Crypto
Armed robbers steal $820K in crypto during luxury home raid in Thailand
Three armed men have forced a Chinese expatriate with Turkish citizenship to transfer approximately $820,000 in cryptocurrency during a robbery at his luxury home near Pattaya, Thailand, prompting a police investigation into the suspects and the movement of the stolen assets.
Summary
- Three armed men broke into a luxury home near Pattaya, Thailand, and forced a Chinese expatriate with Turkish citizenship to transfer approximately $820,000 in cryptocurrency.
- The attackers threatened the victim at gunpoint and stole cash and three luxury watches before escaping in a vehicle that police later recovered.
- Thailand police are examining CCTV footage and tracing cryptocurrency transactions to identify the suspects, whose nationalities have not been confirmed.
- The robbery follows a series of violent attacks targeting cryptocurrency holders, with Chainalysis estimating losses of more than $30 million from such incidents in the first half of 2026.
According to initial reports, the robbery took place at around 3:30 a.m. on Tuesday, October 6, inside a gated residential community in Nongprue, where the attackers entered the property using a ladder before confronting the victim in his bedroom.
The masked men reportedly threatened the resident with firearms and ordered him to open a safe containing cash and valuables. They took an undisclosed amount of money and three luxury watches before demanding access to his cryptocurrency holdings.
Under threat, the victim transferred digital assets valued at roughly $820,000 to accounts controlled by the attackers. Reports indicate that the cryptocurrency was subsequently sold, although authorities have not disclosed which assets were involved or how the transactions were carried out.
The resident eventually escaped and contacted police. His identity has not been publicly released.
Thailand police trace stolen crypto and suspects’ getaway vehicle
Police Region 2 has taken charge of the investigation, with officers examining both the physical evidence left behind and the transactions involving the stolen cryptocurrency.
Police Lieutenant General Wasan Techa-akrakesom, commissioner of Police Region 2, said investigators had made significant progress in the case. The Immigration Bureau has been brought into the investigation as authorities work to establish the identities and movements of the suspects.
Initial information suggested that the three attackers might be Chinese nationals, but police have not confirmed their citizenship. No arrests were disclosed in the initial reports.
Investigators have reportedly recovered the vehicle used by the suspects after it was abandoned in a remote location.
CCTV footage placed the same vehicle in the area on October 5, one day before the robbery. Police are examining the footage as part of efforts to reconstruct the suspects’ movements before and after the break-in.
Alongside the search for the attackers, authorities are tracing the digital assets transferred from the victim’s holdings.
Investigators are reportedly examining accounts connected to the subsequent sale of the cryptocurrency in an effort to identify the individuals who received or handled the funds.
Details about the destination wallets, exchanges involved and potential recovery of the stolen assets have not been made public.
Police have yet to establish whether the attackers knew about the resident’s cryptocurrency holdings before entering the property or discovered them during the robbery.
The distinction remains unresolved because the intruders demanded several forms of property, including cash, watches and digital assets.
Crypto wrench attacks have cost victims millions in 2026
The robbery in Thailand follows several violent incidents involving cryptocurrency holders, including home invasions where attackers have used threats or physical force to obtain access to digital wallets.
Such crimes are commonly described as wrench attacks, a term used for robberies involving physical coercion to steal cryptocurrency or force victims to authorize transfers.
In an August investigation, crypto.news previously reported that criminals had stolen more than $30 million through violent attacks against cryptocurrency holders during the first half of 2026, citing research from blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
The firm documented 46 incidents during the six-month period, compared with 40 in the corresponding period of 2025. Only 12 of the 46 attacks resulted in payments, giving criminals a reported success rate of 26%.
Home invasions accounted for 37% of documented cases, compared with 14% in 2025. Kidnappings represented 52% of incidents, although Chainalysis noted that some cases could involve more than one type of crime.
A separate investigation by security firm CertiK identified 52 verified wrench attacks worldwide during the first half of 2026, with financial exposure totaling $124.1 million.
CertiK’s figure included stolen cryptocurrency, ransom demands, frozen assets and other amounts connected to reported incidents. It did not represent the amount criminals successfully obtained.
