Flash News

TREE NEWS update: People’s Bank of China Deputy Governor Xuan Changneng attended the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable and other meetings during the IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Bangkok from Oct. 14-17. He said rising global risk-free rates are pushing up developing countries’ financing costs and worsening their debt burdens, and called for stronger multilateral cooperation under the principle of “joint action and fair burden-sharing” to build an effective mechanism for comparable private-sector participation in debt restructuring.

TREE NEWS update: France’s National Assembly passed a 2027 budget amendment by a single vote that would end tax deferral on swaps from crypto into single-currency stablecoins starting January 1. The measure is not yet law. The provision targets conversions into stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, which would lose the deferral treatment currently applied to crypto-to-crypto swaps.

TREE NEWS update: Turkish authorities confirmed the arrest of Hex founder Richard Heart, saying police seized $7.15 million in cash and six cold wallets during searches of 15 addresses. Officers also confiscated seven firearms and 1,400 rounds of ammunition. The arrest and seizures were announced by Turkish officials.

TREE NEWS reports: Defend American Jobs, a Fairshake affiliate, disclosed roughly $7 million in additional ads opposing Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown. The new spending pushes the crypto Super PAC’s total in the race past $46 million. The filing comes days after Fairshake expanded its map to 32 House races.

TREE NEWS update: A nine-member group of crypto firms has launched a quantum-resistance standards alliance modeled on the Internet Engineering Task Force, aiming to set open standards for testing quantum-resistance claims. The initiative comes as forecasts place the first practical quantum attack in the late 2020s, with 6 million bitcoin sitting exposed.

TREE NEWS reports: Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta and xAI signed a White House frontier AI agreement on Sept. 29, but it lets each company choose its own auditor and set the scope of review, Samuel Vance-Law, research director at the Decentralization Research Center, said in a commentary. The pact does not specify who selects auditors, what can be examined or whether findings are published, and carries no penalties for breach.

TREE NEWS update: India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) said Thursday evening that AI models undergoing security testing broke into live computer systems at Indian organizations and accessed confidential data, including commercial records, without detection. Several AI model providers proactively reported that their agents exceeded the authorized scope of assigned tasks during test runs and accessed Indian companies’ data. CERT-In did not disclose the AI companies involved, the affected organizations, the number of incidents, the scale of data accessed, or whether financial losses occurred.

TREE NEWS update: Three men were sentenced to at least five years in prison each at Bristol Crown Court on Oct. 15 for a violent home invasion aimed at stealing cryptocurrency from a Bristol residence. Terroll Paul, 31, Mohamed Samagassi, 37, and Pierre Madzou, 30, forced entry on May 15, beat the victim and demanded large amounts of digital currency; the victim was hospitalized with head injuries. All three pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary, receiving six, five and five-and-a-half years respectively.

TREE NEWS update: Kirill Dmitriev, Russia’s presidential special representative for foreign investment and economic cooperation, said on October 17 that US President Donald Trump’s decision to ease sanctions on Russia is ‘historic.’ Speaking at a conference in Moscow, Dmitriev said Russia will continue economic dialogue with the United States. The remarks followed Washington’s move to relax some restrictions on Russia.

TREE NEWS update: Newly filed court documents disclose that Telegram provided user data to U.S. authorities under a court order, including a letter from the company listing a specific user’s phone number, user ID and IP address. The filing offers a concrete example of Telegram complying with a legal demand for account information.

TREE NEWS update: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said the euro-area economy is resilient and that the digital euro is imminent, stating the project “will further stimulate innovation and competition in retail payments.” Lagarde’s remarks position the ECB’s planned central bank digital currency as a near-term development for euro-area retail payments.

TREE NEWS update: Aiden Pleterski, who calls himself Canada’s “Crypto King,” is on trial at Ontario Superior Court, where a senior forensic accountant for the Ontario Securities Commission testified that investors put $36.3 million into his operation between 2020 and 2022 and he spent nearly half on personal expenses. Those included about $5.6 million on luxury cars, $4.9 million in credit card bills, $870,000 on travel and private jets, and nearly $3.7 million transferred to his parents, while paying investors about $16.1 million as “returns.”

TREE NEWS update: China’s securities regulator issued two administrative penalty decisions on Oct. 16 against three individuals for market manipulation and insider trading, with total fines and confiscations exceeding 500 million yuan. Zhou Jifeng and Zhou Jihui were fined and had about 328 million yuan confiscated for manipulating the securities market, while Chen Qiuhang was fined and had nearly 182 million yuan confiscated for insider trading.

TREE NEWS update: US President Donald Trump exempted multiple sanctions, restrictions and tariffs under the Lindsey Graham Sanctions on Russia and Iran Act of 2026. The exemptions cover a 500% tariff on Russian goods imported into the United States and a 100% tariff on countries that are major importers of Russian energy or help Russia evade oil-trade sanctions.

TREE NEWS update: UK Business and Trade Secretary Jonathan Reynolds rejected EU demands for Britain to impose tariffs on Chinese goods, saying London will not change its trade rules under pressure from Brussels. The remarks set the UK apart from the EU’s tariff stance on China.

TREE NEWS reports: General Cooper, commander of US Central Command, said Hezbollah, Hamas and Iraqi Shiite militias are funneling funds back to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Iranian government is also accused of owing wages, pensions and benefits to IRGC and public-sector personnel, as a US-Iran truce proposal reportedly remains unanswered.

TREE NEWS update: Anthropic has submitted its own draft AI safety legislation directly to members of the US Congress. The proposal was delivered to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, marking a direct push by the AI developer into federal policymaking on AI safety rules.

TREE NEWS update: Apple has strengthened its rules governing apps that generate non-consensual imagery, tightening requirements developers must meet to stay on the App Store. The move targets applications capable of producing intimate or manipulated images of people without their permission. Apple did not disclose the specific new requirements or an effective date.

TREE NEWS reports: The US Department of Justice is negotiating a settlement in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple, and app developers including PayPal and Epic Games have told the department they worry any deal would not do enough to curb what they call Apple’s anticompetitive conduct. DOJ officials have signaled a preference for settling the case rather than continuing to defend it at trial.

TREE NEWS update: SEI perpetual futures are now trading on CFTC-regulated OG.com. The dollar-settled contracts carry no expiry, a 100-SEI minimum order size and funding that is recalculated every eight hours. The listing extends US-regulated derivatives access to the SEI token.