Customers of 128 Japanese credit unions were left unable to withdraw cash today after one of Japan’s banking systems suffered an outage amid cascading price drops across the country’s stock market.

Local media reports that the Shinkin Joint Center outage rendered ATM machines across the Tokai region unable to process withdrawals, deposits, or over-the-counter transactions. 

According to reports, the cause of the outage wasn’t the result of a cyberattack, but rather an “equipment malfunction.”

Initial reports suggested that it would be difficult to restore services today but various banks managed to do this by 7pm Japanese Standard Time.

Outage happened as Japan’s stock market slumped 7%

The outage took place as Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock index fell by 7% amid a wider AI stock selloff that cost Wall Street $3.2 trillion.  

South Korea’s KOSPI stock index also finished the day down 6%.

Read more: AI insiders had already cashed out $7.4 billion before stocks crashed

The tech slump was reportedly caused by investors’ fears that a Democrat-led US government might slow down the progress of AI centers, and that Claude owner Anthropic may no longer go public this month. 

Lucky AI insiders, however, were able to personally cash out $7.4 billion near peak prices throughout May to October, beating the slump. 

UK banks also suffered an outage last month

Just a couple of weeks ago, banks across the UK were also disrupted by an outage in a London-based Google Cloud data center.

Not only were ATM withdrawals and deposits not working, but identity verification, card payments, transfers, signing in, chat support, stocks and crypto trading were all disrupted. 

This incident was also not the result of a cyberattack, but rather a “power event.”

Wall Street just lived through a crash for the ages, as the Nasdaq 100 erased a record $2.3 trillion in market value yesterday — its largest ever notional loss.

A sell-off in AI stocks that started on October 7 accelerated yesterday as the VIX volatility index surged more than 70% in a single session.

US-listed equities shed over $3.2 trillion, and market-wide circuit breakers halted trading entirely in South Korea, home to AI giants Samsung and SK Hynix.

Although there were many causes, many commentators blamed politics after a Democratic US midterm election sweep spooked investors about data center approvals and AI oversight changes.

Read more: AI insiders had already cashed out $7.4 billion before stocks crashed

Indices have rebounded slightly this morning, in part due to a better-than-expected headline about 165,000 US job openings.

Even Donald Trump, who wrote “Your 401(k)s are through the roof” two days ago, changed his tune after yesterday’s closing bell, blaming Democratic voters for the collapse. “You only have yourselves to blame,” he said.

Live updates on this week’s tech stock collapse

As of writing time, the Nasdaq 100 has rebounded 1.5%, although the Dow is flat.

Major markets in Asia didn’t fare well. S. Korea’s KOSPI finished down 6%, closing at a nine-month low. Japan’s Nikkei similarly slid 6%, its first close below 60,000 since May.

Protos is covering this developing situation. Scroll down and refresh this page for updates as they arrive.

Gnosis Pay, a firm that issues white label stablecoin cards, has announced a data breach affecting those cards.

Specifically, it claims that on November 3 it “detected unauthorised access to the system powering Gnosis Pay-branded cards (our B2C business line), resulting in the exposure of certain customer information.”

Different users saw different amounts of information exposed, specifically “your name as printed on your card, your shipping address and your Gnosis Pay account reference.”

Other users, like Rotki founder Lefteris Karapetsas, noted that this email communicated that he was told that his breached information included his full home address, name, card number, and all wallet addresses linked to the account.

Gnosis Pay had already intended to sunset this system at the end of this year.

This Gnosis Pay breach is the latest in a long line of hacks, attacks, heists, and breaches in recent months as cryptocurrency has been regularly targeted. 

Protos reached out to Gnosis Pay for comment, but it didn’t immediately respond.

China’s central bank has launched an investigation into Solana after authorities shut down an “illegal” promotional Solana event last month.

According to China’s Financial Times, an official from the People’s Bank of China revealed that it’s halted further in-person Solana promotional events in the country.

The bank, along with various local regulatory bodies, will also investigate Solana and any relevant persons. 

