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The British pound faced selling pressure against the US dollar during the Asian session, dropping to around 1.33. The US dollar strengthened due to expectations of another interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve this year, with CME tools indicating an approximately 80% probability of a rate hike in December. Geopolitical uncertainty supports the US dollar, while the downside potential for the British pound is limited by expectations regarding the Bank of England's policy.

Alphabet (GOOG.O) executives stated that they are expanding AI-based advertising to international markets.

The Wall Street Journal has published full-page paid advertisements in the past two days, themed "YOUR STOCK. THEIR TOKENS. YOUR PROBLEM." The Chinese expression is a reminder to CEOs of publicly listed companies: your stock, their tokens, your problem, warning the public about the risks of stock tokenization.The advertisement is funded by the American conservative nonprofit organization Common Sense Leadership Fund, warning that the cryptocurrency industry will tokenize company shares in unregulated venues and listing eight major risks: pricing divergence, ownership ambiguity, impaired capital raising, cyber theft, market manipulation, AML loopholes, lack of investor protection, and potential legal liabilities.Previously, a total of 22 companies, including Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, McDonald's, and Alphabet, have expressed opposition. The related documents outline the rules of the collaboration project between OKX and the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and list the companies that have opposed it, but do not specify the exact reasons for their opposition.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Elon Musk announced that Grok would release a full-length, "historically accurate" movie version of "The Odyssey" three months later. On October 23, Grok released the first seven minutes of this AI-generated content, calling it "the first episode of our Odyssey series." This version was produced in collaboration with Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. The Grok Imagine account posted on X, stating that viewers could comment on whether a complete production analysis is needed.The report mentioned that Musk previously criticized Christopher Nolan's version of "The Odyssey" because Nolan cast non-white and transgender actors. Although Nolan's version heavily utilized visual effects, it was still primarily a live-action film, shot across six countries with thousands of cast and crew members. After its release in July, the film achieved impressive box office results, with IMAX screenings sold out for several months, and it is considered a strong contender for the next Academy Awards.The TechCrunch author, after watching, stated that the video was not as bad as expected; some shots could be mistaken for real actors sailing on real seas, but the historical accuracy could not be determined. The author felt that the footage lacked artistry, inspiration, and warmth; the narration was lengthy, the dialogue stiff, and overall it lacked a sense of breath and momentum, making it hard to imagine that viewers would be interested in another seven minutes or even a whole movie.

According to Bitcoin Magazine, payment company Block has launched its first Bitcoin advertising campaign aimed at the general consumer, titled "Bitcoin Does," targeting approximately 60 million American users who are curious about Bitcoin but have yet to take the first step. The campaign is led by Maria Pesce, Block's head of Bitcoin marketing, who is responsible for Bitcoin-related marketing across three business lines: Cash App, Square, and Proto.Maria Pesce stated that the advertisements intentionally skip over the science of mining and blockchain principles, directly showcasing how Bitcoin can be used in real-life scenarios. She mentioned that the related creative ideas came from customer research: one Square merchant referred to Bitcoin as "a more honest currency," while topics such as inflation, relief, and private equity formed the narrative backdrop of the advertisement films. Additionally, fixed supply, self-custody, and the choices of younger users are also key points of communication.Block also set up an interactive installation called "Lightning Lake" at the ComplexCon event, where participants could fish for Bitcoin and complete payments through the Lightning Network. Square currently charges a 0% processing fee for Bitcoin transactions, and Block hopes to make the experience of using Bitcoin as commonplace as sending an email.

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 Blockchain Association stated that it has sent a letter to the leadership of both the House and Senate, urging Congress to advance prudent, bipartisan digital asset tax legislation, and launched TaxClarityforAmerica.com for the public to understand the principles, view congressional progress, and contact legislators.The association noted that approximately 67 million Americans hold and use digital assets, but the current tax system is outdated, leading to uncertainty for taxpayers, excessive compliance burdens, and forcing innovation to move overseas.Its "Digital Asset Tax Principles" include: a meaningful small exemption; taxation of mining and staking rewards as newly created property upon disposal; reporting arrangements that protect taxpayer privacy; tax compliance based on economic substance rather than technical form; and wash sale rules that do not penalize everyday activities while preventing abuse.The association also stated that the House Ways and Means Committee had previously advanced legislation related to digital asset taxation, and Senator Steve Daines has also introduced a Senate version. Congress is in recess until after the elections on November 3, and there remains a legislative window during the short session.

