$93M Drained From Ledger Wallets: Is Yours Safe?

One seed. One device. One company's code. If any one of them fails, there's no second line of defence. Multisig fixes that, and it's far less daunting than it sounds. Here it is in plain English 👇

🚨 Qubic pauses its network after wallets lose $1.3 million Qubic has paused its network following a drain of wallets worth $1.3 million. The project says 87.1% of the affected QU is still immobilized on-chain, and the exchange MEXC froze the account that received the remainder.

🚨 BREAKING: Cysic halts its bridge after an unauthorized CYS mint An attacker exploited a bridge flaw to create 10 million CYS on BNB Smart Chain. The receiving address was blacklisted 76 minutes later, with about 2.8M CYS still in it, restricted. Dollar losses are under review.

When interest rates peaked, a 3-month US Treasury bill paid 5.63%. The average US savings account paid 0.57%. On $10,000 that's $563 a year versus $57. The gap is what your bank earns on your money. A new paper from the Bank for International Settlements (the bank central banks use) asked a simple question: when banks pay you that little, do people move their money into stablecoins instead? They looked at every week from 2019 to mid 2025. Over that time stablecoins grew from under $5 billion to over $220 billion. The answer is yes, and the effect is bigger than you'd expect. Savings rates barely move. Banks hardly change them at all until the Fed's rate goes above about 3%. So even a tiny weekly rise of 0.01% counts as a big move. When one happens, stablecoin growth over the next ten weeks drops by about a fifth. In their stronger estimate, by more than half. Put simply, stablecoins grow fastest when your bank is underpaying you. A few other things stood out. It's mostly Americans switching. USDC, which US businesses use, reacted more than twice as much as Tether, which is mostly used overseas. It isn't crypto hype. When they ran the same test on the rest of the crypto market, Bitcoin included, nothing happened. Only stablecoins responded to bank rates. So what do they suggest? At the end of the paper they list two things for regulators to weigh. First, making stablecoin companies keep some of their reserves as deposits in banks. They admit the downside: it would pile large uninsured deposits into a small number of banks. Second, "whether issuers may remunerate holders." In other words, whether stablecoins should be allowed to pay you interest at all. Their final sentence: "How that boundary settles will depend on the returns each form of money is allowed to offer." Read that twice. What your savings earn is turning into a policy decision. There's one more line that's easy to miss. Early on, the authors point out that central banks spent years studying how their own digital currency, a CBDC, would pull money out of banks. Stablecoins, they say, now let them study "a closely related mechanism" using money people already hold. That's why we see stablecoins as a CBDC in all but name. A digital dollar, backed by reserves at banks, with its interest set by regulators and an issuer that can freeze it. The main difference is whose logo is on it. Bitcoin was the one thing in this paper that didn't move. No issuer, no reserves, and no interest rate for anyone to approve. What is your savings account paying right now?

📈 Spot Bitcoin ETFs post -$228.4M net over five trading days Spot Bitcoin ETFs had a net outflow of $228.4M across the five trading days from Oct. 12 to Oct. 16. Only two of those five days were green. One day accounts for the week's net outflow. Oct. 14 saw -$261.4M, more than the week's whole net figure. The other four days together came to +$33.0M. The latest day, Friday, Oct. 16, added another -$82.4M of outflow. Bitcoin is at $81,587.80, down 1.45% over seven days.

Oil is up 77% in a year. Brent just jumped 3.5% in a day to $109. Gas is already up 34%. Inflation already back to 3.7%. And they'll tell you it's "transitory" again. Your dollars are melting.

📈 Why MSCI's rules touch Strategy's bitcoin buying Strategy buys bitcoin partly by selling new shares. When MSTR trades above its bitcoin's value, a premium, each new share raises more than a share's worth of coin. Index removal means funds sell, which can shrink that premium.

Two red candles and everyone's doom posting again. Nearly $1 BILLION liquidated in 24 hours. Not me. I don't touch leverage. My biggest position is Bitcoin and it always has been. That's why I'm still here my friends. Full video 👇

📰 OpenAI research model pays its fees from another person's crypto wallet After running out of test tokens, the model checked 362 addresses with publicly exposed recovery phrases and paid from one it did not own that it was able to find online.

