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What happened in crypto in the past week? We are down this week, both BTC and ETH went massivelly down. We are more about Solana this week. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Strive made its largest single BTC purchase on record, 4045 BTC, holding now 36.818 BTC. Strategy bought just 267 BTC last week, funded entirely from the selling of a 140.872 MSTR shares, bringing total holdings to 848.517 BTC, but they paused the buying this week. FINMA approved Switzerland's first retail ETF to invest directly in BTC on October 20. Bitcoin ETFs are pulling in big money again, with $528M on Wednesday. Lightning Labs lets AI agents pay in BTC, using its Wavelenght toolkit.
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• Ethereum: Bitmine bought 12.535 ETH last week, in their endless quest to reach 5% of the total supply. The Drift exploiter sent another $61M worth of ETH to Tornado Cash. JPMorgan deployed their deposit token, JPM Coin, on the Ethereum blockchain, for institutional clients.
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Kucoin Exchange got some interesting mining campaigns, with reasonable rewards and decent profits. Check it out here! Fidelity found that Solana's stake concentrationexceeds its own safety limit, with the top hosting provider holding 29%, a 4% over the 25% ceiling. Over one-third can block finality, and over two-thids may enable censorship or conflicting finality. Something worth watching up! A NASDAQ firm, SkyAI, just liquidated its entire SOL treasury. Solana's Aplenglow upgrade goes live this week bringing finality down from 150ms to 12.8ms, opening the door to massive real-world apps including high frequency trading and real time payments on-chain. JPMorgan Asset Management put its tokenized money market funds on Solana. World launched WorldID for banking and finance on October 19, giving banks cryptographic tools to confirm a human rather than an AI agent or deepfake is behind a transaction. The European Banking Authority has named USDC as the EU's first significant stablecoin under MiCA. Sofi launched Sofi Earn on Thursday, a bank issued tokenized deposit that pays 4.40% APY with FDIC isurance up to applicable limits. NBA picked Kalshi and Polymarket as partners, giving both rights to use NBA branding and official league data to settle authorized markets.
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• NFTs and blockchain games: On Splinterlands Escalation - the latest mini-set from the Conclave Arcana collection is now closed. I have this Space action game - Stellarch - that I play on Hive blockchain lately, you know me, I like to try them. It is kind of addicting. Space chess!
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• Good news: Anthropic filed publicly for a Nasdaq IPO. The ECB president Christine Lagarde confirmed that Pontes, the Eurosystem's wholesale settlement system for tokenized assets, went live on September 21. Malaysia's central bank launched a tokenized bond platform. Western Union will soon deliver transfers as stablecoins, using its USDPT stablecoin. Kalshi Prime not lets traders to borrow against their own crypto. AVIVA launched a tokenized fund on the XRP Ledger.

• Bad news: Cysic Foundation discovered that an attacker exploited its cross-chain bridge minting 10M CYS tokens without authorisation, moving 7.2M through DEX swaps before being blacklisted. Mount Gox delayed creditor repayments from October 31 2026 to October 31 2027, for the fourth time in four years. Coinbase Ireland was fined over customer fund safeguarding. A Kazakhstan court barred Coinbase and another 5 platforms from offering unlicensed services. Microsoft and Goldman Sachs opted out of tokenized trading. Trump is spotlighting a crackdown on overseas crypto scams. Of course, he doesn't like competition, as he is the one doing the scams on a national level. Polymarket US sued Ohio over sport contracts. CoinDCX admitted they lost 16M USDT, a loss that its CEO dismissed. Keystone is destroying thousands of hardware wallets, after they were physically hacked.

• Joke of the week: A BIS working paper shows that stablecoin market cap growth slows when US bank deposits rates rise, with the effect more concentrated in USDC rather that USDT. Interesting, right? A second best, France moves to tax crypto swaps into stablecoins, the National Assembly passed the amendament with 38 votes to 37. A bit harsh, no more trading for French people then? At least they are nothing like the American democrats, who voted against the rules they wrote on Clarity Act. Crazy, right?

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All the best,

George

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Why not...

...have fun and win rewards on my favourite blockchain games (Splinterlands - a Hearthstone-like card game) (Stellarch - a Play2Earn space game on Hive) (Holozing - a Pokemon-like game) and (Upland - it is alive again, Istanbul being the latest addition).

...get crypto while writing on the Publish0x blog. I am also writing for crypto on Hive. I am spending some time trading on Kucoin Exchange lately.