Strategy is not a real company

MSCI's new rule does not mention bitcoin at all. Under the screening rule finalized on October 15, a company first has to show that its operating assets make up more than half of its total assets, and if it fails that test it faces five financial ratio checks covering operating expenses, cash flow, fair value exposure and dependence on outside financing. A company flagged on four or more of those tests is classed as a non-operating company and loses its place in the MSCI Global Investable Market Indexes, and a company already in the indexes only gets removed if it fails the screen in both of its two most recent annual filing periods. MSCI's preliminary list names five companies for deletion, with Strategy, Japan's Metaplanet and Solana treasury firm Upexi as the three crypto names, alongside uranium holder Yellow Cake and an Icelandic investment firm. Another 17 companies sit on a watchlist, including SharpLink, so this is a ruling on the whole playbook of raising money in the stock market to buy crypto, not just one company. Strategy has fought the rule in public, with executive chairman Michael Saylor and chief executive Phong Le calling it discriminatory, arbitrary and misguided in a September letter. The company argues it still runs a software business and reports its bitcoin treasury as an operating segment. MSCI says the screen is industry neutral and applies to any company that looks more like an investment vehicle than an operating business.

An Example of Why Some Bitcoin Traders Have Never Been Strategy Fans

Their argument basically says; we are now in a position where Bitcoin's value (not all, but still too much) depends on what happens to a single company.  When the company began buying billions in Bitcoin under direction of then-CEO Michael Saylor, he quickly became a hero in the crypto world - which was never deserved,

So what could happen to Strategy stock later today, and how much of that could spill over in to Bitcoin? What it would not do: it would not delist Strategy shares, and it would not force Strategy to sell a single bitcoin, since the selling pressure falls on MSTR stock, not on the 850,364 bitcoin the company holds. But the second-order effect is the big factor, because Strategy's whole machine runs on its stock trading at a premium to the value of the bitcoin it holds. That premium is what lets the company sell new shares at high prices or issue low-interest convertible bonds and funnel the cash straight into more bitcoin, building a stack bought for an average of $75,456 per coin at a total cost of about $64.16 billion. Bitcoin was trading near $73,900 on Wednesday, below Strategy's average purchase price, yet the company still bought another 1,036 bitcoin for $81.9 million in the week ending November 8. If tonight's decision dents the premium, every future share sale raises less money and dilutes existing holders more, which makes the next round of bitcoin buying harder to fund. Strategy says removal would have no meaningful impact on its business, and that may turn out to be true, but tonight is the first real test of that claim, and every company that copied the bitcoin treasury playbook will be watching the same list.

So tonight at 5 p.m. ET, check the list. If Strategy is on it, expect a wave of mechanical selling into November 30 and a hard question for every treasury company that followed Saylor's lead. If it survives, it lands on the watchlist and the same fight comes back at the next review. Either way, the era when passive index money flowed into bitcoin treasury stocks without anyone asking what those companies actually do is ending.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 

If you run an LNbits server, stop what you are doing and turn it off. On Sunday, November 8, the project behind the free, open-source Bitcoin Lightning wallet system told every operator to shut down their servers immediately, after what it called a wave of attacks. Two days later the warning is still in force, with no stable security release, no public explanation of the flaw, and no all-clear from the project. What has shown up so far is a test package not meant for production use, which is not a fix.

What happened on Sunday

The first sign of trouble came at about 12:33 UTC on Sunday, when LNbits told operators to disable its Paywall extension while it looked into a possible bug. Paywall is an add-on that charges people before they can see content, and at that point the warning looked narrow. About 80 minutes later the project widened it to every LNbits server, telling all users to stop their servers immediately, saying it had a number of security patches to push. The project also switched off its own hosted service, my.lnbits.com, promising it back within 24 hours, a target of about 17:20 UTC on Monday that came and went with no restoration notice. The escalation tells its own story: whatever the attackers found, it was not confined to one extension.

The clearest confirmed loss comes from Kevin Ravensberg, who runs the BitTipBot tipping service on Telegram. Attackers created new accounts on his LNbits server and withdrew 2,285,545 satoshis, about 0.023 bitcoin or roughly $1,700 at Sunday prices, between 09:22 and 14:00 UTC on November 8. So the attack ran for more than three hours before the first warning, and was still going when the shutdown notice landed. Ravensberg has said he will reimburse affected users himself, though the funds are frozen while the incident is sorted out. LNbits has not said how many servers were hit or how much was taken in total, and that number may never be public.

The patch is late, and the test build is not the fix

LNbits developer Ben Arc estimated on Sunday that patches should be merged and available within 24 to 48 hours, putting the expected arrival between Monday afternoon and about 14:00 UTC today. That window has now closed. What has actually appeared is a pair of security changes merged into the development branch on November 9, numbered 4310 and 4313, which tighten request forgery protection and switch off new account creation by default. A test package, version 1.7.0rc4, reached PyPI at 01:51 UTC today, after an earlier release candidate yesterday. But PyPI labels it a prerelease, still being checked before a stable release, and GitHub still lists v1.6.2 from September 18 as the latest stable version. A development merge and a release candidate are progress, but neither is a patched release operators can install and trust.

The project has not published a CVE identifier or an affected-version range, and has not publicly named the flaw or the extension that was exploited. Ravensberg has said developers confirmed which extension was used against his server, but neither he nor the project has named it in public. That leaves operators guessing whether their own setup was exposed, which is exactly the uncertainty that makes a shutdown notice the right call even when it hurts. LNbits is the accounts layer behind tipping bots, payment terminals and small checkout services, so every hour it stays down is an hour those services cannot move money.

What this does and does not mean

The shutdown notice covers LNbits servers only. It does not cover Lightning nodes, and it does not mean the Lightning Network itself is broken. The attacks hit account creation and withdrawal in LNbits, not the LND or Core Lightning software underneath it, and your regular Lightning wallet is a different thing from an LNbits server. That distinction matters, because a scare like this can convince people the whole network is unsafe when the problem is one piece of software that sits on top of it. LNbits shipped a security release in September after an audit by V12, so this is not a project that ignores security, but audits do not catch everything.

