With Solstice, Filecoin begins an important transition: from building storage capacity to helping businesses turn that capacity into services customers choose to pay for. The network has established a global foundation of independent storage providers. Now, the change will drive a growing share of block rewards to services that bring paying customers onto the network.
Why the World Needs an Open Storage Marketplace AI training, enterprise applications, archives, backups and other data-heavy products are making dependable storage increasingly important. Yet much of the world's cloud infrastructure is concentrated among a few companies. The Filecoin network offers a different model: an open network where independent providers can supply infrastructure and multiple businesses can build differentiated products.
Those businesses built on Filecoin do not need to sell the same thing. One may specialize in AI datasets, another in long-term archives, and another in enterprise backups. They can compete on reliability, performance, customer service, and price. Customers should have a familiar experience with buying and using a dependable service without needing to learn blockchain mechanics.
But capacity alone cannot create that marketplace. The network must be worthwhile to build products, attract paying customers, and keep serving them. Solstice changes the network's incentives to make room for that next stage.
Why Solstice Changes the Incentive Model Solstice changes the economics because the network's next challenge is different from its first. The early priority was establishing capacity and a dependable base of storage providers. Now the opportunity is converting that foundation into real services with customers who pay because those services solve meaningful problems.
Solstice deprecates Filecoin Plus (Fil+). Every new sector now qualifies for the same 10× reward multiplier Fil+ offered, without needing DataCap or allocator approval. Existing sectors can opt in. A newly created service reward share is tied to demonstrated revenue through Filecoin Pay; when demand gates aren't met, the unallocated portion is burned instead of automatically distributed. This does not guarantee customer demand, but it puts that goal at the center of the network's economics.
That distinction matters for the people building on Filecoin. Providers can focus on dependable infrastructure. The new role of Service Orchestrator can build interfaces, integrations, customer support and specialized offerings. The network needs both sides to work together if it is to compete with conventional cloud services.
Find the complete ramp, quarterly gates, timelock and burn mechanics in Filecoin TLDR's walkthrough and FIP-0118 specification.
For the below diagram, Protocol rules split each block reward across streams, and the service stream’s share grows only as payment volume through Filecoin Pay grows
What Solstice Makes Possible For storage providers, Solstice creates a changing commercial environment, not a requirement that every provider become a software company. Some will focus on reliable infrastructure; others will work with service operators or build specialized products themselves. Orchestrators can invest in customer acquisition, integrations, and services that help bring paid activity to the network.
For customers, Solstice means storage that works the way they expect: sign up, pay for a service, and store their data, without ever touching a wallet or learning token economics. Behind that simple experience sits a global network of independent providers competing to earn their business. That competition pushes on price and on reliability, and it means a customer’s data never depends on the fortunes of a single company.
Solstice is a starting point. The ecosystem still needs reliable products, useful integrations, paying customers, and responsible execution of the new governance and reward mechanisms. As AI expands the world's dependence on data infrastructure, Filecoin has a chance to show that capable storage services can emerge from a competitive network instead of a handful of dominant providers.
NEAR Protocol has outlined plans to apply AI-assisted formal verification to its protocol and core smart contracts after reporting 672 solved mathematics problems at a submission-time model cost of $111.85.
Summary
NEAR plans to apply AI-assisted formal verification to its protocol and core smart contracts. NEAR AI reported solving 672 PutnamBench problems at a submission-time model cost of $111.85. Production verification requires accurate software models, defined requirements, and proofs covering the deployed implementation. Formal verification complements testing and code reviews, with guarantees limited to specified properties and assumptions. NEAR Protocol said in an Oct. 16 announcement that its research seeks to reduce the specialist work and computing costs involved in proving software follows defined rules.
Formal verification proves that software follows defined rules.
Our goal is to make it affordable for more developers. NEAR AI’s progress in automated proof generation brings us closer.
Next: applying it to the NEAR protocol and core smart contracts. https://t.co/MqFxz4B166
— NEAR Protocol (@NEARProtocol) October 19, 2026 The planned application covers the network’s protocol and core contracts, alongside tools for ecosystem developers. NEAR described production verification as a goal, while its completed benchmark work concerns automated mathematical proof generation.
NEAR plans to move proof generation into production software According to NEAR’s announcement, applying the research to running software involves three stages. Developers must represent a program mathematically, define the properties it should satisfy, and construct proofs showing those properties hold.
NEAR AI’s recent benchmark results demonstrate progress on the third stage. The announcement says production work still requires accurate models of software behavior and a clear connection between the proofs and the implementation users rely on.
In its explanation, NEAR distinguishes a proof covering a particular accounting rule from a guarantee that an entire application is secure. A contract could preserve balances during transfers while requiring a separate proof that only authorized accounts can initiate them.
NEAR co-founder Illia Polosukhin has linked the research to risks from AI-generated software and tools that help attackers identify weaknesses.
“The future of AI, and AI-generated code, is exciting – but only once we achieve verifiable and mathematical guarantees of its behavior.”
The announcement reproduces the statement from Polosukhin’s writing on software security. NEAR says formal verification should complement testing, code review and operational security practices.
The $111.85 result measures mathematics proofs NEAR’s announcement reports that its AI agent solved 672 Lean problems from PutnamBench, a benchmark based on the Putnam undergraduate mathematics competition. The reported mean cost was approximately $0.17 per problem at the model prices used for the submission.
The project’s public repository describes the result as 670 upstream problems plus corrected versions of two problems with defective formalizations. NEAR says the reported spending excludes the full cost of developing the system and does not estimate the price of verifying a production contract.
In the repository, the team reports that replaying the same usage at later listed DeepSeek off-peak prices would cost $331. Its methodology includes unsuccessful attempts, although the authors identify a separate parallel experiment using Kimi that they excluded from the cost accounting.
The repository describes checks against unfinished proofs and changes to the mathematical statement being proved. It reports that the longest run lasted more than three days.
Alongside PutnamBench, NEAR says its team reached first place by total solves on the Lean Eval v1 formalization leaderboard. The announcement specifies that ranking measure, distinguishing it from first solves and unique solves.
According to NEAR, mathematics benchmarks exercise a capability needed for software verification because developers translate software requirements into mathematical statements. The company separates those results from the work of proving properties of deployed code.
Formal proofs depend on the rules developers choose In NEAR’s transfer example, a conventional test checks a selected transaction, such as moving five tokens between two accounts. A proof can establish that every successful transfer covered by the mathematical model preserves the accounts’ combined balance.
The announcement explains that developers first choose a requirement, express the relevant software behavior mathematically, and submit a proposed proof to a checker. The resulting guarantee depends on the definitions and assumptions used.
NEAR’s approach uses Lean, an open-source programming language and proof assistant. An AI agent can propose a proof, run Lean, inspect its feedback, and revise the attempt, while Lean’s kernel checks whether the proof follows its logical rules.
An unsuccessful attempt does not necessarily identify a software flaw, according to NEAR. The requirement may be wrong, the implementation may violate it, or the agent may fail to find a valid proof.
Formal verification already has documented applications within the NEAR ecosystem. Certora’s March 30 assessment of Templar, a lending protocol deployed on NEAR, describes manual review of its Rust contracts and formal specification and verification of its market contract. Certora’s assessment page identifies the proven properties and discovered issues as subjects of the full report.
Other blockchain teams have pursued AI-assisted verification In May, Aptos Labs described support for AI-assisted formal verification involving dynamic dispatch in Move contracts. Its stated workflow uses AI-generated specifications with Move Prover, according to coverage of the announcement.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has discussed a similar combination of AI tools and machine-checked proofs. As crypto.news previously reported, his May comments identified applications across Ethereum’s roadmap, including consensus, quantum-resistant cryptography and zero-knowledge systems.
Buterin cautioned that proving one layer does not establish that an entire system behaves as intended. His discussion covered verification from high-level specifications through the lower-level implementation.
NEAR’s separate security research has addressed quantum-resistant signing. Near One’s May proposal selected FIPS-204 signature support, using the ML-DSA standard approved by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The May proposal described a testnet target for the end of the second quarter of 2026. Near One said wallet software, hardware wallets, endpoints, and APIs would require coordinated changes to support the new signing schemes.
Janus Henderson wants to become the most technologically advanced asset manager. Its plan for getting there is to invest in blockchain builders and the networks they run on.
From fund issuer to network operator
The centerpiece is Avalanche. On September 16, 2026, Janus Henderson announced it had become an active validator on the network.
Picture a blockchain as a shared ledger kept by a committee instead of one bank. Validators sit on that committee. They check transactions, agree on which ones are legitimate, and keep the record consistent across the network.
Nick Cherney, the firm’s Head of Innovation, discussed the partnership on October 19, 2026. He framed the Avalanche work as part of the firm’s goal of becoming a tech-forward asset manager.
A stake in onchain credit
The validator role did not arrive alone. Janus Henderson has also taken an equity interest in Tranched, an onchain credit platform.
Tranched manages $300 million in assets. It also has a pipeline exceeding $3 billion, meaning deals it is working toward but has not yet closed.
Janus Henderson is also set to provide anchor capital for Tranched’s issuances. An anchor investor commits money early, which tends to give other buyers confidence that a deal is real and worth joining.
The products already on Avalanche
Janus Henderson did not show up on Avalanche empty-handed. Its tokenized products have been deploying on the network through partnerships with Grove and Centrifuge, work that dates back to 2024-2025.
Two funds lead that effort. The first is the Janus Henderson Anemoy AAA CLO Fund, known by its ticker JAAA.
A CLO, or collateralized loan obligation, bundles corporate loans and slices them into tiers by risk. The AAA label points to the top-rated slices, the ones designed to get paid first.
JAAA holds approximately $690 million in assets under management. The second fund, the Treasury Fund (JTRSY), offers exposure to US government debt in tokenized form.
The funds also got a boost from a $250 million Grove-led program targeting JAAA and JTRSY. That deployment doubled Avalanche’s real-world asset footprint.
What this means
For Avalanche, landing a validator backed by a manager with approximately $500 billion in assets is a credibility signal.
For Tranched, the equity investment and anchor capital commitment may help convert more of its pipeline of over $3 billion into closed deals.
There are risks worth watching. Operating a validator brings technical and operational responsibilities that traditional asset managers have not historically carried. Owning a stake in a platform while also anchoring its issuances creates overlapping interests that investors and regulators may want explained.
The other thing to track is scale. JAAA at approximately $690 million and Tranched at $300 million are meaningful for onchain markets. Against a $500 billion balance, they remain a small slice of the overall business.
Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Solana Foundation official brand assets (solana.com/branding)
SkyAI has sold its entire Solana treasury and initiated a $201 million tender offer, according to a report by The Defiant. The company, which previously held 2,077,799 SOL valued at approximately $218.5 million, reported it now holds $223.8 million in cash. This move by SkyAI, formerly known as Sharps Technology, removes a significant amount of Solana from the corporate treasury market. The tender offer retains a $3-per-share price, despite challenges from Bastion. Solana’s price at the time of the report hovered near $105.
Key Takeaways
The sale of Solana by SkyAI appears to indicate a shift in confidence regarding Solana’s future potential.
Current market pricing suggests reduced confidence in Solana reaching $190 in the near term, with a noticeable decline in YES pricing across several prediction markets.
The tender offer and the cash position retained by SkyAI suggest a strategic repositioning away from Solana.
What to Watch
Watch for any further announcements from SkyAI or Bastion regarding the tender offer and share price challenges. Additionally, observe Solana’s price movement and market reactions to gauge sentiment changes. Developments in Solana’s ecosystem, such as network upgrades or regulatory changes, could also influence market perceptions and pricing outcomes.
LI.FI is launching intent-based execution for Ondo Finance tokenized stocks and ETFs on Solana, linking 450+ assets to its network of 1,000+ wallets, apps and neobanks.
@Lifiprotocol is launching native, intent-based execution for @OndoFinance tokenized stocks and ETFs on @Solana, connecting more than 450 tokenized securities to its distribution network. The network spans more than 1,000 consumer wallets, DeFi applications and neobanks.
The launch uses a Request for Quote (RFQ) liquidity model through LI.FI Intents, enabling one-click secondary market trading of tokenized securities. Retail and institutional traders can trade tokenized stocks against on-chain capital, without routing through traditional broker-dealer clearinghouses or dealing with cross-chain bridging.
How the integration worksLI.FI describes itself as an intent-based execution engine for same-chain and cross-chain token transfers. According to LI.FI, market makers in its network quote competitive prices for tokenized assets, which helps partners offer access at the best available prices across supported chains. Partners can unlock the assets through their existing LI.FI integration.
Ondo and LI.FI first announced the tie-up with support for Ethereum and BNB Chain, with Solana listed as coming soon. Ondo said the integration brought 438+ tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs, including Tesla, NVIDIA, Apple, QQQ and SPY, to LI.FI's partner network. The Solana launch extends that access to a third chain.
