The claims and redemptions window, confirmed in an October 1 release by the project, provides the first working portal for the tens of thousands of Drift users affected by the attack that made headlines more than five months ago. The math behind the DFX recovery token is based on a calculation that converts each verified dollar lost in the Drift hack to one DFX token, a standard SPL token on Solana that can be held, redeemed, or sold on Raydium or other secondary markets. Notably, the token’s USDT value is not fixed.

Drift Foundation releases refund calculation guidelines

According to the Drift Foundation’s claims guide, USDT value is calculated by dividing the Recovery Pool balance by the number of DFX still outstanding. The DFX token was worth around 0.0104 USDT at launch. Hence, a user who lost 100 USDT in April now holds 100 DFX, which they can redeem for about 1.04 USDT at the current exchange rate. The current value is based on the Recovery Pool currently holding roughly 3.11 million USDT against a fixed supply of 299,500,810.998 DFX.

Speculative trading on DFX has quickly gotten hot, with the token climbing about 210% in 24 hours to about $0.03, though liquidity is thin at around $200,000, which also implies volatility. Cryptopolitan reported on Drift user frustrations and unfairness accusations in May, when the project’s recovery framework was interpreted as forcing early redeemers to forfeit their remaining claims. One contributor on the Drift governance forum called the related Insurance Fund vote “effectively an attempt at money laundering.”

Money enters once a day at 00:00 UTC from the Net Protocol Revenue of Velocity at different rates, which includes 60% of the first 30,000 USDT of daily revenue, 70% up to 100,000 USDT, 90% of anything above that, until deposits total the full verified loss. Unclaimed DFX tokens by the time the window closes at 00:00 UTC on January 1, 2028, will be burned. Tether has pledged up to 127.5 million USDT, while other strategic partners have committed up to 20 million USDT.

However, those funds have caps and will only be released in phases, according to a preset schedule. Any additional funds recovered from the stolen total form the fourth stream, but that is less predictable. As of Drift’s September 30 update, $9.2 million of the stolen funds were frozen after the attacker routed funds through Tornado Cash in August. Three of the four Ethereum wallets still hold 107,165 ETH of the stolen crypto and have not moved in months.

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The ECB revealed those findings in the “How firms plan to finance AI investment” post the central bank published on October 2 using data from the central bank’s Survey on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (SAFE). The survey now raises questions about whether observers should be concerned that euro area firms, which already spend far less than their American counterparts, are also declining to close the gap by borrowing. The five largest US tech companies hold $1.65 trillion in hidden debt and $1.35 trillion of debt on their balance sheets, per a Nikkei study cited by Fortune. That figure represents a roughly eightfold jump in just four years.

ECB claims AI development has been carried out without leaning on debt

A separate Moody’s estimate put off-balance-sheet deals at $1.2 trillion, with more than $820 billion of that total committed to data centers that are not even ready yet. Firms are also taking on debt to fund long-term obligations such as chips, servers and leases with data-center operators. Hyperscalers and related names such as Nvidia have issued $225 billion in bonds in 2026, per S&P Global, a 973.7% jump as of the middle of the year.

That number is projected to be near $400 billion by the end of the year. Goldman Sachs expects hyperscaler debt to continue to grow by another 60% in 2027, projecting it to hit a new $420 billion record by the end of the year. The scale of the borrowing has started to draw scrutiny in certain corners on Wall Street. That pattern is starting to form too. As of September, the market for top-rated corporate credit banks and industry is gaining pace while similar offerings from AI-linked issuers are moving in the opposite direction.

“We’re being very selective in terms of how we invest within hyperscaler debt,” Colby Stilson, head of fixed income at Brown Advisory in London, told Reuters. Apollo Global’s Torsten Slok confirmed the scale of the shift in demand, reporting that investor orders per dollar of hyperscaler bonds had fallen below two times as of July from nearly five times in February. Europe’s reluctance to borrow runs headlong into its investment problem.

Oxford Economics projects US corporate spending on AI hardware and infrastructure will grow 40% in real terms between 2021 and the end of 2027, against just 12% for the euro area, figures reported by Cryptopolitan in August. The Bank for International Settlements has warned the US pace could end in an “investment bust,” but the lag still worries European economists. Former ECB President Mario Draghi laid out the stakes in a Financial Times column in September, arguing the European Union hosts under 5% of the world’s AI compute capacity against 75% for the United States.

