Crypto: 14th October 2025

• 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.

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

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

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

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

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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