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Y Combinator, a startup incubator, released a report on the direction of cryptocurrency startups, focusing on stablecoins, asset tokenization, and AI Agents. The report states that over the past year, cryptocurrency applications have been led by institutions rather than consumers for the first time, with the main driving force shifting from speculation to actual financial needs such as hedging oil price risks and cross-border capital transfers for businesses.The report predicts that stablecoins, as well as assets like stocks, debts, commodities, and property rights, will be further tokenized. New types of assets, such as equity in startups and small securities valued under $10,000, will also be issued via blockchain, promoting financial services like trading, lending, and derivatives. AI Agents will become one of the main participants in financial activities.In the next six months, the report focuses on using blockchain to finance the AI industry, new types of dollar stablecoins and non-dollar stablecoins targeting niche markets, new banks based on stablecoins, tokenization of real-world assets, new trading platforms and trading interfaces, as well as AI Agent trading and related API infrastructure. The text mentions that blockchain technology and stablecoins may pose a threat to traditional stock exchanges and banking systems.

U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis posted on the X platform, stating that the Democrats previously requested to lower the annual fundraising cap for Regulation Crypto from $75 million to $50 million and to add a $200 million lifetime fundraising cap.Cynthia Lummis stated that the relevant parties have agreed to these two requests and included them in the CLARITY Act, but at the same time, she accused the Democratic lawmakers of ultimately voting against the rules she had previously drafted, which aimed to protect retail investors.

U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal has launched an investigation into the payment of approximately $6.3 million by the stablecoin issuer Tether to the consulting firm Nxum. Nxum was co-founded by former White House cryptocurrency advisor Bo Hines, who holds one-third of the company's shares. On October 22, Blumenthal sent a letter to Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino, requesting the contracts between the two parties, cryptocurrency payment records, wallet addresses, and communication content.Tether is accused of paying Nxum $415,000 per month since May 2025 for strategic communications, lobbying, and public relations services. Blumenthal pointed out that Bo Hines, while serving as the executive director of the White House Digital Assets Advisory Committee, still held shares in Nxum and coordinated affairs with the company through encrypted communication applications. He also questioned whether Tether transferred cryptocurrency through the marketing company Notorious and then allocated funds to Nxum shareholders. Tether began directly contracting with Nxum after August 2025 and hired Bo Hines to oversee the newly established U.S. operations. Blumenthal has requested that Tether, Nxum, and related parties respond by November 6, noting that the relevant allegations have not yet formed a legal determination, and Tether has not publicly responded.

According to Catcher Predict monitoring, in the Polymarket prediction market for the event "NATO and Russia Military Conflict," the sub-market "December 31" option "Yes" has experienced a dramatic fluctuation in winning probability, dropping from 49% an hour ago to the current 17.5% (a fluctuation of 31.5%). Please note the impact of related breaking news.

The super political action committee Digital Freedom Fund, initiated by Gemini co-founders Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss in 2025, submitted documents to the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday, reporting for the first time advertising expenses exceeding $81,000 to support Republican candidate Ken Paxton's campaign for the Texas Senate seat, while opposing Democratic candidate James Talarico. Early voting in Texas began on October 19, with Election Day on November 3.As of September 30, the PAC has raised approximately $34 million, and its expenditures are not limited to Texas. Documents show its involvement in the Ohio Senate race between Republican candidate Jon Husted and Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown, bringing its total support for Husted to about $7 million. Another crypto industry PAC, Fairshake, also reported over $13 million in direct mail advertising expenditures this week, with approximately $9 million supporting Husted and over $4 million opposing independent candidate Dan Osborn in the Nebraska Senate election.These expenditures indicate potential support for candidates who favor crypto policies and legislation. Prediction contracts from Kalshi and Polymarket suggest that Democrats are favored to regain majority control of the House and Senate by 2027, and the majority party in both chambers will influence the legislative process for bills like the Digital Asset Market Structure Act, which failed to pass procedural voting in the Senate last month. Paxton previously defeated incumbent Senator John Cornyn in the May Republican primary, receiving over $500,000 in advertising support from the Fellowship PAC, backed by Anchorage Digital and Cantor Fitzgerald, with the funds executed through the Nxum Group co-founded by Bo Hines.

The smart trading system Instinct, supported by Y Combinator, is officially launched. This platform aims to open the research and trading capabilities of professional investment institutions to individual traders.The Instinct team members come from organizations such as Squarepoint Capital, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, and the Quantum Computing Center at the University of Southern California. The platform integrates fragmented financial tools and information links through independently operating intelligent agents, capable of processing massive amounts of market data, information, and market sentiment in parallel, automatically discovering cross-market opportunities, building trading tools, and executing trades.With this system, individual traders can cover more niche and specialized investment scenarios, achieving more flexible strategy layouts.Officials believe that the future investment model will shift to individual traders operating in conjunction with AI agent teams, and it is anticipated that within two years, there may emerge single-person investment institutions managing up to 1 billion dollars.

