Morning Edition · Sunday, October 18, 2026
Crypto
Karpelès says Ledger documented spy implants in March as thefts from CryptoBilis-sold wallets pass $86 million
Ledger has confirmed that tampered devices sent seed phrases out over a cellular link, so the standard advice to buy from an authorized reseller did not protect these buyers.
Tech
Claude traces the NSA-supplied seeds behind NIST's P-256 curve to a timestamp-seeded generator run in 1997
Anthropic's team claimed cryptographer Filippo Valsorda's three-year-old bounty and donated it, which removes one long-cited reason to distrust the curves but does not address bitcoin's separate quantum exposure.
Crypto
Aztec says an AI audit found a proof-forgery flaw in its Alpha V5 network and it cannot tell whether anyone used it
The fix waits for the V6 release, and V5 is the second consecutive Aztec alpha to carry a critical vulnerability, while the network's privacy design means past chain data cannot show whether forged proofs were accepted.
Crypto
Google cuts magic-state errors about 40-fold on its Willow chip, removing one bottleneck on the path to attacks on exposed bitcoin keys
Researchers note that breaking RSA-2048 still needs magic states roughly a million times cleaner, while Aztec has set the end of 2030 as its target for a full post-quantum migration.
Crypto
Ethereum schedules Glamsterdam on the Hoodi testnet with a 200 million gas target, more than three times the mainnet limit
Node operators must upgrade before the test, which CryptoSlate dates to October 26, while core developers have still not set a mainnet activation date.
Crypto
Bitget's $388 million loss came through hacked security appliances, not stolen keys, and other September exploits also ran through trusted infrastructure
Hot-wallet key leaks at Duelbits and a signing-key compromise on the SingularityNET bridge followed the same pattern, while NEAR Intents lost $3.8 million to a deposit-accounting bug.
Crypto
Miden announces a private-finance stack built around a USDC-backed private stablecoin as Shield Swap brings Flowdesk liquidity to confidential trading
Both projects aim at institutions that will not trade on public ledgers, and Miden pairs default privacy with transaction-level compliance tools, which raises the question of who holds the right to see the data.
Crypto
Circle defends USDC revenue sharing while Coinbase also backs Open USD, a rival that passes reserve income to distributors
A Bank for International Settlements paper finds that small rises in bank deposit rates slow stablecoin growth, which makes the split of reserve income the central question in the sector's economics.
Crypto
TRON carried $2.2 trillion in stablecoin transfers but TRX supply rose on each of 108 straight days
Fee burns fell short of new staking rewards every day from July 1 through October 16, so the network's stablecoin traffic did not make its native token deflationary.
Crypto
Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley call tokenization a growth line as Polygon buys Coinme to own the payments customer
Citrini's research argues that real-world assets give blockchains a clear role in finance, but the open question is whether banks, networks or applications will capture the fees.
Crypto
Binance will shut its bitcoin mining pool on November 10, giving its miners about three weeks to move their hashrate
Mining stops at 07:00 UTC that day and historical records close two weeks later, while Block's Proto hashboards reach a new hosted-mining channel through Sazmining.
Macro
Bitcoin trades near $82,000 before the October 28 Federal Reserve decision as hot inflation keeps rate hikes in play
Capital Economics expects gold to fall for the rest of the year as the Fed keeps hiking, and all ten of the largest layer-2 networks tracked by L2Beat lost value secured over the past week.