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Category: Business

  • Solana DeFi Firms Orca and Loopscale Merge Under New Formation Brand

    Solana DeFi Firms Orca and Loopscale Merge Under New Formation Brand

    In brief

    • Orca and Loopscale merged under the Formation brand, headquartered in New York, with Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt as CEO; financial terms were not disclosed.
    • Formation targets financing for AI, energy, robotics and defense assets, backed by Orca’s $550 billion-plus in trading volume and Loopscale’s $150 million in deposits and $2 billion in loans facilitated.
    • Formation plans to operate a tokenized securities venue under the SEC’s five-year Innovation Exemption and to introduce issuer tools within 12 months.

    Solana decentralized exchange Orca and lending protocol Loopscale are merging into a single company called Formation, the two teams announced Wednesday.

    The new firm is headquartered in New York and led by Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt as CEO, with fellow co-founder Mary Gooneratne as chief operating officer and Orca’s Christopher Montagano as chief strategy and legal officer. Neither announcement discloses financial terms.

    Myriad: Where does Solana go next? Click to make your prediction.
    Myriad: Where does Solana go next? Click to make your prediction.

    Formation pairs Orca’s trading infrastructure with Loopscale’s credit order book and vaults, so an issuer can launch an asset with trading and credit live from day one, according to Loopscale’s FAQ. Orca has processed more than $550 billion in trading volume since 2021, while Loopscale reports more than $150 million in deposits and over $2 billion in loans facilitated, according to the companies’ own numbers.

    The idea is to provide a full stack of decentralized financial services, integrating liquidity solutions, credit, and vaults into one platform.

    Orca launched in February 2021 and raised an $18 million Series A that September. Loopscale, formerly known as Bridgesplit, raised $4.25 million in 2021 from CoinFund, Jump, Coinbase Ventures, Solana Ventures, and Room40.

    Formation is targeting AI, energy, robotics, and defense companies whose financing needs it says traditional markets serve poorly.

    Truitt cast the merger as a bet that capital markets have to keep pace with the industries they fund. “Every major technological revolution has been paired with a financial one,” he said in the press release.

    Formation’s business is exploring the possibilities opened by the SEC’s Sept. 17 innovation exemption, a five-year order that lets tokenized securities venues trade tokenized U.S.-listed stocks through permissioned automated market maker pools without registering as exchanges. Formation says it plans to operate such a venue and pursue additional licenses, building on Orca’s nearly two years of engagement with securities and commodities regulators.

    Formation’s press release adds that its planned products are subject to legal and regulatory requirements and may not be available to U.S. persons. Loopscale’s lending, borrowing, vaults and order book keep running as before, and existing positions are unchanged.

    ORCA will serve as the token for all of Formation, so Loopscale will not launch its own, per the same FAQ. Loopscale points keep accruing and will convert later this year.

    Over the next 12 months, Formation plans to introduce tools for issuers and new capital allocation strategies alongside its existing trading, lending and vault products.

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  • Crypto Fear and Greed Index Drops to 55, Entering Neutral Zone! Here’s All the Data

    Crypto Fear and Greed Index Drops to 55, Entering Neutral Zone! Here’s All the Data

    The index being at 55 indicates that there is no significant trend of fear or excessive optimism in the market. However, the 6-point daily drop points to a notable shift in investor sentiment.

    CoinMarketCap considers the price movements of the 10 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization in its index calculation. Market volatility is also among the key components used in the calculation.

    In addition, indicators in derivative markets, particularly the put/call ratio used in the options market, are taken into account to assess investors’ risk perception.

    Other components of the index include the stablecoin supply ratio (SSR) and search data from the CoinMarketCap platform.

    Recent data reveals that the greed trend seen in the cryptocurrency market in previous days has weakened. However, the index’s retreat to neutral territory does not, by itself, mean the beginning of a new period of price decline or rise.

    *This is not investment advice.

  • Babylon Adds Bitcoin Vaults to HashKey Cloud

    Babylon Adds Bitcoin Vaults to HashKey Cloud

    Babylon Labs, a Bitcoin staking infrastructure company, and HashKey Cloud, an institutional blockchain infrastructure provider, are integrating Trustless Bitcoin Vaults (TBV). The service will let HashKey clients use native Bitcoin as collateral to borrow stablecoins and access yield strategies.

    TBV allows users to borrow through Aave v4 without wrapping or bridging Bitcoin. The system is designed to connect native Bitcoin with Ethereum-based lending liquidity while avoiding centralized intermediaries.

