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The Singapore Police Force issued a warning on Wednesday, stating that since September 10, they have received at least two reports involving tampered Ledger hardware wallets, resulting in a total loss of approximately 3.5 million Singapore dollars, equivalent to about 2.7 million US dollars. Preliminary investigations found malicious hardware components in Ledger wallets purchased from certain retail stores in Singapore.The incident only came to public attention on October 9, involving devices sold through authorized dealers CryptoBilis in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Subsequently, former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpelès stated that a Ledger Flex purchased at Singapore airport contained a spy implant. Another user reported acquiring a tampered device from local IT retailer Challenger, and later received a new device sent by Ledger.On October 13, Ledger requested retailers in Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Hong Kong to suspend sales of their devices pending the completion of the investigation. The Singapore police stated they are in contact with Ledger, which is reviewing the affected cases, and the police investigation is ongoing.

The chief economist of the American asset management firm Apollo, Torsten Sløk, released five charts, believing that AI has not yet brought significant financial returns to large American companies outside of the tech giants. The per capita revenue and profit margins of the seven tech giants continue to rise; excluding them, the 493 companies in the S&P have seen these two metrics remain basically stagnant, and the data on total factor productivity in the U.S. has not shown significant signs of AI-driven growth.Apollo cited data from the corporate payment platform Ramp, stating that among its clients, the top 10% of companies by spending contributed 99.5% of the model hosting and inference costs. Among the top 1% of companies with the highest AI spending, about 80% have venture capital backgrounds; for companies at the median spending level, this ratio is only 13%. A large amount of AI computing power consumption is concentrated in a few companies, many of which rely on venture capital support.Previous statistics from Apollo indicated that during the second quarter earnings season of 2026, 69% of S&P 500 companies had disclosed that they were actually using AI, but only 2% reported metrics for ongoing tracking of effectiveness. Another NBER study updated in October this year surveyed nearly 9,000 corporate executives from seven countries, with respondents estimating that over the past three years, AI has only improved the annual growth rate of labor productivity in companies by about 0.2 percentage points.

The vulnerability bounty platform Immunefi's CEO Mitchell Amador warned that internet users still face the risk of cyberattacks triggered by PHP vulnerabilities, especially small websites that are slow to adopt emergency upgrades, which may take weeks to patch. He stated, "The vulnerability apocalypse" is coming as planned, where the cost of discovering vulnerabilities becomes cheap while the cost of fixing them remains high. He advised users to treat any websites they log into in the coming weeks as potentially compromised, avoid reusing passwords, exercise caution when connecting to encrypted wallets, and revoke token authorizations that are unrecognizable.Previously, the PHP Foundation admitted that it delayed fixing a critical security vulnerability first discovered in 2024 due to resource shortages. PHP developers released emergency patches for two critical vulnerabilities on the same day, but each website still needs to complete the upgrade on its own. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated that within 24 hours of the PHP vulnerability being publicly disclosed, the web recorded millions of exploitation attempts, with thousands of attempts even before the disclosure. According to W3Techs, PHP supports about 69% of websites with known server-side programming languages, and these vulnerabilities could allow attackers to spread malware or inject malicious scripts into websites.The FBI's Cyber Division also warned that these vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors to "remotely execute code in the PHP core, potentially compromising sensitive data and networks." Amador warned in an interview with Cointelegraph in June that the proliferation of cutting-edge AI models has changed the cybersecurity landscape, giving attackers an advantage, leading to the emergence of the "vulnerability apocalypse," and triggering a resurgence of DeFi hacking attacks. Immunefi is the world's largest vulnerability bounty platform, having paid out $140 million in bounties to 650 protocols to date.

The U.S. SEC filings show that SpaceX has signed a binding primary financing lease commitment with Apollo Global Management.According to the agreement, Apollo will purchase GPU clusters and related equipment and lease them to SpaceX, with the total principal payments under the related lease arrangements expected to reach $40 billion.

