Zcash Retires Its First Privacy Pool, Brazil’s Licensing Bites, and Beijing Names Crypto Directly

A hard fork later this week triples Zcash’s block speed and ends spending from its original shielded pool for good, Brazil’s licensing deadline exposed how few firms are prepared to enter the process at all, and China’s governing party has written virtual currencies into its anti-corruption rulebook

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Run the numbers

*Examples that we provide of share price increases pertaining to a particular Issuer from one referenced date to another represent an arbitrarily chosen time period and are no indication whatsoever of future stock prices for that Issuer and are of no predictive value. Our stock profiles are intended to highlight certain companies for YOUR further investigation; they are NOT stock recommendations or constitute an offer or sale of the referenced securities.

Market-Moving News

Monday’s theme is narrowing. Rules tightening, options closing, fields getting smaller, all of it landing in places that do not usually move in the same week.

A privacy coin is about to retire part of itself and leave whatever stayed behind stuck there. A country just learned how thin its licensed field is going to be. And the party that runs China put virtual currencies in writing.

Exchanges

Billions Leave Binance as Rival Exchanges Record Fresh Deposits

Binance customers withdrew a net $4.72 billion after the exchange began restoring withdrawals following its $6.3 billion hack.

The company put the outflow at about 2.8% of platform assets, making customer withdrawals a substantial part of its recovery.

Other exchanges recorded fresh deposits. A DefiLlama snapshot showed about $349 million in net inflows at OKX over 24 hours, along with $61 million at Bybit and $79 million at Gate.

The Numbers Show Movement, With Limits

Net withdrawals measure money leaving after deposits are deducted. Binance also reported $2.7 billion in inflows, showing funds continued entering the platform even as customers withdrew larger amounts.

The figures do not establish that Binance customers moved directly to rival exchanges. Withdrawals can also go into personal wallets without selling the assets.

Access Remains Part of the Recovery

Binance resumed withdrawals in stages, with restrictions still affecting many cryptocurrencies. Covering stolen assets therefore does not immediately restore every customer's ability to move funds.

Wallet trackers also paint a different picture from customer withdrawals. Binance disputed earlier external estimates because transfers involving its replacement wallets affected the calculation.

Take: Billions in withdrawals make customer behavior a central test of Binance's recovery. Even when an exchange covers losses, you still depend on it to restore access before you can move funds.

Deposit flows and withdrawal access together provide a fuller picture than either number alone.

Tokenization

Hong Kong Enables 24/7 Tokenized Settlement With 12 Banks

Hong Kong has enabled round-the-clock interbank settlement of tokenized deposit transactions using tokenized central bank money, advancing a real-value pilot involving 12 banks and 20 industry participants.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority's EnsembleTX pilot previously relied on the existing Hong Kong dollar settlement system, which limited when participating banks could complete payments.

Central Bank Money Extends Settlement Hours

The upgrade allows participating institutions to settle tokenized transactions outside conventional banking hours, supporting corporate treasury management and transactions involving tokenized investment funds.

The pilot's earlier real-value use cases have involved HSBC, Standard Chartered, Bank of China Hong Kong, BlackRock, Ant International, and China Asset Management Hong Kong.

The expanded settlement capability gives participating institutions more flexibility to move money across time zones.

Commercial Adoption Still Has Further to Go

The system remains a controlled pilot, and the HKMA has not disclosed transaction volumes or values showing how extensively the new capability is being used.

Separately, dealers have completed trial secondary-market trades in tokenized Exchange Fund Bills. The regulator plans to include regulated stablecoins in those trials, but that expansion remains a future step.

Take: Tokenization only removes part of the delay if the money behind a transaction still follows banking hours. Even when a token moves instantly, you still depend on the settlement system to complete the payment.

Hong Kong's upgrade addresses that gap, giving the pilot a more practical foundation for cross-time-zone transactions.

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Security

BTCPay Links Merchant Wallet Thefts to Outdated Payment Servers

BTCPay Server has linked reported merchant-wallet thefts to installations running version 2.4.1 or older, after urging operators to take their Bitcoin payment servers offline while it investigated unauthorized withdrawals.

Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery estimates that approximately $1.63 million, comprising 18.38 BTC and 3,405 LTC, was stolen. BTCPay has not published an official loss total.

