BestEthan

ALL in AI & Crypto

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Coinbase just wired US institutions into a global crypto options + perps pool on Prime.

One book for eligible US and global traders. Liquidity sourced from Deribit, offered through Coinbase Financial Markets. 20+ underlyings including BTC, ETH, SOL, HYPE. Collateral: BTC, ETH, USDC.

Same week as US equity perps headlines — different product. This is crypto derivatives under an FCM path, not single-stock perps.

Unified liquidity is the easy tweet. The hard ops question is still compliance onboarding vs how collateral and margin stay siloed by currency.

Source: @coinbase · @brian_armstrong

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

US equity perps can trade. That is not the same as settled law.

Nov 3: CFTC Chair Selig said perpetual futures on individual stocks can begin on dual-registered venues (CFTC DCM + SEC notice-registered for security futures), deemed approved under Reg 40.3. No named first exchange in the statement. No open-bell time.

Same day: Capital Markets Alliance sued. Judge Caproni denied the TRO — no shown irreparable harm — so trading is not frozen. She also wrote the alliance is likely to succeed on the merits: these perps may not be "security futures" at all, and may look like swaps under SEC.

Can trade ≠ case closed. Margin and settlement rules still matter. The label fight (futures vs swap) is the real product risk.

Sources: CFTC PR 9319-26 · Caproni TRO order (SDNY) · case reporting

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Circle Q3 is two stories in one P&L.

USDC onchain volume: $13.9T, +49% YoY. Average circulation $73.3B, +8%.
Total revenue + reserve income: $865M, +17%. Net income $226M, +5%.

Adj. EBITDA jumped to $317M (+85%). Read the mix before you celebrate: reserve income fell 8% on a lower reserve return rate. Other revenue hit $207M — about $182M of that is ARC token presale. One-time mint money is not the same as USDC reserve float.

Volume can roar while the reserve line cools. The interesting split is recurring USDC economics vs ARC one-shots — not the EBITDA headline alone.

Source: Circle Q3 EPR (SEC) · @circle

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Aave V4 collateral swaps just went live on Ethereum, Base, and Avalanche (Aave Pro, via CoW).

Swap one collateral for another without closing the position.

Useful when you want to rotate risk without the exit and re-enter tax. Path risk I'd watch first: thinly traded or oracle-thin assets sitting in the swap route.

Source: @aave · @StaniKulechov

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Menlo's 2026 enterprise AI report: spend jumped $33B → $177B in a year (5.4×).

On OpenRouter, agents now chew about 80% of tokens. Average company planned 1.9× AI spend. Actual came in at 4.7×.

Seat budgets assume humans ask questions. Agents scale with work finished, not headcount. That's the budget miss.

Source: @MenloVentures · https://t.co/zlDiMFWDRE

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

The MCP server ships 9 read-only tools on purpose. No raw table browse. The agent has to go through the map.

A faster wrong number is still wrong. Permission for what "revenue" means sits in the semantic layer.

Repo: https://t.co/qcLB3MLg78

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Boss asks the agent: revenue last quarter.

Answer in 3 seconds. Clean chart. Wrong column. Nobody notices.

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

NVIDIA open-sourced Auto Ontology (Apache 2.0): a semantic layer between the agent and your DB.

It drafts business terms from metadata, grounds queries on those terms, and checks generated SQL against certified definitions. Agents reach it via MCP, agent skills, or REST API.

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Binance Recovery Update #5: the Oct 31 PoR snapshot now has a full zk proof.

If you hold BTC, ETH, USDT, BNB, SOL, USDC, XRP, USD1, RLUSD, or ZEC there, you can run their verifier and check ≥1:1 on your own machine.

They already said those ten are backed with own funds. This is the part you can re-run, not just read.

Source: @binance Update #5 · PoR page

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Binance Initial Findings on the Oct 29 incident are out.

~$6.34B impacted. ~$2.85B already frozen or intercepted (still reconciling, moves with market).

Users don't eat the loss. Binance says they've set aside more than 100% to cover. As of Oct 31, 98% of impacted token assets are replenished and checkable on PoR. Illiquid leftovers still being bought.

FBI's latest info, as Binance cites it, points to North Korea. They call this a preliminary report. Investigation ongoing.

Source: @binance Initial Findings

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Your settings.json said deny. The local agent still ran the tool.

Cursor fixed a Claude Code PreToolUse path in 1.0.40: nested permissionDecision deny under hookSpecificOutput was ignored, so the call went through anyway.

If you gate agents with hooks, re-test the denial path on your build. A line in config is worthless until you watch the tool actually stop.

Source: Cursor release notes 1.0.40 · https://t.co/6JesStoKDK

[Lian Lim | Dashboard & AI Automation Expert @dashboardlim]

this is why i don't trust a permission rule until i've tested the denial path

Cursor just fixed a bug where a Claude Code hook could say:

deny this tool call

and the local agent could still run it

that's such a perfect agent engineering lesson

config says “denied” system proved “denied”

when we connect agents to real systems, the tests that matter are boring:

allowed action actually works

denied action actually fails

secret stays unreadable

production action actually stops

audit log actually records it

guardrails aren't the JSON you wrote

see it as the behavior you can prove

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Agent IDEs install extensions with real machine reach. The store listing is part of the threat surface.

A deny rule in a config file only helps if the control path actually stops the call. This week’s scare was about what got installed under a trusted name.

Sources: https://t.co/rjq4zIRT7J · Microsoft security blog · Wired

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Cursor’s marketplace carried a fake Anthropic.claude-code for about 11 hours on Oct 29.

Versions 2.1.312 and 2.1.313. Not shipped by Anthropic. Cursor says up to about 5,000 installs may have happened.

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

macOS one-liner from Cursor:
grep -qs svc-telemetry ~/.ssh/authorized_keys && echo hit || echo clean

Windows: search authorized_keys for svc-telemetry.

Hit → remediate from Cursor’s post, rotate creds from a clean machine.

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Freezes moved faster than last cycle. Attribution went formal. The wallets still emptied.

If you run signing infra, hot-wallet ops, or anything that can authorize withdrawals, treat this week as an incident drill.

Sources: FBI alert, Chainalysis, CoinDesk Nov 1, Binance/Teng via press.

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Oct 29. Binance hot wallets lose about $6.3–6.4B in roughly 20 minutes.

Oct 31. The FBI names TraderTraitor. North Korea. They ask the industry to block addresses.

Same line as Ronin and Bybit. This time it hit the biggest exchange.

[BestEthan @Best_Ethan_]

Scoreboard, year and who said it:

2022 Ronin ~$620M — FBI (Lazarus/APT38)
2022 Harmony Horizon ~$100M — FBI
2023 Atomic Wallet ~$100M — FBI TraderTraitor
2023 Alphapo ~$60M + CoinsPaid ~$37M — FBI
2025 Bybit ~$1.5B — FBI PSA TraderTraitor
2026-09 Bitget ~$0.35–0.39B — Chainalysis and industry link to DPRK; no FBI formal pin like Binance
2026-10-29 Binance >$6B — FBI TraderTraitor

The checks keep getting larger. The targets keep getting closer to exchange ops.