Tag: Business – Decrypt

Bitcoin ETFs lost $484.9 million in a single day on Wednesday, the worst outflow since June 25, according to Decrypt‘s ETF tracker. BlackRock’s IBIT took the biggest hit at $207.7 million, with Fidelity’s FBTC next at $105.1 million.

That one session erased roughly 81% of everything that flowed in over the previous nine, so about two weeks of patient buying went out the door in a day. The funds still sit on $57.8 billion in cumulative net inflows, so while it’s a very bad day for ETFs, it’s not exactly a bank run.

The culprit has little to do with crypto itself and is likely much more related to the macro backdrop. The 30-year Treasury yield climbed to about 5.7% on Wednesday, its highest since 2002, while Brent crude settled around $100 a barrel and stocks slid from record highs. Ship attacks around the Strait of Hormuz keep piling up—at least one a day since Oct. 2—and each one is a reason for oil to stay expensive.

What does that mean for Bitcoin investors? Well, expensive oil feeds inflation, inflation keeps the Federal Reserve hawkish, and a hawkish Fed keeps bond yields high. That gets awkward for an asset that pays no interest: why hold Bitcoin through an ETF when a 10-year Treasury yields more than 5% and doesn’t lose 6% in a few days? That’s the math institutions and big-money investors do regularly, and those calculations move the market.

The Fed raised rates in September for the first time since 2023, and the minutes from their most-recent meeting released Wednesday show most officials expect another hike before year end. Traders, though, remain skeptical of another hike, an October move looks unlikely based on CME Fedwatch odds and prediction markets. CME currently prices the odds of a Fed hike in October at 19.4% while Myriad gives a hike a 17% chance.

Outside of Wall Street, Bitcoin slid as low as $81,749.83 on Thursday, about 6% below the $86,978 peak it hit earlier this week, and longs in the derivatives market took the brunt of it: roughly $429 million in positions were liquidated over 24 hours, 87.5% of them long bets, according to CoinGlass.

Bitcoin had risen in October six years running until last year, when it fell 3.69%. This year the funds opened October with $321.6 million of inflows over four sessions and are now $163.3 million in the red, with Halloween still 23 days away and plenty of time for things to get spookier.

The Fed meets next on Oct. 27-28 and again on Dec. 8-9, and the September minutes set no date for the next increase.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Google launched Playground on Wednesday, a web platform where anyone can describe a game in plain language and get a playable version back without writing code. Users then refine the result by chatting, asking for different physics, rules, characters or settings, and can share it with a link, per Google.

“Today, we’re introducing Playground, an experimental gaming platform that lets you create, play, and share custom games,” Google wrote. “Playground lowers the barriers to creation, so bringing game ideas to life can now be as easy as describing it through a few prompts—no coding experience required.”

Playground is live for U.S. users 18 and older, with tiered creation access rolling out based on a user’s Google AI subscription. Google’s announcement did not include prices or say which AI models power the tool.

Games run in a web browser on phones and laptops. Creators can keep them private or publish them to a community gallery, where every game goes through a safety screening, and some genres support leaderboards and multiplayer.

Google calls Playground “an early experiment designed to make game creation more approachable.” It preaches the gospel of vibe coding. “If you can think it, you can play it.”

That said, Playground goes beyond the simple things you can do vibe coding on your Google Gemini session. It seems to be capable of using some of the same tools and resources that experienced game makers use in their daily jobs.

The upgrade path runs through Unity Spark, which Google says Playground will soon integrate for creators who want professional-level mechanics and high-fidelity 3D. Unity makes a game engine, the software toolkit studios build games with, and its then-CEO predicted in 2023 that generative AI would cut the time needed to build game worlds by five to ten times.

DeepMind, Google’s AI research lab, unveiled Genie in 2024, a model trained on more than 200,000 hours of gameplay video that could turn an image or text prompt into a simple 2D platformer. It had 11 billion parameters, the adjustable values where an AI stores what it learned.

In January, Google opened Project Genie to AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., built on Genie 3, a so-called world model that generates an interactive world in real time as you move through it. Sessions were capped at 60 seconds, and Google warned that worlds might not follow prompts or real-world physics.

Game stocks sank the next day, with Unity closing down about 24% and Roblox and others also dropping, as investors worried AI could displace traditional game tools. Roblox, where users build and play each other’s games, had told investors in 2023 it was moving toward letting anyone make avatars and clothing entirely through text prompts.