Ondo's growing footprint on SolanaOndo Finance brought its tokenized equities platform to Solana on January 21, 2026. The Solana Foundation said the tokens are backed 1:1 by securities held at U.S.-registered broker-dealers, and can be minted and redeemed 24 hours a day, five days a week. That launch made Ondo the largest real-world asset issuer on Solana by asset count.
Tokenized stocks are often spread across several blockchains, which fragments liquidity. LI.FI notes that Ondo's platform currently covers Ethereum, BNB Chain and Solana, and that its products are offered to non-U.S. users, with an institutional-first approach. Routing trades through a single intent-based layer is intended to reduce that friction for wallets and apps.
Tokenized securities give holders economic exposure to the underlying shares rather than shareholder rights, Cointelegraph reported in its explainer on Ondo's Solana plans.
Sources:
LI.FI: Ondo Tokenized Stocks Are Now Live on LI.FIOndo Finance: Ondo Tokenized Stocks Are Live on LI.FISolana Foundation: Ondo Global Markets on Solana
Rome Protocol has published connection details for its Hadrian testnet, giving developers a USDC-funded environment to try Ethereum-style applications inside Solana, while its documentation separately lists a mainnet network called Rubicon.
Summary
Rome’s Hadrian testnet runs on Solana Devnet, while its documentation separately lists Rubicon as mainnet. Compound v3 and Aave v3 implementations remain reference applications, without confirmed official protocol migrations. Hadrian uses test USDC for gas, with transaction pricing controlled through configurable operator settings. Rome reports a Halborn audit, while its documentation lists Ethereum compatibility and execution limits. Rome Protocol’s Oct. 18 post identifies Hadrian as a testnet running on Solana Devnet, with chain ID 200010, an RPC endpoint, an explorer, and instructions for obtaining test USDC. The supplied screenshot directs developers to Circle’s faucet and a bridge interface to fund their wallets.
The project’s developer documentation lists Rubicon separately as mainnet, with chain ID 7531 and a different RPC endpoint. Its introductory page describes Rubicon as using real USDC, distinguishing the production environment from Hadrian’s testing assets.
Rome EVM runs Solidity code within Solana Rome’s execution documentation describes an Ethereum Virtual Machine implemented as a Solana program. A proxy receives signed Ethereum-style transactions, checks them through an offchain emulator, and packages their instructions for execution by Solana validators.
According to the architecture described by the project, Solidity contracts can call native Solana programs through cross-program invocation, or CPI. Developers can use familiar Ethereum tools while their contracts execute within Solana’s runtime.
The documentation describes shared application state between EVM and Solana users. Its statement that no bridge is needed concerns interactions inside that environment; Hadrian’s funding instructions separately direct users to a bridge when bringing test USDC into the network.
Rome’s execution guide distinguishes two processing modes. Operations that fit within one Solana transaction use atomic execution, where the complete transaction succeeds or reverts together.
For more demanding operations, the same guide describes iterative execution across several Solana transactions. Accounts are locked during processing, and cached effects are committed at the end. The project lists a 160-step session limit and restrictions on which Solana program calls can use that mode.
Solana’s transaction capacity has been the subject of separate network changes. In an Aug. 30 report, Jacob Creech outlined a planned move from 1,232-byte transactions to a 4,096-byte format, as crypto.news previously reported. The announcement scheduled Transaction V1 for Sept. 9 and treated slot-time reductions and Alpenglow as separate upgrades.
Compound and Aave implementations remain reference applications Rome’s Hadrian guide names Uniswap, Compound and Aave as reference applications validated first on the testnet.
The project’s Aerarium repository describes a Compound v3 lending application with two wallet routes sharing one lending pool. One route accepts Ethereum-style signed transactions through MetaMask; the other uses Phantom and a Solana-derived identity without requiring an Ethereum key.
According to that repository, both routes access the same Comet market, covering USDC deposits, collateral deposits, borrowing, repayments, and withdrawals. The listed application address uses a devnet domain. GitHub
Rome’s Aave interface repository explicitly calls the product a demo and places it on Hadrian. Its accompanying contract repository describes a fork of Aave’s code.
Those materials establish how Rome presents its implementations. They do not establish that either lending protocol’s governing organization has approved a production deployment or moved existing user positions to Rome.
Rome has pursued other financial applications through partnerships. In March 2025, the project announced work with KiiChain on tokenized assets and cross-chain payment finance for Latin America. Executives described plans involving real estate, agricultural commodities and access to Solana liquidity.
USDC gas payments depend on operator configuration Hadrian’s network guide specifies USDC as its gas token and identifies Circle’s Solana Devnet USDC mint. Developers funding from Solana need test USDC and some devnet SOL, according to the guide.
Circle’s faucet supports both Solana Devnet and Ethereum Sepolia. The provider describes faucet tokens as testing assets without real-world value and currently lists a distribution of 20 test USDC per request, subject to its limits.
Rome’s application-chain documentation allows an operator to select an SPL token for gas payments and route transaction-fee revenue to an application treasury.
The same documentation describes a pricing service that converts the chosen gas token against SOL for underlying Solana transaction costs. Its configuration can draw prices from Meteora pools or a Pyth/Hermes fallback.
Rome’s constraints page lists configurable minimum gas prices and a proxy-level multiplier. The published framework therefore describes configurable pricing, without establishing one universal dollar cost for every application transaction.
Audit and compatibility claims carry defined limits Rome’s EVM repository identifies a mainnet program and says Halborn audited it. The repository provides instructions for rebuilding the program and comparing it with the deployed binary, with build-time and commit-hash metadata masked during comparison.
The project’s compatibility documentation lists differences from Ethereum, including disabled modular-exponentiation functionality and gas behavior that does not reproduce Ethereum’s per-operation schedule.
The constraints page says Rome transactions must declare the Solana accounts they touch before execution. It lists a 64-address transaction cap and approximately 1.4 million compute units per transaction. The guide recommends measuring actual Solana compute consumption from transaction receipts because the EVM gas-used figure does not faithfully represent that resource use.
Its mainnet deployment table names a Squads multisignature wallet as upgrade authority.
Separate interoperability projects have targeted institutional markets. In August, Interstice Digital announced a cross-chain swap engine linking Canton with Ethereum, Solana and Robinhood Chain. FalconX supplies liquidity, while Interstice said it does not hold customer assets or execute transactions on users’ behalf.
Bitcoin started the new week with a recovery, pushing the price above $82,000. However, despite the recovery, uncertainty for BTC persists, while treasury companies continued their purchases this week as well.
Firstly, Strategy, the world’s largest publicly traded Bitcoin holder, also made purchases this week.
According to a statement by Strategy founder Michael Saylor, Strategy purchased an additional 267 Bitcoin. This brings the company’s total Bitcoin holdings to 848,517 BTC. The company also repurchased STRC preferred shares worth $193 million.
Saylor noted that Strategy also holds $5.3 billion in assets, adding that the company’s dollar-denominated assets could cover current preferred stock dividends and interest payments for approximately 3.4 years.
“Strategy purchased 267 BTC and repurchased STRC worth $193 million. As of October 18, 2026, we hold 848,517 BTC and $5.3 billion USD in assets.”
Besides Strategy, Strive also purchased an additional 1,223 Bitcoin last week. Strive CEO Matt Cole announced in a post on his X account that they bought 1,223 BTC last week at an average price of $81,734. With this purchase, Strive’s total Bitcoin holdings increased to 36,818 BTC.
Ethereum Purchases Continue! Bitmine, the world’s largest holder of Ethereum, also announced last week that it purchased an additional 12,535 ETH, bringing its total holdings to 6,041,481 ETH. According to the announcement, this represents 4.9% of the total circulating ETH supply.
The official statement indicated that Bitmine’s total assets, including cryptocurrency, cash, marketable securities, and strategic investment assets, amount to $15.1 billion.
This figure includes 6.04 million ETH, 215 Bitcoin, $582 million in cash and marketable securities, $180 million worth of Beast Industries shares, and $74 million worth of Eightco Holdings shares.
Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee stated, “We believe Bitmine will outperform the crypto bull market we anticipate, given that it strengthened its competitive position last year amidst the crypto winter (bear market). We acquired 12,535 ETH last week. Bitmine’s consistent success in purchasing cryptocurrencies is unparalleled by any publicly traded company in the world. Bitmine has purchased ETH every week since the launch of its ETH Treasury Strategy on June 30, 2025.”
Solana Procurement Announced Too! Last week, Nasdaq-listed company DeFi Development Corp. announced it had purchased an additional 3,983 Solana, bringing its total SOL holdings to 2.59 million. The company also stated that it generated additional SOL and commission revenue by using its SOL holdings for staking and operating its own validator.
This acquisition comes just two days before the rollout of Alpenglow, a significant upgrade to Solana’s consensus protocol. CEO Joseph Onorati stated, “We believe Solana is entering a significant new growth cycle as Alpenglow enhances the network’s capabilities and expands the role of tokenization in global finance. We will also be increasing the annual dividend of our variable-rate Series C perpetual preferred stock, ‘CHAD,’ to 14%. This strengthens our income offering at a time when we believe there could be a major bull market for SOL. Our aim is to make CHAD more attractive to income investors while also expanding our SOL accumulation capacity for common shareholders.”
*This is not investment advice.
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SkyAI, formerly Sharps Technology Inc., has gone from being the fifth-largest Solana treasury company to holding no SOL after selling its entire reserve to fund a share and warrant buyback.
The company said Monday that it now holds approximately $223.8 million in cash as of Oct. 16 and had "completed the sale of all of its SOL."
If buybacks are fully subscribed, SkyAI would be left with roughly $22.5 million before costs.
On Sept. 14, SkyAI reaffirmed its commitment to its Solana treasury strategy while noting it held more than 2 million SOL. At the time, SkyAI had the fifth-largest holdings of all publicly traded Solana treasury companies.
However, its Oct. 11 buyback announcement disclosed sales of roughly 1 million SOL, while a subsequent SEC filing put the remaining balance at around 600,000 SOL.
This rapid drawdown of its SOL holdings led to Bastion Trading, which owns nearly 10% of SkyAI, calling for an independent review and saying it would not be participating in the buyback under the proposed conditions.
SkyAI is offering $3 per share or warrant to buy back 95% of outstanding shares. The company ended up dropping a proposed condition that required SOL to remain above $100, because it no longer holds any.
Bastion wanted a price of $3.50 per share, restrictions on insiders, and for strategic advisor warrants to be excluded.
SkyAI still describes its business as "building a financial platform that will combine stablecoin rails on Solana with AI." Monday's announcement does not say whether the company plans to rebuild its SOL treasury or provide any updates on the platform. It said it plans to stay listed on the Nasdaq after the buybacks are complete.
The Block reached out to SkyAI for comment, but did not immediately receive a reply.
SkyAI shares (SKYA) are up 4.5% on the day to $2.77, a 35% gain year to date.
SkyAI is no longer holding any Solana. The Nasdaq-listed company has sold its entire SOL treasury and is now sitting on approximately $223.8 million in cash, according to an Oct. 19 press release.
The plan for that money is a share buyback. For a company that built its public identity around holding a single crypto asset, that is a full reversal, delivered in about two weeks.
SkyAI trades under the ticker SKYA and was previously known as Sharps Technology. The liquidation covered more than 2 million SOL and was completed by October 16, 2026.
How SkyAI emptied the vault The sell-off did not happen in one shot. It began in early October, when the company unloaded about 1 million SOL.
That first tranche had a specific job. It helped fund a tender offer to repurchase up to 95% of SkyAI’s outstanding shares, along with certain warrants.
The tender offer is priced at $3 per share or warrant. Its total size is capped at up to $201.3 million.
Put the two figures side by side and the math is tidy. The $223.8 million cash pile exceeds the maximum the company could spend on the tender, leaving room above the cap.
The cost of the Solana bet The treasury strategy came with a steep entry price. SkyAI’s SOL position was reportedly accumulated at an average price of around $194, and the position carried major unrealized losses while the company held it.
The activist in the room SkyAI’s exit did not happen in a vacuum. Bastion Trading, which together with certain affiliates owns approximately 9.99% of the company’s outstanding common stock, has been pressing management.
Bastion has raised concerns about how transparent the SOL sales were and how fast they proceeded. The firm has also demanded governance changes, including board changes and an independent special committee, as well as a higher offer price of at least $3.5, before it agrees to take part in the buyback.
That last condition matters. A holder with close to a tenth of the company can shape whether a tender offer is broadly embraced or turns into a standoff. Bastion is effectively treating its participation as leverage.
What this means for crypto treasury companies There is also a market-structure angle for Solana itself. Selling more than 2 million SOL is a meaningful amount of supply hitting the market from a single corporate seller.
Several things are worth watching next. The first is how many shareholders will tender at $3, and whether the offer gets close to its 95% target. The second is whether SkyAI makes the governance changes Bastion is seeking, and whether Bastion then participates.
Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Solana’s developers have scheduled the Alpenglow consensus upgrade for Oct. 21, targeting roughly 150-millisecond finality while asking validators and application operators to prepare for changes during the mainnet handoff.
