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Here’s what we’re getting into this week:

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Big changes in crypto security historically come after the damage was already done. It’s usually something like everyone studying the catastrophe but the new reality along with the new list of rules would have to be adopted by whoever still has money left.

This time, some in the community want to move before it’s too late 🫡

The phrase making the rounds is “bunker mode” - it sounds like you’re supposed to unplug the internet and bury your hardware wallet under a tree somewhere, but the idea is actually very different: you protect your wallet by rotating your funds to fresh addresses that have never signed a transaction, each time, then avoid spending from those addresses unless necessary 🤓

It’s just a scary possibility for now. There is currently no proof that AI can break ECDSA, the signature system used by Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets. Nobody has demonstrated an attack and no wallets are being cracked this way today. Drake himself told people not to rush ⌛

Vitalik Buterin supported taking the risk seriously but warned against scrambling. He said he has personally lost more through failed migrations than through hacks 🤔

Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet said that avoiding address reuse makes sense while a hurried mass migration could destroy more money than the threat it is meant to stop.

Others think the warning itself is far too dramatic. Coinbase cryptography head Yehuda Lindell called it a “really bad take” and said there is no evidence that elliptic curve cryptography is close to breaking. Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist argued that hiding public keys would offer little comfort if the entire market lost faith in the security below it 🔒

Dragonfly’s Haseeb Qureshi called bunker mode a sober response to an uncertain but potentially enormous risk. That is roughly where much of the community has landed. The proposed timeline may sound like fearmongering, but using fresh addresses is cheap insurance 🤷‍♂

It also has benefits even if the AI warning turns out to be completely wrong 🤖

Obfuscation is useful. Compartmentalization is useful. Practicing a wallet migration before an emergency is useful. And none of that requires believing Claude is about to wake up tomorrow morning and start emptying dormant wallets 😐

Solana, meanwhile, saw a serious industry wide security discussion and decided it was time for another victory lap over technology that does not exist yet 🙄

Anatoly Yakovenko dismissed much of the panic as fear caused by smart people being unable to predict the future, then encouraged developers to ship protection against that future.

If you honestly think about it, the community really doesn’t need to choose between panic and doing nothing. Nobody has to move every coin tonight. People can stop reusing addresses, check their backups, separate long term holdings and learn how they would migrate if a real warning arrived 🙃

Bunker mode is really an argument for less exposed public data and no single custodian holding everybody’s escape route. If that sounds overly cautious, good. Caution is much cheaper before the emergency.

The ICO era left behind a long list of celebrities that nobody expected to see near a serious financial product again. Apparently that list never reached Circle’s marketing department 🤓

The official USDC account posted a photo of DJ Khaled wearing a Chelsea shirt with Circle’s stablecoin across the front. The caption was “Another one.” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire then welcomed him to “team USDC” 🫥

Crypto Twitter immediately remembered the other one 👇

In 2017, Khaled promoted Centra Tech to his 12 million Instagram followers. He called its debit card an “ultimate winner” and told people to buy CTR coins.

What he did not tell them was that Centra had paid him $50,000 💰

The SEC later charged Khaled for promoting the token without disclosing the payment. He returned the $50,000, paid a $100,000 penalty plus interest and accepted a two year ban on paid securities promotions.

Khaled was not charged with building Centra’s scam. His offense was hiding the fact that he had been paid to advertise it. It’s important to distinguish those, although it does not make his judgment look much better 🤦‍♂

Centra was not a project that failed after trying something difficult. Its founders falsely claimed relationships with Visa and Mastercard. They created a fictional Harvard educated CEO named Michael Edwards and used stock photos to give the company an experienced looking management team. Overall, a blatant obvious scam 😶

The ICO raised more than $25 million. Several founders later pleaded guilty and the story eventually became the Netflix documentary Bitconned 📺

Some users asked why Circle would connect USDC to anyone with that history. Others joked that Kim Kardashian should be next (she also settled with the SEC after failing to disclose payment for a token promotion) 🤡

There is one fair detail here. Circle has not announced a formal partnership or said it paid Khaled. The photo appears to have come through Chelsea, whose shirt carries the USDC brand, alongside a separate promotion involving Khaled and Roc Nation.

But Circle’s official account posted him and its CEO welcomed him. Nobody forced either of them to turn a football appearance into a public return to crypto.

Circle has worked hard to present USDC as the “Safe regulated side of stablecoins. A public company selling trust to banks, businesses and politicians” - and that should make the history check more important.. but nope 🥱

Anyone inside the community could have warned them within ten seconds. Search his name with “crypto” and Centra appears immediately. The problem was either that nobody checked or that somebody checked and decided the audience was worth more than the baggage 👜

It’s safe to say that 99% of the NFT projects from the famous NFT pump era struggled to survive after people stopped paying stupid money for jpegs. Pudgy Penguins wasn’t really one of those 🐧

The collection became a big brand, kind of like how a successful franchise does after it becomes a hit. Its toys reached major stores, the characters found an audience outside crypto and its community stayed active while most competing projects were mostly abandoned 🖼

That success encouraged Igloo, the company behind Pudgy Penguins, to try different stuff. One of those was launching Abstract, an Ethereum layer 2 built around consumer apps and entertainment, hoping the penguins’ audience and brand partners would give the network a head start ⚡

Abstract launched in January 2025. Users liked it initially and companies got involved. The business needed to support the chain never appeared, though 💸

After funding Abstract for 18 months Igloo is shutting the network down on December 15th.

