The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) published an opinion on Oct. 8, 2026, saying national regulators should require MiCA-authorized firms to remediate EU clients' remaining exposure to non-compliant stablecoins as soon as possible and no later than three months after publication — around Jan. 8, 2027. During that window, supervisors may permit only strictly limited, time-limited and closely supervised services such as liquidation, conversion, withdrawal, transfer or safekeeping of existing holdings, and those services must not enable new acquisitions, promotion, active distribution or continued market availability.

ESMA holds that providing any MiCA service involving a non-compliant stablecoin should raise a presumption that the firm is not acting in clients' best interests under Article 66(1), whether or not the service amounts to an offer to the public or admission to trading. Because national supervisors decide whether to grant the limited wind-down relief, EU customers do not automatically receive three months of continued service.

The opinion names no token or issuer, but Coinbase's EEA retail guidance labels Tether's USDT as MiCA-non-compliant, and Kraken's guidance, updated April 13, lists USDT among stablecoins delisted for EEA trading while still permitting deposits and withdrawals (deposits discouraged). ESMA also said warnings, disclosures and client acknowledgments would not resolve the risks created by missing issuer-level safeguards.

On October 10, Onchain Lens reported that suspects linked to the theft tied to Ledger distributor CryptoBillis — an incident said to involve close to $90 million — sent 430.2 ETH, worth about $1.07 million, into Tornado Cash through four wallets. After Tether froze some related funds, the suspects reportedly began swapping USDT into USDD via SUN.io and the USDD PSM, with some funds flowing into a Binance hot wallet.

The swaps suggest the suspects are trying to route around Tether's freeze of related funds, and the traced wallets reportedly still hold about $70.6 million, leaving the case actively in motion.

The flagged suspect wallets reportedly still hold 11,406 ETH (~$28.35M), 213.371 BTC (~$17.65M), 13.646M USDD (~$13.65M) and 10.909M USDT (~$10.91M). The report notes that because on-chain funds are still moving, the tracing data and the suspects' attribution require further verification.

Samsung announced that Samsung Wallet will bring stablecoin access to eligible Galaxy users in the United States, extending dollar-backed digital assets to a mainstream smartphone audience. Coverage of the rollout describes it as USDC support that lets US Galaxy users move funds to bank accounts and crypto wallets, with expansion to more countries planned.

The rollout places dollar-backed stablecoins in front of a mass-market smartphone installed base through a major global device maker, a consumer distribution channel distinct from crypto-native apps and exchanges.

The announcement is framed at headline level; reports on the integration note that several implementation details, such as the stablecoin issuer and the full set of supported tokens, have yet to be disclosed. Search excerpts also state the feature is initially limited to eligible US Galaxy users, with more countries to follow.

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX has completed a new round of financing at a valuation of US$25 billion, with participation from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures and London-based quantitative hedge fund Qube Research & Technologies (QRT), according to WuBlockchain's weekly recap.

The investor list spans a stablecoin issuer, a crypto payments firm, a bank venture arm and a quantitative hedge fund, bringing bank-affiliated and stablecoin-linked capital onto a top-tier exchange's cap table.

The OKX financing was reported as a single line inside a multi-item weekly roundup; the same recap also covered the CFTC's first proposed crypto market rules and AI-related threats to cryptography.

Layer-1 blockchain Sui is launching Hashi, an institutional protocol that lets holders use bitcoin as collateral for lending without moving it off the Bitcoin network, with the mainnet slated to roll out in phases later this month. The initiative debuts with $500 million in capital commitments from a coalition of more than 20 industry partners.

Anchorage Digital CEO Nathan McCauley, whose firm is a day-one launch partner, said connecting institutional clients with Hashi represents "a complete paradigm shift," while Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun said institutions want to put bitcoin to work without giving up the protections they require.

The $500 million consists of capital commitments rather than immediate deposits, and the pre-pledged funds are intended to let markets open with liquidity on day one. Under the design, BTC is locked in a vault address on the Bitcoin blockchain secured by a 2-of-2 multisig with a separate guardian layer, while a voucher token called hBTC is minted on Sui; Certora formally verified the smart contracts and CommonPrefix reviewed the cryptography of its multi-party computation protocol.

Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, and crypto exchange OKX have filed to trade 63 tokenised US stocks. Separately, UBS has moved fund administration for its Luxembourg-domiciled funds to Northern Trust.

