Washington finished a stablecoin rule last week while Congress stayed stuck. The OCC issued the first final regulation under the GENIUS Act, JPMorgan told clients that agency action only partly replaces the Clarity Act that stalled in the Senate, and 16 of America's largest companies objected to having their shares traded on a new tokenized stock venue. Banks kept moving the other way: JPMorgan put its deposit token on Ethereum, SoFi launched an FDIC-insured tokenized deposit and HSBC released a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin. Prices gave back ground into a Federal Reserve meeting on Wednesday, with leveraged longs flushed on Saturday. The institutional build runs on its own schedule, and the argument has moved to who sets its terms.
Welcome to a new week in crypto.
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A $1 billion ETF run reverses into a Fed-week de-risk
Bitcoin traded near $80,000 on Monday and Ether near $2,300, with XRP around $1.28, as traders cut risk ahead of the Fed's Wednesday decision. Bitcoin had sat in a $82,000 to $83,000 range a week earlier, and CoinDesk noted it needs to reclaim $82,500, the floor it lost on Thursday, before buyers can call the dip a pause. Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference is the event: BTSE's Jeff Mei said the Fed probably won't change rates, but that investors are watching how strongly it hints at a December hike, with Brent crude near $114 and the US-Iran standoff adding to the inflation backdrop.
Spot bitcoin ETFs took in $1.078 billion from Monday through Wednesday, then lost $635.5 million on Thursday, the largest daily outflow since June, and $137.9 million on Friday. That left the funds with $304.7 million in net inflows for the week and $104.4 billion in assets. Ether ETFs lost $220.6 million on the week and have seen outflows on 14 of 17 trading days in October, totaling $1.175 billion. Thursday's session carried a Nasdaq drop of 2.6%, its worst since June, as AI-spending worries hit tech earnings.
On Saturday bitcoin briefly dipped to about $79,280, and $404 million of longs were liquidated in four hours, the most in any four-hour window since October 14, per CoinGlass. BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes said overnight that he had sold his fund's directional book, writing "I dumped it all." Derive's Nick Forster, meanwhile, said the platform's implied probability of bitcoin topping $100,000 by Christmas had risen to 12% from 9.7% earlier in the week.
The OCC finalizes the first GENIUS Act rule, and the banks object
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published its final rule implementing the GENIUS Act on Wednesday, the first regulator to finish its piece of the stablecoin law. It takes effect January 18, 2027. The rule creates pathways for banks and non-banks to become permitted payment stablecoin issuers, sets standards for foreign issuers and for custody of reserve assets, and requires full backing with dollars or similarly liquid assets. "We are providing a clear, practical framework for payment stablecoin innovation," Comptroller Jonathan Gould said.
The contested part is rewards. The GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying interest directly, and the OCC's proposal had presumed that certain issuer arrangements with third parties could be unlawful. The final rule drops that presumption and says it will review relationships case by case. The American Bankers Association's Rob Nichols said the gaps "risk undermining the distinction Congress drew" between stablecoins and deposits, while the Blockchain Association's Lindsay Fraser said the change brings the rule closer to the statute.
TD Cowen's Washington Research Group called the case-by-case approach a negative for banks and a source of ambiguity until courts rule, adding that a new Comptroller after 2028 could take a different view of what counts as evasion.
JPMorgan: agency rules help, but only a law makes them last
In a report published Wednesday, JPMorgan analysts led by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou said regulator-led measures are partly offsetting the Senate's failure to advance the Clarity Act, which they see as unlikely to pass this year and possibly returning in 2027. "Only legislation would make the framework more durable over the longer term," they wrote, warning that the industry otherwise relies on a patchwork of actions that "could be overturned in as soon as two years, if a Democrat wins the White House."
The list of agency moves was long. The SEC released a five-year "Innovation Exemption" for tokenized stocks in September, the OCC has granted national trust charters to a growing number of stablecoin issuers and digital-asset firms (the Independent Community Bankers of America has sued over parts of those approvals), and the CFTC is studying leveraged crypto trading on regulated US platforms, though not before 2027. The Financial Accounting Standards Board is considering letting companies classify certain stablecoins as cash equivalents, with comments open until November 19.
The analysts added that elevated political and legal risk premia are likely to persist until market-structure legislation passes, and that a growing number of companies opting out of tokenization has weighed on sentiment for ether.