For someone who has never touched a code editor, Playground turns a game idea into a conversation rather than a career change, though only adults in the U.S. can try it for now. Anything generated this way will likely resemble a prototype before it resembles a hit, after all, Google itself says this is merely experimental.

Google and Unity said in a joint release that Spark arrives later this year, and Google says a closed beta is coming soon.

Yoido Full Gospel Church, the Seoul megachurch Guinness once recognized as the largest congregation in the world, said Wednesday that personal data tied to 850,000 members may have been stolen.

The church’s initial review found names and dates of birth, plus a log of changes members had made to their records. “The file contained 2,629 changes to resident registration numbers, 3,964 changes to phone numbers and 7,202 changes to addresses,” the church said in a statement.

South Korea’s internet security agency, KISA, flagged the suspected breach to the church on Tuesday afternoon. The church has since blocked outside access to its systems, changed its server passwords and begun notifying members.

Oasis Security, a cybersecurity company, found the data on an overseas server that also held attack logs and account details linked to Yoido and a second Seoul megachurch, Sarang Church. The firm came across it in September while tracing internet addresses tied to suspected attacks.

Sarang’s haul is smaller: about 89,000 member records and 286 employee records, including the senior pastor’s. The logs suggest that data was stolen in August, and the church has formed an emergency task force and reported the incident to authorities.

Oasis said the attack records show activity of AI sub-agents, meaning helper programs that an AI model launches to handle separate chunks of a job, along with long attack reports that look machine-written. The churches are still working out how the intruders got in, and AI’s role remains unclear.

President Lee Jae Myung confirmed Tuesday that AI is believed to have been used in recent hacks on South Korean commercial banks. Shinhan Bank’s breach exposed names, phone numbers, annual income and borrowing limits for about 25,000 customers, according to local news reports, and the financial regulator opened an emergency on-site inspection.

Yoido Full Gospel Church said it plans to replace its firewall, the filter that blocks unwanted traffic into a network, and bring in security firms to hunt for other weaknesses while it notifies the 850,000 members whose data may be affected.

Tether, the company behind the world’s largest stablecoin, signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan and the Alatau City Authority, the company announced Wednesday.

The memorandum’s first goal is a stablecoin pegged to the tenge, Kazakhstan’s currency. The three parties will study how other countries issue them and then prepare a concept and pilot proposal, though the announcement does not say who would issue the token.

On tokenization—recording ownership of something real, like a building or a bond, as a digital token on a blockchain—the parties will pick priority asset categories, design a model and launch a pilot inside Alatau, possibly on Hadron, the tokenization platform Tether launched in November 2024. The memorandum sets no date for either pilot.

A memorandum is a written statement of what the parties plan to explore together, so think handshake, not contract. The deal also includes workshops to train central bank staff on issuing tokens, managing reserves and tokenizing assets.

Alatau is a planned smart city in the Almaty region, built from scratch with its own legal regime and pitched as a fintech hub for Central Asia. The $7.2 billion project aims to grow from 52,000 residents to two million, with President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev wanting people there to pay for goods and services in cryptocurrency.

In March, the central bank earmarked up to $350 million for crypto-related investments out of nearly $70 billion in gold and foreign exchange reserves, though the money may go into shares of crypto-linked companies and index funds rather than coins.

Officials said in September that the national crypto reserve has reached $700 million, with about $200 million invested so far, mostly through hedge funds, which are private pools that trade on behalf of large investors.

Kazakhstan already runs a tenge stablecoin pilot called Evo, launched in September 2025 inside the central bank’s regulatory sandbox—a supervised testing ground for new financial products—and was issued by the exchange Intebix and Eurasian Bank with help from Solana and Mastercard. The central bank writes the rules of the test but does not issue the token.

The National Bank has a separate plan to tokenize two Alatau properties, worth up to $50 million and $10 million, due by the end of 2026 on the Kazakhstan Stock Exchange’s infrastructure.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies is about to take its foot off the gas. Chairman Tom Lee said the company will halt its Ethereum buying once its holdings reach 5% of the token’s circulating supply, drawing a hard line under one of the market’s steadiest sources of demand.

Speaking Wednesday at the Token2049 conference in Singapore, Lee said the company is roughly 100,000 ETH away from the threshold. At last week’s pace, that’s about six to seven more weeks of accumulation before Bitmine stops.

