Zano's post-mortem, published Thursday, disclosed that an attacker exploited its Gateway Address vulnerability twice — on Aug. 29 and Sept. 25 — creating about 18.4 million ZANO in each transaction, a total of 36.9 million unauthorized ZANO, and then roughly 1.8 quadrillion Freedom Dollar (fUSD) tokens using the same method. The team responded by rolling the blockchain back about a month, stating the counterfeit coins functioned as authentic ZANO and could be spent normally.

Zano said the unauthorized coins were indistinguishable from legitimate supply, which is why it chose a roughly one-month rollback that also erased legitimate transactions; the team acknowledged the rollback would hurt trust but argued it was necessary to remove the illicit supply.

Zano said the attacker registered a Gateway Address on Aug. 28 and paid 100 ZANO — worth about $553 at the time of publication — to set up the exploit, testing a fabricated asset before the first mint the next day; the first 18.4 million ZANO mint went unnoticed for nearly a month and was flagged only after the second. Zano spokesperson Quinten van Welzen told Cointelegraph that only a small fraction of the coins reached the market, limited by available exchange liquidity, and the team said AI-assisted testing, internal audits and bug bounties had failed to catch the bug.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Oct. 1 that his office served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena on Wednesday over cybersecurity incidents involving its AI models, including the Hugging Face hack. Bonta said developers that fail to stop their models from perpetrating or enabling cyberattacks "can and should be held legally accountable."

Bonta said his office "is committed to determining if that is the case here," framing model-enabled cyberattacks as a matter of developer legal accountability. The subpoena is investigative, a tool for gathering facts before any decision on whether to sue.

Bonta's office has not publicly said what it wants OpenAI to produce, and he said frontier-model builders have "a moral and legal responsibility" to prevent their systems from carrying out or enabling cyberattacks, whether during testing or after release. The subpoena adds California to an Alabama subpoena, an August demand from a 15-state attorney general coalition led by Iowa's Brenna Bird, and a reported FTC inquiry into AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic.

Arbitrum has paused new Stylus activations as an emergency security measure. Separately, a new BoLD guard could delay unconfirmed withdrawals if it accepts contradictory proofs.

The pause blocks new Stylus contracts from being activated on Arbitrum while existing contracts continue to run and renew, and the BoLD guard introduces a new path under which withdrawals awaiting confirmation could be delayed.

Active contracts can still run and renew. No user funds were reported lost in the action.

Coinbase launched a platform that lets AI agents buy, sell and pay, and its shares (COIN) rose more than 3% on the news.

The launch pushes Coinbase into agent-driven trading and payments, a market-structure niche where autonomous software transacts through exchange rails, and the accompanying share move shows investor attention to that positioning.

In an update posted on X on October 2, 2026, Linea said the validators supporting its Yield Boost vault are being exited as a precaution following the MetaMask Staking incident. Linea stated that the funds and control of the staking vault itself are unaffected.

The move makes Linea a second party to pull Ethereum validators in response to the MetaMask Staking incident, extending the incident's operational reach beyond MetaMask's own staking unit. Linea says no vault funds or control were affected and has not asked users to act.

Linea reported no loss of principal and no change in control of the vault, and has not asked users to take any action. Yield Boost converts idle bridged ETH into productive capital, with bridged ETH partially staked on Ethereum mainnet via Lido V3.

On Oct. 2, Deribit said on X that its migration into Coinbase International has been completed, consolidating customers and liquidity onto Deribit, where users can trade spot, options, perpetuals and futures across crypto, equities and pre-IPO markets. Coinbase's migration status report marked maintenance complete at 10:02 UTC on Oct. 1, leaving the former Coinbase International Exchange read-only and ending trading there.

Coinbase says the consolidation pools derivatives liquidity that had previously been split across the two venues. For affected institutional clients, the switch makes new trading connections, a different settlement cycle and separate historical records immediate operational issues.

Institutions using API or FIX connections need new Deribit endpoints and newly created API keys — International Exchange keys and IP allowlists do not carry over, and open orders were canceled rather than transferred. Migrated perpetual positions now settle once daily at 08:00 UTC instead of the former five-minute cycle, and Coinbase says legacy trade and order APIs will remain accessible for roughly 12 months after migration.

Firmus Grid Ltd., an Australian bitcoin-mining firm that has pivoted into AI data-center operations, has priced its ASX initial public offering at A$11 per share, seeking to raise at least A$5 billion in what would be one of Australia's largest-ever IPOs. The pricing implies a valuation of about A$43.7 billion (US$30.3 billion), and the company's listing date has been moved to October 23.

