Strategy posted the largest operating income in its history on Thursday, booking $20.91 billion for the third quarter of 2026. Most of that total came from a paper gain on the company’s bitcoin stack.
Net income reached $19.53 billion, or $44.75 per diluted share, up from $2.79 billion a year earlier.
Chief Financial Officer Andrew Kang, who announced his departure in the same release, framed the result plainly: “Q3 operating income of $21 billion was the largest ever in Strategy’s history.”
Strategy marks its bitcoin to market each quarter, so every price move flows into earnings. Bitcoin rallied during the period. The company’s 848,517 bitcoin were worth $68.9 billion as of October 23, when the token traded at $81,200. The holdings carry an average cost of $75,446, which leaves the position in the black on paper.
Kang pointed to the purchases as the engine of the quarter, saying the company “increased our bitcoin holdings by 26% year-to-date in a challenging bitcoin market.”
Total revenue fell 3%from a year ago to $125.4 million, below analyst estimates of $127.2 million. Gross profit came in at $89.6 million, a 71% margin compared with 70% a year earlier. The company ended September with $2.50 billion in cash and equivalents and $3.40 billion in short-term investments.
Strategy’s bitcoin per share slips
Bitcoin per share, the metric management uses as its main yardstick, moved the other way. The BTC yield stands at negative 3.7% for the year, meaning each share holds less bitcoin than it did in January. Measured in dollars, the bitcoin position shows a $2.03 billion loss over the same period. To fund preferred dividends and stock buybacks, the company has sold roughly $431.8 million of bitcoin this year, a figure the release puts at approximately that amount.
Strategy raised $21.23 billion of capital in 2026, including $5.41 billion in net proceeds from its at-the-market program during the third quarter alone. The company then spent a large part of that money on its own preferred stock. It repurchased 20,980,508 shares of STRC for $2.04 billion at an average of $97.39 per share, a discount to the $100 stated amount.
Chief Executive Phong Le said the buyback program was meant to put the security on firmer footing: “Strategy demonstrated its commitment to returning STRC to health.” Management said it intends to keep buying while STRC trades below par, and about $956.7 million remains under the authorization.
The company’s dollar reserves now total $5.07 billion, made up of a $4.83 billion USD Reserve and $242.4 million of USD Cash. Strategy says that cushion covers 3.4 years of dividend and interest obligations. The board kept the STRC dividend rate at 12.00% to support trading near the $100 stated amount.
STRC moves to daily dividends
Shareholders approved a move to daily dividends on October 28. STRC begins paying daily on November 1, and STRF, STRK, and STRD follow on January 1, 2027.
Le framed the change as a step toward a different kind of market: “Daily dividends are a natural step toward the tokenized, 24/7/365 financial system. Digital Credit is being built for that world, and Strategy intends to lead it.”
Strategy also expects its preferred distributions to count as a non-taxable return of capital for ten years or more, because it does not expect positive accumulated earnings and profits. Shareholders should consult their own tax advisers.
That said, Strategy’s STRC stock is nearing $100. Earlier today, STRC reached $99.99 which once par would reopen funding for Bitcoin purchases. As mentioned ealier, shareholders approved daily dividends to improve liquidity and reduce price volatility. That said, Strategy has not yet confirmed a restart of STRC share issuance.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Strategy-MSTR-is-About-to-Have-More-Bitcoin-Than-BlackRocks-IBIT-VkIJdv.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-29 23:18:272026-10-29 23:18:27Strategy (MSTR) Posts Record Operating Income as Bitcoin Rebounds in Q3 2026
Bitcoin dropped below $79,000 on Thursday as reports of a suspected multibillion-dollar hack at Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, rippled through markets.
The selloff followed reports of heavy outflows from Binance-linked wallets. Some social media reports cited suspicious outflows of up to $5.8 billion, citing onchain data that shows about $3.55 billion in incoming transfers to an unlabeled wallet.
Conor Grogan, a senior director at Coinbase, put the figure at $5.8 billion.
Stablecoin issuers moved to freeze funds. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said the company froze more than 1.567 billion USDT. Circle froze about $823 million in USDC, according to former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who remains a shareholder.
Combined freezes range from $1.8 billion to $2.4 billion depending on reports. “Protecting the industry and our partners is our main priority,” Ardoino said.
Binance has made no official confirmation of a breach. Co-founder Yi He wrote on X that the company is aware of reports of a potential security issue and that its security teams are reviewing all relevant information.
“We are aware of reports of a potential security issue and we are actively investigating…our security teams are reviewing all relevant information with urgency, and we will provide updates through official Binance channels as soon as we have verified information. Users should remain cautious of scams and should not trust unofficial links, messages, or requests for account information.”
Zhao wrote that, in his view, the exchange appears to have been hacked, and he expects all user funds to be covered.
“I don’t manage Binance anymore, but as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered,” Zhao posted.
Blockchain researcher Spreek flagged the activity, which reportedly included a transfer through a contract call allegedly funded by Tornado Cash. Blockaid said it is investigating $3.3 billion in suspicious outflows from Binance hot wallets across Ethereum, Arbitrum and Avalanche.
If confirmed, the incident would be the largest crypto theft on record, surpassing the February 2025 Bybit hack of roughly $1.5 billion. Aave reportedly froze lending markets to block the suspected attacker from borrowing.
Binance.US said the incident does not affect its platform.
Figures remain fluid. One estimate puts the realized loss near 0.7% of Binance customer assets, and other reports continue to revise totals. Neither Binance nor law enforcement has released a formal account of the cause.
Crypto exchange Bybit was not affected. They tweeted that their “systems are operating normally, trading and withdrawals remain available, and user assets remain secure.”
Bitcoin price drops under $79,000 after Binance hack jitters
Bitcoin is trading at $78,800, down 2.89% (about $2,350) over the past 24 hours. The price hit a 24-hour high of $81,890 around midday before sliding sharply after 4 p.m. ET, when it fell to a low of $78,177.37, after rumors of the hack circulated.
Trading volume over the period was about $26.14 billion, and bitcoin’s market cap stands at roughly $1.58 trillion.
A miner operating through FutureBit’s Apollo Solo setup found Bitcoin block 973,262 earlier this week, collecting the full reward of 3.154 BTC plus fees from 2,477 transactions. Multiple explorers, including mempool.space, list the finder as “FutureBit Apollo Solo,” and the coinbase transaction includes text referencing FutureBit and Apollo.
FutureBit posted about the find on X: “Gradually, then suddenly. We (the people) hit a Bitcoin block today. Bitcoin belongs in the hands of sovereign individuals. And we’re building to keep it there.” The company stated that an Apollo device or Solo Node running its built-in solo pool assembled the block template, served the work, and submitted the completed block to the network. The public record does not identify the exact hardware or hashrate that produced the winning hash. It could have been an Apollo BTC, Apollo II, Apollo III, or other compatible machines pointed at a Solo Node, according to FutureBit’s account of the block.
This marks at least the fourth block attributed to FutureBit Apollo Solo. Earlier ones include blocks 867,760, 881,423, and 888,737. FutureBit designs its Apollo hardware for operators who want to run a full Bitcoin node and mine independently at home rather than through large commercial pools. The most recent model, the Apollo III, is rated for up to 18 TH/s in turbo mode with an integrated full node. Bitcoin Magazine covered the Apollo III launch in February 2026 and previously examined FutureBit’s approach to home mining in a July 2025 piece.
Solo mining, is often called lottery mining because of the low odds relative to the size of the reward, remains uncommon against a network hashrate that has recently sat near 1,070–1,087 EH/s. A home-scale setup in the 10–18 TH/s range still faces expected times to a block measured in centuries under current difficulty, yet verified solo finds continue to appear on-chain. Bitcoin Magazine examined the mathematics of these odds in an article titled Why Bitcoin Lottery Mining Has Better Odds Than The Powerball. It compared continuous Bitcoin block attempts with the much lower frequency of major lottery draws.
Another solo block was found the following day via CKPool Solo, illustrating that individual operators can still capture full rewards even as industrial pools produce the large majority of blocks. For users running FutureBit hardware, the company notes that the individual users control both the node and the solo pool, retaining the full reward when a block is found. Solo mining also has significant privacy benefits, and hardware and energy costs can be written off against taxes in some jurisdictions.
The October 26 block is one more validation that solo mining can be viable. Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin design intended the full Bitcoin node to be able to mine blocks, not just validate and audit the blockchain. Improvements in hardware and mining optimizations later on led to the creation of mining pools, which created a very competitive and industrial mining sector. The secondary effects of industrial Bitcoin mining, such as reliable energy demand that can stabilize the grid, have been a boon for states like Texas.
However, the dream of bringing mining back to homes and end users remains alive through companies like FutureBit, Bitaxe, and HeatBit, among others, that are converting heating appliances into Bitcoin miners or designing hardware of the sort for the home.
The Federal Reserve left its benchmark rate unchanged Wednesday, holding the federal funds target range at 3.75% to 4%. The bitcoin price showed some volatility around $81,000.
The decision passed 10-2, and the dissents carry as much weight as the outcome. Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack wanted a quarter-point increase. It is the first time since 1992 that a Fed governor and a regional bank president have dissented together on the same side.
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh faced reporters after the vote and said politics played no role in the decision, days before the midterm elections. Warsh has said he does not favor forward guidance absent a crisis, which leaves investors to read the data themselves.
The committee’s statement dropped its earlier language about when a hike might support a return to 2% inflation. In its place is a line saying more information will guide the policy stance. The Fed also described growth as strong, up from solid.
The signal points toward tightening. Fed funds futures and the Fed’s own dot plot lean toward a rate increase by December, and some pricing puts the odds near three in four. Inflation has been running hot, and the two dissenters are the officials who want to act on it.
Bitcoin price reaction
Bitcoin price’s reaction was restrained. The bitcoin price spiked to about $81,700 in the minutes after the announcement, fell below $80,500, and then recovered toward $81,000. Most traders expected a hold, so the muted move surprises nobody.
Bitcoin’s first response to Fed news tends to be modest, and that the real direction often emerges over the following day. Spot Bitcoin ETFs drew $110 million in net inflows on October 26 and $176 million on October 27, a sign that some institutional money is buying the dip. Other observers have flagged large holders selling into strength.
That tension defines crypto’s position right now. Bitcoin sits about a third below its October 2025 record near $126,000. A rate-hike path works against an asset that has thrived on cheap money, and the market has spent months adjusting to the possibility that the easy-money era is over.
Some traders read the hold as evidence the Fed will move slowly. Others see December as the real test. For now, the level to watch is a bitcoin price of $80,000. It has held as support in recent sessions, and a clean break below it would expose the next floor.
Warsh and his colleagues have said they will wait for incoming data before acting. Bitcoin will have to wait along with everyone else.
Midterms up next
Bitcoin’s next big political test arrives on November 3, when voters across the country head to the polls. Crypto has not really dominated the campaign trail.
The crypto industry spent about $176 million on more than 100 midterm races to build a bipartisan bloc in Congress that could protect its interests after President Donald Trump left office. Fairshake, the industry’s largest super PAC, led the effort and directed strategy as it had in the 2024 cycle.
At the time of writing, the bitcoin price is $81,478.
Crypto hacks have produced roughly $2.35 billion in net losses so far in 2026 after freezes and returns, according to a report by Lightning.news shared with Bitcoin Magazine. A security researcher by the name of Stacy Muur posted on X compiled “a list of protocols that were hacked for more than $50,000 in 2026.” 230 protocols year-to-date. “Crypto security is absolutely cooked.” September alone accounted for about $768 million in Muur’s tally, driven mainly by centralized exchanges and DeFi rather than pure Bitcoin self-custody hardware wallets, which got significant news coverage at the time.
The largest single loss was Bitget’s September 24 drain of roughly $387.5 million from hot and warm wallets. The exchange and firms including Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs have linked the incident to North Korea, citing IP patterns consistent with prior DPRK-linked VPN use, on-chain overlaps with wallets tied to earlier Lazarus Group and TraderTraitor activity, including the 2025 Bybit theft. Attackers used third-party security products to inject fraudulent withdrawal commands without taking private keys.
Liquid Network, Blockstream’s Bitcoin sidechain, took the next-largest hit when attackers exploited an Elements software bug in early September to mint about 4,000 unbacked L-BTC and peg them out for roughly 4,000 real bitcoins, valued near $320 million at the time. The self-described white-hat actors returned 3,400 BTC after negotiations conducted on-chain via OP_RETURN messages and kept about 600 BTC. No federation keys were compromised. The loss came from a type of inflation bug on the Liquid network protocol.
Samson Mow later called the episode part of an “avalanche of AI-assisted attacks” that had already reached other Bitcoin-adjacent software before hitting Liquid. The network is back and running now, having covered the losses, presumably from investors.
DeFi platforms showed the same pattern of concentrated, high-value losses. Drift Protocol lost approximately $285–296 million in an April governance and multisig compromise that involved months of social engineering. An investigation commissioned by the project attributed the operation to North Korean actors.
KelpDAO’s LayerZero-powered rsETH bridge was drained of roughly $292 million in unbacked tokens after a single-verifier design was subverted. LayerZero stated that preliminary indicators pointed to DPRK’s Lazarus Group, specifically TraderTraitor.
Tectonic on Cronos saw about $120.4 million borrowed against manipulated collateral in late August. Validators later rewound the chain and recovered the majority, though several million dollars that had already been bridged off-network were not restored.
Incidents involving Bitcoin hardware wallets were smaller in aggregate despite the wide news coverage. Galaxy Research placed the Coinkite RNG hack values in the range of roughly 1,596–1,789 BTC, on the order of $100–130 million, with higher upper-bound estimates near 2,055 BTC.
Ledger losses of roughly $86–102 million traced to devices sold through the authorized Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis, where an unauthorized hardware implant captured recovery phrases during setup, a supply chain attack. The company stated that confirmed cases were limited to that reseller’s supply chain and that its own systems and direct sales were unaffected, though there are unconfirmed reports of such bugged devices making it to German markets. Combined, however, these hardware-adjacent events remain well below the single largest CEX and DeFi incidents.
The year has also coincided with the practical deployment of AI coding agents capable of scanning codebases for vulnerabilities and automating exploit development. Muur has stated that “AI is definitely making it much easier to find and exploit bugs. I think we’re entering a pretty serious cybersecurity arms race.”
Reports note that code-flaw exploits accelerated after the February release of models such as GPT-5.3-Codex and Claude Opus 4.6, which showed high success rates on smart-contract bug benchmarks at low cost.
OpenAI has disclosed internal testing cases in which agents accessed unauthorized test-network funds or bypassed controls to complete tasks. Most of the year’s largest heists still relied on traditional vectors such as key compromise, social engineering, and infrastructure flaws, but the lowered barrier for discovering and weaponizing bugs adds a new layer of risk, particularly for complex smart-contract systems and sidechains.
Bitcoin’s base layer itself has not been the source of these losses. The bulk of the 2026 damage has concentrated in CEX hot-wallet infrastructure, DeFi governance, oracle designs, and Bitcoin sidechain code, while pure self-custody hardware wallets, even when imperfect, have accounted for a distinctly smaller share. Nevertheless, calls for an update to self custody recommendations have emerged from industry leaders, pushing forward multivendor multisig wallets as the future of niche industry.
Google is reportedly unveiling Google Multi-Party Compute, a crypto custody system that splits signing keys across separate systems, at its first digital assets symposium in New York today. The product is in private preview with several financial institutions. Alphabet has started using it to secure its own assets, according to CoinDeskreporting.
Google plans commercial availability in early 2027 and has not disclosed pricing.
The system applies multi-party computation to a signing key. The key is divided into fragments held by separate parties or machines, and a transaction requires a set number of fragments to sign.
The full key is never assembled in one place. A bank could hold one share on its own hardware, another in Google Cloud, and a third with a rival cloud provider. Institutions can set thresholds such as two-of-three or five-of-seven. Before any signature, a policy engine running inside Google’s Confidential Space checks the transfer against limits, destination restrictions, and approval rules.
Google says it has no access to key shares in unencrypted form, per CoinDesk.
Crypto’s security issues
The pitch rests on a persistent problem. Chainalysis attributed 43.8% of cryptocurrency stolen in 2024 to compromised private keys. DeFiLlama data shows roughly 40% of the $16.69 billion lost to hacks through June came from key compromises. In June, an attacker took seven keys from one developer’s computer during the Humanity Protocol breach and drained wallets across two networks.
Such incidents show how concentrated signing authority creates a single point of failure. The industry has responded by recommending multi-vendor multisignature setups that spread control across hardware and software providers.
Google also frames the product against AI-enabled fraud. Chainalysis found that scams linked to AI tool vendors averaged $3.2 million per operation in 2025, compared with $719,000 for other scams. The report links the two figures but does not prove that AI caused the difference.
Ethereum researcher Justin Drake has warned that AI could eventually find mathematical shortcuts that weaken wallet signatures. No AI system has shown that capability. Google’s MPC design targets stolen credentials and unauthorized transfers, not a break in the underlying cryptography.
Quantum computing presents a separate, longer-term risk. Google researchers estimated that a sufficiently powerful future machine could derive a bitcoin private key from an exposed public key in about nine minutes. Roughly 6.9 million bitcoin have exposed public keys. Google says its architecture can adopt post-quantum signatures later without forcing institutions to rebuild their systems, but it has set no timetable. Background on how quantum machines threaten bitcoin explains which addresses are most exposed.
