Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Prosecutors said three of the five remaining defendants in the case against former NBA guard Malik Beasley over alleged stat manipulation for betting intend to plead guilty, while two others have not accepted plea deals. Co-defendant William Brown has pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy. Beasley’s lawyer said he does not intend to plead guilty, and trial is tentatively set for May 17, 2027.

TREE NEWS reports: A wallet linked to bitcoin treasury company Hut 8 transferred 1,589 BTC — worth about $130 million — to multiple exchanges over the past two days, on-chain tracker Lookonchain said. Hut 8 holds 10,278 BTC, valued at roughly $845.6 million.

TREE NEWS update: Ledger said a highly organized criminal group spent millions of dollars buying genuine Ledger devices, implanting custom hidden components to steal recovery seed phrases during setup, then reselling them through Southeast Asian distributors. Ledger said the incident was a localized distribution-channel attack, not a chip, OS or server vulnerability, and has suspended sales by authorized resellers in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong pending inventory sampling checks.

TREE NEWS update: Pirate Chain said a transaction validation flaw discovered in its source code on October 14 allowed about 39.8 million ARRR to be created without authorization, expanding the token’s total supply by roughly 20%. The newly minted tokens were moved into the Sapling privacy pool. NonKYC flagged suspicious deposits, restricted the accounts involved and blocked withdrawals, while the investigation found two validation failures: a bypass of the inflation check and incorrect parsing of output scripts.

TREE NEWS update: A judge rejected Gemini’s bid to lift restrictions tied to its settlement with the CFTC. The exchange has already paid the $5 million penalty, but a permanent injunction and restrictions on publicly denying the case’s findings remain in place.

TREE NEWS update: Australia has released a draft bill to adopt the OECD’s Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), joining 77 jurisdictions committed to the standard. The first international exchanges of crypto tax data under the framework are expected in 2028. The draft legislation would bring crypto assets into line with global automatic tax information-sharing rules.

TREE NEWS update: Pirate Chain disclosed that an exploit created 39.8 million ARRR, prompting developers to ask users not to move funds while recovery work is underway. The network remains operational, the project said.

TREE NEWS update: A bug in the bOSMO contract still allows cheap minting, putting liquidity pools at risk, and the token now has little backing. Holders will be compensated under a plan that excludes bOSMO bought after the compensation snapshot, meaning post-snapshot buyers will not be reimbursed.

TREE NEWS reports: A scammer reportedly lost $4.8 million of stolen money after storing the funds on tampered Ledger devices. Separately, Bitcoin and Ether ETFs began trading in Thailand, while South Korea blocked 27 crypto exchanges.

TREE NEWS reports: Researchers embedded hidden text to contact AI agents probing Alibaba’s map service, eliciting replies about their assigned tasks, while investigators traced the activity to Tencent Cloud infrastructure. The technique exposed how autonomous agents can be identified and questioned through the services they target. The findings were reported by researchers tracking the agents across cloud infrastructure.

TREE NEWS update: MSCI has finalized index rules targeting non-operating companies, putting Strategy, Metaplanet and SharpLink at risk of exclusion from its indexes. The final list of affected firms is due Nov. 11. The rules cover companies whose main business is holding crypto assets rather than operating businesses.

TREE NEWS update: Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School has acquired Farcaster from Neynar, the social protocol’s new owner announced. Under the change, Farcaster users must sign a “social smart contract” or be dropped to read-only access. No purchase price or further terms were disclosed.

TREE NEWS update: MSCI has adopted a new framework that could remove Strategy (MSTR) from its global equity benchmarks, effective at the close on November 30. The index provider will exclude companies classified as “non-operating” and apply a financial test that may disqualify Strategy from inclusion. A final removal could pressure the crypto-treasury model the company pioneered and weigh on its share price as the pool of index-tracking holders shrinks.

TREE NEWS update: Aave V4’s Arc Markets went live on Sept. 16 with four reserve assets, connecting dollar and euro loans to shared liquidity. The deployment’s Forex market allows borrowers to pledge EURC, which is not eligible as collateral in Arc’s Main market.

TREE NEWS update: Russia’s central bank has confirmed it will ban peer-to-peer crypto trading, giving Russians until July 1, 2027 to buy and sell crypto directly with each other. After that date, every trade must run through a broker or exchange approved by the Bank of Russia. The confirmation sets a firm deadline for ending direct person-to-person bitcoin transactions in the country.

TREE NEWS reports: Binance.US is seeking a $1 billion valuation in a potential funding round of about $100 million, the crypto exchange reportedly aiming to use the capital to regain market share lost after Binance’s 2023 settlement with US authorities. The reported raise would mark a push to rebuild the US arm’s position following the resolution of the enforcement case.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan told investors that Bitcoin rises in all three of his “Choose Your Own Adventure” economic scenarios: AI-driven superabundance, an AI bust, or a muddle-through economy. In the note, Hougan argued each path ultimately funnels to the same outcome — a higher Bitcoin price.

TREE NEWS update: Ledger confirmed a physical implant was found inside signers sold through reseller CryptoBilis, reading recovery phrases off the screen at setup and transmitting them out. Up to $93 million was drained from more than 300 wallets, and the software itself was never touched.

TREE NEWS update: Elon Musk said the Star Mind computer, jointly designed by SpaceX and Nvidia, will enter mass production next year, calling it far beyond almost everyone’s expectations. His comments followed Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying he enjoys working with Musk and that the two companies’ engineering teams are designing a new type of server to deploy data centers in space. Huang said Musk is using Nvidia technology to train and deploy his own AI models.