Crypto-related stocks suffered heavy losses on Wednesday, with bitcoin miners pivoting to AI infrastructure taking the biggest hit
TLDR Crypto 2025-10-23
Markets & Business
Crypto Stocks Plunge Wednesday (4 minute read)
Crypto-related stocks suffered heavy losses on Wednesday, with bitcoin miners pivoting to AI infrastructure taking the biggest hit, including Bitfarms, Cipher Mining, Hut 8, and HIVE tumbling 10-15% while Galaxy Digital fell 15% erasing all gains from its recent earnings report despite its growing data center operations. The CoinShares Bitcoin Mining ETF (WGMI) declined 7% as the multi-month rally fueled by investor optimism for lucrative data center deals fizzled out in risk-off markets. Other crypto stocks weren’t spared with Bakkt down 7.5% extending weekly losses to nearly 40% after surging 300% earlier in October, Strategy slipping 4% below $290, and Coinbase, Robinhood, Bullish, and Gemini posting 5-6% losses, while bitcoin held around $108,000 after touching $114,000 Tuesday and the Nasdaq declined 1% with chipmakers particularly hard hit.
Cuomo’s crypto Hail Mary unlikely to give an edge over Mamdani (5 minute read)
Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced plans to create a “chief innovation officer” and “Innovation Council” for blockchain, biotech, and AI to attract emerging tech companies, but trails Democratic frontrunner Zohran Mamdani by double digits just two weeks before the election. The crypto appeal comes as the Winklevoss twins, who donated over $30 million to crypto lobbies this year, harshly criticized Mamdani, while pro-crypto hedge fund managers, including Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, have donated millions to Cuomo’s campaign in recent weeks. However, the mayor’s office has limited ability to influence crypto policy as financial frameworks are made at state and federal levels, with outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ crypto hub efforts including taking paychecks in Bitcoin and establishing the Office of Digital Assets, yielding mixed results despite the city seeing a 177% increase in crypto startups and 143% increase in blockchain startups since 2019.
Innovation & Launches
Aerodrome to Launch “Aero Ignition” for Token Debuts (2 minute read)
Aerodrome introduced Aero Ignition, a new framework for launching tokens on Base that bootstraps liquidity and distributes supply directly to the community. Projects deposit a share of their tokens as pre-launch incentives, voters direct emissions to liquidity pools, and trading begins with emissions flowing immediately, allowing market activity to set the price. Eligible tokens can list on Coinbase from day one, making Ignition a streamlined, community-first launch mechanism designed for clean, liquid token rollouts.
Introducing Virtuals Robotics (5 minute read)
Virtuals is entering robotics by taking the “Middle Way,” focusing on data and capital infrastructure rather than competing in hardware or model development, addressing two fundamental bottlenecks where embodied AI cannot learn without rich spatial datasets and robotics innovation remains slow without scalable financing. The robotics push completes Virtuals’ vision of agentic GDP, where AI automates reasoning, blockchain enables large-scale coordination, and robotics provides physical execution to form a self-sustaining circuit where thoughts, actions, and transactions propagate autonomously across digital and physical domains. Virtuals’ existing infrastructure, including ACP for agent-to-agent commerce, Butler for human-to-agent collaboration, and Unicorn for capital formation, now extends into physicality, positioning the platform as a full-stack engine for all artificial intelligence, whether embodied or digital, as the convergence of blockchain trust mechanisms, AI reasoning capabilities, and robotic execution.
Guides & Tutorials
When Our Startup Pivoted Its Way to Survival (6 minute read)
Accrue began as a dollar-cost averaging app for investing in crypto and stocks, growing fast until the 2022 bear market froze user activity and investor interest. A pivot to dollar savings gained praise but little revenue, revealing that users liked the app but couldn’t afford to use it. The breakthrough came when a Ghanaian user accidentally used a deposit feature to send money to Nigeria, sparking a shift toward cross-border payments, a move that grew to 70% of revenue in seven months. The team’s biggest lessons were to let go quickly, listen beyond direct feedback, follow unexpected data, and embrace the messiness of finding product-market fit through persistence and pivots.
x402: The Payment Layer for the Agentic Internet (6 minute read)
Coinbase’s x402 protocol turns the web’s “Payment Required” status code into a live crypto-powered paywall, letting AI agents and APIs transact autonomously. Since launching in May with Cloudflare as a founding partner, x402 has enabled developers to earn directly from API calls without keys or sign-ups via instant micropayments. Though still early (90K transactions, $50K in volume), tools like thirdweb’s Nexus now let anyone monetize APIs in under a minute. The vision is, as AI agents begin powering a new machine-to-machine economy, APIs with x402 will become the default data endpoints for billions of autonomous requests, forming the foundation of “Agentic GDP” (the economic output of intelligent agents transacting on the open web).
Miscellaneous
Coinbase’s $375M Echo Buy Is a Smart Bet on Onchain Fundraising (2 minute read)
Even if Coinbase overpaid for Echo, the move is strategically sound. By acquiring an onchain fundraising platform, Coinbase gains entry into a high-margin, high-leverage business that strengthens its entire ecosystem. As long as startups keep forming and seek the lowest-friction way to raise capital, this bet pays off, making the price tag secondary to the long-term strategic position.
AI and UX Are Powering the Next Wave of Crypto Wallets (2 minute read)
The future of crypto wallets hinges on AI-driven usability, not complexity. There’s a shift from seed phrases to smart, embedded, and intent-based wallets that abstract key management, simplify onboarding, and automate multi-chain interactions. Base is developing a social, AI-enhanced “Base app” to push Web3 into mainstream fintech territory, while Askgina.ai envisions wallets as proactive AI agents executing trades and managing portfolios via natural language. Tomorrow’s wallets will look more like super apps—social, automated, and intuitive—where the smartest, most seamless user experience wins.
Quick Links
Inveniam Capital Partners Acquires Storj (4 minute read)
Decentralized storage provider Storj is being acquired by Inveniam Capital Partners, which plans to expand its data and AI platform for private markets.
Tokenized Dollars That Morph Between Deposits and Stablecoins (1 minute read)
A design where a tokenized dollar could seamlessly shift between a tokenized bank deposit and a stablecoin would blur the line between traditional banking and crypto payments.
BTC vs. Stablecoins in Cross-Border Payments (3 minute read)
The real competition in cross-border payments isn’t about speed, it’s about liquidity.
The Next Channel in Global FX Flows (2 minute read)
With over $9T traded daily, global FX markets are rivers of liquidity seeking the path of least resistance, and stablecoins are carving a new channel that will make their reshaping of cross-border capital flows look inevitable.