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The week’s most consequential crypto news happened far from the price charts. Europe’s banking regulator took direct oversight of the second-largest stablecoin, BNY financed a tokenized Treasury inside a live repo workflow, and Interactive Brokers began staking ether for clients. Meanwhile, hot US inflation and steady ETF redemptions kept Bitcoin treasury companies focused on their balance sheets.
EU Places USDC Under Direct EBA Supervision as First “Significant” E-Money Token
The European Banking Authority has classified Circle’s USDC as the first significant e-money token under the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA). The EBA announced the decision on October 14, and it takes effect on November 12.
USDC, issued in the EU by Circle Internet Financial Europe SAS, is the first of 45 e-money tokens notified under MiCA to receive the designation. From November 12, the EBA will directly supervise the issuer’s own funds, reserve assets, liquidity requirements, and recovery and redemption plans. France’s ACPR will keep oversight of governance, qualifying holdings, fitness and propriety checks, outsourcing and conflicts of interest.
The EBA also signed a memorandum of understanding with the New York State Department of Financial Services on cooperation and information-sharing for cross-border stablecoin activity. No change to USDC’s dollar peg was announced; the shift concerns who examines the reserves behind it.
UK High Court Rules Chinese Law Governs Claims to 61,000 Seized Bitcoin
Claims to one of the largest bitcoin seizures in a UK criminal case will be assessed under Chinese law. The High Court decided on October 12 in Director of Public Prosecutions v Qian & Ors that Chinese law governs substantive property-rights claims over more than 61,000 BTC seized by London’s Metropolitan Police, as set out in the judgment and subsequent reporting.
The Crown Prosecution Service has linked the coins, connected to Zhimin Qian, to an alleged Chinese investment fraud involving more than 128,000 victims between 2014 and 2017. The court found that the schemes, investor payments and bitcoin purchases were centred in China.
The ruling is preliminary. Ownership and distribution of the holdings, valued at roughly £3.8 billion ($5 billion), remain undecided, and the next phase will examine how Chinese law applies to individual claims. CoinDesk reported that the decision improves the UK government’s prospects of retaining much of the bitcoin and that victims’ lawyers are considering or pursuing an appeal.
BNY and Citadel Securities Run a Tokenized Treasury Through Triparty Repo
BNY said on October 13 that it had completed a triparty repo workflow with Citadel Securities using a tokenized U.S. Treasury, which the bank described as the first reported use of tokenized assets on a major triparty repo platform.
Citadel Securities bought a two-year Treasury note through BNY on Tradeweb. BNY recorded a tokenized representation of the note on its private ledger, where it settled within minutes rather than on the standard T+1 cycle. Citadel then used the token as collateral in an overnight repo, with BNY supplying the cash. The transaction linked purchase, settlement and financing in one sequence; BNY did not disclose its size.
The test put a tokenized government bond to work in short-term funding markets, one of the core uses of Treasuries, rather than treating it as a standalone digital asset.
Hot US Inflation Pushes Bitcoin Toward $80,000 as Crypto ETFs Shed $610 Million
US inflation came in above forecasts this week, and crypto funds kept losing money. The Consumer Price Index rose 0.6% in September, lifting annual inflation to 3.7% from 3.4%, above the expected 3.6%, while core inflation reached 2.6%. Gasoline, up 9.1%, accounted for more than half of the monthly increase. After the release, CME FedWatch put the odds of another Federal Reserve hike at the October 27–28 meeting at 31.6%, following September’s increase to 3.75%–4.00%, DailyCoin reported.
The data triggered $972.44 million in liquidations over 24 hours. Bitcoin briefly fell below $80,000 on October 17 before recovering toward $82,000.
US crypto ETFs posted $610.7 million in net outflows between October 12 and 16, according to CoinStats’ summary of Farside data, after $1.29 billion left the previous week. Ether funds accounted for $320.1 million, including $299 million from BlackRock’s ETHA, while Bitcoin funds lost $228.4 million.
Binance Will Close Its Mining Pool and Cloud Mining on November 10
Binance will shut Binance Pool and its connected mining services at 07:00 UTC on November 10, ending an operation it launched in April 2020. The exchange said the closure followed an ongoing review of its products and services.
The shutdown covers Pool Savings, Cloud Mining, the Transaction Accelerator, mining-pool APIs, Telegram hashrate alerts and email notifications. Binance will disable its Stratum addresses and mining endpoints at the cutoff, after which submitted hashrate will no longer be credited, CryptoDaily detailed.
Miners must redirect their machines to another pool before the deadline, and Pool Savings users should redeem or cancel their positions. Historical data, account records and payout status will remain viewable until November 24.
Metaplanet Raises ¥52 Billion to Cut Bitcoin-Backed Borrowing
Metaplanet is issuing ¥52 billion of five-year, zero-coupon convertible bonds to repay part of its Bitcoin-collateralized credit facility and buy back shares. None of the proceeds is earmarked for new bitcoin purchases.
About $649.5 million was outstanding under the facility at September 30, roughly 17.7% of the company’s bitcoin net asset value and above its own 10% guideline. Of approximately ¥51.9 billion in net proceeds, about ¥23.6 billion will repay the facility and up to ¥28.3 billion will fund share repurchases, according to the company’s issuance documents.
The conversion price was set at ¥339, a 29.89% premium to the October 13 close, and the bonds are due to close on October 29. Metaplanet said total liabilities will rise at issuance, as the deal swaps secured debt for an unsecured claim that may dilute shareholders. The company held 44,000 BTC at the end of September.
Strategy Spends $192 Million on STRC Buybacks and $21.5 Million on Bitcoin
Strategy bought 250 BTC between October 5 and 11 for about $21.5 million, at an average of $86,194 per coin, but spent $192.4 million in the same week repurchasing its STRC preferred shares, the company disclosed on October 12.
