① Binance’s withdrawal stress test passed the first hurdle. On the first day withdrawals were reopened, it processed $4.649 billion in withdrawals and $1.01 billion in deposits, for a net outflow of $3.64 billion—just 2.1% of total assets. After all 15 networks were restored, withdrawals had eased and stabilized. Last night, Binance also moved 21,750 BTC ($1.69 billion) from cold wallets to hot wallets, possibly to cover users’ losses.

→ That 2.1% figure carries more weight than any reassuring announcement. Deposits are still high, and some of the money being withdrawn is simply moving elsewhere.

② The hackers laundered $242 million over two days: $48 million through Relay, $44 million through THORChain, and $32.1 million through Chainflip. The FBI is pressuring bridges like THORChain to cooperate with efforts to freeze the funds. These bridges are unlicensed, so law enforcement can only act on the portion they’re willing to help with.

→ Whether the bridge accepts this request is a live test of decentralization.

③ If you’ve just withdrawn to self-custody, watch out for address poisoning. During periods of heavy withdrawals, scammers send poisoning transactions to your address. They spoof an address whose first and last four characters exactly match your real address, so copying an address from your transaction history can lead you straight into the trap.

→ Use a QR code or your address book for transfers—don’t dig through your transaction history. For large transfers, send a small test amount first, and verify the entire address, not just the beginning and end.

④ Four AI companies are using the same opt-out rule for the first time. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic have standardized the robots.txt format: websites can add one line to block all four companies’ training crawlers at once, instead of configuring GPTBot and ClaudeBot separately. The rule was proposed by an Anthropic engineer.

→ This rule only applies to training; citations are unaffected. AI can still talk about your content—it just won’t learn from it anymore.

⑤ Grok API outputs will soon include invisible watermarks. Starting November 7, xAI will add text watermarks by default to outputs from all Grok APIs worldwide, including tool-call parameters. The method leaves statistical traces by fine-tuning word-choice probabilities. Copying and pasting won’t remove them, though extensive rewriting can dilute them.

→ If you use AI to generate content at scale, be aware that platform detection will catch up. xAI hasn’t signed the EU transparency code, yet its watermarking goes beyond the EU.

Binance weathered the first wave of the bank run with net outflows of 2.1%. More than $200 million has already been moved offshore, and the law enforcement effort to trace it has only just begun.