Dear PointPay Family,
All of this week's news in one place! Discover the top 5 most important and exciting stories of the past few days, handpicked for you. Just the headline and the gist, so you can quickly catch up on anything you missed and stay on top of the crypto world.
Solana activates Alpenglow - transaction finality speeds up to 150 ms
The Solana network has switched to Alpenglow, a new consensus protocol that replaces the previous TowerBFT mechanism. The upgrade moves validator voting off the blockchain itself and allows their confirmations to be combined into special certificates.
The target finality time is now around 150 milliseconds instead of several seconds. This could make payments and trading faster, while also improving the user experience of applications built on Solana.
JPMorgan brings its bank deposit token to public Ethereum
JPMorgan has deployed JPM Coin on the Ethereum mainnet and opened the token to institutional clients. JPM Coin represents dollar deposits held at the bank, rather than acting as an ordinary stablecoin backed by a third-party issuer's reserves.
The move expands the use of public blockchains for settlement between financial institutions. The bank expects to draw on Ethereum's liquidity and its interoperability with existing crypto applications to move funds and settle tokenized assets. It is an important example of how traditional financial instruments are beginning to operate on public blockchain infrastructure.
Institutional crypto infrastructure becomes part of banking strategies
Standard Chartered's agreement to acquire Zodia Custody was one of the week's most notable events in the digital asset infrastructure services market. The bank plans to integrate crypto asset custody into its existing Securities Services business, while keeping Zodia's software solutions within a separate entity.
For the industry, this signals a shift from experimenting with standalone crypto products toward more comprehensive services for professional clients. Together with the launch of the JPM Coin bank token on Ethereum, the deal highlights two distinct development paths: using blockchain for settlement and building regulated custody infrastructure. In both cases, the ultimate scale of impact will depend on how widely the services are actually adopted.
Crypto hack losses reach $1.18 billion in the third quarter
According to published incident reports, the crypto industry lost around $1.18 billion to hacks and exploits in the third quarter of 2026. The most prominent causes include coding errors, compromised keys, and infrastructure vulnerabilities.
When assessing this figure, methodology matters: different analytics services may classify incidents differently, and initial damage estimates are sometimes revised. The main practical takeaway remains the same: a smart contract audit is not enough if a project fails to protect its access keys, internal tools, and privilege management processes.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs attract over $1 billion in three trading days
US spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a combined net inflow of around $1.08 billion over three trading days. This points to a recovery in demand from investors who use exchange-traded funds to gain exposure to Bitcoin without owning the cryptocurrency directly.
Even inflows of this size, however, do not guarantee a strong price rally. Previous periods of sharp growth came with higher average daily inflows. When weighing the situation, it is important to consider not only the total amount of inflows but also their sustainability, how they are distributed across funds, and how the BTC price reacts.
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