What happened in crypto in the past 2 weeks? We arehaving Bitcoin below the average buying proce for Strategy and the others. They still buy more. A new wave of hacks, Binance being the most notable. I found a way to expose myself to BTC in UK, via BlackRock, using Freetrade. Feel free to check them. What else? Read below:
Bitcoin: Bitwise raised its 10-year Bitcoin forecast to $1.6M by 2036, from $1.3M by 2035 last year. Strive CEO hinted at more BTC to be brought, after they got 6182 BTC on October 23, with holdings reaching 43.000 BTC. Strategy bought 811 BTC for $65M on November 1, followed by another 1036 BTC on November 8. Bitcoin ETFs shed $643M on October 30, bigges single day outflow since June 25. Mercado Bitcoin stays paused after a security incident, with $49M stolen across 17 blockchains. Bitgo Bank and Trust opened Bitcoin staking through Stacks to eligible institutional clients who earn rewards in BTC while their coins stay timelocked in the custody, with each bond running for six months. Arthur Hayes tells BTC holders to be patient, but I do not trust his words personally, after last time when he raised some tokens value and then sold them for a quick buck. Bitcoin right now is trading below Strategy and Strive average buying price.
Ethereum: Vitalik told DEVCON 8 in Mumbai on November 3 that AI voided security assumptions, from software bugs staying hidden to a TV being just a TV. His alternative is open, verifiable defensive technology, and he called hardware wallets with no way to verify them unacceptable. He also said that fee burns were never ETH's price floor, and that Ethereum should be valued as a store of value. Ethereum Foundation researcher hopes the network finishes its post-quantum and post-AI transition by December 2028.
Altcoins and stablecoins: Kucoin Exchange got some interesting mining campaigns, with reasonable rewards and decent profits. Check it out here! HYPE surged as ICE plans a regulated Hyperliquid market. Horizen users bridged their funds to base on November 4, as the chain could not follow the Base network as an L2 after the Denim upgrade. Kraken's parent company bought an undisclosed amount of AAVE on the secondary market, with more purchases possible.
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!
Good news: Ripple won a final approval for a National Trust bank on October 26. Coinbase joins Ripple and Circle with a federal charter. Firedancer team now requires researchers to burn 1 SOL with every bug report, and the fee is non-refundable, after a spring audit contest drew 809 reports, which team beleives were nearly all found or written by AI. Arthur Hayes wants to make Flop, a network whose FLOP token would be convertible into AI computing power. The Depositary Trust Company, DTCC, launched its own tokenization service, with 20 firms including JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and others, running on Canton and DTCC's private Besu network. In Australia, Westpac may cap crypto exchange payments next month, at $10.000 per month. Deep Seek proposed a super agent for parallel AI coding. Circle's profit rose, but USDC reserve income fell. Circle explains hot it freezes USDC after a hack, only when law enforcement obtains a valid court order. SpaceX's proposed supercomputer is to be worth $24B, a 17 times more than the $1.39B value of the BTC that they hold. Schwab made SOL, AVAX, and Chainlink tradable in their crypto accounts on Monday.
Bad news: Coinbase gave EU users a deadline to withdraw 14 stablecoins by October 30, including USDT, PYUSD, and USD1. USDC is available for exchange. In US, New Jersey's securities regulator told Coinbase they intends to rescind its 2023 penalty and cease-and-desist order over staking. Osmosis seized an exploiter's BTC to restore backing, after an governance approved upgrade. Kraken is replacing 176 native trading trading pairs with synthetic pairs, by 6th of November. Circle asked the SEC to treat stablecoins as cash. US Treasury sanctioned 10 individuals and one entity over North Korean IT-worker scheme. Two Texas brothers were sentenced to 15 years in prison for holding a family at gunpoint over nine hours to force them to transfer over $8M in crypto, wrench attacks reached $124M in the first half of 2026, compared with $10M previous year. Nvidia, Nike, and Costco objected to tokenized versions of their shares on OKXICE TSV. French bank Credit Mutuel said that a cyberattack enabled fraudulent transactions, with a $133M theft they traced through crypto exchange withdrawals. France's Assembly adopted an amendment requiring holders of self-custody crypto wallets worth 100K or more to declare them to the tax authority. CashApp disclosed a deal with DOJ to defer an anti-money laundering charge for three years. Loopscale paused its SOL lending protocol after a week long attacks. Thailand's SEC filed a criminal complaint against Bitget's operator, for running a digital asset exchange without a license and said that access will be blocked from December 5. Bank of Russia approved BTC, ETH, and USDT for retail trading.
Joke of the week: So, CFTC sued Utah state to stop them from using its own laws to shut down CFTC-registered prediction markets. Utah filed felony charges against Kalshi and its CEO. The agency will also open legal proceedings against other nine states. And this is not the wildest idea, as CTFC chair floated Know-your-agent rules for AI traders. Second best, the Binance hack. The story started with Binance being exploited for over $6B over an alleged compromised laptop. The $6.3B stollen from hot wallets had the root cause a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop. Tether and Circle have frozen $2.4B in USDT and USDC, with other partners freezing smaller amounts up to $3B. They said the user funds are safe and Binance will cover the losses, and withdrawals were resumed on November 2. FBI tied the attack to the NK-linked unit that was behind last year's Bybit theft.
All the best,
George
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.
