TLDR Crypto 2025-10-17

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said tokenization is now a “huge focus” for the agency, highlighting ongoing work on token distribution rules, transaction definitions, and crypto custody guidance. Speaking at the DC Privacy Summit, she also renewed calls for stronger financial privacy protections, warning against excessive government data access and citing the Fourth Amendment as a safeguard. Peirce suggested crypto could help the US rethink Bank Secrecy Act, AML, and KYC frameworks to better fit peer-to-peer systems, framing the current policy debate as a chance to modernize financial oversight.

Singapore's Monetary Authority has launched BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency) to enable settlement in tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins while managing risks through standardized approaches, building on Project Orchid's foundation of 10+ successful trials since 2021 that explored digital Singapore dollar infrastructure and use cases. The initiative focuses on three areas: distribution and clearing of settlement assets to coordinate networks and enable seamless transfer of different settlement asset forms, programmable compliance controls using standardized mechanisms for more consistent and cost-effective cross-border wholesale arrangements, and agentic payments exploring AI agents executing transactions automatically within predefined limits to optimize timing and reduce manual payment management. Initial members include Circle, DBS, OCBC, Stripe, UOB, Ant International, StraitsX, Coinbase, and Partior.

PROPAGANDA operates as a sustainable business focused on research, design, development, and go-to-market for risky experimental projects across prediction markets, yield experiments, money games, x-to-earn mechanics, commerce, and communication, having launched 31 brand collaborations since January. The project emphasizes that "holding a little will get you a lot" through a portfolio of experiments ranging from weekend ephemeral projects to six-month moonshots with constantly evolving strategy where holders always come first, while all product profits are staked on Morpho with yield used for daily token buybacks, creating a sustainable compounding mechanism. It is a leading Zora Creator Coin.

Coinbase Business is an all-in-one platform for small and midsize companies to receive crypto payments, manage assets, and earn up to 4.1% APY on USDC holdings. The service offers instant settlements, QuickBooks and Xero integrations, and self-service onboarding within two days, aiming to modernize business banking with crypto rails. By blending payments, yield, and accounting, Coinbase positions itself against fintechs like Mercury and Brex while leveraging its partnership with Circle to expand USDC adoption.

Sire is rolling out aVault, an automated USDC trading vault powered by its AI agents, offering passive exposure to sports and market strategies. Users deposit USDC to receive αVault units whose value tracks performance, with early internal tests showing +137% ROI on $10K over ~2 months. Fees include a 2% management charge, a 20% performance fee (dropping to 10% for large $SIRE stakers), and a 2% withdrawal fee (100% of which goes to stakers). The launch began on October 16 with three phases, prioritizing $SIRE holders (25K+ first, 1K+ next, then open to all). The system's high-water mark ensures users pay fees only on new profits, while stakers share in vault success and future buybacks.

Wide sandwich attacks spanning multiple slots now account for 93% of all sandwiches on Solana, with bots extracting 529,000 SOL over a full year by frontrunning and backrunning victim transactions across different slots that evade standard detectors. January marked peak extraction at 87,000 SOL in one month, though monthly extraction remains steady at 30-60k SOL, with top bots waiting for high-value victims and averaging 0.46 SOL per sandwich by sending dual bundles containing frontrun and first break-even backrun, followed by second backrun to capture remaining profit. Axiom users suffered 70%+ of extracted SOL, followed by Bloom at 10-15% and Photon at 5-10%, while 23 validators had at least 6% of leader slots containing wide sandwiches, suggesting private order flow sharing with main stake from Marinade and Jito, including six receiving Solana Foundation stake. Low-cap token buyers face the highest risk due to low liquidity creating high price impact and default slippage settings.

Paxos mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of PayPal's PYUSD stablecoin on Wednesday in a "technical error" during an internal transfer before immediately identifying and burning the excess tokens within 20 minutes, with the company confirming no security breach and customer funds remaining safe. PYUSD's dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and third-party attestation reports rather than intrinsically tied to minting mechanisms, as there aren't enough dollars in global circulation to back $300 trillion, which would require more than double the world's estimated total GDP.

Steak 'n Shake launched the Bitcoin Steakburger featuring the BTC logo stamped on the bun to celebrate five months of accepting Bitcoin payments across all locations, giving over 100 million customers the option to purchase burgers and milkshakes with cryptocurrency since the May rollout. The Bitcoin community engagement has driven double-digit same-store sales increases in both Q2 and Q3 2025, which the brand attributes partially to Bitcoin enthusiast support, demonstrating concrete business impact from crypto payment adoption.

Dozens of Australians queued at Sydney's Martin Place, directly outside the Reserve Bank of Australia, to buy physical gold amid growing distrust in fiat currency.

Visa says stablecoins have already powered $670 billion in lending and could open parts of the $40 trillion credit market to blockchain rails.

Kraken bought Small Exchange for $100 million to unblock launching a US derivatives platform.

Crypto travelers can avoid inflated foreign exchange charges by always paying in the local currency rather than USD when abroad.