OVERVIEW

Crypto Got Leeroy Jenkins-ed 🏃‍♂️

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

Source: finviz

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

Source: TradingView

NEWS
It’s The News We Didn’t Expect, But It’s The News We Needed When We Needed It That Time When It Was Needed 👍️ 

Steak ‘n Shake has gone degen. 🍔

Five months ago today, Steak ‘n Shake began accepting Bitcoin payments. In celebration we are launching the Bitcoin Steakburger! Hurry to any Steak n Shake and enjoy them while they last. Supplies are limited….just like Bitcoin. 🍔🚀

The support we have received from the

— Steak ‘n Shake (@SteaknShake)
1:00 PM • Oct 16, 2025

BEHOLD 🪄 

Source: The Internet

PRESENTED BY CRYPTOTWITS
While You Were Doomscrolling 📱

Expect to see more of this, which is basically me doing the News In Three Sentences. 3️⃣

I’m sorry I don’t have those luscious locks of hair like Kevin. His video update is later on in the newsletter. 🗞️ 

TECHNICAL ANALYSIS
More Liquidation Situation 🫠

Things actually looked not to bad for crypto going into the morning. Of course, that wouldn’t last. Total Market Cap 5-minute chart tells the story 📕 :

Total Market Cap 5-Minute Chart – Click to enlarge.

And the result of the drop over that 2-hour period resulted in some big liquidations. Not Sucktober 10th big, but still, big 😱 :

CoinGlass Liquidation Stats At 1400 EST

And just because I’m a realistic pessimist, this is what the Total Market Cap Daily Chart is looking like right now 👀 :

Total Market Cap Daily Chart – Click to enlarge.

Aaaaand it’s ugly af. 🧌 

From an Ichimoku perspective, one of the most sought after short setups, the Ideal Bearish Ichimoku Breakout, was confirmed on yesterday’s close.

Today is on track to close at it’s lowest level in two-months. And if things accelerate to the downside with the Total Market Cap closing below $3.58T, then it will be the lowest daily close in three months. 😐️ 

Bulls looking for some relief or an answer to ‘when’ the downside moves might end can look at those blue circles. Those circles point to when Kumo Twists occur, they’re often turning points for instruments that are trending strongly into them.

Or, if the market is choppy, it’s when a directional move out of the chop begins. The first one is between October 19 and October 20, the second is between October 28 and October 29.

One other ‘good’ thing for bulls: the Cloud is very, very thin. That means it’s easy for price to move above and stay above the Cloud… if it can move up to get there. 🤔 

PRESENTED BY STOCKTWITS
Stonkmarket Update: Semi’s Mixed 🥣

This guy. Look at that Clark Kent hair. 💈 

He’s just flaunting it around like it’s no big deal. 🥇 

STABLECOINS
I Wonder What Was Backing That 🤔

When stablecoins like USDC are minted, there’s one USD that gets parked for everyone one USDC. That’s how it works. You have a dollar, then you can mint a USDC.

Shortly before 1700 PM EST yesterday, Paxos (the folks who mint/control PayPal’s $PYUSD.X ( ▲ 0.07% )) sent this out:

At 3:12 PM EST, Paxos mistakenly minted excess PYUSD as part of an internal transfer. Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the excess PYUSD.

This was an internal technical error. There is no security breach. Customer funds are safe. We have addressed the root

— Paxos (@Paxos)
8:53 PM • Oct 15, 2025

What they didn’t include in their post was exactly how much ‘excess’ PYUSD was minted.

$300T. $300 Trillion. $300,000,000,000,000.

Which is roughly the value of the entire world’s real estate – but what has people confused and angry is that PYUSD, like any stablecoin, is a collateralized asset. Paxos basically showed everyone they can mint a collateralized asset without the collateral.