The firm’s findings placed France at the top of its list, with 33 verified attacks accounting for nearly 64% of the worldwide total. Europe recorded 39 incidents, while the United States accounted for four.
Armed home robberies have targeted crypto holders in France and the US
Several recent cases have involved attackers entering residential properties and demanding cryptocurrency transfers from occupants.
In September, four masked men held a family captive for more than three hours in Vendin-le-Vieil, northern France, before forcing the father, who worked in the cryptocurrency sector, to surrender access codes linked to approximately €40,000 in digital assets.
The attackers assaulted the father, while his 12-year-old daughter was struck in the face. French authorities investigated the incident as kidnapping and extortion by an organized gang.
Earlier that month, a couple in Alès was restrained and threatened by two armed intruders who demanded cryptocurrency transactions.
The attackers reportedly carried a handgun and a knife and held the couple for more than two hours while their young child was inside the house. Neighbors alerted police after hearing screams, prompting the suspects to flee.
Similar incidents have reached US courts. In June, two Texas brothers pleaded guilty in an $8 million cryptocurrency robbery case involving a Minnesota family.
Federal prosecutors said the brothers held the victims at gunpoint for approximately nine hours while forcing them to transfer digital assets. Both pleaded guilty to interference with commerce by robbery.
Meanwhile, investigators in Thailand are examining the abandoned getaway vehicle, CCTV footage, immigration records and cryptocurrency transactions connected to the Pattaya robbery.
According toPattaya Mail’s October 9 report, officers located a black Toyota Fortuner in a wooded area and identified footage showing the vehicle near Phatthanakan Road and Soi Wat Boonsamphan at approximately 3:38 p.m. on October 5.
Police have not publicly confirmed the suspects’ identities or nationalities, and the investigation remains ongoing.
Cryptocurrency and the technology behind it are no longer a fringe curiosity for Britain’s financial regulator — they are becoming central to how the UK hopes to keep its capital markets competitive. In a speech delivered this week, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) made clear that tokenisation, artificial intelligence and digital assets are now core pillars of its multi-year reform programme, not side projects bolted onto traditional finance.
Jon Relleen, the FCA’s director of infrastructure and exchanges, told delegates at the Reform of the UK Public and Private Capital Markets Summit 2026 that the regulator has “been very busy” completing major elements of a long-running overhaul designed to ensure markets “work well for our economy and support growth.” Crucially, he singled out tokenisation — the process of representing traditional assets like shares, bonds or funds as digital tokens on blockchain-style infrastructure — as one of the fastest-moving frontiers the FCA is now preparing to regulate.
Why cryptocurrency infrastructure is entering the mainstream conversation
For years, cryptocurrency was treated by many regulators primarily as a consumer protection headache: a space rife with scams, volatile prices and speculative trading. The FCA’s own website still carries extensive warnings about crypto investment scams and maintains a public list of firms operating without authorisation. That caution hasn’t disappeared. But Relleen’s speech signals a parallel track, where the underlying technology of cryptocurrency markets is increasingly viewed as a legitimate tool for modernising how capital itself is raised, traded and settled.
This dual-track approach — tightening consumer safeguards while embracing the infrastructure — reflects a broader pattern seen across global financial regulation. Authorities are trying to separate the speculative trading culture that surrounds cryptocurrency from the distributed ledger technology that underpins it, betting that the latter can make markets faster, cheaper and more transparent without necessarily importing the volatility of coins like Bitcoin or Ether.
Trust and risk-taking as twin priorities
Relleen was explicit that reform cannot come at the expense of market integrity. “Trust, market integrity and high standards set the foundations for sustainable growth,” he said, while also stressing that regulators must “enable informed risk-taking.” That balancing act is especially delicate in the context of cryptocurrency-adjacent innovation, where enthusiasm for new technology has historically outpaced investor protections.
The FCA’s framing suggests it wants to avoid repeating past cycles in which cryptocurrency products were sold to retail investors with little understanding of the underlying risks, only for sharp price crashes or platform failures to follow. By building tokenisation into a broader, more deliberate reform agenda — alongside AI adoption and new markets for trading shares in private companies — the regulator appears to be trying to get ahead of the technology rather than reacting to it after problems emerge.