If you run an LNbits server, keep it off until the project publishes a stable patched release and says operators can restart, and trust only its official channels on that. Do not restart on a release candidate, and check your balances before you let users back in. The uncomfortable part is the timeline: the attack ran for hours before anyone was warned, and two days later the fix is still a test build. Open-source wallet software runs on trust, earned by shipping the patch, naming the flaw, and saying plainly who was affected. LNbits has not done that yet.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Coinbase is now, officially, a federally chartered trust bank. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finished the chartering process on Friday, November 6, and Coinbase announced it on Monday, November 9. The new entity is Coinbase National Trust Company, and it puts America's biggest crypto custodian under direct federal banking supervision for the first time. Before anyone gets carried away, this does not make Coinbase a bank in the way most people use the word. It cannot take your deposits, it cannot make you a loan, and it cannot issue a stablecoin. What it can do is hold digital assets for institutions as a fiduciary, under the watch of a federal banking regulator, and that is still a big deal for an industry that spent years asking for exactly this.

What the charter actually covers

The new trust company is a non-insured national trust company based in New York, and its job is fiduciary custody of digital assets, mostly for institutional clients, along with certain transaction services tied to the assets it holds. Coinbase already runs a custody business through Coinbase Custody Trust Company, a limited-purpose trust chartered by New York's financial regulator, and it plans to move that business over to the federal trust company over the next three years. Staking, prime trading and prime financing will stay with Coinbase affiliates, with the trust company acting as a middleman rather than doing those jobs itself. The OCC also attached strings. For the first three years the trust company has to hold at least $60 million in Tier 1 capital and keep enough liquid assets on hand to cover 180 days of operating expenses. One thing the charter does not hand over automatically is access to the Federal Reserve's payment systems, which needs a separate application.

Coinbase is not the first, and it will not be the last

Ripple got its own final OCC approval on October 26, for a national trust bank that will hold the reserves behind its RLUSD stablecoin and act as collateral trustee. Circle, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos all have trust charter applications moving through the OCC as well, according to crypto.news. A year ago, the idea of crypto companies holding federal banking charters sounded like a lobbying fantasy, and now there is a queue forming at the regulator's door. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, gave payment stablecoins a federal framework, and the charters are the next layer of that project. The process itself was not quick. Coinbase applied in October 2025 and got conditional approval on April 2, 2026, and the OCC only signed off on the final step after the company finished its pre-opening requirements. Coinbase vice chairman Ryan VanGrack said the company has spent years asking for clear rules and rigorous oversight, and that the charter puts more of its business behind that commitment. That is corporate language, but in this case the timeline backs it up.

The fight over these charters is not over

Not everyone is cheering. The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC on October 2, arguing that crypto firms can get federal banking status without meeting the obligations that come with being a traditional insured bank. Its president, Rebeca Romero Rainey, said digital assets held at a crypto firm operating under a national trust charter do not carry the same safeguards as money at an insured bank. The lawsuit challenges the OCC's March 2026 chartering rule and asks a federal court in Washington to throw it out. The OCC's position is that national trust banks can do activities connected to traditional trust work, and its final chartering rule took effect April 1, 2026. The practical point is plain. The trust company is not FDIC-insured, so assets held there do not carry deposit insurance, and the legal fight over whether these charters should exist at all is still live. A court could still change the rules after the fact.

So Coinbase is a federally chartered trust company now, and that is a real milestone, not a press release dressed up as one. The custody business that holds hundreds of billions of dollars in client assets now answers to a federal banking regulator, and the rest of the industry is lining up right behind it. Just remember what the charter is and what it is not. It is federal supervision for institutional custody, not a bank account for you, and the court challenge means the whole arrangement could still be argued over for years. The crypto industry spent a decade asking to be treated like the rest of finance. It is getting its wish, paperwork and lawsuits included.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 

Four of the biggest names in crypto just got a date circled on the calendar, and it is not one they picked. On November 5, Senator Richard Blumenthal sent letters to Binance, Tether, World Liberty Financial and Fight Fight Fight LLC, the company behind the $TRUMP memecoin, telling them to start handing over records by November 30 and finish by January 4, 2027. The warning was blunt: if the companies do not produce the records voluntarily by that date, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will consider other ways of getting them. Blumenthal is the panel's ranking Democrat and incoming chair, and January 4 falls one day after Democrats are due to take control of the Senate.

What the letters demand

The four letters are not the same letter sent four times: each one follows a different thread of the same inquiry. The letter to Binance renews requests first made in February and April for records on transactions linked to Iranian entities and Russia's shadow fleet, and it says the exchange has produced no responsive records in 18 months of asking. The letter to Tether renews requests about the use of USDT by sanctioned entities. The letters to World Liberty Financial and Fight Fight Fight renew an inquiry opened in May 2025 into potential conflicts of interest around the Trump family's crypto ventures, covering ownership, foreign investments and safeguards against conflicts. Every recipient was also asked to confirm receipt by November 9, today. No subpoena has been issued yet, but the panel's rules let its chair issue them, so the threat in the letters is a real one.

Binance and the 18-month silence

The Binance letter is the most specific about what has and has not happened, and it is unusually blunt for a document the recipient's lawyers will read. It says the subcommittee has spent 18 months investigating the illicit use of cryptocurrencies, including Binance's anti-money laundering policies, and that the exchange has failed to respond adequately and has not produced any responsive records. Binance pushed back in March, calling the underlying reports false and saying that, to its knowledge, no Binance account had transacted directly with an Iran-based entity. Blumenthal followed up in April, and the November letter says the exchange still has not turned any of it over. Teng was asked to confirm receipt by November 9 and to start producing documents by November 30. Eighteen months of silence is a long time to explain to a committee that is about to gain subpoena power.

Tether, Iran and the $550 million defense

The Tether thread runs through a September 28 report from the panel's Democratic staff, which described USDT as a significant financial lifeline within Iran's shadow banking network. The report put Tether's share of stablecoin market value at about 60 percent and found that 84 percent of 846 sanctioned or seizure-targeted Iran-linked wallets used USDT almost exclusively. Tether has disputed the claims, saying it helped authorities freeze nearly $550 million in Iran-linked tokens in 2026 and arguing that USDT does not provide a haven for sanctioned actors. The subcommittee wants the records that show which picture is closer to the truth. The letters also ask about Tether's dealings with Nxum, the consulting firm co-founded by Bo Hines, the former White House crypto adviser now serving as Tether's US chief executive. That connection reaches beyond sanctions, into the question of who has the industry's ear in Washington.

