Soda Labs completes $3 million seed round financing, led by NextBlock.

A $BTC short got liquidated for 174.86 $BTC ($13.74M) as the market rebounded.

Hardware wallet manufacturer Trezor announced that its security team has received a responsible disclosure report alleging a hardware trojan was implanted inside a Trezor Safe 5 purchased via Southeast Asian official dealer CryptoBilis. The device was bought through Tokopedia in August 2026. The report details an extra circuit board equipped with a cellular module and antenna fitted between the mainboard and screen, which is claimed to read screen content including mnemonics and transmit the data externally via mobile network when the device is powered on. Trezor has not yet received the physical device for laboratory verification, but based on customer descriptions and video communications, it deems the report credible and issues a preemptive warning. CryptoBilis, a Southeast Asian dealer, previously sparked a large-scale fund outflow incident after selling tampered Ledger devices; Trezor removed it from its official dealer list on October 9. Trezor noted that no user loss reports have been received to date, advising customers who purchased devices from CryptoBilis since March 2026 to promptly move their assets to a new mnemonic wallet, never input existing mnemonics on suspicious devices, and contact the official for a replacement device if eligible.

Bitcoin lending protocol Zest Protocol announced in a post that it has suspended new lending operations out of caution following the Binance incident. The move is designed to protect users, and lending services will be restored soon in sync with the broader ecosystem. Zest Protocol has no exposure to Binance.

Beating AI Insight News Brief: Elon Musk acknowledged on October 30 that the development of Grok 4.8 took longer than expected, but guaranteed the new model "will not disappoint". He noted that the team does not optimize for benchmark tests, and he does not care about benchmark scores, focusing instead on the model's practical applications. On September 14, Musk revealed that Grok 4.8 has 2.5 trillion parameters, uses a new C++ training system, and was expected to complete pre-training by the end of that week before moving to reinforcement learning. More than six weeks later, the new model remains unreleased. Musk’s emphasis on not caring about benchmark scores stems from Grok 4.7’s underwhelming performance. Independent evaluation firm Artificial Analysis found that under the same xhigh inference setting, Grok 4.7’s composite intelligence index only rose by 2 points from Grok 4.6 (44 to 46), while average output tokens per query jumped from around 38,000 to 81,000. Users in the Cursor community also complained that Grok 4.7 consumes quotas faster with negligible real-world improvements. In an interview with China Central Television (CCTV) in September, Musk admitted Grok 4.7 is inferior to Claude Opus 5.5, and is not expected to catch up with top-tier models until 2027. In October, he further proposed that Grok Bot call external models including Claude based on task requirements, and plans to have the high-speed version of Grok 4.8 handle a large volume of simple requests.

According to monitoring by ai_9684xtpa, the whale address "58bro.eth" (0x58bro) sold 8,000 ETH in the past hour. The trader redeemed ETH worth over $17.96 million from Aave, then transferred the funds in batches to OKX, and has now withdrawn 10.5 million USDT from the exchange to repay borrowings. Currently, the address still holds 4,911.05 WETH as collateral on Aave, has borrowed 2.51 million USDT, with a health factor of 3.69.

Indian crypto trading platform CoinDCX announced that futures trading has fully resumed. Four tokens—SOPH, ERA, GTC, and LA—remain in position-only reduction mode for risk control purposes, while all other markets are now operating normally. Earlier on October 21, CoinDCX was suspected of being hacked, leading to losses of approximately 15.99 million USDT and a portion of TRX.