On Polymarket, the odds of Donald Trump reclaiming the U.S. presidency by defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in next month's election surged to as high as 13% on Thursday.
While it's not completely clear what exactly spurred the increased confidence in Trump's chances, a mystery trader on the decentralized prediction platform with the call sign Fredi9999 has recently purchased millions of shares, wagering the real estate tycoon-turned-president will beat Harris.
Earlier this week, Fredi9999 owned about 7 million shares in favor of Trump winning, according to Benzinga. Now, the trader owns nearly 11 million shares, according to Polymarket data. In just the last hour, Fredi9999 bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of shares, wagering that Trump would win, according to the platform's data.
The total volume on the wager over who will win between Trump and Harris has so far surpassed $1.6 billion. In 2020, the presidential election generated just under $11 million in wagers on Polymarket.

Snapshot of Polymarket bets on winner of U.S. presidential election. Image: Polymarket
Trump lead widens since Musk proclamation
At the beginning of this week, Trump's lead was considerably less when Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to X to say Polymarket was more accurate than polls. At the time, Trump's odd had risen to 50.6%, compared to Harris' 48.4%. 
In September, the decentralized prediction platform saw record highs in the monthly categories for trading volume, active traders, new markets and cumulative trading, according to The Block Data Dashboard. Polymarket has raised $45 million in a Series B funding round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and existing investors 1confirmation and ParaFi, with participation from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Dragonfly and Eventbrite’s co-founder Kevin Hartz.
Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.

Although the Bitcoin price faces challenges in breaking out significantly from its support level of $60,000, recent on-chain data reveals a fascinating shift in sentiment among Bitcoin enthusiasts. Despite the ongoing price corrections, it appears that long-term holders remain undeterred. In fact, about 15,917 BTC, valued at approximately $987 million, has been withdrawn from various cryptocurrency exchanges over the past week.
Bitcoin Exits Crypto Exchanges In Droves
According to a previous report by NewsBTC, Bitcoin’s recent dip to $60,000 can largely be attributed to the actions of short-term holders. On-chain data reveals that this particular group of traders decided to exit their positions after Bitcoin’s performance failed to meet expectations in early October, further intensifying the selling pressure. However, long-term holders have taken full advantage of this increased selling pressure. Rather than follow the short-term market sentiment, many long-term investors seized the opportunity to add more Bitcoin to their portfolios.
As data would have it, long-term holders seem to have capitalized on the selling pressure, with many of them taking the opportunity to add to their holdings. According to on-chain data highlighted by crypto analyst Ali Martinez, the Bitcoin reserves on cryptocurrency exchanges have been in a steady decline since October 3. On that day, the total Bitcoin balance across exchanges stood at 2.5825 million BTC. What’s notable is that this figure was a result of several consecutive days of BTC inflows to exchanges, beginning on September 28 and continuing until October 3. During this time, the price of Bitcoin fell from $66,230 to $60,047, marking a decrease of about 9.3% as many traders sold on exchanges.
However, in an interesting turn of events, long-term holders have seen this influx of BTC into exchanges as an opportunity to acquire more tokens. As a result, there has been a consistent decline in the total Bitcoin balance on exchanges since October 3. Numbers show that 15,917 BTC were withdrawn from exchanges between October 3 and the time of writing, bringing the total Bitcoin exchange reserve to about 2.5667 million BTC.
What Does This Mean For Bitcoin?
The outflow of BTC from exchanges is generally seen as positive for the cryptocurrency’s price moving forward, as it reduces the amount of BTC available for sale. During this outflow period, Bitcoin retested the $64,000 price level on October 7. However, it has since reversed and is approaching the $60,000 price floor again.
As of the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $60,912, marking a 2.1% decline over the past 24 hours. This dip shows the importance of long-term holders and bullish investors continuing to accumulate BTC from exchanges. The onus now is on long-term holders to keep accumulating Bitcoin from exchanges in order to help prevent further price declines.

