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Switzerland opened a “retail gateway” to Bitcoin today.
Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA announced Tuesday that it had approved the country’s first $BTC ETF aimed at retail investors. It is a special-risk product in the “other alternative investment funds” category under Swiss fund law, and the first to let ordinary retail investors put their money directly into spot Bitcoin.
The most interesting part is FINMA’s rationale for making an exception. To approve the fund, the regulator waived the risk diversification rules, arguing that Bitcoin has a sufficiently long tra

The Houthis have struck again, and oil prices have returned to “war pricing” overnight.
The Iran-backed Houthi militants have escalated attacks on Saudi energy facilities. Shipping tracker Kpler says at least 18 ships have been attacked over the past two weeks.
WTI crude futures rose 4.15% to $107.96 in Tuesday premarket trading, while Brent gained 1.52% to $111.22; Brent briefly touched a five-month high.
USO, which tracks WTI, rose more than 2% premarket, gained 8.5% over the past 5 trading days, and is up 1.3x year to date, just shy of its 52-week high of $163.35.
Meanwhile, AI stocks conti

Sold out, not a single coin left. SkyAI (formerly Sharps Technology), once the fifth-largest Solana treasury company among U.S. stocks, confirmed in a filing with the SEC on Monday that it had liquidated its entire $SOL holdings, with only about $223.8 million in cash remaining on its books as of October 16. This round of “selling coins to buy back shares” moved extremely fast. In early October, the company began transferring SOL in bulk from on-chain wallets to exchanges. On October 11, it first announced the sale of about 1 million coins and plans to launch a tender offer to repurchase shar

A pile of good news, yet XRP still fell 5.7% in a week.
Over the past full seven days, XRP slid from $1.37 to $1.29, a cumulative decline of about 5.7%.
The news was all good that same week. Ripple's Garlinghouse said on October 19 that the CLARITY Act's failure to pass the Senate by a 49-to-50 vote would not affect XRP—the federal judge had already ruled in 2023 that XRP itself is not a security.
On the same day, Germany's largest savings bank network, Sparkassen, opened the doors: its banking app launched crypto trading, with the first 5 banks already offering it, and XRP among the first 5 c

Google is about to lay down the law for crypto ads in the UAE, with the new rules taking effect tomorrow (October 21). Google Ads is updating its Financial Products policy: advertisers running ads for crypto exchanges and software wallets targeting UAE users must hold a license from one of four regulators—the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), or Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA)—and also pass Google's own advertising certification. On the surface, it looks like an expansion: previously, only VARA

Tech stocks rebounded, and Amazon single-handedly took over hype-squad duties.
U.S. stocks rose on Monday, with the Nasdaq up 1.11%. Amazon surged the most: +4.98% to close at $262.45, adding about $134.3 billion in market cap in a single day.
The catalyst was Morgan Stanley, which named Amazon its top pick and raised its price target from $335 to $350, forecasting AWS year-over-year growth of 47% in 2027.
The same day, Amazon also unveiled a major initiative: the open-source tool TorchNeuron. A single configuration change lets PyTorch code run on its custom Trainium chips, and it already has

The IPO institutions fought over fell by a third on its first day of trading.
Today, KOSDAQ saw its biggest IPO of the year: AI infrastructure company Elice Group went public.
Background: The offering price was 90,500 won, set right at the top of the price range. Institutional subscription reached 388.84 times and retail subscription 408.26 times, with more than 10 trillion won in IPO subscription deposits pouring in—making it arguably the hottest IPO in South Korea’s capital markets this year.
Update: But shares opened at just 75,700 won, down 16.4%; they slid throughout the day to 61,000 won

The king of ETH treasuries added 12,500 coins in a week, yet $1.1 billion evaporated from its books.
BitMine's 10/19 SEC filing: Bought another 12,535 ETH in a week, bringing its treasury to 6,041,481 ETH, or 4.9% of circulating supply.
But ETH's price fell from $2,544 to $2,365, and the treasury's total value dropped from $16.2 billion to $15.1 billion—the coins bought this week don't even cover a fraction of the losses.
This isn't new: BitMine has bought every week since 2025/6/30, without a break.
It is about 63,500 ETH short of its 5% holding target, and Tom Lee says it will stop once it r

U.S. chip stocks had just rebounded, but Seoul flat-out said no.
On October 20, South Korea’s KOSPI opened down 0.6% and kept falling, breaking below 5700 in the morning and dropping more than 2%. It touched a session low near 5587, down more than 3%.
Ironically, U.S. chip stocks had just rebounded overnight: the Nasdaq rose 1.11%, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index gained 1.6%, ending an eight-day losing streak, SanDisk climbed 5.5%, and SK hynix’s U.S. ADR rose nearly 5%. But Seoul’s chip giants weren’t buying it.
Samsung Electronics fell 1.5% to 214500 won, while SK hynix briefly dropped

Semiconductors fell for 8 days, and finally stopped.
U.S. market close on October 19: Nasdaq up 1.11%, S&P 500 up 0.41%, Dow down slightly by 0.07%. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index ended its 8-day losing streak, its longest since October 2008, with memory and semiconductor stocks leading gains.
I think this looks more like a technical rebound than a trend reversal: a natural bounce after a deep decline, while the underlying problem remains unfixed.
The real test comes after Wednesday’s close, with earnings from Meta, Tesla, IBM, and Texas Instruments. LSEG expects Q3 earnings growth of ov

