That's 7.1M BTC, about $589B. If ECDSA breaks, these coins could be taken without their owners doing anything.

Why now: on Oct 7, a day after OpenAI dropped 722 AI-made math results, Justin Drake said ECDSA could break before quantum computers do, "in the worst case in months not years". Vitalik agreed it "might fall even faster than expected".

The twist: it's mostly not Satoshi. His era's coins hold 1.71M BTC. Reused addresses hold 5.18M, 73% of everything exposed. That's wallets in use today, including Binance, Robinhood and Bitfinex cold storage, which Drake named directly.

The fix costs nothing: send to a fresh address and never reuse it.

Based warned its cardholders by email that someone got into an internal tool card provider Streamis uses to manage accounts. The access ran from Oct 3 to Oct 5, then was shut.

Exposed: full name, date of birth, phone, nationality, home address, passport number, email, Based wallet address and customer ID. Based says no funds moved and cards keep working. The real risk is the link between identity and wallet: attackers can now see who owns which balance, so expect phishing, scam calls and targeted threats.

So far Based has made no public statement on X, and the number of affected users is not disclosed.

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Orca and Loopscale merged into Formation. The Solana DEX and lending protocol want to finance AI, energy, robotics and defense companies onchain, from issuance to loans and trading.

Loopscale co-founder Luke Truitt is CEO, and Orca’s Christopher Montagano becomes chief strategy and legal officer. Terms weren’t disclosed. ORCA and xORCA stay the core tokens, but a tokenholder proposal would cut automatic xORCA buybacks from 40% of fees to 10%, add 10% for team-run buybacks and send 80% to operations. Orca has handled $550B+ in volume since 2021, Loopscale has $150M+ in deposits and $2B+ in loans.

ORCA is up about 70% in a week to around $2.76, per CoinGecko.

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Samsung is adding Solana stablecoins to Samsung Wallet and Samsung Pay. From the last week of October, users on 82M US Galaxy devices can send USDC abroad without leaving the app.

Built-in on- and off-ramps convert to and from local currency, with payouts to bank accounts in 60+ countries. Samsung won’t charge transfer fees, though receiving wallets or banks may. Coinbase custodies the USDC through Coinbase Prime, with Bastion as the licensed US stablecoin custodian. More markets will follow, subject to local rules.

Solana says it has processed over $5.25T in stablecoin volume in 2026, with PayPal and Western Union already on the network.

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Block Scholes tested Bitget’s unified account, where 125 tokenized US stocks can back crypto positions. On a $1M portfolio, the capital needed fell from $340K to $175K.

The catch is correlation. Stock collateral falls together with the market, so the modeled portfolio hit liquidation after a ~21% correlated drop, versus ~27% if the same value sat in USDT. Since 2022, BTC’s 60-day correlation with the Nasdaq-100 has averaged +0.41.

The stocks keep working too: they still pay dividends in USDT and can be pledged to borrow stablecoins.

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Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 output, 90% below Haiku 4.5 for prompts up to 100K tokens.

It is also much stronger: 72.4% on OSWorld computer use vs 15.7% for Haiku 4.5, 45.9% on Humanity’s Last Exam vs 10.2%, and 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0. It is the first Haiku with an effort setting, from Low to Max, to trade cost for capability. Above 100K tokens the price is $0.50 / $2.50, still 50% cheaper.

It is live on the Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

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This week's theme: trading is turning into a game. Sports bets with XP and card packs, competitions against AI agents, portfolios copied in one click. And the plumbing underneath is growing up.

9 early-stage projects, from a way to buy Waymo without the rest of Alphabet to private transfers on Bitcoin.

Lido unveiled Lido Lend, a lending market on a modified fork of Morpho Blue for passive holders who want yield without hidden risk. Launch is planned this quarter, pending a Lido DAO vote.

Each market is isolated and focused on blue-chip, price-correlated pairs like stETH/ETH, built for looping borrowers on one side and conservative lenders on the other. Deposit screening is meant to filter out hacked funds, and lenders get reliable exits even when a market is fully utilized. Lido points to $25B+ staked as stETH and six years without a major security incident.

Technical specs, market parameters and audit reports will be published before the governance votes.

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Base is partnering with SMBC Nikko on an institutional DeFi gateway for Japan that lets regulated investors use onchain pools with compliance built in. It is targeted for mid-2027.

SMBC Nikko, one of Japan’s major brokerages, signed the MOU on October 2 with Nethermind, Uniswap Labs, Base and Nyx Foundation. SMBC Nikko handles regulators and compliance, Nethermind builds the tech and security, and Uniswap v4 hooks embed AML and counter-terrorism financing checks directly into liquidity pools. Both firms will keep Japan’s FSA updated as it is built.

SMBC Nikko set up a dedicated DeFi Technology Department in February. Base runs on infrastructure managed by Coinbase.

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GSR launched Hare, a desk that curates onchain credit vaults, built with Turtle. GSR commits $100M, mostly as a multi-year credit line that anchors the first deposits.

The first two vaults, coming soon, run on Aave: Hare USD Earn takes major dollar stablecoins, and Hare Gold Earn pays yield on Paxos’ tokenized gold, PAXG and PAXGy. Paxos Labs, Chainlink and Hypernative also back the launch. “Issuers get liquidity from day one, and allocators see GSR’s own capital in the same vaults as theirs,” says Hare CEO Connor Milner, formerly of Re7 Capital.

Vault curators now manage about $8.6B across 788 vaults, per Vaults.fyi data cited by CoinDesk.

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