“We thought this would take five years,” Lee said on stage. “It took us a little over a year. More importantly, we did this all in the middle of a bear market,” he said. “Now we’re going to stop.”

The NYSE-listed firm is the world’s largest Ethereum treasury company, holding 6,016,414 ETH, or about 4.9% of supply, as of its latest disclosure. Bitmine added roughly $41 million in ETH just last week as it closed in on the goal it brands the “Alchemy of 5%.” (Disclosure: Tom Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)

The company has bought Ethereum every week since launching its treasury strategy in June 2025, providing a reliable bid that helped underpin the token through a choppy stretch.

That makes the coming stop notable for the broader market. Bitmine’s weekly purchases have been a persistent source of demand, and their end removes a buyer that has absorbed a steady stream of ETH for more than a year.

Lee has previously signaled the company could even sell Ethereum earned through staking to keep its share of supply from drifting above the 5% cap.

The milestone arrives with Bitmine deep underwater on paper. Because much of its accumulation happened last year at higher prices during the bull market, the firm’s ETH holdings carry roughly $4.5 billion in unrealized losses, according to tracking data, with Ethereum trading near $2,570 on Wednesday.

Ethereum is down 5.5% today, outpacing losses across most major crypto assets, dropping sharply during Asia trading hours, coinciding with Lee’s remarks.

Still, Lee framed the achievement as a point of pride, having compressed a five-year plan into just over a year. Once the 5% ceiling is reached, Bitmine’s defining buying spree, and the market demand it generated, will come to a close.

Bitcoin had a rough morning. It opened today at $85,543.66, slid as low as $82,776.30, and now sits at $83,178.54. The drop appeared to scare off traders as the movement threatened to break a key support as BTC fell sharply within a few hours.

That 3.2% drop left leveraged traders holding the bag. Roughly $969 million in crypto positions were liquidated over the past 24 hours of which $644.47M were long positions, according to CoinGlass.

So what happened, and what comes next? Start with the culprit, because it isn’t just a crypto story.

Stocks slip, oil climbs and bond yields spike

Wall Street is backing off record highs, with the S&P 500 down 0.59% to 7,772.60 and the Nasdaq off 0.71% in morning trading.

The reason is oil. Brent crude is back above $101 a barrel, the 10-year Treasury yield is near 5.34%, and the 30-year hit 5.70%, its highest since 2002. Even gold, the classic safe haven, dropped 1.53% to $4,123.10.

Oil is jumpy because ship attacks in and around the Strait of Hormuz keep piling up. The UK Maritime Trade Operations agency has logged at least one a day in the strait or the Gulf of Aden since October 2, Al Jazeera reports.

On Monday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard ordered a tanker entering the strait to turn around or risk attack. Pricier oil stokes inflation fears, which push yields up and hurt risk assets like Bitcoin.

Oil has bitten Bitcoin before. In June, it sank to $65,590 as Brent climbed to $96 on Middle East tensions. Bitcoin is still about 40% above the roughly $59,500 it traded at in late June.

The Federal Reserve adds to the nerves today with minutes from its September 15-16 meeting, per its calendar.

Bitcoin price: daily bulls, four-hour bears

The four-hour chart shows Bitcoin rejected near $86,978.45 before the slide began. The dip took prices below $83,000, when prices bounced, so traders have some reason to breathe.

Fibonacci retracements are lines that mark where a price may pause, based on percentages of a prior move. Measured on that drop, the most relevant levels to watch on the intraday charts sit at $83,768.01 and $84,877.38. Both now act as resistance.

The Relative Strength Index, or RSI, in this short-term, four-hour window measures momentum on a 0-to-100 scale. At 32.2, Bitcoin is clearly oversold as shown by the quick panic attack. On the intraday session, this is a bearish momentum but also where bargain hunters tend to show up, expecting gains on longer time frames.

Zoom out and the daily charts and the Average Directional Index, or ADX, is 42.8, still a strong bullish trend, with buyers still ahead of sellers. The daily RSI in the daily candlestick reads 52.5, neutral, so this sell-off has barely dented momentum on the bigger timeframe.

Exponential moving averages, or EMAs, track average price over a set window while weighting recent prices more. The 50-day EMA remains above the 200-day on both the daily and four-hour charts, which typically means the broader uptrend hasn’t broken. The daily squeeze is still on, with a momentum reading of 1.17 that is slipping, meaning volatility remains compressed.

