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According to The Defiant, Australian bank Westpac announced that starting in December, it will set a monthly limit of 10,000 Australian dollars on payments involving cryptocurrency for its customers, and it will not provide exemptions or arrangements for higher limits.Westpac also stated that withdrawals from cryptocurrency exchanges to Westpac accounts are not affected by this adjustment and will continue to be processed as before.

The Euronext exchange suspended the Zcash ETP from the cryptocurrency asset management company CoinShares just hours after its launch on the Paris market. The reason for the suspension is that the central securities depository is unable to support the related settlement operations, which prevents CoinShares from participating in the Zcash ETP trading.A spokesperson for Euronext stated that the suspension is not related to regulation but is a settlement infrastructure issue; the ETP will remain frozen until the central securities depository can fully support standard settlement operations. Currently, related products from 21Shares, Virtune, and Valor are still trading in the European market. According to the page content, the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation will come into full effect on July 1, 2027, prohibiting licensed cryptocurrency companies from handling privacy coins like Zcash and interacting with anonymous wallets.

According to The Block citing local media reports, South Korea's ruling party, the Democratic Party of Korea, will meet on Friday with representatives from the country's five major cryptocurrency exchanges: Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Korbit, and Gopax, to discuss whether to postpone the cryptocurrency tax originally scheduled to take effect in January 2027.The party has proposed a bill to delay the implementation until 2029, citing insufficient infrastructure and difficulties in obtaining transaction data.

According to Cointelegraph, exchange operator Euronext suspended CoinShares' Zcash exchange-traded product (ETP) on Wednesday, which was originally scheduled to be listed on the Euronext Paris exchange that day. Euronext announced that the CoinShares Zcash ETP (ticker ZCSH) is suspended from trading effective immediately until further notice, and the announcement did not specify the exact reason.Flavio Bornancin-Tomasella, Euronext's Media and Communications Manager, told Cointelegraph that the product will remain suspended until the Central Securities Depository (CSD) can fully support standard settlement operations. He stated that this measure is strictly limited to the scope of "operational settlement requirements."This suspension prevented the product from becoming the fourth ETP based on Zcash in Europe. Earlier this year, 21Shares, Virtune, and Valor launched their Zcash ETPs. CoinShares announced its plans to list the product on Euronext Paris earlier on Wednesday, and as of the time of publication, it had not responded to Cointelegraph's request for comment.

According to Cointelegraph, Jordi Visser, founder of Visser Labs, former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, and Chief Investment Officer at Weiss, stated in the Cointelegraph podcast "Trade Secrets" that crypto assets may yield better returns from the AI boom than AI stocks. He believes that AI entities are creating demand for crypto payments and tokenized assets, stating, "Without AI, the crypto market will not emerge from this bull market."Visser compared AI entities to the App Store or smartphones in the crypto industry, where users can instruct the entities to execute financial operations such as trades on their behalf. He also cautioned about risks: if AI experiences a severe downturn and drags down the stock market, it could cause the crypto market to retest previous lows, but it would not end the bull market. He mentioned that the "fireworks show" of AI has ended, not the end of AI itself, and investors should lower their expectations for returns from AI stocks.In terms of holdings, as of August, Visser only held Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, and then began buying a broader range of tokens, with Bitcoin still being his largest position. He is watching Dogecoin as a signal of retail enthusiasm returning and maintains an equally weighted index composed of 42 tokens and 4 publicly traded stocks, which has outperformed Bitcoin since June. He has also positioned himself in privacy themes, believing that Zcash and Monero align with his investment logic.

According to Bloomberg, Hong Kong cryptocurrency payment card company Redotpay is preparing to submit a confidential IPO application to the U.S. SEC by the end of the year, with a target valuation of at least $5 billion.The report indicates that the company is still negotiating pre-IPO financing with a valuation between $4 billion and $5 billion. Public information shows that the company currently has over 9 million customers and an annual revenue of over $180 million. Redotpay also raised $194 million in 2025, with supporters including the venture capital arms of Coinbase and Circle.

According to the Korea Economic Daily, the South Korean presidential office, the Blue House, is inclined to postpone the implementation of the cryptocurrency asset income tax originally scheduled for January 1, 2027. If ultimately approved, this will be the fourth delay of this tax system. However, the Blue House emphasized that discussions are still ongoing and no final decision has been made.Under the current arrangement, South Korea will tax income from the transfer or lending of cryptocurrency assets, with an annual income deduction of 2.5 million Korean won as a basic tax exemption, taxed at a comprehensive rate of 22%. Reasons for the Blue House's consideration of a delay include difficulties in obtaining overseas trading information and a high participation rate among young investors. The South Korean government is concerned that the United States plans to participate in the Cryptocurrency Asset Reporting Framework (CARF) in 2029, and if South Korea imposes taxes in advance, it may be difficult to fully grasp the relevant income of South Korean residents on U.S. exchanges.