Tesla has been teasing its upcoming “We, Robot” event as a big reveal, but it’s unclear exactly what the company intends to showcase at the Oct. 10 event in Hollywood, California.
According to nearly all reports, CEO and billionaire technology mogul Elon Musk is expected to unveil a fully autonomous “robotaxi” vehicle. Rumors indicate that the vehicle will be a three-wheeled coupe or a minivan manufactured without a steering wheel, pedals, or any other method of traditional manual control. 
Other pundits have speculated that Tesla will release a new model (perhaps a replacement for the defunct Model 3) or an update on the long-awaited Tesla Roadster. And, of course, based on the title, “We, Robot,” many are predicting that Optimus, the company’s humanoid robot prototype, will make an appearance as well. 
The future of autonomy
On the event’s website, however, the only official indication of what’s planned is a now fully booked invitation to “watch a livestream of our We, Robot event where you’ll see the unveiling of the future of autonomy.” 
The future of autonomy may be an upgrade to the company’s Smart Summon feature:
“Experience Full Self-Driving (Supervised), featuring our latest innovation: Actually Smart Summon.”
Musk has promised to deliver fully autonomous vehicles since at least 2014, often claiming that Tesla was within a matter of months or that the first models would ship within the next year.
Time and again Musk’s self-imposed deadlines have come and gone with no indication that the technology has progressed beyond the current state-of-the-art. 
Fully autonomous
The discourse surrounding Tesla’s progress in the field of autonomous vehicles centers around two key ideas. Firstly, the company has so far committed to what’s called a “vision-only approach.”
One of Musk’s key selling points for the company’s current driver assistance software packages has been that every Tesla vehicle the company ships has all the hardware it will need to become “fully autonomous.” 
To accomplish this, Tesla needs to crack fully autonomous driving using nothing more than the cameras currently installed in all of its production model vehicles. In contrast, competitors in the field of fully autonomous vehicles, such as Waymo, use a combination of cameras and other sensors including LIDAR. 
The second focal point when it comes to Tesla’s promises concerning fully autonomous vehicles is what’s called the “edge cases problem.” It’s widely agreed that Tesla and other organizations working on vehicle autonomy have solved somewhere between 90 and 99% of the challenges associated with getting a car to drive itself as safely as a competent human driver. 
Where autonomous cars fail, however, are in the types of situations that the engineers designing the vehicles can’t always prepare for. When these vehicles encounter an edge case, such as an unexpected obstacle or inclement weather, their behavior can become unpredictable. 
Current driver assistance systems, such as Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving software, are meant to be used with human intervention available.
When analysts measure the efficacy of a given autonomous driving system, they’ll often refer to the number of times humans had to intervene to avoid an unsafe situation or get the computer driver unstuck from a situation it can’t figure out.
Interventions and prototypes
Analysts watching the Oct. 10 event will be waiting not only to see if Tesla unveils an autonomous vehicle, but if Musk or a company representative discusses how many miles per intervention the vehicles can go in terrain they haven’t been explicitly trained on. 
Ultimately, however, it’s possible they’ll provide only a demonstration of an advanced version of the company’s current Summon feature.
While this could be a treat for Tesla owners or those considering a purchase, it might leave investors and shareholders feeling underwhelmed. It might take more than updates to current systems and the specter of another future-facing prototype with robotaxis and full autonomy is still just around the corner.
Analysts such as Cathy Wood, founder of ARK Invest, have predicted that autonomous vehicles will make Tesla trillions of dollars in revenue. However, the company may need to demonstrate real progress in the autonomous vehicle arena in order to shore up those expectations. 

