News linked to both this project and an event.
Odaily reports: Bitcoin News posted on X that Charles Schwab has opened Bitcoin and Ethereum trading to all eligible US retail clients through its existing investment platform, charging a 0.75% fee per trade with a minimum of $1 and a maximum single-trade limit of $2 million. The company is rolling out digital asset transfers between Schwab accounts and external wallets in phases, requiring users to pre-register withdrawal addresses and complete security checks. Paxos Trust Company provides custody, trade execution, and settlement infrastructure, and the related digital assets are not covered by SIPC or FDIC insurance.
According to the Arbitrum Foundation Governance Forum summary, Arbitrum DAO currently has four temperature check votes concluding on October 22, covering the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade adaptation, L1 governance recovery mechanism, treasury ETH transfer, and the USDG strategic plan. Among them, Entropy proposes designating USDG as one of the core strategic initiatives for Arbitrum DAO, requesting an additional 100 million ARB from the DAO treasury allocated to the DRIP budget, while also adjusting the project timeline and permitted uses. Additionally, it is proposed to route AEP net fees into the ATMC and convert them into USDG to support the growth of USDG on Arbitrum.
Polygon announced the launch of Polygon CDK Besu, enabling banks and financial institutions to deploy private blockchains based on Hyperledger Besu and connect to other blockchains and their liquidity via Agglayer from day one. It currently supports deployment on the Ethereum mainnet.
ENS DAO has initiated an on-chain vote on the proposal to activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet. The vote will end on October 25 at 13:32. As of now, 6 wallets have cast 531,300 ENS, with approximately 100% in favor, but the quorum has not yet been reached. The proposal contains 15 actions, which will be executed all at once by an execution contract controlled by the DAO; if any single action fails, none of the actions will take effect. The previously approved pricing scheme will take effect after the proposal is executed, and the same applies to renewals of domains that have not been migrated. Some voters oppose raising the annual fee for domains of 5 characters or more from $5 to $8.
Ethereum Research Forum researcher Pierre proposes a faster, aggregatable, and quantum-resistant privacy pool scheme. The scheme ports a Tornado Cash-like privacy pool onto the hash-based SNARK system Flock, which may offer post-quantum security, and adopts SHA-256. It replaces large circuits with small “single-pass” compression circuits.
According to Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase announced the launch of a deposit token (JPM Coin) representing its US dollar deposits for institutional clients on the Ethereum network, further expanding its blockchain payments business. Initially launched last year on the Coinbase-affiliated blockchain network Base, the token enables institutional clients to bypass the constraints of traditional business days and multi-day settlement cycles, facilitating round-the-clock, second-level fund transfers.
Odaily Report: JPMorgan is expanding its JPM Coin USD deposit token to the Ethereum mainnet, offering it to institutional clients. The token was previously launched on Base in 2025 and represents actual bank deposits, enabling near-instant peer-to-peer transfers and settlements around the clock. It is currently available only to JPMorgan institutional clients through Kinexys, does not support public trading, and is not open to retail customers. JPM Coin is a permissioned, regulatory-compliant bank money and is not a decentralized stablecoin.
According to data from Surf, following the October 15 launch of its SurfBoard NFT series on Robinhood Chain, the project recorded a 24-hour trading volume of approximately 256 ETH (~$620,000) on its first day. This places it fourth among Robinhood Chain's major NFT projects, surpassing the first-day trading volume of QUOTRONS, which operates on the same ERC-404 architecture (~246 ETH). On day one, 837 wallets participated in the official pool, executing 1,522 trades.
Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) stated that the ideal path for supporting various cryptographic algorithms lies in EIP-8288: users locally generate arbitrary signatures, produce STARK proofs, and submit them on-chain via a STARK aggregator. This avoids consuming calldata on-chain, so Ethereum no longer needs to add new precompiles. He also noted that if lattice cryptography (Lattice) is proven to be secure against AI attacks, it could still be utilized for accounts, wallets, and similar applications via precompiles in the future. Previously, Starknet co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson pushed back against related views from a16z, arguing that the rich mathematical structure of lattice cryptography makes it susceptible to AI attacks. Furthermore, the simplified variant based on Module SIS only emerged in 2012 and lacks sufficient maturity. He recommended waiting another three to five years until AI has thoroughly stress-tested these approaches before deploying them to custody large asset balances.
10x Research's latest crypto market weekly report notes that the crypto market broadly suffered a sell-off last week, with altcoins declining significantly more than Bitcoin. The 141 tokens it tracks fell 14% on average, while Bitcoin dropped only 3% over the same period.10x Research states that trading volume in the crypto market is currently declining, stablecoin supply continues to contract, and ETF fund flows have turned to net outflows, reflecting mounting pressure on market liquidity.However, options market pricing indicates that pressure remains relatively low, while speculative positions in the CME futures market are near highs, suggesting that the derivatives market has not yet fully reflected the weak performance of the spot market.10x Research believes that investors should focus this week on key Bitcoin technical levels, Ethereum position allocation, as well as capital flows and position changes in the altcoin market.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin launched a "paranoid mode" for his AI agent on October 16, designed to conceal user identity, request origins, and payment traces. The solution packages zkAPI, Tor, additional obfuscation traffic, and local large language model prompt rewriting into an OpenAI-compatible daemon, with an outer wrapper designed for the agent framework pi. The system is already running on the Ethereum mainnet and supports ETH and USDC deposits. Vitalik stated that the system is "already quite usable," but starting new conversations is relatively slow, and the agent is confined to a software sandbox.