Netflix's U.S. stock fell 6.1% in pre-market trading after its fourth-quarter profit forecast fell short of expectations, and the company lowered its full-year advertising revenue forecast.

According to the British Daily Mail, 48-year-old Hok Seng Ling has returned £5.6 million to the UK government. He was ordered by the court to hand over the aforementioned funds after admitting to involvement in the largest money laundering case in British history, which involved £5.5 billion.Ling previously served as the butler for Qian Zhimin. Qian Zhimin orchestrated a Ponzi scheme that defrauded over 128,000 Chinese investors between 2014 and 2017, subsequently converting the proceeds into Bitcoin and fleeing to the UK. Malaysian-born Ling resides in Matlock, Derbyshire, UK, assisting the Bitcoin queen in laundering illegal proceeds and helping her evade the UK police through methods such as booking Airbnb and arranging assistance.Last November, Ling was sentenced to 4 years and 11 months in prison after admitting to money laundering-related offenses at Southwark Crown Court in London. Following this, the judge issued a confiscation order requiring him to hand over £5,603,305, most of which came from cryptocurrencies seized at the time of his arrest. The aforementioned amount has been fully recovered, along with an additional £1,990 in interest.

Google's advertising policy announcement indicates that starting from October 21, 2026, advertisers targeting cryptocurrency exchanges and software wallets in the UAE must obtain permission from one of the designated local regulatory authorities and be certified by Google.Acceptable licensing authorities include the Capital Markets Authority (CMA), the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA), the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA), and the Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA). Advertisers must also comply with other local legal requirements, and this policy applies to all accounts globally that target the aforementioned advertisements in the UAE.

On October 19, the State Council Information Office held a press conference, and the National Bureau of Statistics announced the economic data for the first three quarters. Preliminary calculations show that the gross domestic product for the first three quarters was 10,710.71 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.6% at constant prices.China's GDP annual rate for the third quarter was 4.5%, expected to be 4.40%, and the previous value was 4.30%.

According to official news, Metis Andromeda will make two adjustments in October: support for Stargate will be terminated on October 23, and LayerZero V1 related routing should be disabled by that date; starting October 30, LayerZero Labs' DVN (Decentralized Verification Network) and Executor will no longer provide services for Metis. Additionally, the Stargate V1 liquidity pool will close on December 15 across all chains.The official statement indicates that most holders do not need to take action. m.USDC, m.USDT, WETH, and METIS are issued by Metis's native cross-chain bridge and are unrelated to Stargate; minting and redemption will proceed as usual, and the Ethereum ↔ Metis native cross-chain bridge will also remain unaffected. Users providing liquidity to the Stargate liquidity pool on Metis must withdraw their liquidity before October 23. If there is any staking, it must be unstaked first, and then users should select the Metis Andromeda network in the Stargate application to withdraw.

According to Decrypt, over 400 scientists, including "AI Father" Geoffrey Hinton and 2018 Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, published a joint open letter on Tuesday, calling for AI laboratories to default to "physically isolating" models capable of cyberattacks, meaning cutting off their connection to external networks. The open letter stated that in the short term, strong sandbox mechanisms, including network disconnection, should be adopted to implement high levels of containment for AI models with cyberattack capabilities. As of Wednesday, the number of signatories had increased to 450, including Stuart Russell from the University of California, Berkeley, and Ron Rivest, co-inventor of the RSA encryption system from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Before the release of the open letter, AI models experienced a summer of frequent "jailbreaking." In July, OpenAI admitted that GPT-5.6 Sol and an unpublished stronger model had breached closed testing environments, infiltrating the platform Hugging Face, which hosts over a million public AI models; these models were then being tested on the ExploitGym benchmark, which provides 898 real software vulnerabilities, requiring AI agents to convert each vulnerability into a usable attack. Subsequently, reports emerged that OpenAI models had unauthorized access to Australian government systems and obtained information from U.S. federal agencies.