Uniswap, the most popular decentralized exchange (DEX), has launched its own application-specific layer-2 blockchain network, Unichain, developer Uniswap Labs announced on Oct. 10. 
The app chain, which is still on testnet, promises to deliver faster and cheaper transactions and enhanced interoperability across blockchain networks, Uniswap said.
“Unichain will deliver the speed and cost savings already enabled by L2s, but with better access to liquidity across chains and more decentralization,” Hayden Adams, Uniswap Labs’ CEO, said in a statement. 
As of Oct. 10, Uniswap commands nearly $5 billion in total value locked (TVL) across some 25 blockchain networks, based on industry statistics.
Unichain is part of Optimism’s Superchain, an interoperable network of layer-2 scaling solutions built using Optimism’s technology stack.
Other superchain networks include Coinbase layer-2 Base and SNAXchain, which governs Synthetix’s decentralized perpetual exchange. 
According to Uniswap Labs, Unichain will initially feature 1 second block times. It eventually plans to cut block times to less than 250 milliseconds. 
“This will feel like a near-instant transaction experience for the user,” according to Uniswap Labs.
Unichain will enable traders to access liquidity from other layer-2 networks in Optimism’s superchain. 
Superchain networks Base and Optimism host approximately $2.25 billion and $625 million in TVL respectively, according to DefiLlama data.
In partnership with cross-chain bridging protocol Across, Uniswap Labs has also proposed an upgrade to the Ethereum network designed to synchronize cross-chain messaging across all its layer-2s. 
The proposal — dubbed ERC 7683 — aims to standardize messages known as “intents” across blockchain networks.
Unichain is also working with Flashbots to integrate Rollup Boost, a modular block-building platform designed to be gradually extended with open-sourced “plug-ins.”
Rollup Boost extensions currently include 250-millisecond blocks and “verifiable priority ordering,” enabling applications to internalize Maximum Extractable Value (MEV).
Flashbots specializes in protecting users from the harmful aspects of MEV or ordering blocks to profit block builders at traders’ expense. 

Ripple Labs will file a cross-appeal in its ongoing case against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company announced Thursday, as part of an effort to maintain its legal defenses as the SEC's own appeal in the case winds its way through an appeals court.
The SEC filed a notice of appeal earlier this month in its long-running case against Ripple, which the regulator first sued in December 2020. Ripple's cross-appeal is intended to ensure that the company preserves its points and arguments in the case, Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty told CoinDesk, though he did not go into detail on what the company may argue in its motion.
"We're really doing that to make sure that we leave nothing on the table, including the argument that there cannot be an investment contract without there being the essential rights and obligations found in a contract," he said.
District Judge Analisa Torres ruled in July 2023 that Ripple's programmatic sales of XRP to exchanges, which in turn sold the token to retail customers, did not violate federal securities laws. Under her ruling, XRP is not deemed to be a security.
Like the SEC's filing last week, Ripple's initial filing is just a notice that it will submit a more comprehensive argument in the future. Alderoty said the two parties would have to fill out a form in the coming weeks laying out "a fairly high level description" of their arguments, but neither the regulator nor the company would get into the specifics until their opening briefs are filed.
The SEC's brief may come near the end of January, while Ripple's opening brief – which would be combined with its opposition to the SEC's brief – would come sometime after that, he said.
"I don't think that folks who are paying attention should be much distracted by these efforts to create confusion, because I think the judge got it right, and I think they should welcome the opportunity for the court of appeals to roll on this issue and finally, bring the clarity that we need," Alderoty said about the appeals court taking up the case – though, he added, the U.S. "really needs a policy solution" from legislators rather than court rulings.
"Short of that, and while we don't have one, it's going to be up to the courts, and we're willing to continue to fight that fight and collect victories and bring clarity to the industry through the litigation process," he said.