The Trump-linked firms

World Liberty Financial and Fight Fight Fight are the most politically charged names on the list, and Blumenthal's inquiry into them is the oldest. He opened it in May 2025, and in July 2026 he hosted a public forum that published testimony from $TRUMP coin investors who said they lost thousands of dollars. In June 2026, Blumenthal and four other Senate Democrats called for hearings into a reported $500 million deal for an Abu Dhabi firm to buy a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial. World Liberty Financial's lawyers have disputed Blumenthal's claims and said the company has no affiliation with Fight Fight Fight LLC. Cointelegraph sought comment from all four companies before publishing and did not receive responses from any of them.

None of this is an enforcement action, and nobody has been charged with anything. What it is, is a clock. November 30 is the first checkpoint, January 4 is the hard deadline, and after that the subcommittee's new chair can reach for subpoenas. For traders, the point is that Binance and Tether sit at the center of the market's plumbing, and a Senate fight over their records can turn from slow-moving to fast-moving if a deadline gets missed. Watch November 30 first, and watch whether any of the four starts producing documents before they have to.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Bitcoin fell to about $73,761 late Sunday, its lowest price since August, before clawing its way back above $75,000. The drop came as crypto traders digested two pieces of bad news at once: an investigation into Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, and stalled talks between the United States and Iran. More than $1 billion in leveraged crypto positions were wiped out in 24 hours, and almost all of it belonged to traders who had bet prices would go up. It was the kind of weekend that reminds everyone crypto never sleeps, and neither does bad news.

A scandal at the top of the AI trade

Nvidia's board said on Sunday it had opened an independent investigation after reports that Huang had a relationship with Alice Huang, a business executive whom US intelligence agencies believe was passing information to Beijing. Huang admitted in a message to employees that he had been unfaithful to his wife and apologized for the harm it caused. Nvidia said it has no reason to believe national security or company secrets were compromised, and said the inquiry would look at all available information, with outside independent counsel advising the board. The company also faces questions about Megaspeed, the Singapore-based firm linked to Alice Huang, which has been accused of helping restricted Chinese firms get hold of Nvidia chips in violation of export rules.

The market did not wait for answers. Tokenized Nvidia shares traded on crypto platforms fell about 3.8 percent to around $180, and Nvidia itself was down more than 4 percent in pre-market trading on Monday. That matters for crypto because Nvidia sits at the center of the AI trade that has driven risk appetite across every market in recent years, crypto included. The Nasdaq fell nearly 5 percent last week, its fourth straight weekly loss, and the AI trade that lifted everything in its path is now the thing dragging it down. When the biggest stock in the world wobbles, Bitcoin feels it within hours.

Longs took the worst of it

Of the $1 billion-plus liquidated, about $913 million belonged to longs, according to CoinGlass data. Ether traders got hit even harder than Bitcoin holders in relative terms, with $448 million in ETH positions liquidated against $272 million in Bitcoin. The largest single liquidation was a $48 million ETH long on Binance. Ether had already been on shaky ground after closing Sunday below its 200-day moving average for the first time since August 18, and the flush pushed it under $2,100 before it bounced back toward $2,140. Solana slipped below $90 and traded near $87.60, marking its fifth straight weekly fall.

The selling did not come out of nowhere. US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded about $1.28 billion in net outflows in the week ended November 6, the worst week since June, and that flipped 2026 flows negative for the year, according to The Block. Bitcoin has now closed five straight weeks lower, and the Fear and Greed Index sits at 29, squarely in fear territory. Traders are also watching Tuesday's US inflation report, which lands at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, and Nvidia's own earnings on November 17. There is no shortage of reasons to stay nervous this week.

What comes next

The bounce back above $75,000 is a relief, but it has already started to stall, and Bitcoin is now stuck between support near its 200-day average around $73,150 and resistance at the 100-day average near $77,430. The real test comes when US markets open on Monday and traders get their first chance to price the Nvidia news in the stock market itself. Three House Republican committee chairs have also asked Huang to attend a briefing on November 18, the day after Nvidia reports earnings, so this story is not going away this week. Stalled talks with Iran add another layer of worry, since rising tensions in the Middle East tend to push oil prices up and risk appetite down.

None of this changes what Bitcoin is, but it is a useful reminder of what moves it right now. Crypto trades around the clock, so it takes the first hit whenever a big weekend story breaks, and leverage turns a bad day into a wipeout. The Nvidia investigation may turn out to be a passing storm or the start of something bigger, and nobody knows which yet. Until the stock market weighs in and the inflation numbers land, traders would be wise to treat the bounce with the same caution they should have shown the longs.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Wednesday's rally lasted about a day. Bitcoin climbed back above $81,000 on Wednesday as markets cheered the midterm results, and by Thursday afternoon it had given the whole move back, falling below $76,000 as a rout in artificial intelligence stocks swept through Wall Street and dragged crypto down with it. The speed of the reversal is the story here, because nothing about Bitcoin itself changed in 24 hours. What changed was the mood in the stock market, and crypto followed it down like it always does when fear takes over.

The AI Trade Broke First

Thursday's selling started in AI stocks, not in crypto. The Nasdaq sank nearly 6%, on track for its worst day since the tariff rollout in April 2025, while a chip-sector index plunged more than 10% in early trading, according to CoinDesk. Chipmaker Qualcomm fell about 10% in premarket trading after disappointing smartphone chip sales, and the selling spread from there. The worry, according to analysts at FalconX and GSR, is that the Democrats' midterm sweep could slow the buildout of the data centers powering the AI boom, because greater political opposition could slow new construction and energy approvals. Investors were already asking whether the vast sums being poured into AI infrastructure would ever pay off, and the election result gave them one more reason to doubt it. Bitcoin miners, many of which have been shifting their businesses toward AI computing, tumbled 15% to 20%, and crypto stocks were caught in the same downdraft, with Coinbase, Circle and BitGo falling between 10% and 15% while Strategy, the Bitcoin treasury company, lost 9.6%.