Wall Street has started selling "downside protection."
BlackRock filed PBIT with the SEC on 10/19: iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF.
No spot holdings: it buys call spreads linked to IBIT and pairs them with short-term fixed income; the single strike is around 90% of the underlying price, losses are capped at about 10%, and upside is capped. The filing states it does not guarantee principal.
BlackRock's third Bitcoin product: IBIT offers spot exposure ($65.1B), BITA sells calls to earn income, and PBIT sells "peace of mind."
The timing is striking: the ETF's average cost is $84,358, leavi

The news rallied before the earnings report.
Sandisk surged as much as 8% intraday Monday, closing up 5.53% at $1,371.12, and the entire storage sector rebounded along with it.
The catalyst was a weekend report by South Korea's Seoul Economic Daily: Samsung has accepted Nvidia's request to use TSMC's 3nm process to manufacture the base die for NVHBM—the first time Samsung has partnered with TSMC in the HBM segment.
Nvidia's move brings Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron under the same NVHBM standard: 15% lower power consumption, 30% more bandwidth, and 30% more space for compute chips.
But amid all

As crude oil let up, Bitcoin caught its breath.
On Monday, $BTC moved back above $82,000, rising as much as 2.4% intraday and briefly topping $82,600. $ETH followed with a 3.7% gain, while $SOL rose more than 4.6%, putting risk assets across the board back in the green.
The rally was fueled by macro factors: Brent crude fell about 2% from a five-month high, and the US also waived newly tightened sanctions on Russia; Treasury yields fell in tandem, while S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures both rose about 1%. As fears of inflation and rate hikes eased, non-yielding assets were naturally repriced.
But

$400 million evaporated in two weeks—can a stablecoin's market cap “slim down” this fast?
USD1, the stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, a crypto project affiliated with the Trump family, saw its market cap fall from $4.43 billion to about $4.02 billion over the past two weeks, a decline of about $401 million, or 9.1%. Data from CoinGecko covers October 6 to October 19, while the official reserve dashboard shows reserves of about $4.01 billion, broadly in line.
On-chain research firm Onchain Benchmark points to concentrated redemptions as the cause: net redemptions of $184.6 million o

The first shot of U.S. earnings season before the market opens today is General Motors.
GM will report Q3 earnings before the market opens in the U.S. Eastern time. Analysts expect EPS of $3.63 and revenue of about $48.76 billion. Over the past 90 days, EPS estimates have been revised upward from $3.26 to $3.63, an increase of 11.3%—the market has a healthy appetite for earnings.
But the stock hasn’t celebrated in advance: it fell 1.86% on Monday to close at $82.40, leaving its gain for the year at just 1.79%. The bigger question is demand: with interest rates pressuring dealers’ financing cos

Bitcoin took another swing at $83,000 tonight, then got pushed back down.
CoinDesk's latest roundup: Bitcoin touched $83,000 overnight before retreating to around $82,000, up about 0.8% over the past 24 hours. CoinGecko data also shows $BTC currently hovering around $83,000, up about 8% over the past 30 days.
The rebound moved in tandem with U.S. stocks. The Nasdaq rose 0.85%, led by a recovery in chip stocks that had been hammered recently: Micron, Intel, SanDisk, and AMD rose between 4% and 7% at the open. Risk assets collectively caught their breath.
But a reality check is in order: Bitcoin

$10 billion flows into crypto vaults—is the yield game back?
Deposits in crypto lending vaults have just surpassed the $10 billion mark.
The figure was only about $4 billion early last year, according to the Financial Times, while S&P Global data shows it was only around $1.5 billion in September 2024—nearly a sevenfold increase in two years.
Crypto vaults are essentially smart-contract vaults for DeFi lending: depositors put stablecoins or tokens into a contract, and a “fund manager”-like role called a curator selects lending strategies, sets risk limits, and collects management fees. Yields

After a weeklong bloodbath, chip stocks are rebounding across the board in premarket trading today: dead-cat bounce or day one of a reversal?
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 11.4% last week, its biggest weekly drop since March 2025. An 8-day losing streak marked its longest since October 2008, wiping out about $2 trillion in a week.
Premarket spark today: AMD rose 3.7% to $548.50, after closing at $528.75 last Friday (-5.95%) and plunging as low as $526.83 intraday. INTC rose 4.2%, MRVL 4.7%, MU 3.6%, and NVDA 1.9%.
Fuel for the rebound: the 10-year Treasury yield edged down to aroun

$10 billion has poured into a business familiar to those who lost big in 2022: lending.
The Financial Times’ latest data: deposits in DeFi lending vaults have topped $10 billion, up from just $4 billion at the start of last year—a 2.5-fold increase in less than two years. You deposit stablecoins into a vault, and a “curator” picks lending strategies, sets risk limits, and charges management fees—the on-chain version of a fund manager.
The yields are tempting: 3%–10% for conventional strategies, and over 20% for aggressive ones.
I don’t think you can look only at the yield. Collateral may be sm