Satoshi Nakamoto is the mythical founder of the world's first and largest cryptocurrency and network, Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), which now has a market cap of over $1.25 trillion.
Of course, no one knows Nakamoto's true identity. This could be a single person or a group of people. Either way, the identity remains a successfully guarded secret.
However, there have been many guesses over the years, and HBO has a new Bitcoin documentary premiering this week that claims to have discovered who Nakamoto is. Regardless, one thing is certain: Nakamoto owns a boatload of Bitcoin, which he or she supposedly mined in the early days of the network. The amount of Bitcoin tokens Nakamoto owns will truly blow your mind. Let's take a look.
Nakamoto is one of the richest people in the world
That's right, the number of Bitcoins owned by Nakamoto makes him one of the richest people in the world. It's a pure paper profit, of course, until the Bitcoin holdings are converted into traditional fiat currencies. Still, there's no denying that Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin-based wealth is impressive.
Now, you might wonder how people can know how much Bitcoin Nakamoto owns if the world doesn't even truly know the founder's identity. That's made possible by the decentralized Bitcoin network and its ledger containing all Bitcoin addresses that can't be altered.
While it's impossible to know just how many addresses Nakamoto owns, several have been traced back to Nakamoto, including the first-ever address, which received an award of 50 Bitcoin by mining the first-ever block. It is referred to as the "genesis block." Estimates suggest that Nakamoto owns 600,000 to 1.1 million Bitcoin tokens. Based on Bitcoin's current price of roughly $63,100 (as of Oct. 8), that's a total value of $37.86 billion to $69.4 billion.
That would potentially make Nakamoto one of the 30 richest people in the world if he owns 1.1 million Bitcoins, and it's certainly possible Nakamoto owns more.

Here are a few other large whale holders of Bitcoin:
Roger Ver ("Bitcoin Jesus") -- 131,000 Bitcoins ($8.27 billion).Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss -- about 70,000 Bitcoins ($4.42 billion).Tim Draper -- 29,656 Bitcoins ($1.87 billion).Michael Saylor (personal holdings) -- 17,000 Bitcoins ($1.07 billion).

Long-term investors
Bitcoin launched as a very speculative investment. The cryptocurrency has also been an extraordinarily lucrative investment since its launch in 2009.

Bitcoin Price Chart
Say what you will about Bitcoin, but the largest investors have been longtime holders. None of Nakamoto's suspected wallets have ever sold or moved Bitcoin. And longtime enthusiasts remain convinced that it will gain more value over time. Large Bitcoin holders like Draper have predicted that Bitcoin could hit $250,000 over the next few years. Saylor has said he thinks Bitcoin will hit $13 million over the next two decades.
I certainly have no price target for Bitcoin, but I do believe it's a compelling investment due to its finite supply of 21 million tokens. Investors have viewed Bitcoin as a hedge against inflation and essentially a form of "digital gold." Additionally, spot-traded exchange-traded funds have also helped make Bitcoin more liquid and mainstream. The new class of digital assets is building a toolbox of traditional finance systems.
All things considered, Bitcoin has hung in pretty well in the face of intense interest rate hikes and a strengthening dollar over the last few years. At some point, perception becomes reality. I think Bitcoin has real staying power at this point and that investors can certainly have some exposure to Bitcoin in their portfolios.

FET has experienced a 5% decline over the past week and now faces further downward pressure as dormant token holders reactivate and move their coins.
With bearish sentiment prevailing and insufficient demand to absorb the increased supply, FET’s price is likely to continue its downward trend.
Old FET Tokens Back in Circulation
During the intraday trading session on Wednesday, FET recorded a significant surge in its age consumed. The metric, which tracks the movement of long-held coins, surged by over 600% in a single day, reaching 1.33 billion — its highest since September 13. 
When an asset’s age consumed spikes, it indicates that many previously inactive coins or tokens have recently been moved or traded. These spikes are often noteworthy because long-term holders rarely move their assets. Therefore, when they happen, they are often a precursor to a change in market dynamics. 