The buyback covered 1,932,145 shares at an average of $99.58, below their $100 par value, shrinking the base on which STRC’s 12% annual dividend is paid. Strategy held 848,250 BTC as of October 11, acquired for about $64 billion at an average of $75,444. It also reported a $4.88 billion reserve for dividends and interest.
Strive Makes Its Largest Bitcoin Addition Since January
Strive acquired 3,311 BTC between October 5 and 9 at an average of about $84,500 including fees, roughly $280 million in total, according to an October 13 SEC filing. Its treasury rose from 29,462 BTC to 32,773 BTC.
The purchase is Strive’s largest increase since January, when its all-stock merger with Semler Scientific added about 5,048 BTC. The company also reported $310.3 million in cash and equivalents at October 9, up $25.6 million from a week earlier.
Interactive Brokers Opens Ethereum Staking to Eligible Clients
Interactive Brokers launched Ethereum staking for eligible Interactive Brokers LLC clients on October 13, adding a Staking Dashboard to its Client Portal. Clients can submit stake and unstake requests, track pending activity and receive rewards as additional staked ETH, which may compound.
Infrastructure provider zerohash runs validator operations, rewards accounting and compliance through an API integration. ETH is the only stakeable asset at launch, although the platform supports trading in 20 digital assets, and no timetable was given for adding others.
Solana Schedules Alpenglow Consensus Overhaul for October 21
Solana will activate Alpenglow, the largest change to its consensus design since launch, on October 21. The migration is scheduled for epoch 1064, expected to begin around 15:00 UTC, DailyCoin reported, citing the Solana Foundation.
Alpenglow retires TowerBFT, the voting system used since 2020, and moves validator votes off-chain, combining them into certificates that finalize blocks. The target is finality of roughly 150 milliseconds instead of several seconds, though actual performance will depend on network conditions. Validators must run Agave 4.3.0, while Firedancer and Frankendancer operators need a temporary client switch. Variable voting fees of about 1 SOL per epoch will give way to a flat 0.8 SOL admission fee.
Headline transaction counts will drop sharply after activation because votes will no longer be recorded as standard transactions.
Privacy coin Pirate Chain confirmed that an exploit discovered on October 14 allowed an attacker to mint about 39.8 million ARRR without authorization, inflating supply by roughly 20%. CoinNess valued the minted coins at about $9.4 million.
The attack combined two validation failures: a bypass of the inflation check and incorrect parsing of an output script. The coins went straight into the Sapling shielded pool, where mandatory privacy prevents full tracing of their movement. Exchange NonKYC flagged related deposits, restricted the account and blocked withdrawals.
The incident followed the Ironwood upgrade, scheduled for activation on October 3. Pirate Chain dropped an earlier rollback plan and asked exchanges and mining pools to voluntarily suspend operations while recovery work continues.
Coinbase Says a Bitcoin Post-Quantum Migration Could Take Seven Years
Coinbase has argued that Bitcoin should begin preparing for quantum computing now, estimating that changing the network’s signature system could take up to seven years. The company acknowledged that today’s most advanced quantum machines have fewer than 1,000 qubits, far short of what is needed to break Bitcoin’s elliptic-curve cryptography, CryptoDaily reported.
Coinbase’s Quantum Advisory Council estimates that about 1.7 million BTC sit in legacy pay-to-public-key addresses with exposed public keys. Whether coins that are never migrated should be burned, preserved or handled another way remains unresolved.
Two draft proposals outline a phased path. BIP-360 would keep post-quantum public keys hidden until spending, while BIP-361 would first block new payments to vulnerable address types and later retire legacy ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. Neither has been adopted.
Ripple Integrates RLUSD Into Cross River Bank’s Core Platform
Ripple will integrate its RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger into Cross River Bank’s Core Operating System, the companies announced on October 15. Cross River’s fintech partners can access RLUSD through a single API, alongside ACH, wire and real-time payment rails, without building their own blockchain infrastructure.
Customers can convert between dollars and RLUSD and settle cross-border and treasury transfers around the clock. The service is initially available in a limited number of US states. RLUSD’s market capitalization exceeds $2.5 billion, with more than $1 billion issued on the XRP Ledger.
Separately, Ripple partnered with Stripe-owned Privy to bring embedded wallets to the XRP Ledger, letting developers offer XRP and RLUSD payments, including transactions by AI agents, without users managing private keys.
Federated Hermes and Prometheum Plan Tokenized Funds for Brokerage Accounts
Federated Hermes, which managed $911.6 billion as of June 30, has partnered with Prometheum to issue and distribute tokenized securities funds through Prometheum’s SEC-registered, FINRA-member broker-dealer infrastructure. The firms announced the deal on October 13 and expect the first product in the first quarter of 2027.
Prometheum’s ProFinancial unit will handle issuance and distribution, while Prometheum Capital provides custody, clearing, settlement and connections to introducing broker-dealers. The aim is to reach investors through existing brokerage accounts and adviser relationships. Ledger Insights reported that tokenized money-market funds are expected first, though the companies have not named a product.
SBI Joins Open Standard to Test Yen-Dollar Stablecoin Settlement
SBI Holdings and Web3 developer Startale Group have joined Open Standard, the coalition behind the dollar stablecoin OUSD, whose backers include Coinbase, Visa, BlackRock and Mastercard. The two firms will run a proof of concept on interoperability between OUSD and JPYSC, a trust-type yen stablecoin issued by SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, DailyCoin reported on October 16.
The goal is faster, round-the-clock yen-dollar settlement. The project remains in planning and testing, with no launch date. Open Standard has grown from more than 140 participants to over 200 since its concept was announced in June.
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