On October 8, 2026, Senator Richard Blumenthal, the chief member of the minority party of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a letter to Cantor Fitzgerald Chairman Brandon Lutnick, requesting the preservation of documents and answers regarding the company's relationship with the stablecoin issuer Tether. The deadline for responses to the five-page letter is October 23, 2026. This request comes from the minority party of the subcommittee, is part of an investigative inquiry, and is not a law enforcement order, nor does it constitute a determination against Cantor, nor does it alter the operation or redemption of USDT.The letter states that since President Trump took office again, the valuation of Cantor's 5% stake in Tether has risen from $600 million to an estimated $10 billion, with Cantor earning tens of millions of dollars each year for holding assets on behalf of Tether; former Cantor Chairman and current Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has profited over $250 million during the same period, including a $192 million distribution from Cantor. The page notes that the above content reflects allegations and estimates made by the senator, and does not represent conclusions drawn from this request. Blumenthal also wrote that Tether claims to operate in El Salvador, but the vast majority of its assets are in the U.S., held by Cantor.

Senior Democratic member of the U.S. Senate investigators, Senator Richard Blumenthal, is continuing to investigate the financial relationship of the stablecoin issuer Tether and has written to Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Brandon Lutnick, requesting information regarding the relationship between the two companies.Brandon Lutnick is the son of U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. After Howard Lutnick joined President Donald Trump's administration, Brandon Lutnick took over his leadership role at Cantor Fitzgerald. Cantor Fitzgerald holds and manages Tether's reserve assets in the U.S., and there are several other business interests between the two parties.

U.S. Senator Steve Daines (Republican from Montana, member of the Senate Finance Committee) has officially introduced a 56-page digital asset tax bill, named the "Aligning Digital Assets with Tax Principles Act" (ADAPT Act). The bill aims to establish clearer tax rules for scenarios such as stablecoin payments, network fees, staking, and lending, and plans to extend existing tax rules like wash sales and constructive sales to apply to digital assets.The core provisions of the bill state that taxpayers generally do not need to recognize gains or losses when using compliant U.S. dollar stablecoins to purchase goods and services, while exempting brokers from information reporting obligations for qualifying consumer transactions; however, this exemption does not apply to traders and market makers. The bill also extends wash sale rules and constructive sale rules to digital assets, with compliant stablecoins excluded from the constructive sale provisions to limit loss harvesting behavior in crypto assets.Additionally, the bill proposes to exempt digital assets used to pay for network, transaction, or gas fees of $10 or less from gain or loss recognition and allows qualifying digital asset traders and dealers to choose to account for them at fair market value. The bill also stipulates rules for income sources from staking and mining, a non-recognition framework for digital asset lending, a safe harbor for foreign investors' transactions, and definitions for digital asset classifications; most provisions will apply to tax years or transactions after December 31, 2026. Previously, the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee passed its own "Digital Asset Tax Certainty Act" on September 16 by a vote of 38 to 5.

The stablecoin giant Tether's Tether AI Research today released QVAC Genesis III, a synthetic training dataset aimed at the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, with a scale of 19.143 billion tokens, covering 159.6 million documents.It is reported that Tether hopes to enhance the reasoning and teaching capabilities of small AI models, allowing more AI assistants to run directly on laptops, mobile phones, and local servers, reducing the ongoing reliance on large cloud models.Genesis III continues the data lineage of Genesis I and Genesis II, covering 19 curriculum-related fields including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer science, medicine, electrical engineering, and machine learning, aimed at high school, university, and professional applications. Tether states that the dataset will focus on training models to explain problem-solving paths, identify erroneous reasoning, and provide corrections, rather than just outputting final answers.According to Tether's disclosed test results, a 1.7 billion parameter model trained with Genesis III option-level data achieved an effective answer rate of 99.45% in relevant benchmark tests. Compared to the Cosmopedia-v2 training model of similar token scale, Genesis III improved scores on the ARC-Easy, ARC-Challenge, and MMLU STEM benchmarks by 28.57, 21.35, and 15.03 percentage points, respectively.

U.S. Senator John Curtis from Utah, a Republican, wrote to Chuck Grassley, the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and Dick Durbin, the Chief Minority Whip, calling for an investigation into whether Donald Trump Jr. and Hunter Biden exploited their presidential family connections for personal financial gain, and requested subpoenas for both individuals. Curtis pointed out that Donald Trump Jr. had accepted wedding gifts from Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, actively promoted family-backed cryptocurrency ventures, and served as an advisor for a prediction market platform; the related companies are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Donald Trump stated that his son has returned the relevant funds to Umar Kremlev.Curtis also called for an investigation into Hunter Biden's substantial business dealings with foreign entities, as well as whether the two utilized their relationship with the president to create commercial value. He mentioned that Joe Biden pardoned Hunter Biden in December 2024, who had previously denied involving his father in business transactions. A week prior to this investigation call, Senate Republicans failed to garner enough Democratic support to advance the Digital Asset Market Clear Act. Some Democratic senators opposed the bill, citing reasons including Donald Trump's use of cryptocurrency ventures to gain benefits related to the presidency; Donald Trump disclosed that he earned $1.4 billion from digital asset-related businesses in 2025.