  • Tereina and Circle Add Stablecoins to SAP

    Tereina and Circle Add Stablecoins to SAP

    Tereina, an SAP-backed (a global software company) financial services company, and Circle, a financial technology company and issuer of $USDC and $EURC, are partnering to bring stablecoin payments into enterprise workflows. The integration will start with SAP Cloud ERP.

    The companies aim to let eligible businesses use $USDC and $EURC through existing financial applications instead of setting up separate systems for stablecoin payments. $USDC will be used for eligible US dollar payments, while $EURC will support euro-denominated transactions.

  • Final moments of death row inmate executed with same drug that Christa Pike survived

    Final moments of death row inmate executed with same drug that Christa Pike survived

    It took just 30 seconds for a US inmate to stop moving after being given the lethal injection, using the same drug given to Christa Pike last month.

    Last night, the US state of Texas executed Jamaal Howard, a 46-year-old man who’d been given the death sentence for fatally shooting convenience store clerk Vickie Swartout in 2000.

    According to a report from AP News, Howard was given a dose of pentobarbital, the medication given to Christa Pike twice during her botched execution on 30 September.

    Reports from those in attendance at the Huntsville prison stated that Howard had taken a couple of breaths and gasped as the high dose of the sedative drug began taking effect.

    He then began to make snoring sounds, which became quieter and quieter as time passed.

    Jamaal Howard was executed yesterday (Texas Department of Criminal Justice)

    Jamaal Howard was executed yesterday (Texas Department of Criminal Justice)

    It took just 30 seconds for Howard to stop moving. He was officially pronounced dead 19 minutes later at 8:03pm, local time.

    His final statement has since been released to the media, with Howard apologising to the family of Swartout.

    Howard was the first person to be put to death after Pike’s failed execution, which has since led to the state of Tennessee halting further executions, pending an investigation.

    According to The Tennesseean reporters who attended Pike’s attempted execution, the 50-year-old had complained of pain in her arm following the first dose of pentobarbital, telling officers: “The vein in my arm feels like it’s about to bust.”

    LADbible

    LADbible

    It was later revealed that it had taken over an hour and seven needles before prison officers could establish an IV line in her arm, while witnesses waiting behind the curtain could hear crying and whimpering.

    Pike’s attorney Randy Spivy would later claim that one of the needles appeared to be bent after being removed.

    The blinds were first opened at around 7:26pm, allowing reporters and witnesses a view of Pike strapped to a gurney and covered by a sheet.

    Christa Pike is the first person in history to survive two lethal injections (Tennessee Department of Corrections)

    Christa Pike is the first person in history to survive two lethal injections (Tennessee Department of Corrections)

    By 7:41pm, it was signalled to witnesses that a round of pentobarbital had been administered. However, those in attendance noted that Pike was still conscious, with one reporter remarking that she was still talking.

    When it became apparent that Pike had survived the first dose of pentobarbital, a second one was administered. The curtains were closed again at 8:05pm, with people still able to hear the sound of Pike’s breathing, signalling that the drugs had again failed to take effect.

    After nearly an hour of waiting, the chamber was cleared by officials and Pike was transferred to hospital.

    It is not currently clear exactly how Pike was able to survive the execution, with some medical experts suggesting the IV line may have been incorrectly placed.

    Pike remains in hospital after the failed execution, with recent reports revealing that she is conscious, able to communicate and move.

  • SEC and CFTC Crypto Rules ‘Fall Short’ of Clarity, Says Rep. French Hill

    SEC and CFTC Crypto Rules ‘Fall Short’ of Clarity, Says Rep. French Hill

    In brief

    • Rep. French Hill, who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, told Fox Business that the SEC and CFTC’s crypto rulemaking “fall[s] short” of what’s needed: a legislative solution.
    • He credited SEC Chair Paul Atkins and CFTC acting Chair Mike Selig for using exemptive relief to define digital assets, but argued agency rules are fragile compared with a durable statute.
    • His stance cuts against the post-collapse narrative of crypto leaning on regulators rather than Congress.

    The regulators may be busy on crypto, but they can’t finish the job. That was the message from Rep. French Hill, who argued this week that the flurry of crypto rulemaking from the SEC and CFTC is no substitute for the market-structure law that stalled in the Senate.

    Speaking in an interview with Fox Business on Wednesday, Hill, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, credited the two agencies for stepping into the vacuum.

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    Myriad: Who wins the midterm elections? Click to make your prediction.

