Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Kraken parent Payward has connected to Singapore Gulf Bank’s real-time multi-currency clearing network, SGB Net, to give institutional clients in selected Asian and Gulf jurisdictions round-the-clock settlement, seven days a week. The service initially supports US dollar transactions for a limited set of clients, with client coverage and currencies to expand later. SGB Net currently clears more than $20 billion in fiat transactions monthly. SGB will also connect to Payward’s Kraken Prime institutional brokerage platform for digital asset liquidity.

TREE NEWS update: S&P Global Ratings has introduced a Vault Risk Assessment (VRA) framework for onchain digital-asset lending vaults, scoring investor impairment risk across six dimensions: portfolio credit quality, liquidity mismatch, curator, blockchain, protocol, and vault security and governance. The scores use letter grades with a “v” suffix. S&P said the VRA is not a credit rating and that first assessment results will be published separately. Onchain lending vault deposits grew from $1.5 billion in September 2024 to $10 billion in September 2025.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo said on X that roughly 5% of the global population holds bitcoin, while about 8% of countries have adopted policies to buy or hold it. In a follow-up reply, he added that around 12% of countries actually hold bitcoin, drawing a distinction between countries that hold the asset and those with active purchase or holding policies.

TREE NEWS reports: An Ethereum OG whale who bought 170,000 ETH in the 2015 ICO transferred 13,330 ETH, worth about $36.37 million, to Coinbase two hours ago, on-chain analyst EmberCN said. The move brings the address’s ICO holdings to a near-complete exit at an average price of $1,137, leaving 1,484 ETH, or roughly $4.01 million. Against a $0.311 ICO cost, the whale has booked about $193 million in profit, a 3,655x return.

TREE NEWS update: FTX creditors registered in mainland China and Macau face a Jan. 31, 2027 deadline to connect a distribution service provider or risk losing all repayments. FTX works with BitGo, Kraken and Payoneer, but none appear as options for residents of those regions, leaving claims stuck at step 8 of the payout process even after KYC and tax forms are approved. Five distribution rounds have already run since the plan took effect in January 2025, with no payout reaching those creditors.

TREE NEWS update: Zcash’s NU7 upgrade is now live on testnet, giving developers several weeks to assess 25-second blocks and other protocol changes before a planned November mainnet activation. The testnet deployment marks the final review phase for the network’s next protocol upgrade.

TREE NEWS update: Greenfield Capital said it has asked the Swiss financial regulator to intervene in a governance dispute at the Safe Ecosystem Foundation, the body behind the Safe smart-account infrastructure. The investor said it had sought changes to the foundation’s board for months before turning to the watchdog. No response from the regulator or the foundation was given.

TREE NEWS update: Hester Peirce, known as “Crypto Mom,” left the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on October 2, departing about two months before her second term’s extension would have expired, to teach at Regent University School of Law. The SEC now has only two commissioners, Chairman Paul Atkins and Mark Uyeda, both Republicans, and the White House has not yet named a successor. Peirce had led the SEC’s crypto task force since January 21.

TREE NEWS update: Zcash has registered a new lobbying operation in Washington, listing the CLARITY Act and two digital asset tax proposals among the issues it plans to lobby on. The registration marks the privacy-focused cryptocurrency’s formal entry into US crypto policy advocacy.

TREE NEWS update: Former SEC chairman Jay Clayton has been appointed as Trump’s new AI czar, drawing criticism from Roman Storm and the XRP community. Separately, veteran trader Peter Brandt flipped bullish and said Bitcoin could reach as high as $600,000 by 2029.

TREE NEWS update: SEC Chair Paul Atkins said the agency will advance more crypto and digital securities rules to keep digital asset markets in the United States. On October 2 he said the proposed crypto custody framework modernizes 1940 rules written only for traditional asset custody, following the Senate’s failure to pass the CLARITY Act last month. The push includes Regulation Crypto Assets and a five-year Innovation Exemption sandbox allowing US equities trading on decentralized exchanges and with liquidity providers. Former SEC official John Reed Stark called it beyond the SEC’s authority.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin rose past 86,000 USDT and was trading at 86,005.4 USDT, up 1.62% over the past 24 hours. The move puts BTC above the 86,000 level on the exchange’s spot market.

TREE NEWS reports: Prediction market predict.fun put the probability of Polymarket launching an official token before March 31, 2027 at 16%. The market-implied odds leave roughly a one-in-six chance that the crypto prediction platform issues a token within that window.

TREE NEWS update: The SEC approved a Cboe BZX rule change allowing Volatility Shares LLC to list a 3x bitcoin futures ETF alongside five other leveraged commodity products, including a 3x ether ETF plus gold, silver, crude oil and natural gas funds. The bitcoin strategy targets three times the daily futures benchmark, before fees, using futures contracts rather than holding bitcoin directly. Trading can begin once the registration statements take effect, with each product issuing at least 100,000 shares at open and calculating NAV daily.

TREE NEWS reports: A Gnosis Safe linked to Ethena withdrew 62.58 million ENA, worth $14.86 million, from Bybit 37 minutes ago, bringing its total withdrawals from the exchange to 117.58 million ENA, worth $27.96 million, over the past nine hours.

TREE NEWS reports: The project Revenue Family, which bills itself as X Money’s off-ramp bridge, has been tied to a malicious approval exploit in which an attacker lured users into signing permit authorizations, obtained unlimited USDG allowances and called transferFrom in the same transaction to move funds out. Stolen funds were split 80/20 into two hacker addresses. The project said on October 1 that its social media accounts had been taken over by an internal reviewer, paused redemptions and denied that REV was its official token.

TREE NEWS reports: Security firm Salus said the project Revenue Family, which presents itself as an X Money off-ramp, executed malicious approvals by submitting users’ permit signatures to obtain unlimited USDG allowances, then calling transferFrom in the same transaction to move funds to two hacker addresses split 80/20. Revenue Family said on October 1 that its social accounts had been taken over by an internal reviewer, paused redemptions and denied that REV was its official token.

TREE NEWS update: Victims of the Drift hack on Solana began filing claims on Oct. 1 against roughly $295.4 million in verified losses, with an initial recovery pool of about $3.11 million. Holders can redeem DFX tokens for USDT at roughly 1.04 cents per dollar of loss — about $10.40 on a $1,000 loss. DFX has a fixed supply of 299,500,810.998 tokens, each tied to one USDT of verified April losses, and unclaimed tokens expire when the claim window closes on Jan. 1, 2028.

TREE NEWS update: The Independent Community Bankers of America sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, challenging the OCC’s authority to grant national trust bank charters to crypto companies. ICBA seeks to vacate the March 2, 2026 final rule and Interpretive Letter 1176, and to revoke Protego Holdings’ conditional charter. The suit names charter applicants or recipients including Circle, Ripple, Paxos, Fidelity, BitGo, Kraken parent Payward, Block and World Liberty Financial.