Cryptoccino — Wednesday 28 October 2026

BTC approaches $81k ahead of the Fed decision. Bitcoin climbed back toward $81,000 during the Asian session after spending much of yesterday below $80,000, brushing off a tech-driven Nasdaq rally that gained 1.2%. The Fed’s two-day meeting opened yesterday; any rate signal tonight could set the near-term direction. Zcash posted an 8% move, coinciding with a co-founder proposal to end automatic grants funding given the network’s $125 million treasury. coindesk coindesk

Robinhood Q3 shows crypto revenue rising 20% on Robinhood Chain, but EPS disappointed. Robinhood reported record total revenue of $1.42 billion for the quarter but came in at $0.51 per share against a $0.55 consensus. Crypto was a bright spot, with Robinhood Chain generating $26 million and overall crypto revenue up 20% quarter-on-quarter. Prediction markets brought in $173 million, signalling where the retail-trading margin is migrating. theblock decrypt coindesk

Galaxy Digital swings to a $323 million quarterly profit and authorises a $200 million buyback. Rising trading volumes and an uptick in lending drove the reversal to profitability after a difficult prior quarter. The $200 million buyback signals management confidence at current prices. Galaxy also reiterated its view that now is a reasonable accumulation window for bitcoin. theblock coindesk

Ark Invest trims its own Bitcoin ETF while adding Circle shares. Ark sold roughly $15.9 million of ARKB as BTC ground lower and bought $5.2 million in Circle stock across ARKW. The rotation reads as a tactical hedge: lower spot-price conviction in the near term, but a structural bet on stablecoin infrastructure ahead of Circle’s anticipated public listing. theblock cryptobriefing

Twenty-six companies now formally object to OKX and ICE’s tokenised-equity venue. Intel, Oracle, IBM, and IonQ became the latest issuers to file objections, arguing they did not consent to their shares being traded on the proposed platform. The coalition spans traditional tech and semiconductor names, and their collective pushback is the most organised issuer resistance to tokenised equities yet seen. Regulators will find it difficult to greenlight the venue without addressing the consent question directly. coindesk decrypt

Ripple receives final OCC approval to operate a national trust bank. The approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency lets Ripple hold RLUSD reserves under federal supervision and offer custody services. BNY is simultaneously adding XRP and RLUSD to its custody platform, and Ripple is piloting invoice settlement on the XRP Ledger with trade-finance firm C2FO. The bank charter matters more than any individual partnership: it is the institutional credibility layer that RLUSD’s growth depends on. bloomberg_crypto decrypt theblock

Janus Henderson and Centrifuge put a licensed Nasdaq-100 fund onchain. The product is described as the first regulated fund tracking the Nasdaq-100 to live on a public blockchain, giving DeFi protocols a compliant building block for index exposure. CF Benchmarks also published onchain versions of the pricing infrastructure it already supplies to BlackRock, extending the data layer underpinning institutional products. Both moves suggest the plumbing for real-world-asset finance is arriving faster than the assets themselves. coindesk coindesk

Luxor raises $16 million to trade AI compute the way it trades bitcoin hashrate. The CMT Digital-led round, with participation from mining-hardware makers Canaan and MicroBT, will fund derivatives and a marketplace for GPU compute. Luxor’s thesis is that compute is a commodity like hash power, and the same financial tooling applies. The $16 million is modest, but the hardware-maker involvement signals they want a market for their own product. theblock decrypt

Bithumb hacked via an employee system in a wave of South Korean financial-sector breaches. Three South Korean financial institutions reported data breaches in close succession, with Bithumb the most prominent crypto name among them. The Bithumb intrusion came through an internal employee-facing system rather than customer-facing infrastructure. No fund losses have been disclosed; the immediate exposure appears to be customer data. coindesk cryptobriefing

Coinbase confirms a third-party vendor exposed customer contact information. The incident traces to Amplitude, a third-party analytics provider, rather than Coinbase’s own systems. Customer funds are unaffected, and Coinbase has denied a breach of its core infrastructure. It is the second vendor-chain exposure at a major exchange in recent weeks, a pattern worth tracking. coindesk cryptobriefing

Keystone to destroy nearly 20,000 hardware wallets after its factory signing key was stolen. Attackers obtained the private key used to authenticate Keystone devices as genuine, opening the door to undetectable counterfeits in the supply chain. The company says recovery phrases and private keys on existing devices were not compromised, but it is recalling and destroying 25,964 units. Affected buyers’ records were exposed in the same incident. coindesk decrypt

SEAL’s weekly triage covers 73 incidents; law enforcement seizes Virtualine bulletproof hosting. SEAL Radar logged 73 incidents in the 20–27 October window across theft, fraud, and infrastructure-abuse categories. Separately, the FBI Washington Field Office, working with Chainalysis and international partners, seized the domain of Virtualine, a bulletproof hosting service used to support criminal crypto operations. Both items are in the full reports for teams doing threat-intel review. seal_radar chainalysis

CFTC sues Utah to protect Kalshi’s right to operate prediction market contracts there. Utah had filed its own lawsuit against Kalshi seeking up to $60 million in profits, arguing the state has authority over event contracts. The CFTC’s counter-suit asserts federal pre-emption, turning this into a test of how far state regulators can reach into federally supervised derivatives markets. The outcome will determine whether every US state becomes a separate legal jurisdiction for prediction platforms. coindesk theblock cointelegraph_regulation

Treasury Secretary Bessent frames stablecoins as a dollar-dominance tool. Bessent argued publicly that US crypto adoption, particularly dollar-denominated stablecoins, extends Washington’s financial reach and keeps Treasury demand elevated globally. The framing aligns the administration’s crypto posture directly with national security and monetary strategy rather than innovation policy alone. It also sets a tone for the stablecoin legislation currently advancing in Congress. coindesk cryptobriefing

Binance files for a Brazilian crypto licence ahead of the Friday regulatory deadline. The exchange is delisting 22 assets for Brazilian users and has opened talks with the central bank about restoring some suspended services. Missing the 30 October deadline would have triggered an operating ban, so the filing is defensive as much as strategic. Brazil is one of the region’s largest crypto markets and a test case for how exchanges navigate Latin American licensing regimes. cointelegraph_regulation

What else is grinding?

• Ethereum quietly patched a Glamsterdam bug that could have redirected staking deposits to block builders rather than validators. coindesk
• Solana’s bug-bounty programme now requires reporters to stake 1 SOL per submission after AI-generated spam overwhelmed the security team. coindesk
• Brazilian firms reportedly shifted corporate balances into stablecoins on election day to sidestep a sharp BRL move, an early real-world stress test for corporate stablecoin treasury use. coindesk
• Samson Mow says a 600 BTC shortfall on the Liquid Network sidechain will be covered within days, with no user funds at risk. cryptobriefing
• Base is targeting 200ms block times with its Denim mainnet upgrade, a step toward the kind of latency that makes onchain orderbooks competitive with centralised venues. cryptobriefing
• Mizuho warns Circle faces 10–20% medium-term reserve revenue risk if AI agents start routing USDC holders into higher-yielding fiat alternatives. theblock

Last sip. The Fed hasn’t spoken yet, and a bitcoin treasury firm still can’t find its coins.