Crypto markets saw a dense wave of updates between Oct. 7 and Oct. 8, spanning product launches, funding rounds, macro data, token listings and large wallet movements.
Gate launches Gate Money at TOKEN2049
Gate founder and CEO Dr. Han took the main stage at TOKEN2049 in Singapore and announced Gate Money, a new financial service entry point that links fiat currency, digital assets, stocks, payments and asset management.
According to the announcement, the service covers use cases including asset holding, receiving funds, transfers, payments, exchange and yield generation. Users can access the feature by updating Gate App to version v8.39.0.
Gate said the rollout rests on its global compliance framework and financial infrastructure. The company said its entities have obtained a MiCA crypto-asset service license and a PSD2 payment institution license in Malta, secured a full virtual asset service operating license from VARA in Dubai, completed registration for digital currency exchange services in Australia, and continued related business through local compliant entities in markets including Japan. It said that framework now covers 81 regulated jurisdictions globally.
Gate said Gate Money extends its offering beyond digital asset trading and management into broader asset, fund and payment scenarios.
Funding rounds and business expansion
Nous Research raises $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation
Nous Research, the developer behind the open-source agent Hermes, said it completed a $90 million financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation. The company plans to bring its open-source AI assistant tools to enterprise users.
It had previously launched Hermes as a local and cloud-based AI agent with built-in capabilities including search, coding and image understanding, and said the system can expand its abilities by learning from user activity.
Noah closes a $38 million seed round
Stablecoin payments infrastructure company Noah said it raised $38 million in seed funding, with participation from Endeit Capital, FJ Labs, LocalGlobe, Felix Capital and several angel investors. The new capital will be used to expand international remittance services and broaden regulatory coverage for stablecoin-based cross-border payments serving businesses and individuals.
GSR commits $100 million to on-chain credit business Hare
Crypto trading and market-making firm GSR said it will commit $100 million to build Hare, a new on-chain credit business developed with liquidity distribution platform Turtle. Hare is designed to create and manage on-chain vaults.
GSR said its multi-year commitment will mainly come in the form of credit lines and serve as anchor liquidity for Hare products before outside capital enters. Hare’s first products will be two Aave-based offerings: Hare USD Earn, which lets users deposit major dollar stablecoins into a single vault for yield, and Hare Gold Earn, a yield product for holders of Paxos tokenized gold assets PAXG and PAXGy. Paxos Labs will be involved in that collaboration. Hare said it will focus on evaluating collateral, counterparties and position risk during periods of market stress.
Vest announces a $13 million seed round
Crypto proprietary trading platform Vest said it completed a $13 million seed round led by Portal Ventures. Individual investors included people affiliated with Citadel Securities, BlackRock and KKR. Vest said it allows eligible traders to trade real perpetual contracts around the clock and share profits with the platform. The round was completed in July but disclosed only recently.
Mecka AI raises $60 million in Series B
Robotics data startup Mecka AI said it raised $60 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Nvidia, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Qualcomm and Samsung Electronics. The company focuses on collecting and analyzing human motion data to train humanoid robots and other robotic systems. Earlier information had said Mecka AI was nearing a Sequoia-led round at a valuation of about $500 million.
Macro signals
30-year Treasury yield tops 5.7%
U.S. Treasury yields continued to rise. At the time of publication, the 10-year yield had reached 5.33%, while the 30-year yield climbed to 5.711%, up more than 6 basis points on the day and marking the highest level since 2002.
Fed minutes show most officials see one more hike this year as appropriate
According to minutes from the Federal Reserve’s September monetary policy meeting, all participating officials supported raising the federal funds target range by 25 basis points to 3.75% to 4.00%. Most officials said one more rate increase before year-end could be appropriate. Officials broadly viewed inflation risks as tilted to the upside, and some said AI infrastructure buildout could push medium-term aggregate demand above aggregate supply.
Vitalik Buterin warns about AI-driven cryptographic risk
Vitalik Buterin said users should not rush to move funds to new wallets, but he added that the risks posed by AI-accelerated mathematical progress to cryptography should be taken seriously. He wrote that users should try to reduce reliance on cryptographic schemes that may be vulnerable not only to quantum computing attacks but also to attacks enabled by AI.
He identified ML-DSA, fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, and lattice-based cryptography as core risk areas. He said that, aside from the quantum computing threat, this is another reason ECDSA security may deteriorate faster than expected, which is why the idea of using new addresses has come up. He added that many people still believe elliptic curve algorithms will be broken while hash-based and lattice-based schemes remain safe, but advances in AI over the next two years could severely weaken the practical security of lattice-based cryptography.