In the report, it’s noted that Solana’s activities as a virtual currency provider are illegal under China’s 2021 crypto laws, and that its promotions would also violate these same provisions. 

Solana cancelled its China event at the last minute

Last October, Solana tried to organise a week-long Shanghai promotional event to celebrate the firm’s apparent acquisition of an office in Shanghai’s Pudong district.

Solana cancelled its “Solana Accelerate China” at the last minute due to “logistical considerations,” while visitors spotted Chinese police arriving at the event. 

In the days before the cancellation, a massive Solana logo was projected onto the side of Shanghai’s Citigroup Tower and a Solana event was hosted on a riverboat.

Solana

@solana

X / Twitter ↗

ni hao shanghai 🇨🇳

Read more: Solana Labs dropped from Burwick Law’s Pump Fun lawsuit

At the time, Binance co-founder Changpeng Zhao said it was “amazing to see that Solana was able to advertise and even get an office in China,” before noting that Binance hasn’t been able to pull this off. 

China’s government has been crypto-averse since 2013, when it introduced anti-BTC legislation. Then, in 2021, it introduced a further crackdown that deemed it illegal to use crypto in the country.

This year’s most recent legislation still maintains that crypto is illegal but added a new provision that forbids offshore Chinese entities and individuals from providing crypto services to Chinese individuals.

New restrictions on stablecoins and real-world asset tokenization were also introduced.

The price of Solana is $90 at the time of writing, down 15% since the promotional event was shut down on October 16. Over the last year, the token has fallen by almost 28% and is now sitting at a market cap of $53 billion.

Insiders at publicly traded AI companies personally cashed out $7.4 billion near peak prices from May through October — right on time. An index of the largest AI stocks, the PHLX Semiconductor Sector, has crashed 32% since its October high.

Since the start of November, this widely-followed AI index has declined 16% and on Thursday, US-listed stocks shed $3.2 trillion in market capitalization in a single trading session. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq 100 index collapsed 6.4%.

Meltdowns were even worse abroad, including a limit-down circuit breaker after South Korea’s KOSPI index crashed 8.5%.

Insiders at AI companies, however, are already sitting on cushy, realized gains.

Across 282 SEC Form 4s from May through October, insiders at nine US AI companies cashed out $7.39 billion. Excluding $179 million in tax-related sales, discretionary exits still exceeded $7.2 billion across 243 filings. 

The selling was by leaders at Nvidia, Oracle, Micron, Broadcom, AMD, SanDisk, CoreWeave, Arista, and Astera Labs who locked in premium prices.

Among them, Nvidia director Mark Stevens unloaded $407 million in June and notified the SEC of his potential to sell an additional 5 million shares worth over $1 billion at the time. 

Stevens’ total sales across five filings this year have surpassed 6 million shares and $1.3 billion worth of NVDA common stock at prices between $210-235 per share.

Four other insiders added $24.5 million to the Nvidia insider selling tally. For context, Nvidia closed for trading yesterday at $181.60 per share.

Read more: Nvidia director Mark Stevens sold a record $411M of stock

A barrage of AI insider selling

Protos has also reported on Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli’s 2026 insider sales worth $750 million, plus three other Broadcom insiders adding $33.7 million.

At AMD, seven insiders cashed out $262 million across 19 SEC Form 4s. AMD plunged 17.3% Thursday to $404.40, down 38.6% from its $658.52 peak earlier this year. 

AMD CEO Lisa Su sold 360,000 shares for $169 million, including $55.4 million in late summer. Forrest Norrod collected $34.4 million, CTO Mark Papermaster took $26.3 million, and four others sold $32.6 million.

The pattern of selling high repeated.

SanDisk CEO David Goeckeler reaped $105 million across two September filings at $1,523-1,587 per share, while five other insiders added $26.4 million, lifting the company’s tally to $131 million. SanDisk closed yesterday at $806.43 per share, a fraction of its $2,354.39 high this year.