Summary
Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade is scheduled for Oct. 21, targeting roughly 150-millisecond transaction finality. Quicknode warns of a brief transaction pause and possible data-stream interruptions during the handoff. Validators must use compatible software and fund vote accounts for the 0.8 SOL admission fee. Some RPC nodes may receive finality information later than validators participating directly in consensus. Quicknode’s maintenance notice identifies Wednesday as the planned activation day, but its latest update warns that the original 14:50 UTC estimate could move forward to 13:20 UTC as block production advances. The provider asks operators to be ready from 13:00 UTC, with the consensus handoff following activation by roughly 20 minutes.
Solana Foundation’s current upgrade page puts the change in epoch 1064 and lists mainnet as not yet activated. Its updated estimate places the epoch’s start near 13:20 UTC, making the epoch boundary the relevant trigger instead of a fixed wall-clock appointment.
Solana Alpenglow targets finality, not faster execution Under Anza’s design, Votor replaces TowerBFT’s voting and finality logic. The target is roughly 150 milliseconds under normal network conditions, not a guarantee that every wallet, exchange or trading application will display a completed transaction within that period.
The Foundation says transaction execution, program behavior and fee mechanics remain unchanged. Ordinary users do not need to alter how they sign or approve transactions, while the separate Rotor data-distribution upgrade is reserved for a later release. Its documentation separates the consensus rollout from earlier reductions in slot duration, which govern how frequently the network produces blocks.
Quicknode’s technical overview describes two voting paths operating simultaneously. One can finalize a block in a single round when 80% of validators participate, while the other uses a second round when participation reaches 60%.
The provider distinguishes that process from the early confirmations users already see. Its overview says applications commonly display confirmations within two to three seconds under optimistic settings, before the old system reaches full finality at around 13 seconds.
The October deployment follows an earlier roadmap that linked Alpenglow to Agave 4.3. An August 14 report documented that Alpenglow code was present in Agave 4.2 for testing, without authorizing mainnet activation in that release.
By September 26, the upgrade had reached devnet after testnet’s transition the previous day, as previously covered by crypto.news. Application teams could then check the new consensus behavior before deploying against the network handling users’ funds.
Traders face a short interruption during the handoff Quicknode warns that new transactions will briefly stop entering blocks while the network changes consensus systems. Its notice describes a pause lasting a few seconds, with a longer interruption possible if the transition takes more time.
Transaction submissions may temporarily return a “node unhealthy” preflight error, the provider says. Yellowstone data streams may disconnect once, while subscriptions using the earliest processed commitment can display slots that never reach confirmation.
The maintenance notice recommends confirmed or finalized commitment for data that must not be reverted. Quicknode says its existing Solana endpoints will remain in place and that its team will monitor the network throughout the change.
In the provider’s technical overview, faster irreversible settlement is relevant to financial applications, corporate treasury transfers and real-time services. The document presents those uses as capabilities of the proposed consensus architecture, without establishing that individual trading platforms will adopt new settlement policies on activation day.
Validator readiness includes software and account funding Solana Foundation’s current checklist instructs validators to run version 4.3.2 of Agave, Jito-Solana or Harmonic Salsa before epoch 1064. Firedancer and Frankendancer are not supported during the migration, according to the same guidance.
Operators must keep at least 0.8 SOL above the rent-exempt minimum in their vote accounts to cover the Validator Admission Ticket. The first charge pays for participation in epoch 1065, and an unpaid fee prevents a validator from voting or producing blocks in that next epoch.
Governance approval predates those operational requirements. The proposal passed in September 2025 with 98.27% of votes supporting it, according to coverage of the completed ballot. Participation represented 52% of stake, so the approval percentage describes votes cast rather than the entire validator population.
That earlier vote approved SIMD-0326, the proposal behind the consensus overhaul. The contemporary report recorded 1.05% against and 0.69% abstaining, with the small rounding difference preserved in the published figures.
RPC delivery can lag behind the 150ms target Anza’s operator documentation explains that consensus messages normally circulate among admitted validators. An unstaked node using the default delivery path learns finality from certificates carried in later blocks, typically adding up to one produced-block interval.
Skipped or delayed blocks can lengthen that wait. A node partnered with an admitted validator can receive messages directly, although network latency between the two remains part of the delivery time.
The September devnet coverage documented separate changes for indexers and explorers. Candidate blocks must remain separate until confirmation, and validator participation data moves away from ordinary vote transactions toward certificates attached to block data.
According to that report, removing vote transactions changes dashboard totals even when the number of user payments and trades stays constant. Services counting both categories must reset their comparisons, while systems tracking validator votes need to read the replacement certificate data.
SkyAI, formerly Sharps Technology, has recently undergone a radical strategic shift. The company has liquidated all its Solana (SOL) reserves to fund its stock and warrant repurchase program, dropping from being the fifth-largest Solana treasury holder to zero SOL holdings. According to a Monday statement, as of October 16, SkyAI held roughly $223.8 million in cash and has "completed the sale of all SOL".
Under the repurchase plan, SkyAI proposed to buy back 95% of its outstanding shares at $3 per share or per warrant. If fully subscribed, the company would retain approximately $22.5 million before related expenses. Additionally, since it no longer holds SOL, SkyAI has scrapped the original repurchase condition requiring SOL’s price to stay above $100.
The liquidation was swift and abrupt: as recently as September 14, SkyAI reaffirmed its Solana treasury strategy, claiming to hold over 2 million SOL. But an October 11 repurchase announcement disclosed it had sold ~1 million SOL, and subsequent SEC filings showed its remaining balance was only around 600,000 SOL. This rapid sell-off has drawn strong pushback from Bastion Trading, a major shareholder holding nearly 10% of SkyAI’s shares. Bastion has called for an independent review and explicitly said it will not participate in the repurchase under current terms, demanding the repurchase price be raised to $3.5 per share, restrictions on insiders, and exclusion of strategic advisors’ warrants from the repurchase.
Despite liquidating its crypto assets, SkyAI still describes its business as "building a financial platform combining Solana-based stablecoin tracks with AI". However, Monday’s announcement did not clarify if the company plans to rebuild its SOL treasury, nor provide updates on the platform. SkyAI only stated it intends to maintain its Nasdaq listing status after the repurchase is completed. As of the latest trading day, SkyAI (SKYA) shares rose 4.5% to $2.77, with a year-to-date gain of 35%.
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I appreciate you sharing this Lookonchain weekly report, but I need clarification on what you'd like me to do.
You mentioned at the start that I should write headlines for Lookonchain tweets (max 120 characters, keeping tickers/amounts/names, no quotes/hashtags/periods).
However, what you've pasted appears to be the beginning of a weekly report summary, not a tweet. Could you provide:
1. The specific tweet
Oct 12–Oct 18, 2026 #LookonchainWeeklyReport
?? Overview
Stablecoin supply fell by $1.65B last week, DEX spot volume rebounded and perp volume edged up, while public companies added 7,721 BTC.
?? Stablecoin Market
The total stablecoin market cap decreased by $1.65B.
?? Spot &
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Bitcoin ETFs see $94.94M outflow, Ethereum ETFs down $87.51M in 24 hours
Bitcoin recovered above $83,000 on Monday, October 19, as technology futures snapped a weeklong decline. The rebound eased fears of a repeat of the October 19, 1987, stock market crash, although persistent fund outflows and macroeconomic concerns continued to weigh on sentiment.
Bitcoin climbed from an overnight low near $80,700 to briefly exceed $83,000 before currently trading around $82,000.
The recovery followed last week’s higher-than-expected U.S. Consumer Price Index (CPI) and Producer Price Index (PPI) readings. Bitcoin fell from above $84,000 to just below $80,000 last week as investors reassessed inflation and interest-rate risks.
Solana also recovered, rising more than 4% from approximately $100.50 on Sunday night to $105 on Monday morning as risk appetite improved.
Strategy and Strive Continue Accumulating Bitcoin Corporate treasury purchases continued despite market weakness. Michael Saylor’s Strategy acquired a modest 267 $BTC, bringing its holdings to 848,517 $BTC. The company also repurchased another $193 million of its $STRC preferred stock and increased its repurchase program from $2 billion to $3 billion.
$STRC fell to $97.72 during last week’s selloff, potentially encouraging further repurchases rather than new share issuance to fund Bitcoin purchases.
Meanwhile, Matt Cole’s Strive added 1,223 $BTC, increasing its holdings to 36,818 $BTC. The company expects another $600 million in purchasing capacity when proceeds from its $SATA preferred stock offering reach its bank account later this week.
Separately, Metaplanet moved closer to expanding into U.S. capital markets after Super League shareholders approved its proposed takeover. At closing, Metaplanet plans to contribute 2,100 $BTC from its 44,000 $BTC holdings and $2.5 million for approximately 93.7% ownership. The combined company plans to rebrand as Superplanet ($SUPA), a U.S.-listed Bitcoin treasury platform, with shares locked up for 5 years.
Saylor Blames Macro Pressures as ETF Outflows Continue Strategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor attributed Bitcoin’s weakness to restrictive trade policies, rising yields, and artificial intelligence spending. Speaking at ParaFi Capital’s Investor Day, he argued that Bitcoin suffers more than equities during risk-off shocks because it represents “pure capital.”
Saylor cited repeated trade war declarations against Canada, rising yield curves, and an estimated $1 trillion AI investment buildout competing for investor capital. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has also warned that government deficits and technology demand compete for limited capital. Despite these pressures, Saylor maintained that Bitcoin was returning to a bull market.
Fund flows tell a more cautious story. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $681 million in net outflows for the week ended October 9 and another $228.6 million for the week ended October 16. Solana ETFs lost $24.81 million and $25.52 million over the same respective weeks.
CoinShares research head James Butterfill described last week’s decline as “a reminder of how sensitive Bitcoin remains to monetary policy over short horizons.”
According to CoinGlass, liquidations reached $327.08 million over 24 hours, affecting 93,756 traders. The largest recorded order involved an $11.81 million ETHUSDT position on Binance.
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Fidelity has run a full checkup on Solana. The verdict: the patient looks healthy, though the doctor has a few follow-up questions.
In a report published October 16, 2026, Fidelity’s Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) concluded that Solana’s broader trajectory remains positive. It credits growing software diversity, infrastructure investment and rising adoption. When a firm managing approximately $7.8 trillion in assets writes a network health report, institutional desks tend to read it.
What Fidelity found The report is titled “The State of Solana: Network Health and Resilience.” It reviews how the network has developed over the past two years.
FCAT analysts Mia Galvin and Kevin Kelly organized their assessment around three pillars. These are network resilience, economic security, and performance usability.
The headline resilience stat is simple. Solana has not had a single mainnet outage across the two-year period the report covers.
Validators have also been showing up for work. The report puts average validator vote success at approximately 99.7% in 2026.
FCAT also pointed to performance gains, including expanded capacity and shorter slot times.
The adoption numbers The value of tokenized real-world assets on Solana climbed from roughly $1 billion to about $4.4 billion within a year.
Stablecoins tell a similar story. Solana carried a stablecoin supply of $16 billion that processed over $2 trillion in volume in Q1 2026.
As of October 2026, approximately 8% of SOL sits with ETFs and digital asset treasuries. Roughly one in every twelve SOL tokens now belongs to a regulated fund or a corporate treasury.
Fidelity has supported SOL trading and custody across various platforms since October 2025.
The fine print: concentration and client risk The biggest concern is validator stake concentration. As of Q3 2026, between 18 and 20 validators controlled more than one-third of active stake.
Geography compounds the issue. The report found that 40% of stake was located in Frankfurt and Amsterdam as of Q3 2026.
FCAT also flagged limited client software diversity. That risk gets sharper as Solana prepares for future upgrades, including the anticipated Alpenglow.
There is a tension here worth noting. The report cites increased software diversity as a positive driver while also calling current client diversity limited. Both can be true: progress is happening, but the job is not finished.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Germany’s Sparkassen savings bank network launched cryptocurrency trading on Monday, allowing customers to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Polygon. The service is being rolled out through DekaBank and will be launched slowly in the participating savings banks, albeit with restrictions on transfers to personal wallets.
Sparkassen Launches Five Cryptocurrencies Through Banking App Under certain conditions, the Sparkassen customers of DekaBank can trade five cryptocurrencies directly via the existing banking application. The offering is named “Krypto – powered by Deka,” and it enables trading in BTC, ETH, XRP, SOL, and POL.
The service can be used in the investment part of the Sparkasse app without the need for a separate securities account. Each transaction costs €0.99, although additional costs arise from the difference between buying and selling prices.
The launch comes after a series of initiatives by German banks to bring on-board cryptocurrency trading to existing customer accounts. DekaBank has created the Sparkassen service, and DZ Bank has backed up a separate rollout amongst Germany’s cooperative banks.
DekaBank is custodian of cryptocurrencies on its own wallet infrastructure and participates in trading arrangements with Börse Stuttgart. Users will have the ability to see their cryptocurrency assets in addition to various other monetary products and services in the current application.
