Flash News

TREE NEWS update: Tether has joined AIsa as a strategic investor, completing the company’s seed extension round and bringing its total funding to more than $9 million. The round’s total size and valuation were not disclosed, and Tether’s specific contribution was not stated. The investment makes the stablecoin issuer an equity backer of AIsa.

TREE NEWS reports: Papertrade, a synthetic perpetuals platform on HyperEVM, recorded $42.24 million in protocol revenue over the past seven days, ranking third across all protocols behind only Tether and Circle, DefiLlama data show. The figure exceeds Pump.fun’s $16.06 million and Hyperliquid’s $14.56 million. The platform ties token issuance to traders’ realized losses: one trader generated $2.84 billion in notional volume and lost about $1.71 million, offset partly by $1.07 million in USDC staking rewards, for a net cash loss of roughly $637,000.

TREE NEWS update: Yuga Labs’ physical and digital trading card game Mudwater TCG has launched on Solana, featuring 120 BAYC-themed artworks across flash cards, numbered cards and ice-crack rare variants. Bored Ape Yacht Club said it has airdropped a total of 6,551 Totems to BAYC and MAYC holders, who can use them to claim Mudwater card packs.

TREE NEWS update: Polygon Labs has completed its acquisition of Coinme, moving into the payments market through stablecoin infrastructure. The deal was disclosed alongside Circle’s plan to expand into roughly 40 emerging markets across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Coinbase is also advancing crypto-collateralized lending, with $2.3 billion in outstanding balances, and on-chain bank deposits. Deutsche Bank plans an institutional crypto custody offering, initially for professional clients in Germany.

TREE NEWS reports: Between 05:22 and 05:32 Beijing time, perpetual contracts tied to US AI-concept stocks fell sharply before rebounding. Western Digital dropped as much as 7.03% to $298.70 and last traded at $318.65; Nebius fell 6.97% to $155.12; Applied Optoelectronics lost 6.93% to $70.52; IREN fell 6.92% to $25.17. Memory names also slid: Micron fell 6.32% to $818.57 and SK Hynix dropped 6.30% to $127.68.

TREE NEWS update: Variational told users in its official Discord that a wallet-connection update will log every user out during a maintenance window expected at 3:00 a.m. on Friday, Oct 23, 2026, requiring them to sign in again through a new flow to view positions and resume trading. The community speculates the update will introduce a trading API, given Variational’s previously flagged development cadence and its Friday points-distribution schedule.

TREE NEWS update: pump.fun has launched perpetual futures trading on its frontend through Hyperliquid’s Builder Code mechanism, charging a builder fee of up to 0.10% of the notional value on every order users submit, including open, add and close orders. The platform also charges up to 0.25% on each transfer of assets into or out of Hyperliquid via its in-app cross-chain bridge, on top of the bridge operator’s own fee.

TREE NEWS reports: A single whale is holding a 1,360 BTC long position worth $110 million, on-chain analyst Yu Jin tracked. The position carries a liquidation price of $80,034, and the trader has set a market stop-loss at $80,500, just above that level. The stop sits roughly $466 above liquidation, meaning the position would be closed before forced liquidation.

TREE NEWS update: Solana’s Alpenglow mainnet beta is set to activate on Oct. 21 at 14:50 UTC, with transaction finality expected to drop from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. The upgrade replaces TowerBFT voting with Votor, which aggregates validator votes off-chain; the network will switch to Votor once staked SOL reaches 82% of the validator set. The Rotor block-propagation component has no activation date yet.

TREE NEWS reports: A whale that had opened a $187 million long position at maximum leverage saw 4,890 ETH of that position liquidated at $2,356 during a price drop at 5 a.m. today, with the liquidated position valued at $11.74 million. That price marked ETH’s lowest point in the early-morning decline and may have been driven by the liquidation itself, on-chain analyst Yu Jin monitored.

TREE NEWS reports: Bitcoin fell below $81,000 on October 18, trading at $80,992.90 per coin, a decline of 0.44% within the day. The move marks a fresh intraday break of the $81,000 level for the largest cryptocurrency.

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 update: Injective has activated fixed gas costs for exchange transactions, allowing traders and app developers to use published gas budgets for orders, cancellations, deposits and withdrawals instead of simulating each transaction. The change is live on the network as of the announcement.

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 update: Lighter will hold its third-quarter investor call on Wednesday, October 21 at 1:30 p.m. ET, the project announced on its X account. Founder Vladimir Novakovski (@vnovakovski) will share the latest project developments, followed by a Q&A session.