He also said that the shortfall between demand and installed supply could widen to 14 gigawatts by 2030.b“Being cut off from AI, once the economy runs on it, would be more like being cut off from the US financial system. The effects would be catastrophic,” Draghi wrote. His proposed fix is for European firms to pool their buying power into contracts large enough to finance new data centers.

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According to reports, factors such as energy costs, water consumption, and environmental problems have seen people oppose the rise of AI infrastructure, as per the Associated Press. For an industry that invests trillions in obtaining additional computing power, gaining the support of local communities is just as vital as acquiring chips, funds, and energy. Amazon’s commitment is more than charitable. It is also aimed at creating the local backing that will help the company grow.

The opposition is difficult to ignore. A poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst in September revealed that 65% of Americans do not support an AI data center being constructed in their area. Only 11% said they would support one. Respondents expressed their worries over environmental issues, consumption of resources, disruption of land, lack of trust in AI, and the increased cost of utilities.

Amazon set to make big investment amid pushback from communities

The opposition is already costing the industry. As per Allianz, in Q1 2026, local opposition prevented or delayed more than 75 projects in the US with a total cost of $130 billion. Community resistance has become one of many obstacles that developers face. Other obstacles include grid limitations, delays with the permit process, and supply chain issues. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), community benefits agreements (CBAs) may be a way to alleviate some of the tension.

These agreements allow developers to make concrete commitments to the communities where they construct their projects. An example comes from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. WRI calls its agreement the first public CBA for a data center. Three developers have pledged $20 million to support sustainability and economic programs, in addition to the use of 100% clean energy, limited water use, and meeting noise restrictions. WRI warns, however, that these agreements are not the answer to all problems.

They can never satisfy the need for more general regulation, while there may be communities that see the data center as not worth it. The pressure behind those concerns is massive. WRI says US data-center power capacity could reach 194 GW by 2035, more than three times today’s level. Data centers could then consume as much as 20% of US electricity, up from 5.9% today. The issue affects not just Amazon. PwC estimates that total expenditure in the construction of data centers around the world will reach $31.6 trillion by 2050, with annual spending rising from about $800 billion in 2026 up to $1.8 trillion by 2050.

PwC emphasizes that the availability of electrical power will determine the location of investments. Meanwhile, CBRE reported that the vacancy rate in Northern Virginia reached only 0.3% for Q1. Power supply shortages, zoning issues, and local resistance policies continued to hamper growth. The policy environment is becoming harsher as well. Global Electronics Council reports that governments are raising transparency and sustainability requirements as the growth of data centers puts pressure on electricity grids, water resources, and communities.

Meanwhile, the IEA reports that the development of AI workloads threatens the existing grids and energy infrastructure. As we have previously reported, the development of data centers and AI technologies helps the construction and manufacturing sectors of the US economy despite the growing problems with electricity supply, raw materials, and infrastructure. The $1 billion commitment from Amazon also reveals that the problem of community acceptance is gaining importance.

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The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) initiated the case in the District of Columbia against a recent action by the OCC and its related guidance. They argue that crypto companies receive the credibility of a bank charter in the US without complying with all the regular bank requirements. Under national trust charters, companies are permitted to manage customer funds and process transactions. However, they cannot take cash deposits or give loans. ICBA has pointed out that extending these charters to crypto companies takes the OCC’s mandate too far, as per the report by Reuters.

ICBA says OCC went too far with awarding the licenses

Speaking on the lawsuit against the OCC, ICBA President and CEO Rebeca Romero Rainey mentioned in an ICBA statement that American consumers reasonably expect a federally chartered bank to carry federal protections. Romero Rainey said digital assets held by crypto firms under national trust charters do not come with the same protections. An OCC spokesperson declined to comment to Reuters. The dispute has been building for months.

In May, ICBA opposed the charter application of Payward, Kraken’s parent company. OCC’s records indicate that the application for Payward National Trust Company was submitted on May 8. Senator Elizabeth Warren had raised these concerns before. She issued a letter in May stating that since December 2025 the OCC had granted at least nine national trust charters to crypto firms and questioning if some of their activities can be classified under the activities allowed for a trust company.