Leverage Did the Rest

Once prices started falling, leverage did what leverage always does and made a bad day worse. More than $1 billion in crypto derivatives positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, with most of the damage coming from traders betting prices would go up. The Block reported that about $880 million of that came in a single four-hour window, with nearly 211,000 traders caught in the wipeout, the largest since late October, when Bitcoin tumbled from nearly $82,000 to $76,000. Bitcoin fell about 6% to roughly $75,700, touching an intraday low near $75,500, its lowest since mid-September, while Ether dropped more than 7% to about $2,247 and Solana, XRP and Hyperliquid fell 6% to 7%. The losses came just a day after $378 million in short positions were liquidated in a single hour as Bitcoin pushed above $80,000, which means traders on both sides of the market have now been wiped out in the space of two days. That is what a market this leveraged looks like when it changes direction twice in 48 hours.

What Actually Changed

For all the drama, it is worth remembering what Wednesday actually was. The post-election rally was driven in large part by short-covering, traders closing bearish bets after a well-telegraphed result, according to Joshua Lim, global co-head of markets at FalconX. "We're seeing some fresh selling come back to the market as the implications on slower datacenter build out enter into focus," Lim said. Carlos Guzman, vice president of research at GSR, put it more bluntly: "The midterms appear to have triggered this sell-off, with investors worried that greater opposition to data-centre expansion could slow the AI buildout." The market has to live with two facts that pull in opposite directions, because the same election that calmed fears about the Iran conflict and sent oil prices lower also made the road harder for crypto legislation, with the CLARITY Act unlikely to pass under the incoming Democratic majorities. Bitcoin is back near its pre-rally levels, and traders are watching the $75,000 to $76,000 zone, where buyers stepped in before, to see if it holds a second time. Wintermute trader Jasper De Maere cautioned against reading too much into a single day, noting that crypto held up relatively well compared with AI stocks and that adoption keeps growing. "Let's see where we land in the short term here, medium term still glass half full," he said, adding that investors should keep an eye out for bargains.

So the rally lasted a day, the selloff lasted a day, and Bitcoin is roughly where it started the week. That is not a crash and it is not a comeback, it is a market that still takes its cues from stocks and still punishes anyone trading with too much leverage. The $1 billion in liquidations is the real lesson of the week, because it shows how fast a crowd can be wrong in both directions. Until Bitcoin can hold above $80,000 for more than a day, the honest read is that nothing has been decided yet, and the next move will probably come from Wall Street before it comes from crypto.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Jack Dorsey's Block has agreed in principle to pay $764 million to settle a Justice Department investigation into anti-money-laundering controls at Cash App, and the number is worth sitting with for a second. The deal, reached in October and disclosed in the company's quarterly filing on November 3, is bigger than the $566 million profit Block reported for the third quarter. Block made less money in three months than it has now agreed to hand over for compliance failures that go back years. The settlement is not final yet, and Block disputes the government's case, but the money is already set aside on the books and the company has warned the final bill could be higher.

A Fine Bigger Than the Quarter

The deal takes the form of a three-year deferred prosecution agreement. Under it, the Justice Department would hold off on a criminal charge accusing Block of failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program under the Bank Secrecy Act, and if Block meets the terms for three years, the charge gets dismissed. The gross figure is about $964 million, cut to $764 million after credits for earlier regulatory settlements, and Block has accrued the full amount as of September 30. The company says it cannot guarantee a final agreement will be reached on those terms, or at all, and that losses above the amount set aside are reasonably possible. It is the same path Binance took in 2023, when it paid $4.3 billion to settle its own money-laundering case.

It Started With a Short Seller

The investigation goes back to March 2023, when short seller Hindenburg Research published a report alleging that Cash App inflated its user numbers by counting duplicate and fraudulent accounts and that weak identity checks let criminals use the platform for scams and money laundering. Block called the report inaccurate and misleading at the time, and it still disputes the basis and methodology of the government's assessment. The Justice Department and the SEC opened inquiries anyway, and while the SEC closed its side in March of this year without recommending enforcement action, the Justice Department kept going. State regulators moved first, and the list of what they found is long.

New York's financial regulator fined Block $40 million in April 2025 after finding a backlog of suspicious-activity alerts that grew from about 18,000 in 2018 to more than 169,000 by 2020. The same review found a screening system that did not block bitcoin transfers to wallets linked to terrorism financing until exposure passed 10 percent. A multistate settlement added $80 million in January 2025, and 46 states took another $45 million in July over Cash App fraud protections. Those payments account for part of the $200 million credit against the Justice Department figure.

Bitcoin Was the Only Part That Shrank

The settlement landed on top of a quarter that was otherwise strong, which makes the bitcoin numbers stand out even more. Block's total gross profit rose 22 percent to $3.24 billion, with Cash App up 27 percent to $2.07 billion and Square up 14 percent to $1.16 billion. Bitcoin went the other way. Gross profit from the bitcoin business fell 50 percent to $52 million, down from $104 million a year earlier, and bitcoin revenue dropped 11 percent to $1.8 billion.

Block says the drop was its own choice, the result of cutting fees on certain Cash App bitcoin transactions as part of a push to turn bitcoin into something people spend rather than something they trade. The company auto-enabled about 1 million Square merchants for Lightning payments in May, waived processing fees on bitcoin through 2026, and launched a national ad campaign in October built around spending bitcoin instead of holding it. Right now, though, it means bitcoin is the smallest and weakest part of Block's business, even as the company asks regulators to trust it with a bank charter. Block is pursuing an industrial bank charter for a unit it calls Builders Bank, which would offer custody and fiduciary services for bitcoin, and regulators weigh compliance history when they decide those applications. A $764 million settlement is not the kind of history that helps.

