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According to The Defiant, the cryptocurrency exchange Blockchain.com has announced the launch of options trading services, initially supporting seven types of crypto assets. Buyers are required to fund the contracts with USDC.The options contracts cannot be exited early before expiration, and buyers must hold them until the expiration date. Residents of the United States and the United Kingdom are excluded from participating in this service.

According to a report by The Block, Coinbase released a report titled "The Always-On Dollar" indicating that in the third quarter of 2026, the average hourly transfer amount of organic stablecoin transactions exceeded $400 million. Over the past 12 months, as of July 31, approximately 73% of filtered stablecoin transfer volume occurred outside of U.S. banking hours, highlighting the demand for 24/7 stablecoin payments.The report shows that the adjusted quarterly transfer volume of stablecoins has grown to four times its original amount since the beginning of 2023, reaching $891 billion in the third quarter of 2026. At the current growth rate, this figure is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by the end of 2027. The report also noted that using USDC to remit $200 through the Base network can save about 86% in fees compared to traditional payment channels. Furthermore, if 80% of global international transactions shift to stablecoin payment networks, the global annual GDP could increase by an additional $155 billion.Looking ahead, the report believes that stablecoins are likely to become an important payment infrastructure for the AI agent economy. McKinsey estimates that by 2030, between $3 trillion to $5 trillion in B2C commercial transactions will be facilitated by AI agents, with stablecoins supporting small transactions such as payment task fees between agents, purchasing API calls, and on-demand access to data and computing power.

BlackRock, the world's largest investment management firm, submitted an application to the SEC on Monday to launch the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protect ETF. According to the filing, the fund aims to provide investors with upside returns from the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) and similar Bitcoin exposure while seeking to offer a certain degree of downside protection.The iShares Bitcoin Trust, managed by BlackRock, currently has assets under management exceeding $65 billion, making it the largest Bitcoin ETF in its category. BlackRock launched IBIT in January 2024 and introduced the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF in June of this year, which aims to provide investors with Bitcoin exposure while generating monthly options premium income.Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart noted on the X platform that this is BlackRock's third Bitcoin ETF application, and its product line currently only covers Bitcoin and Ethereum, without venturing into other crypto assets. In recent years, other companies have launched ETFs tracking assets such as XRP, SOL, and DOGE.

According to the Shenzhen Economic Investigation Bureau, recent investors have suffered financial losses due to participating in investment scams under the guise of "RWA real estate tokenization." These scams typically use technical packaging such as "smart contract automatic dividends" and "blockchain browser verifiable" to lure investors into purchasing fictitious on-chain fragmented property rights. Once the funds are in place, they stop paying dividends and disappear.The Shenzhen Economic Investigation Bureau pointed out that the smart contract address and company registration information can only confirm the existence of the code and the business entity, and do not represent a real binding of underlying physical assets, nor do they indicate that the project has financial business qualifications. According to current regulatory regulations in China, any tokenized financing activities carried out domestically under the name of RWA are considered illegal financial activities. Virtual currencies do not have legal tender status, and related token issuance, financing, and trading speculation are not protected by law.

Three men from Bristol, England, broke into a man's home in the early hours of May 15, assaulted the victim, and demanded a large amount of cryptocurrency. The victim sustained head injuries and was hospitalized, while the three men failed to obtain any cryptocurrency. Terroll Paul, Mohamed Samagassi, and Pierre Madzou all pleaded guilty to aggravated burglary and were sentenced at Bristol Crown Court on October 15. Paul was sentenced to 6 years, Madzou to 5 and a half years, and Samagassi to 5 years.The victim's underage sister called the police, and the three were subsequently arrested at the scene. The police did not disclose the amount of cryptocurrency demanded by the three men. The case falls under "ransom attacks," where criminals use violence or threats to force cryptocurrency holders to hand over digital assets. Data from blockchain security company CertiK shows that in the first six months of 2026, such attacks globally resulted in losses of $124 million, a 12-fold increase year-on-year.

