Thailand requires every digital asset exchange to hold a local SEC license and has moved to block unlicensed foreign platforms. Bitget now has a route in: it agreed to buy GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics (Thailand), a licensed Bangkok-based exchange and brokerage.

Japan's GMO Internet, GMO-Z.com Holdings (Thailand) and other holders will sell their entire stake to BTGT Management (Thailand), an entity in which Bitget holds an interest. Financial terms were not disclosed. GMO said the sale will have only a minor impact on its fiscal 2026 results.

The transfer targets completion by October 31, 2026, subject to change-of-control approval from Thailand's SEC.

After closing, Bitget plans to offer its platform to Thai users through the locally operated exchange. GMO first announced its intention to withdraw from the Thai business in March 2026.

Metaplex, the Solana token and NFT standard protocol, has secured a KRW trading pair on Upbit, South Korea's largest crypto exchange by volume.

MPLX/KRW trading opens on October 20 at 18:30 KST.

Upbit supports MPLX deposits and withdrawals only on the Solana network. Tokens sent to the exchange via any other network may not be credited, so users moving MPLX onto Upbit should check the network before transferring.

A KRW listing gives the token direct access to Korean won traders, one of the most active retail markets for altcoins. New Upbit listings often see sharp volatility in the first hours of trading.

Monday's session gave US spot bitcoin funds their largest daily net inflow in nearly a month, with $526.6M added in total. The last bigger day came on September 22, when the group took in $714.7M.

BlackRock's IBIT alone pulled in $665.2M, its biggest daily inflow since October 7, 2025, more than the entire group's net total.

Fidelity's FBTC lost $83.6M and Grayscale's GBTC shed $54.9M, while the remaining funds recorded no net flows. The day more than erased last week's $228.5M of withdrawals, though bitcoin ETFs are still about $90.5M in the red for October.

Ether funds moved the other way, losing $103.3M in a fourth straight session of outflows. BlackRock's ETHA accounted for $95.4M of those withdrawals.

The defunct Bitcoin exchange's rehabilitation trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, moved the deadline for base, early lump-sum and intermediate repayments from Oct. 31, 2026 to Oct. 31, 2027, with the permission of the court. The notice is dated Oct. 16.

The trustee said repayments are largely complete for creditors who finished the required procedures without issues, but many others have not yet completed them, and a considerable number were not paid due to problems that arose during the process.

This is the third one-year extension in a row, after similar notices in October 2024 and October 2025.

Repayments in BTC and BCH through designated exchanges began in July 2024 and reached more than 19,500 creditors by March 2025. Mt. Gox collapsed in 2014 after losing about 850,000 BTC, and wallets linked to it moved 10,608 BTC in November 2025, weeks after the previous extension.

Paolo Ardoino has pushed back on Senator Richard Blumenthal's Iran sanctions report, arguing that it ignores when Tether actually froze flagged wallets. In an October 19 post, he said that since 2023 Tether froze addresses on average four weeks before official OFAC and Israeli NBCTF designations.

Ardoino credited Tether's enforcement work for a 94% drop in Iran-linked stablecoin volume, and said that in 99% of cases Tether froze reported addresses before Chainalysis labeled them.

The Senate staff report, released September 28, found that 84% of 846 Iran-linked wallets used USDT exclusively or nearly exclusively. It also cited 34 Hezbollah-linked addresses flagged in June 2023 that were only blocked in March 2024, after more than $34.6M in USDT left them.

Tether's figures are company assertions without a published dataset. Blumenthal has asked the Treasury and the Justice Department to investigate Tether's sanctions and anti-money-laundering practices.

Dromos Labs has published the full economic model behind Aero, the onchain spot exchange that combines Aerodrome and Velodrome, two DEXs that lead trading on Base and OP Mainnet. Aero goes live on October 21, built on the new MetaDEX03 architecture.

At launch, Aero deploys on Ethereum Mainnet, Base, Arbitrum, OP Mainnet, Ink, Arc and Robinhood Chain. By mid-October, these seven networks handled nearly four times the DEX volume of Base and OP Mainnet combined.

Staked AERO (sAERO) is a claim on all exchange revenue: pool fees, liquidity and launch payments, and service fees.

To limit dilution, Gauge Caps tie AERO rewards to each pool's revenue, targeting about 1.2x across the exchange, while a market-aware Momentum Fund buys back and burns AERO and sAERO. Earlier Aerodrome programs bought back or locked about 180M AERO, roughly 18% of supply.

Ten days after going live on Sepolia, Ethereum's next network upgrade moves to its second public testnet. Glamsterdam is set to activate on Hoodi at epoch 132,352 on October 26, 2026, at 17:42:48 UTC.

The upgrade combines the Amsterdam execution layer and Gloas consensus layer changes. Its headline features are enshrined proposer-builder separation (EIP-7732), which moves the proposer-builder exchange into the protocol, and block-level access lists (EIP-7928), which let clients read state and validate transactions in parallel.

At the same epoch, Hoodi's gas limit will rise to 200M, matching Sepolia.

Glamsterdam also reprices gas for state creation, state access and calldata, so contracts relying on fixed gas stipends or hardcoded limits may need changes. Node operators must update both execution and consensus clients before activation. No mainnet date has been set yet.

Wall Street research is starting to look past the crypto-native label of DeFi lending. In a new Citi Research note on Aave, analysts Peter Christiansen and Aditi Balachandran describe the protocol as "a decentralized collateral mobility ecosystem" rather than just an onchain money market.

The 24-page report, titled "Aave: Bringing Real World Finance Onchain" and dated October 19, calls Aave the largest decentralized and permissionless lending protocol, with hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative borrowing across multiple networks. It points to Aave V4, Horizon and GHO as initiatives building the intersection of collateral, liquidity and financing.

"We believe collateral mobility may ultimately prove to be one of tokenization's most important use cases," Citi wrote.

The bank's argument: tokenization answers how assets move onchain, while protocols like Aave may decide how those assets are financed, pledged as collateral and integrated into capital markets as Treasuries, private credit and eventually equities come onchain.

Bitcoin's price swings have narrowed steadily over the past decade, a shift Grayscale links to deeper liquidity, institutional participation and regulation as the asset matures.

Bitcoin's realized volatility over the past year stands at 43%, down from 81% five years ago.

That places BTC within the range of S&P 500 constituents. On the 1-year daily volatility chart, based on Bloomberg data as of October 6, 2026, Bitcoin sits above Amazon and JPMorgan but below Oracle, Coinbase, Honeywell and Sandisk.

The comparison frames Bitcoin as closer to a volatile large-cap stock than an outlier asset, which may matter for allocators already holding high-beta equities. Past volatility does not predict future price behavior.

BlackRock is extending its bitcoin lineup beyond spot exposure. The firm's iShares Trust submitted a prospectus for the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF to the SEC on October 19, under the proposed ticker PBIT.

The fund aims to track gains in IBIT, BlackRock's spot bitcoin ETF, up to a limit while offering a level of downside protection. It will not hold bitcoin or bitcoin ETPs directly. Instead it runs three overlapping tranches of call spreads, mostly FLEX options, with one tranche rolling each month, plus a fixed-income sleeve to offset option costs.

Each tranche's protection typically starts at about 90% of IBIT's value, setting an initial maximum loss of roughly 10% before fees.

The upside cap depends on market conditions when each tranche starts, so it will vary over time. The management fee, listing exchange and launch date are still blank, and the draft prospectus is dated 2027. The product follows BlackRock's covered-call Bitcoin Premium Income ETF and still needs to clear the SEC review process before trading.