Google enters a market led by Fireblocks, Fordefi, and BitGo. Google argued to CoinDesk that its banking relationships and security expertise give it an advantage. It also positions itself as a neutral supplier for banks that do not want to rely on competitors.
Bitcoin price traded near $80,500 most of Tuesday, holding above the $80,000 level that has become the market’s line in the sand. Prices ranged between roughly $79,400 and $80,800 over the day, according to Bitcoin Magazine Pro data, and the asset was up about 0.3% over the prior 24 hours by mid-afternoon Eastern time.
The steadiness follows a rough stretch. Bitcoin price fell below $80,000 on Monday as investors cut risk exposure, weighed down by concerns about AI-sector valuations and higher oil prices. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have also been shedding money. Still, the selling hasn’t turned into panic. Bitcoin price has mostly stayed in a band between about $79,000 and $81,000 this week.
The longer view is harder on anyone who bought near the top. Bitcoin’s all-time high sits near $126,000, set in October 2025, and the price is roughly 30% below where it was a year ago.
The Federal Reserve’s policy meeting runs October 27 and 28, with the decision due Wednesday. The central bank has held its target range at 3.75% to 4% after raising it in September, and officials have signaled another increase may be needed by year-end.
Market odds leaned toward a hold the last time they were clearly reported in early October, but those numbers are stale and likely have moved. Traders will watch Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference for hints about a December hike.
Bitcoin price logic amidst the midterms
The logic for Bitcoin is simple. Higher rates drain liquidity from speculative assets, so a hawkish surprise would likely push the price back toward $80,000 or below.
A hold, or a softer tone, could give buyers room to push toward the $88,000 range seen earlier this fall. The November 3 midterm elections add another layer. Prediction markets have favored Democrats winning both chambers of Congress, according to one Polymarket reading cited in recent coverage.
For crypto, the most immediate policy question is the pending market structure bill, and lawmakers’ votes on it could shape how the industry approaches the races. Bitcoin and other risk assets have tended to rally in the 12 months after past midterm cycles.
TD Cowen analysts have warned the results could stall the CLARITY Act for two years. Prediction markets gave Democrats a 90% chance of winning the House and 62% of winning the Senate, a scenario TD Cowen called the most negative for bitcoin.
A split Congress, with Republicans holding the Senate, was seen as better, while a Republican sweep was viewed as the best path for crypto. The bill had stalled after a failed Senate cloture vote in September, with ethics provisions and stablecoin yield still dividing lawmakers.
At the time of writing, the bitcoin price is roughly $80,600.
VanEck launched the Wealth Builder ETF today, trading on the NYSE under the ticker WBMO. The actively managed fund packages the firm’s Wealth Builder model portfolios, which advisers have used through third-party platforms, into one product anyone with a brokerage account can buy.
VanEck, which oversees about $244 billion in assets, selects the holdings, sets the weights and rebalances the portfolio.
VanEck describes the product as a way to “gain exposure to a broad mix of investments across stocks, bonds, gold, and bitcoin with a single ETF purchase.” The fund holds global stocks, bonds, gold and other real assets.
Its bitcoin exposure is indirect. WBMO owns no bitcoin. A wholly owned Cayman Islands subsidiary holds certain investments and gains digital asset exposure through exchange-traded products, which are funds that hold bitcoin or track it.
The subsidiary is generally capped at 25% of total assets at each quarter-end, but that limit covers several asset categories. The prospectus sets no specific bitcoin target. Investors do not need a wallet, seed phrase or exchange account to hold the bitcoin slice. They also cannot control the bitcoin position directly.
JUST IN: $200 billion VanEck includes Bitcoin exposure in their new Wealth Builder ETF
“This fund brings Bitcoin to investors who want one simple diversified holding” pic.twitter.com/dLhGu8VrWy
The fund’s gross expense ratio is 0.33%. A 0.07% fee waiver brings the net ratio to 0.26%. The underlying bitcoin products charge their own fees.
The allocation also limits the swings. If bitcoin rises sharply, WBMO captures only part of the gain. If it falls, bonds and gold should cushion some of the loss, though not prevent it.
VanEck warned in its announcement that digital asset ETPs can be extremely volatile and that some are not registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, which means they lack certain investor protections.
The firm’s other crypto-linked fund, NODE, raised its bitcoin ETP exposure from about 7% at the end of June to 16.8% at the end of September. NODE holds blockchain companies rather than WBMO’s mix, but it shows how VanEck is using crypto in its portfolios.
Earlier this fall, VanEck’s Head of Digital Assets Research, Matthew Sigel, said the Bitcoin community recognized the risks quantum computing posed to Bitcoin’s cryptography.
“It’s a risk,” Sigel said at the time. “But the community has recognized the scope of the issue. There’s a lot of talent that’s now come together with a framework of how to upgrade the system…The upgrades don’t happen as fast because there’s no CEO who can tell the devs, ‘hey, do it now.’ There’s a governance process — it takes more time, it’s a little bit messier, but there are technological paths for quantum resistance, and I think you’ll see more of that over the next couple of years.”
Major companies, including Coinbase and Blockstream, had begun developing quantum-resistant security measures to prepare for future threats.
A Bitcoin Security Consortium, including BlackRock, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Block, had also been formed to fund open-source security initiatives, including proposals such as BIP-360.
A St. Louis man has admitted his part in a violent scheme to steal bitcoin from a Connecticut family. Martel Williams, 27, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court in Hartford to conspiracy to interfere with commerce by robbery, commonly called Hobbs Act robbery.
The charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. U.S. Attorney David X. Sullivan announced the plea.
The plot began in August 2024. Prosecutors say the people coordinating the attack wanted bitcoin belonging to a man who had taken part in a theft worth hundreds of millions of dollars. To get it, they recruited Williams and two associates from St. Louis.
The crew was supposed to force its way into the target’s home, threaten him, and demand that he move the cryptocurrency into accounts the conspirators controlled.
Williams and others traveled to Connecticut between August 21 and August 24, 2024. They rented vehicles and gathered supplies, including air rifles, walkie-talkies, and a laptop computer. For two days, they stalked the target and his parents, waiting for an opening to get inside the house.
Cameras, frustration, and a failed bitcoin break-in
The opening never came. Williams and his associates feared they had been captured on home security cameras. They also grew frustrated with the plan and with a lack of communication from their coordinators. They left Connecticut without carrying out the job.
Shortly afterward, a second crew of six men from Florida arrived to carry out the scheme again. On August 25, 2024, Danbury police arrested those six men after a violent carjacking. The men beat and kidnapped two people inside the vehicle. Those two victims were the parents of the target.
Local outlets have tied the target to a bitcoin theft in the range of $230 million to $245 million, though the exact figure varies from report to report. The federal case itself centers on the attempted robbery, not the original theft.
Federal agents arrested Williams on July 17, 2026. He remains free pending sentencing, and no sentencing date has been set. The FBI New Haven Violent Crimes Task Force, FBI Los Angeles, FBI St. Louis, and the Danbury Police Department investigated the case. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Karen L. Peck and Stephanie T. Levick prosecuted it.
Other defendants in the Danbury case have also pleaded guilty, according to local reporting.
Poetic bitcoin justice
Earlier this month, a scammer who had stolen about 60 bitcoin (roughly $4.8 million) through a fake-review task scam lost it all when thieves emptied three Ledger addresses where the scammer had moved the proceeds on October 9.
Blockchain analysts at Chainalysis said the transfers went into one wallet reported as stolen, while the wider Ledger incident, in which a criminal group allegedly implanted seed-phrase-reading devices sold through Malaysian reseller CryptoBilis, may have drained about $86 million. Ledger said it was working with law enforcement and has confirmed no other vendors were targeted, following a July attack on Coldcard that cost users close to $120 million through a firmware bug.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/27-Year-Old-Missouri-Man-Admits-Role-in-Failed-Bitcoin-Kidnapping-Plot-qAc92z.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-27 18:53:092026-10-27 18:53:0927-Year-Old Missouri Man Admits Role in Failed Bitcoin Kidnapping Plot
Bitcoin developers have gathered all around the world in places like Austin, Berlin, and Florianópolis, to name a few. In early 2028, a group of them plans to meet at the bottom of the world. bitcoin++ has announced Antarctica: Cold Storage Edition, scheduled for January 24 to February 5, 2028. There are only 22 spots available.
The event pairs a technical conference with an expedition ship that departs from Ushuaia, Argentina, crosses the Drake Passage, explores the Antarctic Peninsula, and returns to Ushuaia.
The event plays on bitcoin’s cold storage, the practice of keeping keys offline. The organizers describe the trip as a way to take the conversation somewhere colder, with room for discussions that would otherwise fit into a hallway.
bitcoin++ runs technical conferences, workshops, and hackathons for bitcoin developers. The series began in Austin in 2022 and has since held events in Berlin, Florianópolis, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Riga, Istanbul, Taipei, Las Vegas, Vienna, Nairobi, Toronto, and Seoul. Each edition carries a theme, from “learn me a bitcoin” in Austin in 2022 to “lightning” in Berlin in 2025.
The organization counts some 20 archived editions. Its next conference, bitcoin++ Seoul, privacy edition, takes place November 5 and 6, 2026.
Penguins, parkas, and private keys
The trip runs 13 days and 12 nights. The ship leaves Ushuaia on January 24 and crosses the Drake Passage to the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Possible stops include Neko Harbour, Paradise Bay, Port Lockroy, and the Lemaire Channel.
According to the trip’s website, activities may include kayaking, camping, hiking, snowshoeing, and Zodiac outings. The organizers note that weather, ice, and expedition decisions determine where the ship lands.
The conference follows an unconference format. Attendees propose the talks, demos, and discussions. The ship will have Starlink and a private room for impromptu hackathons and working sessions.
Cost and booking
Reservations are open right now. Fares are quoted in US dollars per person and range from $14,900 in a four-person cabin to $16,700 in a two-person cabin. Passengers may pay in five equal installments or pay in full at signup. Paying the full fare in bitcoin reduces the cost by 5%. The cost of the fare includes parkas.
The final payment is due October 1, 2027. Medical, evacuation, and repatriation insurance is required and purchased separately. Sponsors can place their brands on the expedition parkas. Placements range from $5,000 to $25,000, and each covers about 22 parkas.
The expedition explores the Antarctic Peninsula, not the geographic South Pole.
Blink Wallet announced a new $1 a month inactivity fee, aimed at custodial accounts that have not logged in to the app in over 12 months.
The decision was put into motion in early September via a Terms of Service change, with push notifications sent out to inactive users, and the first charge made by mid-October. Fees charged will be refunded if users log back in within 12 months, according to a blog post published by the company.
The fee, which only affects custodial accounts, serves to relieve the burden of inactive accounts on the startup. According to the announcement, these inactive accounts have ongoing costs such as “ledger and infrastructure, retention of verification records, compliance monitoring and reporting, and support claims.” These costs are in turn borne by active user accounts via normal in-app transaction fees.
A source familiar with the matter told Bitcoin Magazine that around a hundred thousand such accounts fit the inactive category at the time of the first fee charge, with an aggregate balance of over $800,000. The first fee pulled in about $45,000, mostly from accounts that had dust amounts of bitcoin inactive for over a year. None of these figures could be independently verified.
A Bit of History
Blink Wallet may be one of the most popular Bitcoin wallets in the world, favored by advocates of Bitcoin Circular Economies across Latin America and Africa. Designed for an audience not already familiar with Bitcoin, the wallet first came to prominence as the ‘Bitcoin Beach Wallet’. It grew out of El Salvador’s initial wave of Bitcoin adoption, choosing design principles similar to Wallet of Satoshi, which had seen viral success in earlier years. The wallet was initially custodial and oriented around fast Lightning payments, with the innovative option of hedging value in USD via the Stable Sats feature.
Historically, custodial wallets have seen accelerated early growth compared to their non-custodial counterparts. It is arguably due to the friction introduced by non-custodial setup steps like the 12-word backup, but also by the lack of key material under the company’s control, which enabled features like the first generation of Stable Sats in the first place.
Because of the smooth interface and user experience Blink offered, it quickly became a favorite for evangelists to recommend. One particular evangelist allegedly got everyone he met to download the app and gave them about $1 worth of bitcoin. Some of those new users might have stuck around. But events like today’s Blink announcement put into question the effectiveness of such evangelism strategies, given that they may just be turned into dormant dust accounts.
Blink was eventually spun off from Galoy Inc its founding firm, to be run by Lukas Duczko and a new board of directors. The announcement published in October 2024 stated that Duczko now had a controlling stake in the company, while Galoy continued to be a service provider and minority stakeholder. The Bitcoin Beach Fund was also established at the time, seeded with Blink shares as part of the transaction. The wallet once headquartered in El Salvador is now based in the free economic zone of Roatán, Honduras, though it maintains corporate entities in El Salvador and the United States.
Headwinds
Despite its success gaining international adoption among Bitcoin circular economies, evangelists and supporters of the Lightning Network, the company has also faced significant headwinds. And not just Blink but custodial wallets in general, like Wallet of Satoshi, Alby, and Blue Wallet, all phased out their custodial wallet offerings in recent years, pivoting to self custody infrastructure like Spark. The tide began to rise with the EU’s MiCA regulations, which sought licensing and KYC compliance standards from custodians that these wallets simply could not provide.
On the U.S. side of the pond, the Samourai Wallet case and the broader war on crypto by the Biden administration pushed wallet operators outside of the country, with notable examples like Phoenix Wallet, Wallet of Satoshi, Wasabi Wallet, and Blink, limiting or altogether exiting American app stores. The legal uncertainty took place under the shadow of the Samourai Wallet and Tornado Cash cases, which the industry read as threats to user privacy and certainly to self custody wallets, let alone custodial ones.
Fast forward a couple of years and Google Play decided to enforce EU and American laws by limiting Play Store distribution of wallets or exchange apps that do not hold licenses in corresponding jurisdictions. The viral nature and stunningly easy-to-use apps that were possible thanks to custodial Lightning had, in a matter of 2 years, become a liability. It was time to pivot to self custody.
Nobody Said it was Easy
By 2025, Blink’s counterparts already offered self custody options; WOS was beginning to push their Spark-powered wallet, with 2027 as the deadline for custody wallet users to migrate. Alby had shipped a feature to connect self-hosted Lightning nodes to its hub and shut down its custodial Lightning option. Blue wallet had long ago shut down its custodial offer and had since doubled down on becoming an onchain wallet for new and power users alike.
Unlike its competitors, however, Blink’s biggest differentiator is the Stable Sats feature, which likely required a significant redesign to fit the limitations of self custody. It wasn’t until June 2026 that Blink launched its Spark supported self custodial wallet, a big move and one that its user base is still adapting to.
To make things worse, on September 19th, hackers managed to withdraw 6.61 bitcoins from custodial wallet users via compromised admin tools. The company’s backers quickly announced they would make the affected users whole, and the bleeding was stopped, but the blow nevertheless must have shaken the company.
Remarkably, despite some of the most difficult years for the Bitcoin wallet industry, Blink wallet has so far not just survived but stayed in the game. It has retained the slick design that made it so popular, while delivering advanced features that users in developing nations need, such as dollar-denominated value at the speed of lightning, meanwhile pivoting to self custody. The inactivity fee is but an inevitable step further down that transition. Perhaps having teams like Blink’s working on self custody will yield a new crop of sovereign technologies, its fruits badly needed by a sector of the industry battered by regulators and now AI cyber threats.
Seven of the largest banks in the world are now running on Coinbase infrastructure, and Brett Tejpaul, Co-CEO of Coinbase Institutional, says they’re having a “Kodak moment.” He joins Grace Remington and Sean Hagan to explain why the driver has shifted from Bitcoin ETFs to stablecoin payments now that money can move from a Citi account to USDC, across the blockchain in a second, and into a corporate account on the other side. He also gives a candid read on Bitcoin: the macro setup is great, the performance has been disappointing, and institutions aren’t yet treating it as anything but a tech trade.
Chapters: 0:00 Seven of the World’s Largest Banks Are Using Coinbase Infrastructure 1:19 From ETFs to Payments: Citi, USDC and Instant Bank-to-Blockchain Transfers 2:44 $400 Million an Hour in Stablecoins and the Banks’ “Kodak Moment” 4:38 Stablecoins Are a “Speck of Dust”: Payment Providers First, Then Banks 6:10 Agentic Commerce Arriving at the Same Time as the Big Players 6:49 Is Bitcoin Still a Leveraged Tech Trade? “Disappointing” Performance, Great Setup 8:44 Connecting U.S. Funds to Deribit’s 85% Options Market Share 11:06 The Second Wave: Net-New Entrants and Coinbase’s “Amazon to AWS” Pivot 12:57 Activating the Whole U.S. Through Coinbase Infrastructure 13:56 Quantum, 90% ETF Custody Share and “Safe Forever”
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/hqdefault-wm5rbO.jpg360480Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-26 19:24:082026-10-26 19:24:08Coinbase Institutional Co-CEO: Bitcoin’s “Second Wave” of Institutional Capital has Arrived
New York Attorney General Letitia James is trying to secure a $1.37 billion judgment against the operators of NovaTech and its predecessor AWS Mining, two successive cryptocurrency investment schemes that allegedly defrauded hundreds of thousands of investors worldwide out of more than $1 billion.
Alleged founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion never appeared in court and, according to the AG’s office, fled the country.
“NovaTech and AWS Mining scammed thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers by telling them they were making a safe investment when in reality, they were victims of a pyramid scheme,” James said in a statement. “These scammers targeted immigrant and religious communities with the promise of a better life but instead robbed them of their life savings.”
