An employee of a Shenzhen-based company, who disguised himself as an overseas hacker, was sentenced for extorting Bitcoin and USDT, with the virtual currency involved in the case valued at over 630,000 yuan.

Galaxy Research Head of Research Alex Thorn points out that Bitcoin’s weakness in October is tied to weak growth in corporate Bitcoin reserves and net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs. Using the “institutional absorption vs. long-term holder address distribution” metric for analysis, the calculation is: spot ETF net inflows plus net additions to corporate reserves, minus the amount of Bitcoin that has been dormant on-chain for over five years and reactivated. Data shows that as of October 18, the year-to-date net value of this metric stood at roughly negative 127,300 BTC, meaning the distribution of old coins from long-term holding addresses has overall outpaced institutional uptake. The analyst also noted that the year-to-date net inflow of U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs returned to positive territory in September and has barely held steady since, currently at around $355 million, with a small net outflow recorded so far in October.

Qubic announced that between 23:42 UTC yesterday and 01:26 UTC today, attackers exploited insufficient randomness in the seed of some wallets to access and siphon approximately 2.94 trillion QU tokens from 1,404 Qubic wallets. The root cause lies in the seed generation mechanism, not the Qubic protocol itself. Affected seeds include those created in any iPhone or iPad browser before October 18, 2026, those created in Mac Safari on the same date, and those generated via the Qubic iOS App before July 2025. The network has been halted at tick 85,371,949. 87.1% of the stolen funds remain in the Qubic network and are frozen, while the remaining 12.9% has been transferred to MEXC, with the associated receiving accounts also frozen. Qubic said the seed generation issue has been fixed in version 4.26.4. Subsequent actions will be decided by the Computor quorum per network rules, and a full technical report will be published after a fund recovery plan is finalized.

Renowned trader Killa reviewed Bitcoin’s weekly chart trends, noting that last week, BTC fell from $87,000 to the $80,000 range before bouncing back 50%. After the current weekly chart opened, the token rallied on Monday but faced persistent resistance, eventually retesting the prior week’s low around $80,000. Currently, longs are the main targets of market liquidations, so there’s a high chance the trend will shift to targeting shorts next week. For short-term trades, closely watch for a retest of this week’s low at $79,800; if that occurs, look for long entry opportunities. Killa laid out a clear observation framework: If BTC does not retest the lows, focus on the $83,600 level. If the price fails to break above this level, the market will remain in a range-bound capitulation phase; if it breaks through successfully, the rally will push higher. He expects next week’s weekly chart open will move upward, forcing late shorts who entered short positions against the recent rally to cover their positions. In the worst-case scenario for bulls, BTC could dip to the $76,000–$78,000 range. The analyst also explicitly ruled out the extreme scenario of a retest of $74,000.

During the weekend when traditional markets are closed, Trade.xyz — dubbed the "On-Chain Nasdaq" — leverages perpetual contracts to enable continuous trading and real-time price discovery that traditional finance cannot achieve, pricing in advance the upcoming Monday’s U.S. and South Korean stock market trends. Most popular U.S. stock assets on Trade.xyz saw minor declines from their Friday after-hours levels, with an overall flat-to-slightly-weak opening expected on Monday. Their weekend performance is as follows: SpaceX is currently priced at $144.66, down from $145.47 in U.S. Friday after-hours trading; Micron (MU) is at $869.99, versus $875.98 in Friday after-hours; SanDisk (SNDK) is at $1,275.4, compared to $1,292.43 in Friday after-hours; NVIDIA is at $213.57, versus $213.75 in Friday after-hours; Marvell Technology (MRVL) is at $225.84, versus $226.9 in Friday after-hours; Intel is at $88.89, versus $89.33 in Friday after-hours; Google is at $339.68, versus $339.22 in Friday after-hours; AMD is at $527.09, matching its Friday after-hours level. Popular South Korean stocks on Trade.xyz have dropped notably from their Friday closing prices, with an expected opening decline of 4%–5% on Monday. Their weekend performance is as follows: Samsung Electronics is currently priced at $155.81, down from $161.75 at Friday’s close; SK Hynix is at $907.95, versus $954.75 at Friday’s close.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a deferred prosecution agreement with Roger Ver, known as "Bitcoin Jesus", under which fraud and tax evasion charges against him will be dropped in exchange for a maximum fine of $49.9 million. As one of the earliest Bitcoin evangelists, Ver purchased large amounts of Bitcoin in 2011 for less than $3 million. In February 2014, to avoid high tax burdens, he obtained citizenship of the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, and renounced his U.S. citizenship the following month. At that time, he and his companies held at least 131,000 Bitcoin, worth over $70 million at the then-current price. He thought changing his nationality would let him escape the U.S.'s high taxes, but the U.S.'s strict "expatriation tax" foiled his plan. Under U.S. tax law, eligible expatriates must treat their global assets as if sold on the day before expatriation and pay capital gains tax. Ver reported $1.03 million in taxes, but not only failed to disclose his personal Bitcoin holdings, he also severely undervalued his company assets. A decade later, the IRS uncovered his fraudulent tax evasion (fraud and tax evasion are not subject to statute of limitations), ultimately forcing him to pay up to $49.9 million in back taxes, penalties, and interest—48 times the amount he had self-reported paying that year.

On-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa) has monitored that Justin Sun is trading PEPE again after a two-year hiatus. 22 hours ago, Sun’s address 0x176…0a132 received 7.2 trillion PEPE tokens from Poloniex’s multi-sig address, valued at $28.44 million. This marks his first on-chain PEPE transaction since June 2024, when the token was priced at $0.00001256.