Sixteen issuers say no to a tokenized stock venue
Nine companies objected on October 15 to having their shares traded on OKXICE TSV, the planned 24/7 tokenized stock venue from OKX and NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange, including Verizon, Broadcom, UnitedHealth Group, CoreWeave and Rocket Lab. An updated notice dated October 19 added seven more, among them Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, Caterpillar, McDonald's and Western Digital, bringing the total to 16. Decrypt later reported six further names, including Wells Fargo, Cisco and Intuit. Neither notice explains the objections or says whether they keep a stock off the platform.
The venue is the first major test of the SEC's innovation exemption, which lets qualifying platforms trade tokenized US stocks without registering as exchanges. It plans to run on Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's X Layer, settling in stablecoins such as USDC and USDT. Its notice says the venue is not subject to Regulation NMS or fair-access rules, caps trading at a small slice of each stock's normal volume and allows administrators to upgrade smart contracts without advance notice. The updated notice also says the venue may now offer stocks tokenized by the issuers themselves, not only by third parties.
Nasdaq, which won SEC approval earlier this year for its own tokenized securities pilot, has said it will opt its shares out of the exemption, with a spokesperson telling The Wall Street Journal it does not want its stock on a venue that fails to show the best prices in real time or report trades to the consolidated trade feed. The International Monetary Fund recently found real demand for tokenized stocks outside market hours but called the market volatile and illiquid.
JPMorgan takes its deposit token to Ethereum as SoFi tokenizes consumer deposits
On Monday, October 19, JPMorgan's Kinexys unit brought JPM Coin (JPMD), the bank's dollar deposit token, to Ethereum for institutional clients. The token, launched on Base in November 2025, now supports peer-to-peer transfers across the Ethereum Virtual Machine ecosystem. Kinexys cited Ethereum's "established depth of onchain liquidity and tokenized assets," and said its platform has processed more than $4 trillion in cumulative transactions, averaging $7 billion a day. JPMorgan has already tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum, the first in December 2025 and a second in May 2026.
At the retail end, SoFi launched SoFi Earn (SOFIE) on Thursday, an FDIC-insured tokenized deposit paying a 4.4% APY, which the bank says is the first such product offered to individuals by a US national bank. Members can convert SOFIE one-to-one into the SoFiUSD stablecoin to buy crypto or send funds to external wallets around the clock. SoFi expects to finish the rollout to crypto members in November.
Stablecoins moved more than $400 million an hour, mostly after banks closed
A study from Coinbase and The Block Pro Research, "The Always-On Dollar," found that organic stablecoin transfers averaged more than $400 million per hour in the third quarter, with about 73% of screened volume over the 12 months to July 31 settling outside US banking hours. Adjusted transfer volume has quadrupled since the start of 2023 to $891 billion in Q3, and the report projects $1.5 trillion a quarter by the end of 2027 at current growth rates.
The report also counted 293 million unique blockchain addresses holding stablecoins, though addresses are not necessarily individual users, and said seven of the ten largest US banks have tested stablecoins or tokenized deposits for settlement, with the other three signaling plans to follow. It argued that faster settlement frees working capital for corporates, and that stablecoins are the likely payment rail for AI agents.
Asia's central banks and banks build out non-dollar stablecoin rails
The Monetary Authority of Singapore confirmed on Friday that Bank Negara Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand have joined its BLOOM initiative as policymaker members. The project, which began in October 2025, tests cross-border payments using regulated stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits, and its participants include Ripple, Visa, Mastercard, the World Bank Group, Circle, Coinbase, JPMorgan, Standard Chartered and Stripe. MAS said the work will focus on how banks handle different forms of digital money, interoperability between networks, and safeguards such as identity checks and sanctions screening.
In Hong Kong, HSBC launched RedCoin (RCHKD), its first Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, on Friday through its PayMe app, with payments available at more than 100,000 merchants. HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture of Standard Chartered, HKT and Animoca Brands, received the HKMA's first stablecoin issuer licenses in April, and HSBC's John O'Neill said the bank plans to move into wholesale corporate and institutional use cases.
South Korea moved the same way. The Bank of Korea and the government plan to prepare a bill this year amending the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act to treat stablecoins as payment instruments, alongside the broader Digital Asset Basic Act, which Financial Services Commission chairman Lee Eog-weon said is nearing completion.
BlackRock files for a protected bitcoin ETF as IBIT posts a year-high inflow
BlackRock filed with the SEC on October 19 for the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protect ETF, which would give investors upside exposure to IBIT "up to an approximate limit" while seeking "a level of downside protection." Bloomberg Intelligence's James Seyffart noted it is BlackRock's third bitcoin ETF filing and that the firm still offers only bitcoin and Ethereum products. In June the firm launched its iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF.
