The Tron and Tether anti-fraud partnership is adding a second major analytics firm: the three companies formed the Digital Crime Task Force to find and disrupt illicit activity involving USDT on the Tron blockchain, with AI-enabled crime named as an explicit focus.

The group will gather intelligence on illicit flows and work directly with law enforcement to shorten the time between spotting a threat and freezing the funds. Chainalysis supplies the blockchain analytics, Tether holds the power to freeze USDT at specific addresses, and Tron provides the network where a large share of that USDT activity happens.

Chainalysis estimates at least $154B flowed to illicit addresses in 2025, up 162% year over year.

The earlier Tron and Tether effort with TRM Labs, the T3 Financial Crime Unit, reported more than $450M in frozen assets across 23 jurisdictions before it was dissolved in late August 2026 over coordination issues. Tron has said more anti-crime initiatives will follow.

Japanese securities group Nomura is weighing a sale of Laser Digital, its Zurich-based digital asset arm, after losses at the subsidiary pushed Nomura's European business into the red for four straight quarters.

Nomura is reportedly in talks with potential buyers, including Marex Group, which is evaluating a deal. No final decision has been made: the group could sell to Marex or another buyer, or keep the unit.

Founded in 2022, Laser Digital provides institutional trading and asset management and invests in crypto startups. Nomura cut its risk-taking in January after crypto losses in October and November 2025.

The review comes as the unit keeps expanding. Its proposed US trust bank received preliminary conditional approval from the OCC in May, and Laser Digital Japan registered as a crypto-asset exchange service provider in August.

Swiss digital asset bank Sygnum has opened the ETH Alpha Fund SP, a market-neutral vehicle for professional investors. The fund started accepting investors on Nov. 2 and is available to qualified and professional investors in approved markets, including Switzerland.

The strategy pairs native ETH staking with options premiums, cross-venue arbitrage and derivatives carry and funding trades. All gains and losses are realized in ETH rather than dollars.

The fund targets 8% to 10% annual returns in ETH, net of fees, versus an average staking yield of 2.63% at the end of September.

The product is aimed at long-term ETH holders who measure performance in ETH terms. Ethereum staking reached 43.8 million ETH, or nearly 36% of supply, by the end of the third quarter.

India's Enforcement Directorate is investigating CoinDCX and Delta Exchange India for alleged breaches of the Foreign Exchange Management Act, after searching three Bengaluru premises on November 4-5 linked to their operators, Neblio Technologies and Excelium Technologies.

The agency alleges CoinDCX converted users' rupee deposits into USDT and executed their trades on Binance, KuCoin and Gate.io through accounts held by a Costa Rica-registered entity, which it calls a paper company. It puts the volume of these cross-border spot trades at thousands of crores of rupees.

Products marketed as tokenised Apple, Google and Tesla stocks allegedly gave users no share ownership: CoinDCX reportedly opened matching positions on Hyperliquid instead.

The probe follows an October search of RPFAS Technologies, operator of Mudrex and Saber Money, where the ED flagged over Rs 4,600 crore in unauthorised transfers and foreign balances. The allegations against CoinDCX and Delta Exchange remain under investigation.

Gemini Space Station (GEMI), the Nasdaq-listed parent of the Winklevoss-founded exchange, has reportedly sold its U.K. and European businesses to stablecoin payments firm KAST. Neither company confirmed the deal, though a KAST hiring post a month ago tasked a European general manager with transitioning Gemini's U.K. and EU staff.

The price was reportedly below $10M, a fraction of the $80M KAST raised in its March Series A at a $600M valuation.

Gemini announced in February it would wind down the U.K., EU and Australia and cut about 25% of its workforce, keeping the U.S. and Singapore. Buyers were mainly after the regulatory permissions of the shuttered units. Singapore-based KAST, founded by former Circle executive Raagulan Pathy, offers stablecoin accounts, transfers and cards, and says it is actively looking for more M&A.

Everything that moved crypto today, in one card.

Today's headliners: Deutsche Bank, CFTC, Nomura, Novig, Across Protocol, Plume, Bitmine, Forward, xStocks, Pyth Network

Node and RPC provider Chainstack has expanded its incident report on an intrusion that ran from October 26 until October 31, when the company detected it and cut the access paths the same day. The attacker used ARTEX, an open-source framework that orchestrates LLM agents to automate intrusions.

Entry came through an internet-exposed test Grafana instance with unchanged default admin credentials. From there the attacker reached an unauthenticated internal MCP tool server with cluster-admin rights, took development credentials that also worked in production, read production secrets in bulk and queried production databases.

Exposed data includes organization names, account holder names, member emails and password hashes. Node credentials were also reachable and are being treated as exposed.

Chainstack says customer nodes, the console and the API were not modified, and no card details were stored. Customers are asked to change passwords, rotate node credentials, regenerate platform API keys and watch for phishing. The last observed use of a copied credential was on November 2.

The Ethereum Foundation had already moved its post-quantum target from 2029 to 2028. Now nonprofit R&D lab Ethlabs wants to go further, proposing a "pqai27" plan to make Ethereum post-quantum and plausibly post-AI by 2027 after a week with core developers at Devcon.

The plan has two levels. "pqai-ready" means post-quantum consensus and a post-quantum route for every user account while the network keeps the capacity delivered by Glamsterdam. "pqai-scaled", full capacity with post-quantum transactions and blobs, is the stretch goal for 2027.

Ethlabs says it will withdraw quick slots from the Hegotá hard fork and argues that FOCIL, its consensus-layer headliner, should only be scheduled if pqai27 stays achievable.

The lab cites AI speeding up quantum timelines, maths research and bug discovery at scale. Glamsterdam ships as planned and Frames stays on the critical path, but the proposal still needs core developers to adopt it.

This week's theme: the fine print. A vault that says who takes the first loss, an option where the most you can lose is printed upfront, a public record of who stands behind an AI agent.

9 early-stage projects, from risk ratings for onchain yield to a delivery robot that gets paid by itself.

Polymarket says it makes $1.8B a year. Public data points to about $1.1B after trader rebates, level with or above Hyperliquid's $839M as crypto's top earner outside stablecoin issuers.

Polymarket is raising at $21B, about 19x revenue. Hyperliquid trades at 82x on FDV, Pump.fun under 5x. Kalshi, valued at $40B, says its non-sports markets alone make over $1B a year.