Weekly Crypto News Recap: Crypto Rules, JPM Coin, Solana Upgrade & Bitcoin ETFs

This weekly digest covers the past seven days through October 26. Washington issued the first final rule under its stablecoin law, and a shareholder lawsuit put the president’s crypto business before a federal court. Banks pushed further onchain as JPMorgan took its deposit token to Ethereum and Standard Chartered agreed to buy a crypto custodian. Keep reading for the stories that still matter after the headlines fade.

OCC Issues First Final Rule Under the GENIUS Act

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finalized rules on October 21 for payment stablecoin issuance and related custody under the GENIUS Act. Issuers must keep reserves at least equal to outstanding stablecoins and generally process redemptions within two business days. The rule covers national banks, federal savings associations, federal branches and their subsidiaries, nonbank firms that seek federal qualified issuer status, and state-qualified issuers when the OCC has authority over them. The final rule and the Act take effect on January 18, 2027.

Anti-money-laundering and sanctions requirements will follow in a separate rulemaking with the Treasury, and applications are not open yet. Rules from the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the NCUA and FinCEN remain mostly at the proposal stage. A later deadline is unchanged: from July 18, 2028, platforms may not offer US customers a payment stablecoin unless a permitted issuer issued it.

The final text dropped a proposed presumption that certain issuer arrangements with third parties paying stablecoin rewards were unlawful. The American Bankers Association objected that issuers can now offer “economically equivalent yield” through affiliates and exchanges while technically avoiding the statutory ban, while the Blockchain Association said the change brings the rule closer to the statutory text.

JPMorgan Takes JPM Coin to Ethereum Mainnet

J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys unit brought JPM Coin (JPMD), its US dollar deposit token, to Ethereum mainnet on October 19. The expansion follows the token’s launch on Base in November 2025 and gives institutional clients a second public blockchain for moving tokenized deposits around the clock.

Access remains limited to approved institutional participants, who can make peer-to-peer transfers across Ethereum and Base. The bank describes JPMD as an onchain liquidity layer for dollar deposits rather than a retail product. Kinexys says it has processed more than $4 trillion in cumulative transactions and averages about $7 billion in daily volume.

Standard Chartered Signs Deal to Acquire Zodia Custody

Standard Chartered signed definitive agreements on October 21 to buy 100% of Zodia Custody UK Limited, the parent of regulated custody entities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, the UAE and Luxembourg. Financial terms were not disclosed, and the deal still requires regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. The agreements come five months after Zodia’s shareholders and noteholders accepted the bank’s non-binding offer.

After completion, Zodia’s custody business will move into the bank’s Securities Services division. Its software and professional services arm will become a separate company, Zodia Solutions, under SC Ventures, backed by investors including Northern Trust, NAB Ventures, SBI Ventures and Emirates NBD.

Circle Shareholder Sues Trump Over UAE-Linked Crypto Deals

Circle shareholder and former employee J. Benjamin Greenberg filed a federal lawsuit in Washington on October 22, alleging that President Donald Trump and World Liberty Financial profited from illegal foreign emoluments. The suit names Trump, World Liberty, Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and related companies as defendants and was filed derivatively on Circle’s behalf, although Circle said it did not initiate or authorize it.

The complaint targets two deals linked to UAE national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan: a $500 million purchase of a 49% stake in World Liberty agreed days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, and MGX’s $2 billion investment in Binance settled in World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin. Greenberg seeks a declaration that the profits violate the Constitution, disclosure of other foreign crypto benefits and the return of any illegal gains. The White House called the case frivolous. The allegations have not been tested in court.

Germany’s Sparkassen Begin Rolling Out Crypto Trading

DekaBank began offering crypto trading to Sparkassen customers on October 19 through the Sparkasse banking app, bringing Bitcoin, Ether, XRP and Solana to clients of Germany’s savings bank network. The rollout is gradual, and each savings bank decides whether to activate the service.

Orders cost €0.99 plus a spread, and Deka holds the assets in pooled custody, so customers do not control private keys and withdrawals are restricted. More than 230 banks in the group have reportedly expressed interest. The network serves around 50 million customers and holds roughly a third of German retail deposits.

Solana Switches On Alpenglow, Cutting Finality Toward 150 Milliseconds

Solana validators activated the Alpenglow consensus upgrade on October 21 at the start of epoch 1064, retiring the TowerBFT voting system used since the network’s launch. Core developer Anza targets transaction finality of about 150 milliseconds, down from roughly 12.8 seconds.

The first phase, Votor, moves validator votes off-chain and bundles them into certificates that finalize blocks. Headline transaction counts will fall because votes no longer count as ordinary on-chain transactions, even if user activity is unchanged. Rotor, a later block-distribution redesign, has no release date. Early dashboard readings still showed finality measured in seconds rather than a sustained 150-millisecond average.

Switzerland Approves Its First Spot Bitcoin ETF

Swiss regulator FINMA on October 20 approved the country’s first retail ETF that invests directly in bitcoin. The Bitcoin Fund ETF (BBIT), managed by BIT Asset Management, is expected to start trading on SIX Swiss Exchange in November.