DekaBank Restricts Crypto Withdrawals to Approved Providers While it is possible to buy cryptocurrencies at Sparkassen, they cannot be transferred directly to private hardware wallets. DekaBank maintains the private keys, and only specific cryptocurrency service providers are allowed to make transfers.
The agreement involves customers having to trust that DekaBank will keep their digital assets safe and handle their permitted withdrawals. However, the restrictions do not prevent users from selling their cryptocurrencies through the banking application.
The service is aimed at adult customers who make it on their own, and Sparkassen will not give investment advice on cryptocurrencies. DekaBank also cautions investors that the value of digital assets could be volatile with a potential loss of investment.
The custody is part of a broader trend across German financial institutions, including Deutsche Bank’s cryptocurrency custody plans. These services are regulated under EU laws, such as the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation.
Sparkassen Plans Wider Crypto Trading Rollout Into 2027 More than 230 Sparkassen institutions have expressed interest in introducing cryptocurrency trading, according to German banking representatives. Each savings bank, however, will determine on its own if and when it will provide the service.
Around 30 to 40 institutions can join monthly, said Joachim Schmalzl, an executive board member of the German Savings Banks Association. The group is targeting the first half of 2027 for the largest number of interested banks to be connected.
The first phase is limited to the participating institutions and not nationwide through Germany’s savings banking network. Before opening a cryptocurrency account, customers should therefore inquire whether their local Sparkasse has switched on the service.
The expansion comes after the banking group’s earlier stance on digital assets. Sparkassen had previously been against the retail trading of cryptocurrencies due to concerns about price volatility and losses by investors.
The group is still pushing traditional securities and savings products as a way to build up long-term wealth, even with the introduction of cryptocurrency trading.
Cover image via depositphotos.com Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.
Today, the Solana network recorded a historic high: the number of addresses holding tokenized stocks soared to 1.4 million, according to Blockworks data. Fresh on-chain statistics, however, have revealed a deep structural split in the market. While retail investors, amid this unprecedented boom, are aggressively buying up Apple and Tesla shares, large players are in no hurry to take risks and are parking billions in stablecoins and U.S. Treasuries.
1.4 million addresses now hold stocks on Solana https://t.co/0WF8QZfsjz
— Solana (@solana) October 19, 2026 Back in June, the number of stockholders on Solana barely exceeded 500,000, but a powerful influx of users in recent weeks has made the blockchain the absolute leader in the RWA category. The reason for the boom is simple: round-the-clock access. Traditional Wall Street closes on Friday evening, but on the blockchain trading goes on nonstop: up to 65% of tokenized stock trading volume is now conducted outside the standard working hours of U.S. exchanges.
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People are massively using digital versions of Nvidia (NVDAx), Apple, and Tesla shares, as well as stakes in SpaceX, as collateral in DeFi protocols, forcing classic securities to play by the aggressive rules of the crypto market.
A million people are there. But where are the billions?Despite the impressive figure of 1.4 million wallets, the real financial weight of this retail segment is still modest. Capital within Solana is distributed unevenly:
Stablecoins: the network's main safe, holding $14.6 billion.
U.S. Treasuries: a reliable instrument worth $1.5 billion.
Tokenized stocks: a modest $485.2 million.
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While retail provides the blockchain with loud headlines, big capital is bypassing the stock market. Large players use the network exclusively as cheap transport for conservative instruments from Ondo and Securitize. In the global ranking of tokenized stock platforms (the entire market is valued at $3.42 billion), the bStocks platform ($1.2 billion, BNB Chain) leads, while the xStocks project, two-thirds of whose liquidity is tied to Solana, takes third place with a volume of $582 million.
At the same time, Solana's main challenge now lies in the operational plane. Serving 1.4 million active addresses is demanding: the real stress test for the infrastructure will be the first mass processing of corporate actions (dividend payments, splits, and shareholder votes), which require hundreds of thousands of simultaneous transactions.
Issuers are trying to solve the problem with the new regulated Token-2022 standard, but only the first large payouts will show the real resilience of this solution.
While the RWA sector celebrates its victory, the network's native token has ignored this triumph: the price of SOL remains squeezed in a $100–$107 corridor due to capital outflows from spot ETFs. It seems that while the ecosystem is building the rails of the finance of the future, exchange speculators simply haven't noticed.
The Solana blockchain has surpassed a significant milestone, recording 1.4 million addresses holding tokenized stocks, according to data from Blockworks. This surge establishes Solana as the leading blockchain for real-world assets (RWA), particularly in tokenized equities, outpacing previous figures which stood just above 500,000 stockholders in June.
Retail adoption drives tokenized stock boomRecent on-chain analysis highlights a dramatic influx of retail users, many of whom have rushed to purchase digital versions of popular stocks like Apple and Tesla. Investors are drawn by Solana’s around-the-clock trading, which provides access to markets even when traditional exchanges are closed for the weekend. Up to 65% of the tokenized stock trading volume now occurs outside regular U.S. stock market hours, marking a clear shift in investor behavior.
Round-the-clock trading on Solana has attracted retail investors in record numbers, enabling access to stocks like Apple and Tesla regardless of Wall Street’s operating hours.
In addition to stocks from major tech firms, digital stakes in companies such as SpaceX are increasingly being used as collateral within various decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols. This trend is aligning traditional assets with the dynamic strategies typical of the cryptocurrency market.
Mini dictionary: RWA (Real-World Assets) refers to the tokenization of physical or traditional financial assets, such as stocks or bonds, on a blockchain, allowing these to be traded digitally and integrated into DeFi platforms.
Institutional capital focuses on stability over stocksDespite the rapid growth in individual wallet numbers, the overall value of tokenized stocks on Solana remains relatively limited. Capital distribution on the network is heavily weighted toward more conservative assets:
Asset TypeValue HeldStablecoins$14.6 billionU.S. Treasuries$1.5 billionTokenized Stocks$485.2 millionWhile retail investors are driving much of the platform’s visibility, large capital holders have shown caution. They primarily use Solana as a cost-efficient network to transfer stablecoins and tokenized U.S. Treasuries, particularly through projects like Ondo and Securitize—both acting as intermediaries for institutional digital assets.
Among global platforms specializing in tokenized stocks, bStocks on BNB Chain holds the top position with $1.2 billion in assets. xStocks, of which two-thirds of the liquidity resides in Solana, ranks third globally with $582 million in value, illustrating Solana’s prominent but not dominant role in the sector.
Mini dictionary: Ondo and Securitize are platforms that facilitate the tokenization of traditional financial assets, like U.S. Treasuries, enabling institutions to access and issue these assets on blockchains such as Solana.
Network faces scalability test as adoption acceleratesThe rapid increase in participants poses a technical challenge for Solana. Supporting 1.4 million active addresses requires substantial infrastructure, and the network is set to undergo its first major operational test when large-scale corporate actions—such as dividend distributions, stock splits, and shareholder voting—are processed in bulk. These actions will demand the simultaneous execution of hundreds of thousands of transactions.
To address this, issuers have begun implementing the regulated Token-2022 standard, but the true effectiveness of this upgrade will become evident only after the first mass payouts under the new system.
Issuers believe the Token-2022 standard will improve transaction handling capacity, though its resilience will be tested with the first large-scale corporate actions.
SOL price remains subdued amid ecosystem advancesDespite rapid adoption in real-world asset tokenization, Solana’s native token, SOL, has shown little price movement. SOL continues to trade within a range of $100 to $107, pressured by ongoing capital outflows from spot ETFs. While infrastructure for next-generation finance expands on the blockchain, activity in the spot market remains largely unaffected by these advancements.
Not financial or tax advice. PANews content is strictly educational and informational and is not investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, legal advice, or a solicitation to buy or sell any digital asset, security, or financial product. Do your own research and consult qualified advisers.
Disclosure. PANews may publish sponsored content, partner content, advertisements, affiliate links, event promotions, and market commentary involving Web3 projects, service providers, or financial products. PANews personnel, contributors, or affiliates may hold digital assets or other interests related to covered topics. See our Terms of Service.
SkyAI has sold its entire Solana treasury and launched a cash tender offer worth up to $201.3 million, offering shareholders $3 per share despite a major investor’s demand for a higher price.
Summary
$223.8 million in reported cash will fund an offer worth up to $201.3 million. 95% of each eligible share and warrant class is covered by the tender offer. $3 per share remains below Bastion Trading’s requested price of at least $3.50. Oct. 29 is the stated expiration date, unless the company changes the offer. SkyAI’s Oct. 19 announcement says the Nasdaq-listed company held $223.8 million in cash as of Oct. 16, when the offer began, and no longer owned any SOL.
SkyAI’s Solana sales remove the $100 price condition In its latest announcement, SkyAI said the offer no longer depends on SOL’s price because it has completed its token sales. The company had initially planned a condition requiring Solana to stay above $100 during the offer period.
According to the announcement, existing cash will cover accepted securities and transaction expenses, without borrowing or a financing condition. Full participation up to the stated limits would require approximately $201.3 million.
Subtracting that maximum purchase amount from reported cash leaves roughly $22.5 million before transaction fees, expenses, and other changes in cash. The proposed purchases would consume approximately 90% of the disclosed balance, based on those rounded figures.
SkyAI’s Oct. 14 SEC-filed update provides more detail on the preceding sales. At that point, the company reported $204.6 million in cash and approximately 210,000 locked SOL, while saying it intended to sell the remaining tokens.
The update said recent disposals included both liquid and locked SOL, sold at an average of $107.51 per token after fees through BitGo, Anchorage and Coinbase. SkyAI named the service providers involved but did not identify the ultimate buyers in that update.
Comparing the two disclosed cash snapshots shows a $19.2 million difference between Oct. 14 and Oct. 16. That calculation alone does not establish the proceeds received for the final 210,000 SOL, because it does not account for any other cash movements during the period.
Bastion has sought $3.50 and an independent review Bastion Trading, which said it and its affiliates beneficially owned approximately 9.99% of SkyAI’s outstanding common stock, challenged the proposed transaction in an Oct. 14 statement.
The investor requested a price of at least $3.50 per share or eligible warrant, independent oversight of the tender process, and a public review of the SOL disposals. Its requested price is 16.7% above the $3 share offer.
Bastion called the sales a “fundamental departure” from the previously disclosed treasury strategy. It sought transaction dates, quantities, realized prices, costs, and details of board approval, and said it would not participate unless its concerns were satisfactorily addressed.
The statement requested that strategic advisor warrants be excluded and that insiders refrain from tendering. Bastion’s fairness objections remain the investor’s position, not findings by a regulator or court.
The Block reported on Oct. 14 that all five incumbent directors had received more withhold votes than votes in favor at the September shareholder meeting, but retained their seats because investors had no option to vote to remove them.
Its report described a roughly 400,000 SOL difference between the balance in SkyAI’s initial buyback announcement and the lower balance in a subsequent filing. Bastion sought an explanation for that change.
September filings described a staking-funded treasury strategy SkyAI’s Sept. 14 proxy materials said it held more than 2 million SOL as its primary treasury reserve asset, with nearly all the tokens staked through institutional validators.
At the time, management said revenue from the strategy was intended to fund treasury operations, corporate expenses, and research and development. The filing reported more than $12 million in staking revenue, net of validator commissions, from the strategy’s August 2025 launch through June 30, 2026.
The September statement followed an independent committee’s rejection of an unsolicited, nonbinding all-stock acquisition proposal from Forward Industries. SkyAI said its committee and board believed the proposal was not in shareholders’ best interests.
Earlier crypto.news coverage described SkyAI’s initial plan to repurchase shares and warrants after disclosing the sale of roughly 1 million SOL. The Oct. 12 report distinguished company-confirmed disposals from exchange transfers identified by blockchain analysts, which did not independently establish completed sales.
Forward Industries reported in July that it had bought over 500,000 SOL during its fiscal third quarter, taking its holdings to 7.55 million SOL as of June 30. The company put its average acquisition price for those purchases near $79 per token.
In September, Forward said it completed a stock offering that raised $25 million in gross proceeds, with the financing intended to expand its Solana treasury. The transaction involved 3,125,000 common shares sold to an institutional investor.
SEC documents set separate limits for shares and warrants SkyAI’s Schedule TO covers up to 48,311,489 common shares, 4,880,734 cash pre-funded warrants, 9,939,850 cryptocurrency pre-funded warrants and 3,955,293 strategic warrants.
The filing sets a $3 share price and deducts the $0.0001 exercise price for eligible warrants, giving a payment of $2.9999 per warrant before applicable withholding taxes. Together, the listed limits cover 67,087,366 securities.
The Offer to Purchase says the SOL liquidation finished Oct. 15 and describes the company’s focus on an AI finance platform. It warns that brokers may impose earlier participation deadlines than the formal expiration time, set at one minute after 11:59 p.m. New York City time on Oct. 29.
According to the offer document, the board has authorized the transaction but makes no recommendation on whether holders should tender. Participation is voluntary, and eligible holders may withdraw tendered securities before the offer expires.
