Grayscale: AI investment boom extends to crypto market, major winners may emerge in the next five years

According to Seoul Economic Daily, South Korea’s presidential office has decided to further delay the implementation of the crypto asset income tax originally scheduled for January next year. A presidential office official said on the 25th that relevant discussions lean toward the delay. South Korea’s government amended the Income Tax Act in 2020 to impose tax on crypto asset gains, but the policy has already been delayed three times. The original plan was for the tax system to take effect on January 1, 2027. Per the revised Income Tax Act, annual income from crypto asset transfers or lending, after deducting a basic exemption of 2.5 million won, is taxed at 22% (combining national and local income taxes). South Korea also took into account that the U.S. will join the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) starting in 2029, leading to the delay. CARF is an international tax information exchange mechanism, under which participating countries’ tax authorities can collect users’ residency and transaction data from crypto asset service providers and exchange such data cross-border. Given that the U.S. is a large crypto trading market and joined the framework late, if South Korea had implemented the tax earlier, it would have resulted in an excessive tax burden falling on users of South Korea’s domestic crypto trading platforms.

Nomura Securities said market concerns over the investment outlook for artificial intelligence amount to an overreaction, adding that the storage chip shortage will persist until 2028 and the storage sector has been severely undervalued.

According to an official announcement, Binance’s derivatives platform will launch pre-market trading for the PREDICTUSDT perpetual contract at 15:45 (GMT+8) on October 25, 2026, with a maximum leverage of up to 5x.

ai16z founder Shaw announced in a post that he has completed 90% of the reverse engineering work for all Pump.fun contracts, and expects to wrap up the remaining work tonight. He stated, "I will open source everything, otherwise it will be forced to open source."

According to official news, Four.Meme has launched a new OpenFour launch model, the "Binance Agent ID Exclusive Mode", tailored for AI agents on BNB Chain and supported by Binance Wallet. During the bonding curve phase, trading is limited to Binance Agentic wallets holding an Agent ID, with each wallet eligible to purchase up to 1% of the total token supply, and the tokens are non-transferable. Once the token completes its "graduation", trading will open to all users. Users only need to enable developer mode in their Binance Agentic wallet to participate. This mode allows any wallet to initiate a token launch, supports fundraising in BNB, and optionally enables transaction taxes. Developers can pre-purchase tokens worth up to 1.5% of the raised amount before launch and sell them on the bonding curve, but cannot continue buying after the token launch goes live. All tokens launched via this mode will be labeled with a ".ai" tag on the Four.Meme platform.

According to a Financial Times report, Mercuria—one of the world’s largest commodity traders—is suing the 282-year-old Baltic Exchange. The UK High Court will hear the case starting Monday. The core dispute centers on whether the Baltic Exchange should continue publishing benchmark freight rates for oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, following this year’s military actions by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Dubbed the "Dow Jones of the shipping industry," the Baltic Exchange’s published rates serve as the foundation for commodity traders to price and hedge billions of dollars in derivatives. Mercuria contends that after the outbreak of hostilities, shipping traffic through the strait plummeted and Iran has threatened to block the waterway, so the Baltic Exchange should suspend its flagship tanker route benchmark index, TD3C. Mercuria initially claimed it suffered "hundreds of millions of dollars" in losses, but later amended its lawsuit to remove references to financial damages, instead seeking "declaratory relief"—asking the court to invalidate the freight rate publications issued since early March. The Baltic Exchange defends itself by noting that short-term inactivity on a route is not uncommon, with vessels still transiting, and its rates are provided by experienced brokers. Its lawyers warn that a Mercuria victory would trigger "chaotic market-wide consequences," potentially forcing the cancellation of hundreds of trades.