In 2014 I went nearly a week without sleep. I was running PayPal and attackers were inside our corporate network. They'd compromised an eBay employee's laptop, got onto the VPN, taken over a domain controller and made themselves domain admins. eBay and PayPal were one company then, on one Windows network. They stole 145M eBay user records, then came for the segregated vault holding PayPal's card credentials. We fought them off. They never got in, but they got close. Too close. Yesterday Binance lost ~$6.3B in what looks like the same way. A DevOps engineer's laptop, then a service inside the withdrawal stack, then withdrawals the signer approved because they came from a trusted source. Hot wallets emptied in under four hours. No key was stolen. Nobody broke cryptography or a ledger. They found someone with access and used the trust that came with it. Banks get hit exactly the same way. 2016: attackers inside Bangladesh Bank used its own SWIFT access to send $951M of payment orders to the NY Fed. $81M was lost. The rest was held because an unrelated sanctions filter tripped on the word "Jupiter". That was luck, and it only worked because wires took days to settle. June 2025: an IT employee at C&M Software, which connects Brazilian banks to Pix, sold his credentials for about $2,700. Attackers used them to send fake Pix transfers out of six institutions' reserve accounts at the central bank. ~$140M in under three hours. August 2025: stolen vendor credentials at Sinqia, another Pix connector. ~R$710M out of HSBC and one other institution in a single afternoon. The central bank froze most of it, after it had already moved. Same attack every time. Speed is what changed. When settlement took days, a filter, a correspondent bank or someone in ops could catch a bad payment. Pix, FedNow, SEPA Instant and blockchains settle in seconds. Payment security was mostly built for the slow world. PayPal's card and user data survived 2014 because domain admin on the corp network couldn't unlock it quickly enough, and our alerting caught the unusual activity on the network. That's the model. Approval policy no laptop or vendor login can reach. Velocity and anomaly limits enforced outside the system that sends. Dynamic caps on what any one wallet, account or service can move per hour. All of it in real time. About $3B of what left Binance has been frozen, almost all of it stablecoins. The $1.4B in bitcoin is sitting in 19 wallets and nobody can touch it. I don't think that's the problem. For decades the ability to reverse a wire or a card charge let a lot of weak security slide. You either stop the transfer before it's signed or you eat the loss. Nothing about the technology failed here. The chains processed exactly the transactions they were handed. Binance's own systems handed them the wrong ones because an engineer's laptop was compromised. That's operational security. eBay in 2014, Bangladesh Bank and two Pix connectors all failed at it on their own rails. In 2014 the attackers never reached the vault. If they had, the fraud losses would have been the small part. PayPal existed so people could pay without handing their card details to every merchant on the internet. We held those details so they didn't have to. Losing them would have broken the one thing the company was built on, and I'm not sure we would have recovered. I expect blockchains and digital assets to become the standard way money moves. Every custodian of digital assets, or of fiat on a real-time rail, is in that position now. The controls have to adapt to settlement in seconds, crypto or not.

The best evidence to show Crypto is positively differentiating itself this cycle: - Bitmine's pfd perpetual $BMNP up 24% since launch June 2026 - US long-term bonds $TLT -8% - US investment grade $LQD -6% - US high-yield $HYG -3% Crypto credit outperforming fixed income = bullish $BMNR $ETH

$ORCL surged after announcing a roadmap requiring far less external capital (debt and equity) - @Oracle stock rose 11% - Bitmine less than 40,000 $ETH away from 5% See the analogy 👀 Ethereum is the place for onchain finance

Eightco Holdings $ORBS Announces Strategic Monetization to Demonstrate Portfolio Gains and Support Accelerated Buybacks - On Oct 26, Eightco monetized a small portion of its @OpenAI investment at a price per share roughly 40% above its initial purchase price - The Board intends to use the sale proceeds for additional share repurchases - Repurchased more than 55M shares under its $125M share repurchase program - Since August, repurchased 12.98% of shares outstanding Treasury as of Oct 28th, totaling ~$399M: • Nearly 302M $WLD • 16,278 $ETH • $76M @OpenAI equity (indirect) • $18M @Beast Industries equity • $132M cash and equivalents

🚨 BREAKING: Hackers are hitting banks in 7 countries at the same time. This is what Covid looked like in week 1. A few countries. Small numbers. Nobody called it a crisis. 1/ South Korea: hackers used a Chinese AI tool to break into at least 7 financial firms. 68,000 people's data stolen. 16 firms breached by mid-October. This week Daishin Securities reported 38,490 customers' data leaked, bank account numbers included. 2/ Latin America: one gang ran AI agents built on Claude, Grok and Kimi against 400+ targets, banks and payment firms included. They stole passwords and got into customer bank accounts. 3/ Italy: a fake WhatsApp from "the CEO" and an AI-cloned voice got Intesa Sanpaolo's private bank to send out €95 million. €36 million is still MISSING, turned into crypto. 4/ India: small lenders lost ₹300 crore (about $31 million) in 2 months. 150 cases. Hackers copied bank logins and sent the money out as fake loans. One firm was hit twice. 5/ Crypto: $351 million drained from Bitget's hot wallets. North Korean hackers are suspected. 6/ Japan: hackers hit GMO Internet's currency trading service and demanded $50 million in crypto. The prime minister promised an emergency anti-cyberattack package. 7/ Australia: the regulator warns AI attacks put more than A$4.5 trillion in retirement savings in the firing line. Government cyber alerts jumped 80% in a year. Now zoom out. AI hacking tools are now easy to get. Smaller firms have weak security. The money moves in minutes. It jumps across banks, through rented accounts, out as cash or crypto. The bosses are often abroad. Covid locked the streets. Nobody is calling this a crisis yet. But the central banks already plan for the day the hackers get in. The G7 agreed to run drills that simulate AI attacks on banks. The ECB reportedly gave eurozone banks 4 months to hand in their defence plans. If your savings sit in a bank, hit follow. I'm tracking where the hackers strike next and how much they take.

The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady today, and we think patience is the right approach. Inflation remains high, but the question isn't simply whether rates should go higher. It's whether higher rates would actually address the inflation that remains. The challenge is that parts of the economy, and of inflation itself, are moving at very different speeds. Growth remains remarkably resilient in aggregate, supported by a powerful investment cycle, but beneath the surface, parts of the economy that are more sensitive to borrowing costs are feeling considerably more restraint. We see a similar divergence in inflation. Many of the cyclical components that respond to higher interest rates appear relatively well controlled. Meanwhile, persistent pressures across energy, insurance, healthcare and education are unlikely to be meaningfully affected by another 25-basis-point rate increase. In some ways, the Fed is operating a house with one thermostat, but very different temperatures in every room. Turning it down further may make the rooms that are already cool even colder, without doing much to cool those that remain hot. That doesn't mean the Fed should become complacent. Inflation is still above its 2% objective and the Fed should retain the option to tighten further if the underlying inflation trend deteriorates. But hawkish rhetoric and patient policy can comfortably coexist, particularly when the bond market has already done some tightening of its own through higher Treasury yields. For investors, we think this environment argues for humility rather than making a heroic directional call on rates. Real yields remain attractive, and there's considerable income available across high-quality fixed income markets. We continue to favor a moderate duration posture, taking advantage of today's income opportunities while remaining patient as this unusually divergent economy evolves. The Fed doesn't need to ignore the heat. It just needs to be thoughtful about where it's coming from.