Crypto Morning Brief: Google to Launch MPC Crypto Custody System; OKX and ICE Tokenized Stock Plan Faces Opposition from 7 More Companies

Author: TechFlow

Yesterday's Market Updates

Justin Sun-Linked Address Has Transferred Out $48.76 Million in PEPE, with About $9.62 Million in Unrealized Gains

According to on-chain analyst Ai Yi (@ai_9684xtpa), PEPE rose more than 14% in the past 24 hours today, returning to a price level beginning with 5. The wallet labeled by Arkham as a Justin Sun-linked address has transferred out a cumulative $48.76 million worth of PEPE since October 17, at a cost of about $0.000004115, with current unrealized gains of about $9.622 million. This portion of PEPE accounts for about 2.86% of the total supply, and the address has become the largest individual holder on-chain.

U.S. Treasury Secretary: Will Bridge SEC-CFTC Crypto Regulatory Gap Whether or Not Congress Passes Legislation

As reported by Solid Intel (@solidintel_x), U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent said that whether or not Congress advances legislation, the Treasury will fill the crypto regulatory gap between the SEC and CFTC. Bessent also said stablecoins are a new tool to strengthen dollar dominance and a new buyer of U.S. Treasuries. He said the United States will lead in digital assets and have a stronger dollar.

Google to Launch MPC Crypto Custody System

As reported by CoinDesk, Google will announce its Google Multi-Party Compute (MPC) security service at the first Digital Assets Workshop held in New York on Wednesday, helping banks and other financial institutions custody and transfer crypto and tokenized assets. The product is currently in private preview, with multiple financial institutions testing it. Parent company Alphabet has already used it to protect its own digital assets on Ethereum and Solana, and commercial availability is planned for early 2027, with pricing not yet disclosed. The system splits private keys into multiple shards, distributes them across different systems, checks transactions against institution-defined rules before signing, and supports ECDSA and Ed25519 algorithms.

OKX and ICE Proposed Tokenized Stock Plan Faces Opposition from 7 More Companies, Total Reaches 33

As reported by journalist Eleanor Terrett (@EleanorTerrett), updated notices on Tuesday evening showed that JPMorgan, AMD, Applied Materials, Coca-Cola, Adobe, Dell and SanDisk newly objected to the tokenization of their stocks on the platform planned by OKX and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). Previously on October 27, IBM, Oracle, Intel and IonQ had filed objections, bringing the total to 26 at the time. OKX and ICE initially named 62 companies, and more than half have now objected. The plan is being advanced under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) innovation exemption.

Korean Police Launch Pre-Filing Investigation into Securities Firm and Crypto Asset Exchange Hacking Incident

As reported by Yonhap News Agency, the National Investigation Headquarters of the Korean National Police Agency launched a pre-filing investigation (internal inquiry) on the morning of October 28 into hacking incidents involving securities firms and crypto asset exchanges, handled by the team previously responsible for the series of financial-sector hacking cases. Recently, Daishin Securities had the personal and credit information of 38,490 customers leaked; Bithumb has so far confirmed employee information leaks and is still checking whether member information was affected; Mirae Asset had information related to some business systems leaked, but no personal credit information leak has been detected so far. Previously, 16 financial institutions, including KB Kookmin Bank, were also hacked, with about 100,000 pieces of personal information, including ID numbers, account numbers and addresses, leaked. Police said they will compare the modus operandi in new and old cases to check for links and did not rule out that the same attacker is responsible.

Anthropic Engineering Manager Announces End of Coding Interviews, Saying They Can No Longer Effectively Evaluate Candidates

Anthropic engineering manager Felix Rieseberg said in a post that the development of AI coding tools has made traditional programming interviews ineffective for evaluating candidates, so he has stopped using them in his team's hiring process. He believes AI has lowered the execution cost of software development, and junior engineers can demonstrate their capabilities by understanding business goals, proposing breakthrough ideas, and building working prototypes over the weekend. He advises engineers to prioritize business value over to-do lists, focus on a single strong idea, and use a newcomer's perspective to uncover problems that organizations have long overlooked.

Rieseberg also said hiring assessments are gradually shifting toward evaluating candidates' ability to build products using AI, as well as their aesthetic sense, user empathy, and principled thinking.

CZ: Four Data Breaches Surface; Users Urged to Guard Against Phishing and SIM Swapping

CZ said four data breaches were reported today, involving Coinbase's third-party vendor Amplitude, South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, and South Korean securities firms Mirae Asset and Daishin Securities. The Amplitude incident affected the contact information of some Coinbase users, while customer funds were not affected.

CZ warned that leaked names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and transaction records could be used for phishing attacks, SIM swapping, and social engineering attacks. He recommended that users enable hardware security keys or Passkeys, avoid using SMS-based two-factor authentication, and be wary of scam messages impersonating customer support.

Robinhood CEO: U.S. Regulatory Uncertainty on Tokenization May Hinder Large Asset Inflows

According to Cointelegraph, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said on the third-quarter earnings call that the tokenization innovation exemption from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is a positive development, but further rulemaking or legislation is still needed to provide long-term regulatory certainty for tokenized stock markets; otherwise, it may hinder large asset inflows.

Tenev also said Robinhood plans to launch tokenized private company stock products overseas. In terms of business performance, Robinhood's third-quarter crypto revenue fell 55% year over year to $120 million, and notional trading volume declined 38% to $50 billion; revenue from prediction market event contracts rose to $173 million, and the number of traded contracts increased to 16.4 billion.