And everyone knows the rules about printing things out of thin air: only two entities are allowed to do that kind of thing: The US Treasury and the Federal Reserve. And neither of those two was looking for another lover to be introduced to their magical fiat moonies relationship. 🫂 

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

🏥 The NHS Halted Its AI Project – Here’s Why Decentralized AI Might Save It

Britain’s NHS paused “Foresight,” an AI model trained on 57M patients, over privacy fears. Centralized AI sends sensitive hospital data to giant clouds-ripe for breaches. FLoCK’s Federated Learning fixes that by training AI where the data lives, meaning hospitals keep control and hackers get nothing. Flock.io.

🧬 IOTA Identity 1.7 Goes Post-Quantum Before Quantum Even Arrives

IOTA just launched post-quantum and hybrid cryptographic signatures to future-proof digital credentials against quantum computers – the ones that could one day crack modern encryption like an eggshell. It also adds on-chain public credentials so anyone can verify certificates instantly. Think of it like laminating your digital ID for the next 50 years. Iota.

🎭 Deepfake Scams Have Gone Mainstream – and They’re Stealing Lives, Not Just Faces

An 82-year-old man lost $690,000 to a flawless fake of Elon Musk, and that’s just one of thousands. Deepfake fraud jumped 3,000% last year; three seconds of audio is now enough to clone your voice. World ID’s cryptographic “proof of human” can verify real people in video calls and transactions without tracking identities. Worldcoin.

🕵️ Polymesh’s P-DART Brings Confidential, Compliant Asset Transfers to DevNet

Zcash’s pamp made privacy cool, as this story shows. Polymesh Labs and the University of Edinburgh just unveiled P-DART, a privacy-preserving settlement framework that encrypts every transaction with zero-knowledge proofs. It lets institutions trade tokenized securities privately while regulators retain auditable oversight. In plain terms: Wall Street secrecy, blockchain transparency. Polymesh.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

⛽ 1inch Adds Market and Aggressive Gas Modes for Smarter Swaps

The 1inch Pro interface now lets users pick between Market gas (balanced cost and speed) or Aggressive gas (pay more, move faster). It’s like choosing between regular and express checkout – same product, different pace. For volatile moments, Aggressive mode means your swap confirms before prices vanish. 1inch.

⚡ Blade AMM Eliminates Impermanent Loss and Turns Volatility into Profit

Blade’s Formula Market Maker (FMM) throws out the old x*y=k formula that bleeds liquidity providers dry. It uses real-time off-chain pricing to rebalance each block, capturing volatility gains instead of suffering impermanent loss. If CPMMs are coin-flipping in the dark, Blade’s trading with night vision. SushiSwap.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🔥 South Korea’s Data Center Fire Proves the Cloud Isn’t Safe – It’s Fragile

When a blaze at Korea’s National Information Resources Service torched 858 terabytes of government data, the entire digital backbone of the country collapsed – no backups, no failover, no plan B. It’s the nightmare of “centralized cloud” made real: one building, one failure, national blackout. Storj’s says their global distributed model – encrypting, erasure-coding, and scattering data across thousands of nodes – could’ve turned that inferno into a footnote instead of a catastrophe. Storj.

🧱 thirdweb and Arbitrum Stylus Make Blockchain as Easy as Building a Website

thirdweb’s new integration with Arbitrum Stylus lets devs write blockchain apps in Rust, C, or C++ – no Solidity degree required. It’s like switching from assembly language to modern programming: the same power, 90% less pain. In tests, Stylus cut gas use for hashing and Merkle proofs by up to half a million gas – meaning blockchain finally feels less like rocket science and more like actual development. Arbitrum.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

❓️ How Grayscale brought crypto staking to Wall Street for the first time

🦑 Kraken buys Small Exchange for $100M ahead of US derivatives trading launch

🤑 DeFi Development Corp. acquires 86,307 SOL in latest treasury purchase

🤖 Meet Henry: Salesforce’s humanoid robot

🤯 ‘Battlefield 6’ breaks EA franchise records with more than 7 million copies sold opening weekend

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, IMX, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, ZEC, XLM, and NEAR. 📋