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What happened in crypto in the past week? We are going down, as the crucial point for Bitcoin will be either $81K or 84K. Up or down, what is your bet? Ethereum seems to bring panic, with the Q-Day aproaching faster. Bitmine and Strategy are still accumulating, nevertheless. I found a way to expose myself to BTC via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:

• Bitcoin: Metaplanet set BTC at 85% to 90% of total assets and created a net 10-15% tier for acquisitions and income-generating investments. They held 44.000 BTC at the end of September. Its CEO confirmed that the company will stop buying ETH once the company will reach 5% of supply, a hard cap expected to be achieved in the next 6-7 weeks. Strategy got another 334 BTC, teasing another buyout soon, and Robinhood also added $25M in BTC to their corporate balance. Strive purchased its biggest BTC purchase, 3311 BTC, reaching 32.773 BTC in total. Bitcoin last breakout ran on the thinnest volume in years, with short-term holders supplying 86% of the exchange inflows on Sunday, October 11. SUI launched BTC collateral infrastructure with institutional backing. Hot CPI pushed BTC below $82K on October 15, as US consumer prices rose 3.7% in September. Nearly a billion in crypto was liquidated on October 16, well, $939M to be exact.
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• Ethereum: At the beginning of the month we were dreaming of $3K ETH and $90K BTC, will this wish come true this year? Probably Bitmine is happy with the low price, as they hold now 6.02M ETH - 4.9% of all the Ethereum total supply, and they are 99% on the way to its stated 5% goal ($363M in annual revenue from staking is quite useful also). Justin Drake released a warning that there is a possibility of ECDSA breaking before Q-Day, urging migration to fresh addresses to prevent loss of funds. Be careful to not rush and get scammed while you are reading this too, and always check first with a very small amount to test. ETH and BTC ETFs both bled through October's first week. Interactive Brokers aded ETH Staking for its clients, with compounding.
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• Altcoins and stablecoins: Kucoin Exchange got some interesting mining campaigns, with reasonable rewards and decent profits. Check it out here! Ondo Finance launched Ondo Private Markets on October 6, opening Pre-IPO Tech investing to retail. Polymarket launched Protocol V2, rebuilding its entire protocol from ground up. Trump's stablecoin USD1 is about to be spendable at merchants. Blast shuts down after 3 years of operations. Samsung wallet integrates Solana and Sui, enabling USDC to be sent directly from their wallets on selected Samsung devices. A decade old integer overflow in the XRP's Ledger could have let an attacker to generate spendable XRP out of nothing, but the fix was done on September 25, bypassing the normal validator vote process due to the bug severity. Polkadot proposed a DOT-backed stablecoin as its new focus, called dotUSD. AI Agents made over a hundred million on chain payments on Base in the last 12 months.
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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: The Near Intents hacked returned every dollar stolen in the exploit.The CFTC published a notice on October 5 opening a 60-day comment period on federal rules for retail crypto transactions, aiming to prevent fraudulent schemes such as FTX. South Korea recorded a $449.1B crypto economy for the year, with AI-linked tokens surpassing even XRP as the most actively traded category by Won volume. Strategy reported a $20.91B gain on digital assets for Q3. BlackRock's tokenization partner moved into Korea. Tether signed a deal with Kazakhstan to build a tenge-pegged stablecoin. Securitize launched tokenized US stocks on Solana on October 9, starting with Apple, Microsoft, Invidia, Tesla and eight other big companies, with each token backed 1:1 by a real share, with full voting rights, dividends and corporate actions included. Australia is proposing to extend its crypto leverage limits for retail traders on October 13. The IMF put the public tokenized RWA market at $65B as of July 31, with Ondo and XStocks accounting for 70% of the equity value. Kraken's parent company, Payward, agreed to buy a European bank, Saldo Bank from Lithuania. Standard Chartered launched crypto trading in the UAE. Ripple launched around-the-clock RWA swaps for institutions. Solana Mobile and Ledger partnered to be preinstalled on Ledger's new Atom device.

• Bad news: Russia just paid government workers in digital rubles on October 1, the option is voluntary, with every employee able to request it. No benefits with this whatsoever. More than 220K digital ruble accounts were opened in September. They are working hard right now, as the Bank of Russia admitted five digital depositaries and four crypto exchangers to its financial market registers on October 6. The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC on October 2, arguind that they exceeded its authority by granting national trust charters to crypto firms. The banks are losing ground and try to fight dirty? Hyperliquid CEO said that Wall Street wants to lock retail out of wealth, keeping the investors out of the asset's most valuable growth period, with most gains captured by a small group of insiders before the company ever goes public. Crypto may change this! Yet, global regulators said that the stablecoin oversight is still immature. Of course it is, you want to control that too? The Cardano card will shut down on October 31, cardholders can use the card normally until the shutdown date.
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• Joke of the week: Trump announced a Super Intelligence Force on October 4 to coordinate US AI policy, led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, following a Whitye House meeting with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Invidia, and SpaceXAI, reporting to Donald and his chief of staff. Another fraud scheme, I bet! Meanwhile Congress wants to introduce a No Betting on Your Own Race Act, barring candidates and relatives from trading contracts tied to their own elections, with violators facing a $10K fine of three times their net gain. Close second, Ledger confirmed on October 10 that a device bought through resseler Cryptobilis contained an unauthorized hardware implant, so a confirmed tampering method happened.

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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 ( Chain of Legends - with a hint of Heroes of Might and Magic).

...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.