Author: Jeremy Ryan

A Chinese organized crime syndicate laundered more than $1 billion stolen in multiple crypto exploits for North Korea’s Lazarus Group, according to blockchain investigator ZachXBT. In an Oct. 5 thread on X, pseudonymous blockchain investigator ZachXBT said he posed as a paying client to infiltrate the money laundering network in February 2025, just days after the Bybit hack. He put up $349,700 in stablecoins and took a 5% loss on each order to build trust with one of the network’s operators, known as “Jimmy Green.”ZachXBT said the operations spanned Hong Kong and mainland China, and information supplied by the launderer helped…

US corporate credit spreads widened beyond the weakest borrowers from September 25 to October 1, creating a broader test of whether tighter financing and reduced institutional risk-taking could pressure Bitcoin. The largest increase remained concentrated in CCC-and-lower debt, while investment-grade bonds showed a much smaller rise.These option-adjusted spreads measure the premium over a Treasury curve. Their widening shows investors demanding more compensation to hold corporate debt. A borrower’s total interest cost also depends on the Treasury component.The ICE BofA CCC credit spread climbed from 11.28% to 12.15%, an increase of 87 basis points. Over the same dates, the broad high-yield…

Shares of the shell company taking XRP treasury firm Evernorth public nearly quadrupled last week, ahead of a merger that would bring hundreds of millions of tokens and new shareholders into the listed business.Armada Acquisition Corp. II (XRPN) closed at $39.42 on Friday, up 68% that day and about 273% for the week, according to StockAnalysis data. The shares briefly touched $53, compared with $10.58 a week earlier. Shares are higher by another 9.5% in pre-market trading Monday.Evernorth told CoinDesk in an email that it expects the merger to close on Wednesday, Oct. 7, subject to remaining conditions.Armada is a…

Thanks to Guild of Guardians, ImmutableX has broken records with over $11 million in NFT sales in the past month, showing an 80% increase. This blockchain game has been a key driver in the growth of NFT trading volume on the Ethereum Layer 2 platform. The NFT gaming industry is booming, and one game, in particular, is making headlines for its massive contribution to this growth. Guild of Guardians, a popular blockchain-based game, has significantly boosted NFT trading volumes on the ImmutableX platform. With over $11 million in NFT sales in just the past month, the game has seen an…

This week’s newsletter summarizes the responsible disclosure of two denial-of-service vulnerabilities affecting older versions of Eclair and describes a proposal for synchronizing wallet labels between devices through an untrusted store. Also included are our regular sections summarizing proposals and discussion about changing Bitcoin’s consensus rules, announcing new releases and release candidates, and describing notable changes to popular Bitcoin infrastructure software. ● Disclosure of two DoS vulnerabilities in Eclair: Matt Morehouse posted to Delving Bitcoin the responsible disclosure of two denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerabilities affecting Eclair v0.13.1 and earlier. Both were fixed in Eclair v0.14.0, released in May, and users still running…

Bitcoin has gained support from a fall in October Federal Reserve rate-hike odds to roughly 23% from 64%, but a move toward $93,000 still depends on lower Treasury yields and stronger buying, according to Bitget Wallet’s research lead. Summary $90,000–$93,000 remains Zhang’s conditional upside range if yields ease and inflation data supports weaker employment. October rate-hike odds fell to roughly 23%, according to the analyst’s Oct. 5 assessment. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted about $2.65 billion in September, Zhang said. A daily or weekly close above $87,400 would help confirm a breakout, in her view. Lacie Zhang, Research Lead at…

The company has issued more than 400 million cards and processed hundreds of billions of dollars in card volume since 2018, Stern said. Its stablecoin offering combines that issuing business with Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe bought for $1.1 billion in 2024.For a company such as Ramp, that could mean taking a corporate card into new countries using stablecoins instead of rebuilding banking and payments connections market by market. Kraken, meanwhile, has explored letting customers spend from accounts where they already hold digital assets.Stripe has been assembling the pieces for a broader blockchain payments push. After buying Bridge and…

Many of the major platforms are already registered as designated contract markets (DCMs), such as Coinbase, Crypto.com and Bitnomial, and also prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket. The new crypto subcategory would be narrower than that full DCM status, but if firms want to pursue futures, swaps and options, they’ll need the DCM stamp.Closing the spot-market gap was at the core of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act that stalled in the U.S. Senate last month. Since that legislative setback, the CFTC — alongside its larger, sister agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission — has been moving forward on crypto policies…

Nvidia, Tesla, Apple and Microsoft are among dozens of U.S. stocks that could soon be available to trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a new blockchain-based market from crypto exchange OKX and the owner of the New York Stock Exchange.A regulatory filing from OKXICE, a joint venture between OKX and NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange, listed more than 60 securities it plans to offer in tokenized form and explained how the new market would work.The list includes Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, as well as crypto-linked companies Coinbase, Circle, Robinhood, Strategy and Securitize. JPMorgan, Goldman…

For most of financial history, the supply of new markets — not demand — was the bottleneck. Blockchains remove that bottleneck. I believe this will unlock an explosion of net new markets. Markets are mechanisms for transferring risk. Every trade is simply two counterparties agreeing to move some exposure at an agreed price. Abstractly, risk can be expressed along two separate axes: The unit: the underlying exposure (i.e., a company’s cash flows, a barrel of oil, an election outcome, a borrower’s credit, a GPU-hour) The instrument: the mechanism that transfers that exposure (i.e., spot, dated futures, perps, options, event contracts)…