Hi! In today’s edition:
🏛️ Washington wants to know who is trading on Hyperliquid
🎭 A fake investor team came for Bitget's CEO days after the $387.5 million hack
🎰 Kalshi pulls the plug on trader payouts a week after wash trading claims
🤖 Robinhood puts 10x leverage and AI agents in one app
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Congress Aims Its Insider Trading Probe at Hyperliquid
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) widened his prediction market insider trading probe on Tuesday, sending document requests to Hyperliquid Labs, Crypto.com and Aristotle Exchange Inc., the owner of PredictIt, CNBC reported.
The letters ask how each platform verifies users and what systems catch trades that may rest on nonpublic information. Comer's letter to Hyperliquid CEO Jeff Yan cited a leveraged short placed within minutes of an October 2025 tariff announcement that was not yet public, and said the platform has "apparently no identity verification."
A trader who shorted Hyperliquid on Oct. 10, 2025 made about $192 million after President Donald Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, sparking speculation about advance knowledge.
Comer opened the probe May 22 with letters to Kalshi and Polymarket, which have since given the committee nearly 1,000 documents and five briefings.
Impostors Pounce on Bitget Days After Its Hack
Bitget CEO Gracy Chen said scammers impersonating a well-known investment firm targeted her on Monday, four days after attackers took about $387.5 million from the exchange.
Chen told Unchained on Tuesday it was "a social engineering towards me." The impostors knew she was seeking outside help after the theft and "formed a team," with each member playing a different role. She caught it by checking with the firm's leader through a separate channel. She did not name the firm.
Her warning to other teams: a request to interview on an unfamiliar livestreaming platform, rather than Google Meet or Zoom, is "highly suspicious."
Chen said Friday the exchange’s hack matched methods used by DPRK-linked hacker groups, but has since said that rested on "preliminary indicators" and "should not be treated as a definitive attribution."
Kalshi Cuts Short Its Trader Payout Program
Kalshi is shutting down its Volume Incentive Program, which paid traders a share of fixed prize pools based on how much they traded, according to a notice filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Monday.
The program now ends no earlier than Oct. 13, 2026, versus Oct. 1, 2027 in its prior terms, nearly a year sooner. The filing gives no reason, citing a rule that lets the exchange end incentive programs at its "sole discretion."
The notice came a week after an analyst known as Beni alleged that exactly $5,500 trades made up about half of volume in Kalshi's ether perpetual on several days. The Wall Street Journal reported the CFTC was examining the trades. Kalshi denies wash trading.
Kalshi's filing does not say whether it plans to replace the program.
Robinhood Pairs Leveraged Perps With AI Trading Agents
Robinhood plans to let eligible U.S. customers trade crypto perpetual futures contracts with no expiry date, with up to 10x leverage, the company said Tuesday.
The perps will run through Bitstamp over the next few months on eight tokens. Bitcoin and ether get the full 10x, while the other six are capped at 3x. Robinhood will charge 0.01% per trade through year-end. CEO Vlad Tenev wrote on X that the company is bringing America "its first true perps," with profit and loss settling every 15 minutes.
Robinhood also unveiled Robinhood Agents, which lets customers build an AI agent that researches markets and trades from a dedicated account, with manual approval of each trade on by default. More than 150,000 customers already have agentic trading accounts. 24/7 trading of select U.S. stocks and ETFs is planned for early next year, pending regulatory review.
🚨ON TODAY’S LIVE STREAMS 🚨
UNEASY MONEY: Bitget's $387.5 million hack has reopened the debate over whether permissionless networks should intervene, with THORChain declining to block attacker addresses.
Uneasy Money digs in with Opsek founder Pablo Sabbatella, then covers Vitalik's 2030 Ethereum vision, AI agents breaking out of sandboxes, and Zcash-style privacy for Bitcoin. Today, Wednesday at 4pm ET.