The schemes, AWS Mining and later NovaTech, relied on promoters who recruited heavily in Haitian and other immigrant communities — through prayer groups, WhatsApp chats, and ads in Haitian Creole.
AWS Mining sold crypto mining contracts promising 15 to 20 percent monthly returns and 200 percent within 15 months. It collapsed in 2019. The Petions then launched NovaTech, marketed as a registered hedge fund broker, promising weekly trading returns of two to four percent — more than 140 percent a year.
Those returns were fabricated, according to prosecutors. Records from B2Broker, which supplied NovaTech’s white-label trading platform, show that of the more than $1 billion investors deposited between 2019 and 2023, only about $26 million was ever actually traded — and NovaTech’s traders lost $18.2 million of that. Returns to earlier investors came from newer deposits, not trading. When NovaTech collapsed in mid-2023, tens of thousands of investors could not withdraw their funds.
The AG is also seeking $134.5 million the Petions allegedly withdrew to their own wallets from the investor account Cynthia Petion solely controlled, plus $4.7 million tied to the earlier AWS Mining scheme. A default judgment entered in August 2025 already bars the couple and their companies from the securities, commodities, and cryptocurrency industries.
Separately, four of the scheme’s top promoters have agreed to pay nearly $6 million in disgorgement to victims and accepted the same industry bans.
Blockstream has launched a consulting business for financial institutions and opened an office in Lugano, Switzerland, the company shared today. The expansion gives banks, asset managers and other institutions direct access to the firm’s engineering teams and Bitcoin infrastructure, Blockstream said.
Blockstream Consulting Services will support institutions through the evaluation, design and implementation of Bitcoin-based financial infrastructure. The company said the business will develop solutions for tokenized asset issuance, confidential settlement and related infrastructure, with services spanning technical strategy, system architecture, integration and implementation.
From Lugano, Blockstream plans to serve clients across Switzerland, including Zurich, Geneva and Zug. The company said the office will serve as a hub for its European operations, supporting client relationships, strategic partnerships and collaboration with the region’s financial and technology communities.
“Switzerland is an important market for Blockstream given its longstanding banking tradition and supportive regulatory framework for digital assets,” said Peter Bain, chief marketing officer of the company. “We look to provide regional expertise in markets where we see demand for Bitcoin infrastructure. Our consulting business, combined with our new office in Lugano, will bring tailored Bitcoin solutions to financial institutions across Europe.”
Founded in 2014, Blockstream develops technology and services across Bitcoin custody, settlement, payments, asset issuance and self-custody. Its products include the Liquid Network sidechain, Elements, Simplicity, Core Lightning, the Jade hardware wallet and the Blockstream App. This year, the company launched Simplicity smart contracts on Liquid and added Lightning support to Jade.
Bitcoin adoption by financial institutions
The company said the consulting business draws on that experience, with capabilities in cryptography, protocol engineering, security and financial technology. Multidisciplinary teams will give institutions access to the firm’s technical staff from initial evaluation through deployment.
“The next phase of Bitcoin adoption is its integration into existing financial systems,” said Adam Back, Blockstream’s co-founder and CEO. “Our extensive experience in Bitcoin cryptography, protocol development and engineering gives Blockstream the technical expertise to address the complexities of integrating Bitcoin into traditional financial infrastructure.”
The company framed the move as part of a long-term commitment to Switzerland and a broader strategy of building a presence in key markets to support institutional Bitcoin adoption.
The country has become a center for digital asset firms, with Zug’s “Crypto Valley” and a regulatory framework that permits banks to hold and trade bitcoin on behalf of clients.
There was no pricing disclosed, headcount for the Lugano office or named clients for the consulting business. The company said the Lugano office is open and that consulting engagements are available to institutions across Europe.
Bitcoin Core has changed its security disclosure policy to speed up fixes for vulnerabilities that large language models can find with little effort, ending the months-long embargoes those bugs once received.
Maintainers merged the change to the project’s security policy on Thursday. Chaincode Labs developer Antoine Poinsot, who wrote the proposal, announced it in a message to the Bitcoin Development Mailing List the same day.
“We recently experienced an increase in the number of reports for security vulnerabilities that can be easily (re-)discovered,” Poinsot wrote. “This is largely due to LLMs drastically reducing the bar to find certain classes of issues or identify covert fixes.”
How the policy worked before
Bitcoin Core, the software that runs on most nodes in the Bitcoin network, has graded each reported vulnerability by severity and timed its disclosure to match. Low-severity flaws were made public two weeks after the next major version shipped.
Medium- and high-severity issues stayed under embargo until two weeks after the last affected release reached end of life, a span that could stretch to a year.
The extended timelines gave node operators, many of whom upgrade at a slow pace, time to move to patched software before details became public. In practice, the approach meant fixes went unreleased for older maintained versions and arrived with the next major release.
Poinsot argued that this tradeoff fails for bugs that are easy to rediscover. “The embargo period achieves little but it delays the availability of a fixed release,” the policy reads.
What changes
During triage, Bitcoin Core can flag a vulnerability as “easily discoverable,” a category the policy defines as issues that can be found “with minimal effort, such as through a simple LLM prompt.” The label is open to flaws found by other means as well.
For those issues, the project will backport a fix to every maintained major version, cut point releases as soon as possible and publish a security advisory with some details at the same time as the fixed software.
Poinsot acknowledged that such fixes will have less testing time before they reach users.
Vulnerabilities outside that category keep the existing severity-based schedule. Critical bugs, those that could enable coin theft at the protocol level, inflate the supply or cause a permanent chain split, remain outside the standard policy and will be handled case by case.
Developer Antoine Riard pushed for an option to ship a fix without an advisory and withhold details on a case-by-case basis. Poinsot declined, writing that alerting users without details “could create more risk unnecessarily” by prompting a rushed migration among users who would otherwise be unaffected.
A summer of AI-driven reports
The change follows months of heightened pressure on Bitcoin’s open-source projects. In late July, a volunteer group of 16 developers known as the Bitcoin Red Team ran AI models across 390 bitcoin repositories in about a day and logged 4,962 findings, including 85 rated critical.
Within days, a BTCPay Server flaw the group had reported in private was exploited on live merchant servers, draining Lightning nodes.
In August, Core Lightning developers told operators to upgrade or disconnect after AI-generated reports to the project proved accurate.
The Red Team effort followed a Coldcard hardware wallet exploit in which attackers drained 594 BTC in 25 minutes on July 30. Losses across four sweeps approached $114 million.
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Pepenardo has transformed six copies of Bitcoin Magazine’s 2036 Issue into original artworks, drawing directly onto the covers with a Sharpie. The hand-altered editions feature familiar characters from his visual universe, including the Sleeping Knights, previously exhibited at the BMAG Museum in Nashville and Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas. Other imagery includes the masked rider of FAKEGENESIS, Dorian Nakamoto, and Pepe the Frog.
Each magazine features the artist’s signature on its illustrated cover and an additional gold-ink signature on an interior spread reproducing his painting THE DREAMER. Each is paired with two original, one-of-one trading cards created for the collaboration.
The project reflects BTC Inc.’s growing interest in art, publishing, and collectibles, building on Pepenardo’s MEMETIKRON exhibition at Bitcoin 2026, where THE DREAMER (RED KNIGHT) and THE DREAMLESS (GREEN KNIGHT) became highlights of the BMAG auction.
The two oil paintings, each measuring 30 × 39.5 inches, depict reclining knights in red and green armor, referencing financial markets and historical portraiture. Both sold for 0.32698802 BTC (approximately $26,500 each), attracting a combined 197 bids. Their imagery now reappears in artist-made trading cards featuring alternate colorways, remixed compositions, and hand-painted Creator Rare editions inspired by traditional textiles.
Amid a booming trading card market, Pepenardo’s work bridges painting and handheld collectibles, where scarcity, provenance, and variation shape value. His relationship with this market began well before the Sleeping Knights.
In 2023, his painting FAKEGENESIS, a reinterpretation of Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps featuring a masked rider on a green horse, sold at the Bitcoin Conference in Miami for 1.625 BTC. Originally created as a Fake Rares card in 2022, the composition became an early landmark for physical Bitcoin art, demonstrating the growing collector interest in artwork emerging from Bitcoin’s meme culture.
FAKEGENESIS later appeared on the back cover of Bitcoin Magazine, with prints available through the publication’s store. Its return as a hand-drawn magazine cover completes an unusual progression from trading card to painting, printed reproduction, and original collectible.
Bitcoin Magazine itself has a collecting history dating to its first issue in May 2012, co-founded by Mihai Alisie and Vitalik Buterin. At a bitcoin event in London in September 2012, seven copies of the inaugural issue were signed by more than 20 early bitcoin figures. One attracted a winning bid of 7 BTC, although the buyer never completed the purchase or collected the magazine.
Early issues have since become sought-after historical artifacts, with graded copies and rare editions attracting collectors. In 2023, Bitcoin Magazine introduced the Genesis Box, a limited edition of 21 collector’s sets containing the publication’s first 22 issues, each housed in protective acrylic cases.
Much like early exhibition catalogs, first-edition books, and concert posters, Bitcoin Magazine has developed value beyond its original publishing purpose. Pepenardo’s customized covers extend that history, turning the publication itself into a one-of-one artwork.
I spoke with Pepenardo about his paintings, trading cards, and evolving relationship with Bitcoin Magazine, and with Mark Mason, Head of Media at Bitcoin Magazine, about the historical significance of the publication and its growing collector market.
BMAG: This collaboration came together quickly after you noticed the blank space on the cover of the Bitcoin Magazine issue featuring your work. What inspired you to turn these magazines into original artworks, and how do you see them fitting alongside your paintings and trading cards?
Pepenardo: I couldn’t help but notice that welcoming blank space on the cover. It seemed like an obvious place for a drawing. Coincidentally, I came into Bitcoin through watching the energy around trading cards on Counterparty, from 2016 all the way to the present. Hal Finney foreshadowed this ethos in his famous 1993 email titled “Crypto trading cards.” Of course he was talking about digital collectibles, but the principle stays the same. Bitcoin’s history has a magnetic pull on collectibles; people want to hold on to a fragment of such an important modern history. When we look back fifty years from now, the content and the artifacts that came out of the movement will help future generations make sense of Bitcoin’s tremendous timeline.
BMAG: The two knights, THE DREAMER and THE DREAMLESS, began as oil paintings exhibited and sold at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas. They have since appeared in Bitcoin Magazine and now as original trading cards with different variations. How does the meaning of these characters change as they move between painting, publication, and collectible card? What rules guide your remixed versions, and were you surprised by how quickly the cards sold out?
Pepenardo: I was shocked at how quickly they went. I have no words. But it certainly reinforces that what I’m attempting to create and build with my work has some value. Being able to use the trading cards as a way to remix the original works lets me enrich the life of each painting. The mediums are different – oil on canvas for the paintings, various print methods for the trading cards – but the tedious care that goes into executing both is the same.
BMAG: FAKEGENESIS became a defining work in your career, moving from Fake Rares into an original painting that attracted significant attention at Bitcoin 2023 in Miami. Looking back, what do you remember about that moment, and how did it change your practice and the audience for your work?
Pepenardo: FAKEGENESIS will always be the pivotal work that showed me how I should properly approach my art. I knew that even before it sold. It is a painting that embeds the tropes of Bitcoin’s ethos without being too obvious. Art within the context of Bitcoin shouldn’t have to throw a big B at you all the time; it should give you the fiery sensation of standing inside a new history being built. My hope is that it is remembered as a work that represents an entire movement – onwards and upwards.
BMAG: Bitcoin Magazine’s earliest issues have become historical artifacts in their own right, from signed copies of Issue 1 and graded editions to the Genesis Box collection. Even figures like Michael Saylor have signed covers featuring themselves for charity auctions. What gives these publications their enduring collectible value, and how do you see artist-customized covers like Pepenardo’s fitting into that history?
Mark Mason: For over a decade, Bitcoin Magazine has documented the evolution of Bitcoin, from its early technical developments to the people and culture surrounding it. We see each physical issue as a time capsule, capturing a particular moment in Bitcoin’s journey toward hyperbitcoinization.
One of the biggest factors driving their collectible value is that we never reprint past editions. Each issue has a limited print run, creating a finite supply that has made early editions, graded copies, and signed covers increasingly sought after by collectors.
Bitcoin has always existed at the intersection of technology, economics, and culture. Artist-customized covers like Pepenardo’s take that relationship a step further, transforming an already collectible publication into an original artwork. It’s an extension of what Bitcoin Magazine has become: both a record of Bitcoin’s history and an artifact of that history itself.
Pepenardo’s custom magazine covers and trading card sets sold out shortly after launch, with all six one-of-one editions finding collectors. Additional works remain available, including MASTER CUTS OUT THE STONE (after Hemessen), the centerpiece painting from Pepenardo’s MEMETIKRON exhibition, which traveled from the BMAG Museum in Nashville to Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas.
Collectors can also explore FAKEGENESIS prints and the Genesis Box, a limited-edition collector’s set preserving the publication’s first 22 issues from 2012–2014.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring Bitcoin and its cultural implications. Explore available works from Curtis William Readel’s exhibition Paper Money, along with additional prints, original artworks, and collectibles.
BMAG returns to Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 4–6, 2026, featuring European artists exploring money, power, and Bitcoin. Read more in The Architecture of Money and The Undercurrent. Use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.
A shareholder from one of the world’s biggest digital asset companies has sued U.S. President Donald Trump for alleged crypto corruption.
The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by shareholder and former Circle employee J. Benjamin Greenberg, alleges that a member of the United Arab Emirates ruling family agreed to pay half a billion dollars into the Trump-backed World Liberty Financial business — in direct violation of the Constitution.
Circle is the fintech company behind the stablecoin, USDC. Regulators in the U.S. are fast pushing ahead with pro-crypto rules despite lawmakers last month blocking landmark digital asset legislation, which President Trump backed.
A number of lawmakers didn’t back the draft legislation — the Clarity Act — because they said that the Trump family had illicitly cashed in on crypto ventures.
“The corruption at issue is not subtle, and it is not hidden,” the lawsuit alleges. “Since returning to office, President Donald J. Trump and his family have built a cryptocurrency business and invited foreign states to route money to him by paying into it. Foreign money has answered.”
The lawsuit goes on to allege that an investment fund created by the government of Abu Dhabi also gave the president $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin product.
World Liberty Financial is a decentralized finance project co-founded by the president and his sons.
President Trump stopped being involved in the project after taking office in 2025.
Thursday’s lawsuit adds that the president allegedly gave the Emirati leadership access to advanced artificial intelligence chips and pardoned a convicted felon in turn for the crypto investment. It references a February Wall Street Journal article that reported the deal.
“Although the President has dressed his corrupt arrangements in the language of new technology — tokens and stablecoins, holding companies and reserve yields — that vocabulary must not obscure what this is: the oldest form of public corruption, a public official taking money from a foreign power,” the lawsuit further says.
It alleges that the president has “corruptly” profited from $2 billion via the deals.
President Trump, World Liberty, and U.S. Middle East Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are named as the defendants in the lawsuit.
The president campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto industry and received major financial backing from the space but some Washington lawmakers have criticized the way the Trump family has profited from digital asset ventures.
Trump and the White House have always denied any conflicts of interest. The president in August, ahead of the crypto Clarity Act vote, said that Democrats criticizing his family crypto ventures had made money from stock trading.
The Blockchain Association sent a letter to Senate and House leadership on Thursday asking Congress to pass bipartisan digital asset tax legislation, the group’s first broad push on taxes since the Clarity Act failed in the Senate last month.
The letter, signed by Chief Policy Officer Lindsay Fraser and addressed to Majority Leader John Thune, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, argues that the rules governing the 67 million Americans who hold digital assets “were written for a different era.”
The group paired it with a new site, TaxClarityforAmerica.com, built for constituents to contact their representatives.
The asks will sound familiar to anyone who has followed the tax fight: a de minimis exemption for small transactions, cash treatment for stablecoins, tax on mining and staking rewards at sale instead of receipt, broker reporting limited to firms that hold customer assets, and wash sale rules that close loss harvesting without catching everyday transactions.
The letter adds a safe harbor for foreign traders on U.S. exchanges, a mark-to-market election, and R&D credit eligibility for blockchain development. What the letter leaves out is an endorsement. Two bills are somewhat in play, and the association named neither.
Where the tax bills stand
The House moved first. One day after the Clarity Act failed in the Senate, the Ways and Means Committee approved the Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act, H.R. 10357, a 114-page package from Chairman Jason Smith (R-MO). It exempts network fees under $10 from capital gains reporting, with a carve-out for taxpayers who made more than 5,000 transfers in the prior year, and extends wash sale and constructive sale rules to digital assets. Qualified dollar stablecoins are exempt from the wash sale rule.
The package left out the provision the industry wanted most. Rep. Mike Carey’s Tax Clarity for Mining and Staking Act, H.R. 9175, which would have let miners and stakers defer tax until they sell, was in an early discussion draft and gone from the text the committee released on September 14. Instead the bill classifies validation rewards as ordinary income, taxable on receipt. Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), who had proposed capping the deferral at five years, voted for the package and said it leaves the question open for further work.
The Blockchain Association, Crypto Council for Innovation and Digital Chamber had asked the committee in June to pass that bill without changes. The committee did the opposite.
The Senate has its own version. Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) introduced the ADAPT Act on September 30 with Sens. Cynthia Lummis, Bernie Moreno and Tim Scott as cosponsors. It exempts purchases made with GENIUS Act stablecoins from gain or loss, sets the same $10 fee threshold, and applies wash sale rules with grandfathering for existing holdings and exemptions for mining and staking rewards. It sits in committee.