SkyAI (SKYA), a technology firm listed on Nasdaq and formerly known as Sharps Technology, has fully exited its Solana (SOL) holdings, converting its position into roughly $223.8 million in cash. This completed sale represents a sharp shift from the company’s previous cryptocurrency-focused treasury strategy, which had included over two million SOL—making it one of the largest corporate SOL holders among public companies in September.
SkyAI Sells 2 Million SOL as $201 Million Buyback BeginsBy early October, SkyAI began unwinding its Solana position. On October 11, filings indicated it sold around one million SOL. Additional disclosures revealed its SOL reserves had dropped to about 600,000, then to 210,000 by October 14. As of October 16, the company confirmed it held no Solana, with the sales wrapped up by October 15 according to tender documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Previously, SkyAI had used institutional custodians and a Coinbase validator to manage its treasury. The company disclosed an average realized selling price of $107.51 per SOL, net of fees, for transactions completed prior to October 14. However, it clarified that this average does not represent the price achieved across the entire liquidation process.
The company’s pivot stands in stark contrast to other public digital asset strategies, as several crypto-related firms continue to increase their crypto reserves amid market volatility.
SkyAI’s complete sale of its SOL positions marks a rare move among publicly traded companies, as many peers continued to embrace digital assets despite price fluctuations.
Mini dictionary: Solana (SOL), a high-performance blockchain platform known for its rapid transaction speeds and low fees, has been a popular reserve asset for some tech-focused public companies, though it also carries high volatility risk.
After its full exit from Solana, SkyAI announced a major cash tender offer to repurchase up to $201.3 million of its own shares and warrants at $3 per security. The buyback, which can cover up to 95% of each eligible class, is set to run until October 29 unless adjusted.
The company plans to finance this buyback entirely from its existing cash on hand, without additional debt. If fully executed, the buyback would leave SkyAI with a cash balance of about $22.5 million before accounting for transaction costs, resulting in a sizeable reduction in capital reserves.
Previously, SkyAI had set a condition requiring SOL to remain above $100 during the tender period. With its SOL holdings now liquidated, this stipulation has been removed.
ItemBefore SelloffAfter SelloffSOL Holdings2,000,000+ SOL0Cash HoldingsLower (undisclosed)$223.8 millionShare Buyback MaximumN/A$201.3 millionThe announcement has drawn criticism from Bastion Trading, an institutional shareholder that owns nearly 10% of SkyAI’s common stock. Bastion is advocating for a higher buyback price of no less than $3.50 per share, a review of the Solana sales, and changes to SkyAI’s board structure. The group also questioned whether the corporate actions sufficiently protect shareholder interests.
Bastion Trading has challenged the terms of the buyback, arguing for greater transparency regarding the SOL liquidation and demanding improved board oversight.
What SkyAI’s Exit Means for Solana Treasury CompaniesSkyAI’s strategy shift comes as other public firms, such as Forward Industries, continue to increase their exposure to Solana despite substantial price swings. Forward Industries has previously reported unrealized losses from retaining SOL on the balance sheet, underlining the risks associated with large cryptocurrency reserves for publicly listed entities.
Differing from industry peers, SkyAI is transitioning toward an artificial intelligence-driven financial services platform, focusing on blockchain-enabled data products and digital financial solutions. The company has not indicated plans to resume investments in Solana or other cryptocurrencies as treasury assets.
This move follows a period when holding cryptocurrencies in corporate treasuries was promoted as a shareholder value proposition, despite examples such as Upexi registering significant losses tied to digital asset volatility.
THORChain is preparing to switch Rujira back on. The protocol’s v3.21 network upgrade is designed to patch the vulnerability that froze Rujira’s App Layer in late September. If node operators sign off, trading, lending and automated trading services are expected to resume.
The fix targets block height 28,366,100. That block is estimated to land on October 23, 2026, between 13:40 and 15:20 UTC.
What broke, and what gets fixed The problem sat inside the Rujira FIN contract, part of THORChain’s App Layer. An exploit detected on September 26 allowed unauthorized transfers of a concentrated liquidity position. That position belonged to the Rujira team.
The response came fast. On September 27, 2026, the App Layer was paused in coordination with THORChain node operators. No user funds were lost in the exploit, according to the findings.
The v3.21 upgrade is the patch. Once it activates and node operators approve, the halted Rujira products are set to come back online. The upgrade also restores support for SOL and ZEC trading, limit swaps and bRUNE staking.
The grace period gamble To address that, Rujira plans to request a conditional 24-hour liquidation grace period. It would apply to credit positions with a loan-to-value ratio above 100% that face liquidation when services resume.
An LTV above 100% means the loan is now worth more than the collateral backing it. Under normal rules, those positions would be first in line for liquidation the instant the system restarts.
The proposed window gives those borrowers a day to top up collateral or unwind positions. The word “conditional” is doing real work here. The grace period is a proposal that Rujira intends to put forward, not a guarantee.
Why the restart matters THORChain’s pitch has always been native cross-chain swaps without wrapped tokens. Rujira extends that idea into a fuller app layer with trading, lending and automated strategies built on top of the base protocol.
SOL and ZEC trading broadens the assets available on the platform. Limit swaps let traders set a target price instead of taking whatever the market offers. bRUNE staking gives RUNE holders another way to put tokens to work inside the ecosystem.
What this means for users and traders Borrowers are the group with the most at stake in the first hours. Anyone holding a position above 100% LTV should treat the restart window as a deadline, not a suggestion. If the grace period is approved, it buys time. If it isn’t, liquidations could hit as soon as services resume.
Rujira caught the exploit, paused within a day, avoided user losses and shipped a targeted fix.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
THORChain has paused native Zcash swaps after a bug cut into the bonds of the operators who run its network. Onchain records show about 140 RUNE deducted from 18 node accounts.
The protocol says no user or vault funds were lost. The people who absorbed the damage were the node operators, which is roughly the outcome a bonded security model is built to deliver.
What broke, and who paid
The trouble traced back to how THORChain matches outbound ZEC transactions. An outbound transaction is the protocol sending coins back out of its vaults to a user once a swap settles, and that matching step is where the bug sat.
Something in that process went wrong, and the network treated it as a vault slash, penalizing the nodes responsible for it.
The incident occurred around October 19, 2026. The penalty came out of bonds, the RUNE that node operators lock up as collateral for the privilege of running the network.
Swappers came out clean. THORChain stated that user and vault funds were untouched, so anyone holding liquidity or trading through the protocol did not lose money because of this.
ZEC swaps will stay frozen until a fix arrives in the v3.21 network upgrade. That upgrade is expected around block height ~28,366,100, which lands on October 23, 2026.
A fresh integration hits its first snag
Native ZEC support on THORChain is very new. The liquidity pool launched on October 2, 2026, and a soft launch brought full swap functionality online by October 7-8, 2026.
So the halt arrived less than two weeks after swaps went live.
The integration supports transparent UTXOs and Zcash’s NU6.3 upgrade. Transparent UTXOs are the publicly visible side of Zcash, which works much like Bitcoin’s accounting model, as opposed to the shielded transactions that give Zcash its privacy reputation.
Instead of minting synthetic IOUs on another chain, THORChain holds real coins in decentralized vaults and moves them directly between networks, removing the bridge-and-wrapper layer that has caused so much grief across DeFi.
The second disruption this month
The ZEC halt is not THORChain’s only October headache. On October 9, Tether temporarily blacklisted approximately 1.45 million USDT spread across four of THORChain’s TRON vaults.
That freeze disrupted related swaps and liquidity provision actions for around three hours.
The two incidents have different causes. The Tether episode came from an outside issuer exercising its power to freeze funds, while the ZEC problem came from THORChain’s own code.
What this means for RUNE, ZEC, and the protocol
The most important detail for users is the one that did not happen. No user funds were lost, and the losses that did occur fell on bonded operators, which is how the system is supposed to absorb faults.
For node operators, the episode is a reminder that their bond carries real risk. A software bug, rather than malicious behavior, triggered this slash.
The things to watch are concrete. First, whether v3.21 ships around block height ~28,366,100 on October 23, 2026, as expected. Second, whether ZEC swaps come back without further slashes. Third, whether THORChain shares more detail on what went wrong in outbound matching.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
Stablecoin payouts for prop firms are where trader trust is won or lost. A fast, correct payout gets screenshotted and shared. A slow or missing one ends up on review sites and in Discord, and prospective traders read both before they buy a challenge.
This guide covers what payout ops look like at many firms today, how a single screened and verified payout flow works, and how stablecoin payouts compare with card and bank payouts.
How WalletConnect Wallet Verification worksWhat payout ops often look like todayFor many firms, a single payout (or profit split, or reward, depending on what you call it) touches several tools and people. An address is pasted from a support ticket. Someone screens it in a separate tool. Someone else sends it, then chases the transaction hash for the records. Every handoff adds time and another chance for a mistake.
Stablecoin payouts vs card and bank payouts
One payout flow, start to finish
Why verification belongs in the payout stepStablecoin and crypto payouts are final, so the check has to happen before funds move. Wallet verification replaces a pasted address with a wallet the trader connects and signs with, which removes copy-paste errors and gives you a record if a trader later says the payout went to the wrong wallet.
Fewer tickets, cleaner recordsWhen screening, verification, sending, and reconciliation happen in one flow, there are fewer handoffs to break. Support spends less time answering "where's my payout," and finance has a complete record of every payout without stitching it together from several tools.
Pay-ins on the same platformThe same platform handles challenge payments, so traders use one familiar flow from checkout to payout. See stablecoin checkout for prop firms.
FAQ
They reach the trader in minutes, compared with the days card and bank payouts can take.
Which wallets can we pay traders out to?Any of 700+ wallets on the WalletConnect network, across every major chain.
Can we choose the payout currency?Yes. You set the stablecoin or crypto you pay out in.
Is sanctions screening included?Yes. Destination addresses are screened against OFAC sanctions lists before the payout executes, with the result returned to your systems.
How does wallet verification work on payouts?Before the payout is sent, the trader connects the destination wallet and signs in one click to confirm they're in control of it. You get the signed record back.
Cover image via depositphotos.com Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.
Shiba Inu is buying and selling close to $0.00000503, and the on-chain data indicates that only a few holders are shifting tokens off exchanges. Only 538 withdrawal transactions were recorded in the latest reading. For a token with such a large community, this is a very small number.
Shiba Inu outflows aren't what they seemWithdrawals are higher than deposits by count, which is a small positive sign. But the amounts matter more than the number of transactions. Exchange inflow stands at 247.06 billion SHIB, while outflow is 183.58 billion SHIB.
SHIB/USDT Chart by TradingViewThis leaves a net inflow of 63.49 billion SHIB. In simple terms, more coins are coming into exchanges than leaving them. This is mostly a bearish signal, because tokens on exchanges can be sold quickly.
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The netflow did drop 5.42% in the last 24 hours, so the pressure is easing, but it has not yet turned positive for buyers. The exchange reserve is 87.11 trillion SHIB and grew by 0.07% in a day.
Barely any withdraweesA growing reserve means holders are not shifting their coins to private wallets. Long-term holders commonly withdraw tokens when they anticipate higher prices, and that is not happening right now.
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The chart indicates the same weak mood. SHIB dropped from the $0.00000600 region in early October and found support near $0.00000480. It has since produced a small green candle, but the move is weak. Volume is low, and the RSI sits near 40, which indicates sellers still have greater control.
The first resistance is the orange moving average near $0.00000526. Above it, the blue line sits near $0.00000534, and the black line near $0.00000560 is the main barrier. SHIB has to climb above these levels to show real strength. If buyers fail to defend $0.00000480, the price may slide toward $0.00000460.
For a stronger recovery, SHIB needs two things: more withdrawals from exchanges and higher volume on green days. Until then, the small number of buyers taking tokens off exchanges indicates that confidence is still low.
Shiba Inu, a popular Ethereum-based meme coin with a large online community, is currently trading around $0.00000503. Recent on-chain data suggests that only a limited number of holders are moving SHIB tokens off centralized exchanges. The latest data recorded just 538 withdrawal transactions over a recent period, a notably low figure for such a widely held token.
Exchange activity and net flowsWhile the total count of withdrawals exceeds deposits, the overall amounts involved point in a different direction. Exchanges observed inflows of 247.06 billion SHIB, while outflows reached only 183.58 billion SHIB.
MetricValueTotal exchange inflow247.06 billion SHIBTotal exchange outflow183.58 billion SHIBNet inflow63.49 billion SHIBExchange reserve87.11 trillion SHIBAs a result, exchanges saw a net inflow of 63.49 billion SHIB. When more tokens move to exchanges than leave, this typically signals bearish sentiment, as those tokens are easily available for sale. During the last 24 hours, netflow decreased by 5.42%, indicating some relief in selling pressure. However, this trend has not fully reversed in favor of buyers.
Exchange reserves currently hold 87.11 trillion SHIB, up 0.07% in the latest daily reading. An increase in these reserves generally indicates that holders are not moving their assets to private wallets.
Price levels, technical signals, and market moodTraders often shift their tokens off exchanges when expecting price appreciation in the medium or long term. The recent data shows this behavior is not common at present, suggesting caution among SHIB holders.