What reform could mean for everyday investors
For ordinary savers and investors, the practical implications of this shift may not be felt immediately, but they could be significant over time. Tokenised versions of traditional assets could, in theory, make it cheaper and faster to buy and sell investments, lower barriers to entry for smaller investors, and create new ways to trade assets that are currently illiquid, such as stakes in private companies.
At the same time, the FCA’s own consumer-facing warnings underline that cryptocurrency-linked products remain high-risk. The regulator continues to flag crypto investment scams as a priority concern and maintains tools allowing the public to check whether a firm is properly authorised before investing. Anyone tempted by new tokenised products emerging from this reform push would be wise to apply the same scrutiny long urged for conventional cryptocurrency investments: verifying authorisation, understanding volatility, and being wary of promises of guaranteed returns.
A multi-year programme nearing a turning point
Relleen described the FCA’s broader capital markets reform effort as having already completed “major aspects” of a multi-year programme, with more changes still to come. Tokenisation and artificial intelligence were named specifically as areas where markets and technology are evolving rapidly enough that regulation must adapt in real time rather than simply catching up after the fact.
This positions cryptocurrency-related innovation not as a one-off experiment but as an ongoing feature of how UK capital markets will likely operate in the coming years. Whether that translates into tangible benefits for everyday investors, or simply shifts where the risks sit, will depend heavily on how the FCA follows through on the detailed rules still to be written. For now, the message from one of Britain’s top financial regulators is unambiguous: cryptocurrency-based tokenisation has moved from the margins of policy discussion to the centre of the UK’s plan for economic growth.
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“While Tether claims to operate out of El Salvador, the vast majority of its assets reside in the United States under your custodianship,” the Connecticut lawmaker wrote. “As Congress considers how to best regulate digital assets, your partnership with Tether will provide important insights into the inner workings of this industry.”
One of the letter’s many requests: “Please describe all steps Cantor Fitzgerald has taken to investigate allegations that Tether’s stablecoin has been used in illicit finance and money laundering, including within Iran’s shadow banking network and for purposes of Russia sanctions evasion.”
Neither Cantor Fitzgerald nor Tether immediately responded to requests for comment sent to their spokespeople.
While Blumenthal and other aggressive congressional critics of the crypto industry, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, have suffered from a limited authority as members of the minority party, securing a Democratic majority for next year would change that. If they win several more seats in that chamber, they could find themselves atop committees with subpoena power to legally compel information and testimony.
As it stands, the prediction markets suggest that Democrats have a better-then-even shot at returning to the majority. Kalshi has it at 61% and Polymarket at 64%. That number was closer to 50-50 several weeks ago. And the picture in the U.S. House of Representatives is even more positive for Democrats, with both platforms showing the likelihood of a majority shift at more than 90%.
The guidance said authorized crypto firms must stop offering services that let EU customers buy, trade, swap or otherwise increase their holdings of affected stablecoins.
The rules cover exchange services, trade execution, transfers, custody, administration, advice and portfolio management.
National regulators should require any remaining customer holdings to be resolved “as soon as possible, and no later than three months” after the opinion’s publication, ESMA said. That places the deadline at Jan. 8, 2027.
In the meantime, platforms may provide limited services to resolve existing holdings. These can include selling, converting, withdrawing, transferring or safekeeping tokens, but not purchases, promotion, trading or continued market availability.
EU users who keep USDT on an exchange will have to follow that platform’s instructions. Some may be able to sell or withdraw it during the wind-down period; others may face an earlier cutoff.
ESMA said keeping noncompliant stablecoins available through authorized platforms would weaken the reserve, redemption, governance and disclosure rules MiCA imposes on authorized issuers.
The opinion is directed at national regulators, who will decide how individual platforms handle their remaining client balances within the three-month outer limit.
Crypto.com is rolling out a new partnership that hands everyday traders the kind of execution tools once reserved for institutional desks, without charging them a cent extra or asking them to move their funds elsewhere.
