Stripe plans to expand its stablecoin card programs to more than 100 countries by the end of 2026, according to Henri Stern, who now oversees stablecoins and crypto at the payments company. Current customers include Kraken, Ramp and Morse.

Stablecoin card spending reached about $1.2 billion last month, triple the volume from a year earlier, according to Paymentscan. Stripe aims to connect stablecoins with its existing card and payments infrastructure, giving businesses another way to serve customers across borders.

Stripe is also exploring tokenized deposits, DeFi use cases and support for more digital assets. Stern said the company plans to remain stablecoin and blockchain agnostic, with most of its work currently focused on stablecoins.

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At their peak, these ten Ethereum L2s held about $3.5B. Blast alone had $2.51B. Now every one of them is closed or closing.

Half found their users a new home: four sent them back to Ethereum, and Immutable X merged into Immutable zkEVM. The other half, Blast, Loopring, Mint, Redstone and Zero, just turned the lights off.

The tokens tell the rest. Every one still trading is down 96% or more from its high.

Binance launched Binance Intelligence, an AI stack built into the exchange app, unveiled today by Co-CEO Richard Teng and VP of Product Jeff Li.

Binance AI is free for all users from October 5: a "For You" tab that adapts to each user's level, plus a Market Brief across crypto, stocks and macro every four hours. Binance AI Pro arrives in the second half of October and turns plain-language ideas into strategies that run 24/7 in a separate sub-account. Going live costs 19.99 USDC a month. Agent OS, live since August, already handles 280K+ daily calls.

"Blockchain is giving everyone access to markets; AI gives everyone the knowledge to navigate them," Teng said.

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Virtuals Protocol launched Virtuals App in closed beta: a personal AI with its own wallet and market access that researches investments and trades inside your group chats.

You give the AI a task, set its limits and permissions, and it works like your own quant trader. Early users already follow markets they can't watch all day, automate trades around social media posts and build dashboards that track a token's sniper wallets from entry to exit.

The app is on iOS and invite-only for now. It builds on Virtuals' earlier experiments with ACP, EconomyOS, Butler on X and agentic trading competitions.

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Three bitcoin treasury firms disclosed fresh buys today, adding 13,334 BTC worth about $1.15B. Strategy bought 334 BTC for $28.7M and now holds 848,000.

Strategy also reported a $21B Q3 gain on its bitcoin and bought back $176M of STRC preferred stock. Metaplanet bought 11,000 BTC for $949M after selling 10,000 for $789M to show it could cover its interest-bearing debt. It ends Q3 with 44,000 BTC.

Strive added 2,000 BTC for $169M at about $84,422 each, lifting its holdings to 29,462 BTC. 61.5% of the capital came from its SATA preferred stock.

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Money rotated out of metals this month. Gold gave back $1.97T and silver $269B, while the other 13 assets on the board added $1.32T combined, led by Meta (+$283B), TSMC (+$228B) and Apple (+$200B).

Bitcoin's +8.4% beat every top-10 stock except Meta and TSMC, and lifted it one spot to #11, past Broadcom and Saudi Aramco. Meta made the biggest jump, three places back into the top 10, while Broadcom and Aramco each dropped two.

Hyperliquid received its first AQAv2 payment: $14.58M in USDC for 30 days of reserve yield. It goes to the Assistance Fund, which buys HYPE.

AQAv2 went live on August 26. Circle deploys USDC on Hyperliquid, Coinbase manages the reserves, and about 90% of the cost-adjusted yield on that USDC is shared with the protocol in 30-day cycles. The Assistance Fund then buys HYPE on the market and burns it.

That gives buybacks a source beyond trading fees. At this pace it adds roughly $175M a year, though the amount moves with USDC supply and interest rates.

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Most "early" plays in your feed have no funding and no product. We filtered for one signal: real capital behind the project. This week that means Robinhood, Coinbase Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Susquehanna, GSR and The Sandbox founders. Six live activities, with links and steps.

Arcus · Perp DEX

A DEX on Robinhood Chain for stock tokens, spot and perps, built by the team behind dYdX. Points went live on October 1, after $5B+ in volume during private beta.

