South Korea's Financial Services Commission is advancing the expansion of tokenized securities, with bonds and funds set to be included as the first batch of underlying assets.

According to an official announcement, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb will add a new Korean won (KRW) trading market for Zest Protocol (ZEST). The announcement notes that ZEST trading is supported on the BNB Smart Chain (BSC), with deposits unavailable on other networks for the time being. Deposit and withdrawal functions will open within two hours of the announcement’s release, while trading is scheduled to launch at 14:00 on October 12, 2026. ZEST’s listing base price is set at 262 KRW, and deposits require 15 network confirmations. To ensure trading security, buy orders will be restricted for the first five minutes after trading goes live; sell orders are limited to prices within the range of -10% to +100% of the base price. Additionally, only limit orders will be supported for approximately the first two hours post-launch.

HTX market data shows that Zest Protocol (ZEST) briefly touched $0.23, is now trading at $0.22, and has risen 14.18% in 15 minutes, likely due to Bithumb’s upcoming listing of the ZEST/KRW trading pair.

According to OKX’s announcement, the crypto exchange will launch USDT-margined X-Contracts (X-Perp) on its web platform, mobile app, and API starting at 16:30 (UTC+8) on October 12, 2026. The specific launch schedule for each contract is as follows: CXMTUSD USDT-margined X-Contract goes live at 16:30 on October 12; BSPUSD USDT-margined X-Contract goes live at 16:45 on October 12; TQQQUSD USDT-margined X-Contract goes live at 17:00 on October 12; UNITREEUSD USDT-margined X-Contract goes live at 17:15 on October 12.

According to official announcements, Lighter announced today that it has completed the destruction of 2,452,017 LIT tokens. The tokens were automatically repurchased via its program by the end of Q3 2026.

Per HTX market data, GRASS has rallied above $0.89, logging a more than 24.5% gain in the past 24 hours. News driving the move: Grass has recently pivoted from pure DePIN bandwidth sharing to delivering real-time web content retrieval for AI agents. Its Contents API launched around October 8-9, with official benchmark tests indicating a 97%-98% retrieval success rate—outperforming some rivals and reinforcing its "AI data layer" positioning.

Beating AI News Brief: Andrej Karpathy, who currently works on Anthropic’s pre-training team, has again addressed the public perception gap regarding AI capabilities. He argues this gap is widening, evolving from two distinct user groups talking past each other into an increasingly steep funnel. In his rough estimate, roughly 6 billion people (75% of the global population) have almost no exposure to large models. Around 1 billion to 2 billion people only occasionally use free chatbots, treating AI as a search or writing tool. Moving up the funnel, about 20 million people (0.2%) use cutting-edge models in professional fields like programming and mathematics. They have observed that complex projects that once took weeks or even months can now be handled by AI agents. At the very top are roughly 5,000 people (0.00006%), who have internal access to the most advanced AI systems. Karpathy outlines these frontier capabilities as including thousands of AI agents collaborating continuously for weeks, automatically discovering zero-day vulnerabilities, conducting cyber offense and defense at machine speed, and advancing mathematical research. He notes that human ability to review and understand these AI outputs has begun to lag behind. Karpathy attributes the gap to three factors: differing scales of problems users face; faster AI progress in fields like programming and mathematics where results are easily verifiable; and capability and access gaps between free, paid, and internal AI systems. The general public may still view AI as little more than an error-prone chatbot, while a small group of professionals have already started using it to handle large-scale projects.