“These companies are effectively crypto banks that want to evade the fundamental safeguards and obligations that come with being a bank,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a May 18 letter to Comptroller Jonathan Gould. The OCC views the matter in a different light. Its final chartering rules, which took effect on April 1, state that it “would neither expand nor contract” the chartering authority of the agency. Instead, it explains that trust-limited national banks may perform a range of non-traditional functions related to the activities of trust companies.

The statistics shed light on the reasons behind the fierce debate surrounding the matter. Comptroller Jonathan Gould has come out with a statement that the OCC has received 40 applications for new bank charters in roughly 18 months and that 23 of these are for digital assets. This is eight times as much as in the preceding four years, according to earlier materials from Cryptopolitan. The situation has implications that reach beyond US banking.

A study by the Bank for International Settlements indicates that the volume of stablecoins on the market could exceed the $300 billion mark by 2026, marking a staggering 98% of the total as linked to the US dollar. Simultaneously, according to the Financial Stability Board, different jurisdictions have major gaps in the way they implement regulations, allowing for regulatory arbitrage to happen. The OCC lawsuit can help define the extent of the applicability of the US trust companies charter in the crypto area and indicate the weight of the federal charter in the global market.

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The move comes eight months after Tether invested $100 million in Anchorage at a $4.2 billion valuation. Reportedly, employees were told by McCauley that Anchorage is cutting jobs due to the general downturn in the current crypto market, as per The Information. The number 68 mentioned here is an estimate and not an official number. It is based on the 17% cut reported by The Information and the earlier employee data reported by McCauley. However, the timing of the layoffs is remarkable.

Anchorage cuts 400 employees as crypto winter grips industry

Tether’s February investment valued Anchorage at $4.2 billion and made it possible to pay employees through the first employee tender offer. Thus, the layoffs do not appear as a desperate need for cash, but as an effort to reduce expenses in response to the worsening economic situation. Anchorage is not the only company going through layoffs. CryptoJobsList reports that there have been at least 7,411 job cuts in 60 crypto companies in 2026.

The biggest among these is Block’s 4,000 job cuts in February. Hiring activity has also declined. In January, Tiger Research reported that the number of new job listings on the leading crypto job portals declined by approximately 80% on a year-over-year basis, continuing a decline that began after 2022. The remaining vacancies in the job market are becoming increasingly specialized. Of the 2,932 openings monitored by Tiger Research in the first half of 2026, engineering accounted for 34.1%.

Compliance and legal jobs followed at 10.4%. Meanwhile, stablecoins and payments comprised 13.4% of the total job openings in the market. That’s consistent with Anchorage’s approach. The company identifies itself as a service provider to institutions in custody, trading, settlement, and other digital asset-related activities. It has also advanced further into the institutional market infrastructure with the development of products that link regulatory custody with crypto trading.

Institutional interest has not faded. In a 2026 survey published by EY, it was revealed that 73% of the companies surveyed intended to expand their investments in digital assets over the following year. Similarly, the analysis of BCG established that infrastructure, such as custody, settlement, and tokenized assets, is becoming more important due to the increasing integration of digital assets with traditional finance.

Anchorage fits into the changing picture. In June, Binance included Anchorage in its triparty banking network, allowing institutions to keep collateral in regulated custody while trading. The layoffs therefore indicate a crypto industry that is becoming more selective about where its funds go. There is still enough capital, but companies are limiting their spending. For Anchorage, the issue is whether the company can thrive with a smaller workforce while focusing on infrastructure projects as its avenue of growth.

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A survey of 26 licensed virtual asset service providers run by the Korean Financial Intelligence Unit and the Financial Supervisory Service, covering January through June, has revealed that the combined market capitalization of Korea’s exchanges fell by 33%, a drop of 28.3 trillion won, while won-denominated deposits sank by 35%, or 2.9 trillion won. Average daily trading volume was also down 44%. The market value had fallen to about 58.9 trillion won (roughly $42 billion) by the end of June, compared to its value of 87.2 trillion won six months earlier.

