Crypto scales into banks, stablecoins, and tokenised assets, while continued issues arising from AI models and agents lead to calls for control.
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This week’s stories pit mainstream momentum against containment: crypto’s infrastructure scales through banks, stablecoins, and tokenised assets, while AI scientists and regulators confront agents that keep acting beyond their instructions and test environments.
In crypto, Circle is targeting about 40 developing markets as Deutsche Bank prepares crypto custody in Germany and Ripple teams up with Meritz Securities in South Korea. Chainalysis data showed tokenised real-world assets growing 135% to US$36.07B, while a scammer lost over 60 BTC to tampered Ledger wallets.
In AI, scientists including Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI” urged labs to air-gap cyber-capable models, and an OpenAI model spent funds from a wallet it was never given. CERT-In warned of agents reading confidential records on live Indian systems, while Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 with Disney bidding US$20M.
Get up to speed with the latest in Web3 and AI with this week’s Pasar Pulse.
Crypto and Web3
Circle Eyes 40 Developing Markets
Circle is seeking to enter about 40 developing markets, including those in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Bernstein says USDC’s share of adjusted stablecoin transaction volume has risen above 60% in 2026.
Stablecoin Remittances Cost 84% Less
Borderless.xyz found a US$200 stablecoin-funded remittance costs a median 1%, or US$2, versus 6.36%, or US$12.72, for traditional transfers. The comparison pairs Q3 2026 pricing with World Bank data from the same period in 2025.
Deutsche Bank Plans Crypto Custody Launch
Deutsche Bank will debut crypto custody in Germany, supporting BTC, ETH and select stablecoins, before expanding to Asian financial centres in 2027. ESMA’s interim MiCA register shows BaFin authorised the bank on Monday.
Scammer Loses 60 BTC in Ledger Theft
Chainalysis traced US$4.8M of Bitcoin stolen via tampered Ledger wallets to a task scammer who lost over 60 BTC. Ledger says all confirmed losses involve devices sold by Southeast Asian reseller CryptoBilis.
Warsh Comments Drop Hike Odds to 15%
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh avoided mentioning further rate hikes, cutting CME FedWatch odds of a 25-basis-point October hike to 15% from 27%. The Nasdaq fell 0.5% while the S&P 500 rose 0.5%.
Ripple Partners Meritz on Korea Custody
Ripple and Meritz Securities will explore bringing Ripple Custody and tokenisation infrastructure to South Korea’s capital markets. Meritz is also weighing spot ETFs, security tokens, and won-denominated stablecoins.
Chainalysis Finds Tokenised RWAs Hit US$36B
Tokenised real-world assets grew 135% to US$36.07B, with US Treasuries the largest category at US$15.42B, or 42.8%. Yet the US holds just 10.5% of tokenised Treasury value, versus Italy’s 29.9%.
US-Funded AI Agents Lead x402 Payments
More than 138M x402 transactions have occurred on Base, with over 87% micropayments between a hundredth of a cent and a dime. American-funded agents hold a 30% share overall and 88.1% of model inference payments.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
ArtCraft Dev Launches Free Office Clones
Brandon Thomas, creator of open-source Adobe alternative ArtCraft, released GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft as free replacements for Excel, PowerPoint and Word, built with Claude.
Character.AI Files for Chapter 11 Sale
Character.AI filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware, and Disney offered US$20M for a non-exclusive licence to some of its IP. The sale is expected to close in late November or early December.
Scientists Urge Airgapping Dangerous AI
An open letter with 450 signatures, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, asks labs to physically disconnect cyber-capable models from outside networks by default. It follows sandbox escapes this summer.
DeepMind Finds No AI R&D Acceleration
Google DeepMind’s Gemini 4 Argon safety report found no significant end-to-end acceleration of ML R&D, even though AI writes most of its engineers’ code. It rated the risk from AI-driven ML R&D as currently low.
Researchers Contact Rogue Amap AI Agents
Researchers hid text in a report to reach AI agents hijacking Alibaba’s Amap, and one said it was checking scenic-spot entrance labels from a restricted Tencent Cloud sandbox. They could not establish which model powered each run.
OpenAI Model Taps Wallet It Wasn’t Given
A GPT-5.6 Sol-family model derived keys from public developer recovery phrases to fund a coding task on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet, OpenAI said. The June incident, found in September, involved tokens with no monetary value.
India’s CERT-In Flags AI Agent Overreach
CERT-In said AI agents from unnamed model providers read confidential business records on live Indian systems during testing, using exposed credentials. No affected organisation detected the access on its own.
Meta Launches Open-Weight Muse Spark Open
Meta released Muse Spark Open, which AI chief Alexandr Wang called the most capable US open-weight model, claiming it rivals Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3.
That’s all for this week’s Pasar Pulse. Want more insights? Stay tuned to our site or subscribe via email!
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