📰 How MSCI's non-operating company test works MSCI checks whether a listed firm runs a real business or mainly holds assets like crypto. A firm failing the checks for two years can be dropped from its indexes. Strategy, Metaplanet and SharpLink could be hit.

🚨 South Korea names two crypto firms in bank data breach wave South Korea's financial regulator has named crypto businesses Streami, operator of the Gopax exchange, and Pravang as two of 16 financial firms affected by recent breaches, alongside Shinhan, Kookmin, Busan and Hana banks. About 100,000 pieces of customer data were exposed, covering names, resident registration numbers, emails and contact details. Officials have found no leaked account passwords or card numbers so far, and more firms may be added.

⚖️ Russia keeps regulated crypto off self-custody wallets A licensed firm holds the keys on a regulated account. Under Law 282-FZ, the Bank of Russia blocks moving them to a wallet you control. From July 1, 2027, trades between individuals need an authorized intermediary.

⚖️ Patrick Witt leaves White House crypto council Witt, the council's executive director, confirmed his exit on Oct. 15. No replacement was named. The CLARITY Act he helped negotiate stalled in the Senate after a failed procedural vote in September.

🚨 BREAKING: US wholesale prices just jumped 1.3% in ONE month. Biggest spike since March 2022. Producer inflation is now 6.3% a year. Gasoline +20.3% in September alone. Energy +10.8%. What businesses pay today, you pay next. Still transitory?

Fear & Greed: 48, Neutral. That is two points under the middle of its 0 to 100 scale, with Bitcoin at $80,800 and down 2.45% on the week. Average funding is still positive at 0.5858%, so traders holding leveraged longs are paying shorts to keep them open.

What's your Bitcoin price prediction by the end of this year?

Bitcoin holders might soon be able to borrow against their BTC without wrapping it. Babylon Labs just posted a proposal to Aave. It's a proposal. Nothing is live yet. How it would work: Your BTC stays on the Bitcoin chain, locked in a vault you pre-sign. No WBTC. No bridge. No custodian holding it. Aave sees a token representing that vault, and you borrow stablecoins against it. Now the risks. Liquidation: BTC drops, your health factor drops below 1, and your ENTIRE vault gets seized. Smart contract risk: Your loan runs on Aave and Babylon code. A bug or exploit in either could cost you your BTC, and DeFi has lost billions to hacks. Babylon's contracts are still being re-audited before mainnet. Getting your BTC back out takes about 3 days because of a challenge window. Loan limits, liquidation levels and the price oracle haven't been set yet. The liquidation backstop still runs through WBTC. And you pay a Babylon fee on top of normal Aave interest. Still needs a community vote and an on-chain vote before anything goes live. Never borrowing against your Bitcoin is still the safest move. If you do, borrow small.

🚨 HEX founder Richard Heart was detained in Istanbul this morning. What's solid so far: Turkish intelligence (MİT) and Istanbul police raided a home in Beşiktaş at dawn. His wife was detained too. He's been on an Interpol red notice since late 2024, requested by Finland over alleged aggravated tax fraud and assault. The SEC's US case against him was thrown out in 2025 on jurisdiction. What isn't: Turkish media say police found piles of cash, dozens of luxury watches and guns. Every outlet has different numbers. No official statement. No word on extradition. HEX today? Down about 3%. The token is already 99% below its 2021 high. Hard to crash something that's already on the floor.

🇺🇸 US inflation just jumped to 3.7%. Prices rose 0.6% in ONE month. BLS says gasoline (+9.1%) was over half of it. Gas is up 34% on the year. Airfares 22%. Is your savings account paying 3.7%?

🏦 US September CPI report due at 12:30pm UTC today The US releases its September consumer price index figures later today. Forecasts point to headline inflation climbing to 3.6% year on year, with core inflation forecast at 2.5%.