Crypto: 14th October 2025
Published 14th October 2025
📣 Headlines
• Mastercard and Coinbase compete to acquire stablecoin firm BVNK, signaling intensified competition to control fiat-to-stablecoin rails.
• Revolut launched in India with full-KYC wallets, UPI support and cross-border remittances, challenging banks and fintech rivals on high forex fees.
• Flipkart’s Super.money partnered with Juspay to power a new D2C checkout, targeting $100M revenue by 2026 and pushing programmable payment rails at scale.
• Charles Schwab backed Singapore’s Qapita in a $26.5M Series B to expand private-market cap table and issuer equity services infrastructure.
• Age-gating and identity verification expanded across porn and social platforms, heightening privacy and compliance debates relevant to decentralized identity.
• Apple doubled its top bug-bounty payout to $2M and boosted rewards for critical exploit chains, strengthening incentives for device-level security that protects crypto users.
• The Linux Foundation launched the React Foundation to govern React and React Native, bringing long-term stability to front-end frameworks widely used by web3 apps.
• Two teenagers were arrested in England over an extortion-driven cyberattack and data leak on Kido, underscoring persistent credential and PII-theft risks across consumer platforms.
📉 Macro, Markets, and Skepticism
Was DOGE all for nothing? Here are the receipts (blog.quintarelli.it). DOGE did not move the needle as US spending rose 6% to $6.6 trillion in 2025 calendar fiscal year
Crypto’s murky core — and why the bubble must burst (taxresearch.org.uk). Jemima Kelly’s FT Alphaville critique frames crypto as regulatory evasion and wealth extraction, contrasting hype with opacity and real-world losses
Is the crash happening? (taxresearch.org.uk). Crypto market crash discussed, including metrics, leverage liquidations, and potential links to policy shocks and broader markets
The Debasement “Trade” (bombthrower.com). Bitcoin and gold rally as debasement trade headlines frame a monetary regime shift and capital flight
🕵️ Crypto Crime, Laundering, Enforcement
EXCLUSIVE: Defendant in Record UK Crypto Seizure Case Bought Dubai Properties (occrp.org). Leaked Dubai real estate data shows Ling Seng Hok bought two luxury properties amid a UK crypto seizure case
A Tale of Two Bitcoin Billionaires (codastory.com). Explores Zhimin Qian’s $7.24B Bitcoin seizure, Chinese cooperation, and parallels with Justin Sun’s Libertarian tech ventures
Inside a Crypto Scam Nexus (dti.domaintools.com). Investigation links MedAI Genesis, Novacrypt, and ZZZTD scam sites to a single Alibaba Cloud IP 8.221.100.222 and related infrastructure
Coinomize: Dissecting One of the Longest-Running Bitcoin Mixers (caudena.com). Caudena maps Coinomize’s blockchain across Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, and cross-chain bridges, revealing three laundering stages and 62k+ transactions
🔗 Stablecoins, DeFi, Asset Flows
Zcash price doubled (johndcook.com). Zcash price doubled over a week; explores privacy coin interest, possible hedging against Bitcoin, and Monero correlation with price moves
The best-performing stablecoin vaults, October 2025 (tradingstrategy.ai). Overview of October 2025 DeFi stablecoin vaults, ERC-4626 benchmarks, and new mUSD stablecoin from MetaMask within multi-chain vault analytics
Tether’s Next Chapter: Extending Dominance Across Networks and Rails (coinmetrics.io). Tether’s market dominance across networks, usage on chains, and potential new rails shaping stablecoin growth
NYSE Owner ICE Invests $2B In Prediction Site Polymarket (thetechee.com). ICE to invest up to $2bn in Polymarket at an $8bn valuation, potentially 25% stake
🔐 Privacy, Primitives, and Identity
The Ethereum Foundation’s Commitment to Privacy (blog.ethereum.org). Ethereum Foundation expands privacy efforts with PSE, Kohaku, IPTF, and privacy-focused UX and governance tools
Supporting privacy with new funding mechanisms (blog.ethereum.org). Funding Coordination and Keyring Network enable privacy-focused vaults with zkVerified access, directing protocol fees to legal defense funds for Tornado Cash developers
Ethereum’s consensus layer elliptic curve (johndcook.com). Explains Ethereum’s consensus curve BLS12-381, its p-field, r-order, embedding degree 12, and related pairing-based cryptography with Python-powered calculations
Building Unforgeable Professional Endorsements with ATProtocol (ngerakines.leaflet.pub). Unforgeable mutual endorsements using ATProtocol with CIDs and DIDs, two-record architecture, firehose validation, and offline, tamper-evident workflows
📚 Academic Research
Assessing the Impact of Post-Quantum Digital Signature Algorithms on Blockchains (arxiv:cs). Benchmarking post-quantum signature schemes (ML-DSA, Dilithium, Falcon, Mayo, SLH-DSA, SPHINCS+, Cross) vs ECDSA across security levels 1-5 on blockchain workloads
Privacy-Preserving On-chain Permissioning for KYC-Compliant Decentralized Applications (arxiv:cs). Privacy-preserving on-chain permissioning for KYC-compliant DeFi using SSI, ZKPs, and attribute-based access control
Pseudo-MDPs: A Novel Framework for Efficiently Optimizing Last Revealer Seed Manipulations in Blockchains (arxiv:cs). Pseudo-MDPs for Last Revealer Attack in PoS blockchains; two MDP reductions; improved dynamic programming (value iteration) and policy extraction
Multi-Agent Analysis of Off-Exchange Public Information for Cryptocurrency Market Trend Prediction (arxiv:q-fin). Multi-agent framework analyzes news impact, volatility-aware fusion of sentiment and technicals, and distributed processing for Bitcoin trend prediction
Tensor time series change-point detection in cryptocurrency network data (arxiv:stat). TenSeg detects multiple change-points in tensor network data via tensor decomposition for cross-covariance networks in cryptocurrency platforms
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