Over at CoreWeave, Protos has documented $740 million in insider sales after its Nasdaq 100 inclusion. In fact, across 141 filings this year, 12 CoreWeave insiders have actually sold $2.88 billion.

CoreWeave sank Thursday to close 68% below its 2026 high.

Micron insiders harvested $279 million across 18 filings, led by CEO Sanjay Mehrotra’s $182 million worth of selling.

At Oracle, three insiders totaled $69 million across four filings, led by Vice Chairman Jeffrey Henley unloading $63.7 million.

Tomorrow will be a climactic moment in a competitive battle between the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), Kalshi, and Coinbase over stock “perps,” a crypto-inspired derivative that uses perpetually-rolling futures funding to create leveraged instruments for betting on stock prices.

Despite a US district judge leaning toward a conclusion that “the CFTC lacks statutory authority to allow perpetual derivatives on individuals stocks to be offered to retail investors,” tomorrow, Michael Selig’s commission must explain why that preliminary conclusion about perps is wrong if it wants to file an opposition.

Tomorrow’s deadline arose after a Tuesday lawsuit filing against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in Manhattan by a trade group that counts the powerful CBOE and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities among its members.

The group, the Capital Markets Alliance (CMA), is seeking to halt a variety of approvals for stock perps listings.

Kalshi listed four contracts on Tuesday at up to 4.9x leverage: Costco, McDonald’s, Qualcomm, and Amgen.

The roster has since swelled to dozens of stock perps, including Nvidia, Tesla, and even SpaceX.

Hours after Tuesday’s filing, US District Judge Valerie Caproni ordered the CFTC to respond by Friday, November 6. Although Caproni denied an immediate restraining order over “conjectural” harm declarations, she found CMA “likely to succeed on the merits of its claim.”

Tomorrow, the CFTC must convince the court that her preliminary conclusion is wrong.

Read more: Ken Griffin wants the SEC to follow Citadel’s advice about DeFi

Doubting CFTC authority over stock perps

The CFTC’s 45-day review clock about these perps expired on November 2 without sufficient objection.

The next morning, CFTC Chairman Michael Selig hailed the launch of perps on US exchanges as an opportunity to pull traders from so-called “offshore, and often unregulated, venues,” with Kalshi immediately launching several stock perps.

On September 18, 2026, KalshiEX, Coinbase Derivatives, and Bitnomial Exchange submitted applications to list cash-settled US equity perpetuals.

Coinbase Derivatives proposed an equity perpetual suite anchored by Apple’s common stock, while Bitnomial filed for Alphabet stock and added Apple stock among its 10 stock perpetuals.

The CMA alleged that CFTC regulations “invited a parallel, synthetic market in US stocks to grow outside the exclusive jurisdiction” of the SEC, threatening US stock markets that trade over $1 trillion daily.

Judge Caproni agreed that single stock perps “seem to represent a major disruption to the equities market” and set CMA’s reply for this month.

If the court grants CMA’s motion, dozens of stock perps at venues like Kalshi, Bitnomial, and/or Coinbase could face suspension.

A lawsuit filed by former Ethereum Foundation (EF) Protocol Support lead Kayleen Fulton against Stiftung Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, and others alleges she was fired after disclosing a cancer diagnosis and organizing opposition to a “suicide pledge.”

In February of this year, the foundation distributed a draft of its new mandate to employees.

The document featured a so-called “Source Seppuku License” that included a promise that “the author, maintainer, editor or (re)distributor… shall uphold the following… to take his or her own life with a sword upon failure to uphold any of the pledges in this license, or upon modification or removal of any part of this license.”

Read more: Where are the Ethereum founders 11 years after the genesis block?

Fulton claims that 79 employees voted to remove that section, with one employee citing “a colleague lost to suicide the year before.” 

Buterin allegedly promised “significant changes.”

However, the version published on the EF website maintained the Source Seppuku License.

Furthermore, the foundation chose to record it permanently on the Ethereum blockchain, with the suicide pledge intact.