FINMA classified the fund as an “other fund for alternative investments” with particular risk and granted an exemption from diversification rules. Retail access remains subject to custody and operational-risk safeguards, clear risk disclosures and point-of-sale conduct rules under Switzerland’s Financial Services Act. No precise trading start date was set.

BlackRock Files for Downside-Protected Bitcoin ETF as Flows Swing

BlackRock filed with the SEC on October 19 for the iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF, expected to trade as PBIT. The proposed fund would seek upside exposure to the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) while using overlapping options tranches to cap gains and provide a defined level of downside protection. No launch date has been set, and the filing warns investors can still lose their entire investment.

The same day, IBIT recorded $665.16 million in net inflows, its largest single-day intake since October 7, 2025. Demand reversed within days: US spot bitcoin ETFs posted $635.5 million in net outflows on October 22, the largest daily withdrawal since June 25, as bitcoin fell to around $81,200. Spot ether ETFs lost $110.5 million the same day.

France Backs Proposal to Tax Crypto-to-Stablecoin Swaps

France’s National Assembly backed amendment I-3898 by 38 votes to 37, a measure that would tax gains on crypto-to-regulated-stablecoin swaps at the existing 31.4% flat rate from January 1, 2027. The change would end tax deferral that currently applies to many crypto-to-crypto exchanges when the destination asset is a MiCA electronic-money token.

The proposal remains part of an unfinished budget process rather than final law. Proponents cited about €1.5 billion in potential revenue, a political estimate that depends on investor behaviour. France’s public-accounts minister questioned whether stablecoins were sufficiently defined for enforcement.

Bitcoin Core Speeds Up Fixes for Bugs AI Can Find

Bitcoin Core maintainers merged a change to the project’s security policy on October 22 that ends long embargoes for vulnerabilities classed as easily discoverable, meaning flaws that can be found with minimal effort such as a simple prompt to a language model. Fixes for such bugs will ship in point releases for every maintained major version as soon as possible, together with a security advisory.

Other flaws keep the severity-based schedule, under which medium and high-severity bugs can stay hidden until about a year after a fix ships. Developer Antoine Poinsot, who wrote the change, said the old embargo was “the wrong tradeoff” for easy findings. The shift follows a summer in which a volunteer group used AI models to log 4,962 findings across 390 bitcoin projects, 85 of them critical.

Kalshi Faces State Lawsuit Over Sports Event Contracts

Utah Attorney General Derek Brown sued Kalshi in state court on October 20, alleging that its sports event contracts amount to illegal gambling. The complaint cites about 55,800 Utah accounts and more than 5 million wagers by February 2026 and seeks injunctions, restitution and damages. Utah estimates Kalshi collected between $30.6 million and $61.2 million in fees from accounts in the state. A federal judge ruled in August that federal commodities law does not override Utah’s gambling ban; Kalshi is appealing.

In Missouri, Novig and Crypto.com-linked North American Derivatives Exchange filed federal lawsuits on October 16 to block state enforcement after Attorney General Catherine Hanaway’s 30-day cease-and-desist deadline expired.

CFTC Challenges CME’s Standing in Crypto Perpetuals Lawsuit

The CFTC is asking a court to reject CME Group’s challenge to its approval of Kalshi’s bitcoin perpetual contract, arguing that CME has not shown any actual or imminent harm. CME contends the agency lacked authority to allow the products, which it says should be treated as swaps.

The regulator cites CME’s own Q2 2026 earnings remarks that its crypto futures volume grew more than sevenfold in three years and that it had not heard client demand for perpetuals. According to CME’s complaint, Kalshi has since self-certified more than a dozen further crypto perpetuals that generated over $1 billion in trades. The outcome will shape whether perpetual futures can trade on US-regulated venues.

Tether Disputes Senate Findings on Iran-Linked USDT Activity

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said on October 19 that the company’s actions had cut Iran-linked stablecoin volumes by 94%, pushing back against a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report. The subcommittee found that 84% of 846 wallets sanctioned or targeted for seizure over Iranian links transacted almost entirely in USDT.

The report accused Tether of failing to consistently freeze illicit wallets before 2024 and urged the Treasury and Justice departments to examine its sanctions compliance. Tether says it froze addresses an average of four weeks before designations by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control and Israel’s counter-terror financing bureau and helped freeze about $550 million in Iran-linked USDT this year.

Fearless Wallet Extension Leaked Private Keys, Polkadot Foundation Warns

The Polkadot Community Foundation warned on October 21 that four versions of the Fearless Wallet browser extension sent users’ private keys to an attacker-controlled server whenever the wallet was unlocked. The code entered the extension’s public source on February 19, 2025, inside a large update labelled “TON ecosystem,” and was active at different times until October 10, 2026.

Anyone who used versions 3.0.1, 3.0.3, 3.0.4 or 3.0.5 since February 2025 should treat every account in it as compromised, create a new key in another wallet and move funds. Eight users have reported unauthorized transfers totalling 17,286 DOT. The reviewed mobile apps do not contain the code, and the foundation stressed that Fearless is a third-party wallet, not an official Polkadot product.

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