The exchange has struck a deal with Insilico Terminal, a platform built for active crypto traders who want faster order execution and more sophisticated trade management. The integration lets Crypto.com Exchange accounts connect directly to Insilico’s system, giving users access to professional-grade tools while their assets stay put on Crypto.com.
What Crypto.com Users Actually Get
The feature list reads like something out of a Wall Street trading desk: Chase and Swarm orders, TWAP execution, Scale orders, Depth of Market visibility, programmable hotkeys, automated position sizing and one-click strategy execution. These are the kinds of tools typically used by high-frequency and high-volume traders to manage risk and speed across volatile markets, and now they’re available to Crypto.com’s retail and professional user base alike.
Crucially, the integration isn’t limited to a single market view. Traders can monitor and execute across their Crypto.com accounts alongside positions held on other exchanges, all from one customizable workspace. For anyone juggling multiple platforms, that consolidation could cut down on the lag and guesswork that comes with switching between tabs during fast-moving sessions.
No Fees, No Custody Risk
Perhaps the most notable part of the arrangement is how it’s priced: there isn’t a price tag at all. Insilico’s execution tools are being made available to Crypto.com users free of subscription costs or hidden charges. The connection runs through an API-only setup with two-factor authentication support, and Insilico has been explicit that it does not take custody of user funds or store sensitive account information.
That distinction matters in an industry still recovering from a string of custody failures and collapsed platforms. By keeping funds on Crypto.com rather than routing them through a third party, the partnership is designed to let traders access advanced functionality without taking on additional counterparty risk.
Insilico has positioned itself around low-latency performance, pitching its infrastructure as built specifically to handle the kind of volatility that defines crypto markets, where price swings of several percent in minutes are routine rather than exceptional.
Targeting the High-Volume Trading Crowd
Crypto.com and Insilico both frame the collaboration as aimed squarely at serious traders, from high-volume futures players to active spot traders looking to sharpen their execution. Iskandar Vanblarcum, Managing Director of Crypto.com Exchange, said the move reflects the exchange’s commitment to its more advanced trading community.
“By integrating with Insilico Terminal, we are making it even easier for users to engage with our markets using professional-grade, low-latency execution tools at the speed and scale they require,” Vanblarcum said.
The companies describe the partnership as a way of combining Crypto.com’s existing market access with Insilico’s execution technology, layering a more advanced trading environment on top of the exchange without disturbing where customer funds are actually held.
The announcement lands at a moment when exchanges are under growing pressure to differentiate themselves beyond simple spot trading, as competition intensifies for traders who want institutional-style tooling without institutional account minimums. For Crypto.com, bundling Insilico’s toolkit into its existing platform offers a way to court that audience directly, positioning the exchange as a venue capable of serving both casual investors and professional desk traders from the same infrastructure.
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Bitcoin ETFs erased October’s net inflows with $485 million in withdrawals, while Ether funds logged a seventh straight outflow session.
The latest entry in the ever-expanding catalogue of crypto gimmicks has arrived, and it comes in the form of a vape pen. Dubbed “Gudtrip,” the product is being marketed as an AI agent vape pen with blockchain integration — a combination of buzzwords so dense that commentators have joked it is missing only “quantum” to complete the bingo card of 2020s tech hype.
The device, flagged by longtime blockchain critic David Gerard on his site Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, is emblematic of a broader pattern that has defined cryptocurrency culture for years: take a mundane consumer product, bolt on an AI “agent,” wrap it in blockchain terminology, and hope the resulting novelty generates enough attention to translate into sales or token value. Details on exactly how the vape pen’s blockchain component functions, what the AI agent actually does, or who is meant to benefit from either feature remain scarce. What is clear is that the pairing of inhalable nicotine products with decentralized ledgers and artificial intelligence is being treated, at least by crypto-watchers, as more punchline than breakthrough.