    Hill noted that SEC Chairman Paul Atkins and CFTC Chairman Mike Selig “have taken steps to use their regulatory power, their exemptive relief, to give definition to digital assets and digital commodities, so we can have a functional system here in the U.S. for this innovative form of finance.”

    But he was blunt about the limits of that approach. “In my judgement, these regulatory policies fall short of what we have to do, which is have a legislative solution,” Hill said, pointing to his own authorship of FIT21 in the previous Congress and the Clarity Act in this one.

    He said he still holds out hope the bill can pass during the lame-duck session, arguing, “We need that permanent law change to make sure America is number one in digital assets and blockchain technology.”

    Hill’s comments cut against a narrative that has taken hold since the Clarity Act’s collapse. The bill would have set the rules of the road for the majority of cryptocurrency activity in the United States, and cleared up the jurisdictional lines between the CFTC and the SEC on digital assets.

    BitcoinBTC · USD

    $82,417−1.58%

    Oct 1Oct 3Oct 5Oct 6Oct 8

    $86.8k$85.3k$83.9k$82.4k

    24h HighHigh$83,713

    24h LowLow$82,318

    VolVol$1.4B

    Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

    →

    But the Senate failed to advance the bill in a 49-50 vote last month, prompting the SEC and CFTC to press ahead with their own initiatives and leading many in the industry to conclude that crypto had stopped waiting on Congress and learned to lean on the regulators instead.

    Those agency moves have come fast. The SEC rolled out an “innovation exemption” for tokenized stocks and proposed new rules for how investment advisers and funds can custody crypto, while the CFTC sent crypto-markets rulemakings to the White House and floated a plan to bring crypto exchanges under federal oversight. Together, the steps amount to the only form of “clarity” that regulators can offer crypto in Congress’s absence.

    Hill’s point is that such relief is inherently fragile. Exemptions and guidance can be challenged in court or unwound by a future administration, whereas a statute is durable.

    A longtime crypto advocate tapped to lead the committee precisely because of his digital-asset focus, Hill has consistently framed legislation as the industry’s only path to lasting certainty.

    The lame-duck window he’s banking on is narrow. Whether a bill that couldn’t clear the Senate weeks ago can be revived before year’s end remains an open question, but Hill, for now, isn’t ready to hand the job to the regulators.

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  • Former executioner reveals harrowing reality behind what it was like to carry out firing squad execution

    Former executioner reveals harrowing reality behind what it was like to carry out firing squad execution

    A man who was once tasked with taking the life of a death row inmate described it as just ‘another day at the office’.

    The former executioner, who remained anonymous, was a part of the five-strong firing squad who put child killer John Albert Taylor to death three decades ago.

    He revealed his motivations for volunteering for the macabre job, described what unfolded in the execution chamber and explained how he felt in the aftermath in a sobering interview.

    Taylor, 36, faced the ultimate punishment in January 1996 after being found guilty of the rape and murder of 11-year-old Charla King in Utah.

    He was given the death sentence for his horrific crime and spent seven years at Utah State Prison before facing his fate.

    The 36-year-old child killer said he opted for the controversial method to 'inconvenience' the state of Utah (Utah State Department of Corrections)

    The 36-year-old child killer said he opted for the controversial method to ‘inconvenience’ the state of Utah (Utah State Department of Corrections)

    The murderer penned a letter in 1992 explaining why he opted for the firing squad to end his life, according to Deseret News, while insisting he was innocent.

    “To be strapped to a table and injected full of drugs leaves me with a feeling of helplessness; because I am innocent of the crime for which I was convicted of,” Taylor wrote.

    “Anyway, if my execution is carried out, it will be a murder. Granted, it may be legally sanctioned, but, nonetheless, murder it will be, and the firing squad is my way of showing that point; and because of the cost and the inconvenience it will cause the state because they are not really prepared for an execution by firing squad.”

    After eating pizza and sipping Coke with a relative, Taylor was taken into the execution chamber at the Utah prison, where five marksmen were waiting for him.

    ‘Anti-climatic’

    His victim’s mother, Sherron King, sobbed and said of him being put to death: “It broke my heart to know that another human being had to die…I know what his mom’s going through.

    “So many people had to die in this. But I know we can’t allow him to live; it just hurts so much.”

    One of the men firing the fatal shots at Taylor had a lost less emotion about the execution – dubbing it ‘anti-climatic’ and ‘another day at the office’.