So the scoreboard reads like this. Block is a healthy company that just had a strong quarter, and it is also a company that agreed to pay more than that quarter's profit to make a criminal charge go away, for problems regulators say go back years. The bitcoin business is shrinking on purpose, the compliance bill is growing by accident, and the bank charter Block wants will be judged partly on how it handles both. Traders who use Cash App to buy bitcoin do not need to do anything differently today, but they should know what kind of company is holding the other end of the trade.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 

A digital bank used by nearly half of Paraguay just collapsed, and the fallout has already claimed a central bank chief and nearly a president. Ueno Bank, which claimed around 3 million customers in a country of roughly 7 million people, was seized by Paraguay's central bank this week after regulators found its solvency ratio had fallen below half of the legal minimum. Customers woke up locked out of their accounts, unable to withdraw or move their money, and the government had to rush emergency laws through Congress to start paying them back.

All this has served as a motivation behind crypto quickly becoming popular there - as Paraguayans have been paying a premium for USDT and Bitcoin on peer-to-peer markets, just to hold money that no bank can freeze.

The bank half the country used

Ueno grew fast after launching as a digital lender in 2021, and by this week it held around $850 million in public funds, including roughly $380 million from state pension and healthcare programs. The central bank's board voted unanimously on November 2 to put the bank into resolution, and the seizure was announced the next day, after adjustments to Ueno's financial statements pushed its capital below half of what the law requires. The freeze left millions of people, pensioners among them, unable to reach their savings, and it put about 9% of the country's banking system deposits in limbo. Congress passed an emergency law on November 4 requiring the deposit guarantee fund to start repaying customers within five business days, and the first payments are going to people with balances of up to 10 million guaraníes. The law also lets the fund advance up to 40 months of minimum wage to each eligible customer, worth about 121.76 million guaraníes, or close to $19,800.

The president tried to quit. Congress said no.

President Santiago Peña announced his resignation on November 5, saying he wanted to protect national stability, but lawmakers refused to accept it. The Chamber of Deputies voted 78 to 0 to impeach him instead, and the Senate summoned him to defend himself the next day, because accepting his resignation would hand him a lifetime Senate seat and the legal immunity that comes with it. Peña had previously invested in Grupo Vázquez, the business group that controls Ueno, and lawmakers have accused him of a conflict of interest over the bank, though he denies wrongdoing and says he sold his stake in March 2025. The attorney general has ordered three criminal investigations into the collapse, prosecutors have charged 27 people connected to the bank with breach of trust and financial fraud, and eight executives were detained on November 3. The head of the central bank, Carlos Carvallo, resigned the same day the seizure was announced.

Paraguayans are paying extra for crypto

With bank accounts frozen and the guaraní sliding, people in Paraguay started paying more than the going rate for digital dollars. The retail price of a US dollar rose from 5,900 guaraníes on October 30 to 6,500 by November 5, a jump of about 10%, and on peer-to-peer markets the median of the ten best offers for USDT stood near 6,399 guaraníes, roughly 4% above the central bank's reference rate. One seller on Bybit even asked 6,942 guaraníes per USDT, about 13% above the official reference, though that was a single asking price rather than the market rate. Bitcoin showed the same pattern, with peer-to-peer buyers paying around 498 million guaraníes, about $76,983, or roughly 1.7% above the international price of $75,716 on November 6. Searches for Bitcoin in Paraguay started climbing on October 23 and peaked on October 30, days before the seizure was announced. Crypto leaders were quick to make the case, with Avalanche founder Emin Gün Sirer saying crypto assets like Bitcoin need no trust in third parties, and Aave founder Stani Kulechov saying Bitcoin matters now more than ever.

This is the story Bitcoin was built for. Satoshi Nakamoto published the whitepaper in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis and stamped the genesis block with a newspaper headline about banks needing a second bailout. Eighteen years later, three million people in Paraguay learned the same lesson the hard way: money in a bank is only yours until the bank says it is not. The premiums Paraguayans are paying for USDT and Bitcoin are the price of money nobody can lock away, and right now that price looks cheap to them.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 

Two of the biggest names in bitcoin mining just told investors they are done mining bitcoin. IREN and Core Scientific both said this week that they expect to wind down their mining operations by December 31, and from January they will be AI data center companies instead. This is not a side project or a slow pivot. Mining now brings in less than a tenth of the money at either company, while renting out power and floor space to AI customers brings in the rest. The machines that used to chase bitcoin blocks are being pulled out to make room for GPUs, and two companies that helped define the mining industry are walking away from it on purpose.

The numbers made the decision for them

Core Scientific was once one of the largest bitcoin miners in the world, and its third-quarter results show how little of that business is left. Mining brought in just $17.5 million of the company's $232.9 million in quarterly revenue, about 7.5 percent, while colocation services brought in $215.4 million. Self-mining revenue fell to $12.3 million from $57.4 million a year earlier, and the company had nearly half as many miners running at the end of September as it did at the end of 2025. Chief financial officer Jim Nygaard told investors on Thursday's earnings call that the company expects to complete the wind-down during the fourth quarter and enter 2027 as a pure-play, high-density colocation provider. The pivot started in 2024 with hosting deals for CoreWeave, and Core Scientific now counts CoreWeave and AMD as customers under agreements covering roughly 1.1 gigawatts of capacity. The company also took $266.5 million in mining asset impairments in the first quarter of this year, a sign of how fast the old equipment lost value once the strategy changed.

IREN's numbers tell the same story from the other side of the world. The Australian-founded company reported $200 million in AI cloud revenue for the quarter, up 182 percent from the previous quarter and nearly 88 percent of its $228 million in total revenue. Mining revenue fell 58 percent to $28 million over the same period. IREN signed a five-year, $9.7 billion cloud contract with Microsoft in November 2025 and has built up a $20.3 billion backlog of AI work, and it aims to have the switch substantially complete by December 31, with only limited mining continuing into 2027. The company pushed back its target for reaching $4 billion in annual AI revenue from late 2026 to January 2027, and it still needs to raise about $6 billion of the $15 billion in spending planned through the end of fiscal 2027. Even so, the direction is clear, and the mining rigs are not coming back.

