On Tuesday, Bitcoin slid from its 30-day line at $82.8k, dipped to retest the 50-day line at $81.1k, then bounced back to hover near the 30-day line. Off stage, though, a report from an international regulatory body pushed a stablecoin market now worth over $300 billion back into the spotlight on safety. On October 12, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a report warning that stablecoins could face a redemption crisis under market stress. What makes the warning special is precisely that it targets the well-reserved ones: even with full reserves, a run is not guaranteed survivable.[1] ...

The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three names: Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel. The official citation reads: “for the discovery of light-gated ion channels and optogenetics."[1] The award, which sounds a little abstract at first, tells a rather romantic story: humanity spent decades, and finally learned to use a beam of light to switch on or off a specific group of nerve cells in the brain, with precision. ...

Last Friday (Oct 9), BTC quietly retested its 50-day line (around $80.7k), then, after a two-day weekend, climbed back to $83k–$84k. But what sent a chill down the market’s spine was not the price action. It was a supply-chain attack on Ledger hardware wallets that, by some accounts, drained close to $100 million. A Ledger unit shipped from Malaysia, when opened, was found to contain a tiny board where the screen’s padding should have been — a board that had no business being there. On a fingernail-sized piece of silicon sat a full mobile-communications stack: an LTE module, an antenna, an eSIM, plus a microcontroller wired into the device’s SPI bus. It cannot crack your password, but it quietly watches the screen, memorizes the 24 words you jot down during setup, and beams them out[1]. ...

The recent supply-chain compromise of Ledger devices (analyzed in a companion piece) has left a lot of people nervous — suddenly doubting the hardware wallet they trusted. That reaction is understandable. But it does not mean a hardware wallet is a false proposition. To see why, we have to separate the product from the idea. A product, and a commodity A hardware wallet from Ledger, OneKey, or any other vendor is, first, a product — something designed and built to meet a need — and second, a commodity — something that enters the market to be exchanged and sold. The two words describe the same object from different angles: “product” emphasizes function, “commodity” emphasizes the transaction. ...

Overnight, BTC continued its pullback, slipping below the $83k round number. Recently, a remark by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin brought the once-distant topic of AI and cryptographic security to the foreground. He warned that if AI makes as much mathematical progress in two years as it did over the past fifty, then not only is elliptic-curve cryptography at risk, but even lattice cryptography — long hailed as the post-quantum hope — could be weakened[1]. The backdrop to that judgment is a batch of AI-generated mathematical results OpenAI published a few days earlier, and an even more aggressive warning issued by Ethereum researcher Justin Drake in response. ...

A reader left a comment after a September 22 article on PONS — investment versus speculation, and a look back at UNI: “Since UNI’s true value is supposedly far above its price, from an investment standpoint why not just dollar-cost-average into UNI?” In that piece I did not claim UNI’s true value is far above its price. I only said that, compared with UNI’s price and fundamentals back in 2021, today its price is far below then while its fundamentals are far better. ...

On Wednesday morning, Bitcoin was still hovering around the $83,000 mark. According to reports, analytics firm CryptoQuant warned that short-term traders’ on-chain unrealized profit has hit a 21-month high, suggesting the market may be due for a pullback [1]. The logic is straightforward: the thicker the paper profit, the stronger the temptation to take it. With book profits piled up to a near two-year peak, CryptoQuant’s warning at this moment is essentially a bet on that urge to take profit. ...

Overnight, Bitcoin suddenly rallied. A single candle of more than 7% shot straight from the 81k zone to 87k, marking a new high for this rebound that began in late August. The market erupted in celebration. Some pounded their chests over missed opportunities, some scrambled to reposition, some smugly patted themselves on the back. This move was a pure cascade of short liquidations — what is commonly called a short squeeze. ...

A while back, CZ posted a view online that “IPOs will move on chain,” which sparked a lot of discussion at the time. I saw that view too, but it didn’t strike me as particularly profound. Looking back now, my initial reaction was simply that such a view amounted to this: In the future, a stock’s IPO, besides happening on traditional centralized exchanges, might also place a portion on the blockchain. That is essentially no different from today’s tokenized stock trading — it still maps some off-chain business onto the chain, letting the business run both off-chain and on-chain. ...

You have probably had that moment: scrolling through old photos, you suddenly realize that being 18 was more than a decade ago. The cicadas of your college-entrance-exam summer still seem to buzz in your ears, yet the calendar tells you plainly that you have traveled very, very far. As children, summers stretched on without end — a single piece of candy, a breeze, could spend an entire afternoon. Now the four seasons feel fast-forwarded: the resolutions you made at New Year’s barely get started before the year is already over. ...