Lummis’s earlier bill, S. 2207, with a $300 per-transaction de minimis exemption capped at $5,000 a year, has been in the Finance Committee since June 2025.
Neither chamber’s bill contains the exemption for small bitcoin purchases that the industry made a centerpiece at Bitcoin 2026. The House bill’s $10 threshold covers fees, not purchases. The Senate bill’s spending exemption covers stablecoins, not bitcoin.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute and others have argued that any de minimis rule should cover bitcoin, and Thursday’s letter asks for a “meaningful” exemption without naming a figure.
Awkward timing
Congress is in recess until after the November 3 midterms. When members return, they will have a lame-duck session measured in weeks, and crypto taxes compete with government funding and whatever else leadership decides to clear before the 119th Congress ends.
Lummis, the Senate’s loudest voice on digital asset taxes, retires in January 2027.
The Clarity Act’s collapse shapes all of this. The market structure bill passed the House 294-134 in July 2025, then stalled in the Senate for more than a year while the banking lobby fought the crypto industry over stablecoin yield and Democrats pressed for ethics language aimed at the Trump family’s crypto ventures.
The cloture vote on September 15 failed 49-50. No Democrat crossed over, and Republicans Susan Collins, Josh Hawley and Jerry Moran voted no. Sen. Thom Tillis switched his vote so he could file a motion to reconsider, which keeps the bill alive on paper and little more.
With market structure off the table, the industry has shifted its lobbying to what might move. Tax is the obvious candidate: the House package cleared committee with bipartisan votes, and the wash sale provisions raise revenue, which gives tax writers a reason to attach them to a larger vehicle. Punchbowl News reported Thursday that the association’s refusal to back either bill signals the industry wants more than what Congress has produced.
Regulators keep filling the gap in the meantime. The OCC issued its final GENIUS Act rule on Wednesday, and the SEC and CFTC have been setting market structure policy through rulemaking and enforcement in the absence of a statute.
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Three companies have notified the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of their plans to operate tokenized securities venues following a new rule, according to the top regulator.
Tokenized Stock Venue, Perpetuals.com, and OKX have all submitted plans to operate by allowing trading of tokenized stocks, the SEC said in a Wednesday announcement.
Along with the Intercontinental Exchange, crypto exchange OKX was the first to file with the regulator to debut tokenized securities trading on a new platform, OKXICE.
The SEC in September said it was offering a five-year exemption to platforms that facilitate trading of tokenized stocks. Regulators like the SEC are pushing ahead with regulating the crypto space despite lawmakers blocking major digital asset legislation in September.
Tokenized stocks are the latest example of firms wanting to utilize Bitcoin’s underlying technology to help upgrade traditional finance. By putting stocks on the blockchain, traders can operate 24/7, according to proponents.
The SEC said Wednesday that just because the firms are on the list, doesn’t necessarily mean they meet all the requirements for the rule.
Wall Street’s top regulator is now very pro-crypto under U.S. President Donald Trump. SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said the regulator wants to “update” how it watchdogs securities, and “modernize them in the age of blockchain and crypto assets.”
Atkins has said that the regulator wants the U.S. to be on track to be the “crypto capital of the world.”
Under the previous Democratic Joe Biden administration, the SEC was hostile towards the crypto industry and hit major companies — including Coinbase and Kraken — with lawsuits. The regulator attracted criticism for so-called regulation by enforcement.
But under Trump, that has changed: the Republican campaigned on a ticket to help the crypto space and has signed a number of laws and executive orders aimed at helping the digital asset space.
Traditional finance titans like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton for years have used blockchain rails to tokenize money funds.
In January, the S&P 500 gave crypto platform Trade[XYZ] the green light to debut a new derivative contract on decentralized exchange Hyperliquid, giving traders the ability to trade the stock index 24-7.
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British multinational Standard Chartered will buy digital asset custodian Zodia Custody, months after signing an agreement.
A statement from London-based Zodia Custody on Wednesday said that the deal will see the company’s service integrated into Standard Chartered’s existing digital asset custody activities.
Standard Chartered is expanding its crypto-related offerings worldwide. Earlier this month, it said it had plans to offer crypto custody services for institutional clients in Singapore. It already offers the service in the UAE, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong.
“As institutional adoption of digital assets accelerates, custody is increasingly becoming part of the global banking landscape,” Zodia Custody CEO Richard Clark said.
He added: “Zodia Custody has built a strong business with the specialist expertise and capabilities to meet the needs of institutional clients.
“Bringing that expertise together with Standard Chartered’s global reach and established banking platform will strengthen its digital asset custody offering and provide institutions with greater access to trusted, regulated custody services worldwide.”
Ying Ying Tan, global head of securities services and digital assets at Standard Chartered, added that the deal “further deepens our digital asset custody portfolio and reinforces our position as a leading provider of digital asset services globally.”
Zodia Custody shareholders in May approved Standard Chartered’s offer to buy the company.
The company works to custody bitcoin and other digital assets for institutional and asset managers.
Standard Chartered has delved deeper into the crypto space in recent years. In 2025, the bank set up a trading desk for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in London, making it one of the first global banks to enter spot cryptocurrency trading.
It has since debuted custody and trading services in countries around the world.
Top banks worldwide are debuting or planning to debut crypto custody services, with State Street, Standard Chartered, U.S. Bank, and Citigroup all committing to direct crypto custody over the past 18 months.
Crypto custody is often a starting point for banks moving into the digital asset space. BNY Mellon in 2022 became the first major U.S. bank to offer digital asset custody services.
For long-term Bitcoin holders, accessing capital has traditionally presented a difficult choice: sell a portion of their holdings or leave that value untouched.
Bitcoin-backed lending offers another option, allowing holders to borrow against their Bitcoin while maintaining exposure to the asset.
In a recent video shared on X, SALT Lending highlighted how borrowers can use Bitcoin-backed loans for more than simply accessing cash, outlining several ways liquidity can support broader financial goals.
Bitcoin-backed loan = liquidity without selling.
Real estate. Business growth. Diversification.
Keep your long-term position. Put capital to work.
Turning Bitcoin Holdings Into Financial Opportunity
Rather than selling Bitcoin to fund a major purchase or investment, borrowers can pledge their holdings as collateral to access capital while preserving their long-term position.
One potential use case is real estate. Bitcoin holders looking to purchase property may be able to leverage their holdings for liquidity instead of liquidating Bitcoin to fund the transaction.
Business expansion presents another opportunity. Entrepreneurs and business owners can potentially use Bitcoin-backed loans to fund operations, hire employees, or pursue growth opportunities without selling their Bitcoin or giving up equity in their businesses.
SALT Lending also pointed to investment diversification as another possible application. Borrowers may use loan proceeds to access other markets or investment opportunities while retaining exposure to Bitcoin.
Another consideration is tax planning. Selling appreciated Bitcoin can trigger capital gains taxes, while receiving proceeds from a properly structured loan generally does not constitute a taxable sale. However, individual tax circumstances vary, and borrowing introduces additional financial risks.
A Strategic Approach to Bitcoin Liquidity
The broader takeaway from SALT Lending’s video is that Bitcoin-backed borrowing should be viewed as a financial planning decision rather than simply a way to access cash.
Real estate purchases, business investments, and other opportunities all require borrowers to weigh the potential benefits of liquidity against borrowing costs, repayment obligations, and the risks associated with Bitcoin’s price volatility.
Because Bitcoin-backed loans are secured by a volatile asset, significant price declines can increase loan-to-value ratios and potentially require additional collateral or trigger liquidation, depending on the loan terms.
For borrowers with a clear financial strategy, however, the ability to access capital without immediately selling Bitcoin creates another avenue for putting their holdings to use.
SALT Lending provides Bitcoin-backed lending solutions designed to help eligible borrowers access liquidity while maintaining their long-term Bitcoin exposure.
As Bitcoin continues to evolve beyond an asset primarily associated with buying and holding, lending may play an increasingly important role in how holders manage their finances and pursue opportunities without necessarily selling their Bitcoin.
Disclaimer:SALT Lending is a paid sponsor of BMTV and serves as BMTV’s Official Liquidity Sponsor. This article is sponsored content and does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Bitcoin Magazine. The information provided is for promotional purposes and should not be considered financial advice. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before making any investment decisions related to Bitcoin or other financial products mentioned herein.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Liquidity-Without-Selling-Bitcoin-0eOJzO.png9071734Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-21 16:24:072026-10-21 16:24:07Beyond HODLing: How Bitcoin-Backed Loans Can Unlock New Financial Opportunities
The Liquid Network on Tuesday said that things were up and running again, over one month after hackers stole 4,000 bitcoin, worth about $320 million at the time, from the network’s federation wallet before returning most of it in a “white hat” operation.
Writing in a blog post, the Liquid Network said that it was entering “the final stages of recovery with enhanced security.”
Hackers in September stole 4,000 bitcoins from the federation wallet that backs the Blockstream sidechain. Blockstream was able to negotiate to get back most of the funds.
“The final phase of restoration involves reestablishing the network’s full 1:1 bitcoin backing, followed by the controlled reactivation of Federation peg-outs for authorized PAK key holders,” the Liquid blog post read.
“The Federation, Blockstream, and independent security experts have made substantial progress toward this objective, with the necessary technical infrastructure and safeguards now in place.”
The post added that it had introduced phased swaps again. Blockstream CEO Adam Back wrote on X on Tuesday that swaps were working again.
Liquid is a layer-2 created by Blockstream that allows users to quickly move assets backed 1:1 with bitcoin. People can swap stablecoins for bitcoin and bitcoin on the Lightning Network on apps that support the Liquid Network.
Hackers were able to get 4,000 bitcoins by exploiting an inflation bug on the Liquid sidechain to create over 4,000 LBTC — a token supposedly backed by bitcoin — that did not exist before and cash them out for real on-chain BTC.
The hackers claimed to be white hat hackers who then had an exchange with Blockstream via messages written into Bitcoin blocks. Though critics argue they were not so ‘white’ since they kept 15% of the stolen funds, worth millions.
In one message, the hackers slammed Blockstream as “delusional, greedy, and arrogant,” and threatened to reveal all of Blockstream’s encrypted messages in the exchange unless the company paid the hackers 10% of the bitcoins as an official bounty.
“You SHALL pay 10% using your own money as bug bounty or you will cause all your holders a 15% loss for your irresponsibility and stinginess,” the message read.
The hackers are still holding onto around 600 bitcoins — or 15% of the total funds — worth close to $50 million at today’s prices as per the latest public knowledge.
It is not clear if Blockstream reached a settlement with the hackers in private.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-1-6-JBi4lv.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-20 21:10:582026-10-20 21:10:58Liquid Network Announces Final Stages of Recovery Following Massive Hack
Swiss financial regulator FINMA has approved the country’s first bitcoin exchange-traded fund for retail investors.
The watchdog said Tuesday that the approval comes as people in Switzerland express a growing interest in crypto — particularly bitcoin.
Bitcoin ETFs — particularly in the U.S. — have widened the scope of investors who can buy and sell the leading cryptocurrency. Via shares that trade on the stock exchange, investors can buy exposure to the biggest cryptocurrency in a safe and regulated way.
“As early as 2021, FINMA authorised a fund for qualified investors that invests primarily in a basket of cryptocurrencies,” the announcement read.
JUST IN: Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority has approved the country’s first Bitcoin ETF pic.twitter.com/AOVLGqTa5H
“As Bitcoin has a long trading history and a particularly high trading volume compared with other cryptocurrencies, FINMA has approved an exemption from the applicable risk diversification rules in this case.”
It added: “At the same time, FINMA emphasises that investments in Bitcoin — even through an approved ETF — remain highly risky.”
The announcement did not reveal which asset manager or bank would debut the product. Switzerland already has crypto ETFs limited to institutional or qualified investors on the market.
In the U.S., bitcoin ETFs had the most successful debut in the history of investment vehicles when approved in 2024.
Now, traders, institutions, and retail investors can quickly buy shares that track the price of the leading cryptocurrency and not worry about exchanges or storage of the digital coin.
The funds, managed by Wall Street giants like BlackRock, Fidelity, and Morgan Stanley, manage over $97 billion in assets, according to CoinGlass data.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-19-mYzarS.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-20 20:53:322026-10-20 20:53:32Swiss Financial Regulator Gives Green Light to Country’s First Bitcoin ETF
Bitcoin treasury Strive’s preferred stock, SATS, is now trading on the Nasdaq, according to the company.
The stock debuted Tuesday and will pay a 15% dividend every business day, according to an announcement.
Nasdaq-listed Strive said it closed its upsized initial public offering of 7,000,000 shares of SATS at a public offering price of $90 per share.
JUST IN: Strive’s ‘SATS’ has officially IPO’d on the Nasdaq, and is raising $630 million to buy more Bitcoin and income-generating assets pic.twitter.com/IxqeUENary
It comes as public companies work to financialize bitcoin via different products. OG bitcoin treasury Strategy, which has five different preferred stocks, proposed daily dividends for its products last month.
“The successful, upsized IPO of SATS marks a critical milestone in our strategy to maximize long-term total returns for our common equity investors,” Matt Cole, Chairman and CEO of Strive, said in a statement.
The Nasdaq-listed Strive also has SATA, another preferred stock, which pays a variable dividend.
Strive debuted as an official bitcoin treasury last year and is now the fourth biggest company in the space.
Founded by former Ohio gubernatorial candidate and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the company holds 36,818 BTC worth over $3 billion at today’s prices. The company on Monday announced another bitcoin buy of 4,045 BTC between October 12 and 16.
In January 2026, it completed the acquisition of Semler Scientific in an all-stock deal — the first instance of a publicly traded Bitcoin treasury company acquiring another such company.
Like with other digital asset treasuries, the idea is that investors can get amplified returns from Strive’s stock. The company buys bitcoin with equity, and maintains a debt-free balance sheet: no bonds, no credit lines, and no leveraged positions that could trigger forced liquidation in a downturn.
Strive is following in the footsteps of software company Strategy, which started buying bitcoin in 2020. Strategy is now the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, with 848,517 coins worth over $60 billion.
Its five preferred stocks are STRF, STRC, STRK, STRD, and STRE.
Strive’s stock, ASST, was trading 4% higher on Tuesday.
Bitcoin custody and insurance firm AnchorWatch has said that its Nevada state-chartered trust company opened for business, offering qualified custody for fiduciaries, public companies, trusts and high-net-worth individuals.
AnchorWatch Trust Company, authorized by the Nevada Financial Institutions Division to act as a custodian, opened on Monday, according to AnchorWatch.
The service is aimed at public companies holding BTC, a category that has expanded sharply as more corporations have added the asset to their balance sheets.
JUST IN: AnchorWatch Trust Company launches a Bitcoin custody service with up to $370 million in insurance per client
“Its clients include fiduciaries, public companies, trusts, and high-net-worth individuals requiring qualified bitcoin custody.” — The Block pic.twitter.com/sxGL36ee7I
The company’s flagship differentiator is pricing: fixed-dollar annual fees tiered by vault size, capped at $10,000 per month, rather than the percentage-of-assets charges typical among qualified custodians. Once a client hits the cap, additional bitcoin purchases or price appreciation do not increase the annual fee.
“For large enterprises, the pricing cap will translate to potential six- or seven-figure annual savings for qualified custody,” the company said in its announcement.
ATC offers clients two qualified-custody models. Flagship Custody, where ATC holds the keys required for qualified custody while the client’s trustees or executives hold additional keys, and multi-institution custody, where key control is distributed across three institutions — AnchorWatch Trust Company, BitGo in the United States, and CoinCorner in the Isle of Man.
The multi-institution model addresses a growing concern among institutional bitcoin holders: concentration risk at a single custodian, an anxiety sharpened by past industry failures.
Clients may also apply for insurance issued in the covered client’s or entity’s name — a structure AnchorWatch contrasts with policies held in the custodian’s name, where coverage terms may leave ambiguity about the client’s position in a claim. The insurance is provided by AnchorWatch and backed by A+ rated Lloyd’s of London syndicates.
As a Lloyd’s of London Coverholder, AnchorWatch says it has authority to write up to $370 million in limits per ATC client, covering loss of Bitcoin from perils including violent coercion and kidnapping, as well as losses arising from fraudulent acts by AnchorWatch itself. Coverage is subject to underwriting approval and policy terms.
Insurance is available to U.S.-domiciled companies and subsidiaries and U.S.-resident individuals. Custody without insurance may be available across a broader range of jurisdictions, subject to KYC and AML requirements.
AnchorWatch’s underlying custody platform, Trident Vault, has secured customer Bitcoin for 20 months, according to the company. It has been audited or reviewed by security firms Halborn and Doyensec, and by the technical underwriters at the Lloyd’s syndicates backing the policies.
AnchorWatch describes itself as a Bitcoin-native insurance and custody company; ATC is its Nevada state-chartered trust company arm.
Money determines where we live, what we can afford, and how wealth accumulates across generations. Yet the mechanisms that create and distribute it remain largely occluded, even as their consequences become harder to unsee. For Dutch artist Carlijn Kingma, investigative financial journalist Thomas Bollen, and monetary researcher Martijn Jeroen van der Linden, that disconnect became the impetus for The Waterworks of Money. This ambitious project maps the hidden architecture of the financial system through drawing and animation, rendering it understandable to the people living within it without flattening its complexity.
