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- Stablecoin Rules Land, HSBC Puts One in Millions of Pockets, and China Wants Bitcoin
Stablecoin Rules Land, HSBC Puts One in Millions of Pockets, and China Wants Bitcoin
British police seized 61,800 bitcoin from a woman now serving 11 years in a UK prison. Chinese prosecutors just asked a court in Tianjin for every coin.
America’s first finished stablecoin rule arrives with the hard lines replaced by judgment calls, Hong Kong’s biggest bank drops a currency-pegged coin into a payments app, and prosecutors move on a record bitcoin seizure
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Market-Moving News
3 things landed since your last edition, and none of them care what the Nasdaq did.
First, the opening rulebook for American stablecoin issuers, which traded bright lines for discretion. Second, a bank slipping a licensed stablecoin into an app people already use for lunch. Third, a government asking a court for bitcoin that a different government has in custody.
Stablecoins
HSBC Takes Its First Stablecoin to 3.3M Users and 100,000+ Merchants
HSBC has launched RedCoin, its first Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoin, directly through the PayMe payments platform.
More than 3.3 million PayMe users can activate stablecoin wallets inside the existing app and use RedCoin for instant peer-to-peer transfers and payments across a network of more than 100,000 merchants.
Stablecoins Move Into Everyday Banking
The distribution model is what makes the launch stand out. Users do not need to open a crypto exchange account or adopt a separate wallet application.
RedCoin sits inside payment infrastructure they already use, allowing HSBC to introduce stablecoin transactions without requiring customers to change their normal payment habits.
The token is issued under HSBC’s Hong Kong stablecoin license, with the bank also providing custody through its digital-asset infrastructure.
Payments Are Only the First Step
HSBC plans to extend RedCoin into its Hong Kong mobile banking app later this year and connect it with tokenized investment products.
The initial plan includes letting customers use RedCoin to subscribe to a tokenized share class of an HSBC Hong Kong dollar money-market fund, linking stablecoin cash and digital investments within the same banking environment.
Take: RedCoin matters because distribution can be more important than introducing another stablecoin. Once you can use digital dollars through the same app already handling everyday payments, crypto no longer requires a separate customer behavior.
HSBC is turning stablecoins from a specialist product into something that can sit quietly inside ordinary banking.
Protocol
Ethereum Delays Glamsterdam Test After Gas Changes Raise Smart-Contract Risk
Ethereum developers have postponed the next Glamsterdam activation on the Hoodi testnet after researchers found that proposed gas-accounting changes could alter how existing smart contracts behave when operations fail.
The October 26 Hoodi activation has been canceled, along with a planned increase in the testnet gas limit to 200 million. Developers have not yet set a replacement date.
Gas Changes Create Compatibility Risk
The concern centers on two proposals that change how Ethereum charges for creating and accessing blockchain state. Researchers found that the new rules can leave contracts with different gas amounts after failed operations.
In some cases, a contract could permanently record a failure that would previously have reverted completely. Other operations could become much more expensive and fail unexpectedly.
No active Ethereum mainnet exploit has been identified. The issue affects how contracts could behave if the proposed rules eventually reach production.
A Major Upgrade Hits a Roadblock
Glamsterdam includes broader changes to block construction, transaction processing, gas accounting, and Ethereum’s ability to support larger blocks.
The upgrade already activated on Sepolia earlier this month, but Hoodi was intended to provide another major rehearsal before any eventual mainnet rollout.
Take: Delaying the test is better than discovering a compatibility problem after the rules reach mainnet. A gas change can look technical until you realize it may alter whether an existing contract completes, fails, or records state permanently.
Glamsterdam now needs to prove those economics are safe before its scaling benefits matter.
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Enforcement
New York Seeks $1.37B From NovaTech Founders Over Massive Crypto Scheme
New York is seeking nearly $1.37 billion from NovaTech's founders after accusing the crypto investment operation of collecting more than $1.16 billion in digital-asset deposits through a massive pyramid scheme.
The state is asking for roughly $1.13 billion in disgorgement plus $232.5 million in prejudgment interest. Authorities say at least $134.5 million moved to wallets linked to founders Cynthia and Eddy Petion.
Only a Fraction Reached the Trading Operation
NovaTech presented itself as a crypto trading and investment business, but New York says only about $26 million of the $1.16 billion collected was transferred to an outside trading provider.
That trading activity reportedly lost most of the capital deployed. Authorities allege withdrawals, returns, and recruitment bonuses were funded largely with money coming from newer participants rather than profitable crypto trading.
Founders Face a Billion-Dollar Recovery Claim
The founders have failed to respond to the case and are accused of leaving the United States, while a default judgment was previously entered against them.
Four promoters connected to NovaTech have separately agreed to pay nearly $6 million and are permanently barred from working in securities, commodities, and crypto businesses.
Take: A billion-dollar crypto scheme becomes much easier to understand when only a small fraction of investor money ever reaches the trading operation.
