Cryptopolitan

Circle (NYSE: CRCL) has published a long blog post explaining how it splits USDC revenue with partners on Friday, October 16.
The post was authored by Circle’s chief commercial officer Kash Razzaghi, and it does not name a competitor.
However, it is being seen as a response to Open USD (OUSD), the rival stablecoin that was recently integrated across Stripe’s stablecoin stack.
OUSD is powered by a new issuer that is promising to hand back more of the money a stablecoin earns, and the content of Circle’s latest blog reads as if it’s a response to that move.
Where does USDC revenue go?
Circle reported that it made around $1.4 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026. It said about $819 million of that revenue, which is around 59 cents of every dollar, went to the wallets, exchanges, banks and payment firms that distribute USDC, along with transaction costs.
Another $473 million, which was reported as roughly 34 cents of every dollar, was reinvested in licenses, banking ties, settlement liquidity, compliance and blockchain work.
Circle said that it made 7 cents of net profit per revenue dollar.
The redemption fight at the center of it
When the Open Standard Consortium launched the OUSD token on June 30, it pitched that businesses could mint and redeem for free with no volume limits.
It also stated that partners can collect all of the reserve earnings minus a small management fee.
When Stripe announced that it had integrated OUSD across its stablecoin stack on September 30, it stated that OUSD does not come with minting or burning fees. Stripe also mentioned that it allows partner businesses to earn rewards tied to their activity and balances.
According to Circle, free redemption already exists. It stated that all its customers can cash out through standard bank rails at no charge, with settlement in up to two business days.
Circle pointed out that all its customers who move money over the Circle Payments Network or build on its platform can now redeem USDC for free. It added that this has near-real-time, 24/7 settlement capabilities.
Circle reported that it redeemed $71.8 billion of USDC in the first quarter of 2026, which is around 90% of the supply circulating at the time.
A challenger about one-hundredth the size
The gulf between USDC and OUSD is very large currently, with the former’s supply sitting around $72.6 billion per CoinMarketCap data. OUSD, on the other hand, has roughly 1% of that.
Since the launch of OUSD, Circle’s leadership has said something about it at least twice in four months. The first response came around the same time that it was launched. Circle’s CEO Jeremy Allaire had played down the launch and said that Circle welcomed competition.
However, Circle’s shares declined by around 13% following the announcement of the OUSD launch and the message that its issuers would distribute reserve yield to partners instead of keeping it.
Open Standard Consortium is backed by more than 140 companies, including Stripe, Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock.
Some analysts who shared their thoughts following the launch acknowledged that it was a threat to Circle’s business, and one of those who said that then is Rob Hadick of Dragonfly.
However, that was not the position of everyone; Clear Street’s Owen Lau said that the selloff looked like an overreaction. Lau pointed to Paxos’ consortium-backed USDG, which had reached only about $3 billion in supply.
Coinbase and Binance take the biggest cuts
Circle says more than 150 partners share USDC’s economics, but the payouts are heavily concentrated. Circle wrote, “The partners that bring the most USDC to market earn the most.”
It cited the second-quarter earnings of Coinbase, which is its largest and longest-standing partner. Circle reported that Coinbase held an average of $20 billion of USDC inside its products, more than 30% of the quarter-end supply, and captured roughly half of USDC’s economic rewards over the past year.
Binance is another big beneficiary. The world’s largest exchange invested $100 million in Circle and signed a five-year deal under which Circle pays it a monthly fee to promote USDC.
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The G7’s finance ministers and central bank governors have agreed to stage tabletop exercises aimed at mimicking AI-driven cyberattacks on the financial system, stated in an announcement by Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama.
The objective is to pressure-test situations where this happens to regulators and banks, and how they would detect and recover from such a breach.
G7 signs off simulation plan
Katayama stated that ministers approved the plans during meetings on the sidelines of the IMF’s annual gatherings in Bangkok. Finance deputies had discussed simulations focused on frontier AI before the ministers approved the proposal.
According to the proposal that was agreed upon, G7 finance ministries and central banks will simulate cyberattacks to test how quickly they can detect breaches, contain them and restore systems. The findings will help update existing crisis response plans.
A Japanese finance ministry official who attended the meeting said the exercises will focus specifically on attacks powered by AI.
Private banks and major financial institutions may also participate, depending on the scenario, to test how well the wider financial system can recover from an attack. The exercises are designed to assess existing safeguards, update response plans and identify gaps in cross-border cybersecurity.
Why have regulators moved towards simulation plans?
The proposed exercises come amid warnings from the IMF and central banks that AI-driven fraud and cybercrime threaten both financial stability and public confidence in major institutions.
On October 14, two days before the announcement, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey and IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned at meetings involving the IMF and World Bank in Bangkok that AI-driven cybercrime was escalating rapidly and could erode confidence in the financial system.
AI is speeding up cyberattacks by helping criminals automate phishing and create convincing fake documents, while also picking out software weaknesses faster than human teams can respond.
Not the G7’s first drill
On May 18, 2026, the G7’s Cyber Expert Group simulated a malware attack on technical infrastructure shared across the financial sector, involving 24 organizations from G7 countries, including central banks, financial regulators, finance ministries and private firms.
The proposed drills would take a different approach, testing how financial institutions respond when attackers use AI to launch cyberattacks, rather than focusing solely on defending AI systems against threats.
Katayama had already suggested in July that the G7 planned to discuss common AI security and cyber-defense standards for banks, suggesting the October announcement followed months of preparation.
Banks are already getting ready
Banks are already taking actions to deter these risks. On October 13, three days before the announcement, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told investors on the bank’s third-quarter earnings call that the bank had barred external AI agents from directly accessing customer accounts.
Dimon said JPMorgan would not let outside AI agents access its systems without restrictions, citing the risks to both customers and the bank. He warned that rogue agents could number in the thousands.
Bank of America has taken its own precautions, hiring hundreds of contractors to fix vulnerabilities that AI tools uncovered in its systems. The G7 exercise takes this approach to the wider financial system, testing how authorities would respond to an AI-driven attack targeting shared payment networks or widely used banking software across several countries at once.
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CoreWeave (NASDAQ: CRWV) and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) have told OKXICE that they do not want tokenized versions of their stock to be traded on its new venue.
The venue is operating under the SEC’s exemption rule that lets it treat 30 days of silence from companies as a yes to having their stock tokenized.
Will tokenized versions of Broadcom and CoreWeave be sold on OKXICE?
Both CoreWeave and Broadcom have refused to have tokenized versions of their stock trading on OKXICE’s new venue. The AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems (NASDAQ: CBRS) has also kept its tokens off OKXICE. Stock tokens already circulating on other platforms are untouched.
The new venue operates under the SEC’s “Innovation Exemption,” an order the agency issued and put into effect on September 17. It says that permissioned onchain trading platforms, which the SEC calls Tokenized Securities Venues, don’t count as “exchanges,” and that the firms providing liquidity don’t have to register as “dealers.”
Davis Polk, which advised a client on the matter, says the relief lasts five years, until September 17, 2031.
