US Stock Futures Dive Further

December 20 (Xinhua) — A Chinese national named Tong has drawn high attention from Chinese police following a U.S. tip alleging his involvement in money laundering for drug traffickers. To verify the allegations, China’s Ministry of Public Security tasked the Liaoning Provincial Public Security Department with investigation work. Tong and another individual, Chen, who attempted to flee the country, were arrested on the spot in Wuhan, Hubei Province. Both were sentenced to imprisonment and fined in September this year. Tong primarily used the hawala system to conduct illegal foreign exchange transactions totaling over 16 million yuan via domestic bank cards. In some transactions, he instructed domestic individuals to purchase virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Tether, then resell them to overseas individuals in exchange for U.S. dollar cash. During the investigation, police also uncovered that some criminals were evading U.S. oversight through large cash withdrawals and virtua

On December 20th, per Hyperinsight monitoring data, the entity known as "Buddy" opened long positions in Bitcoin, ZEC, and HYPE over a nearly 10-minute span. As of press time, their total long position size has hit $17 million.

As of December 20, stablecoin total market capitalization has edged down 0.26% week-over-week to $309.298 billion, per DefiLlama data—still holding near its all-time high. USDT maintains a 60.23% market dominance.

December 20th — Per FarsideInvestors’ monitoring, U.S. Bitcoin spot ETFs registered a net outflow of $1.583 billion yesterday, with IBIT posting a $1.736 billion net outflow. Separately, U.S. Ethereum spot ETFs saw a net outflow of $75.9 million, all stemming from outflows in BlackRock’s ETHA.

December 20: Per Onchain Lens monitoring, Arthur Hayes transferred 680 ETH (valued at $2.03 million) to Binance and Flowdesk, potentially for sale.

On December 20, Nic Carter—founder of smart contracts and co-founder of Castle Island Ventures—published a lengthy article. In it, he noted that leading quantum theorist Scott Aaronson’s research indicates breaking Bitcoin with quantum computing is merely an “extremely difficult” engineering challenge, not a requirement for new basic physics discoveries. Carter pointed out Bitcoin could theoretically implement a soft fork to adopt a post-quantum (PQ) signature scheme; some PQ encryption/signature schemes already exist. The main hurdles, however, are selecting the specific PQ scheme, organizing the soft fork, and migrating all addresses holding tens of millions in combined balances. As a result, mitigating Bitcoin’s quantum decryption risk could take nearly a decade. Further, a large portion of vulnerable Bitcoin sits in abandoned addresses, and their owners can’t be forced to move the funds. Even if Bitcoin upgrades to PQ signatures, it would still face the risk of 1.7 million BT