📽 It’s time for another weekly crypto roundup! Matt Zahab and Rachel Wolfson are back with Episode 66, breaking down the latest crypto headlines. Don’t miss out — tune in now!👇

📌 Price Action

📌 Trump’s 100% China Tariff Triggers $20B Wipeout, 1.6M Crypto Traders Liquidated On Friday afternoon, Over 1.66 million crypto traders were liquidated in the past 24 hours as the market experienced a sharp downturn, wiping out a staggering $19.33 billion in positions, according to data from CoinGlass. The sell-off followed escalating macro uncertainty after President Donald Trump reaffirmed his plan for 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, spooking risk markets. Data from Coinglass shows that over 1.6 million traders were liquidated, with nearly 87% of positions being long. The event marked a rare moment where macro policy news spilled directly into digital asset markets, erasing billions in open interest within hours and pushing Bitcoin below $105,000 before a rapid rebound took shape.

📌 Early Bitcoin Whale Shorted $1.1B Right Before Tariffs, Now Up $27M Satoshi-era whale with 86K BTC shorted $1.1B in BTC and ETH 30 minutes before Trump's 100% tariff announcement, banking $190M-$200M as liquidations hit $19.33B across 1.66M traders. The trader, identified by blockchain tracking firm Lookonchain as a “Bitcoin OG” who held 86,000 BTC from 2011, deposited funds into Hyperliquid starting October 9 to establish highly leveraged bets against the crypto market’s top two assets.

📌 “Trump Insider” Whale Who Made $160M From BTC Crash Is Building Massive Shorts Again On Monday, the trader known for profiting handsomely after shorting Bitcoin and Ethereum ahead of the recent market crash has opened fresh short positions, even as the market shows signs of recovery. Lookonchain on Tuesday posted blockchain data showing the investor entered at $115,783 and currently holds a 3,440 BTC short position worth about $392.67m, with an unrealized profit near $5.7m and a liquidation threshold of $128,030.

📌 China Hits Back at Trump’s Tariffs with Rare Earth Restrictions On Tuesday morning, China’s rare earth squeeze meets Trump’s 100% tariffs, jolting risk appetite and triggering a $500M crypto flush as Beijing leverages supply choke points against Washington’s tariff shock. China has tightened export controls on rare earth magnets, escalating tensions with Washington and triggering widespread turbulence across global markets, including a $7 billion sell-off in cryptocurrencies. The move, seen as direct retaliation against President Donald Trump’s newly announced 100% tariffs on Chinese goods, has reignited fears of a full-scale trade war between the world’s two largest economies.

📌 Trump Family Earned $1B in Pre-Tax Gains Through Crypto Ventures The family of US President Donald Trump has generated pre-tax gains of around $1 billion in the past year from their diverse array of crypto-related ventures, a new investigation reveals. Trump family-backed crypto ventures encompass memecoins, stablecoins, trading cards, and decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms. Per the Financial Times, the TRUMP and MELANIA coins, memecoins tied to himself and his wife, reportedly generated around $427 million. Meanwhile, WLFI token sales fetched approximately $550 million.

📌 Paxos Accidentally Minted $300 Trillion of PayPal’s Stablecoin Stablecoin issuer Paxos revealed that it erroneously minted $300 trillion worth of PayPal’s PYUSD stablecoin on Wednesday, only to reverse the mistake minutes later by burning the excess tokens. Blockchain records visible on Etherscan confirmed the flurry of minting and burning transactions, exposing a rare but dramatic “fat-finger” error in the reportedly tightly controlled world of stablecoin issuance. The transactions revealed that the firm had accidentally added six extra zeros during minting. Within minutes, Paxos destroyed the incorrectly issued $300 trillion PYUSD and re-minted the correct amount of $300m instead.

📌 Hyperliquid Goes Permissionless with HIP-3 Challenging CEX Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 flips listings from committee to code by letting builders spin up their own perp DEXs on HyperCore if they stake 500,000 HYPE, pulling CEX-style scale on-chain. Hyperliquid has activated its HIP-3 network upgrade, opening the door for developers to launch their own perpetual decentralized exchanges (perp DEXs) without centralized approval. The upgrade, which went live on October 13, 2025, at 9:15 a.m. UTC, marks one of the biggest structural changes in the protocol’s history, effectively making Hyperliquid a permissionless platform for all derivatives.