Daily turnover fell to 3.1 trillion won from 5.4 trillion, and customer deposits in won dropped to 5.2 trillion from 8.1 trillion. Exchange operating income collapsed by 78% to 81.6 billion won compared to 374.8 billion a year earlier. Regulators tied much of the loss to Bitcoin, which the FSS noted fell 33% to $58,559 by the end of June. The survey also found that 93 of the 234 tokens listed on just one exchange were valued at 100 million won or less by appraisal. The regulator said this figure should make users think twice.

Korean won deposits drop by 35%

The decline in deposits is due to overseas platforms baiting Korean traders with products the country’s market does not allow. For example, there is a perpetual futures contract built on KORU, a U.S.-listed exchange-traded fund that returns three times the daily move of Korea’s Kospi index. Binance launched a KORU product with 20x leverage on June 22, then raised the limit to 50x four days later. Because the fund itself already tracks three times the index’s daily price swings, traders could end up exposed to as much as 150 times that loss or gain.

Earlier in June, Binance had also offered 20x products on Samsung Electronics, SK hynix and Hyundai Motor, and Bybit, OKX and KuCoin launched their own KORU contracts. On June 23, the Kospi fell 9.99%, and KORU fell by 35.7% in one session to $700.01. These platforms operate outside the reach of South Korea’s investor protections. Traders get to them by purchasing Tether with won on a licensed local exchange and then transferring the stablecoin overseas.

Tiger Research, working with blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, tracked roughly 120,000 Korea-linked wallets and estimated that about 700 trillion won, or $530 billion, left domestic exchanges between 2021 and 2026. Outflows reached around $120 billion in 2025 and were projected near $52 billion this year, the firm said. Wallets owned by South Koreans put roughly $1.64 billion into three decentralized derivatives platforms: Hyperliquid, Lighter and Variational, between January 2024 and July 2026.

In July alone, about 1,200 of those wallets traded $4.97 billion in notional volume on Hyperliquid. Their most-traded instruments included contracts linked to SK Hynix, Samsung Electronics and crude oil, which can be traded with leverage and around the clock, even when regular markets are closed. Shinhan Securities analyst Park Sung-jae said in July, when domestic trading had fallen to about 1.6% of Kospi turnover, that investors are leaving due to the diverse investment methods foreign crypto exchanges offer.

He mentioned that those exchanges offer futures and leverage, while spot trading is “the only de facto trading option” in South Korea. Meanwhile, Cryptopolitan previously reported that South Korea plans to apply a 22% levy on annual crypto gains above a 2.5 million won deduction starting January 1, 2027, with the first returns due in May 2028. Petitioners warned that the rule would push even more traders offshore and gathered the 50,000 signatures needed to force a National Assembly review. Lawmakers from both ruling and opposition parties have floated delays as far out as 2030.

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The decision originates from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) v. Larralde et al., Case Number 6:23-cv-1445-WWB-DCI, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida on July 31, 2023. The CFTC announced the decision involving the default judgment on September 30, 2026. Early and Kingrey were required to settle for $15.73 million in restitution and pay civil penalties amounting to $15.75 million.

CFTC highlights inconsistencies in Fundsz’s statement

In a complaint lodged in 2023, the CFTC claimed Fundsz made an assurance that lucrative returns of over 3% every week would be generated using a proprietary algorithm that trades crypto and precious metals. The promoters also claimed that an investment of $2,500 could snowball to an unbelievable figure of $1 million in just four years. According to the regulator, the funds of clients were never traded as stated, and the returns on the investments presented to clients were made up.

The court thereafter discovered that both Early and Kingrey committed serious misrepresentation of facts concerning profit expectations, degree of risk, and previous performance of the investment. Those allegations echo the warning signs issued by the FTC, especially in investment offers that minimize risk while promising unusually high returns. The Fundsz case is important, but is minor in relation to the big picture of investment fraud.

The FBI noted there had been 181,565 cryptocurrency-related reports in 2025 with losses totaling more than $11 billion. Investment fraud accounts for about 49% of total losses incurred due to fraud, while the over-60 age group suffered losses of $7.7 billion, a 37% rise compared to the data from 2024. In 2025, the FTC reported that scams had caused losses of over $7.9 billion, with the median loss per scam exceeding $10,000.