A Pattern of Crypto Gimmicks Chasing the Next Hype Cycle
Gudtrip did not emerge in isolation. It lands amid a wave of similar crypto gimmicks that attempt to fuse whatever technological buzzword is currently ascendant — these days, almost always AI — with blockchain infrastructure that may or may not serve any functional purpose. Gerard’s own recent writing has chronicled several other examples from this same moment: an AI-branded crypto wallet associated with Elon Musk’s Grok that was reportedly compromised through a combination of an NFT and a prompt-injection attack, and companies reportedly experimenting with paying staff in AI-linked tokens rather than conventional currency.
Taken together, these stories sketch a familiar shape. When a new technological trend captures public imagination, cryptocurrency promoters have historically been quick to graft it onto existing crypto products, regardless of whether the combination makes technical or economic sense. ICOs borrowed the language of ground-breaking innovation during the 2017 boom. NFTs absorbed digital art and collectibles culture. Now AI agents — software systems marketed as capable of autonomous decision-making — are being stitched onto blockchain projects, vape pens included, in what critics describe as an attempt to manufacture relevance rather than build it.
Why Crypto Gimmicks Keep Finding an Audience
Despite years of volatility, high-profile collapses, and regulatory scrutiny, crypto gimmicks continue to find traction because they tap into a recurring appetite for speculative novelty. A product that promises to be simultaneously cutting-edge in artificial intelligence and finance offers a kind of double hype — two trend narratives bundled into one pitch. For promoters, that bundling can be a marketing shortcut; for consumers and investors, it can obscure a lack of underlying substance.
The security incident involving the Grok-linked wallet is a case in point. According to Gerard’s reporting, the unofficial crypto wallet tied to the AI chatbot was hacked using a method that combined an NFT with a prompt injection — a technique that manipulates AI systems by hiding malicious instructions within content the system processes. The episode underscores a practical risk that often gets lost amid the marketing sheen of AI-blockchain mashups: stacking emerging, imperfectly understood technologies on top of each other can multiply vulnerabilities rather than multiply value.
Meanwhile, the reported experiments with paying employees in AI-branded tokens raise a more old-fashioned concern that has dogged cryptocurrency since its earliest days — compensating workers in volatile, illiquid digital assets rather than stable currency shifts financial risk onto the people least equipped to absorb it.
Substance Still Lagging Behind the Hype
What connects a vape pen, a chatbot wallet, and employee paychecks is not a coherent technological breakthrough but a marketing instinct: when uncertain whether a product has staying power, pile on every trending label available. Whether Gudtrip’s blockchain and AI features amount to anything more than branding is, based on currently available information, an open question — one that mirrors the skepticism long directed at crypto projects chasing headlines rather than solving clear problems.
For now, Gudtrip stands as the latest, oddest data point in crypto’s long history of gimmicks searching for a market. Whether it fades quickly like many before it, or finds some unexpected niche, may say less about vaping or artificial intelligence than it does about an industry still hunting for its next genuinely useful idea.
- Gudtrip: the AI agent vape pen with blockchain (David Gerard)
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Cardano wallet firm SecondFi finally launched a recovery portal for victims of the neo-finance platform’s $21 million hack, but will only pay roughly $8 for every unrecoverable NFT taken.
SecondFi says victims looking to recover their assets will be assessed with an “incident snapshot” based on the June 2026 exploit of Cardano wallets.
This snapshot will only act as an estimate, and SecondFi claims, “The final amount may differ.”
Unfortunately, for any NFTs that for some reason cannot be returned to victims, SecondFi says it will offer unlucky holders “a fixed amount” of 30 ADA, worth $7 and 60 cents.
Victims are also required to use a newly created Cardano wallet for the destination of any recovered funds.
Recovery portal repeatedly delayed
Today’s portal launch was initially scheduled for August, but was pushed back several times across September.
The portal allows victims to verify their affected wallets and submit a claim for any taken assets.
Incredibly, the project’s official guide recommends typing the private recovery phrase of an exploited wallet into SecondFi’s webpage, an extremely dangerous suggestion that puts users at risk of spoofing, man-in-the-middle, and a variety of other catastrophic attack vectors.
Their exploited wallet addresses are checked against the incident snapshot, where a tool provides “an estimated breakdown of any assets eligible for recovery.”