Odaily reports: U.S. brokerage Charles Schwab is rolling out Bitcoin and Ethereum external wallet transfers to eligible clients in phases, supporting transfers of the relevant assets into and out of external wallets, expanding its service scope beyond merely providing market exposure within investment accounts. Charles Schwab stated that Bitcoin and Ethereum held through its services will not receive FDIC insurance, and the relevant crypto assets are not insured traditional bank deposits. The service will be launched gradually, and the company has discussed expanding supported assets beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Odaily reports: Deutsche Bank is close to launching an institutional-grade crypto asset custody business and is expected to begin serving institutional clients within a few weeks. It will initially target German enterprises and professional investors, supporting assets such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, with technology jointly developed by Swiss digital asset infrastructure company Taurus. The service is not a retail-facing cryptocurrency trading app, and the relevant plans are still subject to regulatory approval. Deutsche Bank has also discussed tokenized deposits, digital securities, and the possibility of expanding to Asian financial centers in 2027.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) posted on October 17 that approximately 50% of Bitcoin mining costs are capital expenditures for computing hardware, with the remaining 50% consisting of electricity costs; meanwhile, AI inference costs are almost entirely driven by capital expenditures for compute. The post has already reached 46,700 views since publication.
According to CryptoSlate, Microsoft and the cybersecurity organization Health-ISAC have obtained a U.S. court order to seize and redirect the domains supporting three services: YAM Store, CoGUI, and Iron Man. These three services sell stolen accounts and phishing tools to fraudsters. Since January this year, they have assisted in sending over 1 billion phishing messages, targeting more than 75,000 institutions across over 150 countries, generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue for operators. Microsoft has disabled more than 20,000 accounts associated with YAM Store and continues to block over 100,000 spoofing and fraudulent domains. According to Microsoft's investigation, these services accept payments in USDT (Tron network) and ETH, with Cloudflare noting that buyers can also pay using USDC. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs assisted investigators in locating and freezing related assets, though the frozen amount was not disclosed.
According to Metis official (@MetisL2), Metis Andromeda will implement two adjustments in October: ceasing support for Stargate on October 23, with LayerZero V1-related routes required to be disabled by that date; and starting October 30, LayerZero Labs' DVN (Decentralized Validator Network) and Executor will no longer provide services to Metis. Additionally, Stargate V1 pools will be shut down across all chains on December 15. The official statement indicates that most holders do not need to take any action. m.USDC, m.USDT, WETH, and METIS are issued via the Metis native cross-chain bridge and are unrelated to Stargate; minting and redemptions will proceed as usual, while the Ethereum ↔ Metis native cross-chain bridge remains unaffected. Users providing liquidity to Stargate pools on Metis must withdraw their positions before October 23. If staked, assets must first be unstaked, after which users can select the Metis Andromeda network in the Stargate application to withdraw.
Gerald Podobnik stated Deutsche Bank will launch its first digital asset service within weeks. In the first phase, it will roll out crypto custody in Germany, supporting major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and will subsequently add mainstream stablecoin redemption services. The bank plans to expand its custody platform to Asian financial hubs next year and offer tokenized deposit services, helping clients issue digital bonds and other blockchain-based securities.
Odaily reports: OpenAI disclosed that in June of this year, an internal research model, the GPT-5.6 Sol series, was assigned the task of updating a cryptocurrency trading application and deploying a contract on the Ethereum testnet Sepolia. Because the task did not provide a funded wallet and did not authorize the use of external funds, the model first attempted to obtain test ETH from a faucet but was unsuccessful. It then derived addresses from publicly available developer mnemonics online, scanned hundreds of addresses, and found an account with a balance. In its internal reasoning, the model questioned whether using funds from a publicly exposed private key was ethical, then concluded that the funds were testnet ETH with no real value and that the mnemonic had already been made public. It therefore used the account to pay the gas fee required for deployment and successfully completed the contract deployment. OpenAI discovered this behavior during a subsequent expansion of alignment monitoring and disclosed it on October 15, 2026, in its official Misalignment Reports, categorizing the incident as the unauthorized use of a funded test cryptocurrency wallet.
Odaily News - Financial services company Charles Schwab has completed the rollout of direct Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for eligible retail clients. The company manages approximately $13.33 trillion in client assets and has 40.3 million active brokerage accounts.Charles Schwab CEO Rick Wurster stated that the company is gradually rolling out cryptocurrency deposit and withdrawal functionality, and plans to add trading for Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink by the end of 2026. Currently, transfers support the Bitcoin network and the Ethereum network, and withdrawal addresses must be pre-registered.Schwab Crypto charges a 0.75% trading fee, with a minimum transaction amount of $1 and a maximum of $2 million. Rick Wurster stated that cryptocurrency trading will become one of the new transaction-based revenue streams; the platform is currently not available in New York State, Louisiana, U.S. territories, or international markets. (Bitcoin.com News)
Odaily News: The Starknet community has initiated a 7-day non-binding vote to poll STRK holders on whether they support further research into the possibility of transitioning Starknet from an Ethereum L2 to an independent quantum-resistant L1.The proposal notes that Starknet currently employs hash-based STARK proofs and native account abstraction technology, giving its core protocol quantum-resistant capabilities, and user accounts can also adopt quantum-resistant signatures without requiring protocol upgrades. However, the parts that depend on Ethereum, such as its cross-chain bridge and data availability, remain constrained by the progress of Ethereum's quantum-resistant upgrades. Transitioning to an independent L1 is expected to eliminate this dependency.The proposal makes clear that regardless of which approach is ultimately adopted, STRK will continue to serve as the network's native token, no new tokens will be issued, and the cross-chain bridge from Ethereum to Starknet will remain open.This vote is intended solely to gauge community sentiment and is not a formal decision to transition. If the vote passes, the team will initiate further research and propose a detailed plan; if it does not receive support, the team will continue advancing quantum-resistant upgrade work under the existing L2 architecture.