Sources familiar with the matter: U.S.-Iran talks make little progress, with neither side willing to make concessions.

Former Dragonfly partner Omar Kanji has officially joined alternative investment management platform Brevan Howard as Head of Growth Investments for Digital Assets and Portfolio Manager, and will remain based in New York. Kanji previously announced his departure from Dragonfly on September 1, bringing an end to his four-year tenure at the firm.

At the 2026 Korea Blockchain Week, Tom Lee stated that the cryptocurrency market has entered a bull market phase. Bitcoin has broken through its 200-day moving average, institutional investor inflows have increased again, tokenization is growing increasingly widespread, intergenerational wealth transfers are becoming more convenient, and AI agents are starting to transact using digital currencies.

The Illinois Department of Revenue has released draft rules defining the implementation scope of the 0.2% digital asset transaction tax already enacted into law. The draft classifies stablecoins as taxable digital assets, while non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are exempt. Decentralized finance (DeFi) transactions are generally tax-free, but transactions involving protocol fees for platform operation and maintenance remain taxable; network fees and exchange fees paid exclusively to liquidity providers are not subject to tax. Furthermore, cross-chain bridging activities conducted via brokers, and self-custody wallet withdrawals where centralized exchanges charge fees will also be included in the tax scope. The bill is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027, with the public comment period closing on October 30.

According to official announcements, HSBC has revealed that its upcoming Hong Kong-based stablecoin will be named HSBC RedCoin, with a phased rollout plan. The initial phase will focus on peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers and peer-to-merchant (P2M) payments, before expanding to corporate and institutional use cases. HSBC also released a new survey of over 1,000 local customers, which found strong market interest and readiness for the stablecoin. Among respondents, 74% are familiar with at least one stablecoin use case. The top use cases are digital asset trading and tokenized investment (57%), followed by personal transfers (53%), cross-border remittances (52%), and merchant payments (52%).

Beating AI Express News: AI coding tool Pi has officially integrated MCP in its version 0.99.0. The original "No MCP" label on its official site was crossed out and updated to "Now with MCP+Codemode". Pi has long openly criticized common MCP integration approaches. Last year, developer Mario Zechner found in tests that Playwright MCP’s 21 tool descriptions take roughly 13,700 tokens, while Chrome DevTools MCP’s 26 tools occupy around 18,000 tokens. He argued that an overabundance of tools wastes context window space, is difficult to combine, and the large volume of returned content directly enters the model’s context. This time Pi adopted a different integration strategy: MCP tools are not exposed to the model by default, instead managed via Codemode. The model can write JavaScript to call, combine, and filter tools in parallel, only sending necessary results back to the context. Tools can also be loaded lazily, no need to declare all upfront. Pi team member Earendil has not retracted prior criticism, noting many MCP servers still overload with excessive tools and text results, and the tool combination issue remains unresolved. Pi now retains MCP’s general interface, while using Codemode to avoid the usage patterns it was most dissatisfied with before.

According to TradingBeats monitoring, a large whale address on Hyperliquid placed 140 regular limit buy orders in batches this morning for BTC and ETH, planning to purchase 400 BTC and 5,000 ETH with a total order value of approximately $45.207 million. The address currently holds no crypto positions. BTC buy orders are concentrated in the $79,600–$81,695 range, totaling around $32.294 million, with the highest buy price roughly 1.9% below the current market price. ETH buy orders fall between $2,565 and $2,600, amounting to about $12.913 million, and their highest buy price is approximately 2.7% below the current price.