Shiba Inu’s price chart mirrors these on-chain trends. After declining from the $0.00000600 region in early October, SHIB found support just above $0.00000480. Although a small recovery followed, the move has been subdued, with low trading volume and a relative strength index (RSI) near 40. This technical reading suggests selling pressure still dominates the market.
For the price to demonstrate stronger momentum, SHIB must clear several resistance points. The orange moving average offers initial resistance at $0.00000526, followed by the blue line near $0.00000534 and then the black line at $0.00000560, which represents a key barrier. If buyers cannot maintain the $0.00000480 support level, the price could decline further toward $0.00000460.
A solid recovery for Shiba Inu would require an uptick in both withdrawal volumes and trading activity during price rallies. For now, the low number of withdrawal transactions points to continued uncertainty and cautious sentiment among token holders.
Although SHIB withdrawals outnumber deposits by transaction count, exchange inflow continues to surpass outflow in total volume, resulting in a net inflow that reflects bearish sentiment as more tokens remain on exchanges.
Michaël van de Poppe just set his Ethereum price prediction at $25,000 this cycle, and we checked his numbers. Crypto News: Pepeto Passes $11.2 Million While Ethereum Price Prediction at $25,000. Michaël van de Poppe now puts his Ethereum price prediction at $25,000 for this cycle, with stops at $15,000 and $20,000 along the way,.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Oct. 19, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
Pepeto has officially announced its presale passing $11.2 million, and no new crypto in this week's crypto news gets more attention. 43,000 holders are in, each stage selling out quicker than the last, and traders calling it the next Shiba Inu of 2026. These buyers watched tiny early SHIB buys on this chain turn into money that bought houses, and they are spotting the same opportunity here again.
Ethereum, the chain Pepeto is built on, adds the second reason. Michaël van de Poppe just set his Ethereum price prediction at $25,000 this cycle, and we checked his numbers. The article breaks down this prediction in detail, and gets into Pepeto to see why it is gaining this viral attention as the next Shiba Inu breakout of the year.
Crypto News: Pepeto Passes $11.2 Million While Ethereum Price Prediction at $25,000
Pepeto announced the milestone during Ethereum’s best news run this year, and it matters because Pepeto lives on Ethereum, and when the chain gets stronger, everything on it rises. Michaël van de Poppe now puts his Ethereum price prediction at $25,000 for this cycle, with stops at $15,000 and $20,000 along the way, (Source: The Coin Republic). Here is why, in simple terms. ETH hit its record near $4,878 in November 2021 and only passed it by a little in August 2025, so it spent close to four years moving sideways, the longest flat stretch of any major crypto. And here is what most people miss: during that quiet phase, whales buy while everyone else gets bored and sells.
The proof is on chain: 1.5 million ETH is waiting to be locked up for staking. Whales are putting coins away for years, not selling them, and institutions keep buying while ETH holds near $2,374. These wallets do not lock up millions of ETH to lose.
But from $2,374, even $25,000 is a 10x, and a coin already worth hundreds of billions in market cap moves slowly, because every double needs oceans of new money. Strong, yes. Fast, no.
Ethereum’s life-changing money went to those who bought it early and cheap, and the meme coins born on it repeated the rule: Shiba Inu launched without a single product and still turned early buyers into millionaires on community power. Every cycle, that early chance lands on one new name.
New Crypto Pepeto Follows Shiba Inu Success, With a Real Platform Underneath
Shiba Inu's story shows why missing this new crypto could turn into a big regret. SHIB started in August 2020 as a pure hype token on Ethereum. It launched with no tools, yet its community alone made it a crypto giant by October 2021, and the people who bought before the crowd made millions in returns. It was all about the timing: every life-changing SHIB story began while the token was cheap, unknown, and not yet on big exchanges.
Put Pepeto next to that story point by point and it matches. Same chain, Ethereum. Same engine, a meme community growing on word of mouth alone, 43,000 holders deep. Same stage, still unlisted and still cheap. Then come the differences, all favoring Pepeto: a zero-fee exchange built, a bridge linking Ethereum with BNB Chain and Solana, an AI scanner screening every token.
One presale analyst, after reviewing hundreds of launches, told a crypto news desk plainly: the first token since Shiba Inu to show viral growth and a working trading platform at the same time. Shiba Inu had only the first of those and still hit a $41 billion market cap.
Conclusion
Pepeto announced its $11.2 million milestone just as everything around it turned positive. A top analyst now backs the $25,000 Ethereum price prediction, and that is big news for every project built on Ethereum, because when Ethereum rises, the money flows into the smaller tokens on its chain, and a small token needs far less money to multiply than a chain already worth hundreds of billions.
That is why every past Ethereum rally lifted its meme coins many times more than ETH itself. Pepeto adds one more reason: Ethereum's biggest problem is that it is busy and expensive to use, and Pepeto fixes exactly that.
The big wallets in this presale are set up for returns as big as Shiba Inu's, and smart money buys on research small traders never see. Getting in early with them is how people win in crypto.
For more information about Pepeto (PEPETO): Website: Official Pepeto Website, where what remains of the current stage is visible.
FAQs
Where does the Ethereum price prediction land this cycle?
Michaël van de Poppe holds the strongest Ethereum price prediction, $25,000 this cycle with steps at $15,000 and $20,000, per The Coin Republic, roughly 10x above today’s $2,374.
Is Pepeto really the next Shiba Inu on Ethereum?
Pepeto shows Shiba Inu's early profile on Ethereum, viral growth before listing, plus the zero-fee exchange, a bridge, and an AI scanner SHIB never built, $11.2 million raised, 43,000 holders.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this press release is not a solicitation for investment, nor is it intended as investment advice, financial advice, or trading advice. Investing involves risk, including the potential loss of capital. It is strongly recommended you practice due diligence, including consultation with a professional financial advisor, before investing in or trading cryptocurrency and securities. Neither the media platform nor the publisher shall be held responsible for any fraudulent activities, misrepresentations, or financial losses arising from the content of this press release.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by our writers are their own and do not represent the views of U.Today. The financial and market information provided on U.Today is intended for informational purposes only. U.Today is not liable for any financial losses incurred while trading cryptocurrencies. Conduct your own research by contacting financial experts before making any investment decisions. We believe that all content is accurate as of the date of publication, but certain offers mentioned may no longer be available.
Shiba Inu's daily burn rate has jumped 2,349%, but the real figure behind the surge remains surprising. Despite the sharp rise, the total value of Shiba Inu tokens burned during the reported period amounted to just about $5.
According to the Shibburn page, Shiba Inu burn activity rose 2,349% in the last 24 hours, with 1.10 million SHIB burned in the timeframe, amounting to just $5 in monetary terms. This highlights how a relatively small number of token burns can produce a striking percentage increase when activity in the preceding period is low.
The burn rate alone does not reveal how many tokens were destroyed. If there was little or no burning in the prior period, a small transaction can cause a large percentage increase.
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Here, the reported $5 of burned SHIB suggests that the growth is due to a large percentage change rather than a large drop in Shiba Inu's total supply.
The weekly burn rate was down 83.47% with 79.85 million SHIB burned in the last 7 days; meanwhile, the monthly burn rate was up 84.73% with 749.93 million SHIB burned in the last 30 days.
SHIB price actionAt the time of writing, Shiba Inu was up 2.33% in the last 24 hours to $0.000005, rebounding following a three-day drop towards the weekend.
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The crypto market fell in the past week as investors considered inflation concerns. Last week's strong inflation data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed wholesale prices rising 6.3% annually last month in the biggest jump since 2022 and consumer costs up 3.7% annually in September, beating estimates.
Weekend selling hit altcoins hard as fear from equities spilled into crypto, with most altcoins recording losses in one of the largest weekend drops since April. SHIB, for instance, is down 6.58% in the last seven days. Since the BTC low in June, buying on Friday and selling on Sunday has been profitable.
With the Federal Reserve's next interest rate decision due Oct. 28, traders are now pricing in a probability above 85% that the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee will leave borrowing costs unchanged.
As XRP continues to show mixed price action after multiple weeks of extreme volatility, the latest onchain data from crypto analytics platform CryptoQuant shows that XRP reserves across all major exchanges have remained substantially high.
While the metric has drawn attention from market participants, analysts reveal that the surge in XRP supply indicates that traders are reducing leveraged positions while the amount of XRP held across exchanges remains unusually high.
Nearly 12 billion XRP still available for salePer the data, the aggregate XRP exchange reserves have surged to 11.81 billion tokens as of October 17, nearing the highest levels recorded over the last year.
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This means that the available supply of XRP across all exchanges has yet to reach its highest level of the year, but it remains unusually high.
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While the massive surge in XRP reserves has come as its price struggles to recover from its recent decline, market participants are beginning to raise questions about whether the growing exchange supply could have been fueled by selling pressure.
Nonetheless, this provides a bearish outlook for XRP, especially at a time when the broader crypto market is facing a major downtrend.
XRP OI on Binance Drops by 15.8%The data further showed that the rise in XRP exchange reserves coincides with a notable reduction in leveraged trading activity on Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume.
As of October 17, the Binance XRP open interest stood at $453 million, marking a decline of 15.8% from $538.1 million recorded on October 4.
This suggests that interest in the XRP derivatives market has decreased as traders close or liquidate positions.
Shiba Inu’s daily burn rate soared 2,349% in the past day, yet the total value of tokens burned amounted to just $5, according to data compiled by Shibburn, a tracking platform dedicated to monitoring SHIB token burns.
Spike in daily burn activityOver the past 24 hours, SHIB holders destroyed 1.10 million tokens, but the sharp percentage spike reflects the extremely low level of burning activity previously rather than a meaningful reduction in supply.
Despite the significant percentage increase in the burn rate, approximately $5 worth of SHIB was destroyed, highlighting that large changes in percentage figures can result from small changes in absolute numbers when baseline activity is low.
Such dynamics can create the impression of dramatic changes when previous token destruction volumes were minimal. In the context of cryptocurrency, token burns reduce the supply by sending coins to an address from which they cannot be retrieved.
Mini dictionary: Shibburn, a blockchain-based data platform that tracks Shiba Inu token burns across multiple wallets and networks, providing real-time updates and historic statistics for SHIB supply reduction.
Weekly and monthly burn totalsIn the last seven days, SHIB burn activity fell 83.47%, with around 79.85 million tokens destroyed. Over the past month, the burn rate improved by 84.73%, as nearly 749.93 million SHIB were sent to burn addresses during the 30-day period.
PeriodBurn Rate ChangeSHIB BurnedDaily+2,349%1.10 millionWeekly-83.47%79.85 millionMonthly+84.73%749.93 millionWhile the daily rate spiked, the larger timeframe data shows fluctuating activity and points to the relatively minor impact of short-term burns when measured against the overall supply.
Market price and trading trendsSHIB’s market price rose 2.33% over the last 24 hours to $0.000005, marking a rebound after a three-day pullback. Nevertheless, the token remains down 6.58% over the past week as a broader downturn weighed on major altcoins.
Weekend trading proved volatile, as losses in equities spilled over into crypto, leading to some of the steepest weekend sell-offs since April and leaving most altcoins in the red.
Notably, buying Bitcoin at Friday lows and selling by Sunday would have been advantageous since its June trough, underlining a pattern of weekend-driven volatility within the sector. Shiba Inu, one of the largest meme-inspired tokens, has closely tracked the movements of other leading altcoins during these swings.
Broader market outlookInvestors navigated inflation pressures last week, after the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported wholesale prices had jumped 6.3% in annual terms, the largest increase since 2022. Additionally, consumer prices rose 3.7% year-on-year in September, surpassing analyst expectations and intensifying inflation concerns in financial markets.
Investors watched inflation data closely, as the Federal Reserve approaches its next interest rate decision, with market participants pricing in an over 85% chance that the Federal Open Market Committee will maintain current borrowing costs.
The upcoming Federal Reserve meeting, scheduled for October 28, remains a focal point for traders as monetary policy signals could influence both traditional and digital asset markets.
A new hard-fork of bitcoin called eCash is expected to go live by the end of the month, providing new features and modernizing a blockchain that has seen only sporadic changes since its inception nearly 20 years ago. In a note, analysts with CoinDesk say that eCash (ECX) will activate seven new sidechains for users that opt in.
"eCash brings an app platform to Bitcoin, with seven sidechains going live at mainnet launch, from payments and privacy to prediction markets, identity and tokens," says CoinDesk. The fork will take place at block 973,728, says CoinDesk, crediting users with eCash tokens on a 1:1 basis with whatever bitcoin they hold. Bitcoin is up 1.2% to $81,878. ([email protected])
Trust Wallet just got lighter. The self-custody app says it has removed nine years of accumulated code, shrinking the app by 200 MB.
The company isn’t done, either. More code cuts are planned, which suggests this is the opening act of a longer cleanup, not a one-off spring clean.
What Trust Wallet actually removed The October 19, 2026 announcement covered legacy code, outdated technology stacks and unnecessary dependencies. Those three categories add up to roughly 200 MB of reclaimed space.
