Drift Foundation announced on October 2 that DFX claims and redemption are live, allowing users with verified losses from the April 1 incident to claim 1 DFX for every 1 USDT of loss. Each DFX carries a claim on a Recovery Pool that currently holds roughly 3.11 million USDT.

The launch turns the April 1 losses into a tradable, pool-backed claim structure, giving verified victims a defined redemption path rather than an open-ended recovery promise. The pool's size relative to total losses means the redemption amount per DFX depends on how much is ultimately recovered and committed.

DFX is redeemable for USDT at a Redemption Amount calculated as the Recovery Pool balance divided by DFX outstanding supply; redeemed DFX is burned and the transaction is irreversible. The Recovery Pool is funded by a daily share of Velocity's protocol net revenue, up to 127.5 million USDT in matching funds from Tether, up to 20 million USDT from strategic partners, and assets recovered later; the claims window closes at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2028, after which unclaimed DFX is burned.

MetaMask proactively initiated the exit of about 17,000 affected Ethereum validators holding more than 523,000 staked ETH (roughly $1.4 billion) after block rewards from 18 of its validators were found to have been diverted to an address funded through Tornado Cash. The company said its wallets faced "no immediate threat" and that the issue was confined to its "non-custodial staking operations".

The mass exit pushed Ethereum's validator exit queue to its highest level this year, with the estimated withdrawal wait extending from about three and a half days to nearly two weeks. MetaMask has not disclosed whether validator signing keys were exposed, leaving slashing risk and the full scope of the breach unresolved.

Security researcher 0xKaden, of Spearbit and Cantina, said block rewards from 18 MetaMask validators were "not paid to the correct fee recipient but instead to this tornado [Cash] funded account"; the address has made no transactions, holds 0.46 ETH including 0.1 ETH funded from Tornado Cash, and received 18 incoming ETH transfers from Titan Relay: Forwarder worth less than $1,000 in total. On-chain analyst Emmett Gallic separately flagged a 133,300 ETH transfer (about $360 million) from wallets labelled "Lubin/ConSensys" a few hours before MetaMask's statement, with no suggestion that transfer was suspicious.

Google released Gemini 4 Argon on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, marketing it as its most powerful model to date and pitching it as a workhorse for coding and cybersecurity work. According to CNBC, the model launched first with selected cybersecurity partners rather than general availability.

The release is Google's latest entry in the frontier-model competition, and per CNBC its initial rollout is limited to select cybersecurity partners rather than all developers. Google positions it for developers, professionals and enterprises tackling difficult problems.

Google's blog says Gemini 4 Argon was built with frontier-level capabilities in coding, knowledge work, cybersecurity defense and creative writing. Third-party tracker Artificial Analysis lists "Gemini 4 Argon (High)" among the leading models in intelligence and describes it as reasonably priced relative to similar models.

The United States sanctioned the A7 Network, a Russia-linked payments operation, and Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposed a rule that would prohibit transmittals of funds involving the network's Sub-Agents. FinCEN said A7's sub-agents processed more than $17 billion in dollar-denominated transactions from January 2025 through June 2026.

The proposed rule would extend US restrictions beyond A7 itself to the foreign sub-agents that appear as the contracting or paying party on A7-related invoices and payment instructions, a layer FinCEN says is used to move funds from non-Russian bank accounts. The payment prohibition is a proposal and is not yet in force.

According to FinCEN's notice of proposed rulemaking, the A7 Network assigns a foreign Sub-Agent to appear as the contracting or paying party on invoices, sales agreements and payment instructions, enabling payments to be executed from non-Russian bank accounts through correspondent banking and SWIFT channels. The measure was issued alongside Treasury action under the heading "Operation Economic Outcast."

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules and amendments establishing a tailored framework for the custody of crypto assets by registered investment advisers and regulated funds. The 760-page proposal, published Thursday and open for a 60-day public comment period, would clarify which entities may serve as custodians and how advisers and funds must keep records and make federal disclosures.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins said the proposal "would provide a clear regulatory framework for the custody of crypto assets, giving investment advisers and funds a compliant pathway where none existed before." Atkins also said existing custody rules were designed to protect client assets from loss, theft, misuse and misappropriation, but considered only traditional assets — "an untenable situation in the 21st century."

The proposal would allow advisers to self-custody client assets in limited cases — a scenario an SEC official described as likely unusual — requiring that no qualified custodian is available, that the firm meet certain expertise requirements, and that the arrangement be reviewed quarterly to see whether a custodian has become available. It would also permit the use of state-chartered trusts as custodians, and includes new clarifications of industry practices and auditing requirements.