The AI trade giveth and taketh away

There is a twist in the timing that the two companies will not enjoy. Their shares fell hard on Thursday, IREN by about 17 percent and Core Scientific by about 11 percent, as part of the same AI stock selloff that dragged bitcoin below $76,000. The fear driving that selloff is that the AI data center boom may be slowing, which is exactly the business these two companies are betting their futures on. TeraWulf, another miner turned AI host, reported this week that its bitcoin mining revenue fell 69 percent while its AI leasing income surged, and Riot Platforms signed a $28 billion lease with Anthropic and is selling its mined bitcoin to pay for the build. Across the industry, public miners wrote down about $1.1 billion in asset value in the first half of the year as they restructured toward AI. The whole sector is making the same bet at the same time, and Thursday showed what happens to that bet when Wall Street gets nervous about AI spending.

What it means for bitcoin

For bitcoin itself, the departures are less dramatic than they sound. Mining is spread across many operators around the world, and the network keeps running no matter which companies decide to stop. What changes is the shape of the industry around it, because the public miners were the ones with cheap power, big facilities, and access to capital markets. Those assets are now being pointed at AI, and the companies that remain pure miners will be smaller and more specialized. The irony is hard to miss. Bitcoin miners spent years arguing that their power contracts and data centers were valuable in their own right, and they were right. The value just turned out to be bigger for training AI models than for mining bitcoin, and the market is now pricing them on that basis. Anyone holding shares in a mining company should check what business they actually own today, because the name on the ticker may no longer describe the work being done.

Two giants of bitcoin mining are quitting by New Year, not because mining failed but because AI pays several times more for the same power and the same buildings. The network will be fine, and the miners that stay will keep mining. The bigger story is that the AI boom has now swallowed the industry that grew up around bitcoin, and the companies that made the switch first are the ones that will live or die on whether the AI buildout keeps going.

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Author: Dorian Fenwick
Silicon Valley Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 The list of companies that want nothing to do with OKXICE's tokenized stock platform hit 67 this week, and two of the biggest names in tech just joined it. Apple and Meta both filed formal objections to having their shares traded as tokens on the new venue, a joint project from crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. The count stood at 50 when we last covered this story on Monday, and it has grown by 17 in four days. Of the 62 companies OKXICE originally picked for its lineup, 56 have now objected, which is about 90 percent of the whole list. The only names left standing are six companies that already live and breathe crypto.

The week the no’s piled up

The objections arrived in waves all week. A notice dated November 2 pushed the total to 56, adding Tesla, Amazon and Netflix to the list of objectors. The next day brought Apple, Home Depot and GE Vernova, taking the count to 59. Thursday added Nebius, Boeing and ServiceNow, and Friday finished the week with five more: Meta, Palantir, S&P Global, KLA and Super Micro Computer. Eleven of the 67 objectors were never on OKXICE's original list at all, which means companies are objecting before they are even asked, just to make sure their shares stay off the platform. The deadline for the companies named in the October 4 notice passed this week, and venues have up to five business days to publish objections, so the public list can lag behind the decisions companies have already made.

Why a simple objection is enough

The objections work because of the SEC's Innovation Exemption, issued on September 17. Under that order, a qualifying platform can trade tokenized stocks without registering as a traditional exchange, but it has to notify each company first and give it 30 calendar days to object in writing. A company that objects in time keeps its shares off that venue, and OKXICE has to leave those securities out of its lineup. The block applies only to OKXICE and only to tokens issued by an unaffiliated third party, so it does not stop a company from tokenizing its own shares or working with a different platform. OKXICE will not issue the tokenized securities or hold customer assets itself, and it plans to offer round-the-clock trading through permissioned liquidity pools on XLayer, OKX's own blockchain, with stablecoins used for settlement.

What is left on the menu

That leaves six names without a disclosed objection, and every one of them is a crypto company: Strategy, Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, Securitize and BitGo. Securitize and BitGo had already said they did not plan to object, and none of the six has given any sign of changing its mind. It is worth remembering that not objecting is not the same as endorsing the project, and there is no guarantee any of the six will actually be trading when the venue opens. The bigger problem for OKXICE is what the lineup now looks like. The whole pitch was the chance to trade shares of famous companies around the clock on a blockchain, and the famous companies have almost all walked away. Demand for tokenized stocks elsewhere has been thin too: a Dune report found the median decentralized trading pool for tokenized equities held just $92 as of August 31. A venue that launches with only crypto stocks on it is a very different product from the one OKXICE announced, and it is not clear who it is for.

Four days ago this looked like a setback with 50 objections. Now it looks like a rout, with 90 percent of the original lineup gone and the two biggest tech companies in the world among the latest to say no. Tokenized stocks are still coming, and the SEC has made room for them, but the companies whose shares traders actually want are not rushing to join in. OKXICE can still launch with the names that remain, yet the lineup will look nothing like the one it first promised, and the market will decide whether a tokenized stock exchange that only lists crypto companies is worth trading on at all.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Zcash had a very good day yesterday. The privacy coin jumped close to 12 percent to about $1,318, with more than $1.2 billion changing hands in a single day, and it muscled its way back into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market value. Unfortunately those were short lived and the market had reversed them by the following day. 

But what will hold are the legitimate improvements Zcash devs have been working on, as they are about to switch on its biggest network upgrade in years, an upgrade called NU7, and traders spent the day positioning for it. The upgrade is expected to activate around Thursday, November 5, once the chain reaches block 3,543,405, and it will make Zcash blocks three times faster.

Three Times Faster, Same 21 Million

The headline change in NU7 is speed. Under a change known as ZIP 218, the target time between blocks falls from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, which means a first confirmation arrives in about a third of the time it used to take. An exchange that waits for three confirmations before crediting a deposit would see the wait drop from nearly four minutes to about 75 seconds, assuming it keeps the same requirement. Faster blocks do not mean more new ZEC flooding the market, because the reward paid out per block falls by a factor of three at the same time, so daily issuance stays the same and the 21 million supply cap and the four-year halving schedule do not change. The upgrade also introduces a Network Sustainability Mechanism that puts 60 percent of transaction fees into a reserve for future mining rewards while miners keep the other 40 percent, with payouts from that reserve not starting until around February 2031. Old version 4 transactions stop working at activation, which means any ZEC still sitting in the original Sprout pool becomes unspendable, so anyone holding coins there needed to move them before the switch flipped.

