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Good morning and happy Monday.
Crypto traders didn’t have to wait till Halloween to experience their scariest day of the year.
Last week, Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange, fell victim to the largest single theft in recorded history after North Korean hackers swiped $6.3 billion worth of crypto off its platform. The heist took all of just 20 minutes, analysis firm TRM Labs said in a blog post on Friday. The company has said it will make its customers whole, a process that will occur piece by piece in an industry that exists firmly outside the bounds of the FDIC. Digital coin issuers Circle and Tether have already frozen $3 billion of the total haul, and Binance said Friday it’s working to recover more. Binance also maintains a roughly $1 billion all-bitcoin nest egg called the Secure Asset Fund for Users, or SAFU, to cover users in the event of such snafus. Binance said the remaining losses will be covered by company funds. For its part, North Korea made off with at least $2.4 billion in assets “beyond any issuer’s reach,” according to TRM. That’s the equivalent of nearly 10% of the country’s entire 2025 GDP, a pretty big treat for such a quick trick.
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MARKETS
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Stock data as of market close on October 30, 2026.
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Photo via Richard B. Levine/Newscom
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Voters in Alaska, North Carolina, Maine, Michigan and Texas are tipped to decide which party controls the United States Senate in tomorrow’s midterm elections. The implications for economic policies around tariffs, affordability and the Iran war are immense.
The stakes are also big for users of Kalshi and Polymarket, who have staked more than $1.4 billion on event contracts related to the midterms.
Under Contract
Institutional heavyweights have backed the two leading prediction markets as if their odds of future success are on par with the 1927 New York Yankees. Kalshi, which is expected to launch an IPO as early as next year, was valued at $40 billion in its latest fundraising round last month, up from $22 billion in May. Polymarket was valued at $21 billion in August, up from $15 billion in April. Their popularity has exploded in the last 24 months, with traders wagering on everything from whether the US government will confirm the existence of aliens to who will be the next James Bond.
But it’s political event contracts that are under the microscope this week, and not just because of the midterms. Prediction markets whiffed big time last week when they implied the odds of Flávio Bolsonaro beating Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential election were roughly 80%, a forecast that went sour faster than a gym membership and a New Year’s resolution. It smacked of wide misses in the US earlier this year. Francesca Hong, whose implied odds to win Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor were 95%, lost. And Spencer Pratt, given a nearly 80% chance of making the runoff in the Los Angeles mayoral election, fell flat. That means tomorrow, Kalshi and Polymarket face a major stress test:
- The two have already cracked down on insider trading this year, though anonymous campaign staffers told NPR in May that they’d pocketed thousands betting on their own candidates. Polymarket is also investigating suspect trades on last week’s Israeli election.
- News companies including CBS, CNBC, CNN, Fox News parent Fox Corp. and Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones have inked partnerships with Kalshi and Polymarket. As of Friday, traders on Kalshi and Polymarket were pricing in the odds that the Democratic Party wins the Senate at 70% or higher — if that doesn’t play out, the news orgs may face questions about their reliability.
  All in the Game: Election contracts are still a largely reputational concern. Kalshi and Polymarket’s biggest moneymaker, by far, is sports. And a bipartisan array of attorneys general in states including New York and Utah have sued them for allegedly operating illegal, unregulated gambling operations. The companies maintain their event contracts are financial derivatives and, thus, exclusively under the federal jurisdiction of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Although, last week, it was revealed that America’s most popular sports league, the NFL, seems to disagree. Philadelphia Eagles star Saquon Barkley revealed he was required to divest a stake in Polymarket after the NFL Players Association was informed the league “views prediction markets as gambling entities.”
Written by Sean Craig
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Anthropic’s IPO is getting nearer and nearer, and no one is happier than Broadcom.
The developer of so-called custom accelerator chips (XPUs) and networking chips has been one of the biggest victims of the market’s recent AI-and-chips trade repricing purge, plummeting some 33% from an all-time high reached in early June. But Anthropic’s S-1, officially made public last week, showed Broadcom has plenty of business locked in, while a new deal struck between the two firms last week, plus the promise of an OpenAI IPO next year, suggests demand is likely to continue.