Before a venue can list a token made by a third party, it has to give the company a heads-up. The company then has a month to say no, or the venue will start trading. Companies usually have no say over whether a national exchange trades their shares, so the right to object is new.
OKXICE filed a notice on October 4 saying it wants to list tokens tied to more than 60 U.S.-listed companies, including Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and SpaceX, as well as crypto-tied firms such as Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Circle (NYSE: CRCL), Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) and Securitize.
Each tokenized stock would trade against either USDC, USDG or Tether’s USDT.
The venue intends to trade 24/7. Notably, its filing does not name the firm minting the tokens.
Can CoreWeave and Broadcom object to having their tokens traded?
Davis Polk says a company can only object to a venue that sends it a notice. Their objection doesn’t stop anyone from tokenizing the company’s stock elsewhere, and the SEC order has no effect on trading overseas.
As of September 13, about $2.43 billion worth of tokenized stock, roughly 84.5% of the whole segment, had been issued without the company’s permission. Meanwhile, tokens issued with consent made up only about $365 million and had hardly grown in a year.
Cryptopolitan reported that the broker Robinhood lists more than 190 stock tokens, which are digital products that track the prices of publicly traded companies. AMC, the company behind one of those stocks, sent Robinhood a cease-and-desist demand over a token tied to AMC shares, and Robinhood refused.
In an October 2 comment letter, Computershare asked the SEC to let companies file a standing objection, so they wouldn’t have to respond to each venue’s notice separately. It also asked for a central, searchable register that would list which venues are seeking to list tokens and which companies have objected.
Hunton Andrews Kurth, a law firm, echoed the sentiments in an October 8 letter that crypto emails often get caught in spam filters, which can lead to the notice being missed. Its clients want the process changed so that a company has to give clear consent that they want their stock tokenized. They want the deadline removed, and they also want a public database saying what tokens are not to be tokenized.
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Solana Foundation President Lily Liu announced on Friday, October 16, that it has canceled the Solana Foundation event slated for the same day in Shanghai to kick off its Accelerate China developer tour.
The post on the morning of the event pointed to venue logistics, with registrations running well past the event cap, as the reason the day’s panel would not hold. Attendees at the venue also reported law enforcement presence at the Shangri-La hotel where the event was meant to be held.
The October 16 Shanghai session was supposed to be the first of four mainland China stops.
Did Solana cancel its Shanghai event?
Guests who registered for the Solana Foundation’s Shanghai event at the Shangri-La reportedly received an email from organizers that read: “this morning’s agenda has been postponed” for “logistical considerations at the venue.”
The organizers apologized for the short notice and promised attendees they would be updated once a new schedule was set.
The Solana Accelerate China website lists the October 18 Hangzhou event as the next on the schedule.
Why did Solana cancel the Shanghai event?
Social media accounts of attendees at the Shanghai event reported police presence. An attendee, posting on X as Olivia under the @knowyourself518 handle, wrote in a translated Chinese post that “There were 8 or 9 law enforcement officers on guard,” and also reported that the event was suspended.
Screenshot of the text that attendees reportedly received for the cancellation of the Shanghai event. Source: Olivia via X/Twitter
Solana Foundation’s Liu thanked the Chinese community for a “warm welcome” in a post on X. “Due to the publicity, event registrations quadrupled overnight, far exceeding the event cap,” Liu wrote, focusing on the turnout rather than the disruption.
Can Solana Foundation hold events in China?
Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao raised a question on many people’s minds when he replied to Olivia’s post with the question: “Looks like they really didn’t know the local policies? But it’s not the first time either, same thing happened less than a year ago.”
CZ’s comments referenced the late October 2025 Solana Accelerate APAC event in Shenzhen that was disrupted after an on-site inquiry by local police. Organizers reportedly canceled the final hackathon, citing “public safety” due to overcrowding.
The question lands just one day after CZ praised the Foundation’s “amazing” feat of securing an office and advertising in China. Per the Binance founder, even BNB Chain had not managed that achievement.
The Foundation lit Solana branding on the Shanghai skyline and promoted a Pudong office described as the highest commercially available workspace in the world.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has outlawed crypto since at least 2021 in Mainland China.
The other three stops stand for now. Solana’s Accelerate China page lists Hangzhou on October 18, Shenzhen on October 20 and Beijing on October 22. Whether Hangzhou opens its doors on Sunday will be the next public signal on the tour’s fate.
SOL traded around $105.50, up nearly 4% on the day, per CoinMarketCap data.
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Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), Metaplanet (TYO:3350) and Sharplink (NASDAQ: SBET) got put on notice for MSCI exclusion as the index provider finalized rules on Thursday to potentially cut asset-heavy firms from its global equity indexes.
Strategy, Metaplanet, Sharplink and other asset-heavy firms from its global equity indexes, a change effective November 30 that threatens billions of dollars in passive demand for bitcoin treasury stocks.
“Non-operating companies,” per MSCI’s October 15 confirmation of its August proposal, will be ineligible for its Global Investable Market Indexes. The proposal passed with minor modifications and did not name any companies.
All eyes now turn to November 11, when any firm exclusions will be folded into the November 2026 Index Review.
Which firms will MSCI remove from its index?
The new rules confirmed by MSCI stretch its benchmark exclusion criteria to cover corporate issuers that behave like the investment funds, business development companies and other passive vehicles it already bars.
MSCI proposed a two-stage test to screen whether firms qualify to continue to be included in its index or not.
The first test checks whether a company counts as a real business based on the amount of operating assets it holds.
Issuers that fail the core test face a second test that scores companies across five financial ratios: operating asset intensity, expense intensity, cash flow, fair value intensity and capital dependence.
Firms need to pass on at least four of the five financial ratios to retain their eligibility card.
Firms already in the index have a buffer, only facing exclusion after failing the index’s screen in both of its most recent annual filings. Companies that are not yet in the index will be ineligible for inclusion if they have failed in either of their filings over the previous two years.
Are the new MSCI rules targeting corporate crypto reserve firms?
The MSCI simulation ran on May 2026 data put publicly traded firms with crypto reserves, Strategy, Metaplanet and Sharplink, on alert after they were flagged alongside other asset holding firms for deletion or watchlist designation.
Yellow Cake, a UK uranium holder, was also recommended for deletion in the simulation.
Strategy could see about $2.8 billion flow out of its stock if MSCI decides in November to drop the firm from its index, according to JPMorgan analysts. That potential outflow will result from a forced sell-off by funds tracking MSCI benchmarks.
The company has already refuted the scale of an unfavorable MSCI decision, arguing that MSCI GIMI-linked funds hold only about 3.1% of its shares.
Strategy’s MSTR stock closed Thursday trading at $151.29, while Metaplanet’s stock traded at 277 yen (about $1.75).
Saylor and allies keep pushing back
Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor and CEO Phong Le signed a September letter calling the proposal “discriminatory, arbitrary, and misguided” and a “pretext” for targeting digital asset treasuries. The letter warned that it “would profoundly harm MSCI’s reputation as a reliable and neutral index provider.”
Saylor frames Strategy as an operating business. Originally MicroStrategy, it sells business intelligence software to clients including Coca-Cola and Porsche, and treats its Bitcoin treasury as a separate operating segment rather than an investment holding.
