Bitcoin Core 32.0 finally ships on Oct 21 at 13:27 UTC — eleven days late, signed at commit 465dde2 with the tag message "Reproducibility Matters" — and its release notes retire BIP 9 bits 5–28 from soft-fork signalling under BIP 323, cutting Bitcoin's upgrade-voting surface from 29 channels to five on hardware-nonce grounds, with no consensus change and, at filing, no press coverage at all
- the release also pairs the block-policy fee estimator with a mempool estimator that can only lower the quote, adds 8-thread prevout prefetching, defaults four wallet commands to PSBT v2, and fixes not the widely-reported webserver memory bug but a private-broadcast IP leak (#35410) alongside the wallet-name command execution path (#36048), with three medium/high vulnerabilities patched in 30.0 due for disclosure in two weeks
- Brent above $111 drags BTC to ~$81,405 on Oct 20 with ~$1B liquidated, then it closes near $84,470 on Oct 21, ~33% under the record, as October FOMC hike odds fall from a 44% CPI-day spike to ~18–28% and Goldman moves its call to December
- ETFs lose $228.4M in the week to Oct 18, a fourth red week, before a thin +$23.2M Tuesday, with October crypto fund outflows past $1B
- the SEC's Regulation Crypto Assets window closes Oct 20 with ~140 letters, many unreadable behind federal access restrictions, while Patrick Witt's exit leaves the White House crypto council with nobody in it
- Strategy buys 267 BTC for $22.1M against $193.1M of its own preferred and lifts that buyback ceiling to $3B
- difficulty rises 5.92% to 140.58T, highest since March, with next-retarget forecasts spanning +14.24% to −0.45%
- Strive begins a recurring monthly payment to the OpenSats Red Team Fund and HRF grants OpenSats $250,000 for operations
- the Ledger CryptoBilis supply-chain attack climbs to $93–102M across ~300–324 wallets, an implanted board exfiltrating seed phrases over eSIM while the Secure Element and signing logic stay untouched, and MediaMarktSaturn delists Ledger across Europe.
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