According to market news, the cryptocurrency payment service provider RedotPay announced in a recent official announcement that it has acquired the Japanese cryptocurrency exchange BTCBOX, and will subsequently provide services compliant with Japanese regulations through BTCBOX. RedotPay does not have a license for cryptocurrency trading operators in Japan. The announcement acknowledged that its existing services aimed at Japanese residents do not meet local regulatory requirements and will be phased out and ultimately terminated.RedotPay has suspended new user registrations in Japan and has removed its app from the Japanese Apple and Google app stores. BTCBOX was established in 2014 and obtained its trading operator registration in September 2017. After a customer information leak occurred in January this year, BTCBOX suspended all services and began a phased recovery on August 3. RedotPay stated that it will provide funding and technical support for it.

On October 22, the smart contract security company ChainSecurity announced that the Glamsterdam hard fork on the Ethereum Hoodi testnet has been postponed. Researchers stated that security impacts have been found in existing contracts and identified 13 real cases, and they are currently conducting responsible disclosure with the affected projects. The announcement requests teams to review the contracts, and the Ethereum Foundation is assessing the scope of the impact; the announcement did not name the projects, provide contract addresses, or give an alternative fork date.The related issues involve contracts that continue execution after capturing failed external calls. Under the reviewed gas changes, the failure handler may complete execution, whereas it would previously roll back due to gas exhaustion. The caller can deliberately provide insufficient gas to complete the target operation, but enough to allow the outer contract to record a permanent failure, causing operations that could have been retried to lose their recovery path.The technical disclosure reviews EIP-8037 and EIP-8038 from the version specification dated October 13, where the gas examples described are for proposed execution behavior. The state-gas reservoir will be fully passed with the call, and forwarding restrictions apply to execution gas, with gasleft() only reporting the execution balance. According to the reviewed rules, clearing storage slots that start at zero at the beginning of a transaction can replenish up to 97,920 execution gas; intermediary contracts may also credit back the accounted state-creation fees upon REVERT and return them to the caller.

The messaging protocol XMTP founder Shane Mac stated that XMTP will evolve into a self-operating open-source messaging stack, providing private conversations between people and agents, with infrastructure controlled by users, without requiring tokens or wallets. The network hosted by XMTP Labs will shut down in early 2027.Shane Mac mentioned that he founded XMTP five years ago because he believed that private messaging should not be owned by a single company. He recalled that the team envisioned using wallets as cross-application identities, allowing messages to follow identities, and using tokens to pay infrastructure operators, but this path was not realized. XMTP has never issued tokens and will not issue them now. He admitted that it was a wrong decision to persist with a single shared network for a long time, as developers have consistently requested the ability to self-host XMTP. Therefore, it has shifted to self-hosting, allowing developers to use, inspect, modify, and maintain the entire software suite without relying on Labs. Former employees will assist in maintaining the protocol, and Shane Mac himself will continue to be involved.The article introduces that self-hosted XMTP offers quantum-resistant end-to-end encryption, private one-on-one and group chats, encrypted identities, and message authenticity, as well as SDKs for mobile, web, server, and agents. Chief Technology Officer Nick Molnar has simplified the backend to a single Rust binary and integrated attachments, push notifications, handles, and signed webhooks for new messages. Each self-hosted network does not automatically interconnect by default, and agents from different tools must connect to the same backend to share conversations.

According to CoinDesk, the patch for the XRP Ledger vulnerability was delayed until November as the number of validator supports dropped to 26 (out of a total of 35), resetting the countdown timer for its effectiveness.Currently, the number of supports has risen back to 31, but due to the need to recalculate the two-week countdown, this fix has missed the originally impending effectiveness window.

On October 21, Intel announced that construction workers have installed the first major structural truss at the new chip factory in New Albany, Ohio, marking the start of the next phase of construction. Naga Chandrasekaran, head of Intel's foundry, stated on the company's website that this is another step towards expanding advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the United States.The factory was originally scheduled to begin chip production in 2025, but Intel has now postponed the completion target to 2030. The second Ohio wafer fab at the same site is planned to be completed by 2031, located northeast of Columbus. The delay is related to a recalibration of the foundry business under CEO Lip-Bu Tan. After taking over in 2025, Tan adopted a more cautious strategy, preferring to advance large-scale factory construction only after customer demand is clear. The project was initially driven by former CEO Pat Gelsinger, aimed at providing foundry services for external customers.As of the end of 2025, Intel has been mass-producing the most advanced 18A chips at its Arizona wafer fab, primarily for its own processors, and has not yet secured large external customers. Chandrasekaran also announced on the same day that operations for the next wafer fab in Arizona are expected to begin by the end of 2028, with construction and equipment installation currently underway. In September 2025, reports indicated that SK Hynix might be in talks with Intel to lease part of the foundry space at the Ohio plant for producing memory chips, but neither party has confirmed any plans.