The Bitcoin Policy Institute escalated the dispute up to the Congress level in a September 30 paper by Conner Brown. BPI called on Congress to scrutinize MSCI’s power, noting that 54% of long-term US fund assets track benchmarks from just three providers and that roughly $21 trillion is benchmarked to MSCI alone, as Cryptopolitan reported.
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RWA perpetual futures are becoming more established in the crypto space, with volumes growing by nearly 75% since August. New platforms are adding to the volume, displacing the leading providers on Hyperliquid.
In October, RWA perpetual futures volumes extended a seven-week streak of growth. Weekly volumes on decentralized markets climbed from $22.8B up to $39.8B, an increase of 74.7% against the final week of August.
Competition is also rising among the providers of RWA trading. TradeXYZ still logged $12.73B in the past week, but has lost market share to Variational. Since early September, Variational’s market share has grown from 10.6% to 32% of all RWA perpetual futures trading.
RWA trading has offset some of the slowdown on perpetual futures markets, which often shift between crypto, equities, and commodities. As Cryptopolitan reported, perpetual futures trading has turned into one of the major use cases for on-chain activity. Recently, Ripple also announced its own brand of on-chain RWA perpetual futures swaps.
RWA perpetual futures on DEXs are the fastest and most direct way for crypto natives and international traders to access non-crypto markets. The growth of perpetual futures also coincides with rapidly expanding tokenization, which adds spot markets for selected assets. RWA perpetual futures add extra opportunities for leveraged positions.
RWA perpetual futures are still a growth sector
RWA perpetual futures trading is still evolving, and users are shifting between available markets. The sector remains unregulated for now, with minimal exclusion lists and still almost complete anonymity.
TradeXYZ retains over $1.9B in open interest, a significant share of the $7.8B total on Hyperliquid. Its current competitor, Variational, reports $2B in total open interest, spread across 550 markets. TradeXYZ has lost some of its open interest since August, when it peaked at $2.15B. Other trackers place the TradeXYZ open interest at around $3.6B.
In total, perpetual futures open interest for RWA is estimated at $3.8B based on Dune Analytics methods. Around $1.9B in value is used in decentralized protocols as collateral. RWA perpetual futures on DEXs still lag behind the centralized markets, which carry over $215B in open interest. Still, RWA perpetual futures are only a small part of that market, which is mostly focused on crypto contracts.
As of 2026, on-chain infrastructure is mostly used by crypto natives. RWA perpetual futures and tokenization are yet to be adopted as official rails for traditional finance, though this is one of the optimistic cases for the industry.
RWA perpetual futures also boost fee production, becoming one of the predictably busy markets with 101.5K active daily addresses for Hyperliquid, of which around 10K are trading RWA contracts. RWA contract trading is still one of the developing use cases, with more growth expected in the coming months.
RWA perpetual futures bring real liquidity
The growth of RWA perpetual futures on DEXs and centralized markets is the key to RWA adoption.
In terms of tokenization, Ethereum, Solana, and BNB Chain are still leaders in paper value. Solana expanded its tokenized value from $1B in 2025 to $4.37B in October, with liquidity coming from XStocks trading on selected markets.
The Hyperliquid ecosystem is still the leader for on-chain trading and bringing real liquidity from whales and crypto natives.
HIP-3, the RWA perpetual futures hub on Hyperliquid, also tracks the main trends in the RWA space. As of October 16, the platform has focused again on indexes and selected equities, with another uptick in activity for gold and oil.
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An OpenAI research model took funds from a crypto wallet it did not own to finish a June coding task.
OpenAI discovered the incident in September, months after it had occurred and disclosed it this week.
How did OpenAI’s research model access an unauthorized wallet?
OpenAI has published an incident report about a model from its GPT-5.6 Sol family. The model was asked to update a crypto trading prototype and deploy contracts to Sepolia.
Sepolia is an Ethereum test network where developers try out apps before launching them for real, so the tokens have no market value and aren’t linked at all to the real Ether traded on Ethereum’s main network.
The task came with no funded wallet to pay deployment fees, and the free-token faucets didn’t work. So the model wrote a script that created 362 addresses from recovery phrases often reused by developers, then checked each one for a suitable balance.
One of the 362 addresses held enough test ether for the job, but before using it, the model stopped and asked itself in its notes whether it was ethical to use a publicly known key and the funds in it.
It arrived at the conclusion that the money was “effectively abandoned,” since the recovery phrase was public and test tokens have no value before signing the deployment, paying the fees and reporting the task as finished.
Notably, the model did not say where the money came from.
On Ethereum’s main network, those fees would have come out of someone’s real holdings that the model had no claim to. This is worrying considering crypto and AI firms are now wiring up agents that hold wallets and pay for services with no human signing off on each transaction.
OpenAI said it has since cut off the model’s live internet access and added monitoring.
The report states that the incident occurred on June 26, but it wasn’t discovered until three months later on September 25. OpenAI says it found out about the incident while expanding its misalignment monitoring across logs of older model activity.
What is OpenAI under investigation for?
OpenAI has created a framework for reporting misalignment and released its first batch of reports, saying it wants to get concerning behavior out fast, “even when we haven’t fully explained or mitigated” it.
However, due to the timing, every honest report becomes material for people assembling complaints like the FTC, which plans to put senior executives under oath and issued civil subpoenas to OpenAI and Anthropic on Wednesday for records on safety incidents, security practices and privacy policies, Cryptopolitan reported.
Months earlier, 15 Republican state attorneys general, led by Iowa’s Brenna Bird, told OpenAI to preserve every record of its Hugging Face breach, including any notes an agent left “apparently for future versions of itself” on escaping the company’s controls.
OpenAI admitted to the Hugging Face breach in July, saying that rogue agents broke internal controls, reached the open internet and coordinated what it called “an unprecedented cyber incident.”
Agents reportedly probed three U.S. government sites, among them the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau and the SEC.
Rogue agent incident reports. Source: OpenAI
OpenAI’s new site mentions a number of other incidents, including a September sandbox escape and a lab experiment with self-replicating prompt injection.
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has said the company is still sorting through agent activity logs and will disclose cases by severity. The Hugging Face incident is still the worst case found so far.
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A federal judge in the Southern District of New York, Alvin Hellerstein, rejected the joint bid by the Gemini crypto exchange (NASDAQ: GEMI) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to remove a permanent order barring the exchange from misleading the US regulator.
Judge Hellerstein of the SDNY declined to reopen a consent order that goes back to January 2025. That ruling was two-fold:
Gemini was handed a $5 million civil penalty
The exchange was also permanently banned from making false or misleading statements to the CFTC
The exchange already paid the full $5 million fine long ago, as noted in the May joint filing by Gemini and the CFTC.
Whether the money would be returned if the court threw out the order was never specified. But the practical effect of vacatur would have fallen almost entirely on the injunction, with a favorable judgment entirely clearing the standing judicial finding that the exchange misled its regulator from the record.
SDNY said Gemini and CFTC did not present new facts
The CFTC and Gemini presented two different angles in their bid for the federal court to vacate the injunction.