Strategy has spent $1.28 billion, or 64%, of its $2 billion Digital Credit Securities Repurchase Program on buying back STRC, leaving less than $724 million as of Monday's filing. STRC, which Strategy has said it wants to trade near its $100 stated amount, opened for trading at $99.18.

The fund meant to keep STRC near $100 is nearly depleted, while the shares have traded below $99 on the majority of trading days over the past year. The buybacks are funded largely by dilution of MSTR common stock, which ranks junior to STRC.

Strategy spent $151.7 million repurchasing STRC last week at an average price of $98.86 per share, up from an $86.52 average in late July, and has bought back 13.3 million STRC shares, roughly one in eight outstanding. Although the program technically allows repurchases of STRF, STRD and STRK, the source reports it has only ever repurchased STRC.

Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin issued for Open Standard, launched on Sept. 30 with 468.4 million tokens outstanding and about $468.45 million in backing assets. It is issued natively on Tempo, Base, Ethereum and Solana, and comes with a distribution partnership that makes it available across parts of Stripe's payments stack.

Stripe processed $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, and OUSD's current circulation is less than 0.3% of that monthly figure, illustrating the scale of the network through which the token could be distributed if businesses adopt it for payments and treasury activity. Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison said Open Standard was designed so most reserve yield flows back to participating partners rather than being retained by the issuer.

Reserve data showed $257.2 million in cash and $211.2 million in Treasuries and short-duration money-market funds, with more than $400 million of liquidity deployed across decentralized exchanges, stablecoin swaps and bridges on Tempo. Stripe said businesses can hold OUSD through Stripe Treasury, send it via Global Payouts, accept it with Payments and use it with stablecoin-backed card products, subject to product and geographic availability; Coinbase begins supporting the network Oct. 1, and additional Mastercard distribution through BVNK is planned.

According to on-chain monitoring by PeckShield dated October 1, the NEAR Intents attacker moved the stolen funds to KuCoin and bridged them into BTC. The attacker's address has interacted with an address (0x098B7...E2f96) flagged as North Korea's Lazarus Group.

If confirmed, the on-chain interaction would tie the roughly $3.8 million exploit to a group attributed to North Korea; NEAR Intents says the incident has been reported to law enforcement and that affected funds will be compensated in full.

NEAR Intents said the loss stemmed from a bug in how its Omni deposit and withdrawal infrastructure interacted with the NEAR Intents smart contract, and that the contract-side issue has been patched. The attribution to Lazarus Group has not been independently confirmed.

Citi and Coinbase have expanded their partnership to link conventional fiat banking infrastructure with stablecoin-based payment flows, according to The Daily Hodl. The move pushes deeper integration between traditional finance and crypto settlement rails.

As framed by the source, the expanded tie-up deepens the connection between a major global bank and stablecoin-based payment flows, extending institutional exposure to crypto settlement rails. No specific terms, products or launch timelines are given in the available reporting.

OpenAI says it disrupted a coordinated campaign to extract the hidden reasoning its models generate before answering, a campaign it says began on July 1. On July 24 and 25 alone, OpenAI logged 16,000 extraction requests from more than 4,000 users as part of a wider cluster of over 15,000 users, and it says the activity was fully disrupted by July 28.

According to OpenAI, the hidden reasoning it targets could be used to train another model without the original safeguards. OpenAI says it has since closed a pathway that let someone who already held another user's encrypted reasoning replay it to recover its contents.

OpenAI said the operators "did not break our encryption, compromise a database, or gain direct access to stored user conversations," but instead manipulated model interactions so protected reasoning could be reproduced in visible form, violating its terms of service; one method involved copying encrypted reasoning out of one conversation and asking a model to decode it in another. OpenAI also said it is unclear whether all operators observed originated from a single actor, while attributing a core cluster of the activity to individuals associated with Moonshot AI, developer of Kimi.

The Ethereum Foundation and Open Anonymity Project launched zkAPI, a privacy-preserving payment layer for metered APIs, now live on Ethereum mainnet. Users deposit ETH, USDC or other credits into an onchain vault and authorize spending with zero-knowledge proofs, allowing providers to verify payment without learning the payer's identity or which deposit funded the usage.

According to Coinotag, the launch gives Ethereum's privacy stack a working mainnet showcase for zero-knowledge payments and gives the Ethereum Foundation a reference deployment it can point other teams to, while the AI inference side needs usage data before it can be called adopted.

zkAPI can issue short-lived, spending-capped API keys and settle based on actual usage, and it is initially focused on AI inference but can extend to other pay-per-use services. The system does not provide network or content anonymity, meaning IP addresses, timing patterns and identifying information in prompts may still be linkable.