The Waterworks of Money depicts the financial system as a vast network of reservoirs, channels, and pumps, revealing how money moves through banks, governments, businesses, and households. Some areas receive an abundance of liquidity, while others remain perpetually dry. The resulting drawing operates simultaneously as an artwork, an educational tool, and an examination of financial power.
The project emerged from two years of research, including interviews with more than 100 experts across banking, government, academia, and monetary reform movements. Kingma spent more than 2,200 hours translating that research into an intricate architectural landscape. Bollen, whose investigative journalism examines the workings of the financial system, and van der Linden, whose academic research explores money and monetary reform, helped develop the economic research and narratives behind the work.
One of the project’s scenarios explores a monetary future shaped by bitcoin. As bitcoin enters traditional finance, an alternative monetary system either challenges existing structures of financial power or eventually becomes part of them, and the project’s collaborators have watched both happen.
Ahead of Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5-6, where Bollen joins two panels, I sat down with all three of the project’s collaborators to discuss making money visible, the relationship between monetary systems and inequality, and bitcoin’s place in Europe’s financial future.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money illustrates the financial system as a network of reservoirs, pumps, and channels, with some parts of society receiving abundant liquidity while others remain dry. After two years of research and interviews with financial experts, what surprised you most about how money actually works? What do you think the public most fundamentally misunderstands about it?
Thomas Bollen: What surprised me most is that many people inside the system know a great deal about their own corner of it: interest rate derivatives, asset management or mortgage lending. Very few of them can oversee the larger system in which they operate.
What is clearly not well understood is that banks create new money when they make a loan. They are not just intermediaries that pass on the savings of their depositors.
But can you blame ordinary people for that? During the research phase we spoke to many bankers and even a CEO of a major bank who did not know they were working for a money creating institution.
If we want to improve understanding we should start at our schools and universities. Many textbooks still get it wrong, and economics education hardly pays any attention to it. In 2022 even the Riksbank’s prize in economics (the Nobel prize that is not really a Nobel prize) was awarded for research that presents banks as mere intermediaries.
BMAG: One of the central ideas in The Waterworks of Money is that money doesn’t flow evenly through society. Housing affordability has become a major issue in Europe and the United States, while asset prices and financial wealth have increasingly outpaced wages. How much of this inequality results from the design of our monetary system, rather than broader economic forces?
Thomas Bollen: It is impossible to capture that in a precise number, because so many factors play a role. But it is quite clear that the money system exacerbated inequality enormously during all those years when credit was extremely cheap.
Ray Dalio, founder of the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, summed it up in 2019: “Money is free for those who are creditworthy.” For everyone without money or creditworthiness, it was out of reach.
Cheap credit for rich people and large multinationals (who used it for share buybacks and M&A deals) drove up the price of shares, and of houses. Bank money creation produced a specific kind of inflation: asset inflation. Wealthy households and large multinationals, who already owned those assets, profited far more from it than people without them or small businesses that did not have the same kind of access to cheap credit as their larger competitors.
The Waterworks of Money, Carlijn Kingma
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money is filled with details that help explain how the financial system works. What was the most difficult part of the monetary system to illustrate? Did anything you learned during the research change how you approached the drawing?
Carlijn Kingma: The biggest challenge was the way all the parts are connected. How do you show that clearly?
Water is the obvious metaphor for money, and it takes you a long way. Liquidity, cash flows, money drying up: they are already in the language of finance. It was also great for connecting the different parts of the system, because I could draw the pipes and canals that run between them.
But in some places you need more than that if you want to be completely accurate. Money comes in many forms: commodity money, public money, private credit money, and further out short-term debt and repo contracts can also serve as money or near-money. It was not possible to draw that many different kinds of water running through the system.
BMAG: The Waterworks of Money has been shown to both art audiences and people interested in economics, including at Bitcoin Amsterdam last year. Have you noticed differences in how these audiences respond to the work? Has their feedback influenced how you think about the role of art in explaining complex ideas?
Carlijn Kingma: The response depends on what people already know. Visitors with more financial knowledge usually laugh more, because they catch all the small jokes. We renamed Basel III to “Babel III”, for instance, because the bank rules written after the crisis add up to about three bibles.
In our bitcoin future scenario, The Republic of a Thousand Coins, we put in a lot of jokes about central bankers. You can see Alan Greenspan there as an inflatable doll. That works best if you know who he is, and the bitcoin crowd knows far more about monetary history than the general public.
Above all, we noticed that art opens doors. The drawing gives people a visual starting point for a conversation. Even without any prior knowledge, the metaphor lets you see the social outcomes of how money flows.
BMAG: Your research has examined how financial crises can reinforce the influence of institutions considered too important to fail. More recently, you’ve explored the growing power of asset managers such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Are we witnessing a genuine transformation in how financial power operates, or have the same underlying problems simply taken new forms since 2008?
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: Following the crisis of 2008, there was a general consensus among mainstream policymakers, think tanks and many economists that the banking sector needed to be repaired. In Europe, the influential de Larosière Group concluded that the causes of the crisis were excessive leverage, opaque securitisation, shadow banking risks, and fragmented supervision in the EU, and argued that “repair is necessary and urgent.” The banking repair consisted of new and stricter regulations, stronger coordinated supervision and new crisis management procedures. The underlying architecture remained unaltered, meaning that fundamental change never occurred.
But the architecture remained fragile. Take, for example, 2023. When Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse got into trouble, the crisis playbooks developed after 2008 stayed in the drawer. The US authorities guaranteed all SVB deposits, including the more than 90 percent above the insured limit. In Switzerland, the state backed the rescue of Credit Suisse by UBS.
Advocates of banking repair often claim to have made the system safer. But the inherent fragility of funding long-term loans with runnable bank deposits is still there. Even with all the regulation, you cannot prevent a bank run, and that fragility is precisely what they refuse to solve. The banking system only survives because of massive public safety nets and privileges given to banks.
Large powerful non-banks have indeed emerged but they do not play a pivotal role in money and payments. This is a key distinction between the two sectors.
BMAG: Bitcoin began as an attempt to create money outside the control of governments and banks. Today, it’s increasingly held through investment funds and traditional financial institutions, including some of the same powerful asset managers examined in your recent work. Does this integration strengthen bitcoin’s ability to change the financial system, or risk reproducing the concentration of power it originally sought to challenge?
Martijn Jeroen van der Linden: As a financial asset, bitcoin has benefited from investments from traditional financial institutions. But the increasing use of bitcoin as an investment has compromised its promise of an alternative payment system.
At the same time, bitcoin and the rise of stablecoins have challenged the banks on their payment infrastructure. The banks are now innovating too: look at Wero, the payment wallet that a group of European banks launched in 2024. That is a change. But it is something different from the structural reform of money and banking.
BMAG: Your project imagines bitcoin as an alternative to the existing monetary system. Amsterdam also has a remarkable history of monetary experimentation, from the development of modern financial institutions to David Chaum’s pioneering work on private digital cash decades before bitcoin. Given that history, how do you see bitcoin’s role in Europe’s financial future? Has your perspective changed since you began working on the project?
Thomas Bollen: What I appreciate about bitcoin’s design is that it resembles full reserve banking. A bitcoin is not a claim on something else, so it carries no risk of a bank run. Bank deposits are: they are a promise that you can withdraw your money at any moment, while the bank can never keep that promise to all its customers at once.
We can learn a lot from our history. The Amsterdamsche Wisselbank, founded in 1609 and often seen as the world’s first central bank, started out as a full reserve bank: every bank guilder was backed by coins in its vault. It went under only after it secretly began lending more and more to the Dutch East India Company.
That is the risk of every monetary experiment: it can go in the wrong direction. In the crypto world, all kinds of companies started copying the banks. They lent out their customers’ bitcoins, while those customers still saw their coin-balances in their accounts. Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX shows how this practice can go horribly wrong.
Detail: Republic of a Thousand Coins, Carlijn Kingma
Thomas Bollen will participate in two panel discussions at Bitcoin Amsterdam on November 6, 2026, on the Treasury Stage. Europe’s Monetary History & Future: Austrian Economics, Banks & Bitcoin (11:00–11:30 AM), alongside Rahim Taghizadegan and Willem Middelkoop, and Staat vs. de Markt: Hoeveel Overheid Hebben We Nodig in Geld? (1:55–2:25 PM), alongside Paul Buitink and Simon Lelieveldt.
Watch the full two-part animated exploration of The Waterworks of Money on YouTube and support the project by purchasing a signed, limited-edition print by Carlijn Kingma or making a donation toward its continued research at waterworksofmoney.com/buy.
The Bitcoin Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG) organizes international exhibitions, auctions, and artist collaborations exploring bitcoin and its cultural implications. Learn more at museum.b.tc.
Join us at Bitcoin Amsterdam, November 5–6, 2026. Get your tickets here and use code BA26-BMAG20 for discounted admission.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/The-Architecture-of-Money-Mapping-Financial-Power-in-the-Age-of-Bitcoin-WABAPx.png6391243Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-19 19:44:042026-10-19 19:44:04The Architecture of Money: Mapping Financial Power in the Age of Bitcoin
Super League stockholders have approved all proposals tied to Metaplanet‘s 2,100 BTC investment, clearing the way for the Nasdaq-listed company to be renamed Superplanet and become the Japanese firm’s U.S. Bitcoin treasury vehicle.
The proposals passed at Super League Enterprise, Inc.’s 2026 annual meeting of stockholders, held Friday and were disclosed Monday morning. The transaction itself was first announced in August.
Under the definitive agreement, Metaplanet, Inc. will contribute 2,100 Bitcoin and $2.5 million in cash through its wholly owned U.S. subsidiary, Metaplanet Holdings, Inc.
JUST IN: Japan’s Metaplanet to buy Super League for 2,100 BTC and $2.5 million
This will give the 2nd-largest corporate BTC holder a U.S. listed Bitcoin treasury platform! pic.twitter.com/0gucAALjAX
In exchange, Metaplanet receives 44,859,400 shares of common stock at $3.00 per share, along with preferred stock and warrants.
At closing, Super League will be renamed “Superplanet, Inc.” and trade on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “SUPA.” Its advertising and media activation business will continue as a distinct operating segment, and Matt Edelman will remain chief executive officer.
Among the measures stockholders approved were the issuance of common stock and warrants to Metaplanet and the corporate name change. The proposals also included an increase in authorized preferred shares from 10 million to 100 million, according to a summary of the meeting posted on X.
“Super League stockholders have voted to approve the proposed Metaplanet transaction, an important step in our transformation from a Bitcoin treasury company into a global Bitcoin-native financial platform,” Metaplanet CEO Simon Gerovich wrote on X.
“Upon close, Superplanet will be our U.S.-listed Bitcoin treasury platform, providing direct access to U.S. capital markets and greater flexibility to opportunistically raise capital.”
Edelman framed the vote similarly in the company’s announcement: “Their approval brings us one step closer to redefining what this company can become.”
Closing is anticipated in the fourth quarter of 2026, subject to customary closing conditions, including required filings with the Nasdaq Capital Market. The shareholder approvals represent a required step but not the final one.
Super League said the arrangement is intended to establish conditions governing Metaplanet’s ability to dispose of its equity holdings following the transaction. The company did not provide details of exceptions to those restrictions in its announcement.
Metaplanet held 43,000 BTC as of August 18, describing itself as the third-largest corporate Bitcoin treasury among publicly traded companies. The combined structure is intended to give the group two listed Bitcoin treasury platforms — one on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, one on Nasdaq — each with its own investor base and reporting currency.
Super League connects brands with what it describes as a 3.3 billion-person global gaming population through advertising and branded content programs across gaming and digital media platforms. Metaplanet is a Tokyo-listed company building Bitcoin-based financial products and infrastructure.
Call it poetic justice: one of the biggest victims of last week’s Ledger theft happened to be a scammer themself, according to blockchain analysts, and lost nearly $5 million in bitcoin.
In a post Thursday, Chainalysis wrote that a crook lost 60 bitcoins worth about $4.8 million they’d stolen via a so-called task scam.
According to Chainalysis, the address was linked with a con where people were paid to fake sales and reviews of real items. They were told to add their own money in order to get paid — and then stolen from.
One of the biggest victims of the Ledger theft was a scammer themselves. They lost more than 60BTC, about $4.8M. The funds were from a task scam.
But the mastermind behind the task scam moved the stolen money to Ledger addresses which were then targeted by different scammers last week.
“On Sep 22, the person behind the scam moved the proceeds into three separate Ledger addresses,” Chainalysis said. “On Oct 9, thieves emptied all three. One transfer each, into the same wallet. The wallet is reported as stolen funds.”
Paris-based Ledger last week said it had started an investigation after customers in South East Asia reported they’d lost funds after buying from Malaysia-based reseller, CryptoBilis.
Ledger has since said that the scam was a massive organized crime operation where a group installed implants into devices and put them back on the market. The implants could read users’ seed phrases so criminals could then drain wallets.
Calling it one the most “sophisticated attacks” the digital asset industry has experienced, Ledger is yet to reveal how much money has been lost — but blockchain investigator Specter said $86 million had been drained.
And the task scam conman, according to Chainalysis, was one of the victims.
Ledger has said that it is working with law enforcement to “follow the funds and dismantle the attackers’ infrastructure” and has made sure no other vendors have been targeted by scammers.
CryptoBilis has stopped selling Ledger products, the company said.
Criminals have targeted bitcoin hardware sellers this year, with a huge attack taking place in July on the popular Coldcard products.
Crooks were able to steal close to $120 million in bitcoin from Coldcard users because the devices had a firmware bug which led to faulty seed generation, allowing hackers to guess investor seedphrases.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-16-Gw68nB.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-16 22:12:362026-10-16 22:12:36Poetic Justice: Scammer Lost $5M in Bitcoin After Being Targeted by Ledger Thieves
The Bitcoin for Financial Services Summit (BFFS26) returns to Denver October 20–22, 2026, bringing together CPAs, wealth advisors, attorneys, lenders, and finance leaders who are building Bitcoin into their practices. Now in its second year, the summit has grown to more than 30 sessions across two full program days, with a speaker lineup drawn from the firms defining Bitcoin custody, credit, and advisory.
Headlining the program are Joseph Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Unchained, who opens the summit with a keynote on custody, credit, and trust at scale; Alan Lane, former CEO of Silvergate Bank, on lessons for Bitcoin and banking; Patrick Lowry, CEO of Samara Asset Group, on holding Bitcoin as a public-company treasury reserve; and Colin Crossman, Wyoming’s Deputy Secretary of State, on the regulatory outlook for banks, exchanges, and advisors. Additional speakers include Kate Goldman of Anchorage Digital, Sam Baker of River, Eric Yakes of Epoch Ventures, Daniel Hillery of UTXO Management, Moish Peltz of Falcon Rappaport & Berkman, and CJ Konstantinos of Peoples Reserve.
Sessions focus on practical application: bringing Bitcoin into wealth planning and family offices, Bitcoin-backed lending and mortgages, treasury accounting and valuation, retirement and income planning, charitable giving strategies, mining as an asset class, and fiduciary duty when clients hold Bitcoin. Dedicated workshops will offer continuing education credit for financial advisors and CPAs.
“Last year proved that financial professionals want more than a Bitcoin primer. They want to know how to serve clients who already own it,” said Jordan Guess, CPA, co-host of the summit in a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. “This year’s program is built around the questions advisors and accountants are actually getting from clients, answered by the people building the infrastructure.”
The summit opens Tuesday, October 20, with the Better Money Invitational golf tournament at City Park Golf Course, hosted with Bitcoin Sports Network, followed by a welcome party at The Space sponsored by Falcon Rappaport & Berkman. Evening programming includes wine and whiskey tastings, and Thursday begins with an optional sunrise hike in the Rocky Mountains.
BFFS26 is co-hosted by Jordan Guess and Wyatt O’Rourke of BFFS Media, producers of the Bitcoin for Financial Services podcast. Sponsors include Unchained, Anchorage Digital, UTXO Management, River, SOUND HSA, SustainHash, and Stormrake.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/tn-1-B53hfo.webp6301200Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-16 19:44:292026-10-16 19:44:29BFFS26 Denver: Joseph Kelly on Bitcoin Custody and Credit; Alan Lane on Banking Lessons
Sazmining announced Thursday that it is now selling Proto’s immersion hashboards directly to individual and institutional buyers through its mining-as-a-service platform. Previously, the hardware was mostly in the hands of large-scale operators.
Each hashboard delivers roughly 200 TH at around 15 J/TH, and buyers own them outright while Sazmining handles deployment, monitoring and maintenance at a US facility. Mining rewards go straight to the owner’s wallet.
The move follows a multi-megawatt supply deal between Sazmining and Proto — the bitcoin mining arm of Jack Dorsey’s Block (NYSE: XYZ) — which both companies expect to expand as demand grows.
“Because of our aligned-incentive model, Sazmining only earns when we produce bitcoin for our clients,” said Kent Halliburton, CEO and co-founder of Sazmining.
He also pitched mining as a form of bitcoin acquisition diversification: rather than paying the market price on the day of purchase, a miner’s costs are spread across the machine’s working life.
Wyoming-based Sazmining, founded in 2018, operates renewable-powered facilities across the US, Paraguay, and Norway. It says its fleet runs more than 20 percentage points ahead of the Bitcoin network’s carbon-free share.
Proto is Jack Dorsey’s Block’s bitcoin mining play. The Twitter founder has spent years arguing bitcoin is the foundation of “a more open financial system,” funding everything from Cash App’s buy-and-send rails to the Bitkey self-custody wallet, and he framed mining as the obvious missing piece back in 2021: “Bitcoin mining should be as easy as plugging a rig into a power source.”