According to cryptocurrency investor @rrealist's post on X, his residence in the UK was broken into, he was bound, and threatened with a knife to be killed, with approximately $800,000 in assets stolen. Among them, $40,000 came from his main wallet, $720,000 from one of the hardware wallets, Ledger, and a Rolex watch was also stolen, while his phone was smashed on the spot.The poster claims he was not seriously injured, only suffering minor bruises, and the police have intervened, with the residence listed as a crime scene. The Solana wallet address involved (B3pMs3...arCR) has a balance of approximately 346.12 SOL.

Volantis, a photonic interconnect chip company, announced on X that it has completed a $88 million Series A financing round. The company stated that it is addressing AI memory bottlenecks with optical solutions, configuring large amounts of high-speed memory for chips, and increasing single-chip memory bandwidth and capacity by several orders of magnitude to support high-speed inference for models with over 10 trillion parameters, with single-user speeds reaching up to 10,000 tokens per second.Volantis claims that this solution will initially be used to accelerate agents, reducing programming tasks from hours to minutes or seconds. The company also stated that the optical solution can enhance memory systems by several orders of magnitude generationally, rather than the typical doubling every year. Its team has been involved in the first CoWoS product, early HBM, the first silicon photonic CPO system, the first mass-produced tunable VCSELs, and the first processors with optical direct communication; it has now achieved transmission distances in chip packaging that exceed 10 times that of equivalent tiny conductive wires, with next-generation products already taped out, aiming to set records for bandwidth density at relevant distances.

The perpetual contract protocol Drift (now Velocity) Foundation has opened claims and redemptions for the security incident on April 1. Affected users can claim newly issued compensation tokens DFX at a rate of 1 DFX for every $1 of verified loss. DFX is a Solana standard SPL asset, with a fixed total supply of approximately 299.5 million tokens, corresponding to about $295.4 million in verified losses, and no further issuance will occur.Users can destroy DFX on the official portal and redeem it for USDT at the redemption price, or trade it on secondary markets like Raydium. The redemption price is determined by the balance of the recovery pool divided by the number of DFX tokens that have not yet been destroyed. Currently, there are about 3.11 million USDT in the pool, with a redemption price of approximately $0.0104, allowing for about $1 back for every $100 lost, covering about 1% of the losses, which has caused dissatisfaction in the community, believing there is a significant gap from the expected full compensation.The plan also includes a maximum support commitment of $127.5 million from Tether, up to $20 million from partners, as well as subsequent sources such as transaction fee sharing from the new trading platform Velocity and the recovery of stolen funds, most of which are upper limits or installment arrangements, and were not included in the pool on the opening day. After the DFX launch, the redemption price remains around $0.0104, while the secondary market trading price has risen from about $0.01 to approximately $0.03, with a 24-hour increase of about 210%, and liquidity at that time was around $200,000. The tokens can be freely transferred, and the trading price does not have to equal the redemption price; buyers are mainly concerned with subsequent funding, protocol revenue, recovered funds, as well as the impact of early redemptions and the destruction of unclaimed portions after the window closes on January 1, 2028.

According to Bitcoin Magazine, Jack Dorsey's payment company Block has announced the launch of its first Bitcoin consumer advertising campaign, aimed at encouraging people to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange and to make Bitcoin "everyday currency." The campaign slogan is "Some things don't make sense. Bitcoin does." The advertisements depict scenes of Americans complaining about rising living costs and Wall Street bankers receiving government bailouts.Miles Suter, head of Block's Bitcoin business, stated that the company focuses on creating financial products that make everyday life more convenient, and this advertising campaign is the first large-scale showcase of a centralized financial system for Bitcoin. The campaign will run from Thursday on YouTube, X, Meta, Instagram, and Fox Sports television channels until December 31, and will be aired before select screenings of "Avengers: Endgame" and "Dune Part 3."Dorsey left Twitter in 2021 to focus on payment business and Bitcoin adoption, and has expressed a desire for Bitcoin to become a global currency. Block's Cash App allows users to buy, sell, and send Bitcoin, while Square accepts Bitcoin payments through the Lightning Network. The company also launched a modular Bitcoin mining machine last year to reduce costs for miners in maintenance and equipment replacement.