You can’t trade your way through the AI apocalypse

MarketsPublishedOct 19, 2026US spot Ether ETFs recorded around $955 million in October net outflows so far, while Bitcoin funds extended their weekly withdrawal streak to two weeks. US spot Bitcoin and Ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw $549 million in net outflows last week as investors continued pulling money from two of the largest crypto funds. Bitcoin ETFs recorded around $229 million in weekly net outflows, while Ether funds posted even higher withdrawals at $320 million, according to SoSoValue data. The latest withdrawals marked a second consecutive week of losses for Bitcoin ETFs and a third for Ether funds. Outflows slowed from the previous week, when the two recorded $1.22 billion in net outflows. Spot Ether ETFs have recorded roughly $955 million in net outflows so far in October, more than in any other month this year. Monthly flows in spot Ether ETFs. Source: SoSoValueEther (ETH) fell 5% over the past seven days to around $2,433, while Bitcoin dipped 1.3% to $82,783 at the time of publication, according to CoinGecko data.

A bitcoin wallet dormant since 2013 moved 411 BTC, now worth about $34 million. It is one of several long-dormant wallets to wake up recently.

Zoom enterprise customers will now be able to see “proof of human” badges to verify that people appearing on video calls are real, after a global rollout of biometric identity technology from World. On Sunday, the Sam Altman-backed project announced that World ID for Zoom is now available in the Zoom Marketplace. The system compares an image captured by the company’s iris-scanning Orb, a live selfie and the participant’s video feed before displaying a Human Badge visible to other meeting participants. World first announced its Zoom integration in April, when it was undergoing limited beta testing with VanEck Funds. The feature is now available globally to Zoom enterprise customers. World also named Bain Capital, Pantera Capital and other financial firms as initial design partners for its broader identity verification technology. The rollout follows incidents involving AI-generated impersonation. In 2024, an employee at engineering firm Arup transferred about $25 million after scammers impersonated executives during a video conference.

The team behind Zakura wants every swap through NEAR Intents to get its own key, so a refund address left on NEAR’s public chain can’t expose a user’s wider payment history.

South Korea’s senior finance officials are reportedly set to meet crypto exchanges on Tuesday as calls to postpone a planned cryptocurrency tax are heating up ahead of its scheduled implementation in January. According to Yonhap, the government is planning to hold a consultation on crypto taxation, with representatives coming from Upbit, Bithumb, Coinone, DigitalX and Gopax, along with executives of the Digital Asset Exchange Alliance, known as DAXA. Government officials attending include Kwon Dae-young, first vice minister of finance and economy, and Yoo Young-jun, director general for digital financial policy at the Financial Services Commission. South Korean regulators have delayed the crypto tax three times, with the latest delay pushing the start date to 2027 amid political disagreement and industry pushback over exchange readiness and the threshold level. An exchange official told Yonhap on Sunday that unresolved transaction rules and limited time to prepare infrastructure supported postponing the tax.

Validators have a bug-fix patch on course to go live Friday. The lending system it partly repairs is still 10 votes short of approval.