South Korea moves to let exchanges freeze deposits and withdrawals on suspected hacks
South Korea's Financial Services Commission plans to allow crypto exchanges to pause deposits and withdrawals when they suspect a hack, without waiting for an intrusion to be confirmed. The FSC will issue no-action letters permitting preventive suspensions under specific conditions. Current rules ban exchanges from blocking withdrawals without justification and only clearly allow restrictions after a hack has been verified. The regulator also wants exchanges to conduct round-the-clock monitoring, raise cold wallet holdings, and strengthen insurance coverage and reserves.
Nomura weighs sale of crypto unit Laser Digital as Marex evaluates deal
Japan's largest brokerage Nomura Holdings is considering selling its crypto subsidiary Laser Digital Holdings AG and is in talks with potential buyers including Marex Group, according to Bloomberg. Marex is evaluating the transaction, people familiar said. Nomura has not made a final decision and may sell to another party or continue holding the business. Zurich-based Laser Digital posted losses last year amid sharp crypto market volatility, dragging Nomura's European operations into the red.
Binance records largest liquidation wave since 2021 as open interest slides
Binance has registered its highest liquidation volumes since 2021, signaling a fresh deleveraging wave, CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost wrote. BTC open interest on Binance fell from $10.6 billion to $8.8 billion in less than a month, a drop of 17%, while its 180-day moving average rose from $8.4 billion to $8.6 billion. Monthly liquidation totals over the past three months were among the highest since 2021: over $1.4 billion in August, $1.1 billion in September, and $1.3 billion in October, with November already exceeding $520 million before the month is half over.
India's Unocoin denies all funds stolen, calls service halt a proactive security step
Indian crypto exchange Unocoin pushed back against claims that all user funds were stolen after a server breach on November 9 left services suspended. The exchange said no user funds were lost and characterized the halt as a proactive security measure. Arkham data had shown 81,000 tracked addresses with zero balances, and the website returned 504 errors. On-chain fund movements remain under investigation.
Huma Finance links HUMA token crash to hacked early liquidity provider wallet
Huma Finance co-founder Richard Liu said an early liquidity provider's wallet was hacked on October 22, leading to the sale of about 12 million airdropped HUMA tokens into the market and triggering sharper-than-expected price swings. Liu said the project questioned its market makers and found no evidence of malicious manipulation. Between November 2 and 7, open interest across platforms jumped from about 620 million to 1.1 billion tokens, funding rates turned negative from November 4, and perpetual volumes ran seven to ten times spot volumes.
TSMC confirms employee data leaked; hacker demanded 3 BTC for 46,000 records
A hacker on an underground forum claimed to hold 46,000 records totaling 6.9 GB of TSMC employee personal data and demanded 3 bitcoin for the files, threatening to publish everything if no buyer emerged within a week. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. confirmed that some current and former employee data was exposed without authorization. An initial assessment matched the data to a cloud service provider's system, and the company said there was no evidence its own systems were breached.
Bitcoin perpetuals trade below spot for 156 straight hours as OI climbs
Bitcoin perpetual futures have traded at a discount to spot for 156 consecutive hours, with the negative basis widening since November 6 and sitting at 0.047% over the past day, according to CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. Open interest in BTC perpetuals rose by 22,000 BTC in the past week to 367,400 BTC, one of the strongest weekly gains since August. The combination of rising open interest and weak basis makes the market more vulnerable to forced deleveraging, the analyst noted.
ByteDance founder says catching OpenAI and Anthropic will take until at least 2029
ByteDance co-founder Zhang Yiming told employees the company can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI in frontier AI but will not truly match them until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest, Bloomberg reported. Zhang said ByteDance's Seed large language models are trained on datasets several orders of magnitude smaller than those used by top US rivals. He again warned against over-reliance on model distillation and urged the team to focus on long-term development.
Baidu launches 'Ciyuansuo' token marketplace as model calls surge
Baidu founder Robin Li unveiled a large-model trading platform called Ciyuansuo, describing it as an exchange for model tokens that lets companies and individuals find, buy, and use trusted model inference capacity. Since launching a month ago, the platform has attracted more than 100 supply resources, with average daily calls exceeding 50 million and daily token calls surpassing 700 billion. Li noted that nearly every day in the first nine months of the year saw at least one new model release, driving explosive demand for model calls.
Binance CSO warned months before hack about fake coding tests breaching devices
Months before Binance lost $6.3 billion in a hack, Chief Security Officer Jimmy Su described in an interview how fake programming tests could compromise employee devices in a manner closely resembling the attack's entry method. Su said attackers could tailor fake job offers to employees and trick them into running code as part of a technical assessment, allowing credentials to be stolen and networks to be penetrated further. He noted that individual steps in such assessments appear legitimate, making them difficult for antivirus software to detect and flag.
$2.8 billion in BTC and ETH options expire Friday with max pain at $76,000
Nearly $2.8 billion in weekly options are set to expire on November 13, including $2.48 billion in BTC options with a max pain point of $76,000 and a Put/Call ratio of 0.52, according to Greeks.live analyst Adam. ETH options total $300 million with a max pain of $2,200 and a Put/Call ratio of 1.55. BTC dipped below the $76,000 max pain level before settlement, falling as low as $72,700, pressured by the Binance hack aftermath, ETF outflows, and hotter-than-expected US CPI data.