Crypto In America host Eleanor Terrett posted on X that after the failure of the Clarity Act, the crypto industry's super political action committee Fairshake is preparing to make its largest expenditure this year, investing $30 million to oppose Sherrod Brown's re-election campaign for senator.If Brown successfully returns to the Senate, he may regain his qualifications and serve as the chairman or a senior member of the Senate Banking Committee. This news was first reported by The New York Times and confirmed to Eleanor Terrett by a Fairshake spokesperson.

U.S. Republican Senator and Wyoming Federal Senator Cynthia Lummis stated: The Democrats had previously requested that any cryptocurrency project raising more than $25 million from the public provide audited financial statements, and this requirement has been written into the bill.Lummis noted that the Democrats voted against the transparency they had requested. Lummis has served as a Federal Senator from Wyoming since 2021, having previously served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 2009 to 2017.

Crypto In America host Eleanor Terrett reported that seven Democratic senators, including Kirsten Gillibrand, Mark Warner, Ruben Gallego, and Angela Alsobrooks, stated that they are "committed to passing the Clarity Act in a bipartisan manner."This statement comes as both sides are making initial efforts to restart bipartisan negotiations and assess the willingness of all parties to return to the negotiating table and push for the passage of the Clarity Act before the end of the year. This information comes from three informed sources.

According to a report by Reuters, U.S. Senate negotiators are discussing legislation that would require artificial intelligence companies to demonstrate that they are taking reasonable precautions to prevent their tools from causing harm. The proposal aims to grant the U.S. Secretary of Commerce the authority to require developers to provide proof of reasonable steps taken to prevent harm, referred to as "duty of care," and to authorize the dispatch of government auditors to test relevant products. Reuters was unable to immediately determine what constitutes "reasonable," and the related legislation is still under discussion.Even if Congress passes the measure, its prospects of becoming law still face significant resistance. U.S. President Donald Trump stated on Monday that existing authorities are sufficient to regulate and prosecute technology companies, suggesting that he would not sign a bill that sets new rules for artificial intelligence. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, and Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is involved in the negotiations, are discussing the proposal. Thune told reporters on Monday that Congress could set safeguards against more significant threats without compromising the U.S.'s leading position in the artificial intelligence race.Klobuchar stated in a statement that she is continuing to push for bipartisan legislation to oversee the greatest risks posed by artificial intelligence models, including requiring developers to work with government experts to validate and test models to ensure safety. Senior Democratic member of the Commerce Committee Maria Cantwell is also involved in the discussions. Reuters reported on Friday that negotiators are also discussing the possibility that if the government determines that certain artificial intelligence models are unsafe and wishes to prevent their release, it could be brought to federal court, where companies could challenge that decision. The portion of the measure involving federal courts would also prevent states from enforcing their own laws regarding specific risks associated with artificial intelligence models.

U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis stated that the recent lawsuit against Tether for freezing $42.4 million in USDT highlights the regulatory gaps in the current crackdown on illegal financial activities in the cryptocurrency industry. She pointed out that stablecoin issuers and trading platforms may face civil litigation risks if they freeze related assets due to suspicions of illegal activities.Lummis indicated that Section 305 of the "Digital Asset Market Structure Clear Act" would grant stablecoin issuers and trading platforms the necessary authority to promptly freeze stablecoins suspected of being involved in illegal activities while avoiding civil liability as a result.She believes that this provision can help the cryptocurrency industry more effectively prevent the flow of illegal funds and address the legal risks faced by issuers and trading platforms when taking compliance measures.

U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis stated that if the Clarity Act fails to pass in this Congress, the next real opportunity to reintroduce market structure legislation will not come until 2030. Completing this work now could prevent wasting job opportunities, investments, and tax revenue in the coming years.

According to Tech Funding News, German AI data analytics startup Zeit AI has completed a €5 million seed round financing, with investors including Y Combinator, the Oxford University Seed Fund, Sequoia Capital Scout Fund, ACE Ventures, and HPVC, founded by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner.Angel investors include former German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, 2014 World Cup champion Mario Götze, and Meta board member Charlie Songhurst. Zeit AI was founded two years ago by two former Palantir employees, and its product ZeitMind is an autonomous data analyst that can automatically process raw data and generate reports, alerts, inventory optimization, and other applications without the need for human data engineers to intervene.