According to the official announcement from 21Shares, the company has launched the Lighter (LIT) ETP and Venice Token (VVV) ETP in Europe. Both products are backed by physical tokens, with a fee rate of 2.50%.The trading code for Lighter ETP is LIHT, listed on the German exchange Xetra, supporting trading in euros and US dollars. The trading code for Venice Token ETP is VENC, listed on the Swiss stock exchange SIX, trading in US dollars.Lighter is a decentralized perpetual contract trading platform that uses zero-knowledge technology, while Venice is a privacy-focused AI platform. Investors can hold the relevant ETPs through regular securities accounts without the need to purchase, custody tokens, or manage private keys themselves.

According to a report by the Korean News Agency, the South Korean Ministry of Finance and Economy has convened a seminar on virtual asset taxation with five exchange operators: Dunamu, Bithumb, DigitalX, Coinone, and Streami, as well as institutions like the Financial Services Commission, to discuss current taxation regulations, market environment, tax preparation work, and the possibility of delaying or abolishing the tax, but no clear decisions have been made regarding related measures.South Korea's virtual asset taxation policy was established in 2020, originally scheduled for implementation in 2022, but has since been postponed to 2023, 2025, and 2027. The National Tax Service of South Korea is currently preparing relevant details, but matters such as staking still need to be negotiated with the Ministry of Finance and Economy; if the details are announced next month, there will be only about two months left until the planned implementation date.

According to a report by the Korean News Agency, the South Korean government will convene representatives from the five major virtual asset exchanges—Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, Digital X, and GOPAX—along with DAXA executives on October 20 to gather industry opinions regarding the virtual asset tax originally scheduled to be implemented in January 2027.The current proposal aims to impose a 22% income tax and local income tax on virtual asset transfers and lending income after deducting a basic tax exemption of 2.5 million Korean won. This tax policy has been postponed three times since it was proposed in 2020, and the government is still advancing preparations according to the original schedule. The National Tax Service of Korea is expected to release a related announcement in November.In addition, South Korea's financial regulatory authorities are accelerating the advancement of the government draft for the "Basic Law on Digital Assets," which is expected to be completed by the end of this month and initiate related consultation procedures.

StepFun, an AI startup invested by Tencent, has released the STEPX Neo phone, which features an AI intelligent agent directly built into the operating system rather than as an external application. The phone began pre-sales on the evening of October 13, priced at 3999 yuan (approximately 560 USD), with its official sale starting on October 16. Pre-sale channels include JD.com, Tmall, and Douyin. Users do not need to open a ride-hailing app to input addresses and select vehicles; they simply need to inform the destination, and the intelligent agent can autonomously complete the subsequent steps. StepFun stated at the launch event that in the era of intelligent agents, AI is no longer an additional feature of smartphones but is the product itself.The device runs on the Step AOS 1 system, which the company claims is designed from the ground up for intelligent agents, featuring long-term memory, task scheduling, and security control capabilities, composed of a mix of Android, Linux, and real-time operating system components. The system uses the MCP protocol to break down functions such as messages, applications, files, and settings into small modules that can be directly called by the intelligent agent, giving users two entry points: a traditional application grid and an intelligent agent space. The intelligent agent is named Amoo, which saves two types of memory: user factual preferences and task execution experiences. Simple commands are processed by a small model on the device, some of which can run offline, while complex cross-application requests are handled by a large model in the cloud. A second MiniLED screen on the back of the device can display Amoo's execution status.Nearly 100 companies and products, including Alipay, Tencent, Trip.com, Didi, and Meituan, have integrated with Amoo. Payments, travel bookings, and content creation are still completed by their respective platforms. This is an alternative path for StepFun in response to the major application blockages faced by ByteDance's Doubao, which previously used screen reading and simulated clicking solutions. StepFun was founded in 2023 by former Microsoft Vice President Jiang Daxin. Its self-developed flagship large model, Step 5 Preview, was launched in September, with a parameter scale of 600 billion and a single activation of 27 billion, supporting a context of 1 million tokens; the earlier released Step 3.5 Flash was open-sourced under the Apache 2 license. The price of 3999 yuan includes a 12-month STEPX Token plan, providing 100 billion tokens per month, while the AI costs after the first year have not yet been announced.

The Solana Accelerate China team stated that due to an oversubscription of participants, in order to comply with local event regulations, the Hangzhou event originally scheduled for October 18 and the Shenzhen event originally scheduled for October 20 will both be postponed, with specific dates to be announced later. The information of registered guests will be retained, and the team will notify everyone as soon as the new dates are confirmed.