According to the Chainalysis report, at least $14 billion was lost through crypto-based scams and fraud in 2025, which could go over $17 billion once other unidentified illegitimate addresses are factored in. The average amount of each scam increased by 253%, reaching $2,764. Fundsz is not an isolated case. Cryptopolitan reported in August that the SEC and CFTC separately sued Goliath Ventures and founder Christopher Delgado.

The SEC alleged it raised at least $425 million from more than 1,300 investors, while the CFTC cited roughly $397 million from about 1,600 customers. Cross-border enforcement remains more difficult. An October 2025 FSB review found significant gaps and inconsistencies in national crypto frameworks, warning that uneven implementation creates opportunities for regulatory arbitrage and complicates oversight of a global market. The immediate question is how much of the ordered restitution victims ultimately recover. The CFTC has cautioned that repayment orders do not guarantee full recovery when defendants lack sufficient assets.

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The conviction still stands, but the case will return for resentencing, according to Reuters and a case summary. The three-judge panel said the AI-generated video improperly influenced the sentencing. “While the record does not reflect precisely how the AI video factored into the sentencing calculus, there is no question it played a role,” Judge D. Steven Williams, Arizona Court of Appeals, as reported by Reuters. The court concluded that the video prejudiced Horcasitas enough to make the sentencing procedure fundamentally unfair. Reuters reported that Arizona’s attorney general and Horcasitas’s public defender declined to comment.

Arizona appeals court throws out AI-generated video

The script was written by Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, who found it difficult to express in words what she thought her brother would have said in that situation. According to NPR, the family created the avatar by means of a short video clip, an image from the funeral, and a variety of other AI tools. The avatar introduced itself as an AI creation before speaking to Horcasitas with the words: In another life, we probably could have been friends.

Later, the judge of the trial expressed gratitude to the family for the video. The decision comes at a time when courts face challenges when it comes to artificial evidence. A report published by the University of Colorado Boulder states that over 80% of court cases in the U.S. are partly based on video evidence, while courts are yet to have common rules to deal with AI-generated or AI-enhanced footage. Researchers are also concerned about the so-called “deepfake defense,” whereby real video footage is declared as fake because AI makes the claims plausible.

This worry was one of the reasons for the creation of the CIFAR Synthetic Evidence Corpus, initiated in June 2026, as researchers realized that previous datasets were unsuitable for teaching the technology how to detect subtle manipulations that could occur in evidence material. NIST identifies provenance tracking, watermarking, and synthetic-content detection as key ways to manage AI-generated media.

Europe has gone further: Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires certain synthetic content to be machine-readable and deepfakes to be disclosed as artificially generated or manipulated. The commercial link is becoming easier to see. SNS Insider values the deepfake-detection market at $1.19 billion in 2026 and projects it will reach $12.14 billion by 2035, a 29.5% CAGR. One Arizona ruling will not create that market by itself.

But when more than four-fifths of court cases already depend on video, every dispute over whether evidence is authentic increases the practical need for tools that can verify it. That turns courtroom deepfakes from a legal headache into a real business opportunity for companies selling forensic verification. China is moving in the same direction, with Cryptopolitan reporting new liability rules for AI deepfakes and voice cloning in September.

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The Hangzhou-based startup announced the release on its official WeChat account, according to Reuters. The package includes modules for computing and communication workloads, with DeepSeek saying the tools are based on open-source components it had previously developed for Nvidia hardware, which have now been adapted for Huawei’s processors. Alongside the software, the two firms co-developed what DeepSeek referred to as a “supernode” system running on 128 of Huawei’s Ascend 950 accelerators. The system is tuned to balance computation and data movement across the cluster.

DeepSeek open-sources six software tools for Huawei

The release, as reported by the South China Morning Post, is meant to seed an “independent and controllable” software ecosystem for GPUs instead of only a single product. The biggest part of the release is an Ascend-compatible version of TileLang, DeepSeek’s high-level programming language for writing the critical kernels that drive model performance. Nvidia remains its main back end, but the language now officially supports Huawei’s Ascend 950, adding features such as native code generation, automatic scheduling and synchronization, according to SCMP.

