Andre Cronje: DeFi has become a hollow shell, and is now merely "on-chain finance"

A $ZEC whale is buying $MASK (Nullmask)! This whale holds over $15M in assets, including 10,241 $ZEC ($11.69M). Over the past 3 days, he has been accumulating $MASK, buying a total of 3.69M $MASK ($151K).

JPMorgan Asset Management released its "2027 Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions" report on October 19, including Bitcoin in its long-term return forecast for the first time. The report projects Bitcoin’s compound annual return over the next 10 to 15 years will reach 10%, outperforming 7.5% for U.S. large-cap stocks, 5.5% for gold, and 8.2% for U.S. real estate investment trusts (REITs). It also estimates Bitcoin’s arithmetic average annual return at 20.9% and annualized volatility at 55%. Matt Hougan, chief investment officer of Bitwise, noted that JPMorgan has ranked Bitcoin as the top-performing asset expected over the next decade, a move that signals a shift in traditional financial institutions’ attitude toward crypto assets.

Beating AI Express: In February this year, after Anthropic demonstrated Claude Code’s capability to modernize legacy COBOL systems, IBM’s stock price plummeted 13.2% in a single day. Eight months later, OpenAI released its latest results for the GPT-6 series on legacy programming languages, with a maximum success rate of 97.9% in COBOL code migration tests. COBOL, created in the 1950s, remains widely used in banking transactions, ATMs, and insurance systems. Many programs have operated for decades, their original developers long departed, and some business rules exist only within the code itself. Rewriting these into modern languages requires not just making the code run, but also ensuring fully consistent calculation results. For instance, COBOL’s fixed-point arithmetic discards excess decimal places unless explicitly ordered to round; a new program using rounding instead could lead to financial account errors. OpenAI specifically tested AI’s ability to convert COBOL programs to languages including C++, Java, Python, and Rust, requiring byte-for-byte identical output between the old and new programs. GPT-6.1 Sol achieved an 86.6% success rate at low inference settings, compared to just 5.4% for the previous GPT-5.6 Sol, with an estimated API cost reduction of 39%. Success rates climbed further to 97.9% when increasing inference settings. OpenAI also open-sourced MultiLangBench, which tasked AI with building SQLite-compatible database engines from scratch in 20 different programming languages. GPT-6 Astra posted an average test pass rate of 87.4%, versus 26.8% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Between the two models, their scores on COBOL were 72.1% and 10.9% respectively – COBOL ranks as the most challenging of the 20 tested languages.

Investors are rushing to buy credit default swaps (CDS) to shield their portfolios from a potential AI boom bust. The financial instrument, which rose to prominence during the global financial crisis, has seen its trading volume surge sharply. Firms are on a borrowing spree to fund trillions of dollars in AI infrastructure spending, driving demand for these "insurance-like" derivatives that pay out if the underlying entity defaults on its debt. According to Morgan Stanley research, weekly average trading volume of CDS linked to bonds issued by Oracle, SpaceX, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Broadcom and Nvidia topped $9 billion in September, compared to less than $2 billion in July. Institutional data shows that year-to-date trading volume of U.S. corporate CDS indexes has already surpassed last year’s full-year total. (Financial Times)

According to Lookonchain’s monitoring, a crypto whale holds over $15 million in assets, including 10,241 ZEC tokens valued at $11.69 million. The whale has been steadily accumulating MASK tokens over the past three days, purchasing a total of 3.69 million MASK tokens worth $151,000.

A $ZEC whale is buying $MASK (Nullmask)! This whale holds over $15M in assets, including 10,241 $ZEC ($11.69M). Over the past 3 days, he has been accumulating $MASK, buying a total of 3.69M $MASK ($151K).