Victims must then provide a new Cardano wallet address as a destination for the recovered assets. A zero-knowledge proof is then created (this can take up to 15 minutes) before the recovery claims process begins (this can take up to five working days).
Read more: Mystery deepens over Cardano wallet’s $18.5M white hat hacker
Criminal hackers stole $2.4 million from Cardano wallets thanks to a “nonce derivation” issue that exposed users’ private keys.
Around the same time, a mysterious white hat hacker took $18.5 million from Cardano wallets as part of the platform’s security response.
Since the incident, SecondFi announced that it was winding down operations to focus on asset recovery, while Cardano co-founder and SecondFi creator, Emurgo, gave up the handling of its Token2049 booth as a result of the hack.
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Bitcoin has slipped below $84,000 after reaching $87,197 last Friday, while analysts have offered competing views on whether October can deliver a recovery toward $100,000.
Summary
- SideShift founder Andreas Brekken predicts Bitcoin will reach $100,000 within weeks as investor attention turns toward crypto.
- Bitfinex says holding $84,000 could leave late short sellers exposed if spot buying increases.
- Nansen’s Jake Kennis says October’s historical gains do not establish a reliable Oct. 5 bottom.
- DWF Labs’ Martin Lee puts Monday’s $90 million ETF outflow against two months of strong inflows.
Andreas Brekken, founder of SideShift.ai, told crypto.news that he expects a strong October for Bitcoin, arguing that investors are looking for opportunities after capital flowed toward the SpaceX IPO.
“I’m predicting a strong Uptober and $100K in weeks.”
In Brekken’s view, investors who no longer consider themselves early to the artificial intelligence trade could turn to crypto as their next choice among risk assets. He described the change as an “attention transfer,” attributing the earlier drain on liquidity to the SpaceX offering.
Other analysts tied their recovery forecasts to measurable buying rather than investor attention alone. Bitfinex’s team identified $84,000 as the immediate support to defend, while Nansen and Bitget Wallet researchers cautioned against treating October’s seasonal record as evidence of a market bottom.
Bitcoin’s $84,000 support could leave shorts exposed
According to Bitfinex Alpha’s latest update, Bitcoin fell below $84,000 overnight ahead of the Oct. 7 Federal Reserve minutes, triggering a wave of forced position closures.
The team put total crypto futures liquidations over 24 hours at $510.6 million, including $417.6 million in long positions. Roughly $300 million of the long liquidations occurred within an hour as Bitcoin broke below the support level, the analysts said.
Despite the selloff, Bitfinex reported that open interest across major perpetual trading venues was 0.5% higher on the morning of Oct. 7 than on Oct. 5. The analysts interpreted the relatively steady number of outstanding positions as evidence that fresh trades replaced longs forced out of the market.
With average annualized funding rates edging lower but remaining positive between 5% and 6.5% throughout the week, the team attributed much of the new positioning to short sellers.
“If BTC holds $84,000, late short positions become trapped below this key level.”
A rise in spot purchases could put those traders under pressure and carry Bitcoin toward, or above, its $87,722 yearly opening price, according to the analysts.
Bitfinex’s earlier assessment placed 867,000 BTC in the $84,000 cost-basis cluster, the largest concentration identified by its analysis. The team also described that price as the dividing line at which 75% of Bitcoin’s supply sits in profit.
The failed $87,197 breakout lacked spot buying
In Bitfinex’s account, last Friday’s advance relied mainly on futures trading. Open interest increased by $2.1 billion during the 24 hours before the September U.S. payrolls report, then contracted by $1.5 billion as the report was released.
Without enough spot purchases to sustain the move, the analysts said Bitcoin retreated toward $84,000 after its third rejection below the yearly open in two weeks.
Their base case remained consolidation between $84,000 and $87,722, with an upward break depending on ETF inflows returning toward September’s daily average of $340 million.
In an Oct. 6 report on Bitcoin’s stalled recovery, the team said several ETF sessions attracting at least $340 million each, combined with a daily close above $87,722, would support a move toward $90,000.