If your capital is supposedly producing returns through trading, the first question is whether the trading activity actually matches the money coming in. NovaTech shows how quickly that gap can become the entire case.
Coin Leaderboard
Crypto Pulse
All 4 majors drifted slightly lower overnight, which is the market's way of admitting it has not decided anything. The action moved to Seoul, where Upbit's order book did most of today's heavy lifting.
Irys (IRYS): $0.09 [+209.1%]
Upbit listed it with won pairs, and Korea took it from there. That one book handled more than half of a day's trading that came to roughly $357M, against a market cap near $83M.
Turnover at 4x the entire cap is less a trend than a stampede, and the price doubled before handing some of it back.
Irys itself is a layer 1 that stores data on-chain and runs EVM contracts against it, so there is a product underneath the frenzy. On supply, 2B of 10B tokens are out.
Bitlayer (BTR): $0.06 [+41.5%]
A bitcoin layer 2 where gas is paid in BTC and BTR covers governance. The turnover is the striking part rather than the price: 24-hour volume climbed more than 4,500% day over day, to around $51M on a market cap near $16M.
It is spread across a PancakeSwap pool, Gate, DigiFinex, and Kraken instead of piling into one venue. Fair warning, since it is on the record: BTR has run this pattern before, a Korean-led spike into thin liquidity, and handed the gains straight back.
ARK (ARK): $0.23 [+28.7%]
The elder statesman of this list, a layer 1 whose Mainsail rebuild has been grinding through testnet updates. Volume ran near $40M against a market cap around $45M, with Upbit's won pair taking the largest slice and Binance's dollar and lira books splitting most of what remains.
Supply is about as tidy as it gets, with all 199.95M tokens circulating and no vesting cliff hanging over the price. One caution when you go looking: searches for ARK also surface Cathie Wood's fund, which is an entirely different animal.
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Future Forward
A central bank, an expiry, and a vote.
Macro Events:
📊 The Fed decides Wednesday. Third-quarter growth and the latest inflation print both land Thursday at 8:30 am ET. Bitcoin has been taking its cues from tech stocks for weeks, so neither one slips past unnoticed.
Derivatives:
📅 Monthly options expiry Friday. The month’s bitcoin and ether contracts settle on Deribit at 08:00 UTC. Large expiries can pull price toward heavily-traded strikes beforehand, though that is a tendency rather than a rule.
Politics:
🗳️ US midterms on November 3: Congress gets reshuffled, which shapes oversight and the odds on the next round of crypto legislation. Who staffs the agencies actually writing the rules is a separate question.
Crypto Know-How: The Number Every Token Page Buries
Market cap is the figure you see quoted: current price times circulating supply. Useful, and narrower than it looks, because circulating supply is a data provider’s judgment call rather than a count of what can actually change hands today.
Fully diluted valuation sits beside it in smaller type. Same price, multiplied by a bigger supply number, usually total or maximum supply depending on whose page you are reading.
When those 2 figures sit close together, most of the supply is already in the count. When FDV runs 5 or 10 times the market cap, the supply feeding that calculation is far larger than what currently circulates.
That gap is a question, not a verdict. It does not prove the rest is locked in team allocations waiting to land, and it says nothing about the terms those tokens will arrive on. Vesting differs wildly, schedules run for years, and plenty of projects grow into their supply.
So when something looks cheap on market cap, go read the tokenomics. Which supply figure is the provider using, how much is genuinely out, and when does the next tranche unlock? All of it is published, and it takes 5 minutes.
Everything Else
Seven high yield stocks are named free and the leader has $988 million sitting in undistributed income with new loans coming in 170 basis points above what is rolling off.
Coinbase Ireland was fined by Ireland’s central bank over safeguarding and outsourcing breaches under the Electronic Money Regulations. The sanction still needs High Court confirmation.
STRK holders backed research into turning Starknet into an independent, post-quantum chain, with 93.52% of voting power in favor. It green-lights a study rather than a departure from Ethereum, and StarkWare itself abstained.
ETH developers postponed Glamsterdam’s activation on the Hoodi test network with no replacement date, after concerns surfaced about how proposed gas-accounting changes interact with contracts already deployed. The upgrade itself is not canceled.
AAVE is in line for new tokenomics, with the founder saying buybacks, burns and staking all feature in the next version.
DOGE now has Dogecoin Labs, a newly formed independent outfit working alongside the Dogecoin Foundation that folds MyDoge, DogeOS and Such App under one roof.
An opening rulebook that swapped its hard lines for discretion, a stablecoin arriving in millions of pockets by way of a payments app, and a seized bitcoin hoard that 2 legal systems are now circling.
The pattern is that the unglamorous layer is where the ground keeps shifting. Go check which supply figure your token pages are quoting before Wednesday’s Fed decision hands you something louder to stare at.
Best Regards,
— Warda Kashif
Crypto Intel