The CFTC regulator argued that the 2022 complaint should never have been filed, and that the current regime would not have filed it under its regulatory scope. Gemini, on the other hand, built its case around its settlement being made under coercive regulatory pressure.
However, Hellerstein knocked back both arguments, writing in the judgment: “Newly acquired knowledge of facts that existed at the time the Consent Order was entered does not constitute a significant change in factual circumstances,” adding that “the CFTC’s present assessment that this action should not have been brought does not require vacatur or other relief.”
The SDNY judge also rejected Gemini’s coercion claim, writing that the exchange “made the calculated decision to settle the case shortly before trial,” after roughly three years of litigation. Hellerstein added that the exchange knew of its own internal problems, including its former chief operating officer’s fraud scheme.
Gemini entered a settlement about three weeks before the case was scheduled to go to trial.
The settlement, at the time, resolved a June 2022 suit accusing Gemini of making false or misleading statements to the CFTC in 2017 about the risks of manipulation in a proposed Bitcoin (BTC) futures contract.
The CFTC is expanding crypto oversight
The CFTC under the Trump administration has gained expanded regulatory oversight over the areas that most of Gemini’s expansion plans to become a “full-stack” marketplace run through.
Gemini President Cameron Winklevoss said the company is looking at products spanning crypto spot, predictions, futures, options and perpetual contracts. However, the court order from the 2022 settlement stays as a spot on the exchange’s record as it seeks a complete suite of licenses from the CFTC.
The exchange, through affiliates, is already stacking the approvals to launch its new products and services.
Gemini Titan became a Designated Contract Market (DCM) in December 2025 to launch a prediction market. A different affiliate, Gemini Olympus, received a Derivatives Clearing Organization license in May 2026.
A political path to the reversal
The joint motion filed in late May was itself the product of a turbulent year at the agency. In September 2025, then-nominee Brian Quintenz published texts with the Winklevoss twins, saying he released them because President Donald Trump “might have been misled.”
Quintenz claimed the brothers pressed him over the Gemini case, which Tyler Winklevoss called “lawfare trophy hunting,” and then pushed the White House to stall his confirmation.
Trump withdrew Quintenz’s nomination and later installed Michael Selig as CFTC chair. Under Selig, the commission reversed course on Gemini.
In its May filing, the CFTC said it “concluded the complaint should not have been filed,” and the agency found its enforcement division had “resorted to inappropriate tactics.”
Selig remains the CFTC’s only sitting commissioner, and this month, Cryptopolitan reported that the agency proposed its first crypto market rules after the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate.
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Israeli advertising firm Discover-Tech used ordinary online ads to track people and install spyware to their devices, as per Reuters.
It was able to distribute ads across a vast network of websites and apps using advertising platforms operated by Google, Comcast and Yandex. Independent investigations by Citizen Lab and Confiant revealed how the operation worked. Simply loading an ad could expose users to surveillance or spyware, even without clicking on it.
Why a loaded ad was enough to compromise a device
Real-time bidding auctions ad space in milliseconds, sharing device and location data with potential buyers. Some ads also run code. Citizen Lab calls the zero-click spyware technique AdFection and links Discover-Tech to Candiru, an Israeli spyware maker blacklisted by the US in 2021.
On April 12, 2026, Confiant found a MyIPInfo banner, which redirected to an infrastructure linked to Candiru through Amazon CloudFront. The ad loaded a fake verification tool that have about 90KB of hidden JavaScript. This allowed it to collect information about the device and communicate through an encrypted channel. Confiant investigated the activity between April and September 2026.
45 infected machines at Al Jazeera, millions more exposed
Citizen Lab examined four billion bidding records. It found out that Discover-Tech had booked its advertisements on at least 120,000 online sites and in 75,000 applications.
As per Confiant’s estimation, there are at least 10 million advertisements delivered via Discover-Tech in a day. Its cofounder Jerome Dangu said “very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech.”
Citizen Lab confirmed that Candiru spyware compromised 45 Windows machines at Al Jazeera during 2024–2025. The broadcaster said it “condemns the spyware attacks targeting a number of its staff.”
Discover-Tech ads are also shown on networks associated with government and international agencies, including the Pentagon, United Nations, NATO, European Commission, International Atomic Energy Agency and International Criminal Court. Researchers also detected Discover-Tech ads on networks associated with chipmakers Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron.
However, exposure does not necessarily mean infection. Unlike the reported compromises at Al Jazeera, these appearances do not establish that spyware successfully infected devices at those institutions.
Google, IAB Europe and Beeswax cut off access
Google removed Discover-Tech from its advertising platform “for systematically violating our policies.” IAB Europe also dropped the ads company from its list of approved vendors. Comcast’s Beeswax blocked its access to the platform.
The findings raised wider concerns about online advertising security. Citizen Lab researcher Wolfie Christl warned that “the way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat.”
A $1.34 trillion market built on the same plumbing
The advertising market continues to grow, raising the stakes for security. WARC expects global ad spending to reach $1.34 trillion in 2026. In the US, programmatic advertising earned a staggering $162.4 billion in 2025 according to IAB numbers. But security measures have been unable to keep up with the increasing application of artificial intelligence in the advertising industry.
IAB research shows only about 40% of the surveyed ad buyers have already done or plan to do something regarding legal, security, and data risks related to AI-powered measurement.
Norway recently fined Microsoft-owned Xandr NOK 92 million for unlawfully sharing sensitive Grindr data through ad auctions. It was a privacy violation, not a spyware case. Regulator Line Coll said responsibility “cannot be passed on to others.”
Discover-Tech spyware campaign: Millions exposed, 45 devices infected
The Discover-Tech case comes as advertising companies are increasingly investing in consumer data and AI-powered targeting. As Cryptopolitan previously reported, Publicis Groupe signed an agreement to buy LiveRamp for $2.2 billion, thus enhancing its AI-based marketing activities.
While the deal has no connection to the spyware attacks, it shows how important data and automation have become to the industry. The findings also raise questions about whether existing security measures are keeping pace.
Citizen Lab has called for investigations into Discover-Tech and Candiru, putting pressure on advertising platforms to improve how they screen vendors and detect malicious ads.
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Tesla finally revealed its second generation Roadster with SpaceX thrusters on Thursday via a livestream. The announcement was made at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, just outside Waco. The demonstration included a driverless prototype climbing a curved ramp, flipping off of it and landing smoothly on its wheels. The car also used thrusters to hop over a lineup of five Teslas, including the Semi and the Cybercab.
Real life, baby pic.twitter.com/3QEqn18wig
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 16, 2026
The show arrived two weeks later than intended. Tesla had set the reveal for October 1 before weather at the site forced a reschedule. The car was first teased by Musk back in November 2017 and deliveries were set to be in motion in 2020. Nearly nine years and at least six production targets later, the car was finally unveiled to the public.
The Stunts Ran on SpaceX-built Thrusters
Tesla’s engineering prowess was on full display throughout the reveal. Two systems did most of the work. Tesla engineering VP Lars Moravy said it can generate up to 2G of suction, enough to keep the prototype pinned to an inverted ramp. Musk pitched the same downforce as a way to break track records.