Privacy Is Back in the Spotlight

Zcash has had a remarkable year even before this week, with the token up roughly 170 percent since January, and part of that run comes from privacy moving back to the center of the conversation. A spot Zcash exchange-traded fund from Grayscale started trading in August, which gave regular investors a simple way to buy exposure without touching a wallet or an exchange. The election added another layer to the story, because a policy memo posted on the Zcash forum this week warned that financial privacy and illicit finance could face greater scrutiny once the incoming Democratic majorities take office in January. Some traders read that as a reason to own the one major coin built around encrypted payments that hide the sender, the recipient and the amount, while others simply saw a coin with a dated catalyst and a chart pointing up. Either way, the move was not just a rising tide lifting every boat, because ZEC bounced even while several other large tokens sat flat or lower, which suggests traders were buying Zcash for Zcash reasons.

What to Watch Next

The first test comes the moment NU7 activates, because upgrades that look great on paper have a habit of producing surprises when real software meets a live network, and node operators were told to install compatible software ahead of time. The next test is whether the price holds above the recent highs, because ZEC is still about 60 percent below its all-time high of $3,191.93 even after this week's run, and traders are watching the $1,350 area where the rally stalled on Wednesday. There is also unfinished business inside the community, because Zcash Community Grants withdrew a proposal this week that would have moved 98,000 ZEC toward mining rewards, and a rival plan backed by two community groups would send future funding into a development and legal-defense lockbox instead. None of that changes what NU7 does on day one, but it will shape how the network pays for its own future once the upgrade is behind it.

Zcash spent years as the coin everyone respected and few people traded, and this week it reminded the market why it still matters. The upgrade makes the network faster without printing a single extra coin, the privacy story is only getting louder, and the token is back in the top 10 after a 170 percent run this year. If NU7 flips on cleanly and the price holds its gains, the next question will not be whether privacy coins are back, but how far this one can run.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

 The group behind the biggest crypto heist in history is not done, and it is getting better at its job. The FBI blames North Korea's TraderTraitor unit for the $6.3 billion theft from Binance on October 29, and a new report from Bloomberg says the group is now using artificial intelligence to pick its targets. The unit may have only around a dozen members, according to experts cited in the report, but it hunts what cybersecurity researchers call "big game": large crypto companies with deep wallets, not individual investors. Its previous record was the $1.5 billion Bybit theft in 2025, and the Binance job smashed that record in about 20 minutes.

TraderTraitor does not break in through the front door. It studies a target company, learns how its systems and payment flows work, and then goes after the people who hold the keys. The group is known for approaching employees with access to sensitive systems and luring them with lucrative fake job offers, a tactic that ends with a compromised laptop or a clicked link. Binance has said its own initial investigation found a compromised laptop belonging to an engineer as the point of breach. Nick Carlsen, a senior investigator at TRM Labs, told Bloomberg that novel techniques used by the group suggest it is making ample use of AI in its recent hacks, and Park Seong-su, a threat researcher at Zscaler, said the new tools have lowered the barriers to carrying out advanced operations while speeding them up tremendously. Carlsen added a detail worth remembering: for all the talk of AI, the group's bread and butter is still the human part.

The scale of the operation is hard to overstate - North Korea is believed to be responsible for 89 percent of reported crypto hack losses in 2026

That's according to Chainalysis figures cited by Bloomberg, and the $6.36 billion taken from Binance is worth nearly 20 percent of North Korea's estimated annual economic output. United Nations experts said in 2024 that the country's cyber thefts and illicit financial activity could be funding about 40 percent of its banned weapons programs. Crypto has now overtaken the old revenue streams. Where Pyongyang once smuggled cigarettes and forged dollar bills, its hackers now bring in billions in pure profit from a single successful heist, and the money is increasingly flowing into conventional military spending as well, from new naval vessels to drone technology.

But the full story may be more complicated, because while Bloomberg's sources say AI is helping TraderTraitor find and compromise its targets, blockchain analytics firm Elliptic says it has found no evidence that AI directed the laundering of the stolen Binance funds. The laundering was automated, with about 20 automated services moving the money through decentralized exchanges, lending protocols and cross-chain bridges in less than three days, but Elliptic co-founder Tom Robinson said the pattern fits scripts written and supervised by people, not an AI agent making its own decisions. The numbers behind the cleanup are still staggering. In under four days the hackers used about 12,000 wallets across 11 blockchains, roughly one new wallet every 25 seconds, and more than 40,000 transactions. About $2.85 billion, or 44 percent of the stolen funds, has been frozen or seized, while the hackers still control about $3.28 billion spread across more than 950 wallets. Elliptic also found about $16 million sent to addresses holding proceeds from September's Bitget exploit, which suggests the same laundering operation is handling funds from more than one attack.

For anyone holding crypto on an exchange, the lesson is uncomfortably simple. Your money is only as safe as the least careful employee with access to the systems that move it, and the people trying to find that employee now have AI helping them search. Exchanges are beefing up security around staff with key access, but TraderTraitor has already shown it can get past the defenses of the biggest exchange in the world. Self-custody is not a slogan here, it is the one defense that does not depend on a stranger's laptop staying clean.

The AI angle is real, but it is worth keeping it in proportion. The evidence so far says AI helped the hackers choose and reach their target, while the laundering that followed looks like old-fashioned automation run by human hands. That distinction matters less than it sounds, because either way the group is faster, richer and harder to stop than it was a year ago, and it has now shown it can take $6.3 billion from the largest exchange on earth in less time than a lunch break. The next target is probably already being picked.

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Author: Ren Nakamura, Asia Newsroom, GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Two months ago, a bug in the software behind the Liquid Network let an attacker mint about 4,000 LBTC tokens backed by nothing at all, then swap them for real bitcoin worth roughly $320 million. Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain run by a federation of companies led by Blockstream, and it exists to move bitcoin faster and more privately than the main chain allows. The attack drained the federation wallet from about 4,205 bitcoin down to 197, leaving the tokens that traders and exchanges rely on backed by almost nothing. On Monday, the Liquid Federation announced the hole is closed and every LBTC is backed one-to-one again, which is good news for anyone holding the token. The part that deserves a closer look is how the hole got closed, because the attacker never gave all the money back.

