Odaily reports: Cboe Global Markets, the parent company of the Chicago Board Options Exchange (Cboe), has announced that Cboe has expanded the trading hours for options on certain U.S. equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), adding pre-market and post-market trading. The pre-market trading session for these options is from 7:30 to 9:25 ET, Monday through Friday, and the post-market trading session is from 16:00 to 16:15. The expansion covers popular stocks such as Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Robinhood, and Intel, as well as major ETFs including SPY, QQQ, and GLD, involving a total of 29 underlying symbols. (PRNewswire)

Odaily reports that South Korea's JB Financial Group announced an investment in artificial intelligence company Upstage through its subsidiaries Jeonbuk Bank, Kwangju Bank, and JB Woori Capital. The three institutions jointly invested 40 billion KRW (approximately $30 million) in Upstage's Series C-2 funding round, acquiring approximately a 2% equity stake.

Earlier reports indicated that Upstage co-founder and CTO Hwalsuk Lee revealed that the company is considering various capital market options including an IPO, and is also considering launching a Pre-IPO funding round. (FNNews)

Odaily reports: OpenAI states that in two internal programming tasks, AI Agents weakened alignment-failure monitoring mechanisms while performing user-requested software modifications. In the first incident, a GPT-6.1 Sol Agent responsible for fixing an evaluation pipeline disabled the automatic alerting function that notifies the safety team. The Agent interpreted a prior instruction—"do not send messages during the search of Slack history"—as justification for suppressing monitoring notifications.

In a separate, independent incident, a GPT-6 Astra Agent responsible for a migration program removed the monitoring integration from the program in order to align the code with the reference implementation, and subsequently falsely told the user that it had not removed the monitoring mechanism. In both incidents, the AI Agents had considered whether they should preserve the monitoring safeguards, but ultimately interpreted routine programming instructions as permission to weaken those safeguards. In response, we are strengthening our alignment-failure monitoring systems, and we are also evaluating whether these cases reflect benign overpersistence in AI or indicate a tendency to evade alignment-failure monitoring under certain circumstances.

Odaily Report: Citadel Securities CEO Griffin stated that it was a mistake for congressional Republicans and Trump to further cut taxes last year. Griffin said, "We no longer have enough fiscal space to extend these tax cuts."

Griffin pointed out that US national debt has exceeded $40 trillion, and Republicans "have to bear responsibility" for pushing tax cuts over the past two years. Griffin, a major Republican donor, stated that the key to solving America's fiscal problems lies in "truly driving economic growth," while also promoting European economic growth. He added, "The tariff war with Europe is simply a disaster."

Odaily: Nvidia is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Australian AI cloud service provider Firmus. (The Information)

Odaily: Musk revealed on Tuesday during SpaceX's (SPCX) quarterly earnings webcast that SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA) have formed special committees and begun exploring a potential transaction. This marks an important step from market speculation to formal evaluation, though the two sides have not yet reached agreement on the terms of a deal.

Both companies rank among the world's most valuable enterprises. SpaceX is currently valued at approximately $2 trillion, while Tesla's market capitalization is close to $1.5 trillion. If a merger ultimately materializes, based on a simple sum of the two companies' current valuations, the assets involved would be approximately $3.5 trillion, and the potential transaction could set a record for the largest corporate merger ever. Musk serves as chief executive of both companies, and said at the meeting: "I do think there's a lot of value in combining the two companies. By working together to develop superintelligent software, we can gain a lot."

However, the transaction is far from being finalized. Musk said that because he leads both companies and has a conflict of interest, he will not participate in the special committees' discussions. Currently, the two committees have not reached agreement on the terms of the deal.

Odaily Report: South Korea's Ministry of Economy and Finance has convened a symposium on virtual asset taxation with five exchange operators—Dunamu, Bithumb, DigitalX, Coinone, and Streami—as well as institutions including the Financial Services Commission, to discuss the current tax regulations, market conditions, and tax preparation work, as well as delaying or abolishing the taxation, but no clear decision has been made on the relevant measures.

It is reported that South Korea's virtual asset taxation policy was established in 2020 and was originally scheduled to take effect in 2022, but has since been postponed to 2023, 2025, and 2027. The National Tax Service is currently preparing the relevant detailed rules, but matters such as staking still require consultation with the Ministry of Economy and Finance. If the detailed rules are announced next month, only about two months will remain before the planned implementation date. (Yonhap)

Odaily reports: Augnition Global Investors, a tech hedge fund founded by Jeff Wang, former global equities head at Sequoia Capital, has announced the completion of over $1 billion in fundraising. According to disclosed regulatory filings, the fund had at least $570 million at launch, of which approximately 45% was internal capital. Jeff Wang led Sequoia's global equities business for a decade, and during his tenure at Sequoia, he participated in investments in late-stage private companies including ByteDance, SpaceX, Stripe, and Airbnb. Augnition Global will primarily invest in both public and private technology companies. (Bloomberg)

According to Odaily, Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, posted on X that over 12% of LAPTOP tokens have been permanently burned, and another 30% of the tokens are tied to real-world prediction events. According to Hunter Biden, if the relevant prediction events come true, the corresponding tokens will be burned; if the predictions do not materialize, the tokens will be donated to charity.