The other system is a set of compressed-air thrusters developed with SpaceX. Air stored in high-pressure tanks gets pushed through 10 nozzles to jump, rotate and accelerate the car. Musk stated that these tanks can be recharged while the car is driving, and Tesla says the system runs on compressed air with no fuel involved.
Those thrusters also produced the event’s standout number. The demonstration showed the next generation Roadster clocking 0 to 60 mph in just 0.81 seconds. Tesla quotes a top speed of over 230 mph and more than 300 miles of range.
The Flying Comes in Short, Controlled Hops
Tesla’s demonstration showed the car bouncing off the ground and landing smoothly rather than any sort of hovering or cruising. As of now, Tesla hasn’t said much about how the thruster version would work on public roads. Musk wasn’t selling a family car either and at one point he told the crowd it was “not necessarily a safety-optimized car.”
Musk Says the Roadster Won’t Move Revenue
Musk has never pretended this car matters to the balance sheet. Back in 2023, he called it a “small potato situation” for Tesla’s finances. Morningstar expects around 2,000 Roadster sales a year, against the 1.6 million vehicles Tesla sold last year.
Its job is mostly symbolic. Musk confirmed it will be the only Tesla that stays human-driven going forward, at a point when the company’s attention has shifted to robotaxis, Full Self-Driving and Optimus. Tesla’s own post on X pitched it as the best of the last cars people will drive themselves.
Roadster
The last best driver's car pic.twitter.com/WURiDjgcPD
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 16, 2026
Reservation and Tier Details
Tesla is splitting the Roadster into three trims. The base Performance car seats two, uses active aero and the suction system, and hits 60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. Thrust adds rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters and cuts that to under 0.9 seconds. Rocket seats one, adds thrusters around the body for jumps and rotation, and is quoted at under 0.59 seconds with a top speed above 230 mph.
Only the Performance car is open for reservations. Thrust will be a limited release, while Rocket is invite only.
None of the three has a price yet. Tesla’s website shows that reservations cost $50,000, split into a $5,000 refundable payment upfront and $45,000 due within 10 days for the performance version while the Thrust version has a reservation cost of $250,000, with a $5,000 refundable payment and $245,000 due within 10 days. On stage, Musk said the car enters production in 2028, but Tesla gave no delivery date.
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Between September 28 and October 5, 2,599 Amap jobs were pushed through the urlquery.net scanner by a fleet of AI agents on Tencent Cloud.
Research group Swarmchasers said on October 14 that five runs returned the answers they sought through Jina’s cache.
1,676 of 2,599 urlquery jobs drew success codes from Alibaba
Most of the tasks asked which entrance Amap users most frequently arrive at when navigating to a place, such as Chengdu Zoo.
Alibaba says its mapping app, Amap, has about 1 billion monthly active users. It received at least 35,300 requests from the 2,599 submissions.
Of these submissions, 1,676 received 2xx success codes directly from Amap, though some could have been CAPTCHA pages. The researchers said the number is not an upper bound on success, because the answers they verified came through some other conduit.
The route ran through Jina, a cache-enabled page reader. Amap was still blocking them, but agents were having Jina pull Amap place pages onto Jina’s own servers and return them as text beginning on October 4.
A program inside the browser of urlquery then passed the text to a webhook inbox or wrote it into the page title. These titles are published by urlquery.
Swarmchasers logged five runs where this led to entrance figures. Answers for Chengdu Zoo and Chengdu’s Global Center came in on October 4, Beijing Wildlife Park and Beijing World Park on October 5, and Shanghai Museum East on October 6.
The zoo and Global Center runs accepted Jina copies that were up to 30 days old, so their answers could be out of date.
Agents also turned urlquery.net into a remote code runner by encoding programs in base64 and putting them in URLs that its browser ran. They got tokens from Alibaba’s anti-bot scripts, sent requests to four pre-production hosts, and checked Amap keys that were left in public code.
Amap returned error 419 to the agents’ own tokens. But one leaked key-and-security-code pair returned actual place data, and researchers found no sign that private systems had been accessed.
All 17 inboxes trace to Hong Kong and a hysandbox-ats proxy
When Amap became urlquery’s most scanned site on October 4, Swarmchasers, a team formed at a hackathon put on by AI Digest and Grove Research, spotted the fleet. Researchers buried text in their preliminary report steering agents to a mailbox that forwarded requests to a Claude Opus model the team ran, after an inbox message, possibly from a fleet member, used the team’s own word “fleet”.
Agents sent 33 messages, read 12 of the team’s 20 replies and replied to 7. One agent said it was run in a restricted Tencent sandbox and refused to share process or network information.
An agent tells Swarmchasers it ran in a restricted Tencent hysandbox and withholds environment details, in a mailbox message dated October 7, 2026, from the group’s report.
“In hindsight it was not a good idea to be misleading, but at the time we were caught up in the excitement of it all,” the researchers wrote.
All 17 agent inboxes the team inspected through October 5 traced back to Tencent Cloud addresses in Hong Kong. All direct requests from those machines were forwarded through a proxy called hysandbox-ats.
The proxy name matches a `*.hysandbox.tencent-cloud.com` SSL certificate issued to Tencent in August. The sandbox is in line with the infrastructure of Tencent’s Hunyuan model team, the report said.
A person close to Tencent told the researchers the fleet came from a temporary project by an evaluation team, separate from Hunyuan, set up to test how third-party models browse the web and answer questions.
Some agents called themselves Anthropic’s Claude. They were most likely wrong, the report says, and the model behind the fleet is still a mystery.
The last time the fleet was seen was October 8. Swarmchasers said the case shows that alignment is still unsolved across the industry, not just at Tencent.
Chinese and Western labs have both had agentic failures before. Earlier in 2026, Alibaba itself disclosed that one of its coding agents mined crypto during training.
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General Atlantic is planning to pursue a public listing in the first half of 2027, with a valuation as high as $10 billion, as per Financial Times.
This amount refers to the potential market value, not the proceeds raised from the IPO. Although General Atlantic has over $130 billion in assets under management, investors will be buying shares in the management company, rather than in the funds themselves.
A listing three years in the making
General Atlantic’s plans began with a confidential filing in December 2023. In August, Reuters disclosed that JPMorgan Chase would head the revived offering in partnership with Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. Then, a 2026 launch seemed plausible, but as per the recent schedule, it has been pushed back to 2027.
The firm’s portfolio includes AI developer Anthropic, payments company PhonePe and Mexican bank Banamex. It has also branched out beyond growth equity to include credit and infrastructure, expanding its endeavors in anticipation of a future IPO.
Deals, not IPO proceeds, are moving cash
Meanwhile, General Atlantic is pursuing exits without going public. KKR agreed to acquire Gen II Fund Services from Hg, General Atlantic and other investors for $5.1 billion in enterprise value. The transaction is expected to close in 2027, following their joint investment in 2020.
General Atlantic executives Aaron Goldman and Caroline Woodworth said:
In Gen II, we saw a business with deep client relationships, an ambitious team and a culture of innovation and growth.
— General Atlantic, Gen II announcement
The $5.1 billion values the entire business, not General Atlantic’s share of the proceeds.
