TLDR Crypto 2026-10-13

Caroline Pham, now MoonPay's chief legal officer, said the CFTC does not need Congress to regulate crypto and called its proposed Regulation CAM and CTX the “absolutely the kind of protection” retail crypto traders need. She argued tokenized deposits, not stablecoins, fit wholesale markets because atomic settlement of one trading day would need about $15 trillion in cash that does not exist, and expects NYSE and Nasdaq to list “real” tokenized shares with meaningful volume within two years.

Amy Oldenburg, Morgan Stanley's head of digital asset strategy, said the bank now expects to support tokenized equities on its alternative trading system in Q1 2027, later than the H2 2026 timeline it gave in March, because client demand depends on products that do not exist yet. She pointed to DTCC's tokenization service launch at the end of October and the GENIUS Act taking effect in January as milestones, and said the tokenized RWA market will “without question” land in the $3 trillion to $10 trillion range by 2030. The bank is also building abstracted wallet infrastructure, runs a Digital Asset Lab, and holds a conditional OCC approval for a digital trust.

The Stonks Exchange acquired Stockify, combining Base's primary token launch venue ($STONKEX) with a protocol that auto-distributes tokenized equity dividends via a no-claim mechanism. Under $STFY's unchanged mechanics, a 3% ETH trading fee routes 90% of proceeds to purchase tokenized stocks sent to eligible wallets with no staking or claiming required. The deal adds $STONKEX to Stockify's dividend index at equal weight alongside NVIDIA, Meta, Apple, Alphabet, and SpaceX, giving STFY holders direct exposure to the combined entity's growth through existing payout infrastructure. Base now hosts 130+ tokenized stocks targeting 250 by month's end, and the merged team aims to supply liquidity and holder depth for newly listed assets as the chain accelerates its push to become the primary onchain equities venue.

AMM liquidity providers on Ethereum lose money to LVR (loss versus rebalancing), with MEV bots capturing most arbitrage profits from price gaps between pools and external markets. BRO-AMM addresses this by combining oracle-verified post-trade reconciliation windows, mandatory trader collateral, and reputation-tiered fees to compensate legitimate arbitrageurs while penalizing excess extraction. Six-month ETH/USDC simulations show 68-79% reductions in arbitrage losses on Ethereum and 49-55% on Arbitrum, with Ethereum depositors shifting from net losses to profitability. The proposal depends on trusted oracle data and remains simulation-only, pending live validation.

EtherFi introduced its own stablecoin, ether.fi USD, powered by Ethena, and picked MoonPay as a payments infrastructure partner; RedotPay launched SPEI for Mexican pesos and partnered with Niu Global; Stripe Treasury made OUSD on Tempo the default stablecoin for US businesses, with OUSD-backed cards paying 2% cash rewards; Tangem Pay became a physical card (5,000-card early run); and Jupiter Mobile launched on-chain QR payments.

Two wallets are exploiting Paper Trade by running $20M clips on Hyperliquid to shift ETH prices 10-20bps, then opening nine-figure paper longs that capture the manufactured move at no real cost. The attack exposes a structural gap between real-market price impact and paper trade settlement that the protocol must close to remain viable.

Raheim Hamilton, co-creator of Empire Market, received a 40-year federal prison sentence and a $5 million fine on October 9 for running a dark web marketplace that processed over 4 million transactions totaling $430 million between February 2018 and August 2020. The platform accepted only cryptocurrency and encouraged vendors to use tumbling and mixing services, with drug sales accounting for roughly $375 million of volume. Prosecutors seized approximately 1,230 Bitcoin and 24.4 Ether from Hamilton. Co-creator Thomas Pavey faces forfeiture of roughly 1,584 Bitcoin, gold bars, and real estate before his own sentencing later in October. The platform shut down in August 2020 in an alleged $30 million exit scam, and the combined recovery of 2,800-plus Bitcoin across both defendants demonstrates that chain analysis pierced mixing-service obfuscation at this scale.

The IMF's Global Financial Stability Report found that more than half of tokenized equity trading occurs outside US market hours, with 80% of transactions in the five most liquid tokenized US stocks (Tesla, Nvidia, and Google among them) sized below one share. These tokens carry roughly 1.5x the volatility of their traditional counterparts while showing considerably lower liquidity, raising structural questions about price formation and investor protection. The tokenized equity segment totals $2.3 billion within a broader $65 billion tokenized real-world asset market, and the IMF data positions the segment as a retail-driven, offshore-hours venue rather than a functional extension of regulated equity markets.

Payward received full market approval from Dubai's VARA, covering retail, professional, and institutional services, and plans to launch Kraken in the UAE within weeks with AED spot and margin trading, direct AED deposits and withdrawals, onchain staking, and xStocks tokenized stocks, plus OTC and Kraken Prime for institutions.

AAVE's share of major lending tokens' combined FDV fell from nearly 60% in January to about 30% in June and is now back at 46.8%, a gain of more than 17 points.

Jeonbuk Bank started offering bitcoin-backed loans on a limited basis to corporate clients, accepting only bitcoin as collateral for now, with plans to expand depending on demand and regulatory developments.