Tether, Anchorage, Kraken and Others Establish FASE Foundation to Pilot Stablecoin Humanitarian Aid

According to Tether's official press release, Tether announced on October 28 the establishment of FASE (Financial Access and Systemic Empowerment), a Swiss nonprofit foundation, focusing on four areas: financial security, financial inclusion, access to basic resources, and responsible AI and robotics. Founding members include Anchorage Digital, Bitfury, Bybit, Chainalysis, Fasanara Capital, Kraken, Opera, Pave Bank, Prosper Global (formerly Mercy Corps), and Solana Foundation. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) will provide technical advisory support.

The first projects include: establishing a global youth alliance with Goodwall, with plans to provide anti-fraud education to up to 10 million young people, prioritizing Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia; launching a stablecoin humanitarian aid pilot with Prosper Global, initially covering up to 1 million people; and partnering with the United Nations Trust Fund for Victims of Human Trafficking to support survivor assistance.

Today's Market Update

Recommended Reading

Initia Foundation Approves Vulnerability Loss Backstop Plan: Fully Replenishes Damaged Collateral to Restore iUSD 1:1 Backing

https://www.techflowpost.com/article/34937

The Initia Foundation has formally approved a special allocation to backstop collateral losses caused by the earlier MoveVM zero-day exploit, aiming to restore collateral backing for ecosystem synthetic stablecoin iUSD to 1:1. Compensation covers up to 1,080,000 USDC, 105 ETH and 1,400,000 AUSD₀, with final amounts subject to third-party on-chain audit and validator reconciliation. Previously, the attacker exploited a virtual machine vulnerability to forge approximately 2,000,000 unbacked AUSD, then extracted assets through cross-chain bridges and liquidity pools, creating a shortfall in iUSD collateral. The Foundation plans to use reserve funds to cover the losses and coordinate with stablecoin issuer Agora to handle partially frozen assets involved in the incident. This backstop removes a major obstacle to Initia's relaunch of its mainnet and related Rollup networks, but final payouts remain contingent on audit results and actual disbursement of funds.

DOJ Pushes to Ban Claude, Agencies Rush to Buy It: Claude Secures Up to 40% Procurement Discount, Usage Surges 20x

https://www.techflowpost.com/article/34934

This article focuses on the U.S. government's policy contradiction toward Anthropic: while the U.S. Department of Justice has filed an appeal seeking to restore a government-wide ban on Anthropic, the General Services Administration (GSA) has reached a new procurement framework with Anthropic that allows federal, state and local agencies to use Claude at up to a 40% discount, paying based on actual Token usage without a minimum spend commitment. The article says about 500 federal, state and local government agencies currently use Claude in daily operations, and usage by civilian federal agencies has grown about 20x over the past year. The contrast between government litigation to ban it and continued procurement at the operational level highlights that political and regulatory disputes are unlikely to block frontline departments' actual demand for AI tools; however, expanded government procurement does not mean the related security controversies have been resolved.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Backs Crypto: Stablecoins Are a New Weapon for Dollar Hegemony and New Buyers of U.S. Treasuries

https://www.techflowpost.com/article/34921

This article notes that U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessent is elevating crypto assets to the national financial strategy level, arguing that U.S. dollar stablecoins are not only a channel for the dollar's expansion into emerging markets but also an important new buyer of U.S. Treasuries. Currently, more than 90% of stablecoins worldwide are dollar-denominated, and the U.S. Treasuries and related assets held by USDT and USDC issuers are worth approximately $170 billion to $220 billion. Standard Chartered forecasts that the stablecoin market could reach $2 trillion by 2028, corresponding to about $1 trillion of new demand for short-term Treasuries. The United States hopes to use the GENIUS Act to promote stablecoin expansion, creating a cycle of increased dollar usage, higher Treasury demand and lower government funding costs. However, large-scale stablecoin redemptions could force issuers to sell Treasuries in a concentrated manner, while broader crypto market regulatory legislation has not yet been enacted. Stablecoins are shifting from crypto trading tools into financial infrastructure that helps the United States maintain dollar influence and expand the buyer base for U.S. Treasuries.

Three Financial Institutions in South Korea, Including Bithumb, Hit by Hackers: Nearly 40,000 Customer Records Leaked, Regulators Launch Investigation

https://www.techflowpost.com/article/34919

South Korea's second-largest cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb, asset manager Mirae Asset and Daishin Securities have been hit by successive cyberattacks. Daishin Securities confirmed that personal information and credit data for 38,490 customers were stolen, while Bithumb found unauthorized access to its internal mobile office system and is still investigating whether core member databases and wallet management systems were affected. South Korea's Financial Supervisory Service has dispatched on-site inspection teams and expanded security checks across financial institutions and licensed crypto-asset service providers. The article notes that AI is lowering the cost of vulnerability discovery, fuzz testing and attack payload generation, making concurrent attacks against different financial systems easier to carry out; even crypto platforms that prioritize smart contract audits can be compromised if vulnerabilities exist in office systems, employee endpoints or identity verification processes. Financial institutions' security defenses cannot focus only on on-chain assets; they must also cover internal systems and the supply chain, while improving automated monitoring and response capabilities.

Source: TechFlow