MSCI signed off on its final index rules yesterday evening, and the test for crypto treasury companies now reads like something out of Blade Runner: fail it twice and they retire you. 🧪

So does $MSTR ( ▼ 9.56% ) get thrown out of the indexes now? Not yet, but the mechanism that could do it is written and scheduled.

The old interim test stated: digital assets at or above 50% of total assets and you were flagged. That's gone. In its place MSCI put an operating-assets screen plus five financial ratios, with buffers on thresholds and timing so companies don't bounce in and out every review. A company not yet in the index is ineligible if it fails either of the two most recent annual periods. A company already in gets removed only if it fails both, and MSCI can use the latest interim filing to make that call.

The names in the blast radius are the ones you'd expect. A May simulation already flagged Strategy, Metaplanet and Yellow Cake, and $SBET ( ▼ 7.46% ) may be in the mix. Saylor and CEO Phong Le called the proposal "discriminatory" earlier this year, and Strategy's September letter said adoption "would have no meaningful impact on Strategy's business" but would damage MSCI's reputation as a neutral index provider. 📅

The $SOL ( ▼ 1.25% ) DAT $SKYA ( ▼ 3.29% ) has sold nearly all of its SOL and is offering to buy back up to 95% of its own stock. Two conditions, one deadline, and a price nobody at SkyAI controls. 💸

Which gets you to to where things are at now: with the locked tokens haircut 10%, $3.00 works out to about 0.95x mNAV, a small discount on coins that were just converted to dollars on holders' behalf. 🧾

There is a Doctor Who episode, "Heaven Sent," where the Doctor spends four and a half billion years punching a wall harder than diamond because the castle has no other way out. The Bank of Russia published the floor plan this week. 🏰

You can buy Bitcoin at a licensed Russian platform and you cannot withdraw it to your own wallet. That is the Bank of Russia's own Q&A page, updated this week, reading Federal Law 282-FZ back to anyone who asks. In force since Sept 1. Part 9 of Article 31 bars an individual from moving digital currency off a platform account to a non-custodial wallet. Part 5 bars transfers between individuals through depository-managed addresses.

$USDT ( ▲ 0.01% ) gets admitted to organized exchange trading once Directive 7441-U takes effect, and foreign stablecoins are captured by the law, so the dollar-shaped exit is inside the fence too.

Sberbank entered the digital-depository register on Oct 6 and the exchange-operator register on Oct 12, next to VTB and Atomyze, and says it plans to start testing BTC, ETH and USDT inside SberBank Online on Dec 1. So the on-ramp is a bank app, the off-ramp is another licensed Russian entity, and the door marked "your keys" is painted on the wall.

How big does Sber think the fenced yard gets? Deputy chairman Popov projects about 4 trillion rubles, call it $46 billion, in year one and 7.5 trillion by 2029. 🚪

Monday, London. Tuesday, Tianjin. Two court orders, two days, one pile of 61,896 Bitcoin. ⚖️

London. On Oct 12 the High Court handed down DPP v Zhimin Qian [2026] EWHC 2509 (KB) and ruled that Chinese law governs the victim claims on the Bitcoin UK authorities seized from the Qian Zhimin fraud. The BTC is in British custody.

Tianjin. On Oct 13 the Tianjin No. 2 Intermediate People's Court said, through The Paper, that back on Sept 28 it had accepted prosecutors' application to confiscate 61,896.41552945 BTC, about $5 billion at the time, plus $XRP ( ▼ 2.48% ), $DOGE ( ▼ 1.39% ), cash and assorted other property. That filing sat in a Chinese docket for two weeks.

The pile. The underlying fraud pulled 40.38 billion yuan from more than 102,000 investors, and that figure is now in front of two benches on two continents. One side holds the keys. The other holds the court the victims file in. (Sherman's Planet, for the Trekkies, with both sides claiming it and no Organians coming to break up the bar fight.)

Victims and their relatives have six months to register a claim with the Tianjin court. 📝

Three names. Three exits. One empty office. 🚪

March: David Sacks leaves.
End of July: Deputy Harry Jung leaves.
Oct 14: Executive director Patrick Witt, a Defense Department employee on loan, leaves and the White House confirmed it to Eleanor Terrett. No replacement named.

Witt was the public voice on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, so the reserve now has no voice, public or otherwise. Headcount at the White House Crypto Council: zero. Nobody at the council has commented, for the obvious reason.

So who is flying the ship? Mother is. The SEC's Innovation Exemption went out Sept 17. The CFTC's crypto ANPRM hit the Federal Register Oct 13. Both agencies are running their own rulemaking on their own clocks.

One footnote. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Tether paid about $6.3 million to Bo Hines' consulting firm, part of it while he was running White House crypto policy in 2025, before he joined Tether that August. 💼

On Tuesday Hyperscale Data filed a prospectus supplement that cut its at-the-market offering from $300 million to $100 million and removed the June plan to buy Bitcoin and precious metals from the use of proceeds. This morning it announced it had tokenized 5,000 troy ounces of physical silver. 🥈

For scale, tokenized commodities on rwa.xyz were about $5.16 billion, and gold is nearly all of it, with XAUT at $2.98 billion and PAXG at $1.79 billion. Everything else is a rounding error, and silver is a rounding error inside the rounding error.

The tokens sit on the company's own exchange, on the company's own chain, and trading is "anticipated to commence within weeks." The Tuesday filing put the stock at $0.1569 and said $49.8 million of the offering had been raised so far. No ticker. No dollar value. No date. 🤷

Around midday Taipei time Wednesday, $COIN ( ▼ 5.79% ) started redirecting Taiwanese users to a block page. The page cites a New Taipei District Court order enforced under the Public Officials Election and Recall Act. The reason is Coinbase's prediction markets, which run on Kalshi and include Taiwan's presidential election. 🚧

Betting on elections is a crime there, and this looks like the first time a court has pulled a top US exchange's website over it.

Buuut… the mobile app kept working.

Bloomberg reportedly ran a piece Thursday saying Taiwan blocked Coinbase and Kalshi, and Reuters carried the headline while noting it had not verified it. I could not find the Bloomberg piece, and a separate Kalshi block is not confirmed. Coinbase, Kalshi and Taiwanese authorities have said nothing, and Coinbase's status page shows no incident in Taiwan. 📱

Email me, Jonathan Morgan, feedback; I’d love to hear from you. 📧
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