Administrator Access Put Connected Wallets Within Reach

BTCPay lets businesses accept Bitcoin through software hosted on their own servers. Hot wallets keep signing keys on those servers, allowing payments without a separate manual signature.

Founder Nicolas Dorier said attackers logged in with administrator privileges on affected installations, though the full method used to gain that access remains undisclosed.

Updated Software Has No Credible Drain Reports

The project says it has no credible reports of wallet drains involving its latest 2.4.7 release and has urged operators to keep their installations updated.

The number of affected businesses remains unknown. Bitquery counted 682 wallet sweeps, but those transactions cannot establish how many separate merchants or servers were compromised.

Take: Self-hosted crypto payments remove a custody intermediary, but they leave the operator responsible for the software protecting the funds.

Running that infrastructure also means securing administrator access and applying updates before old weaknesses become an entry point. BTCPay's incident shows how routine maintenance can become a direct financial risk.

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*Examples that we provide of share price increases pertaining to a particular Issuer from one referenced date to another represent an arbitrarily chosen time period and are no indication whatsoever of future stock prices for that Issuer and are of no predictive value. Our stock profiles are intended to highlight certain companies for YOUR further investigation; they are NOT stock recommendations or constitute an offer or sale of the referenced securities.

Future Forward

An election, a regulator with follow-up questions, and a room full of institutions in Hong Kong.

Politics:

🗳️ US midterms tomorrow: Crypto-tied groups have contributed more than $200M across this cycle, putting the industry among the heaviest forces in federal campaign spending.

Fairshake alone is backing 33 House candidates, 19 Republicans and 14 Democrats, which is a deliberate play for friends on both sides rather than a bet on one.

Regulation:

🏛️ Korea takes the question to the banks on Thursday. Regulators there went through exchange security at the start of the week, and the follow-up brings in the major banks.

The legal floor has exchanges holding at least 80% of customer assets offline, and whatever gets tightened there will be read as a template well beyond Korea.

Conferences:

🎤 Hong Kong Digital Asset Summit, Thursday and Friday: At the Grand Hyatt, with an invitation-only business day on Wednesday.

Tokenization has been the theme every bank turned up to talk about this year, and this is the room where those conversations get said out loud.

Crypto Know-How: What Proof of Reserves Does Not Prove

Reserve figures got quoted everywhere last week, so it is worth knowing what one of them actually is.

A proof of reserves is a snapshot of what an exchange holds at one moment.

Many publish a cryptographic structure alongside it, often a Merkle tree, letting you confirm your own balance appears in the disclosed liabilities data without exposing anyone else’s.

A few use more advanced privacy-preserving methods. There is no single standard that every venue follows.

Now the gap. The reserves side shows assets.

It does not establish what the exchange owes, whether those assets are pledged elsewhere, whether liabilities were left out, or whether the funds were borrowed an hour before the snapshot and handed back after.

Without a matching proof of liabilities that has been independently checked, you are looking at part of a balance sheet.

Which still beats a press release. A venue where you can verify your own inclusion is making a claim you can partly test, which is rarer than it ought to be.

So read it as evidence, not a guarantee, and look at the date. A number from last Tuesday is a number from last Tuesday.

Everything Else

• THREE small-cap names are developing early structure beneath the surface, and a free guide shows what to watch next.

• UBER ran corporate cash through tokenized bank deposits into a tokenized money market fund and redeemed part of it over a weekend, with the balance it left invested still earning while traditional settlement was shut. 

• AAVE has reopened its lending markets after last week’s precautionary freeze, though 9 assets stay at zero loan-to-value on V3 or zero collateral factor on V4, so you can still supply them but they hand you no borrowing power.

• NVDA has joined the companies objecting to third-party tokenized versions of their shares trading on the OKX and ICE venture, taking the objector count to 50, with Micron and Costco among the other names added. 

• KITE hits its first cliff unlock tomorrow, worth around $75M and closing out a 12-month cliff, in a week carrying roughly $285M of scheduled releases. BTW’s is larger in dollar terms, and MMT’s exceeds its own circulating supply. 

• BTC climbed back above $78,000 with all 4 majors on the leaderboard higher, a quieter open than anything last week managed to produce.