Bitcoin price fluctuated around $80,000 this week, marking a 1.8% decline. Market capitalization dropped from $2.71 trillion to $2.68 trillion, with Bitcoin dominance at 60.1%. Spot Bitcoin ETFs saw inflows exceeding $442 million, while Ethereum funds recorded outflows of nearly $225 million.
The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) finalized regulations for payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. The rules cover reserve requirements, redemption, risk management, and auditing. AML and sanctions compliance requirements were excluded from this document and will be addressed separately by the US Treasury.
The Qubic blockchain resumed operations following an attack on 1,044 wallets that occurred between October 17 and 18. Attackers stole approximately 2.94 trillion QU due to insufficient randomness in seed phrase generation. Developers released a fix in web wallet version 4.26.4 on October 19.
Kaspersky researchers identified that the Lazarus Group is utilizing AI and post-quantum cryptography in the Operation FlashHole cyber-espionage campaign. The group has been active since at least July 2025, targeting organizations in South Korea. The LPEClient tool now uses ML-KEM-1024 for encrypted communication.
OpenAI coordinated the remediation of two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, identified as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, both rated 9.2 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. SlowMist reported that 53.3% of 1,488 analyzed crypto-industry domains utilize PHP, potentially exposing them to remote code execution risks.