    In an interview with CNN that took place 14 years after Taylor’s death, he dispelled some misconceptions around what facing the firing squad is like.

    The unidentified executioner, who at the time was still a law enforcement officer in Utah, said that the process was quick, proficient and professional rather than the bloodbaths often depicted in movies.

    One of Taylor's executioners shared a matter-of-fact account of the process (Utah State Department of Corrections)

    One of Taylor’s executioners shared a matter-of-fact account of the process (Utah State Department of Corrections)

    He showed CNN photos of Taylor’s autopsy, with one depicting how the murderer’s heart had been obliterated into three pieces, but barely flinched at the graphic photograph.

    “It was anti-climactic,” he said. “Another day at the office. I’ve shot squirrels I’ve felt worse about.”

    The former executioner volunteered to participate in taking the death row inmate’s life and said of his motivation to do so: “How often does this come along? [Delivering] 100 percent justice.

    “There’s just some people we need to kick off the planet.” He said he would not mind doing it again, either, adding: “I haven’t lost three seconds of sleep over it. It’s true justice.”

    The man explained he psyched himself up for the job by reciting the words ‘don’t f**k this up’ to himself.

    What the rest of the firing squad said

    Along with four other gunmen, he was given a month to prepare for Taylor’s execution. The firing squad practiced their shooting skills in the execution chamber.

    One of the guns was loaded with ‘ineffective’ rounds rather than live ones, although as this produced the same recoil, no one was aware of who had the dud gun.

    The fivesome fired simultaneously, with the ex-executioner explaining that Utah officials ‘don’t want to hear five shots’, but instead one in unison.

    One of his colleagues who also took part in Taylor’s execution told the Salt Lake Tribune it was, in their eyes, an ‘assignment’, adding: “Nothing more than getting an order to do something like kicking in a door to serve a warrant.”

    Another described it as ‘returning a defective product to the manufacture’, although there was one who wasn’t as steely.

    An executioners view through a canvas screen that shielded the firing squad during an execution in Utah in 1977

    An executioners view through a canvas screen that shielded the firing squad during an execution in Utah in 1977

    A third member of the firing squad admitted that he had ‘issues about shooting a guy strapped in a seat’, who was ‘helpless’.

    “But the state had ordered us to do this and we had a job to do,” he added. “I don’t regret doing it, but I would never do it again.”

    Death by firing squad is still an execution method that is on the table in five US states – South Carolina, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah.

    Earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that President Donald Trump has approved the execution of former US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad.

    It will mark the first military execution since April 1961. Hasan killed 13 soldiers and left another 30 injured after opening fire at the Texas military base, Fort Hood, in November 2009.

  • NEAR Protocol Hits Top 20 on First-Ever Post-Quantum Asset Launch

    NEAR Protocol Hits Top 20 on First-Ever Post-Quantum Asset Launch

    The connecting link was the $NEAR Intents architecture: the Confidential Intents feature enabled direct and confidential swaps of QTC for more than 180 assets across 30 different blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, in a single click directly from wallets, bypassing vulnerable traditional bridges.

    $NEAR token rose for two straight months while everyone was watching Bitcoin

    This historic launch capped a broad-based $NEAR uptrend that had been developing over the past two months. According to weekly TradingView charts, the asset had been steadily breaking out of a prolonged accumulation phase around $1.50–$1.80 since late August.

    Weekly price chart showing $NEAR Protocol’s breakout and entry into the top 20 cryptocurrencies, Source: TradingView

    Beyond the quantum catalyst, the long-term rally was driven by a combination of fundamental factors: integration with Robinhood Crypto Chain, which simplified operations with the USDG stablecoin and Ethereum, as well as capital inflows from institutional funds, including Digital Commodities, diversifying their portfolios toward AI infrastructure and Chain Abstraction technologies.

    For $NEAR Protocol itself, which already supports quantum-safe account signatures on mainnet and plans to upgrade its consensus by the end of 2027, the QTC integration became a practical demonstration of the network’s readiness for the next generation of technology, cementing the project’s position in the top tier of the crypto market.

  • Anthropic Launches Haiku 5.5: Its Cheapest and Fastest Claude Model Yet

    Anthropic Launches Haiku 5.5: Its Cheapest and Fastest Claude Model Yet

    In brief

    • Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, down from $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5.
    • Haiku 5.5 scored 72.4% on the OSWorld 2.1 offline subset and 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, ahead of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna on both but well behind Sonnet 5.5’s 70.6% on the coding test.
    • Anthropic also halved Sonnet 5.5’s cache-read price to $0.10 per million tokens and is adding monthly API credits for Max and Team subscribers this week.

    Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Wednesday, calling it the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model it has made. It targets high-volume chores such as summarizing documents and querying databases, plus speed-sensitive jobs like live customer support and operating a web browser for the user.

    Developers who plug Claude into their own products pay $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. Tokens are the small chunks of text, roughly three-quarters of a word, that AI models read and write—and they’re what big AI companies bill by. That matches the rate OpenAI set for GPT-6 Luna, its rival small model, when it launched on September 22.

    Myriad: How high will Nvidia go? Click to make your prediction.
    Myriad: How high will Nvidia go? Click to make your prediction.

    Haiku 4.5 charged $1 and $5, so the new rate is 90% lower, while prompts above 100,000 tokens get a 50% cut. Since about 90% of requests to the old model fell under that line, and Haiku 5.5 splits text into slightly more tokens, Anthropic puts the average saving near 75%.

    Customer-support chats and long-email summaries are the jobs Anthropic built Haiku for. So essentially repetitive, easy, non creative tasks are the best fit for this model.

    That said, benchmarks show this is not a dumb model by any means. For example, on OSWorld 2.1, a test of whether an AI can operate a real computer through long, multi-step tasks, scored as a partial-credit percentage, Haiku 5.5 beats OpenAI’s GPT Luna scoring 72.4% success rate vs 48.9%.

    Terminal-Bench 4.0 hands AI agents professional tasks to finish by typing commands on their own, and scores the share completed correctly on the first attempt. Haiku 5.5 landed at 39.2%, against 16.4% for OpenAI’s Luna and 0% for Haiku 4.5

    For comparison, Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5 scored 70.6%.

    We tried the model on a simple logic question and it was extremely fast to respond, almost instantly. It also gave the wrong answer, which is not what you want from a model, so be careful about blindly trusting it.

    On GDPval-AA v2.1, which rates models on real professional work across 44 occupations using an Elo scale, the head-to-head rating system borrowed from chess, Haiku 5.5 scored 1620. Luna got 1437 and Haiku 4.5 got 735.

    This is also the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, a dial that lets users trade cost for smarter answers. Anthropic also halved Sonnet 5.5’s cache-read price to $0.10 per million tokens, the discounted rate for text a model has already processed.

    BitcoinBTC · USD

    $82,408−1.59%

    Oct 1Oct 3Oct 5Oct 6Oct 8

    $86.8k$85.3k$83.9k$82.4k

    24h HighHigh$83,713

    24h LowLow$82,318

    VolVol$1.4B

    Market projectionsOdds by Myriad

    →

    Haiku 5.5 comes 15 days after Opus 5.5 on September 22 and nine days after Sonnet 5.5 on September 28, the last of the three Claude 5.5 models Anthropic had promised. Opus 5.5 was the first release since CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to slow gains in AI capabilities.

    Haiku 5.5 is available now on the Claude website, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure under the name claude-haiku-5-5. Anthropic is also rolling out monthly API credits this week: $100 for subscribers on the Max 5x plan, $200 for Max 20x, and up to $500, pooled across users, for Team plans.

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  • Bitcoin and ether holders urged to enter ‘bunker mode’ against possible AI attacks

    Bitcoin and ether holders urged to enter ‘bunker mode’ against possible AI attacks

    That would theoretically put a large share of crypto within reach. Millions of bitcoin sit in addresses whose public keys are already visible onchain, as CoinDesk has previously reported. On Ethereum, any account that has ever sent a transaction has revealed its key, and the stablecoins and tokenized funds issued on the network are controlled through that signature system as well.

    No practical attack on bitcoin or Ethereum’s wallet keys has been demonstrated, and none appeared in the research reviewed by CoinDesk.

    AI already a crypto threat

    The warning followed OpenAI’s release on Tuesday of 722 mathematical manuscripts produced by an unreleased model tested on approximately 4,000 research problems. Some findings have computer-checkable proofs, while others remain unverified and could contain errors, the company said.

    The manuscripts came from the model OpenAI said last month had solved the Navier–Stokes problem, one of seven Millennium Prize challenges in mathematics. Each result used, on average, computing power equal to roughly three hours of ChatGPT Pro reasoning, the company said.

    Within a day, an outside researcher reran the computer check on one result, a new limit on how fast computers can multiply large grids of numbers, a question mathematicians have worked on since 1969, and found it held.