UNCHAINED: Hunter Biden now says fiat is a sham, the banking class is corrupt and Elizabeth Warren is "so wrong" on crypto.
Laura asks how Biden squares that with the crypto policies of his father’s administration, how he fell down the crypto rabbit hole, and why he decided to launch $LAPTOP. Streams today right after Uneasy Money, around 5:15pm ET.
🪦 Balancer is shutting down after more than 99% of BAL votes approved an orderly wind-down, with payouts estimated at about 16 cents per BAL from a treasury of roughly $9.96 million. Pools move to withdrawals-only on Oct. 30, and the treasury claims window opens in May 2027.
🤖 Bitwise debuted a staking NEAR ETF on NYSE Arca under the ticker NRR, the first spot NEAR exchange-traded product in the U.S. The firm is pitching NEAR as infrastructure for AI agents that pay and trade on users' behalf, and the fund charges a 0.75% fee.
🔮 Polymarket hired Lisa Mantil, a longtime Goldman Sachs partner who ran the bank's ETF accelerator, as head of institutional growth. She will lead work with investment managers, banks and other financial institutions following the May launch of Polymarket's U.S. exchange.
⚖️ The SEC charged four entities over two schemes that used fake WhatsApp investment groups and AI trading pitches to take at least $15 million from hundreds of mostly U.S. retail investors. The defendants allegedly made up profits, posted forged SEC certifications and demanded advance fees before letting victims withdraw.
📈 Standard Chartered forecasts ENA at $2 by the end of 2028, about 7x from the $0.28 reference price in its first report on Ethena's token. The call rests on buybacks: if USDe grows to $40 billion with ENA's price unchanged, buybacks would retire about 23% of tokens a year, a level the bank said "would be far too high."
🔒 Aztec relaunched its zk.money wallet for private stablecoin payments on its Ethereum layer 2, capping transfers at $2,500 with a $50,000 daily deposit limit shared across all users. The original version handled $100 million across more than 75,000 wallets before it shut down in 2023.
🏦 Morgan Stanley opened a Digital Asset Lab to test DeFi vaults, stablecoins and tokenized funds separately from its core systems. Digital-asset lead Amy Oldenburg said DeFi vaults are still too nascent to put the rest of the platform at risk.
📈 Cboe and S&P Dow Jones Indices extended their licensing deal for S&P 500 Index options through 2051 and said they may work together on tokenized options contracts. They did not announce a specific product or timeline.
🇧🇷 CSD BR began mirroring fund shares on the XRP Ledger with Ripple, starting with BTG Pactual investment funds. The Brazilian operator oversees more than BRL 22 trillion (about $4 trillion) in registered assets, and its own systems remain the official record.
🇸🇻 El Salvador launched Sivar, a remittance app built with Modveon and Coinbase that charges a flat $2 per transfer and settles in stablecoins on Base. The country received about $9 billion in remittances last year, roughly 92% of it from the U.S.
💰 Kalshi is in advanced talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation of roughly $40 billion, with Tiger Global and Dragoneer among the possible investors. The prediction market raised $1 billion at a $22 billion valuation in May.
💸 Jeeves raised $110 million in an equity round led by CoinFund, with a16z, Coinbase Ventures and AllianceBernstein participating, to grow its stablecoin-native banking platform for enterprises. The company also launched a stablecoin wallet with payouts to 190 countries and expanded its stablecoin card to 35 countries.
🔮 Raven closed a strategic round with Coinbase Ventures and CMCC Global at a $90 million pre-money valuation, without disclosing how much it raised. The trading firm has moved into market-making for prediction markets and has quoted more than 3,000 contracts.
🔒 Project Eleven acquired Riva Labs, bringing on its team and its post-quantum wallet, hardware signer and MPC technology. The companies did not disclose terms.
Omid Malekan: Al Agents Will Not Cause Bank Runs. Progress Will.
Shayon Sengupta: The Read Layer for Machine Intelligence