Michael Saylor, the founder of Bitcoin Strategy Company, responded to Bloomberg's interview regarding the possibility of MSCI's new index rules excluding MSTR. He stated that this move is not very important for Strategy, as the scale of funds they control is relatively small, but he is disappointed with MSCI's stance so far. Oil, natural gas, land, and machinery are all considered capital, while Bitcoin is not. This is a value judgment and actually reflects a bias against digital assets. They are like unregistered financial advisors, setting a "bad precedent" for the entire industry, and he hopes they will reconsider. Digital assets represent the future; MSCI may not want to participate in this future, but investors will not agree, and neither will the United States. If MSCI abandons the proposal to exclude MSTR, it would benefit the entire industry.Regarding the core controversy of whether Strategy belongs to companies with actual operating businesses, Michael Saylor compared it to banks and insurance companies. He believes these financial institutions sell credit and policies, while Strategy supports digital credit products with Bitcoin. Therefore, Strategy is an operating enterprise and should be viewed like other financial companies.

According to Bloomberg, citing informed sources, SoftBank is considering acquiring Allied Universal, the largest security services company in the United States, with a potential equity valuation of up to $18 billion. The company also has about $12 billion in publicly traded loans and bonds, and including related debts, the total transaction value could approach $30 billion.Masayoshi Son is exploring the application of AI robots across various industries. The report indicates that SoftBank hopes to have robots undertake some security tasks for Allied in the future, but the deployment of humanoid security robots may take longer. Relevant discussions are still in the early stages, and matters including pricing have not been finalized.

Crypto podcast host Andy (@andyyy) posted a preview stating that a major AI product/feature will be released in the coming days, aimed at institutional-level on-chain asset management, with embedded risk strategies. It is reported that this product has already conducted pilot programs with several funds and asset management institutions.Andy previously accurately predicted the launch of the SEC's crypto exemption policy a week in advance.

According to Reuters, citing informed sources, after Anthropic disclosed its latest financial data, some existing and potential IPO investors are considering lowering their valuation expectations. At an investor event in San Francisco on October 14, some investors discussed a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, down from the previous expectation of about $2 trillion for the November IPO.Anthropic disclosed to investors that its third-quarter revenue grew 45% quarter-over-quarter to $16.8 billion, achieving adjusted profitability. However, second-quarter revenue had more than doubled quarter-over-quarter to $11.6 billion, and the slowdown in growth disappointed some investors. The aforementioned valuation is a discussion among investors and is not the final IPO pricing; Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the market prediction event on Polymarket "Dota 2: Team Synapse vs. Dawn Bulls - DreamLeague Western Europe Closed Qualifiers Playoffs", the "Yes" option in the sub-market "Both sides defeat Roshan" has experienced a sharp fluctuation in winning probability, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 90.5% (a fluctuation of 40.5%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

The Korea Exchange has launched a sidecar mechanism for the KOSDAQ index.

Federal Reserve Chairman Waller stated that the Federal Reserve needs to consider financial stability risks.

Federal Reserve Chairman Waller stated that artificial intelligence will impact the economy on the demand side before affecting the supply side.

According to the Wall Street Journal, sources say that the Vice President of Tesla (TSLA.O) Energy and Charging Business has left the company.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the market prediction event "Dota 2: Lynx vs. Dawn Bulls" on Polymarket, the "Yes" option for the sub-market "Both sides defeat Roshan" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50% an hour ago to the current 90.5% (a fluctuation of 40.5%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

The stablecoin issuer Tether's Tether AI Research (referred to in the text as Tether Data, S.A. de C.V.) has released the open-source multilingual automatic speech recognition model QVAC TranscribePsy. This model has 254 million parameters and runs entirely on-device, suitable for smartphones, smart glasses, and humanoid robots, with audio not needing to be uploaded to the cloud; smart glasses can process in near real-time via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and the model can also run on the robot's onboard processor.Evaluation shows that its word error rate on the Open ASR Leaderboard is 8.02%, 6.58% on Multilingual LibriSpeech, and 21.56% on Common Voice. It outperforms the specifically mentioned Qwen3-ASR-0.6B, omniASR-CTC-1B-v2, OWSM-CTC-v4, and Whisper-Medium on Multilingual LibriSpeech. Among six tested smartphones, it is the fastest model, being 2.6 times faster than the second fastest model and 5.7 times faster than Whisper-small. The Core ML version transcribes 10 minutes of audio into 1.65 seconds on the iPhone 17 Pro Max, occupying less than half the disk space of a certain tested Core ML competitor and using 1.7 times less memory.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the market prediction on Polymarket for the event "Dota 2: Kalmychata vs HULIGANI - DreamLeague Eastern Europe Closed Qualifiers Playoffs," the "Yes" option in the sub-market "Both sides destroy barracks" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation in win rate, soaring from 50.5% an hour ago to the current 90% (a fluctuation of 39.5%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.