Block formally announced it was building an open bitcoin mining system in January 2022, with the stated aim of making mining “more distributed and efficient.”
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The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has dismantled the online backbone of a multinational cryptocurrency scam that drained tens of millions of dollars from Russian-speaking victims across the U.S.
Working with the FBI, investigators executed search warrants across three time zones in a matter of hours and seized or disrupted 241 scam domains and more than 100 cloud servers hosted by Eastern European and American companies. The servers held the scammers’ victim data, site content and operating software, according to a Wednesday statement.
“Our groundbreaking Virtual Currency Unit identified the fraud, tracked the stolen cryptocurrency, broke new ground by uncovering the infrastructure behind the operation, and worked with the FBI to dismantle it,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said.
— Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez (@BrooklynDA) October 14, 2026
“By disrupting more than 100 servers and hundreds of fraudulent websites, we have struck at the heart of this criminal enterprise and made it far harder for these scammers to victimize others. I commend our investigators and thank the FBI for their partnership in this extraordinary operation.”
The scam worked by luring victims via Russian-language investment ads on Facebook. A Russian-speaking “advisor” then called and walked them through opening an account on a fake crypto platform and buying digital assets.
Weeks or months later, when victims tried to withdraw, they were locked out or hit with bogus “fees” and “taxes.”
Some lost their life savings. Then the scammers came back for more: Posing as recovery services, they contacted victims weeks later and promised to retrieve the stolen money.
The unit had already taken down 400 scam domains, but new ones kept appearing. Hitting the servers behind them cuts off the scammers’ ability to launch new sites quickly or reach past victims.
The three-year investigation has recovered about $300,000 so far, and prosecutors say they are working to claw back more.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-1-5-GqOBJM.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-15 23:03:272026-10-15 23:03:27Brooklyn DA Pulls the Plug on Crypto Scam Network
Stocks and shares are a safer bet than buying bitcoin? Not so fast.
According to research from crypto asset manager Grayscale, the digital coin’s realized volatility fell within the distribution of S&P 500 constituents — with a meaningful number of large-cap stocks exhibiting more price swings.
Bitcoin’s price surged in August and September, giving it its best quarter in years and leading a number of analysts to declare that it’s back in a bull market.
“As the asset has matured, with deeper liquidity, broader institutional participation, and more regulated access venues, its price swings have narrowed considerably from the extremes of its early years,” the Grayscale’s head of research, Zach Pandl, wrote in a Wednesday note.
“That shifts the question from whether to own a volatile asset to how to size an allocation.”
He added that bitcoin’s volatility has declined to 43% over the past year, from an average of 64% over the past 10 years and 81% five years ago.
It is now lower than that of 19% of S&P 500 constituents. “For those comfortable owning volatile equities, Bitcoin’s price fluctuations may be less daunting than assumed,” the report added.
December data from K33 Research revealed that 2025 was the least volatile year for the asset so far.
Bitcoin’s price became notorious for wild swings in its early days — with drawdowns of over 80% in the space of months.
But as more investors have piled into the asset — especially since the 2024 approval of U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds — it’s become harder to move its price.
Still, bitcoin at one point in 2026 was down over 50% from the all-time high it hit last October . It has since recovered and was recently trading for $82,485 — 35% below its record of $126,080.
The coin in August benefited from news that the U.S. Treasury would at least double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations. The so-called debasement trade — where investors buy an asset to hedge against a weakening currency — has become popular again, especially as the dollar has dropped.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-14-ihoI6n.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-15 20:30:462026-10-15 20:30:46Bitcoin’s Volatility Has Fallen Within S&P 500 Ranks, Study Shows
America is accumulating bitcoin while exporting dollar-pegged stablecoins to everyone else, according to a new Chainalysis report.
The blockchain data said in its Wednesday report, “North America: Inside the Growth of Agentic Commerce,” that the U.S. became a net importer of Bitcoin in 2026 — for the first time since 2022.
According to the data, institutions this year have been buying bitcoin while retail largely sells.
“A dollar stablecoin is a way to hold dollars without an American bank account, and Americans already have one,” the report read.
“The rest of the world is pivoting to a digital dollar because it meets a need that American users don’t share. Meanwhile, Americans are leaning harder on bitcoin as an infinitely scarce store of value.”
It added that U.S. dominance keeps climbing: Since the 2024 launch of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, America’s share of global Bitcoin activity has risen every single reporting period — even as the overall U.S. crypto economy ($2.78 trillion) contracted 2.2% in a brutal bear market, retaining most of 2025’s near-doubling.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved bitcoin ETFs in January 2024 after a decade of denying the products.
Managed by Wall Street titans like BlackRock, Fidelity, and most recently, Morgan Stanley, the funds had the most successful debut in the history of ETFs.
Institutions and Wall Street can now buy shares of the funds which track the price of bitcoin and take care of buying and selling the digital coin.
The approval of the ETFs has helped the industry mature, the report noted, and helped the U.S. become an overall bigger bitcoin investor.
Stablecoins, meanwhile, have turned U.S. debt into a “currency-of-choice for peer-to-peer economies as well as businesses working across borders,” the report continued.
“In the 2026 period we continued to see stablecoins enter new use cases most especially abroad, benefitting the U.S. companies, and the U.S. government, with billions of dollars in economic activity,” it added.
Since Donald Trump became president, he has signed a number of pro-crypto laws and executive orders. The GENIUS Act, signed in 2025, allows banks and other entities to issue stablecoins if they back the tokens with assets like U.S. Treasuries and provide monthly disclosures of their reserves.
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Russia’s central bank has added Sberbank to its register of organizations authorized to exchange digital currencies, according to reports.
Sberbank was added to the list of digital depositories, which will keep a record of cryptocurrencies and digital rights, earlier this month.
Now, it joins eight other organizations on the exchange register, including state-controlled VTB, Russia’s second-largest bank, and T-Invest Lab, part of T-Technologies, which also owns online lender T-Bank, according to a Monday report from Interfax.
The announcement comes as Russia fast moves forward with Bitcoin-related regulation. Sberbank last month announced that it was the first in the country to have been approved to custody bitcoin.
The Bank of Russia gave it the green light for “digital currency record-keeping” and to facilitate the transfer of such assets, covering bitcoin and other, smaller cryptocurrencies.
“This status will allow the bank to provide services related to organizing the circulation of digital currency on interfaces which clients already use,” Sberbank was quoted saying in the news report.
A law on digital currencies and digital rights came into effect in Russia on September 1, creating a comprehensive legal framework for cryptocurrency circulation. Transactions involving cryptocurrencies can be conducted via the existing infrastructure of exchanges, brokers and trustees, and now also via crypto exchanges and digital depositories.
Cryptocurrency can be bought and sold via crypto exchanges, while the rights to these assets are recorded in digital depositories.
Banks and other organizations have been able to apply to the CBR for the corresponding licenses since October 5. Some existing players have simplified access to the market and can obtain licenses on a notification basis within just one day.
Under the new rules, unqualified investors will be able to buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies including stablecoins, within a limit of 300,000 rubles ($3,556) per year through one intermediary.
Qualified investors will have access to all cryptocurrencies traded on the exchange and over-the-counter markets.
Sberbank will debut its crypto wallet in December — the same month the Moscow Exchange will debut crypto trading.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-12-WKC7Us.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-14 21:30:142026-10-14 21:30:14Russia’s Central Bank Authorizes Sberbank to Exchange Cryptocurrencies
Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Saldo Bank, gaining an EU banking license and a footprint across five European markets.
Payward is buying Saldo Finance Oy, a Finnish holding company whose subsidiary, Saldo Bank UAB, is a digital-first specialized bank licensed in Lithuania. The bank operates in Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany, with a passport into the Netherlands.
Payward did not reveal the financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in 2027, subject to regulatory approvals.
It comes as Kraken, like other crypto exchanges, pushes further into the traditional finance world, allowing users to trade stocks, bonds and other assets. The company has sold its app as a “primary account for everything.”
“A regulated EU bank is the piece that lets us serve European clients the way a primary financial institution should: one place to hold assets, move them freely, and put them to work,” said Arjun Sethi, Payward’s co-CEO. “We are starting in the EU, and the ambition is global.”
Payward said that once completed, the acquisition is expected to let Payward Banking offer interest on deposits, SME and consumer loans, credit cards, and banking-as-a-service tools such as card issuance, SEPA payments access and embedded lending for partners.
Saldo already offers retail term deposits in all four of its operating markets, consumer lending in Lithuania, Finland and Sweden, and a credit card in Finland.
Payward says it already holds a Federal Reserve limited-purpose master account in the U.S. and an e-money license from the Central Bank of Ireland, and has originated more than $2 billion in loans.
The deal comes shortly after Payward this week announced plans to launch in the UAE following full approval from Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority.
In September, Bloomberg reported that Nasdaq Inc. was investing $100 million in Payward at a $21 billion valuation, citing people familiar with the matter. Payward and SoFi Technologies also recently agreed to route SoFi customers’ crypto orders through Kraken Prime, Kraken’s prime brokerage arm.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/kraken_phone_1920x1080-KPl3YU.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-14 16:30:012026-10-14 16:30:01Kraken Parent Company Payward to Buy Saldo Bank in European Banking Push
British multinational Standard Chartered on Wednesday announced a bitcoin trading service for affluent clients in the United Arab Emirates.
The service is the first such service offered by an international bank in the UAE, Standard Chartered said.
It comes after the bank last month debuted bitcoin trading for institutional clients in the Arab nation. Standard Chartered became one of the first global banks to enter the spot crypto trading space when in 2025 it set up a trading desk for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in London.
JUST IN: Standard Chartered becomes the first international bank in the UAE to offer Bitcoin trading directly through eligible clients’ bank accounts pic.twitter.com/uPVQV9D8SJ
“As client interest in digital assets continues to grow, this launch represents a significant milestone for Standard Chartered as we bring digital assets into our core wealth offering,” said Samir Subberwal, Standard Chartered’s global head of wealth solutions, retail products, data and analytics.
“With digital assets moving into mainstream wealth conversations, clients are increasingly looking not only for access, but also for the security, trust and confidence that comes from investing through a regulated and trusted institution.”
Rola Abu Manneh, Standard Chartered’s chief executive officer UAE, Middle East and Pakistan, added: “We are proud to be the first international bank in the UAE to launch a cryptocurrency trading offering.”
The service will allow clients to buy bitcoin via their bank accounts. No third-party apps or wallets will be needed, the bank said.
Standard Chartered said it will manage end-to-end custody and settlement through a closed-loop model, reducing exposure to third-party wallet risks.
The British bank is expanding its crypto-related offerings worldwide. Earlier this month, it said it had plans to offer crypto custody services for institutional clients in Singapore.
Standard Chartered already offers the service in the UAE, Luxembourg, and Hong Kong.
Banks worldwide are integrating or offering bitcoin-related products and services.
A number of U.S. and European banks have started offering crypto-related services by custodying assets for institutions. Others are offering trading via their flagship apps.
Crypto exchange Kraken’s parent company Payward has said it has plans to launch in the United Arab Emirates.
After receiving full market approval from Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority, Payward said Tuesday that Payward can now operate as a regulated virtual asset service provider serving retail, professional and institutional investors.
It follows a preliminary approval in May that allowed the company to complete its operational set-up ahead of onboarding clients.
JUST IN: Kraken has been approved to launch Bitcoin and crypto asset trading in the UAE pic.twitter.com/H7gJNwK3KS
At launch, Kraken clients in the UAE will be able to trade spot and margin with dirham-denominated pairs and fund and withdraw directly in dirhams.
They’ll also have access to on-chain staking, xStocks tokenized equities and Krak for crypto transfers, while institutional clients gain OTC spot trading and Kraken Prime. Crypto derivatives and new yield products are expected later in 2026 and into 2027, subject to regulatory approval.
Payward holds more than 100 licenses and registrations worldwide, spanning Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.
The expansion comes as the company increasingly makes a number of deals. In September, Bloomberg reported that Nasdaq Inc. was investing $100 million in Payward in a deal valuing the company at $21 billion. Kraken will distribute Nasdaq’s tokenized stocks on its own platform, according to the report.
Payward and SoFi Technologies also recently announced a deal to route SoFi customers’ crypto orders through Kraken Prime, Kraken’s prime brokerage arm launched in 2025, and to list SoFi’s stablecoin on the exchange.
Kraken, like other crypto exchanges, is pushing into the traditional finance world, allowing users to trade stocks, bonds and other assets. The company has sold its app as a “primary account for everything.”
Whether or not quantum computers will break Bitcoin one day is a hot topic.
But what about second-layer solutions like Lightning?
Well, researchers from East Texas A&M University, North American University, Florida Gulf Coast University, and Florida Institute of Technology have been working on that.
JUST IN: East Texas A&M University students announce they’ve built the first post-quantum security solution for the Bitcoin Lightning Network pic.twitter.com/GJYL2a9g2G
In an announcement Tuesday, the team of researchers said that they built what they describe as the first full post-quantum security design for the Lightning Network.
As first uncovered in a research paper in September, the team said they added post-quantum cryptography to Lightning’s communications, payment requests and related systems, implemented in Rust-Lightning.
It works like this: The solution layers new quantum-resistant cryptography on top of Lightning’s existing cryptography rather than replacing it. It uses ML-DSA digital signatures and ML-KEM key exchange, post-quantum algorithms standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, alongside the classical methods Lightning already relies on.
In this hybrid design, an attacker would have to break both the new and the old cryptography to compromise a connection or forge a payment request.
According to the team led by Dr. Ahmet Kurt, an assistant professor in East Texas A&M’s Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, it took about three to four months and roughly 11,000 lines of code — and it’s a complete working implementation, not just a small demo.
Lightning lets users make fast, cheap Bitcoin payments through a network of off-chain channels instead of recording each one on the blockchain.
Its cryptography could eventually be broken by powerful quantum computers, and that risk exists even if Bitcoin itself gets upgraded, because Lightning has its own communication and payment systems, the team said.
They added that their work demonstrates that Lightning’s off-chain systems can begin preparing for the quantum era independently while others focus on solutions for the mainnet.
Quantum researchers have warned that a time will come when Bitcoin’s software — which underpins the biggest and strongest computer network in the world — will need to be upgraded to deal with quantum computing.
While some crypto VC firms have urged action, top developers in the space have argued that many of today’s quantum computers have limited capabilities.
Still, they have noted that their development could arrive unexpectedly — just like advances with artificial intelligence — and have started developing some solutions, including top Bitcoin infrastructure firm, Blockstream.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-10-89X346.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-13 22:49:072026-10-13 22:49:07Researchers Build First Working Post-Quantum Defense for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network
Bitcoin’s price could be due a move upwards as the supply of the leading cryptocurrency on exchanges shrinks.
That’s according to a researcher at data firm CryptoQuant, who wrote in a Monday report that bitcoin on exchanges has dropped to 2.67 million from 2.8 million since February.
The price of bitcoin was recently $83,485, unmoved over a 24-hour period but up 8% over the past 30 days after having its best quarter in years. Its surge in August and September has led a number of analysts to declare the bear market is over.
“If buying demand continues to improve while exchange supply remains low, BTC could benefit from a supply-demand imbalance, creating favorable conditions for a longer-term upward trend,” the report by on-chain researcher Rei Researcher read.
It added: “More importantly, in recent weeks, bitcoin has recovered from its lows while exchange reserves have continued to decline. This is a notable development, suggesting that the supply readily available for trading is decreasing even as the market recovers.”
The report further noted that it was possible investors were taking bitcoin off exchanges to put in cold storage solutions.
Bitcoin’s price was mostly trading under $65,000 for the first half of 2026. The coin spent most of this year in a bear market following the all-time high of $126,080 it hit in October 2025.
But that all changed in August. News that the U.S. Treasury would double the size of its liquidity-support buyback operations, weakening the dollar but strengthening bitcoin and other non-yield bearing assets.
Now, the so-called debasement trade — where investors throw money at an asset to hedge against a currency losing its value — is hot again. Bitcoin is benefiting from the trade, analysts say, as it did in 2024 and 2025.
Bitcoin’s price is still more than 30% below its record.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-9-cjneIM.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-13 17:05:392026-10-13 17:05:39The Amount of Bitcoin on Exchanges Is Shrinking. Is a Rally Imminent?
The Moscow Exchange plans to let clients trade cryptocurrencies starting in December and has begun testing operations with professional market participants, a senior executive said last week.
“We are actively testing. We started a week ago,” Boris Blokhin, the exchange’s senior managing director for sales and business development, told journalists on the sidelines of the Sber Investments forum, according to a Thursday Interfax report.
The exchange — the biggest in Russia — will work with a partner settlement digital depository, where market participants will open accounts. It won’t need any additional permits or licenses to launch trading, Blokhin added.
JUST IN: Russia’s Moscow Stock Exchange will allow its 40.1 million clients to invest in Bitcoin and crypto assets pic.twitter.com/ZJOxEPWNNv
The plan follows Russia’s law on digital currencies and digital rights, which took effect in September and sets comprehensive rules for crypto in the country.
Trades can run through existing infrastructure such as exchanges, brokers and trust managers. New players will also join, including crypto exchangers, where assets are bought and sold, and digital depositories, which record ownership.
Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, announced last month it was the first in the country to have been approved to custody bitcoin. The Bank of Russia gave it the green light for “digital currency record-keeping” and to facilitate the transfer of such assets, covering bitcoin and other, smaller cryptocurrencies.