The third quarter saw a significant upturn in private equity exits, but this increase did not occur uniformly across the board. In fact, data from PitchBook’s Q3 2026 Global PE First Look shows that global exit value soared by 65% to reach nearly $481.6 billion, with major deals driving much of the increase. In terms of number of exits, only a 9.3% increase to reach among the same number of exits of 1,089 was recorded, along with a more modest deal value increase of 7.8%.
Yet, when it comes to fundraising, things look different. Only 523 funds were closed; thus, reducing annual results by 30.5% compared to last year. However, with raised $368.1 billion in 2025, the pace of increase is 3.1%. For General Atlantic, an improved exit market is good news but investment controls remain tightened and IPOs are not guaranteed anymore.
The IPO window is open, and it has teeth
These recoveries do not ensure a smooth listing. According to Reuters, there are several cases of failure in 2026. For example, Australian data center operator Firmus canceled an IPO targeting a valuation of $30.6 billion. Oura postponed an IPO to raise around $2.2 billion, while PhonePe halted its plans to raise between $9 billion and $10.5 billion.
For General Atlantic, excellent exits may bring in backers, but pricing will still be a problem.
General Atlantic Eyes $10B IPO in 2027 as Private Equity Exits Rebound 65%
Where crypto fits, and where it doesn’t
General Atlantic also backs Fireblocks, a digital-asset infrastructure provider, and Talos, an institutional crypto-trading technology company. Both appear in its investment portfolio from 2022.
Cryptopolitan reported that Talos raised $105 million that year from investors including General Atlantic, at a $1.25 billion valuation.
A General Atlantic IPO would not directly revalue either business. Its impact on the global crypto market would depend on whether the listed firm subsequently directs more capital toward digital-asset infrastructure.
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Meta on Thursday pushed out Muse Spark Open, an 816-billion-parameter open-weight model that it says is the most capable US model of its kind.
The model runs on a pair of Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios at home, the company says.
Each M5 Ultra brings up to 512GB of unified memory
Meta’s model card says that Muse Spark Open uses a mixture-of-experts design that activates 42 billion of its 816 billion parameters per token.
It accepts text, images, video and audio and returns text. It has a context of up to 1 million tokens.
Meta aims it at work that involves code and agents. Its goals are long-horizon tasks, software engineering and reasoning in more than one step.
Each M5 Ultra Mac Studio has up to 512GB of unified memory, so two would have about a terabyte, which Meta said in its announcement was enough to store the entire model. It runs locally on Apple’s MLX framework.
Meta says Muse Spark Open runs on two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios, posted by @AIatMeta on X on October 15, 2026.
In Meta’s demos, Muse Code, built on Spark Open, shipped changes to Ice Cubes, an open-source Mastodon client. It also drove the DaVinci Resolve video editor to scrutinize footage and cut vertical crops.
Apple will ship the 512GB model in late October, but it hasn’t said how much it will cost yet. Right now, a 256GB M5 Ultra Mac Studio costs $10,799. That means four of them, which is about a terabyte, would cost $43,196 before tax.
Meta’s model card says the NVFP4 build needs at least 700GB of GPU memory and BF16 needs at least 2TB.
Spark scores 39 on Artificial Analysis, below three Chinese rivals
Meta’s “most capable” claim only covers US models. Meta’s own table gives Spark Open a score of 39 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
Several open-weight Chinese models rank higher on the same list. While GLM-5.3 is at 45 and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is at 44, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.6-Pro is at 46.
Spark Open leads its listed rivals on JobBench at 61.8 and MCP-Atlas at 89.2, both tool-use tests, and on HLE-Diamond without tools. Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 outdo it on terminal coding, longer software-engineering tasks and the GDPVal-AA professional-work benchmark.
Chinese models accounted for 41% of downloads in the year to March 2026, outpacing US models, according to an assessment by Hugging Face. In September, OpenRouter said open-weight models accounted for 60% of the token volume from US-based requests, the majority from Chinese labs.
“I waited so long for US open weight models to be relevant again,” wrote Interconnects author Nathan Lambert on X. He added, “Still more work to do!”
Spark Open is hosted by seven partners: Together AI, Fireworks AI, Baseten, Groq, Modal, Nebius and OpenRouter. Weights are hosted on Hugging Face, Amazon SageMaker AI, Google Cloud Model Garden, and Microsoft Foundry Models.
It’s offered by Meta under the Muse Model License, which permits many developers to use it for free, but with limited commercial terms.
The release overturns Meta’s April approach. Then Muse Spark launched closed and proprietary, under new AI chief Alexandr Wang, in what Meta called a full overhaul of its AI work.
Open weights put the parameters in anyone’s hands to download, run and fine-tune, the stance Meta held before the Muse Spark line.
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Volvo Cars is expanding its partnership with Nvidia to bring more advanced hands-free and automated driving features to future models, with plans to extend the technology across its lineup, including hybrids and gasoline-powered cars, without limiting it to only EVs.
Three pieces of Nvidia tech going into future Volvos
According to the matching press releases from both companies about the partnership expansion, Volvo will incorporate three Nvidia technologies into its next generation of vehicles. The products lined up for Volvo include the Hyperion sensor and computing architecture, the Alpamayo driving software stack, and Halos, Nvidia’s safety evaluation layer.
The goal is to enable fully autonomous travel from start to finish, including driving on highways and city streets and navigating parking areas.
Volvo has not disclosed any figures pertaining to the partnership or the car models that will get the technology first.
When the brand synonymous with car safety for almost 100 years teams up with AI, amazing things happen. 🚗
We’re expanding our partnership with Volvo Cars to advance safe automated driving: Volvo’s safety expertise will come together with the NVIDIA Hyperion, Halos OS and Alpamayo Stack driving software, debuting in a next-generation Volvo car.
Read the news: https://t.co/NrqeVYGLC4
— NVIDIA (@nvidia) October 15, 2026
Ali Kani on running two stacks at once
Nvidia’s automotive chief, Ali Kani, said Alpamayo uses multiple layers of safeguards designed to improve safety.
It combines Alpamayo’s suite of AI models, datasets and simulation tools for developing autonomous-driving software with a more traditional software stack that uses machine learning alongside camera and radar perception.
The two systems also operate simultaneously, Kani explained, with the use of multiple sensor types adding another layer of protection.
Kani added that developers have already downloaded the open-source Alpamayo software over 650,000 times.
Two CEOs, one safety pitch
CEO and president of Volvo, Håkan Samuelsson, stated in the press release that the automaker had spent almost the last century building its well known reputation for safety. He added that the expanded partnership combines Volvo’s safety expertise with “world-class AI technology.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated in the press release that the partnership aims to make future cars safer and easier to drive.
Volvo and Nvidia have worked together since 2017. Volvo, founded in 1927, sold more than 710,000 vehicles in 2025, 46% of them electric. Nvidia has also expanded its automotive business through partnerships such as its work with autonomous trucking company Einride.
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Rakuten Wallet will give away physical Shiba Inu (SHIB) coins at an investment seminar on November 3 in Osaka. Participants who show their SHIB holdings in the app will be able to take home the souvenir.
This gives the exchange with one more way to convert the excitement about the meme coin into customer engagement.
