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Oct 21, 2026, 1:25 a.m. EDT3 min readRipple brings Wall Street into 24/7 stock bets, but HSBC warns markets are still thin. (Steve Heap/Shutterstock)SummaryRipple Prime now allows institutional clients to trade swaps tied to more than 100 stock, commodity and currency markets around the clock, using its RLUSD stablecoin as collateral. HSBC called the offering “evolutionary, not revolutionary,” warning that limited liquidity could constrain large trades and initially favor market makers, proprietary traders and hedge funds. The risks of weekend trading surfaced when nearly $52 million in leveraged chip-stock positions were liquidated within 10 minutes while the underlying shares were not trading. Ripple is giving institutions a way to bet on stocks, gold and oil over the weekend through its brokerage business, but HSBC says thin trading could limit how much money follows them in. Daragh Maher, head of digital assets research at HSBC, called the launch an “evolutionary, not revolutionary” step in a note to clients on Monday, a copy of which was shared with CoinDesk.

Tech giants have deployed emergency blocks against eight vulnerable digital certificates that could allow attackers to impersonate legitimate websites. By Tuesday, browser developers and other major technology companies had deployed protections against eight intermediate certificates issued by India-based certificate authority eMudhra Limited after discovering that their private keys were insufficiently secure. Mozilla cryptography engineer Dennis Jackson wrote in an incident report that Mozilla independently recovered the private keys when it first received notice of the flaw on Saturday, confirming that the key-generation process was “flawed” and “trivial to exploit.” An attacker who intercepts a user’s connection could use fraudulent certificates to impersonate a legitimate website and potentially read or alter the information exchanged, according to Mozilla. While many companies quickly blocked the affected certificates, the threat remains for applications and systems that don’t receive those blocks automatically.

Skip to main contentCrypto NewsOct 21, 2026, 12:35 a.m. EDT2 min readSolana’s Alpenglow, its biggest network overhaul since 2020, goes live Wednesday. (CoinDesk)SummarySolana’s Alpenglow upgrade is expected to reduce transaction finality to about 150 milliseconds from roughly six seconds by moving validator voting off-chain. Faster finality could make trading and payments feel more like those on centralized exchanges, while validator costs are expected to fall by about 60 percent. The upgrade is scheduled to activate Wednesday after six test-network restarts and a failed migration that was later successfully completed. Solana transactions could soon become irreversible in just 150 milliseconds, or roughly 40 times faster than today, as the network switches on its Alpenglow upgrade on Wednesday. The upgrade changes how validators, the computers that process transactions and vote on which ones are valid, agree with each other. Today, every validator writes its votes straight onto the blockchain like any other transaction, and a payment isn’t locked in until enough of them stack up — which takes about six seconds.

Updated Oct 21, 2026, 12:16 a.m. EDTPublished Oct 21, 2026, 12:11 a.m. EDT3 min readInternet panics after EMudhra's private key compromise. SummaryEight private keys belonging to Indian certificate authority eMudhra were compromised, potentially allowing attackers to forge certificates and impersonate trusted websites. Major browser makers quickly blocked the certificates, and no attacks have been reported, but some nonbrowser software may remain vulnerable because it does not check whether certificates have been revoked. Researchers said eMudhra used easily guessed integers as private keys, enabling all eight to be recovered from public certificates in under a second. The internet has been scrambling to patch a hole in the system that tells your browser which websites are real. It started on Oct. 17, when a researcher told browser makers that eight secret keys at eMudhra, an Indian company that vouches for websites, have been compromised. A researcher named Wayne reported the security flaw and to prove the vulnerability, he used all eight compromised keys to digitally sign his warning message: "We have a problem here – Wayne.

Oct 21, 2026, 12:07 a.m. EDT2 min readBitcoin hovers around $83,000 as AI earnings revive tech, ZEC jumps 11%SummaryBitcoin rose 1.3 percent to about $82,700 as strong technology earnings lifted Asian stocks and revived enthusiasm for the artificial intelligence trade. Zcash surged 11 percent after developers set the activation height for NU7, an upgrade designed to cut block times to 25 seconds and make payments confirm three times faster. Analysts at Hashdex said Bitcoin’s nearly yearlong bear phase may be nearing an end, though the cryptocurrency must reclaim $84,000 before the Federal Reserve’s Oct. 27-28 meeting to signal renewed strength. Bitcoin rose 1.3% to just above $82,700 as of Wednesday Asian morning hours, hovering around the $83,000 mark after strong earnings from SpaceX and Super Micro Computer revived the AI trade and sent tech stocks across Asia higher. ZEC led the majors, jumping 11% to about $1,260, after Zcash developers set the mainnet activation height for NU7, the network’s next upgrade. The activation height is the block number at which every node switches to the new rules.