Russia’s relationship with Bitcoin is complicated. President Vladimir Putin in 2024 seemed to praise the original cryptocurrency back in 2024. “For example, Bitcoin, who can ban it? Nobody,” he said at a forum at the time.
But the Kremlin keeps a tight grip on what citizens can do with it. Using crypto as a form of payment has been illegal in Russia since 2022; unqualified investors can buy bitcoin and stablecoins capped at 300,000 rubles ($3,556) a year through a single intermediary.
Qualified investors can buy any cryptocurrency traded on exchange and over-the-counter markets, with no limit.
President Putin in October signed a law to set in stone the regulation of digital currencies and digital rights in the country.
Jeonbuk Bank has become the first bank in South Korea to offer won-denominated loans backed by bitcoin, according to reports.
The subsidiary of JB Financial Group has started offering the loans, according to exclusive Monday reporting by the country’s Edaily paper.
For now, the product is limited to corporate customers raising working capital, and bitcoin is the only eligible collateral. The bank said it may expand the service depending on regulatory changes and market demand, the report added.
JUST IN: South Korea’s Jeonbuk Bank will offer the first ever bitcoin-backed won loans for clients pic.twitter.com/jXbIPsejWU
Jeonbuk Bank won’t own or control the bitcoin itself. The collateral is held by a specialized custodian, limited to virtual asset service providers registered under Korea’s Act on the Reporting of Specific Financial Information, it further noted.
If a borrower defaults, the bank won’t take the coins but will rather liquidate them through enforcement procedures such as a court-ordered sale and recover the loan from the proceeds.
The bank said it chose bitcoin for its market capitalization and trading volume, the largest of any digital asset, and that its own stress tests showed bitcoin held up as collateral even during sharp price declines. To value the collateral, it uses an index based on a weighted average of prices across multiple global exchanges.
Similar products already exist abroad. JPMorgan Chase debuted bitcoin-backed loans for institutional clients in March, and Switzerland’s Sygnum Bank offers comparable credit.
The loan is the first concrete result of the “Crypto Bank” vision put forward by Jeonbuk Bank President Park Chun-won. The lender is the only regional bank to provide real-name verified accounts to crypto exchanges, and it is preparing an “all-in-one wallet” that combines fiat accounts and digital asset wallets.
“This loan is an example of designing a risk management and recovery structure that allows us to utilize existing bank lending and collateral management systems without directly holding virtual assets,” said Jeong Sang-hoon, executive vice president of the bank’s digital division.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Bitcoin-Kimchi-Premium-Is-Back-as-Price-Spikes-Higher-in-South-Korea-bsy69r.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-12 22:06:362026-10-12 22:06:36South Korean Lender Jeonbuk Bank to Offer Bitcoin-Backed Loans
Bitcoin’s price dipped further on Monday, sliding 2% over a 24-hour period to trade at a little over $82,423.
The coin over the past week has dropped by 3%, and so far this month, it’s trading down.
October is usually a strong month for the OG cryptocurrency. Data from Coinglass shows that it has finished eight of the last 10 Octobers in the green.
Last year was one of the exceptions: while bitcoin’s price notched an all-time high of $126,080, it then started to enter a bear market after October 10 — when the biggest crypto liquidation event in history battered the asset’s price.
Markets across the board got hit hard following tariff threats from U.S. President Donald Trump. Crypto long positions got wiped out and over $19 billion in digital asset bets were liquidated.
Bitcoin then spent most of 2026 in a bear market.
The good news? That the coin just had its best quarter in years and a good September — historically a rough month for the cryptocurrency. Analysts now are saying that while it’s got off to a bad start so far in “Uptober”, signs of a bottom this month may already be in.
Writing for data firm CryptoQuant, Japanese asset management platform XWIN said it could be up from here.
“Now, signs of a potential bottom are emerging,” XWIN said in a note. “On October 12, markets priced roughly an 18% chance of an October Fed hike, while Brent crude had eased from nearly $110 to around $103.”
It added: “‘Uptober’ need not mean uninterrupted gains: a correction can build the foundation for the next advance.”
High oil prices have — at least in the short-term — hurt bitcoin’s price as investors then expect the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates in order to control inflation.
But while the U.S. central bank last month raised interest rates, bitcoin’s price was unfazed and rose following the news.
Other analysts have now said the biggest cryptocurrency is out of a bear market due to it crossing its 365-day moving average — a signal that has marked the start of its bull markets in past cycles.
Meanwhile, the first life insurer licensed to operate entirely in Bitcoin, has raised $37.5 million in new funding from its existing investors, the company announced.
Bain Capital Crypto led the round, with participation from Haun Ventures, Framework Ventures, Pantera Capital, Apollo, Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures and Morgan Creek Digital. The raise brings Meanwhile’s total funding to more than $180 million. Sam Altman is also among its backers.
The company said the round follows a surge in demand for its Bitcoin life insurance policies outside the US, particularly in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, amid broader macroeconomic instability.
“Wealthy families around the world already hold Bitcoin. What they haven’t had is a regulated way to pass it on,” Zac Townsend, Meanwhile’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
“Brokers came to us because their clients kept asking. This round lets us keep up with them.”
In early 2026, Meanwhile launched BTC Life 1-Pay, a single-premium whole life policy aimed at high-net-worth clients outside the US. It is the company’s second product line, after BTC 10-Pay, which is designed for US taxpayers.
Under BTC Life 1-Pay, a client pays one premium in Bitcoin and receives a guaranteed death benefit in Bitcoin for life. The policy’s value grows in Bitcoin, and after the first year the owner can borrow up to 90% of it, with no repayment schedule and no margin calls.
Policies can be owned by individuals, trusts or companies, which the company says makes them suited to succession and estate planning.
Since launch, Meanwhile has signed 15 brokers serving wealthy families, including in Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE and Switzerland. Partners include Lioner, an insurance, trust and family office group with offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Zurich, and Apeiron Group, a marketplace for high-net-worth life insurance.
“We’re reaching a turning point where more high-net-worth clients are asking not just how to hold Bitcoin and digital assets, but how to plan around them and ultimately transfer that wealth to the next generation,” said Justin Man, CEO of Apeiron Group. Digital assets.
Meanwhile said its net long-term underwriting income has already passed last year’s total and is on track to more than double in 2026. The company did not disclose specific figures.
“Meanwhile owns every layer of a regulated life insurer and builds it like an AI-enabled startup,” said Stefan Cohen, partner at Bain Capital Crypto. “The growth this year proves the model, and we’re glad to back them again.”
The company’s operating entity, Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited, holds the first Class IILT license granted by the Bermuda Monetary Authority. It received the license in July 2024 after two years in the regulator’s sandbox.
The insurer’s balance sheet, reserves and audited financial statements are all denominated in Bitcoin. Policyholder Bitcoin is held with regulated institutional custodians.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-7-KV7WjC.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-10 00:53:092026-10-10 00:53:09Bitcoin Life Insurer Meanwhile Raises $37.5M as Wealthy Families Look to Pass On Their BTC
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the American authorities will soon seize $1 billion in crypto from Iran.
Speaking on Newsmax’s NPolicy Summit in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, Bessent added that economic sanctions on the Middle Eastern country were working.
Iran has been using bitcoin — and other cryptocurrencies — to skirt around U.S. sanctions. The U.S. in April started targeting crypto wallets linked to the Iranian regime, Bessent said at the time.
“What we have done has never been seen before,” Bessent said Thursday on Iranian sanctions.
“We’re probably going to seize $1 billion of crypto this week,” he continued. “We know where it is. We are isolating them. We did have a maximum pressure campaign, now we have an absolute isolation campaign and it’s working.”
Bessent didn’t reveal what cryptocurrencies the U.S. will seize or how.
It would be very hard — if not impossible — for the U.S. to freeze Iran’s bitcoin unless it keeps it on a centralized exchange.
Bitcoin, being censorship resistant, cannot be frozen. But many other cryptocurrencies, including Tether’s USDT, can. Bessent previously said the feds had seized Iran’s crypto in the form of the popular stablecoin.
Iran started a bitcoin-backed insurance service for its counties shipping companies earlier this year.
The Financial Times last month reported that the Middle Eastern country was using bitcoin to settle cross-border transactions through Iranian crypto exchanges after the central bank advised its countrymen to do anything necessary to help the economy.
U.S. President Donald Trump revived his “maximum pressure” campaign weeks after returning to office. A national security memorandum signed in February 2025 put the Treasury on a sustained campaign against Iran’s shadow banking, money laundering and sanctions-evasion networks.
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Just one transaction can compromise years of discreet Bitcoin activity, Cake Wallet’s chief operating officer has warned.
Speaking on the Bitcoin Rails podcast this week, activist Seth for Privacy talked about different ways of protecting one’s privacy when using Bitcoin and said that focusing on privacy was a must for the West.
Bitcoin privacy is a hot topic again ever since the developers of private coin mixer Samourai Wallet went on trial last year and were subsequently imprisoned.
But just this week, the U.S. Department of Treasury scrapped two long-stalled crypto surveillance proposals, handing a major win to privacy advocates and the digital asset industry.
“If you ever spend your no-KYC coins with one of your KYC coins — which if you just let the wallet do its thing, it could do because it doesn’t know the difference — you immediately connect all of the non-KYC Bitcoin that you spend in that with your identity,” Seth said, referring to UTXO management, also called “coin control” by some wallets.
Bitcoin wallets don’t hold a single balance but a collection of separate unspent transaction outputs — UTXOs — each one a discrete “coin” from a specific past transaction.
When you send a payment larger than any one UTXO, the wallet picks several and combines them as inputs to the same transaction — an easy mistake to make, Seth highlighted.
Seth added that unlike in the global South, where people have experienced more oppressive states, citizens in the West will need to “feel pain” in order to realize how important privacy is.
Still, he added that attitudes were changing and people were getting more serious about protecting their privacy.
“It has been shifting, in the last five or six years a lot of people — even in the West — are starting to think [privacy] really matters, we really need to think about this seriously now,” he said.
Cake Wallet is a privacy-oriented, self-custody, open-source wallet. The wallet earlier this year integrated Bitcoin’s Lightning Network into its platform.
Using the second layer solution is not only faster and cheaper, it also offers more privacy than Bitcoin’s main chain.
While Cake Wallet supports other cryptocurrencies, including privacy coin Monero, Seth for Privacy added that he’d love it if the digital coin didn’t exist.
“If Bitcoin’s privacy got good enough that you could use it and have at least almost as good privacy as Monero without massive hoops to jump through, and Monero ceased to exist, that’s fine,” he said.
“I would much rather the thing that more people use has better privacy than a more niche tool that has perfect privacy, and that’s something that less people are using because it’s less well known.”
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/podcast_studio_1920x1080-vbOpa9.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-09 20:02:392026-10-09 20:02:39Here’s How Not To Screw up Your Bitcoin Privacy
U.S. investors this week reversed course, cashing out $729 million from spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds — putting downward pressure on the leading cryptocurrency’s price.
Funds managed by BlackRock, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, and ARK 21-Shares all experienced significant outflows on Wednesday and Thursday, according to data from Farside Investors.
Investors had started the week by selling close to $90 million in shares but then bought nearly $119 million on Tuesday.
The rest of the week has seen outflows following news that the Federal Reserve may raise interest rates. Other negative news includes the price of Brent crude jumping following renewed attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.
U.S. President Trump also hinted that talks with Iran weren’t bearing fruit — a sign war in the Middle East could continue.
Bitcoin’s price recently stood at a little over $82,688, down more than 3% over a seven-day period. The leading cryptocurrency has rebounded slightly over the past day, jumping nearly 2% over 24 hours.
Still, the coin was fast closing in on $90,000 last week. Investors are expecting decent returns as the month dubbed “Uptober” has historically delivered for bitcoin speculators.
The price of bitcoin has been particularly sensitive to geopolitical headwinds this year — especially since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran, leading to an oil price surge.
Oil prices going up tend to lead investors to bet on the Federal Reserve raising interest rates. And with higher interest rates comes less liquidity for the price of bitcoin to do well.
Still, that’s not always the case: the Fed last month talked tough on getting inflation down and raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point and bitcoin’s price rose in the following days.
Bitcoin’s price is 34% below the all-time high of $126,080 it touched in October. It has spent most of 2026 in a bear market but analysts are now increasingly pointing to evidence of a bull market following a rally in August and September.
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Bitcoin software company Breez said demand for its developer tools has surged since AI coding agents went mainstream, with partnership inquiries rising roughly 14-fold as developers, and increasingly the agents they deploy, look to add bitcoin payments to their apps.
In a company blog post, it tied the jump directly to Anthropic’s Claude Code, which launched as a research preview in February 2025 and became generally available three months later.
Before 2025, Breez said, most prospective partners fell into three camps: committed bitcoin enthusiasts, crypto developers, and fintech firms that treat bitcoin as an asset class.
Since Claude Code arrived, the company said, it has heard from many developers with little or no bitcoin experience. Requests have come from fitness apps, messaging apps that want users to send each other money, an eSIM service for travelers, and the team behind a mushroom-identification app.
Breez said many of these developers pick bitcoin for speed. Setting up traditional payment acceptance, including a bank account and cross-border transfers, can take weeks or months, while the company says its SDK can be running within minutes.
Breez said a growing share of inquiries now come from software, not people. The company said it regularly fields requests from coding agents writing on behalf of the companies that deploy them.
The company argues agents favor bitcoin because it is permissionless. An agent can build an app and set up payments for users worldwide without opening a bank account, passing onboarding checks or signing forms.
“Bitcoin is agnostic about whether the code of its current owner and user is composed of DNA base pairs or weights in a neural net,” Breez wrote.
That same absence of gatekeeping has long drawn scrutiny from financial regulators, who require traditional payment providers to verify customers.
Breez said its newest SDK implementation, built on the Bitcoin scaling protocol Spark, handled the added volume without problems.
The company framed the shift as an update to investor Marc Andreessen’s 2011 essay arguing that software is eating the world, saying AI is now eating software. It compared Bitcoin’s role to background infrastructure like electrical sockets and subsea cables.
Crypto exchange WhiteBIT announced on Thursday that the platform has integrated the network to help users quickly and efficiently move funds.
Powered by BTC infrastructure provider Voltage, the Swiss exchange said that bitcoin withdrawals and deposits can be made over the network. A number of major exchanges — including Coinbase and Kraken — have integrated the second-layer solution in recent years.
Lightning Transactions are now on WhiteBIT! Faster $BTC transactions via the Lightning Network — using a QR code or payment details. Deposit fee: 0.25% Withdrawal fee: 0.15% Move $BTC at Lightning speed. Learn more: https://t.co/nt0svdMqg5pic.twitter.com/WHfmRKT6QI
“WhiteBIT’s mission is to make blockchain technology accessible and widely adopted by delivering practical, user-friendly solutions for digital assets,” WhiteBIT Founder and CEO Volodymyr Nosov said in a statement.
“Adding Lightning support brings us closer to this goal as we are making Bitcoin faster and more useful for customers who want to top up accounts, send and receive funds, and use Bitcoin across more real-world flows.”
Zug-based WhiteBIT, the 17th biggest exchange by transaction volume, according to CoinGecko data, added that the launch supports a faster Bitcoin rail with use cases for “remittances, exchange funding, merchant-style QR payments, and interoperability with Lightning-enabled wallets and applications.”
Transaction volume on Lightning has surged this year. The reason, broadly, is that exchanges are using the network to move funds because it’s so cheap and fast.
Launched in 2018, Lightning was previously pushed for smaller transactions like tipping or buying a cup of coffee.
The network also offers more privacy than Bitcoin’s main chain: because Lightning payments are settled off-chain rather than recorded on the public blockchain, individual payments are harder to trace.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-6-3NV5xM.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-08 19:10:072026-10-08 19:10:07WhiteBIT Integrates Lightning Network for Fast and Cheap Bitcoin Transactions
Greece is planning a law to tax crypto investors’ capital gains at a rate of 15%, according to reports.
According to Reuters and local media, the country’s Finance Ministry has drafted a bill with the proposal. Greece currently has no legal framework for taxing crypto.
Under the draft, the first €500 (about $580) of crypto gains each year would be exempt.
The bill would tax only the net gain when crypto is sold, after deducting trading fees. Swapping one cryptocurrency for another, such as bitcoin, would not trigger the tax. It would apply only when holdings are converted into euros or another fiat currency, or used to pay for goods and services.
Investors could carry losses forward against future crypto gains for up to five tax years, and tokens earned through staking or lending would be taxed only when sold.
The rules would apply retroactively from January 1, 2025, meaning gains from last year onward would be declared on tax returns filed in 2027.
The bill is due to be submitted to parliament in November.
Greece follows the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation. The Hellenic Capital Market Commission authorizes and supervises crypto service providers, and the Bank of Greece handles prudential oversight of stablecoin issuers.
Licensing has been slow: no Greek providers appeared on the EU’s register until September, about two months after MiCA’s transitional period ended on July 1.
Since January 2026, the EU’s DAC8 directive has required crypto exchanges to collect detailed data on their users and transactions and report it to national tax authorities, much like banks already do for ordinary accounts. Greece wrote those rules into national law in May.
Crypto tax treatment varies widely across the bloc. Rates range from 8% in Cyprus to 30% in France. Some countries are more lenient: Germany exempts crypto held for more than a year, and Portugal does the same after 365 days.
Pro-crypto regulator Mike Selig has said that pushing ahead with new rules will stop another collapse like FTX.
