Here's your Monday industry catch-up 📰

Crypto & Blockchain Update: October 7-13

📈Market Highlights

- Bitcoin rises 1.5% in the last 7 days to above $64,500
- Ethereum up by 1.8% within last week, at around $2,500
- Last week’s top 3 gainers were NEIRO (40%), ENA (34%), BRETT (+31%); while top 3 losers over past 7 days were HNT (-14%), CFX (-10%), and NEAR (-8%)
- Crypto Fear & Greed Index is at 45 Neutral
- 25% decrease in dApp volumes on BNB Chain, with 37% drop in on-chain activity within last 7 days

📃Regulatory Updates

- British man sues Newport City Council for $647M in damages due to lost hard drive with 8,000 $BTC
- FBI used a fake coin “NexFundAI” (NEXF) to catch market manipulators, as it claimed to represent shares in an AI-related fund
- Australia’s first Spot Ether ETF goes live on Tuesday, Oct 15th
- Bitnomial exchange sues U.S. SEC for overextending its jurisdiction over digital assets, following suit of Cryptocom
- Former FTX executive Ryan Salame headed to prison

🎮Blockchain Tech & Gaming

- RootstockLabs started developing Union, a new permissionless Bitcoin bridge based on BitVMX
- Karate Combat to launch UP, a Layer-2 blockchain built on Hedera in Q1 2025, as well as $UP token
- Avalanche shooter “Off the Grid” ranked at the top of Epic’s Most Popular Free-to-Play PC games list on Friday, over Fortnite and Rocket League
- Nexus, zkVM developer, launches beta version of Nexus, “the world’s first open prover network”
- Uniswap developer plans to launch its own blockchain as L2 Ethereum, named Unichain
- CARV, identity and data layer for gaming and AI launched its utility token CARV

💰Investments & Partnerships
- VC firms Gate Ventures, Boon Ventures partner with Movement Labs to launch a $20M crypto fund for web3 startups
- Yala, a Bitcoin liquidity with an overcollateralized stablecoin protocol, raised $8M in seed round, with testnet release this week
- Worldcoin partners with Dune to provide real-time World Chain data accessibility to community
- Paradigm, crypto venture capital firm, announces $20M investment into Ithaca, a crypto infrastructure startup focused on open source tools
- Aethir, cloud computing platform for underutilized GPUs launched $100M ecosystem fund to accelerate adoption
- PiP World secures $10M in funding from Exinity to build the “Duolingo of crypto”

🛡️Crypto security

- Chinese scientists claim to have breached the encryption algorithms used in banking and crypto using a quantum computer
- Crypto-stealing malware discovered in Python Package Index (PyPI)
- Blockchain Security Standards Council (BSSC) announced its board of directors led by F. Weichelt from Anchorage Digital

🗞️Miscellaneous

- “Bitcoin” search volume worldwide drops to lowest in last 12 months; while “memecoins” rises
- Peter Todd named Satoshi Nakamoto in HBO documentary
- Mt. Gox postpones deadline to repay its creditors by a year to October 2025
- Trump-backed World Liberty Financial will launch token sale Tuesday, october 15th
- Scroll, Ethereum layer-2, was listed on Binance, sparking community debate over centralization

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Have a successful new week ahead🤝
- Swapin Team