Backers: Robinhood Crypto (strategic investment) · incubated by dYdX Labs

How to join:

1. Sign up via our Arcus invite link and connect your wallet. Private beta users already got Season 0 points.

2. Trade. Stock tokens and other RWAs earn more, and so do RWA perps traded outside US market hours. Swaps in Robinhood Wallet routed through Arcus are boosted too.

3. Season 1 pays a fixed 250K points per week, updated Wednesdays at 3PM ET. The program ends no later than H1 2027.

Elysium · Hyperliquid Network

A new network from Kinetiq, the team behind kHYPE, a liquid-staking token for HYPE. It's built to take Hyperliquid DeFi and spot trading past current throughput limits, and the testnet is open.

Backers: Maven 11, Susquehanna, IMC, Flowdesk, Chorus One (Kinetiq seed) · $1.75M

How to join:

1. Open elysium.kinetiq.xyz/testnet-bridge and connect your wallet.

2. Claim test tokens, add the Elysium network and bridge to HyperEVM.

3. Make a few different transactions over several days, not just one. No rewards have been announced, so use test funds only.

Reya · Perp DEX

A perp DEX that just moved to a new v2 orderbook. v2 is in private beta and opens in phases, starting with Season 1 traders and market makers.

Backers: Coinbase Ventures, Framework Ventures, Wintermute, Brevan Howard Digital, Robot Ventures · $10M

How to join:

1. Open app.reya.xyz and join the v2 queue.

2. Once you're in, trade on the new orderbook. ETH, BTC, SOL, HYPE and XRP are among the first markets.

3. Season 2 pays in $REYA: 3% of total supply. The season is short and the pool is fixed, so getting in early means fewer people splitting it.

Entropy · Pre-IPO Perps

Perps on stocks, commodities and pre-IPO companies, built on Hyperliquid by ex-Citadel Securities, Optiver and Polymarket traders. It's now also live inside Trust Wallet.

Backers: Ribbit Capital (seed lead) · $14M seed

How to join:

1. Trade at entropy.io. Tencent ($HK700) was just listed with 10x leverage.

2. If you post about markets, apply to the Entropy Partners program through the application form. The team reviews every application.

3. Keep posting: the first affiliate badges went out on October 2 to people already creating content about Entropy.

dare market · SocialFi

A Solana platform where people post public challenges with bounties and others complete them with proof. v2 went live on October 1: every dare can now launch its own token.

Backers: Karatage, Paper Ventures (co-leads), GSR, Axia8, Ansem · $2M

How to join:

1. Open app.dare.market and sign in.

2. Launch a token for your dare (SOL or USDC), or trade existing ones. Trading fees fill the dare's bounty pool.

3. Or complete dares yourself. The daily Dare of the Day has been paying $1,000 bounties.

Hollywood Hills · Fan Investing

A cosmic-horror feature film from The Sandbox founders, built around the real Dead & Famous bus tour in LA. Fans can invest in the film, share its revenue and hunt for clues that can change the story.

Backers: Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget (lead investors) · $1M fan campaign

How to join:

1. Join the waitlist at hollywoodhills.cc.

2. The investment window opens October 8 through Republic (18+, limited allocation, first come first served).

3. Investors get one of 3,000 Villa collectibles, each hiding a piece of the mystery. This is a paid investment, not a free mint.

Not financial advice. Points and testnets don't guarantee a token.

OKX and ICE notified the SEC they will launch a 24/7 tokenized US stock venue through OKXICE, their 50/50 venture, under the SEC's new Innovation Exemption.

The first list includes NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, SpaceX, Coinbase and Circle. Each token is backed one-to-one by a real share with dividend and voting rights, and trades against USDC, USDG or USDT in permissioned Uniswap v4 pools on X Layer. Only verified wallets can trade.

Listed companies get 30 days to object, and Cerebras already has. OKX lists 70+ tokenized stocks offshore, but US users can't buy them.

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Zcash activated NU7 on testnet, cutting the target block time from 75 seconds to 25 ahead of a planned November 5 mainnet launch.

NU7 went live at testnet block 4,465,026, and both major node clients, Zakura and the Zcash Foundation's Zebra, now support it. Miners will get 40% of transaction fees, while 60% goes to a reserve for future mining rewards. The block reward drops to a third, so ZEC issuance stays on schedule. The upgrade also disables the old Sprout privacy pool.

Developers will decide on mainnet activation on October 20. Anyone still holding funds in Sprout should move them before the upgrade.

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