Show your SHIB balance, get a metal coin
Senior analyst Matsuda will be speaking at Rakuten Securities’ seminar in Osaka. During the event, attendees can receive a physical SHIB coin by visiting Rakuten Wallet’s booth and showing their SHIB balance in the app. The giveaway is open to seminar attendees while supplies last.
The collectible is neither airdrop nor blockchain token or any other type of payment instrument. Launched in July, it is Rakuten Wallet’s fifth release in the Real Coin series, which included such coins as Bitcoin, Ether and XRP before.
The new SHIB variant has been sandblasted, giving it a matte finish. According to the company, the feedback received internally was entirely good.
From an April listing to offline marketing
On April 15, 2026, Rakuten Wallet incorporated SHIB, XRP, Dogecoin, Stellar, and Toncoin into its trading portfolio, bringing the number to 14 tokens.
Rakuten’s retail ecosystem means the exchange can reach around 44 million customers, although this total does not reflect the active SHIB traders. Customers can convert Rakuten Points into SHIB, linking the token to the larger payments system of the company.
DigitalToday reported that Rakuten Pay can be used at about five million locations in Japan. The company also talked about having massive promotional giveaways to increase awareness of SHIB and encourage users to join its ecosystem.
SHIB Coin Giveaway: Real Coin History and April 2026 Listings
A $228 billion retail market in play
The amount of Japanese crypto transactions from July 2025 to June 2026 was $228.3 billion, according to Chainalysis. This figure is less than that of South Korea, recorded at $449.1 billion. The share of decentralized exchanges in the crypto services market of Japan amounted to 34.5%, while 65.7% of the retail DEX swaps were between $10 and $1,000.
The general manager of Binance Japan, Arisa Toyosaki, described the problem as:
Japan has a large, active retail crypto base, but growth has been constrained by tax treatment and a relatively conservative investing culture.
— Arisa Toyosaki, quoted by Chainalysis
Previously, Cryptopolitan has reported the addition of SHIB to the Green List of Japan, getting the same regulatory treatment as Bitcoin and Ether. While this is important from the regulatory listing perspective, it does not mean that it endorses any investments.
Giveaways versus measurable demand
Japan’s cryptocurrency market is on the rise and could be beneficial for Rakuten. However, being able to reach potential customers does not mean that they would engage in trading.
This distinction can be observed in CoinGecko’s report for the third quarter of this year: the worldwide cryptocurrency market capitalization increased by 39.6%, while the spot trading volume on the top 10 centralized exchanges decreased by 14.2%. Thus, the increasing valuation did not cause any positive changes in trading.
Can promotional giveaways succeed in bridging the divide? Research conducted at the University of Arizona by Tianyang Xie, Yong Ge, and Karthik Kannan looked at a sample of 2,160 cryptocurrencies in order to understand the role of digital token giveaways in the profitability of crypto trading. They found that airdrops had a positive impact on returns and trading volumes.
Nonetheless, the way the giveaway was organized played a big role in determining its success. Issues related to privacy diminished both measures. On the contrary, a more equitable token giveaway was associated with higher returns, but trading volumes went down as a result. Social-media exposure also influenced outcomes.
Attracting traders is one thing. Getting them to stay is another. Bitquery analyzed 51 major airdrops in 2026 and found that, in the median case, 73% of recipients moved their tokens within a day. After 30 days, only 23% still held at least half their tokens, while the median token traded 48% below its first-week price.
Japan Crypto Market 2026: Trading Volume, Market Growth and Airdrop Retention
These findings, along with the University of Arizona research, concern digital token giveaways rather than physical collectibles. Still, they raise a relevant question for Rakuten: will its SHIB promotion encourage people to keep trading, or simply attract attention for a day? The answer will depend on whether trading volume and liquidity improve beyond the event itself.
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Anthropic can no longer block the safety findings that METR publishes about it.
The company said on Thursday that it had given six embedded researchers from the nonprofit almost the same access as its own staff.
Six embedded researchers get company hardware and internal tools
METR looks at frontier AI models. Its team now has pretty much the same Anthropic hardware, working space and internal tools that the company’s own risk assessment teams use.
Anthropic staff are told to give the evaluators the same amount of information they would give to another employee who is working on alignment risk. METR will look at Anthropic’s risk levels, incidents and practices on its own and then release the results.
There are a few pre-set categories that Anthropic can push redactions into. These are customer data, attorney-client privileged material and details of its model architectures.
METR also has the right to say in public whether a redaction was necessary, as long as it doesn’t say what was cut.
Anthropic’s October 15, 2026 post on independent evaluators, setting out METR’s access and publication rights.
Anthropic talks about the setup in terms of an information gap. Outsiders don’t know nearly as much about a lab’s systems as the lab itself, and full disclosure could help malicious actors or leak private training and compute data.
The company said that banking supervision works in the same way. Regulators put resident examiners inside the biggest banks so that risky behavior can be caught by a third party before it gets to the public.
The METR team works under enforceable agreements. Other METR researchers, including those working on separate projects for Anthropic, are walled off from its work.
SecureBio starts in the first of three evaluator tiers
Anthropic is building three tiers of access, and METR is the only evaluator yet at the top of them. First-tier evaluators perform narrow reviews and need Anthropic’s sign-off to publish.
The second tier has more information and can publish without approval, subject to the same redaction categories. The third adds in the embedded, employee-like access that METR now has.
SecureBio, a nonprofit biosecurity group, is in tier one. It has finished and published a pilot review of an earlier risk report and is now working its way through the chapter on chemical and biological weapons in the August Risk Report.
Anthropic is also building a partnership with Accenture and Faculty on red-teaming, alignment assessments and safeguard tests. Early talks are under way with other groups, Hugging Face among them.
This is what CEO Dario Amodei promised in an essay he wrote in September, in which he urged the industry to pace frontier development. Cryptopolitan reported that Amodei suggested giving outside reviewers desks, badges, laptops and access levels similar to those of staff doing risk assessments.
Sam Altman of OpenAI endorsed the idea on X. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same,” Altman wrote.
Anthropic, Google and OpenAI have also talked about a common industry standards body. All three, along with Meta, Nvidia and xAI, have since signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence, pledging to work with independent auditors.
The deal also comes after a spate of incidents since late August in which AI agents acted beyond their instructions.
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Amazon has announced the introduction of two AI-powered listening devices under its Bee brand. These include the Frontier wristband and Eclipse phone attachment, both built to capture conversations which they can use in generating summaries and product recommendations.
The devices are the first Bee products to launch since Amazon acquired the San Francisco-based wearables startup in July 2025, before which the company had raised $7 million and sold only one product, the $49.99 Bee Pioneer wristband.
Listening devices aimed at remembering what you said
The Bee Frontier is a listening device that can be worn on the wrist or attached to clothing. The product has two microphones with the noise filtering feature, offering as much as seven days of battery life with an IP67 water resistance rating. The device charges via USB-c, and comes different colors, which include Lavender, Sage and Onyx.
The wristband sells for $74.99 and is already available on Amazon.com, according to the company.