The white hat who kept $47 million

The attacker called themselves a white hat and left a message in a Bitcoin transaction saying exactly that, then returned about 3,400 bitcoin the day after the attack, once Blockstream said the bridge nodes had been patched. What stayed behind was roughly 600 bitcoin, worth about $47 million at current prices, and the attacker wanted a 10 percent bug bounty in exchange for handing it over. Blockstream said no, and said it plainly: taking assets without authorization and refusing to return them is a crime, not responsible disclosure, and this is theft, not white-hat behavior. The company refused to pay a ransom for the remaining coins, and the money stayed gone. That refusal is the reason the federation had to find about 600 bitcoin somewhere else to make LBTC whole again.

Blockstream wrote the check

The money came from Blockstream itself, according to Samson Mow, a Liquid Federation board member, who identified the company as the source of the deposits that closed the gap. The deposits arrived in pieces, with about 50 bitcoin landing on October 28, then 300 bitcoin and a final 250 bitcoin on November 2, and the federation announced full backing the same day. Adam Back, the chief executive of Blockstream, posted a screenshot of the network dashboard showing assets matching liabilities at 100 percent, with a reserve deficit of exactly zero. SideSwap, one of the federation members, reported about 4,270 bitcoin in reserve against the same amount of LBTC on November 3. The bug itself was fixed quickly, with a patched version of the Elements software released on September 9, three days after the exploit, and Blockstream said no private keys were lost and none of the network operators were hacked.

What is still not back to normal

Full backing does not mean everything is back to the way it was, because direct withdrawals from the federation are still restricted, and users have had to swap bitcoin and LBTC through participating providers for weeks instead of using the network's own peg-out path. The federation has not said when those restrictions will lift, and the announcement this week did not address it either. There is also the question of who exactly paid for what, since the blockchain shows the deposits arriving but does not name the people behind them, and only Mow has pointed at Blockstream in public. For LBTC holders, the practical result is the same either way: the token is backed again, and the sidechain survived an attack that took about 95 percent of its reserves in a single day. For everyone else, the story is a reminder that the words white hat and hacker can describe the same person on the same day, and the difference between a rescue and a robbery can come down to how much money comes back.

Liquid is whole again, and that matters, because a sidechain that loses its backing and never gets it back is finished. Blockstream paid roughly $47 million to make that happen, refused to call a thief a white hat, and got its network back to full backing in about two months. The lesson for anyone holding tokens on a sidechain or a bridge is simple enough: the peg is only as strong as the people standing behind it, and this time the people behind it paid up. The attacker, meanwhile, is still holding about 600 bitcoin, and nobody knows who they are.

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Author: Cedric Holloway
New York Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News

Tuesday night changed the math for crypto in Washington. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, according to projections from CBS, NBC, CNBC and the Associated Press, and the result puts the crypto industry's most important piece of unfinished legislation on a countdown clock. The CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill that would finally settle which regulator oversees which tokens, now has until January 3 to get through the current Congress, or it dies and has to start over from scratch in a Congress run by the other party. Bitcoin did what it usually does when Washington throws it a curveball: it fell first and asked questions later, dropping to about $75,600 overnight before climbing back above $78,000 by morning.

The bill that was already stuck

The CLARITY Act passed the House back in July 2025 by 294 votes to 134, with 78 Democrats voting for it, and then it hit a wall in the Senate. On September 15, the Senate voted 49 to 50 on a procedural motion just to open debate, 11 votes short of the 60 needed to move forward, and every one of the 49 yes votes came from a Republican. The bill stalled on two issues that had little to do with the technology itself: ethics rules about federal officials holding crypto, and language about stablecoin yield that regional banks said would drain their deposits. Senator Mark Warner said Congress could not pass the bill while the president was allowed to profit from crypto personally, and Senator Elizabeth Warren said the ethics language could not be enforced against him. Senator Thom Tillis filed a motion to reconsider after the vote, which keeps a revote possible during the lame-duck session, but it would still need 11 more yes votes than the bill got in September.

The new bosses in town

The election also reshuffles who runs the committees that matter most to crypto. Warren is in line to chair the Senate Banking Committee, and Maxine Waters is in line to chair the House Financial Services Committee, which would handle any new version of the bill. In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown defeated Republican Senator Jon Husted, who had voted for the CLARITY Act in September, and the crypto industry's main political action committee, Fairshake, had committed $30 million against Brown. Brown could also end up chairing the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Not every result was bad news for the industry: in Texas, James Talarico won his Senate race after campaigning for crypto rules aimed at curbing fraud while allowing innovation. TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg, who follows Washington for Wall Street, offered the gloomiest read of the night, saying a Democratic sweep could end the bill's chances for two years and predicting investigations into President Donald Trump's crypto ties. Senator Angela Alsobrooks, one of the bill's negotiators, still says a deal is possible before January, and Warren has said she favors bipartisan crypto legislation, just not the version senators saw in September.

What does not change on Wednesday

For all the drama, the election does not change a single rule overnight. Stablecoins remain governed by the GENIUS Act, which is already law, and the Securities and Exchange Commission and the CFTC can keep writing rules without any new legislation from Congress. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt has said regulators would not wait around for the lame-duck session. The market reaction told the same story: Bitcoin slid from about $77,300 late Tuesday to a low near $75,600 in the early hours of Wednesday, then recovered past $78,000 by the morning, with ether up about 2 percent and DeFi tokens leading the rebound. About $469 million in leveraged positions were liquidated over 24 hours, according to Coinglass, a sign traders were guessing at headlines rather than trading on facts. Nothing in the results changes the value of a single token, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

The real deadline is January 3, when the new Congress convenes and every unfinished bill, including the CLARITY Act, has to be reintroduced from the beginning. That gives the current Congress a lame-duck session of about two months to find 11 more Senate votes for a bill that could not find them in September, under a Democratic majority that will write the next version on its own terms if this one fails. The industry spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars getting this bill to the edge of the finish line, and it now has 60 days to close the deal or start over with a very different set of people holding the pen.

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Author: Rowan Marrow
Seattle Newsroom
GlobalCryptoPress | Breaking Crypto News