Good morning, everybody.
It’s your Daily Crypto News for Monday, October 26th, 2026. My name is Matt.
I don’t know what happened to everybody’s social media feeds this weekend, but mine was absolutely flooded with fear. Geopolitical problems, AI bubbles, cybersecurity attacks, power grid failures, and predictions that the entire market was about to collapse on Monday.
I don’t know if I’m stuck in some particularly terrible algorithm or if everybody is seeing the same thing.
But apparently, Black Monday was coming.
Then I looked at the futures markets, and things were up.
So much for that.
I’m not saying there aren’t legitimate risks out there. There absolutely are. But I think we’re reaching a point where social media is manufacturing so much anxiety that it’s becoming difficult to distinguish an actual problem from something the algorithm wants you to panic about.
And that’s why we’re bringing in Craig Cobb today. We need somebody looking at the charts instead of predicting the end of civilization every fifteen minutes.
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Craig Cobb: Bitcoin’s Market Structure and Why Patience Matters
Before we get into the rest of the news, I want to remind everybody where you can follow Craig and get his market analysis.
Market Intern: Craig’s trading education platform, with a free seven-day trial.
The Grow Me Co.: Craig’s free Tuesday newsletter covering market analysis and potential trading opportunities.
Craig’s message fits what we’ve been discussing for weeks. The market will make its move when it makes its move, and trying to predict every short-term fluctuation isn’t necessarily going to make you a better investor.
Bitcoin has been bouncing around the $80,000 region, occasionally slipping below it before recovering.
I’m still looking at that as the same broader trading range we’ve been discussing. A brief move to $79,000 doesn’t automatically mean the entire market structure has collapsed.
But that doesn’t mean the market is giving traders attractive opportunities either.
The price action has been messy, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to sit on the sidelines rather than force a trade.
I’m not a trader. I’m a HODLer.
And right now, I’m not particularly worried about Bitcoin sitting around $80,000.
If you want to watch Craig’s full chart analysis, we’ll have his video available through the newsletter at DailyCryptoNews.net.
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Bitcoin ETFs Lose Momentum After a Strong Start to the Week
Last week was a perfect example of why trying to time every move in Bitcoin is so difficult.
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs reportedly attracted more than $1 billion between Monday and Wednesday.
That’s a significant amount of institutional buying.
Then Thursday arrived, and approximately $640 million flowed out.
Friday brought another $140 million in outflows.
So we had substantial buying early in the week followed by significant selling toward the end.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin slipped below $80,000 during the weekend before recovering.
And this is what I keep telling people.
You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen tomorrow. You can look at technical levels, study institutional flows, and develop a reasonable expectation, but the market doesn’t have to cooperate.
I’m watching the broader trend, not trying to predict every candle.
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Electrum Wallet Vulnerability Leads to Confirmed Bitcoin Theft
Now, let’s get into what I think is today’s most important cryptocurrency security story.
Electrum, one of Bitcoin’s oldest software wallets, has reportedly patched a vulnerability that allowed malicious servers to trick users into signing transactions that could send their Bitcoin to an attacker.
And unlike some of the theoretical security threats we’ve discussed recently, Electrum developers have reportedly confirmed at least one theft.
Here’s how the attack worked.
Electrum relies on external servers to retrieve information about Bitcoin transactions. A malicious server could provide a fabricated transaction that appeared in a user’s transaction history.
The fake transaction contained an invalid signature that affected versions of the wallet didn’t properly reject.
The attacker then waited for the user to interact with it.
If the user believed the transaction was stuck and attempted to increase its fee using Bitcoin’s replace-by-fee feature, the wallet could prompt them to sign a transaction that actually directed funds to the attacker.
The user thought they were simply increasing a transaction fee.
Instead, they could be authorizing a theft.
Electrum reportedly released version 4.8.3 on October 24 to address the problem.
If you use Electrum, check the official project’s security notices and make sure you’re running a patched version.
This is another reminder that cryptocurrency security isn’t just about somebody breaking Bitcoin’s underlying cryptography. A vulnerability in the software you use can be enough to put your money at risk.
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CoinDCX Faces Questions Over Previously Compromised Wallet Infrastructure
India’s cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX is facing another security controversy involving old wallet infrastructure.
According to the reports discussed today, the exchange acknowledged losses connected to wallet addresses that had previously been compromised.
Here’s the problem.
Customers were reportedly still sending cryptocurrency to older deposit addresses, even after the exchange had moved to newer wallet infrastructure.
CoinDCX was supposed to credit customer accounts and automatically transfer those incoming funds into its current systems.
But that transfer process apparently failed for a period of time.
As a result, cryptocurrency accumulated in wallets that should no longer have been trusted.
The transcript contains conflicting loss figures of $16 million and approximately $60 million in USDT, so the precise amount requires confirmation.
But the underlying issue is serious regardless of the final number.
If an exchange knows particular wallet infrastructure has been compromised, why are customer deposits still being directed there?
And why wasn’t the system reliably transferring those funds somewhere safe?
That sounds like a significant operational failure.
We spend a lot of time talking about sophisticated hackers, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. But sometimes the problem is much simpler.
A company knows there’s a vulnerability, doesn’t fully resolve the underlying process, and eventually somebody loses money.
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Hardware Wallet Customers Face a Growing Supply-Chain Security Problem
We’re also seeing more reports involving hardware wallet companies and their customers.
Keystone disclosed a breach involving its Shopify-based store, reportedly exposing customer information including names, contact details, shipping addresses, and purchase information.
The company says private keys, recovery phrases, wallet passwords, and payment information were not exposed.
That’s an important distinction.
But customer information is still valuable to criminals.