The same assessment placed ETF investors’ estimated average purchase price at $84,320, using Checkonchain’s flow-weighted calculation. According to Bitfinex, holders had spent 233 consecutive days below that level before Bitcoin reclaimed it on Sep. 21.
For the analysts, a return to breakeven helps explain weaker buying appetite, since inflows have historically accelerated when ETF investors hold a larger profit cushion.
ETF outflows have not unsettled DWF Labs’ Lee
Martin Lee, head of content and data insights at DWF Labs, said he was “not too concerned” about Monday’s roughly $90 million withdrawal from Bitcoin ETFs.
Lee described Sep. 21–25 as the funds’ strongest inflow week this year, with about $2.4 billion arriving, followed by another $241 million the next week. In his assessment, both preceding months had produced strong inflows.
A Sep. 26 report documenting September’s ETF inflows put the Sep. 21–25 total at $2.39 billion, according to Farside Investors. BlackRock’s IBIT received $1.16 billion, Fidelity’s FBTC attracted $701.6 million and ARK 21Shares’ ARKB added $294.7 million.
Across the year, Lee counted negative flows on 93 of 190 trading days, or about 48%, despite net inflows of $1.2 billion.
For Lee, weekly and monthly totals carry more weight than individual sessions, although he said the withdrawals warrant monitoring. Bitfinex’s concern centers instead on the pace of new purchases: its figures show weekly inflows falling from $2.39 billion to $241.1 million.
October’s record does not establish a bottom
Jake Kennis, senior research analyst at Nansen, said Bitcoin has delivered a median October return of roughly 14% since 2013, with gains in 10 of the past 13 Octobers.
However, Kennis rejected the idea that those monthly results establish Oct. 5 as a dependable turning point.
“Ultimately liquidity, positioning, macro conditions, and underlying demand are more important drivers than any specific date.”
Kennis cited Bitcoin’s 2.7% seven-day gain as positive momentum entering October, while cautioning that it did not confirm a calendar-driven bottom. He identified post-September positioning and improving risk appetite as possible contributors to the historical “Uptober” pattern.
Lacie Zhang, research lead at Bitget Wallet, said:
“This year, Bitcoin’s bottom may already have formed near $57,000. What matters more from here is the direction of macro liquidity and ETF flows rather than any specific seasonal date.”
Zhang also said weaker altcoins can take longer to bottom, even when they follow Bitcoin’s market cycle.
In an Oct. 5 assessment of Bitcoin’s conditional upside, Zhang identified $90,000–$93,000 as possible targets if Treasury yields decline and inflation figures support the weaker employment reading. She required a daily or weekly close above roughly $87,400, continued ETF inflows, and stronger spot purchases before calling the move a convincing breakout.
For the next U.S. inflation test, Bitfinex’s analysts pointed to September CPI on Oct. 14, saying the release could end Bitcoin’s trading range.
Forget retail traders and Wall Street allocators for a moment. According to BlackRock, the next wave of crypto demand might not come from people at all, but from machines quietly transacting with one another, thousands of times a second, without a human anywhere in the loop.
In a new report titled “The Machine-Native Economy,” the $15 trillion asset manager argues that artificial intelligence and digital assets are converging in ways that could reshape how value moves through the global economy. The core idea is straightforward: as AI agents take on more autonomous tasks, from booking flights to purchasing datasets to renting cloud computing power, they will need a financial system built for machine speed rather than human bureaucracy. BlackRock believes that system already exists, and it runs on blockchains.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries
Why Traditional Payments Can’t Keep Up With AI-Driven Crypto Demand
The report’s starting point is a blunt critique of existing financial plumbing. Card networks and automated clearing houses, BlackRock notes, were designed around human onboarding, batch settlement windows, and fee structures that make sense for a $50 purchase but collapse under the weight of a transaction worth a fraction of a cent. An AI agent calling an API a thousand times a minute, or paying machine-to-machine for slivers of compute time, doesn’t fit that mold.
That mismatch, BlackRock suggests, is exactly where crypto demand could surge. Blockchain rails, the report argues, are “particularly well suited to high-frequency, sub-cent, machine-to-machine transactions that take place around-the-clock,” pointing to use cases like on-demand data purchases and consumption-based compute billing as early examples of what an agent-driven economy might actually look like in practice.
