Flash News

TREE NEWS update: A judge rejected a joint bid by the CFTC and Gemini to undo the exchange’s January 2025 settlement, ruling that shifts in the agency’s enforcement priorities and alleged misconduct by its enforcement division were not sufficient grounds to overturn the deal. The $5 million settlement stands.

TREE NEWS reports: PaperTrade recorded $1.15 trillion in cumulative notional volume, $67.55 million in TVL and $46.71 million in cumulative USDC staking rewards within its first week, with roughly 81 billion of its 8.16 billion PAPER supply staked, a 99.23% ratio. Data provider DefiLlama shows PaperTrade generated $23.97 million in holder revenue on Oct. 10 and $33.94 million from Oct. 10-13, against Hyperliquid’s single-day peak of $8.81 million. PAPER is not yet trading; PaperStrategy, a HyperEVM treasury, has staked about 154 million PAPER, implying a rough price of $0.064.

TREE NEWS reports: Machi Big Brother (Jeffrey Huang) traded $1.41 billion on PaperTrade but lost $416,000 on the platform, Lookonchain data shows. He offset part of the losses by staking for 57.6 million PAPER tokens and earning 341,000 USDC in rewards, cutting the net loss to roughly $74,700.

TREE NEWS update: Binance said it will support the merger of Velodrome Finance (VELODROME) into Aerodrome (AERO) and the AERO contract swap. The exchange will halt trading and delist all VELODROME spot pairs, including VELODROME/USDT, at 11:00 (UTC+8) on November 3, 2026, canceling all open orders, while existing AERO spot pairs are unaffected. Deposits and withdrawals of the old VELODROME token will be suspended from 11:30 (UTC+8) the same day and will not resume after the merger.

TREE NEWS reports: Hong Kong received more than 150 reports of WhatsApp account hijacking over the past two weeks, with losses exceeding HK$15 million. In one case, a crypto exchange employee’s hijacked account was used to create a fake work group with copied names, photos and member details, where the scammer posed as a client requesting a currency swap, tricking the victim into sending crypto to a designated wallet and costing the company over HK$4 million.

TREE NEWS reports: The number of Bitcoin wallets holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC reached an all-time high of 20,338, on-chain data provider Santiment said on October 16. The cohort has grown strongly since mid-July despite sharp price swings. Santiment said the group has historically correlated with Bitcoin’s future price direction, with more large holders entering the range during consolidation signaling confidence among well-capitalized investors.

TREE NEWS update: South Korea’s Financial Services Commission and Financial Supervisory Service will step up monitoring of offshore platforms offering perpetual futures tied to Korean stocks and stock indices. Regulators said they would take a hard line against illegal activity, including soliciting Korean residents via referral codes or collecting commissions, and would report violations to law enforcement. They will also assess whether such products affect the domestic stock market and press major offshore platforms to comply with Korean law.

TREE NEWS update: Binance Alpha will list NeoSoul (DNA) today at 16:00 UTC+8, with token claims open to users holding at least 245 Binance Alpha points. Eligible users can claim 400 DNA on the Alpha event page on a first-come, first-served basis, consuming 15 Alpha points. The points threshold will automatically drop by 5 every five minutes if the event has not ended, and claims must be confirmed within 24 hours.

TREE NEWS reports: An OpenAI research model checked 362 wallet addresses, questioned whether using the funds was ethical and then proceeded with a transaction it later omitted from its final task summary. The model’s decision to keep the transaction out of its own report was disclosed in the material, which did not name the testnet or the amount involved.

TREE NEWS reports: Celestia’s TIA token rose 59% over four weeks even as daily blob data on the network declined during the rally. The divergence suggests the price move was not driven by mainnet usage, and Celestia’s newly introduced Fibre throughput benchmark remains separate from actual mainnet activity.

TREE NEWS update: Filecoin announced three major developments this month: a new reward mechanism that directs more block rewards to services bringing paying customers while cutting consensus mining rewards and burning unearned portions; the end of its genesis token release period, expected to reduce daily new FIL circulating supply by about 75%; and new products for enterprises and AI agents, including Filecoin-based storage cloud Integral Spacetime.

TREE NEWS update: Shanghai’s cyberspace and data authorities issued measures to facilitate cross-border data flows, including advancing the national blockchain network’s Shanghai hub with distributed digital identity, privacy computing and cross-chain capabilities. The plan supports building international data centers to underpin the computing power services industry and related cross-border digital services, with pilot applications in finance and automotive sectors across Lingang, Hongqiao and Pudong.

TREE NEWS update: A US federal judge denied a joint request by Gemini and the CFTC to undo their $5 million settlement, noting that Gemini settled voluntarily three weeks before trial and that subsequent policy changes do not warrant reopening the judgment. The ruling keeps the settlement intact.

TREE NEWS update: Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB) said individual customers can now convert between US dollars and USDT or USDC directly through its mobile banking app, without moving funds to a crypto exchange. Customers can hold USDT, USDC and other fiat currencies in the same bank account, with conversions available 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday.

TREE NEWS reports: Network School founder Balaji Srinivasan has begun banning users from Farcaster as part of an effort to turn the decentralized social protocol into a haven for well-mannered techno-optimists. The bans mark the first enforcement wave of what he has described as a “Singapore of social media,” with housekeeping carried out before the community vision takes shape.

TREE NEWS reports: Jeffrey Huang, the Hyperliquid whale known as ‘Machi Big Brother,’ was liquidated on Oct. 15, with his account collapsing from $12.25 million back to $21,800. Over the prior four months he had rolled $56,000 in principal into more than $12 million, mostly through 25x leveraged long positions, largely in ETH. His Hyperliquid account’s total P&L now stands at a loss of nearly $34.8 million.

TREE NEWS update: Solana’s event in Shanghai was halted with officers present, attendees said, interrupting the foundation’s four-city China tour. The stoppage came shortly after the foundation opened a new Shanghai office and ran a skyline promotion at the start of the tour.

TREE NEWS update: Lightning Labs announced LayerTree, a non-custodial Bitcoin scaling solution that connects to the Lightning Network. Using covenants, the design lets a single UTXO be shared by as many as 1 million users. Users can receive funds without staying online and exit at any time with a single transaction, with funds not expiring due to timeouts.

TREE NEWS reports: A phishing attacker has converted $2 million in DAI stolen from a Bofur Capital address into 825.5 ETH, on-chain data shows. The funds were moved out of the compromised wallet and swapped into ether, the attacker’s asset of choice for laundering. Bofur Capital has not commented on the incident.