Asia Gulf Holdings (AGH), the parent company of Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB), announced the appointment of Martin Gilbert, Chairman of Revolut Group, and Maliki Osman, former Minister in the Prime Minister's Office and Second Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore, to the Global Advisory Council. The two will provide advice on global investment strategies and geopolitical affairs, respectively.Maliki Osman will also advise on government relations and regional cooperation, while Martin Gilbert will focus on global investment strategies, asset management, and investment opportunities in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa. The council is chaired by Amy Lee, with former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Randal Quarles serving as vice chairman. This appointment was announced on October 26, and Maliki Osman will exit politics in May 2025.

Kimi officially posted on X, apologizing for the usage frequency limits and unnecessary quota consumption of the K3.1 Pro subscription plan, acknowledging that the issue was caused by the platform itself and should have been resolved earlier.Kimi will perform a one-time quota reset for all subscription plan users, restoring usage equivalent to 25% of the total monthly quota, which is approximately one week's quota; if the current used quota is less than 25%, the used amount will be reset to zero. The relevant adjustments will be reflected in the usage progress bar before the end of the day in Pacific Standard Time.Kimi has adjusted the subscription plan parameters and will reduce unnecessary sub-agent calls and output length to lower quota consumption.

Cryptocurrency analyst Darkfost stated that this round of deleveraging is driven by factors such as price declines, chain liquidations, and traders actively closing positions to reduce risk. Looking back at July this year, Ethereum also experienced a more severe contraction in open contracts, followed by stabilization and a rebound, with an increase of over 32%, and the price once breaking through 2800 USD. Deleveraging is part of the market adjustment process, and such phases are often accompanied by panic sentiment, which may also occur at the tail end of an adjustment.The overall performance of the altcoin market has been weak over the past three weeks, with Ethereum's price correcting by about 15%, and its market capitalization shrinking by approximately 54 billion USD. In the derivatives market, Binance's ETH open contract volume decreased by 1.3 billion USD in the past month, a decline of nearly 20%, dropping to 5.7 billion USD; the total amount of ETH open contracts across the network has fallen to 11.5 billion USD.

Apollo Global Management's Chief Economist Torsten Slok stated that despite companies investing heavily in artificial intelligence, AI has not yet brought tangible returns to U.S. businesses outside the technology sector. Slok pointed out that the per capita income of employees in 493 companies in the S&P 500 index remains flat, and corporate profit margins have not seen growth.

The Central Bank of Malaysia and the Bank of Thailand joined the Singapore-led BLOOM initiative on Friday as members of the policymakers. BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency, and is a public-private partnership initiative aimed at helping financial institutions utilize stablecoins and tokenized deposits for cross-border payments. According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the initiative aims to reduce costs and help institutions bring services to market faster by decreasing the need for financial institutions to establish arrangements with each counterparty or market individually.The Monetary Authority of Singapore launched BLOOM in October 2025, building on Project Orchid, which was initiated in 2021 to explore the application of a digital Singapore dollar. BLOOM's work also covers corporate cash management, trade financing, and payments executed by AI agents within preset limits, with participants including Airwallex, Mastercard, Ripple, Visa, and the World Bank Group. Additionally, the Central Bank of Malaysia announced in February that three initiatives would test the ringgit stablecoin and tokenized deposits for domestic and cross-border wholesale payments in 2026.

According to the Straits Times, Edward Robinson, Chief Economist of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, stated at the Beijing Financial Street Forum on October 20 that once artificial intelligence leads to widespread productivity improvements, central banks may relax monetary policy. However, currently, the AI investment boom is driving demand, and policies should maintain appropriate restrictions. He pointed out that AI-related investments are driving economic growth, but the technology has not yet brought significant productivity improvements to the broader economy, and he called for a gradual, data-driven approach.The Monetary Authority tightened monetary policy in April and July 2026 due to rising inflation risks, and maintained the policy unchanged in October. An October 14 statement warned that if the AI boom generates broader economic spillovers and raises unit labor costs, domestic inflation may remain high. Robinson noted that AI-driven electronic products accounted for over 70% of this year's export growth in Asia, but the growth of industries producing AI-related technologies mainly stems from increased investment and more intensive use of existing resources, rather than efficiency improvements. He cited OECD estimates stating that if sufficiently widespread and appropriately invested, AI could increase total factor productivity growth by up to 0.6 percentage points annually.

