Tel Aviv-based Pearl Research Labs, the team behind the Pearl proof-of-useful-work L1, has quietly raised $130M without a public announcement. The round reportedly splits into a $55M equity raise and a $75M GPU infrastructure fund, with Lightspeed, Ribbit Capital and Square Peg among the backers.

Pearl miners run matrix multiplications on Nvidia GPUs, the same math behind AI inference, instead of burning energy on hashing. The network went live in April 2026, based on a cryptography paper by CEO Prof. Omri Weinstein (ex-Nvidia) and CTO Prof. Ilan Komargodski.

The PRL token is up roughly 520% over the past three months.

In May, Pearl signed a deal with Together AI, which offers clients a 25% discount on AI jobs run on an open-weights Google model while mining PRL in parallel. The open question is demand: most network activity still comes from sophisticated miners running idle computations purely to earn the token.

India's largest crypto exchange has now disclosed a 15.99M USDT loss tied to deposit wallets it had retired after its July 2025 breach, which cost the exchange $44M. Unusual activity on that legacy infrastructure was detected on October 21.

The automated service that sweeps funds out of old addresses failed for a period of time, so deposits users kept sending to the deprecated Tron addresses piled up and were drained. CoinDCX says it will absorb the full loss, customer funds sit in segregated cold wallets and active trading systems were not affected.

The admission came days after CEO Sumit Gupta called early breach reports "a possible false alarm" on X.

On-chain investigator ZachXBT disputes the retired-wallet explanation, pointing to an affected deposit address that kept sweeping user funds to the exchange's current hot wallet as recently as April and May 2026.

Perp DEX Extended has named its token XTEN and shared the first allocation figures ahead of a launch planned for November 2026. Claiming is not open yet.

300M XTEN, or 30% of the 1B genesis supply, is reserved for eligible participants in the Extended Points programme.

Eligible users will receive the tokens in a self-hosted Arc wallet, with nothing to pay. The XTEN white paper was prepared under MiCA, has been notified to the competent EU authority and is expected on October 31, with full tokenomics to follow.

The team warned users about fake claim sites and direct messages, pointing to extended.exchange, @extendedapp and its Discord as the only official channels.

Everything that moved crypto today, in one card.

Today's headliners: HSBC, MAS, SEC, Wells Fargo, China, Initia, Tether, Ethereum, Chainlink, Plume

Initia, a layer 1 built to connect a network of app-specific rollups, is reportedly dealing with an exploit on its chain. An attacker infinite-minted several tokens and began selling them, with more funds still in flight.

The attacker has cashed out about $2.6M so far.

The root cause and the full list of affected tokens have not been confirmed yet. Infinite-mint bugs dilute holders of the minted assets and can drain liquidity pools that price them, so the final loss could grow while the stolen funds keep moving.

The joint venue from OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, owner of the New York Stock Exchange, filed to launch under the SEC's new innovation exemption. Under that framework, platforms must notify companies before listing tokenized versions of their shares and stop if the issuer objects. Six more companies, including Wells Fargo, Arm and Intuit, have now objected.

OKXICE planned to tokenize 63 stocks. Objections have now reached 22 issuers, about a third of the list.

Earlier objectors include Microsoft, Alphabet and Goldman Sachs, and the count has grown quickly over the past week. The issuer veto has become the main constraint on tokenized equity venues: 24/7 trading and fast settlement only work with a deep bench of liquid large-cap names.

Bitcoin Core, the software most of the bitcoin network runs on, used to keep medium and high severity flaws under embargo until two weeks after the last affected version reached end of life, which could mean about a year. Maintainers have now merged a change to the project's security policy that ends this for bugs an AI can easily rediscover.

During triage, Core can now flag a vulnerability as easy to discover, meaning one that can be found with a simple prompt to an LLM. Those fixes get backported to every supported version and shipped in a point release as soon as possible, together with a security advisory. Antoine Poinsot of Chaincode Labs, who wrote the change, pointed to a jump in reports driven by LLMs lowering the bar to find certain classes of issues.

In late July, a 16-developer volunteer group ran AI models across 390 bitcoin projects and logged 4,962 potential flaws, 85 of them critical.

The tradeoff is less testing: patches won't get as much "bake time" before reaching users. No bug has been flagged under the new rule yet.

The Solana wallet now lets verified US users trade Kalshi event contracts directly inside the Phantom app, covering politics, sports, the economy and crypto. Trades are funded with CASH stablecoins and require a linked Kalshi account with full KYC.

Market restrictions apply in Michigan, Nevada and Washington. Phantom says it is "confident and comfortable" launching while several states pursue Kalshi in court, including a Utah Attorney General suit filed on October 20 alleging illegal gambling operations.

The integration puts Kalshi markets in front of roughly 20 million Phantom users.

The core dispute is whether state gambling laws apply to CFTC-registered event contracts. Until courts settle it, access in some jurisdictions could shrink.

Crypto exchanges were fined about $69M in 2024 and $1.1B in 2025. In the first ten months of 2026, the total is about $37M, including Coinbase Ireland's €3.25M fine this week.

— 2024 had no record cases: Gemini's $37M from New York's NYDFS was over half the total.

— In 2025 OKX, KuCoin and BitMEX alone paid $901M to the US Justice Department.

— This year the biggest fine is Bithumb's $25M in South Korea.

The total is already below 2024's level, and US penalties fell to $4.5M.

Some names keep coming back: Coinbase and KuCoin were fined in all three years, Gemini, OKX and Bybit in two.

Most of 2025's fines violations from 2018 to 2023. OKX and Bybit have since secured licenses, and the bill keeps shrinking.

NovaTech collapsed in May 2023 after taking in more than $1B in crypto, largely from Haitian and other immigrant communities. New York's attorney general has now asked a court to order founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion to pay $1.3B in damages and disgorgement.

The request follows an August 2025 default judgment issued after the couple left the country. That judgment also banned both from the securities, commodities and crypto industries.

From August 2019 to April 2023, investors deposited over $1B in crypto with NovaTech, but less than $26M was ever traded on its platform.

Four top promoters (Martin Zizi, Frantz Ciceron, Ricardo Roy Sr. and James Corbett) settled separately, agreeing to pay nearly $6M for victims and accepting permanent industry bans. More than 11,000 New Yorkers invested in NovaTech and its predecessor AWS Mining.