The offering would rank among Australia's largest-ever IPOs and puts a bitcoin-mining-origin company at the center of the AI and high-performance computing investment cycle, with the source citing Jane Street, Blackstone and Nvidia among its backers. The company is described as benefiting from surging demand for AI infrastructure in Asia-Pacific.

The A$11 price is below the up-to-A$50 billion valuation previously expected, and the listing date was changed to October 23. The Chinese-language report states the raise target as US$5 billion, while the English-language market summary puts it at A$5 billion, with up to A$5.5 billion cited in some reports.

Fiserv's digital asset platform is now live with financial institution clients, debuting with Roughrider Coin — a USD-backed stablecoin from the Bank of North Dakota (BND), issued by VersaBank USA, with Fireblocks providing tokenization infrastructure and Solana processing transactions. More than 90 North Dakota banks and credit unions are expected to access it through Fiserv's Commercial Center, Fiserv's existing online banking system for interbank transfers.

BND says initiation, approval and settlement run through the same operational channels banks use for ACH and wires, giving participating North Dakota institutions an additional interbank settlement route on a public blockchain with permissioned access.

Participation is voluntary and restricted to financial institutions; BND describes each token as one-to-one US dollar backed, with minting only after a confirmed transfer from an institution's operating account into a designated "for benefit of" account, and automatic burning via smart-contract instruction when tokens arrive at the receiving institution's wallet. Fiserv assigns VersaBank USA responsibility for minting, burning, custody and reserve management, and BND cites freeze and clawback capabilities available through Solana's Token-2022 extensions; Fiserv calls Roughrider a stablecoin while BND's deployment page calls it a dollar-backed token deposit, and no payment volume was disclosed.

Researchers published a Nature paper — with an accompanying arXiv preprint (2511.07312) — describing an AI system, named Ataraxos, that beat the best human Stratego player in history. According to the reporting, it reached that level while playing roughly 34 times fewer games than DeepNash, DeepMind's 2022 Stratego agent.

Stratego is a hidden-information game in which the best move depends on facts a player cannot observe, making look-ahead search difficult; the paper presents general techniques for self-play reinforcement learning and test-time search under hidden information. Commenters on Hacker News pointed to the training efficiency — far fewer games for a stronger result — as the critical element of the work.

The Nature article describes Ataraxos as based on general techniques developed for both self-play reinforcement learning and test-time search under hidden information. According to the report, human players were surprised by how often the agent tucked its flag into a corner behind just two bombs, a rarely played setup.

The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) sued the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, Oct. 2, 2026, arguing the agency exceeded its statutory authority under the National Bank Act by granting national trust bank charters to crypto firms. The ICBA's complaint says the OCC must revoke a recent charter approval and that the digital asset trust banks are not held to the same regulatory standards as traditional banks.

The suit directly challenges the legal basis of the OCC's crypto charter pathway, which firms have used as an entry point into the U.S. banking and payments system. The ICBA argues community banks are placed at a "severe competitive disadvantage" by the charters.

ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey said in a statement that "Congress did not create the national trust charter as a side door into the banking system for crypto firms seeking the credibility of a federal bank charter," adding that the firms do not carry the same obligations on capital, liquidity, supervision and FDIC insurance. An OCC spokesperson told CoinDesk the agency "does not comment on litigation."

Tavus unveiled Griffin on October 1, describing it as the first "Human Interaction Model," a real-time system that understands and generates face-to-face conversation. In the company's own test, 26 of 54 participants (48%) believed its Griffin-Lite version was a real person after a one-minute video call, compared with 1 of 41 (2.4%) for Tavus' previous system, and access remains limited to select trusted testers while safety work continues.

The result lands as security researchers already document deepfake use in live video calls: in January, North Korea-linked hackers used AI-made video to impersonate trusted contacts on Zoom or Teams calls, attributed by researchers to BlueNoroff, a Lazarus Group subsidiary, where victims were talked into installing malware disguised as an audio fix.

Tavus says Griffin-Lite ranks first on Nvidia's VideoFDB benchmark, scoring 3.83 out of 5 on the generation track versus 2.80 for the next-best system and 3.92 for a human reference, while trailing humans on the perception track at 3.73 against a 4.20 human reference; Tavus says Nvidia ran the evaluation independently. The test was not a classic Turing test — participants were told they would be matched with another person for a one-minute call and only asked at the end whether it had crossed their mind that their partner might not be real — and a community note on X has flagged that the results are not independently verified and do not follow a standard protocol.