Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Binance Futures will list four USDT-margined perpetual contracts on October 6, 2026, the exchange said in an official announcement. USDEXUSDT opens at 17:00 Beijing time, followed by VKTXUSDT at 17:05, MCDUSDT at 17:10 and AKAMUSDT at 17:15. All four are TradFi perpetual contracts quoted in USDT.

TREE NEWS update: Chain investigator ZachXBT said he went undercover posing as a laundering client and helped freeze part of the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in February 2025, after gaining the trust of a Chinese-speaking team that claimed to have laundered most of the haul for North Korea’s Lazarus Group. He said 442,000 USDT tied to a wallet cluster holding over $12 million of the funds was frozen by Tether, and that he has passed findings to law enforcement.

TREE NEWS update: Better Markets said the CFTC’s proposed framework for bringing certain cryptocurrency transactions and exchanges under its oversight would leave investors less protected than under the SEC. The advocacy group called the CFTC the ‘wrong agency’ to regulate retail crypto.

TREE NEWS update: Crypto firm Rain has applied for a US federal trust bank charter, joining a growing queue of digital-asset companies seeking the designation. The move comes days after community banks asked a court to overturn the OCC rules that underpin such charters. The legal challenge targets the federal framework crypto firms rely on to obtain trust bank status.

TREE NEWS update: OKX has launched OKX Money, an app that lets users hold, send and spend dollar-backed stablecoins, with qualifying USDG balances earning up to 10% APY. The product is aimed at emerging markets, combining stablecoin payments with a yield-bearing savings feature. OKX did not disclose which markets will get access first or when the rollout begins.

TREE NEWS update: Ethereum-based AI project IMD (identity.md), which aims to run a community-owned company staffed by AI agents, said its agent network opened to NFT holders on Sept. 20 and grew from dozens of nodes to more than 370 within five days, while the IMD token rose over 200% in a week. About 3.8 million IMD, roughly 32% of supply, is staked as sIMD, and the Uniswap V4 CappedBurnHook burns 85% of IMD removed from the main ETH/IMD pool. Paid demand remains small: 115 orders at 0.5 IMD each, about $560.

TREE NEWS update: OKX founder and CEO Star said at the OKX NOW global product and ecosystem conference in Singapore on October 6 that the exchange is evolving from a crypto trading venue into a global fintech platform spanning custody, payments, investing and wealth management. Star said global financial institutions including ICE and NYSE, Standard Chartered, Ripple and Circle have taken equity stakes in OKX, and that AI is now core infrastructure, with roughly 95% of engineering code merge requests handled through AI workflows.

TREE NEWS update: Amazon Web Services has added Zhipu’s GLM-5.3 model to its Amazon Bedrock platform, with AWS sharing revenue with Zhipu based on model usage volume. Zhipu said it has struck similar revenue-share arrangements with several other overseas cloud providers, and has signed comparable agreements with Alibaba Cloud’s Bailian platform, while Huawei Cloud has listed GLM-5.3 and reached intent on a similar partnership.

TREE NEWS update: Solana has debuted an open-source delivery-versus-payment (DvP) program built with input from J.P. Morgan, letting institutions settle trades atomically on-chain with finality in seconds rather than days. The standard is aimed at institutional trading workflows that require simultaneous exchange of assets and payment.

TREE NEWS reports: On-chain investigator ZachXBT said he infiltrated a Chinese crime network that laundered more than $1 billion for North Korea’s Lazarus Group by posing as a customer. The information he obtained helped trace funds from the $1.5 billion Bybit hack, he said.

TREE NEWS update: About 25,000 people are expected at Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands this week for the Token2049 conference, held October 7-8. The event will feature more than 500 exhibitors and over 300 speakers, including Hyperliquid CEO Jeff Yan, Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan and World Liberty Financial co-founder Eric Trump. Primitive Ventures founding partner Dovey Wan said the asset class has matured considerably since the first Token2049 in 2018.

TREE NEWS update: The CFTC opened a rulemaking process on Monday to build a unified federal framework for retail leveraged and margin spot crypto trading, proposing Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM to create a new “Crypto Asset Market” registration category. Qualifying platforms could offer retail leverage and margin spot trading under CFTC oversight, giving exchanges an alternative to state-by-state licensing. Chairman Michael Selig said the step advances the U.S. as the “global crypto capital,” while the agency said it cannot compel all crypto trading onto CFTC-registered venues without congressional authorization.

TREE NEWS update: Nasdaq-listed bitcoin treasury company Strive bought 2,000 BTC last week for roughly $169 million, its largest purchase in four months. The company, co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, now holds 29,462 BTC.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin rebounded above 86,000 USDT, trading at 86,007.3 USDT. The move marks a recovery for the largest cryptocurrency back past the 86,000 level after recent weakness.

TREE NEWS reports: Nasdaq-listed DeFi Development Corp bought about $3 million of Solana in its latest weekly purchase, lifting its holdings 1% to roughly 2.56 million SOL and SOL equivalents. The addition is about half the prior week’s gain and well below the company’s mid-September buying pace.

TREE NEWS update: Fairshake, the crypto-focused political action committee, said it will financially back 32 House candidates in the US midterms, all of whom voted in favor of the CLARITY market structure bill in 2025. The legislation remains stalled in the Senate.

TREE NEWS update: The US Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has withdrawn two proposed rules covering unhosted crypto wallets and crypto mixers, citing concerns over “legitimate activity” and describing the move as part of the Trump Administration’s deregulatory agenda. The rules had been proposed under the prior administration and would have imposed reporting requirements on crypto transactions involving self-custodied wallets and mixing services.

TREE NEWS reports: An anonymous 4chan user who called Bitcoin’s October 2025 peak to the day back in 2023 is being watched for a second prediction about the end of the crypto winter. The claim has circulated as a so-called Bitcoin prophecy, with attention focused on whether the same account’s timeline holds again.

TREE NEWS update: CFTC staff have cleared a fast-track process for converting stock-index perpetual contracts, requiring exchanges to give position holders five calendar days’ notice and a chance to exit. Other material contract terms must remain unchanged under the streamlined path. The move eases the route for venues seeking to convert such products without a full review.