Cryptoccino — Friday 02 October 2026

Citi raises 12-month BTC target to $113K, adds $3K call on ETH. The bank revised its bitcoin forecast upward from $82K, citing renewed ETF inflows and macro tailwinds from falling rates. The $113K target still sits roughly 10% below Bitcoin’s October 2025 record high, so the call is constructive but not aggressive by current sentiment. coindesk decrypt

Bitcoin spot ETF nine-day inflow streak breaks, $149M exits the funds. After pulling in roughly $3 billion across nine consecutive sessions, US spot bitcoin ETFs saw net outflows of $149M on Wednesday. Spot Ethereum ETFs also shed $59.6M on the day, with Fidelity’s FETH leading the drawdown at $26.6M. theblock

Bitcoin enters Q4 pinned in the $82K-$85K corridor. Despite the strongest quarterly performance since 2024, BTC has failed to break out of a tight range to open October. Historically, October is the asset’s best calendar month, but a Fed still in hiking mode and 5.3% Treasury yields are making bulls work for it. coindesk decrypt

Crypto shorts bear the brunt as $102M in positions liquidated. A brief upward move squeezed leveraged short positions, with short liquidations dominating the $102M total. Bloomberg’s analysis reinforces the point: leverage has not left the building, whatever the narrative about crypto’s maturation says. cryptobriefing bloomberg_crypto

Evernorth shareholders approve $1B XRP treasury deal, Nasdaq listing set for Oct. 8. The Armada Acquisition Corp. II merger vote cleared, putting the largest self-described pure-play XRP treasury company on course to begin trading next week holding approximately 473 million XRP. The Ripple-backed vehicle will trade under its own ticker and is positioning itself as an XRP equivalent of Strategy’s bitcoin reserve model. theblock decrypt

Lloyds and Visa settle $750K cross-border payment in USDC during live pilot. The seven-day pilot marks one of the first live, bank-to-bank settlements using a public stablecoin between two systemically important financial institutions. For Circle and the stablecoin-as-rails thesis, a Lloyds endorsement carries more weight than most DeFi-adjacent case studies. theblock

Ethereum Foundation ships zkAPI for privacy-preserving AI model payments. The zkAPI lets users deposit ETH into a vault and authorise API spending via zero-knowledge proofs, so the model provider never learns who is paying. It is a small but concrete example of ZK infrastructure moving out of rollup contexts and into application-layer payment flows. theblock

EIP-8363 staking reward burn proposal withdrawn from Hegota upgrade. Co-author Jérôme de Tychey pulled the proposal after core contributors argued that a hard fork scoping process was the wrong venue for an issuance-level change. The withdrawal keeps ETH issuance politics squarely on the research agenda but off the near-term roadmap. theblock

NEAR Intents drained for $3.8M via contract bug, attacker given 48-hour deadline. A flaw in the cross-chain swap contract allowed an attacker to drain approximately $3.8M before the protocol halted deposits and withdrawals across 11 networks. The general manager issued a public 48-hour ultimatum to return funds; the team has promised full user compensation regardless of outcome. theblock coindesk decrypt cryptobriefing

MetaMask forces Lido validator exits after infrastructure security incident. MetaMask confirmed a security event affecting its staking infrastructure and began exiting Lido positions as a precaution; it says no user wallets are at direct risk. The ETH being unstaked may take up to 45 days to return, and Lido warned of associated lost rewards during the withdrawal queue. coindesk decrypt

Aave v3 Safe module exploit, up to $310K drained. An attacker exploited a vulnerability in a third-party Safe module integrated with Aave v3, siphoning an estimated $310K. The incident is a reminder that the audit perimeter for DeFi positions now has to extend to every module in the Safe stack, not just core protocol code. cryptobriefing

Chainalysis traces $387M Bitget theft to North Korea using AI-assisted on-chain analysis. Chainalysis published its post-mortem on the September 24 Bitget hack, crediting AI tooling with accelerating the trace of funds laundered through multiple hops including Zcash’s shielded pool. The Zcash routing connection also explains most of ZEC’s 21% price drop from recent highs as sentiment around the asset soured. chainalysis decrypt

SEC custody proposal covered in Lead above. See the Lead for full analysis of the SEC’s proposed crypto custody framework for investment advisers and regulated funds. sec_press

Illinois delays 0.2% digital asset tax by six months amid ongoing legal challenge. State officials and industry plaintiffs jointly petitioned the court to push the effective date from 1 January to 1 July 2027, buying time for a legal challenge arguing the bill was rushed through without adequate process. The tax, which applies to crypto transactions, remains the only state-level levy of its kind and the lawsuit’s outcome will be watched nationally. coindesk cointelegraph_regulation decrypt

EU regulators press Binance on reverse-solicitation exemption used to keep serving European clients. European officials, with ESMA pushing for stronger enforcement powers, are questioning how Binance continues to serve EU customers from Abu Dhabi under a MiCA exemption that was never meant to function as a permanent licence substitute. Binance lost its EU MiCA registrations earlier this year, making this the central legal tension around its European business. bloomberg_crypto cointelegraph_regulation decrypt

New York and Wyoming regulators sign mutual oversight pact for digital asset firms. The agreement lets NYDFS and Wyoming’s banking division share supervisory data, co-ordinate licensing reviews, and run joint examinations or enforcement actions. For firms dual-licensed in both states, the practical effect is more scrutiny with less bureaucratic duplication, which cuts both ways. cointelegraph_regulation

What else is grinding?

• Trump’s third memecoin holder dinner is set for 22 November at his Washington golf club, reserved for the top 185 TRUMP token holders, drawing fresh corruption-related scrutiny from ethics watchdogs. coindesk cointelegraph_regulation
• Fifty thousand Europeans signed a letter urging the EU to loosen MiCA’s stablecoin reward restrictions ahead of the framework’s scheduled review, with Hyperliquid’s policy arm separately pushing for perps to be regulated under MiFID II rather than MiCA. cointelegraph_regulation theblock
• Bitwise and Franklin Templeton XRP ETF products absorbed a combined $7.24M in inflows on Wednesday, a modest but consistent accumulation signal as Evernorth’s public listing approaches. cryptobriefing
• DogeOS launched a DeFi testnet, betting that Dogecoin miners will eventually provide security for applications built on top of it. coindesk
• Robinhood Wallet added Arcus as an RFQ routing provider for its stock token swaps, expanding eligible token coverage to over 190 assets. theblock
• Tokenised real-world assets now span 10,322 individual instruments across 36 chains with total value at $46.2B, per a new RWA Foundation report. cryptobriefing

Last sip. MetaMask still hasn’t said what the incident actually was, and 45 days is a long time to wait for an answer.