📊 Crypto Trading Signals - October 18, 2025

🔥 Top Stories

1. Arthur Hayes plans a $250 million raise in private equity fund.

Source: Bloomberg

🏷️ Arthur Hayes • Fund • Private Equity

""The fund plans to invest $40 million to $75 million per deal to acquire as many as six companies, focusing on service providers including those offering trading infrastructure and analytics platforms.""
— @Spencer420

2. Binance among crypto firms hit by French money-laundering checks as regulators seek to determine which of more than 100 entities registered as offering crypto services in the country will be granted European Union-wide permits in the coming months.

Source: archive.ph

🏷️ Binance • Money laundering • Crypto

"These people can't stop CZ. He gets whatever he wants and he will get the European Union-wide permits."
— @Danicjade

3. Japan's Sumitomo Mitsui and two other banks to jointly issue a stablecoin as the lenders join forces to promote settlements made with pegged cryptocurrencies.

Source: archive.ph

🏷️ Stablecoins • Banks • Japan

"Still don't understand reason for diff stablecoins.. someone better explain at this point "
— @Danicjade

4. AI-powered trading tools like Stoic AI, Botty, and CryptoHopper are reshaping crypto markets, offering plug-and-play strategies without coding. Yet, risks remain—automation doesn’t erase volatility or guarantee profits.

Source: Cryptonews

🏷️ trading • AI • Markets

"Will AI constitute more damage than good? Time will tell if people rely on AI than their senses "
— @Danicjade

5. Ondo Finance requests SEC to hold off on Nasdaq's tokenized securities plan, (a RWA saga).

Source: CoinTelegraph

🏷️ SEC • Real World Assets • Ondo Finance

"The game has always been for the big players lol. Good to see Ondo Finance advocating for lesser players even tho SEC might not give in to their request "
— @Danicjade

🎯 Trading Signals

Lead Story Deep Dive: Russia's $379B Crypto Surge Isn't What You Think

Russia just overtook the UK as Europe's top crypto adopter with $379B in inflows between July 2024 and June 2025—a 48% jump that's 3.5x larger than last year. But here's what the headline misses: this isn't just sanctions evasion theater. It's the first real-world stress test of crypto's core value proposition at nation-state scale.

Sure, part of this is oligarchs moving money around Western freezes. But the bigger story is millions of ordinary Russians watching their ruble crumble under wartime inflation and turning to DeFi because their traditional banking system is literally cut off from global markets. When SWIFT access disappears and your currency is toilet paper, crypto stops being a speculative tech bet and becomes basic financial infrastructure.

The 3.5x growth in DeFi usage is particularly telling. These aren't people aping into memecoins—they're using protocols for remittances, savings, and cross-border payments because they have no other choice. This is crypto working exactly as the cypherpunks imagined: censorship-resistant money for when governments fail you. It's just happening in a context most Western crypto bros never considered.

The uncomfortable truth? Authoritarian regimes and conflict zones might be where crypto proves its utility first, not Silicon Valley or Wall Street. That creates a massive narrative problem for an industry trying to go mainstream.

Other Trends We Noticed: TradFi's Awkward Crypto Courtship

While Russia goes all-in by necessity, traditional finance is tiptoeing in through the side door. Japan's Sumitomo Mitsui and two other megabanks are jointly issuing a stablecoin—not because they love decentralization, but because they see the writing on the wall for settlement infrastructur

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