The Eclipse, a credit-card-sized device that attaches magnetically to the back of a phone, is rated for more than 21 days of use on a single charge. It will come in four colours — Silver, Midnight, Honey and Blush — and start at $99.99. Amazon has yet to put it on sale.
Recording starts only when users press a button on either device, with an indicator light showing when the audio recording has commenced. Amazon claims the Bee devices are designed to let people focus on conversations instead of jotting things down, with summaries, to-do lists and reminders available later via its mobile app or new desktop app.
Shopping side sits behind $12 subscription
Linking Bee to Amazon.com lets the device turn casual comments into product searches. The integration is optional and requires Bee Pro, which Amazon prices at $11.99 a month.
Bee Pro unlocks unlimited conversation summaries, the desktop app and integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook and Apple HealthKit. Subscribers can also ask Alexa+ on an Echo device about details captured by Bee.
Users who skip the subscription still get summaries, but their device memory is limited to 14 days. Amazon is offering new buyers a 30-day free trial of Pro.
GeekWire put the shopping tool in the context of a long-standing suspicion that phones secretly listen to conversations to serve targeted ads, a claim researchers have found no evidence to support.
Amazon’s approach is more explicit, as the device records only when users choose to activate it.
A little light on your wrist is the only warning
The privacy risks extend beyond the person wearing Bee, since others nearby may also be captured in recordings without realizing it. Amazon says the Eclipse prompts users to obtain consent from everyone on a phone call each time recording starts.
Tech reviewer Jon Rettinger, who has more than 1.66 million YouTube subscribers, questioned whether such measures adequately protect people who have not agreed to be recorded, CNET reported.
Rettinger added that 12 US states already require all parties to be notified when any form of conversation is being recorded, while California specifically requires consent from everyone involved in a private conversation.
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Virtu is already trading real-world asset perpetual swaps through Ripple Prime, which opened the product to institutions on Thursday.
Over 100 markets are linked to the swaps, which keep trading even after the exchanges behind them close for the weekend.
Prices track Trade.xyz perpetual futures listed on Hyperliquid
Clients can take positions tied to equities, equity indices, ETFs, metals, energy and foreign exchange. Trading and settlement are 24/7.
On Friday a stock exchange closes and reopens on Monday but swaps relating to its shares carry on trading on Saturday and Sunday.
In its announcement Ripple said Ripple Prime is principal on every trade. The swap values are based on the perpetual futures that Trade.xyz lists on Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives venue.
Institutions obtain Hyperliquid liquidity through their Ripple Prime account. They never connect to the venue directly.
Clients can post RLUSD as collateral and cross-margin positions
“Virtu is ramping up across emerging liquidity pools, and Ripple Prime’s 24/7 cross-margining across asset classes helps us expand our presence more efficiently as markets move toward round-the-clock access.”
Scotte Moegling, head of business development for digital assets at Virtu, said in the release. US market maker Virtu is among the clients already trading the swaps.
Ripple Prime clients can cross-margin swap positions against other asset classes supported by Ripple Prime. Offsetting positions trim the amount of collateral that has to be posted by a firm.
Ripple USD (RLUSD) is the company’s dollar stablecoin and also serves as collateral. Availability varies by jurisdiction.
Ripple says the arrangement furnishes clients with a single counterparty, centralized risk management and consolidated margin across a portfolio. Currently, the product is licensed to run only under Ripple Prime’s CIV BVI license with other regions in the pipeline but no timeline.
Ripple announced the RWA swaps on Ripple Prime in a post on X on October 15, 2026.
International CEO of Ripple Prime Michael Higgins said that institutions are seeking 24/7 access to equities, commodities and currencies. Ripple said volumes in perpetual futures linked to real-world assets have exploded this year but gave no figures.
Ripple Prime sprang from Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road, which closed in October 2025. The unit provides clearing, financing and trading of currencies, bonds, derivatives and digital assets from one institutional account.
It added support for Hyperliquid in February. Institutional clients would then be able to margin positions on the decentralized venue against other holdings.
Hyperliquid is permissionless and has no KYC checks.
Neuberger Specialty Finance extended Ripple Prime a $200 million debt line in May 2026, earmarked for margin loans. The unit has reportedly tripled revenue year over year since its US debut.
Ripple also co-invested last week with Circle and SC Ventures in a $25 billion valuation funding round for OKX. In the same week, Brevan Howard, which backed Ripple’s $500 million raise in November 2025, signed on as a Ripple client.
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BitFuFu might abandon its planned acquisition of an 80-megawatt Bitcoin mining site in Ethiopia.
The site operator’s payment dispute with its power supplier imperils $4.1 million already paid by the miner.
A power supplier’s 10-day notice put $4.1 million at risk
The Singapore miner, listed on Nasdaq as FUFU, outlined the problem in a Form 6-K filed October 13. Through its subsidiary Finfront Holding Company, BitFuFu agreed on October 22, 2024 to acquire a majority stake in the Ethiopian company that operates the site.
The deal never closed. The agreement has a number of unfulfilled conditions.
BitFuFu is now reviewing its “contractual rights and available remedies.” Options include terminating the agreement, arbitration against the sellers, clawing back payments and removing its hardware.
The miner has paid the sellers $4.1 million in cash and has installed around 13,700 Bitmain Antminer S19 machines at the facility. Those machines produce about 1.57 exahashes per second and had a net book value of $1.74 million as of Sept. 30.
BitFuFu is not party to the contract behind the conflict. The target company is, and it has not paid the disputed amounts to its Ethiopian power supplier.
The supplier moved on Sept. 28. It warned the target that it would seize collateralized equipment and assets if payment didn’t come within 10 days.
As of filing, the money had not been paid, BitFuFu said. The miner sees “a material risk” that the deal won’t close at current terms, or ever.
Chairman and CEO Leo Lu tried to limit the harm. The Ethiopian investment is “a limited portion of our overall asset base,” he said.
The facility has already been affected by local power curtailment, Lu said, with limited further impact expected on Bitcoin output. “We believe this event’s incremental impact on the Company will be minimal,” Lu said.
Cloud output sank about 20% to 69 BTC in September
BitFuFu mining output in September was 167 BTC, down 4% from 174 BTC in August. Daily production held at 5.6 BTC.
Self-mining increased from 88 BTC to 98 BTC. But cloud mining shed about 20% to 69 BTC from 86 BTC.
The managed hashrate declined to 19.4 exahashes per second from 20.6, and power capacity declined to 324 megawatts from 344. Bitcoin hoard climbed 15 coins to 1,388 BTC.
BitFuFu’s September 2026 production and hashrate against August, as of September 30, 2026, from the company’s release.
While CleanSpark’s production sank about 11% to 529 BTC, Canaan was flat at 44 BTC. CleanSpark also dropped monthly mining updates for quarterly reporting as it shifts focus to its data center business.
FUFU closed at $1.31 on Thursday, against $2.64 at the end of 2025.
BitFuFu reported $475.8 million in revenue for 2025, up 2.7%. It reported a net loss of $57.4 million.
Cryptopolitan reported that the result was dragged down by a $32.8 million fair-value loss on Bitcoin holdings. Cloud mining, where customers rent managed hashrate, accounted for 73.7% of revenue.
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