If somebody knows your name, where you live, and that you purchased a cryptocurrency hardware wallet, that creates potential phishing and physical-security risks.
We’re also hearing about customer information exposure involving Trezor’s shipping provider ShipMonk and an order-tracking vulnerability affecting SafePal customers.
Separately, reports involving modified Ledger devices sold through a reseller describe physical hardware tampering designed to compromise recovery information, with estimated losses exceeding $86 million.
These incidents aren’t necessarily connected.
And none of them establish that the cryptography protecting legitimate hardware wallets has been broken.
Instead, they demonstrate how attackers can target everything surrounding the wallet.
Customer databases, shipping companies, online stores, manufacturers, resellers, and the devices themselves can all become points of attack.
That’s a pretty big ecosystem to protect.
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Initia Halts Its Network Following a $2.7 Million Exploit
Initia reportedly halted its Layer 1 network and associated rollups on Friday after discovering a vulnerability in its Move virtual machine implementation.
The issue allegedly allowed unauthorized token creation.
Before the network was stopped, an attacker reportedly minted and transferred approximately $2.7 million worth of assets, including AUSD, ETH, and USDC.
Again, that’s a real security concern.
But here’s something I want everybody to understand after last week’s Black October discussion.
We don’t have evidence that all these incidents are connected to artificial intelligence or to one coordinated wave of attacks.
Could AI eventually make vulnerability discovery faster? Absolutely.
Could attackers use AI to identify weaknesses that humans missed? That’s a legitimate concern.
But hacks, software vulnerabilities, compromised customer databases, and operational failures existed long before today’s AI systems.
We shouldn’t automatically attribute every security incident to the latest technological threat simply because it’s dominating the news.
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$436 Million in Crypto Positions Liquidated as Bitcoin Drops Below $80K
Saturday brought another round of volatility.
Approximately $436 million in cryptocurrency positions were liquidated over four hours, according to the market figures discussed in today’s episode.
Roughly $404 million involved long positions.
That means the overwhelming majority of those liquidations came from traders betting on prices moving higher.
When Bitcoin fell below $80,000, leveraged positions were forced to close, contributing to additional market pressure.
And this is exactly why I don’t particularly enjoy trading these short-term moves.
You can be directionally correct about Bitcoin over the next six months and still get wiped out because you used too much leverage during one bad afternoon.
I’d rather hold my Bitcoin and let the market work through these fluctuations.
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South Korea May Delay Its Cryptocurrency Capital Gains Tax Again
South Korea is reportedly considering postponing its cryptocurrency capital gains tax for a fourth time.
The proposed delay could push implementation into 2029.
This is another example of how difficult governments are finding it to establish workable tax systems around digital assets.
Regulators want to collect revenue, but they also have to consider how their rules affect domestic exchanges, investors, and the competitiveness of their financial industries.
If one country imposes significantly more complicated or expensive rules than another, businesses and investment activity may move elsewhere.
And that creates a difficult balancing act for governments trying to regulate a global market.
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Crypto Prices
Here’s where the cryptocurrency market stands this morning.
Bitcoin: $80,284, roughly unchanged over 24 hours
Ethereum: $2,330, roughly unchanged
BNB: $740, roughly unchanged
XRP: $1.28, down 0.3%
Solana: $101, up approximately 0.7%
TRON: $0.33, up 0.5%
Zcash: $1,223, up 2.5%
Hyperliquid: $77.07, up 1.5%
Total market cap: $2.68 trillion, roughly unchanged
Fear & Greed Index: 44, Neutral
Bitcoin is also down approximately 2.3% over the past seven days.
So despite all the dramatic headlines, we’re not seeing the kind of market collapse that some people were predicting over the weekend.
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My Take
I think everybody needs to be a little more careful about how they’re consuming financial and cybersecurity news.
Last week, we were talking about Black October, PHP vulnerabilities, AI-assisted hacking, and the possibility of increasingly sophisticated attacks against cryptocurrency infrastructure.
Those are real subjects worth investigating.
But now every security incident seems to be getting pulled into the same narrative.
A hardware wallet company experiences a customer data breach. An exchange has a problem with old deposit addresses. A blockchain discovers a software vulnerability.
Suddenly, social media makes it sound like artificial intelligence has broken the entire financial system.
Maybe some of these incidents will eventually prove connected. But right now, we shouldn’t pretend that connection has been established.
It’s similar to what happens when there’s a major airplane crash.
For the next several weeks, every aviation incident makes the news. It can feel like airplanes are suddenly falling out of the sky every day, even when the underlying rate of incidents hasn’t necessarily changed.
That’s how news cycles work, and social media algorithms amplify the effect.
I’m not saying you should ignore security threats. Quite the opposite.
Update your wallets, protect your private keys, pay attention to legitimate security notices, and understand where your assets are held.
But don’t confuse the volume of frightening headlines with proof that the world is falling apart.
Read reputable reporting. Look at what actually happened. Separate confirmed losses from speculation, and ask whether something represents a new systemic problem or another example of a risk we’ve known about for years.
And when it comes to Bitcoin, I’m still watching the same broader trading range.
We dipped below $80,000. We’re back above it. The market hasn’t given me a reason to panic.
Thanks to AlphaDon for the Spotify comment, and thanks to everybody continuing these conversations.
You can follow the newsletter at DailyCryptoNews.net, and don’t forget to check out Craig Cobb at Market Intern and The Grow Me Co..
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Happy HODLing
The spot Bitcoin ETF flow swing is striking: over $1 billion in from Monday to Wednesday, then about $640 million out Thursday and $140 million out Friday. That reversal within one week fits the messy range around $80,000 better than a clean trend.