Speaking on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co. show Wednesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair said that crypto exchanges will have the chance to register with the regulator in order to safeguard digital asset spot markets.
Once one of the most popular crypto exchanges, FTX quickly and abruptly went bankrupt in 2022 due to mismanagement. Its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, is now serving 25 years in prison for fraud and other crimes after $8 billion in customer funds was stolen.
The CFTC and other regulators are pushing ahead with rulemaking for the crypto space, despite lawmakers last month blocking the long-awaited Clarity Act.
“Four years ago, we saw the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, where he stole over $8 billion in customer funds. That can’t happen under our regime,” Selig said.
“Actually, Sam Bankman-Fried’s subsidiary that was CFTC registered, all the funds were safe and secure because they were segregated, and we have some of the most stringent requirements of any federal agency when it comes to markets — we want to bring that to the crypto world,” he added.
Selig added that some exchanges may choose to remain under the state regimes, while others will register federally.
The CFTC is relying on powers it already has to regulate crypto markets. The watchdog this week sought public comment on a framework that would create a new federal registration category, called a “crypto asset market,” for exchanges offering leveraged, margined or financed crypto trades to retail customers.
Exchanges that don’t offer leverage could stay under state licenses. But the agency reads “leverage” broadly, which could bring even fully paid trades under its oversight unless customers take delivery of their crypto.
CFTC Chair Selig, formerly chief counsel at the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, last month said that the regulator was preparing for the transition of markets moving “24-7, on-chain.”
Both the CFTC and Securities and Exchange Commission have taken a more friendly approach to regulating the crypto industry since U.S. President Donald Trump took power.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/image13_1920x1080-bpemcC.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-07 20:21:222026-10-07 20:21:22CFTC Chair Says New Crypto Rulemaking Will Prevent Another FTX-Style Collapse
Forget stocks — U.S. investors are more interested in upping their bitcoin holdings, according to new research.
Charles Schwab’s 2026 Modern Wealth Survey dropped on Wednesday, and showed that current cryptocurrency investors want to keep adding to their holdings.
The research revealed that a total of six in 10 plan to invest more over the next 12 months — a higher share than among owners of all other investments measured, including ETFs (56%), stocks (52%), bonds (42%), and mutual funds (41%).
“Existing cryptocurrency investors are certainly leaning in, particularly younger investors who are driving much of the interest and momentum in cryptocurrency,” Head of Digital Assets at Charles Schwab, Joe Vietri, said in a statement.
“But to me, the bigger story is that cryptocurrency is increasingly viewed as a complement to traditional investments.”
Charles Schwab is the country’s largest custodian for registered investment advisors, and earlier this year began a phased rollout of Schwab Crypto to retail clients, giving them direct access to bitcoin trading along with educational content and professional support.
Schwab also offers crypto-linked exchange-traded funds, bitcoin futures, and its own Schwab Crypto Thematic Index ETF. CEO Rick Wurster has said Schwab clients hold more than 20% of all crypto exchange-traded products across the industry.
Wednesday’s report added that one in five Americans overall own cryptocurrency today, and another one in five say they don’t own it but are interested in buying it. Among investors, nearly half own cryptocurrency.
It further noted that millennials are the most likely to own cryptocurrency, and are more than four times the rate among Boomers.
The online survey was conducted by Logica Research from August 24 to September 17, 2026, among a national sample of 2,000 Americans ages 21 to 75.
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Jack Dorsey’s Block is pushing so hard for bitcoin adoption, it gifted 1 BTC to a lucky conference attendee at this year’s ComplexCon in Los Angeles.
The fintech giant attended the Complex Networks yearly event at the weekend in a bid to introduce newbies to the leading cryptocurrency through — in its words — “culture, shopping and play.”
Block’s Cash App had a stall at the event with a fishing game dubbed “Lightning Lake”, allowing attendees to win small amounts of bitcoin.
But one fortunate player was lucky enough to scoop up a whole coin — worth $85,000 at the time.
“We wanted bitcoin to feel approachable, tangible and fun,” Maria Pesce, Head of Bitcoin Marketing at Block, told Bitcoin Magazine.
“People could go from never having used bitcoin to paying with it, all in a trip around the lake.”
She added: “At Block, our goal is to make bitcoin everyday money, and ComplexCon gave us a chance to introduce bitcoin to a new audience through culture, shopping, and play.”
Block has long pushed for bitcoin adoption via its companies and products: Cash App allows users to send, receive and buy bitcoin and Square point-of-sale terminals accept the orange coin via the Lightning Network.
NYSE-listed Block this month even debuted an advertising campaign to make the push for people to use the leading cryptocurrency as a medium of exchange.
Dorsey, who in 2021 left Twitter to focus his efforts on payments and Bitcoin adoption in 2021, has repeatedly said he wants the cryptocurrency to be the global currency and “everyday money.”
Block even piqued the interest of celebrities at ComplexCon: Kanye West’s daughter North West and rapper French Montana were spotted by Lightning Lake trying to fish for bitcoin.
Payment volume processed on crypto cards has climbed to a record $12.5 billion, up 140% year-to-date, according to data from paymentscan.xyz, first shared by The Kobeissi Letter.
The figure is also 247% higher than levels recorded in October 2025.
The surge is being driven by growing use of stablecoins as a payment rail and a broader push for cheaper, faster cross-border transactions, The Kobeissi Letter said.
BREAKING: The total volume of payments processed on crypto cards has reached a record $12.5 billion, up +140% year-to-date.
This also marks +247% growth compared to levels seen in October 2025.
Continued adoption of stablecoins as a payment rail and the push toward cross-border… pic.twitter.com/8AMiahkD0F
QR-code payments are another bright spot: demand for QR-based spending helped push activated cards on Jupiter Spend, one of the largest on-chain card providers, up 55% quarter-over-quarter.
“Crypto cards are the next phase of crypto adoption,” The Kobeissi Letter said.
The figures come as major players move into the space of crypto cards. Fold Holdings (NASDAQ: FLD) announced earlier this year that it had started issuing its Fold Bitcoin Credit Card to select waitlist members, with wider access rolling out in batches over the coming weeks and months.
The card runs on the Visa network, is powered by Stripe Issuing and is accepted at 175 million merchants. It offers a base rate of 1.5% back in bitcoin, rising to as much as 4% through behavior-based boosts and partner offers. Cardholders who pay their bill in bitcoin earn an extra 0.5% back.
Aven has taken a different approach. Its Aven Bitcoin Visa Card, unveiled at the Bitcoin Conference 2026 in Las Vegas, lets holders borrow up to $1 million against their bitcoin without selling it, with rates starting at 7.99% APR and repayment terms of up to 10 years.
Collateral is held by BitGo, while Coastal Community Bank issues the card.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-2-656xee.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-06 21:48:492026-10-06 21:48:49Crypto Card Payments Hit Record $12.5 Billion as Stablecoin Adoption Surges
A credit union founded by postal workers in 1930 is now custodying real Bitcoin for its members. St. Cloud Financial Credit Union CEO Jed Meyer explains how its patent-pending hybrid custody model gives each member individual Bitcoin ownership in a multisig vault. He also covers how the credit union has grown to more than 20 BTC under custody without even trying.
Chapters: 00:00 St. Cloud Financial Credit Union’s Path to Bitcoin 01:08 Stablecoins, Dollars, and Bitcoin as New Money Networks 02:26 Bitcoin ETF vs. Credit Union Custody: The Hybrid Custody Model 03:18 Bringing Main Street Into Bitcoin With Direct Buy and Sell 04:45 Minnesota Custody Law, NCUA Exams, and the CLARITY Act 07:32 20+ Bitcoin in Member Vaults and Lightning Plans 09:38 What It Takes for a Credit Union to Own Bitcoin 10:57 The Cloud Dollar Stablecoin and the Cooperative Ownership Model 12:59 How Credit Unions Decide Which Digital Assets to Offer 14:10 Educating Skeptics and Why Credit Unions Must Own Their Rails
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/350M-St-Cloud-CEO-The-First-Credit-Union-to-Put-Bitcoin-on-Core-Ledger-Jed-Meyer-nn756X.jpg7201280Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-06 21:34:322026-10-06 21:34:32$350M St Cloud CEO: The First Credit Union to Put Bitcoin on Core Ledger | Jed Meyer
Mortgage rates just hit their highest level in nearly three years, and homebuyers are already pulling back. HousingWire Lead Analyst Logan Mohtashami explains why the 10-year Treasury yield keeps climbing since talks with Iran broke down, and why the Federal Reserve has turned hawkish. He also explains how mortgage spreads are keeping 30-year rates from climbing above 8%.
Chapters: 00:00 30-Year Mortgage Rates Hit 7.28%, Highest in Nearly Three Years 00:52 Iran Talks, the Fed, and Why the 10-Year Yield Keeps Rising 01:58 Mortgage Spreads Explained: Why Rates Aren’t Above 8.6% 03:28 What It Would Take to Get Meaningful Home Price Cuts 04:43 Homebuilders, Profit Margins, and Mortgage Rate Buydowns 06:17 Why Today’s Housing Market Isn’t 2008 08:13 Bitcoin vs. Real Estate: Competing for Monetary Premium? 09:52 Borrowing Against Bitcoin for a Home Down Payment 10:52 Grant Cardone’s Bitcoin and Real Estate Model 13:15 2027 Outlook for Mortgage Rates, Home Prices, and Affordability
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Housingwires-Logan-Mohtashami-Real-Estate-vs-Bitcoin-Bond-Market-Outlook-RlMbKc.jpg7201280Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-06 21:28:542026-10-06 21:28:54Housingwire’s Logan Mohtashami: Real Estate vs Bitcoin & Bond Market Outlook
The SEC’s proposed custody rules could make it easier for investment advisors to help clients own Bitcoin directly. Coinbase’s Ryan VanGrack explains why institutional capital tends to flow where there are clearer rules, and why he sees direct ownership and ETFs as “both and, not either or.” He also shares why traditional finance is accelerating its push into Bitcoin and digital assets.
Chapters: 00:00 Coinbase Wins CFTC Approval for Its Own Clearinghouse 01:29 Can SEC Guidance Last Without the Clarity Act? 02:40 SEC Custody Proposal: Helping Advisors Hold Bitcoin Directly 04:14 Tokenization: The Biggest Upgrade Since Electronic Trading 05:41 How Tokenization Cuts Out Wall Street’s Middlemen 07:34 What Washington Still Needs to Fix for Bitcoin Holders 08:56 Institutional Adoption Accelerates After the Clarity Act Vote 11:07 How Coinbase Is Bringing Digital Asset Infrastructure to Community Banks 12:01 Sponsor: Square 12:34 Is Crypto Really a Tool for Illicit Finance?
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Coinbases-Ryan-VanGrack-CFTC-Approval-22Opens-Many-Doors22-for-Bitcoin-Ls93wD.jpg7201280Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-05 21:14:012026-10-05 21:14:01Coinbase’s Ryan VanGrack: CFTC Approval “Opens Many Doors” for Bitcoin
New SEC rules could open the door for financial advisors to hold Bitcoin for their clients, and Coinbase is already at the center of that custody story. Shan Aggarwal, Coinbase’s first-ever Chief Business Officer, explains how Coinbase custodies most of the Bitcoin ETFs and supports the advisor community. He sees the advisor rule as expanding the pie for Bitcoin access, with Coinbase providing the infrastructure behind it.
Chapters: 00:00 How the SEC’s New Advisor Rules Could Bring Bitcoin to Wealth Managers 01:13 What BlackRock and JPMorgan Want From Bitcoin Infrastructure 02:16 What Will Drive the Next Wave of Bitcoin Adoption 03:28 Can the Coinbase One Card Turn Spenders Into Bitcoin Owners? 04:22 Coinbase’s Trillion-Dollar Stablecoin Opportunity 05:14 Coinbase and Citi Bring Stablecoin Payments to Merchants 05:56 Sponsor: SALT Lending 06:26 How Coinbase Customers Are Using Bitcoin Lightning 07:37 Will AI Agents Pay in Bitcoin or Stablecoins? 08:30 Coinbase Expands Into Collectibles and Everyday Bitcoin Rewards
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
Institutions are no longer debating whether to own Bitcoin. Now the question is how. TD Cowen Managing Director Lance Vitanza explains why Bitcoin is evolving from a standalone asset into a capital markets ecosystem of common stock, preferreds, bonds and income products. He shares what he heard at the Bitcoin Treasuries conference in New York and why institutional investors increasingly evaluate Bitcoin within a portfolio.
Chapters: 00:00 Bitcoin Is Evolving From an Asset Into a Capital Markets Ecosystem 01:36 Bitcoin Preferreds, Bonds and Dividend-Paying Instruments 03:25 How Analysts Are Evaluating Digital Credit 05:23 Which Bitcoin Treasury Companies Survive a Downturn 07:28 Strive, Metaplanet and Nakamoto: Why Operating Businesses Matter 10:24 Could MSCI Index Removal Hurt Bitcoin Treasury Companies? 12:27 Blockchain Surveillance, Front-Running and Trust in Bitcoin Prices 14:20 Sponsor: Cash App 15:01 TD Cowen’s Bitcoin Price Target for 2027 16:38 Why Well-Run Bitcoin Treasury Companies Could Outperform Bitcoin
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
The International Monetary Fund has praised El Salvador for improving its economy — but scolded it at the same time for its ongoing Bitcoin experiment.
In a statement Friday, the IMF said that it had approved a $139 million disbursement to the Central American nation while also trying to “reduce the state’s involvement in Bitcoin-related activities.”
El Salvador in 2021 made Bitcoin legal tender, much to the ire of the IMF and other major institutions. The Latin American country was at the time negotiating a development loan with the agency.
The IMF in September said that El Salvador wasn’t buying bitcoin; the country’s Bitcoin Office has repeatedly said that it does buy the cryptocurrency.
“Economic activity has exceeded expectations, supported by sustained improvements in security and investor confidence, as macroeconomic imbalances continue to be addressed,” the IMF said.
It continued: “However, certain performance criteria were not met, including on the Bitcoin accumulation front, for which waivers were granted based on strong corrective measures and renewed commitments.”
The IMF further said that the Salvadoran state’s involvement in Bitcoin-related activities is being unwound and that “no further bitcoin accumulation is envisaged beyond the documented donations.”
Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele in 2022 said the country would buy one bitcoin per day but it was never clear where the money was coming from — or if he was actually buying at all.
The IMF said in September that El Salvador was — at least for some time —not using public funds to accumulate bitcoin but rather had received bitcoin from private donations.
El Salvador and the IMF entered a $1.4 billion loan agreement at the end of December but the fund asked for the country to scale back certain aspects of its Bitcoin strategy.
The Salvadoran state gifted its citizens bitcoin in 2021 and debuted a wallet with the hope of getting more citizens using the cryptocurrency in the dollarized country.
President Bukele in 2024 admitted that Salvadorans weren’t using the cryptocurrency to buy things as expected, but always boasted that the government was still stacking sats.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Pics-1-SFYIk4.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-02 22:01:182026-10-02 22:01:18IMF Praises El Salvador — But Still Tries To Scale Back Its Bitcoin Project
South African bank Absa has become the first African lender to custody bitcoin, according to reports.
As reported first by Bloomberg on Friday, the Johannesburg-based lender will serve institutional clients, mostly by custodying bitcoin — but other digital assets will also be a part of the service.
Banks worldwide are integrating or offering bitcoin-related products and services. A number of U.S. and European banks have started offering crypto-related services by custodying assets for institutions.
Rob Downes, head of digital assets at Absa’s corporate and investment banking unit, was quoted saying that while bitcoin was the biggest asset the bank would custody, others would follow.
Absa did not immediately respond to questions from Bitcoin Magazine.
The African continent has a large crypto-native base, with data firms frequently highlighting the high adoption — particularly in countries where currencies have been significantly debased.
In Chainalysis’s 2025 report, South Africa’s $36.0 billion in on-chain value made it second in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria alone received $92.1 billion, nearly three times the total of second-place South Africa.
On the global index, South Africa ranked 30th for crypto adoption.
The character of its market is different from Nigeria‘s: it’s more institutional, with regulatory clarity resulting in hundreds of licenses being issued to VASPs and attracting professional investors and traditional finance.
BNY Mellon in 2022 became the first major U.S. bank to offer digital asset custody services. And this month, German multinational Deutsche Bank said it would debut a bitcoin custody service for European corporate and institutional clients later in 2026.
https://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/South-Africas-Absa-Becomes-First-Bank-on-the-Continent-to-Custody-Bitcoin-Am3SWH.jpg10801920Bitcoin Developerhttps://bitcoindevelopers.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/loho_hor_1-300x108.pngBitcoin Developer2026-10-02 18:12:282026-10-02 18:12:28South Africa’s Absa Becomes First Bank on the Continent to Custody Bitcoin: Report
Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority has approved the country’s first Bitcoin ETF 
Strive’s ‘SATS’ has officially IPO’d on the Nasdaq, and is raising $630 million to buy more Bitcoin and income-generating assets 
Japan’s Metaplanet to buy Super League for 2,100 BTC and $2.5 million 
Kraken has been approved to launch Bitcoin and crypto asset trading in the UAE 
Russia’s Moscow Stock Exchange will allow its 40.1 million clients to invest in Bitcoin and crypto assets 
South Korea’s Jeonbuk Bank will offer the first ever bitcoin-backed won loans for clients 
Lightning Transactions are now on WhiteBIT!
Absa has become the first African bank to offer Bitcoin custody 
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