Trust Wallet describes the work as “behind-the-scenes” refactoring. Refactoring means restructuring existing code without changing what the app does for the user. The wallet should behave the same. It just carries less baggage under the hood.
CEO Felix Fan pointed to further optimizations aimed at performance and efficiency. He also offered a memorable description of what it’s like to rework a live product used by millions.
“Making jet engine changes in-flight.”
For reference, around mid-October 2026, before the optimization work, the Android version of the app sat at about 160 MB. The iOS version was around 250 MB.
The second round of trimming this fall The code purge is not happening in isolation. On September 15, 2026, Trust Wallet dropped native support for 25 lower-activity blockchain networks.
The stated goal was to let the company focus its engineering resources more tightly. Fewer networks to maintain means fewer integrations to update, test and secure.
Crucially, users on those networks were not locked out of their funds. Assets stay accessible through recovery phrases, the string of words that acts as the master key to a self-custody wallet.
Nine years of technical debt Trust Wallet has a long history by crypto standards. Binance acquired it in 2018, and it has kept growing since.
The app now supports over 100 blockchains. It also claims more than 200 million downloads, a user base that makes any structural change high stakes.
What this means for users and the wallet market For everyday users, the most obvious benefit is practical. A smaller app takes up less storage and could load and update faster, which matters on older phones or devices with limited space.
The security angle may be the more important one. In general, less code means fewer places for bugs to hide. Security researchers call this the attack surface, the total set of entry points an attacker could probe. Every outdated dependency is a potential weak link, and removing unused ones could reduce risk without users lifting a finger.
The trade-off showed up in September. Users of the 25 dropped networks lost native support and had to rely on recovery phrases if they wanted continued access through other tools.
What to watch next is the follow-through. Fan has flagged more optimizations, and the company has promised further code cuts.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Kaye Quema. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
METIS TECHBIO ENTERED STRATEGIC COLLABORATION WITH LILLY
COLLABORATION TO ADVANCE NEXT-GENERATION TISSUE-SPECIFIC LNP DELIVERY TECHNOLOGIES
ELIGIBLE FOR UPFRONT PAYMENT AND UP TO $1.10 BLN IN MILESTONE PAYMENTS
ELIGIBLE FOR SINGLE-DIGIT TIERED ROYALTIES ON ANNUAL NET SALES
Oct 19 (Reuters) - Hong Kong-listed Metis TechBio 7666.HK said on Monday it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Eli Lilly LLY.N worth up to $1.1 billion to research and develop tissue-specific drug delivery technologies.
The Chinese biotech will use its proprietary AI-driven drug-delivery platform to develop next-generation technologies aimed at improving how LNP-based drugs reach target tissues.
Metis will be eligible to receive an upfront payment in the low double-digit millions US dollars and up to about $1.1 billion in development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments.
It will also be eligible for tiered royalties at a single-digit percentage of annual net sales of products that are developed due to the collaboration.
The Chinese biotech will use its proprietary AI-driven ionizable lipid discovery and optimisation platform to develop delivery technologies aimed at improving the targeting and biodistribution of LNP-based therapies.
Metis and Lilly aim to discover and optimise novel LNP architectures that could improve tissue specificity and therapeutic performance, with potential applications across multiple disease areas.
(Reporting by Nikita Maria Jino and Kumar Tanishk in Bengaluru; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
Hong Kong-listed Metis TechBio said on Monday it has entered into a collaboration agreement with Eli Lilly worth up to $1.1 billion to research and develop tissue-specific drug delivery technologies.
The Chinese biotech will use its proprietary AI-driven drug-delivery platform to develop next-generation technologies aimed at improving how LNP-based drugs reach target tissues.
Metis will be eligible to receive an upfront payment in the low double-digit millions US dollars and up to about $1.1 billion in development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments.
It will also be eligible for tiered royalties at a single-digit percentage of annual net sales of products that are developed due to the collaboration.
The Chinese biotech will use its proprietary AI-driven ionizable lipid discovery and optimisation platform to develop delivery technologies aimed at improving the targeting and biodistribution of LNP-based therapies.
Metis and Lilly aim to discover and optimise novel LNP architectures that could improve tissue specificity and therapeutic performance, with potential applications across multiple disease areas.
Metis TechBio has formed a collaboration with Eli Lilly that is potentially worth more than $1 billion to the Hong Kong-listed biotech.
Metis on Monday said the companies will work with to discover novel lipid nanoparticle-based delivery solutions designed to enable tissue-specific delivery of therapeutic modalities.
Metis said it will use its proprietary, AI-driven ionizable lipid discovery and optimization platform to develop delivery technologies with the potential to improve targeting and biodistribution of lipid nanoparticle-based delivery, while Indianapolis drugmaker Eli Lilly will contribute its expertise in drug discovery, development and commercialization.
Metis said it will receive an upfront payment in the low double-digit millions of dollars and will be eligible for up to about $1.1 billion in development, regulatory and commercial milestone payments, along with royalties on product sales.
DeepSeek's $0.75 per 1,000 Search & Fetch calls is 6 to 9 times cheaper than every established retrieval provider — and it introduces a billing model that no frontier lab has adopted for inference.
Lena ParkForkast mind
A production agent running 10,000 search-and-fetch cycles per day would spend $7.50 on DeepSeek’s new APIs. On any established search provider, that same workload costs $50 to $120. The gap is not marginal — it is a different billing model entirely.
DeepSeek’s Search and Fetch APIs, launched October 17 alongside DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017, charge $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests per endpoint. Billing begins at 00:00 Beijing time on November 1 (16:00 UTC on October 31). Until then, calls through DeepSeek Harness, Claude Code, and Codex are free. Each endpoint is capped at 5 requests per second per account, and failed requests, empty results, and timeouts are not billed.
The pricing is per-call, not per-token. That distinction matters because it is the first time any company that ships a frontier model has offered agent tooling at a flat rate per request rather than metering by the volume of text that flows through the system. Every frontier lab — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — still prices model inference by the token. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol runs $5.00 per million input tokens and $30.00 per million output. Anthropic’s Sonnet 5.5 is $2.00 and $10.00. Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro is $1.25 and $10.00. The cost of a single agent step depends on how much text the model consumes and produces, which makes budgeting for high-frequency agentic loops inherently volatile.
Against established retrieval providers, the gap is even wider. Brave Search API charges $5 per 1,000 requests. Exa charges $7 for standard search and $12 for deep search. Tavily ranges from $8 to $16 depending on depth. Perplexity Sonar starts at $5 per 1,000 requests and adds token costs on top. DeepSeek’s $0.75 is 6.7 times cheaper than Brave and 9.3 times cheaper than Exa’s standard tier. This is the same price architecture our prior coverage identified in DeepSeek’s retrieval monetization move — the per-call model is the mechanism that makes the price floor sustainable.
Agents use models differently than humans do. A human chatting with a language model generates a long, variable sequence of tokens per exchange. An agent performing retrieval makes a structured call, receives a bounded result, and moves to the next step. The value of that step is binary: the agent got the information or it did not. Per-call pricing maps to that binary outcome. Per-token pricing does not — it forces the builder to pay for output length even when the retrieval result is a short, fixed-format object. The agent cost stack has been restructuring around exactly this divergence: Google now meters compute directly, factoring prompt complexity and effort, while Orb’s 2026 pricing study of 80 AI agent companies finds 95 percent on hybrid pricing models, with effort, compute, and discrete steps climbing as the primary billing units. Pure outcome pricing remains rare at 3.8 percent and falling.
DeepSeek’s move isolates the retrieval layer as the first component to transition from per-token to per-call. The sandbox and infrastructure layers are already commoditizing — what remains contested is the orchestration and retrieval interface above them. By pricing retrieval at a flat rate per call, DeepSeek is attempting to capture that interface before established providers can respond with their own per-call models.
Whether this pricing model propagates to core inference is the question frontier labs are now watching. The per-token model captures value across the entire lifecycle of a prompt — every input token, every output token, every reasoning step. A flat per-call rate for inference would require labs to estimate the average workload per call and price accordingly, which introduces margin risk on complex reasoning tasks. The structural incentive for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google is to keep inference per-token while watching whether DeepSeek’s retrieval pricing forces their own search and tooling layers to compress.
For builders, the practical shift is in cost modeling. Per-call pricing makes the retrieval layer predictable: 10,000 calls at $0.75 per 1,000 is $7.50, regardless of how much text each call returns. That predictability does not exist in per-token inference, where a single complex reasoning chain can consume thousands of output tokens at variable cost. The ability to mix per-call retrieval with per-token reasoning — using DeepSeek’s tooling alongside a frontier model for the cognitive layer — gives builders a new axis of cost control. The catch is the 5-requests-per-second cap per endpoint, which limits throughput for high-concurrency agents. Whether DeepSeek raises that ceiling will determine whether the per-call model scales to production workloads or stays confined to prototyping.
Verification Note: All pricing figures cited in this article are from vendor-published documentation (DeepSeek API docs, Brave, Exa, Tavily, Perplexity, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google). OpenAI and Anthropic pricing sourced from third-party aggregators due to access restrictions on official pricing pages.
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PANews reported on October 19 that, according to official sources, De¹ announced the launch of Tokenized Asset World, the first vertical of its Financial World Model (FWM), on BNB Chain. Focusing on tokenized equities and RWAs, it aims to integrate scenarios such as asset trading, liquidity execution, collateralized lending, structured credit, and AI agent interaction to create a unified, continuously learning financial intelligence environment.
Building on BNB Chain's existing diverse financial ecosystem, De¹ will leverage infrastructure including PancakeSwap, ListaDAO, Venus, and the BNB Agent SDK to convert on-chain activities such as real trades, lending, and liquidations into verifiable training signals, forming a continuous feedback loop spanning market interaction, model updates, trading routing, and agent strategy optimization. This move will help BNB Chain's fragmented financial scenarios form a complete system that AI agents can uniformly understand and operate, enabling the financial world model to continuously learn and optimize from real market activity.
BNB Chain completed its 37th quarterly Auto-Burn, removing 1,646,196.44 BNB from circulation.
The burned BNB was worth about $1.197 billion and moved to the 0x…dEaD blackhole address.
The Auto-Burn formula uses BNB’s price and BSC block production, and it is independently auditable.
Lorentz and Maxwell Upgrades speed up BSC blocks, so the burn formula parameters were adjusted.
The BNB burn for the 37th quarter is complete, with BNB Chain removing 1,646,196.44 BNB from circulation. The tokens were worth about $1.197 billion at the time of the burn.
The BNB Foundation announced the completion of the quarterly event on 19 October 2026. After the burn, the remaining total supply stands at 131,512,085 BNB. The Auto-Burn mechanism aims to reduce the total supply to 100 million BNB over time.
Details of the 37th BNB Burn
The BNB Foundation published the data for the latest BNB burn alongside a transaction ID. Anyone can review the transaction on-chain through the provided link.
The figures were recorded at 10:05 AM UTC on 19 October 2026. Furthermore, the Foundation links a real-time data page showing the amount still to be burned.
This quarter’s BNB burn took place directly on BNB Smart Chain. The change follows the BNB Chain Fusion. Future burns will also occur on BSC.
The burned BNB moves to the blackhole address, 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dEaD. Tokens sent to this address leave circulation.
BNB is the native coin of the BNB Chain ecosystem. It powers transactions on BNB Smart Chain, the opBNB L2s, and BNB Greenfield.
Besides transaction fees, BNB serves as a governance token. Holders can therefore take part in the on-chain governance of BNB Chain.
BNB also functions as a strategic reserve asset. Mainstream financial institutions have started to take notice of the coin. The coin is also described as essential for powering its Web3 environment. BNB moved from the Ethereum network to BNB Chain after its mainnet launch on April 18, 2019.
How the BNB Auto-Burn Mechanism Works
The BNB Auto-Burn follows a formula built on two inputs. These are the price of BNB and the number of blocks BSC produces in a quarter.
This approach keeps the process transparent and predictable. The formula also adjusts the burn amount each quarter. Its long-term goal is to reduce the total supply to 100 million BNB.
The Auto-Burn is an independently auditable and objective process. Figures are reported quarterly to the public. In addition, the mechanism operates separately from the Binance centralized exchange. The philosophy behind BNB, known as “Build and Build,” reflects its role in ecosystem development.
Recent network upgrades changed the formula’s context. Following the Lorentz and Maxwell Upgrades, BSC produces blocks more frequently than before.
This pace differs from the period when the formula was first defined. As a result, the parameters were adjusted to keep the original idea consistent.
BNB also has a separate real-time burning mechanism through BEP-95. A portion of the gas fees in each BSC block is burned. Validator governance determines the burn ratio.
Consequently, this real-time BNB burn links ongoing burning directly to network activity. The two mechanisms therefore operate side by side.
A crypto whale staked 139,000 HYPE tokens, incurring a loss of $2.02 million over the past 30 days.