The security organization SlowMist has released an in-depth threat intelligence report on the DarkSword Trojan backend and iOS attack chain. The report tracks the evolution of this attack infrastructure and reveals its high danger to cryptocurrency asset users.According to SlowMist's analysis, after the relevant exploit code was made public in March 2026, DarkSword-PROV2 appeared on GitHub in July, and its attack infrastructure was observed to be operational by late September.The SlowMist team not only tracked its online infrastructure but also correlated its management panel with public GitHub repositories, dissecting the exploit code, delivery chain, and post-compromise capabilities. The report highlighted several key findings of this attack framework: a highly automated complete attack pipeline that integrates vulnerability delivery, device and data collection, data theft, and cryptocurrency wallet fund aggregation functions.The extensive and deep data theft capabilities of this toolkit target not only keychains, files, and information but also specifically cryptocurrency wallet data, with the ability to decrypt wallet data and aggregate funds. Although the toolkit claims to support iOS 13 and above, code analysis confirms that its actual effective exploit window is concentrated in the iOS 18.6--18.7.2 and iOS 26--26.1 version ranges. The publicly available vulnerability components have been weaponized and integrated into a deployable attack framework, significantly lowering the threshold for launching complex iOS attacks.In response to this threat, SlowMist has provided clear security recommendations. Users should keep their iOS systems updated and avoid clicking on untrusted links, as merely opening a malicious page in the Safari browser could trigger vulnerabilities. If a device has accessed suspicious landing pages, users should consider their mnemonic phrases and private keys as compromised and must create new wallets and transfer assets using a clean device that has never accessed that page.Additionally, users should thoroughly check for abnormal transactions and token authorizations across various chains and immediately revoke unnecessary authorizations.

According to reports from South Korean media, on October 19, during the National Assembly's inspection of state affairs in South Korea, when asked whether the launch of single-stock leveraged ETFs affected the volatility of the South Korean stock market, the head of the Financial Supervisory Service, Lee Chan-jin, stated that he believes it has had an impact to some extent. He expressed deep regret over criticisms for not actively preventing the listing of related products.On the same day, during the National Assembly's Administrative Committee's inspection of the Financial Supervisory Service, a member of the People Power Party stated that searching for news related to the listing of single-stock leveraged ETFs would reveal that there were occurrences from "Black Monday" to "Black Friday," turning an entire week into a black one, and asked Lee Chan-jin whether he believed the listing of this product had an impact on this. Lee Chan-jin responded that he believes it has had an impact to some extent. When asked about other reasons for stock market volatility, Lee Chan-jin added that Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix have experienced severe volatility.

Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB) announced that personal customers can conduct two-way exchanges between USD and USDT, USDC through the mobile banking app, without the need to transfer funds to a cryptocurrency exchange.Customers can hold USDT, USDC, and other fiat currencies in the same bank account, and the service supports 24-hour exchanges from Monday to Friday. Singapore Gulf Bank was initiated by the Singapore Huangpu Group.

According to Bitcoin Magazine, the Singapore-listed company BitFuFu disclosed an addition of 15 Bitcoins, bringing the company's total Bitcoin holdings to 1,388, valued at approximately 114.2 million USD.BitFuFu is a Bitcoin mining company registered in Singapore, with business covering mining and computing power-related services, and discloses changes in Bitcoin reserves as a public company.

As chip stocks' market value evaporates by $1 trillion, ETF investors are pouring billions into the dip.The VanEck Semiconductor ETF attracted over $430 million in inflows over the past three days, while the Direxion Daily Semiconductor Bull 3X Shares ETF saw approximately $3.8 billion in inflows this week, setting a record. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has cumulatively dropped 12% over six days.

DeepSeek API Platform has released a notification regarding service recovery and compensation, stating that between 8:11 and 13:04 Beijing time on October 15, 2026, its service system experienced a failure, resulting in the API service being unavailable during that period. The platform apologizes for this and has stated that a comprehensive investigation and rectification regarding service stability has been initiated, with efforts to streamline and eliminate single point dependencies to prevent similar issues from occurring again.As compensation, the platform will fully refund the consumption amount of user accounts within 7 days (from October 8 to October 14) in the form of bonus credits, which will be automatically credited to the accounts. API billing deductions will first be taken from the bonus account.