Buterin’s suggestions included favoring hash-based schemes over lattice-based ones where practical, being highly cautious with parameter sizes in any lattice-based system, avoiding putting encrypted notes on-chain in privacy protocols and using third-party off-chain transmission instead, and keeping funds in addresses that have not yet been used in any transaction if doing so is not cumbersome.
For multisig wallets, he said off-chain confirmation is better than on-chain confirmation because signers’ signatures would not be exposed on public networks. If ECDSA were broken earlier than expected because of AI advances, the setup could at least degrade gracefully into a 1-of-1 arrangement rather than leaving funds open to anyone. Earlier, Justin Drake had said the worst-case scenario for ECDSA being broken could be a matter of months and suggested large holders move assets to new addresses.
Exchange and token updates
Coinbase to list Pons spot trading on Oct. 8
Coinbase said it will list spot trading for Pons (PONS) on Oct. 8. If liquidity conditions are met, the PONS-USD trading pair will open later that day in supported regions.
Hunter Biden responds again to LAPTOP token controversy
Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, posted on X that he was releasing the results of an independent investigation into the LAPTOP token launch and had hired forensic firm Groom Lake to review all trading from the launch day.
Hunter Biden denied that the team cashed out. He said the founder tokens remain concentrated in the same wallet and have not moved since launch. He also said his personal tokens are locked for six months and will then vest over two years.
Citing the investigation, he said market maker 1 had $500,000 in starting capital but added only about $5,200 and fewer than 30,000 tokens to the liquidity pool, with the token amount representing just 0.003% of total supply. That very thin liquidity sent the token from $0.05 to about $317 in under two minutes, followed by a 98% drop within an hour. Eighty-four seconds after the peak, market maker 1 withdrew funds during the sell-off, taking the amount of liquidity near the current price available to absorb selling from $16,200 to zero.
He said market maker 1 made about $686,000 from its DEX position, while market maker 2 recorded more than $2.1 million in net profit from related DEX trades. He argued that the market makers responsible for the launch problems should buy back and burn tokens. Hunter Biden said he accepts final responsibility, will not leave the project, and plans next week to burn most of the unclaimed tokens from the first airdrop, which accounted for 10% of total supply.
On-chain flows and institutional activity
U.S. government-linked wallets move $670 million in crypto over 32 hours
A U.S. government-linked address transferred another 5,382.1 BTC worth $448 million to Coinbase Prime overnight and into the early morning. Over the past 32 hours, the address moved a cumulative $670 million in tokens, including 6,215.7 BTC worth $520 million, 119 million USDT and 40,285 BNB worth $31.63 million. All of the BTC and USDT went to Coinbase Prime.
HyperLabs redeems 3.75 million HYPE
HyperLabs, the development team behind Hyperliquid, redeemed 3.75 million HYPE worth $332 million eight hours earlier. Four hours earlier, after being distributed across five wallets, the tokens were consolidated at address 0x875...1d1, described in the report as likely an institution that bought coins from the team over the counter.
Of that amount, 1.25 million HYPE worth $110 million was staked again, while 2.5 million HYPE worth $220 million remained in the wallet.
Whale pinosaur.eth exits a nine-year ETH position
Whale address pinosaur.eth sent 9,618 ETH, valued in the report at $24.58 million, to Kraken six hours earlier, closing a position held for nine years. The reported profit was $24.21 million, or about 65x.
The wallet’s ETH could be traced back to a withdrawal of 7,459 ETH from Bitfinex in April 2017, when ETH was priced at $50.
Ark Invest sells Robinhood shares
Ark Invest, led by Cathie Wood, disclosed that it sold 151,903 Robinhood shares worth $16.6 million through its ARKK ETF on Wednesday.
Media and ecosystem developments
Cointelegraph is said to be seeking a buyer
According to people familiar with the matter, crypto media company Cointelegraph is looking for a buyer. The report said long-running weak price action and limited volatility in crypto have shifted user attention away from crypto news, while Google has also weighed on the company’s business.
In October 2025, Cointelegraph was hit with a manual action from Google that caused its site to disappear from search results, cutting organic traffic by about 80%. Before that, the company’s website was hit by a frontend vulnerability attack in June of the previous year.
Similarweb data showed the site had more than 12 million monthly visits in December 2024. As of Sept. 1, its monthly traffic was only slightly above 700,000. LinkedIn information showed Cointelegraph, founded in 2013, has more than 200 employees. Its Middle East and North Africa franchise business was acquired in July 2022 by Luna Media Corporation to support global and regional expansion.
Sui moves ahead with Samsung Wallet integration
Sui said it is working on integration with Samsung Wallet, a step it expects will allow about 82 million Galaxy devices in the United States to support transfers of Sui-based USDC. The service will also include gas-free transfers, allowing users to send USDC without paying additional network fees. The initial rollout is planned for the U.S., with more markets to follow.