DeepSeek also positioned TileLang as an alternative to Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA platform, saying it simplifies programming while still allowing developers to get the most out of the underlying hardware. The company described it as an early step toward a more independent GPU software ecosystem. CUDA’s dominance is what makes the challenge so difficult. Nvidia’s nearly two-decade lead in CUDA tools and libraries has made its chips a core part of AI workloads, and no Chinese rival has managed to break that hold.

As US export controls limit Chinese companies’ access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips, Huawei has been pushing its Ascend processors even more. The DeepSeek tools arrived about two weeks after Huawei unveiled its next-generation AI processors and supernode systems, which the company expects to begin training models by next year. A week earlier, Huawei said it would ship its next-generation Ascend 960DT chip in the first quarter of 2027, moving the launch up by three quarters, and drew a chip roadmap stretching up to 2029.

Rotating Chairman Eric Xu claimed Huawei’s Ascend chips already hold a bigger slice of China’s AI chip market than Nvidia does, although he gave no figures to back this claim. Wednesday’s release builds on a partnership that has grown closer this year. DeepSeek had already previewed its V4 model running on Huawei’s Ascend processors, moving away from its earlier reliance on Nvidia. Huawei also stated at the time that it had worked with DeepSeek to make V4 compatible across the entire Ascend lineup.

The partnership also shows how China’s biggest AI companies are adapting to Nvidia’s absence and are not just waiting for export restrictions to ease at some point in the future. The key question remains how much these tools can narrow the performance gap that has helped keep developers tied to Nvidia’s CUDA, which is one that we still have no answer to, for now.

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Only eligible Axis Bank Visa and Mastercard credit cards can be added to Apple Wallet for now. RuPay cards, which run on India’s domestic network, are not supported at launch. The Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which dominates India’s digital payments market, has also been skipped by the service and excluded from the launch. UPI accounted for 84% of India’s payment volume in 2025, according to an IMF report cited by Techeconomy. The state-backed system allows its users to transfer money directly between bank accounts using a QR code.

Users can add only eligible cards to their wallets

Apple has instead decided to enter the much smaller card-based segment, with Axis Bank accounting for 16.3 million of the roughly 124 million credit cards in the country as of August, according to central bank data. The launch also gives Apple another way to make money from its growing user base in India. iPhone users in the country tend to be more affluent and more likely to use premium credit cards, making them an attractive customer base for banks despite UPI’s dominance.

Apple will also earn a fee on each transaction, which ultimately creates another revenue stream from the users the company has spent years accumulating. The terms Apple is seeking directly explain why the launch partner list remains short. TechCrunch, citing people familiar with the matter, reported that Apple is asking for about 20 basis points, or 0.2%, on each transaction. That would amount to a sizeable share of the 40 to 50 basis points that end up being the margins on each transaction in the payments layer.

Apple has stated in its newsroom post that shoppers can pay in different stores by double-clicking the iPhone’s side button, authenticating with Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode, and by holding the device close to a contactless reader. The company stated that there is no need for a separate app, PIN, or any forms of OTPs at checkout. These privacy mechanics are unsurprising and very normal for Apple Pay, as actual card numbers and details are not stored on the device or on Apple’s servers, and are not shared with merchants. Instead, a unique Device Account Number is encrypted and stored in the Secure Element chip.

According to Gautam Aggarwal, Mastercard’s president of India and South Asia, Mastercard’s tokenization technology protects each Apple Pay transaction with a unique, cryptographically secured token, keeping card details hidden from merchants. Axis Bank presented the launch as a way to give its customers more choice and flexibility, with Apple Pay support across both the Mastercard and Visa networks, said Amitabh Chaudhry, the bank’s MD and CEO.

At launch, Apple says the service will reach millions of merchants, including Blinkit, Croma, Ixigo, Reliance brands, Tata 1mg, and Zomato, alongside Apple Store locations. The company also worked with payment providers like Cashfree, Juspay, Mswipe, Paytm, PayU, Pine Labs, and Razorpay to wire up acceptance. Coverage could be patchy at first. One person told TechCrunch that payments could work at one enabled terminal but fail at another whose acquiring bank has yet to activate the service. So cardholders with supported cards could still potentially face issues during the initial rollout.

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