Igloo CEO Luca Netz said the company funded Abstract for 18 months and lost tens of millions of dollars across two years of building consumer products. It hired what he called an all star team and brought in major brands, but never found enough demand to justify the cost 🤕

The chain struggled with getting DeFi interest and got almost no interest from larger financial players. Consumer apps may have been willing to launch there, but money did not follow them in sufficient volume 🤷‍♂

Igloo said it will return its attention back to Pudgy Penguin NFTs and PENGU tokens.

Igloo also decided against launching another token to fund another attempt - and that honestly deserves some credit.

The easy way would have been to sell the community a governance token, extend the runway and let holders discover later that “consumer crypto” still had no real consumers willing to pay for it. NFT companies have definitely made stranger decisions 🫠

Privacy should not require an explanation. Nobody wants strangers reading their bank history every time they pay for something, yet public wallets expose balances and past activity by default 🤷‍♂

That is EXACTLY why we love RAILGUN 🔫

It uses zero knowledge proofs to hide details such as the sender, recipient, token and amount while still letting people use apps on existing EVM chains. Privacy becomes something useful inside DeFi rather than a separate corner people have to disappear into.

Ambire dev Jordan Enev recently shared a look at what the teams have been working on 👇

RAILGUN is being built directly into Ambire through Kohaku. That means private transfers without a separate setup. The same wallet people already use will simply gain a private way to send funds 🛩

This is exactly how privacy reaches more people: put it where they already are and make it easy enough to use every day.

Europe is not a market that companies usually walk away from. A market worth around €34 trillion and a region that gives financial companies access to hundreds of millions of relatively wealthy customers under one set of rules 🧐

Tether is letting USDT get pushed out of that market anyway..

European regulators have now closed the remaining loopholes around stablecoins that never received approval under MiCA. Licensed exchanges and other regulated services must stop letting customers buy, trade or increase their exposure to those tokens. Existing positions can remain available briefly for selling, conversion or withdrawal, but they must be dealt with by January 8, 2027.

USDT is the biggest token affected 🪙

And Tether knew what was required but chose not to apply.

That decision looks almost insane from a distance. Why would the largest stablecoin company give Circle and every smaller European issuer a free run at one of the richest financial markets in the world?

The answer begins with how Tether makes money 👇

Paolo Ardoino argues that the bank deposit requirement could also make stablecoins less safe. Banks do not leave every deposited euro sitting untouched. If holders rushed to redeem billions of USDT, Tether might not be able to retrieve those deposits quickly enough.

He has a point. European central banks recently asked for the same requirement to be changed because they are also worried that large stablecoin deposits could enter and leave banks too quickly 🏃

Tether still decided that waiting for a better rule was not worth changing USDT in the meantime. The token is too large, too profitable and too deeply tied to US government debt for Europe to dictate a new reserve setup.

Its global users have not punished that decision. Yet.

USDT has continued growing while access disappeared from European exchanges. Daily activity on Tron and BNB Chain increased strongly through the MiCA rollout, driven mainly by payments and transfers in regions where ordinary dollar banking is expensive or difficult to access. Researchers found no clear fall in global USDT demand connected to the European restrictions.

Also, Tether has not entirely abandoned Europe 👇

USDT stays outside. Tether’s money still gets inside. Though of course, these coins are not going to have the same weight as USDT did.

At the same time, the company is tying itself much closer to the United States:

Those ties are now attracting attention from American politicians. Senator Richard Blumenthal is demanding information about Cantor’s relationship with Tether, including how much the firm earns from holding its reserves and what it has done about USDT use in sanctioned financial networks 💵

All of that does show how much of the company’s future now depends on American debt, American banks, American regulation and people who recently worked inside Trump’s government.

Tether has simply decided which politicians are better for business.

That makes the European decision look less like a principled stand and more like a calculated bet. Washington lets Tether keep the reserve model that earns it billions. Europe wants the company to tear that model apart before USDT can enter its regulated market 💲

Tether chose the billions.

Is giving up direct access to Europe worth it? In short term for Tether - probably yes. USDT remains dominant, global demand is still growing and Tether can still make some money in Europe through companies willing to follow MiCA 📔

But for the longer term:

Other countries are also watching. If Europe can remove USDT from licensed platforms without hurting its local market, more regulators may decide that Tether is not as impossible to replace as its size suggests 👋

“Keys to winning in a bull market” - Doc:

Some alpha from 0xGeeGee:

The “Famous 4chan prophecy” placed the bottom at last Sunday on Oct. 4th (but let’s see where this actually goes):

That’s it for this week, frens.

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That’s us for this week. Take care of yourselves, don’t let one bad call ruin your weekend. We’ll be back next Friday.

Yours, The 🔥 Team

_{W3oF is brought to you by Ambire Wallet.}