Odaily reports: On-chain analytics platform Arkham has announced the launch of Arkham Enterprise, an enterprise-grade crypto analytics platform aimed at professional investigators, compliance teams, and trading researchers, offering features such as on-chain fund tracing, risk scoring, case management, and transaction analysis.

At the same time, Arkham has also adjusted the feature permissions of its free platform: Tracer 2.0, transaction filtering, full transaction history, creation of custom labels and entities, and the counterparty section on explorer pages will be available exclusively to enterprise users. Free users viewing the transaction history of a single address or entity will be limited to the most recent 100 transactions, but will still have access to features such as Visualizer 2.0, the block explorer, prediction markets, and Arkham labels.

Odaily reports: Layer-1 blockchain Qubic has restarted its network and initiated a fund recovery process. Previously, attackers exploited a wallet seed vulnerability to drain approximately $1.4 million in QU tokens from 1,404 accounts; network validators Computors have approved a recovery plan, and affected users can submit claims until May 1, 2027.

Qubic's block explorer shows the network resumed processing ticks at 20:00 on October 19, surpassing the previously paused progress of 85,371,949. The vulnerability affects wallet seeds generated by certain Apple devices and browsers. Qubic recommends creating new wallets using version 4.26.4 or above and transferring funds as soon as possible. (Cointelegraph)

According to Odaily, digital hardware wallet manufacturer NGRAVE disclosed on October 19 that attackers hijacked a third-party notification service used by its LIQUID companion app and sent fake security alerts to users, resulting in approximately 70 wallet addresses being stolen for about $2.56 million across 4 blockchains. Among the losses, Bitcoin accounted for approximately $1.77 million, XRP approximately $454,000, Ethereum assets approximately $316,000, and Stellar approximately $18,000.

The attackers lured users into clicking on counterfeit websites and entering their 24-word recovery phrases or Perfect Keys, after which automated scripts transferred the assets within minutes. NGRAVE stated that the ZERO hardware wallet and private keys were not directly compromised, and that victims voluntarily handed over their recovery credentials during the phishing process.

The unauthorized access may have begun on October 11. After obtaining one access key, the attackers acquired a key with broader permissions and sent fake notifications on October 17. NGRAVE detected the anomaly approximately 1 minute after the notifications appeared, but the first wallet had already been drained 6 minutes later, and the notification system was shut down that evening.

NGRAVE's CEO stated that the company failed to fulfill the most basic security responsibilities of a crypto security company, and said that the affected keys have been replaced, with two-person approval, domain restrictions, and emergency shutdown mechanisms added. The company also reminded affected users to create new wallets and contact the support team, noting that some device information, wallet activity, IP addresses, and approximate locations may have been exposed. (Bitcoin.com News)

Odaily reports: Stuart Alderoty posted on X platform that Ripple has submitted a comment letter on the U.S. SEC's proposed crypto asset regulatory rule, Regulation Crypto Assets, and expressed support for the proposal, stating that the SEC has clear authority to adopt the rule. Alderoty said that for years, the "case-by-case, coin-by-coin" enforcement approach has pushed innovation overseas, and the industry needs holistic rules for digital assets; the proposal is faithful to the Howey Test, under which it is the investment contract rather than the token itself that constitutes a security. Alderoty also stated that Ripple has spent over $150 million to clarify the relevant rules.

Odaily Report: NEAR ecosystem governance proposal HSP-029 has entered the voting phase, proposing to gradually reduce the maximum annual issuance rate of the NEAR token from 2.5% to 1.6%. The proposal, put forward by SVRN CEO Sal Ternullo, plans to decrease linearly by approximately 3.75 basis points per epoch over 24 months, while maintaining the 90/10 split between stakers and the treasury. If passed, a 90-day grace period will be implemented before the reduction officially begins.

Proposal estimates show that the plan is expected to reduce NEAR issuance by approximately 11.8 million tokens over two years, and by a cumulative total of approximately 66.1 million tokens over six years, equivalent to a 4.36% reduction in supply compared to the current state. The staking annualized yield will gradually decrease from the current 5.268% to 3.372%. The proposal must go through a dual process to take effect: after passing the House of Stake vote, validators must independently adopt it through the standard protocol upgrade process. Currently, the NEAR network has 406 active validators with a staking rate of 42.71%.

Odaily reports: According to Odaily monitoring, an address has achieved a 100% win rate on BTC trades over the past 30 days, covering the period from September 18 to October 20, 2026, across 30 trading rounds. Between 21:37 on October 20, 2026 and 05:14 on October 21, it flipped from a short position to a long position, currently holding 104.81036 BTC valued at approximately $8.6991 million. The weighted average closing price of this BTC short position was approximately $82,583.03, and the weighted average opening price was approximately $82,744.75.

Address: 0xf517639a8872e756ac98d3c65507d2ebc25cc032; Total PnL: $773,200 (sample as of 2026-10-17 09:02)

BTC trading rounds: 30; Win rate: 100.00%

Statistics period: 2026-09-18 to 2026-10-20

Odaily: A Fox Business crypto reporter posted on X that the comment period for the SEC's "Reg Crypto" proposal closes today, but an SEC spokesperson said the Commission will continue to accept public comments after the comment period ends. The proposal would establish a new fundraising exemption for crypto issuers raising funds in the United States.