X(PU) Marks the Spot
If buying up endless amounts of GPU was Act 1 of the AI infrastructure buildout, a slow but steady transition to custom chips, which can be designed for specific tasks making them useful for certain inference heavy lifting, may just be Act 2. Analysts at Omdia, for instance, expect custom chip sales to overtake GPUs by volume as soon as 2028. Broadcom has positioned itself firmly at the center of the transition, partnering with Google to make the company’s tensor processing units, with OpenAI to make its “Jalapeno” chip, and with Meta.
Still, Anthropic’s S-1 shows that the Claude-maker is likely to become the biggest customer of Broadcom XPUs as soon as next year:
- In the filing, Anthropic disclosed its already signed five-year equipment lease agreements with Broadcom to the tune of $161 billion. The frontier lab accounts for roughly 50% of the roughly 32 gigawatts of compute Broadcom said it expects to sell through the start of 2028.
- The chip designer has said it expects AI semiconductor revenue to generate $58 billion this year, which CEO Hock Tan has said should be expected to roughly double next year and double again the year after that.
Add It to the Debt: On the other hand, Broadcom’s deals with Anthropic aren’t entirely neat and clean. The two are now tied up in the largest AI debt deal ever, which required Tan to personally woo Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Blackstone to help finance the two companies’ $63 billion chip sale, according to a Wall Street Journal report last week. The banks plan to sell the debt on bond markets sometime next year, leaving it potentially exposed to another round of interest rate hikes.
Written by Brian Boyle
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Photo via Chen Yuyu/VCG/Newscom
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You think the AI selloff was bad here? China’s AI bubble is whizzing around the room as it deflates.
The mainland’s STAR50 has cratered more than 40% since its summer peak, as investors shed shares of the AI leaders that make up the index.
Beijing has tried to tame its bull markets with measures like increased margin requirements. But Chinese tech stocks have continued to buck higher than peers, with investors at the index’s peak paying a nearly 250 times multiple, per Reuters, on STAR50 companies’ earnings. Since China’s 2024 stimulus, the STAR50 has climbed about 230% through its June 30 closing high.
That’s come crashing down, spooking investors that are temp-checking US markets for signs they may be growing too hot to handle.
More Than Air in the Bubble
Traders are pointing fingers at several culprits, including high share prices, incoming tax bills, and the looming threat that the US and other countries could step up sanctions. The fear isn’t unfounded: The State Department earlier this month sanctioned five Chinese companies connected to the founder of AI startup Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, which it said engaged in or benefited from the theft of US trade secrets. China’s Commerce Ministry has said that China’s AI development is 100% homegrown.
Sanctions aside, some of the STAR Market-listed companies that shriveled in the recent rout simply were trading for much more than they had any track record to support:
- Robotics company Unitree’s shares closed Friday down about 23% from when they started trading in August — a first day that saw shares jump 460% above their IPO price. Still, its third-quarter results, reported this week, showed revenue up 70% from a year earlier as it rolled out new robots made for research labs and classrooms. Shipments of its humanoid robots (called Yang Bots because they can dance the yangge, a Chinese folk dance) topped 7,000 in the first half, more than in all of 2025, estimated Counterpoint Research.
- Memory chipmaker CXMT’s shares fell about a quarter in October, despite the company notching 132 billion yuan in profit in the first nine months of the year, reversing a loss the year earlier. GPU makers Moore Threads and MetaX (no relation to Meta or X), whose shares soared roughly 400% and 700%, respectively, on their debuts late last year, have each lost about half their value since July.
Overpuffed: A correction won’t necessarily derail China’s AI ambitions: Goldman Sachs still counts dozens of Chinese AI names, including CXMT, as promising. More pain could come before the market finds a floor, though. The US AI trade meanwhile has shown some signs that it could deflate at a slower pace until it reaches a reasonable size, like an overpuffed air mattress that needs to be rolled around on a bit. The Nasdaq slipped about 8% from its early-October record through Friday; North American startup funding fell 35% last quarter according to Crunchbase; and chatbot maker Character.ai filed for bankruptcy this month.
Written by Jamie Wilde
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- Doing Just Fine: AI and tech had a bumpy week that rocked markets, but oil majors Chevron and Exxon are still raking in profits amid this year’s energy crisis.
- McJustice: A federal judge said McDonald’s must stand trial in a class action lawsuit that claims its McRib sandwich misleadingly doesn’t contain any rib meat.
- Downvote: Shares of Reddit plunged 29% on Friday after the company reported shrinking search traffic and said it will test requiring users be logged in to visit its site.
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