Generally, when dormant coins re-enter circulation, it indicates renewed activity from long-term holders. However, the market must show strong demand for this to translate into positive growth for an asset’s price. 
In FET’s case, this is lacking as market sentiment toward the altcoin remains bearish. Hence, these previously stagnant coins have re-entered the market during a period of weak demand, adding to the downward pressure that the altcoin already faces. 
Currently, FET’s price sits below its 20-day exponential moving average (EMA) and 50-day small moving average (SMA), confirming the weakening demand. The 20-day EMA measures its average close price over the last 20 trading days, while the 50-day SMA is a longer-term indicator that tracks the asset’s average closing price over the past 50 days.

When an asset’s price trades below these key moving averages, selling pressure outweighs buying activity. Traders interpret this setup as a signal for further downward movement. 
FET Price Prediction: Token May Revisit Two-Month Low
Readings from FET’s moving average convergence/divergence (MACD) indicator show that its MACD line (blue) is below its signal line (orange) and is poised to breach its zero line. When this indicator, which tracks an asset’s trend direction and potential price reversal points, is set up this way, buying pressure is weakening, and a sustained price decline is likely.
If FET continues to witness a decrease in demand, its price may fall to a two-month low of $0.70. 

However, if market sentiment shifts from bearish to bullish, FET’s price may initiate an uptrend and rally toward $2.09.

Yala, a crypto startup developing a bitcoin-backed stablecoin, has raised $8 million in a seed funding round co-led by Polychain Capital and Ethereal Ventures.
Other investors in the round included Galaxy Vision Hill, Anagram, ABCDE, Amber Group, HashKey Capital, Satoshi Lab and UTXO Management, Yala said Thursday. This was an oversubscribed seed round, Yala co-founder and COO Kaitai Chang told The Block, adding that the firm initially aimed to raise $5 million.
Yala began raising capital for the seed round in March and closed it last month, Chang said. He added that the round was structured as a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) with token warrants but declined to comment on Yala's valuation.
Yala was founded in January of this year by Chang, a former Binance Labs employee; Bin Liu, who also co-founded Alchemy Pay; and Vicky Fu, a former director of engineering at Circle. The trio aims to advance the development and expansion of decentralized finance on Bitcoin.
What is Yala?
Yala is developing a bitcoin-backed, yield-earning stablecoin called YU. Users will soon be able to mint YU by depositing bitcoin onto any destination blockchain through MetaMint. "MetaMint is a cross-chain protocol allowing for the instant conversion of native BTC into stablecoins on EVM-compatible chains, thus eliminating the need for intermediate wrapping and simplifying user experience," Chang said.
Yala claimed that investors have already committed over 2,000 BTC (currently worth around $126 million) in deposits for its protocol. While Yala currently accepts BTC as collateral, Chang said the protocol plans to also accept Bitcoin liquid staking tokens in the future.
Yala is also adding an insurance feature to its protocol to address challenges such as Bitcoin's 10-minute block production time, Chang explained. He said the addition safeguards users from liquidation caused by bitcoin price volatility or high-risk activities like restaking.
"The insurance module, Takaful, represents Yala's innovative approach to DeFi on Bitcoin, creating a cooperative framework where participants, insurers and shareholders collectively manage risks and benefits," Chang said. "It details insurers' roles in fund management, contract formulation and governance, incorporating 'qard hasan' loans [interest-free, based on Islamic ethics] as a fallback for insufficient funds, thereby ensuring a resilient, compliant and community-driven financial environment."
Yala's launch schedule
The Yala protocol is currently under development, with the testnet expected to launch this month and the mainnet in the first quarter of next year, Chang said.
YALA, the protocol's governance token, is also expected to launch alongside the mainnet.
Currently, 23 people work remotely for Yala across the globe, Chang said, adding that he plans to expand the team across functions such as business development, engineering and marketing.
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Disclaimer: The Block is an independent media outlet that delivers news, research, and data. As of November 2023, Foresight Ventures is a majority investor of The Block. Foresight Ventures invests in other companies in the crypto space. Crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. The Block continues to operate independently to deliver objective, impactful, and timely information about the crypto industry. Here are our current financial disclosures.