The daily low of $82,776.30 also stopped about $150 above the Fibonacci retracement around the $82,626.41 price line.

As oil and yields rose, stocks, gold and Bitcoin sold off together, which suggests this isn’t a crypto-specific problem.

So, macro lit the fuse, but leverage fed the fire. When price falls, exchanges force-close leveraged positions that can no longer cover their losses. Those forced sales push the price lower still.

Traders on Myriad, a prediction market developed by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, are already pricing in more pain. As of this writing, the BTC lows in October market gives 92% odds that Bitcoin touches $82,500 this month, 67% for $80,000 and 43% for $77,500.

Upside bets are cooler. The BTC highs in October market has 55% odds on a touch of $87,500 and 36% on $90,000. Both markets pay out on Binance touches, not closes, so a drop and a rally can both resolve “yes” in the same month.

Bulls need to retake $84,761.70, the top of the four-hour trend band, and then the $84,877.38 retracement to argue the dip is over. If $82,776.30 gives way, the next stops are the four-hour band bottom at $81,567.49 and the daily 50% retracement at $81,165.95. The Fed minutes and any new Hormuz headlines are the catalysts to watch.

Cryptocurrency wallets controlled by the U.S. government moved more than $100 million in Bitcoin and BNB on Tuesday, according to data from blockchain analytics firm Arkham.

Some of it landed at Coinbase Prime, which market observers typically interpret as being deposited for sale. But the reason for the move, or if any sale is planned, is currently not confirmed.

The Bitcoin part of the stash amounted to 833.6 BTC, worth about $71.6 million. It hopped through two unlabeled addresses before reaching deposit addresses Arkham tags as Coinbase Prime, the service Coinbase runs to trade and store crypto for big institutions.

Arkham ties about 568.7 BTC of that to forfeited funds from Sergei Potapenko and Ivan Turõgin. “Forfeited” means a court has signed off on the government keeping assets tied to a crime. The two Estonians ran HashFlare, a crypto-mining service that sold mining contracts without the computing power to back them.

Prosecutors say HashFlare took in more than $577 million in sales between 2015 and 2019. A federal court sentenced both men in August 2025 to the 16 months they had already served. The Justice Department said forfeited assets would be available to repay victims.

The other 264.9 BTC came from the Bitfinex hack. In 2016, hacker Ilya Lichtenstein stole 119,754 BTC from the exchange. In January 2025, the Justice Department argued that 94,643 BTC should go back to Bitfinex. The government kept moving funds from that wallet throughout the day until it was fully drained.

The rest of that $103 million in crypto was BNB, the token of the Binance exchange. The government moved 40,285 BNB, worth $31.63 million, to an unlabeled address, which later passed the full amount to another one. Arkham traces the coins to funds seized from Alameda Research, the trading firm tied to the collapsed FTX exchange.

A transfer, though, is not a sale. Coinbase Prime also acts as the government’s custodian—basically a vault service—so a deposit can mean storage, as in a similar $288 million move in July. Only the government knows which one this is, and it hasn’t said.

The U.S. government has sold plenty of seized Bitcoin before, but it’s been a while. When it sent 19,800 BTC from the Silk Road haul to Coinbase in December 2024, worth about $1.92 billion, Bitcoin slid more than 2% within 24 hours. Silk Road was an online black market the government shut down.

Bitcoin’s price runs on supply and demand, and a government unloading a big pile at once can push it down for every holder. That is why traders watch these wallets.

But when it comes to crypto sales at the moment, the government’s hands are partly tied. A March 2025 executive order created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a stash of forfeited Bitcoin that “shall not be sold.” Bitcoin counts only once it is finally forfeited, so coins tied to open criminal cases sit outside it.

BNB isn’t Bitcoin, so it falls under a separate Digital Asset Stockpile. Treasury can release those assets only for things like repaying crime victims, law enforcement operations, or legal requirements. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said forfeited Bitcoin is the foundation of the reserve.

Tuesday’s coins are a sliver of the government’s total pile. Arkham’s September research puts U.S. government holdings at about 325,000 BTC, worth roughly $27 billion, or about 1.6% of Bitcoin’s supply. That makes Washington the largest government holder in Arkham’s ranking, ahead of the U.K. at 61,245 BTC and El Salvador at 7,200 BTC.

Almost all of the U.K.’s stash came from a fraud that hit more than 120,000 Chinese pensioners, while El Salvador got its Bitcoin through direct purchases and mining.