The filing would place tokenised US equities on venues tied to a major exchange group and a large crypto exchange, extending the asset class beyond crypto-native pilots — but it is an application, not an approval or a launch. The UBS mandate signals continued migration of institutional fund back-office functions to specialist administrators.

The tokenised-equity item is a regulatory filing by ICE and OKX covering 63 US stocks, and the UBS item is a fund-administration transfer for Luxembourg-domiciled funds; neither is described as a completed product launch.

OpenAI's research lead issued a statement saying the company terminated three former employees — Jasmine Wang, Mikita Balesni and Tomek Korbak — last week after an investigation found they violated clear policies on handling sensitive information, and that the internal probe uncovered a significant breach of trust going beyond what their public letter disclosed. OpenAI said it is standing by that decision.

OpenAI explicitly denied that the dismissals were retaliation for raising safety concerns, saying critical internal safety and research debate happens daily and that employees are not fired for voicing worries. The statement also added a concrete commitment: contracts with third-party safety evaluation bodies are being finalized and will be detailed in the coming weeks.

OpenAI said that while it tolerates good-faith mistakes, it found conduct in this case that violated its sensitive-information policies, and it maintains the terminations were not related to safety advocacy or public expression. The company said it will bring external evaluators into its safety work, and that maintaining the monitorability of frontier models is a long-standing research priority requiring industry-wide investment.

Aerodrome and Velodrome have fixed Oct. 21 as the launch date for their merger and published the token conversion terms: AERO converts one-for-one, while VELO converts at roughly 0.044 new AERO per token. Existing locks retain their remaining duration.

The terms give holders of two widely used DEX tokens a defined path into a single token, consolidating Aerodrome's Base liquidity hub with Velodrome's Optimism operations. The VELO ratio also sets how much new AERO existing VELO exposure will represent.

The VELO conversion rate is stated as approximately 0.044 new AERO per token, while AERO is a one-for-one conversion. Locked positions are not shortened or extended by the merger — they keep their remaining duration.

HSBC and Ant Digital Technologies have completed a testnet trial that lets AI agents discover digital services and pay for them using HSBC's tokenized bank deposits, with transactions settled in real time on a blockchain testnet. The trial combined HSBC's Tokenised Deposit Service, Ant Digital's Anvita Flow network and the Jovay Testnet layer-2 environment, according to Friday's announcement.

The demonstration adds to a run of bank-led experiments with AI agents initiating transactions on customers' behalf, following controlled tests by Santander with Mastercard's Agent Pay, Sygnum on a blockchain mainnet and CaixaBank with Visa Intelligent Commerce.

The companies described the transactions as micropayments, typically defined as less than $2; HSBC provided settlement capabilities and real-time risk checks while Ant Digital's network coordinated service access and payments. They said the test was limited to technical verification and did not represent a commercial launch or live customer offering.

Tether removed four THORChain Tron vault addresses from the USDT blacklist at 15:30 UTC, roughly three hours after freezing about $1.45 million in USDT, with their balances intact. THORChain has restarted Tron trading, deposits and signing, while 19 other wallets blacklisted in the same sweep remain frozen.

THORChain technical co-founder Chad Barraford said the freeze was "unprecedented in the industry" and raised questions for all DeFi protocols about the safety of the asset, adding that the team had no communication with Tether beforehand and hoped it was an error or misunderstanding. The reversal restored Tron trading, deposits and signing on the protocol, but the 19 wallets still blacklisted keep the censorship question open.

The four blacklisted vault addresses held a combined roughly 1.45 million USDT. Barraford said THORChain did not know why the action was taken and was actively reaching out to Tether; Cointelegraph said it contacted Tether and THORChain but received no immediate response.

Telegram's built-in Gram wallet has been renamed "Money" and is now fully available to Telegram's more than 1 billion users, after previously being limited to a subset of users, according to a post from the Walt channel. Money supports storing and sending Gram and purchasing gifts and collectible usernames, with users able to top up from Walt and transfers settling instantly with no network fees.

The change moves an embedded, fee-free custodial wallet from a limited user group to Telegram's full user base, widening access to Gram storage and transfers as well as in-app purchases of gifts and collectible usernames.

The announcement came from the Walt channel, and the source notes that the wallet was previously available only to some users. Foresight News has separately reported that Wallet in Telegram was renamed Walt, which continues to offer trading, investment, yield products, multi-chain assets and cross-chain transfers.