According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a crypto whale staked HYPE worth $10.95 million and incurred a $2.02 million loss over the past 30 days. The whale staked 139,050 HYPE (valued at $10.95 million) and delegated the assets to Infinitefield.xyz. The wallet also holds a 10x leveraged long position worth $202,250 involving CXMT, SKHX, and LYTE, with an unrealized loss of $36,540. The wallet’s total profit from perpetual contracts stands at $7.22 million, but it has suffered an overall $2.02 million loss in the past 30 days.
34 minutes ago
Aster launches pre-market trading on PAPER, with up to 3x leverage.
According to official announcements, Aster has launched pre-launch contract trading for PAPER (papertrade.xyz), supporting a maximum leverage of 3x.
34 minutes ago
Mastercard launches stablecoin risk intelligence service for institutions.
Mastercard announced at the Money20/20 USA conference this Monday the official launch of its "Stablecoin Security" risk intelligence service. The service enables financial institutions to comprehensively evaluate risks of stablecoin payments before funds are recorded on-chain. Via an API interface, Mastercard will supply banks with risk scores for seamless integration into their existing fraud prevention and compliance systems. According to Mastercard, the service tracks fund sources throughout the entire lifecycle of stablecoin payments, screens for links to financial crime risks including fraud, scams, and sanctions violations, and conducts in-depth analysis of transaction context before delivering risk scores. Citing a Bank for International Settlements (BIS) study, Mastercard noted that among 593 million stablecoin transfer events observed in 2025, nearly 60% took place in complex multi-step transactions rather than simple peer-to-peer payments, underscoring the necessity of pre-transaction security assessments. Ann Johnson, Executive Vice President of Mastercard Security Solutions, stated: "Stablecoins are creating new possibilities for value exchange, but financial institutions need the right intelligence and controls to participate with confidence."
34 minutes ago
I appreciate you sharing this Lookonchain weekly report, but I need clarification on what you'd like me to do.
You mentioned at the start that I should write headlines for Lookonchain tweets (max 120 characters, keeping tickers/amounts/names, no quotes/hashtags/periods).
However, what you've pasted appears to be the beginning of a weekly report summary, not a tweet. Could you provide:
1. The specific tweet
Oct 12–Oct 18, 2026 #LookonchainWeeklyReport
?? Overview
Stablecoin supply fell by $1.65B last week, DEX spot volume rebounded and perp volume edged up, while public companies added 7,721 BTC.
?? Stablecoin Market
The total stablecoin market cap decreased by $1.65B.
?? Spot &
34 minutes ago
Bitcoin ETFs see $94.94M outflow, Ethereum ETFs down $87.51M in 24 hours
Former 5th-largest SOL treasury company radically shifts strategy to liquidate all its SOL holdings, having reaffirmed its 'SOL treasury strategy' just one month ago.
SkyAI, formerly Sharps Technology, has recently undergone a radical strategic shift. The company has liquidated all its Solana (SOL) reserves to fund its stock and warrant repurchase program, dropping from being the fifth-largest Solana treasury holder to zero SOL holdings. According to a Monday statement, as of October 16, SkyAI held roughly $223.8 million in cash and has "completed the sale of all SOL".
Under the repurchase plan, SkyAI proposed to buy back 95% of its outstanding shares at $3 per share or per warrant. If fully subscribed, the company would retain approximately $22.5 million before related expenses. Additionally, since it no longer holds SOL, SkyAI has scrapped the original repurchase condition requiring SOL’s price to stay above $100.
The liquidation was swift and abrupt: as recently as September 14, SkyAI reaffirmed its Solana treasury strategy, claiming to hold over 2 million SOL. But an October 11 repurchase announcement disclosed it had sold ~1 million SOL, and subsequent SEC filings showed its remaining balance was only around 600,000 SOL. This rapid sell-off has drawn strong pushback from Bastion Trading, a major shareholder holding nearly 10% of SkyAI’s shares. Bastion has called for an independent review and explicitly said it will not participate in the repurchase under current terms, demanding the repurchase price be raised to $3.5 per share, restrictions on insiders, and exclusion of strategic advisors’ warrants from the repurchase.
Despite liquidating its crypto assets, SkyAI still describes its business as "building a financial platform combining Solana-based stablecoin tracks with AI". However, Monday’s announcement did not clarify if the company plans to rebuild its SOL treasury, nor provide updates on the platform. SkyAI only stated it intends to maintain its Nasdaq listing status after the repurchase is completed. As of the latest trading day, SkyAI (SKYA) shares rose 4.5% to $2.77, with a year-to-date gain of 35%.
Arkham has reported more than 35 million labels on Robinhood Chain, saying its platform supports searches for every address, transfer, and transaction identifier on the Ethereum layer-2 network.
Summary
Arkham says Robinhood Chain has over 35 million labels, with searchable addresses, transfers, and transaction identifiers. Its tools support wallet tracking, entity analysis, and custom alerts for onchain activity. Arkham’s July 22 announcement confirms the integration predates its latest October post. Robinhood’s Stock Tokens remain unavailable to US persons under the company’s product restrictions. Arkham said in an Oct. 19 post that its labels, alerts and tracing tools are live on the chain. Its website dates an earlier integration announcement to July 22, when the company described support for tracking traders, monitoring transfers and accessing network data through its API.
Arkham’s Robinhood Chain support predates the latest post The October announcement puts a figure on Arkham’s labeling coverage while repeating the availability of its blockchain intelligence tools.
“We’re live on Robinhood Chain, bringing Arkham’s labels, alerts and tracing tools to Robinhood Chain,” the company wrote.
In its July announcement, Arkham described full endpoint integration for Robinhood Chain through its application programming interface. The company said calls available for other supported chains could be made for Robinhood Chain, alongside alerts for large fund movements and tools for following token prices.
By September, Arkham’s published research described the network as integrated into its multichain explorer. That article listed transaction searches, holder-concentration monitoring, and custom alerts for transfers, liquidity movements, and activity involving wallets or entities.
Neither the earlier announcement nor the supplied October post provides a matching Ethereum label count or a chain-by-chain coverage methodology. The 35 million figure remains Arkham’s reported total, without an independently established comparison of labeling depth between the two networks.
Robinhood Chain searches cover wallets and counterparties Arkham’s research describes several ways to examine activity beyond searching for a transaction identifier, commonly called a TXID.
According to the company, entering a Robinhood Chain address can display its historical balances, current portfolio, and leading counterparties. Its entity-clustering feature groups addresses attributed to a known entity so users can examine aggregate holdings.
The same research says users can trace transfers in real time and inspect specific payments or smart-contract executions through the platform’s search bar. Arkham presented those functions alongside examples of traders operating in the network’s memecoin markets.
Robinhood’s developer documentation separately lists Blockscout explorers for mainnet and testnet. It identifies Alchemy as its recommended infrastructure provider and directs developers seeking historical reads and indexing to archive endpoints available through infrastructure providers.
For network configuration, the documentation specifies mainnet chain ID 4663 and testnet chain ID 46630. Both use ETH as their currency, while Robinhood Chain uses Ethereum blobs for data availability.
The documentation distinguishes public endpoints from production infrastructure. Public endpoints are rate-limited, and Robinhood recommends a provider for production use. Developers can obtain standard transaction and account data through those services, while Arkham describes its offering through labels, entity groupings, portfolio views and alerts.
Tokenized stocks share the network with memecoin markets Robinhood launched the public mainnet on July 1, describing it as a permissionless layer 2 built using Arbitrum technology. Its launch announcement named Uniswap and Pleiades among the initial trading venues, with infrastructure integrations from Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink.
As crypto.news previously reported in its explanation of the network’s tokenized stock structure, Stock Tokens provide exposure to underlying equities while operating as transferable assets within supported onchain applications.
Trading developed around speculative tokens during the network’s first weeks. July 16 coverage of its early memecoin trading activity recorded roughly $312 million in total value locked and 3.6 million daily transactions. CASHCAT, an unaffiliated memecoin associated with Robinhood’s original working name, reached a market capitalization near $156 million.
By Sep. 2, coverage of RWA-linked trading volume cited a $390 million daily total from data compiled by onchain researcher Adam Tehc. Memecoin-stock pairs accounted for $217 million, while tokenized-stock trading contributed $127 million.
Those figures describe historical snapshots, rather than current October trading conditions. The September account described pools pairing memecoins with tokenized versions of companies including Nvidia, Tesla, Intel and Roblox.
Robinhood’s launch statement said eligible Stock Token holders could trade around the clock and use tokens in lending pools or as collateral across decentralized finance applications. Availability varied by jurisdiction, including for products accessed through Robinhood Wallet.
US Stock Token restrictions remain in Robinhood’s disclosures Robinhood’s support page distinguishes the public blockchain from its brokerage and crypto accounts. The company says Robinhood Chain operates independently of the main app and does not affect investments, crypto balances, or portfolios held there.
The same page identifies Robinhood Digital Assets, LLC as the chain’s provider and describes that entity as a software provider that does not offer regulated financial or advisory services.
In its product disclosures, Robinhood identifies Stock Tokens as tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited. Holders receive economic exposure to underlying securities without legal or beneficial rights in the underlying issuer.
Robinhood says those Stock Tokens are not registered under US securities laws and cannot be offered, sold or delivered in the United States or to US persons. Its disclosures list further restrictions covering jurisdictions including Canada, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
MARA-linked wallets deposited 1,000 BTC worth $82.8 million into Binance and Gate over five days.
The transfers equal roughly 2.8% of MARA’s 35,577 BTC holdings reported in late June.
Exchange deposits do not confirm selling, although MARA previously sold 23,093 BTC for $1.63 billion.
Bitcoin faces resistance at $82,500, while analyst Minga identifies $79,700 as a potential downside target.
MARA Holdings has transferred 1,000 BTC worth approximately $82.8 million to Binance and Gate over five days, according to Lookonchain.
The transfers have raised questions about whether the publicly listed Bitcoin miner is preparing to sell more of its reserves. However, exchange deposits alone do not confirm that a sale has occurred.
Bitcoin is up 1.54% over 24 hours but down 1.37% over seven days, according to CoinGecko. Meanwhile, market analyst Minga identified $82,500 as a key resistance level that could determine Bitcoin’s next short-term move.
MARA Bitcoin Transfers Raise Questions About Potential Selling
Lookonchain reported that wallets linked to MARA Holdings deposited 1,000 BTC into Binance and Gate over five days. The transfers represented approximately 2.8% of the company’s 35,577 BTC holdings reported in late June.
Transaction tracking showed repeated outflows, with individual batches ranging from approximately 100 to 500 BTC. At current reported valuations, these movements represent a substantial amount of Bitcoin potentially entering exchange liquidity.
MARA has previously sold Bitcoin to support its financial strategy. Earlier in 2026, the company sold 23,093 BTC for $1.63 billion to reduce debt and finance its artificial intelligence expansion.
The company is also expanding into AI and high-performance computing, businesses that require substantial infrastructure investment. Bitcoin mining itself carries significant electricity, equipment, and operational expenses that can influence how miners manage their reserves.
However, the latest transfers do not establish MARA’s intentions. Bitcoin sent to an exchange could be sold, transferred between accounts, or used for other purposes. Confirmation of actual selling would require additional transaction or company disclosures.
If MARA does sell these holdings, the transactions could add to available exchange supply. Their effect on Bitcoin’s price would depend on market liquidity, buyer demand, and the scale of any completed sales.
Bitcoin Price Faces $82.5K Resistance as Traders Watch $79.7K
Bitcoin traded at $82,830.29, with $23.68 billion in 24-hour trading volume, according to CoinGecko. Despite its daily gain, BTC remained down 1.37% over the previous seven days.
BTC price on CoinGecko
Minga identified $82,500 as the key support-and-resistance level to watch. The analyst said Bitcoin needs to reclaim this level as support to strengthen the case for further upside.
If Bitcoin fails to hold above $82,500, Minga sees a possible move toward the current weekly low of $79,700. The analyst identified that area as a potential zone for long positions.
Conversely, a break above resistance followed by a failed attempt to maintain higher levels could create another short opportunity. Minga cautioned that BTC remained within a range, making risk-to-reward conditions less attractive for some trades.
Separately, Ali Charts examined Bitcoin’s historical performance after U.S. midterm elections. BTC gained 30.91% in 2010 and 6.61% in 2014, before falling 47.13% in 2018 and 18.15% in 2022.
BITCOIN POST U.S. MIDTERM ELECTIONS
Bitcoin’s performance in the month following U.S. midterm elections has been mixed:
Interestingly, the pattern shifted after 2014, with $BTC delivering negative returns… https://t.co/u7pxFLuxYH pic.twitter.com/mX2ATToNqR
— Ali Charts (@alicharts) October 18, 2026
The next U.S. midterm elections are scheduled for November 3, 2026. These historical returns show differing outcomes rather than a reliable forecast for Bitcoin’s future performance.
For now, MARA’s exchange transfers and Bitcoin’s resistance test are separate developments that traders should monitor. The key questions are whether the transfers lead to confirmed selling and whether BTC can sustain a move above $82,500.