The filing landed the same day IBIT took in $665.2 million, its largest single-day inflow since October 7, 2025, with spot bitcoin ETFs adding $526.6 million overall. Presto Research's Min Jung said investors may be positioning for a "catch-up trade," given bitcoin's range-bound price while other risk assets sat near highs. The fund held $66.4 billion in net assets at the time.
In Europe, Switzerland's FINMA approved the country's first spot bitcoin ETF for retail investors on October 20. BIT Asset Management confirmed that its Bitcoin Fund ETF (BBIT) received the approval and is expected to begin trading on the SIX Swiss Exchange in November. FINMA made an exception to its fund diversification rules, citing bitcoin's trading history and volumes, and said other providers have applied.
Visa and Fireblocks: a $2.5 billion report, a denial and a safeguarding fine
Axios reported on Thursday that Visa was in late-stage talks to acquire crypto custody and stablecoin infrastructure firm Fireblocks for about $2.5 billion, citing multiple sources. Fireblocks said the report was "not true at present time," and Visa declined to comment. The firm was last valued at $8 billion in a January 2022 funding round and launched a stablecoin payments network in September 2025 with more than 40 participants, including Circle, Bridge and Zerohash.
The rumor fit Visa's trajectory. Its stablecoin settlement volume has passed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times the level a year earlier, and rival Mastercard closed its BVNK acquisition in August after agreeing to pay up to $1.8 billion. The Block noted that $2.5 billion would still rank among the largest crypto deals, below Coinbase's $2.9 billion purchase of Deribit and Naver Financial's pending all-stock deal for Upbit parent Dunamu at around $10.3 billion.
On the compliance side, the Central Bank of Ireland fined Coinbase Ireland €3.25 million (about $3.6 million) on Thursday for breaches of customer fund safeguarding and outsourcing rules, subject to High Court confirmation. The regulator found that for about 19 months roughly 30 institutional clients deposited dollars into accounts held by Coinbase Inc. rather than the Irish entity, and that daily safeguarding shortfalls reached €5.2 million in 2024. Coinbase said no customers lost money.
Strategy keeps buying, with a $4.83 billion reserve behind its dividends
Strategy bought 267 BTC for about $22.1 million between October 12 and 18 at an average of $82,900, lifting its holdings to 848,517 BTC, acquired for roughly $64 billion at an average of $75,446. The purchase was funded by at-the-market sales of MSTR stock and its cash reserve. In the same period the company repurchased STRC preferred shares for about $193.1 million and used $45.5 million to fund preferred dividends. Its USD Reserve stood at $4.83 billion, and the board raised the digital credit securities repurchase authorization from $2 billion to $3 billion.
MSTR closed the prior Friday at $136.83 after an 11.3% weekly drop, with MSCI's newly finalized rules threatening to exclude Strategy and other treasury companies it considers "non-operating" from its indexes. K33's Vetle Lunde warned that the preferred-stock funding model, with rising STRC dividend obligations, may ultimately cost the company bitcoin and that common stock issuance is a more efficient route. Executive Chairman Michael Saylor, speaking at ParaFi Investor Day, described a "perfected" digital money: a dollar-pegged, bitcoin-backed stablecoin that he said could offer yields of 6% to 8%.
Initia, CoinDCX and Keystone: three security failures in one week
Initia halted its Layer 1 and rollups on Friday after an attacker exploited what co-founder Ezaan Mangalji called a previously unknown "Day 0" bug in the network's MoveVM implementation on the Cosmos SDK. The bug allowed unauthorized minting of non-native tokens; Mangalji said the attacker minted and bridged out about $2.7 million of AUSD, ETH and USDC before the chain was paused, though Initia had not confirmed the total loss.
Indian exchange CoinDCX confirmed on Sunday that it lost 15.99 million USDT from deposit wallets it had stopped using after its $44 million July 2025 hack, after an automated sweeping service failed and user deposits piled up at the old addresses. The disclosure came days after CEO Sumit Gupta called early breach reports "a false alarm," and onchain analyst ZachXBT, who challenged the exchange's account, advised customers to withdraw funds. CoinDCX said it absorbed the loss and that user funds in cold wallets remain safe.
Hardware wallet maker Keystone disclosed that an attacker accessed its Shopify-based store on October 20 and obtained customer names, contact details, shipping addresses and order details. No payment data, recovery phrases or private keys were exposed, Keystone said, but several customers said their older orders were exposed despite the company's pledge to delete shipping data after 180 days. The company has not said how many customers were affected.
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