Bitcoin as Savings, Stablecoins as Spending Money
Perhaps the most striking part of the report is its attempt to sketch out how AI agents might actually behave with money if given the choice. Citing research from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, BlackRock says controlled simulations found that AI systems generally gravitated toward stablecoins for everyday payments, while favoring bitcoin for long-term value preservation.
In other words, the machines sorted themselves into roughly the same two-tier monetary logic that many human crypto investors already follow: a stable, dollar-pegged token for spending, and a scarcer, harder asset for saving. BlackRock frames this as evidence of “a potential AI-native monetary architecture in which stablecoins serve as transactional money and bitcoin as a store of value,” a split that, if it holds at scale, could generate steady transactional crypto demand from stablecoins alongside accumulation-driven demand for bitcoin itself.
The report goes further, suggesting that as agentic AI systems become more capable and more widely deployed across industries, digital assets could become genuinely embedded in AI’s economic infrastructure. That would stretch beyond bitcoin and stablecoins to include tokenized real-world assets and other native crypto tokens that support blockchain settlement, according to the report.
BlackRock’s Growing Bet on Digital Assets
This isn’t a one-off musing from a firm dabbling in crypto commentary. BlackRock has steadily built out a crypto footprint over the past two years, most visibly through its iShares Bitcoin Trust, which the Securities and Exchange Commission approved in 2024. That fund went on to post the most successful debut of any ETF in history and now oversees more than $67 billion in assets, cementing BlackRock’s position as the dominant player among U.S. spot bitcoin funds.
The firm has also previously argued that bitcoin deserves to be treated as its own asset class, separate from equities or gold, and has pointed to investors using it as a hedge against potential sovereign debt crises. The AI-agent thesis adds a new, less conventional layer to that argument: instead of framing crypto demand purely around human portfolio allocation or macro hedging, BlackRock is now betting that software itself will become a buyer, and that machine-driven adoption could end up being an underappreciated force in the market.
Whether AI agents actually begin transacting in bitcoin and stablecoins at meaningful scale remains to be seen, and the report leans heavily on simulations rather than live market data. But coming from a firm managing trillions of dollars and sitting atop the world’s largest bitcoin ETF, the argument carries weight. If BlackRock is right, the next leg of crypto demand may not be driven by a bull run in sentiment among human traders, but by the quiet, round-the-clock commerce of machines that never sleep, never take holidays, and never wait for a bank to open.
- BlackRock Says AI Agents Could Be the Next Big Driver of Crypto Demand (Bitcoin Magazine)
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Justin Sun, the creator of TRON and crypto billionaire suing the Trump family, posted a bizarre admission on X yesterday when he stated that his exchange Poloniex is now “the world’s only exchange used solely by the boss himself.”
In essence, Sun, while perhaps being tongue-in-cheek, seemed to admit that most of the volume on Poloniex is down to him.
The only way to create nearly $1 billion dollars in volume on an exchange would be by trading with yourself. In other words, wash trading.
Read more: Is Justin Sun mixing HTX’s reserves with Poloniex?
In most countries, wash trading is considered illegal because it can be used to manipulate the price of an asset. However, unless it can be verifiably proven it’s rarely prosecuted.
The SEC previously alleged (in a since-dropped case) that Sun had engaged in wash-trading of TRX.
Freedom in loneliness and rumors about harm
While Sun has been posting about finding freedom in trading crypto assets with himself, the rumor mill went into overdrive during the weekend in Mainland China.
A few individuals began spreading a fake screenshot claiming that UAE media outlets were reporting Sun had been shot in Dubai.
The news spread fast and wide with some people in China being upset and worried for the billionaire, while others were almost celebratory in their response.
Nonetheless, Sun put the rumors to bed by posting “All is well” with a smiling sunglasses emoji on X on Sunday.
Sun has been hopscotching between Chicago, where he’s promoting TRON ETFs getting listed, and Singapore, where he’s set to attend a conference this week.
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.
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