The complaint also alleges that EF Co-Executive Director Bastian Aue insisted that every employee must commit to the mandate or the foundation would assume they had resigned.

Fulton and one of her colleagues, Trent Van Epps, then sent the board of the EF a letter signed by 53 members of the “Protocol cluster” which “declined to affirm [the Mandate] under coercion” but stated that they didn’t resign.

Subsequently, Fulton’s employment was terminated.

Buterin and Fulton apparently had a conversation after her termination during which he stated that the question he was struggling with was “what kind of dynamics you want to reward inside of the EF.”

He was also apparently concerned that “if you reward making a stink with outcomes, then everyone will know that essentially making that kind of a show both internally and externally is the way to cause outcomes inside of the EF.”

Protos emailed the EF for comment on this lawsuit, but it did not immediately respond.

Spooked US regulators are reportedly contacting banks to probe for unusual activity or disruptions in the wake of the $6.3 billion Binance hack. 

US banks are also trying to learn from the hack and are reportedly checking their own security systems to figure out if they’re prepared to respond to a similar hack. 

That’s according to various sources speaking to Reuters, which reports that officials from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of ​the Currency have been reaching out to banks to assess the impact of the Binance hack.

Read more: LIVE: Binance says it’s yet to open up more token withdrawals

One source whose bank was contacted said there weren’t any disruptions to their services, but that they’ve prepared statements for customer inquiries.  

Another claimed that AI’s rapid evolution has meant banks are having to commit even more resources to cybersecurity while struggling to keep up with hackers. 

Reuters also reported that a cybersecurity team at one of the largest US banks contacted Binance in the wake of the hack. Its goal is to create its own internal report that will review the bank’s security systems. 

Binance hack caused by malicious ad and fake job interview

Binance was hacked on October 29 following a series of security breaches targeting three Binance employees.

An engineer looking for a popular AI coding tool first clicked on a malicious search engine ad for a software installation program before downloading the malware-laden program. 

This security breach was detected and dealt with by Binance, but the details of the engineer and his team had already been leaked. 

Three months later, another Binance engineer was tricked into a fake job interview, which led to them downloading an “assignment” containing malicious code.

This malware subsequently extracted sensitive information from the engineer, and by October 29, it was able to log into a third Binance engineer’s computer and launch the malicious script that caused the $6.3 billion hack.

Binance has removed all of its API keys associated with crypto trading terminal SignalPlus as an “immediate precautionary measure” following a hack at the third-party firm. 

Binance posted today to its X account, “Binance’s own systems are unaffected. User funds remain safe.”

Crypto derivatives exchange Deribit also removed all SignalPlus API keys in response to a potential incident. 

Yi He

@heyibinance

X / Twitter ↗

We also encourage all third-party platforms integrated with Binance to review their security controls, monitor for unusual activity and contact us immediately if they detect any concern💁🏻‍♀️ This is not a challenge for any single company……

Read more: BitMart hit by $391K hack amid security staff exodus

SignalPlus says $82K in user funds were stolen

SignalPlus has since confirmed on X that it was hacked and under $82,000 worth of user funds was stolen.

It claims it was targeted via a compromised Telegram account belonging to one of its third-party partners.

“Posing as this contact, the attacker communicated with one of our engineers and sent a fake Microsoft Teams meeting invitation,” SignalPlus claimed.

The engineers computer was comprised, and then, by November 4, the waiting hacker “began using the engineer’s access privileges to attack our internal network.”

SignalPlus says it was able to shut down the incident, and that it will reimburse user losses. In the meantime, SignalPlus’ services will remain unavailable until it’s confirmed everything is secure again.

Binance warned users to check their accounts and positions

Binance advised its users to review their positions and open orders while waiting for SignalPlus to give the all-clear before “rebinding any API keys, and always enabling IP whitelisting.”

The exchange also called for its third-party partners to “review their security controls, monitor for unusual activity and contact us immediately if they detect any concern.”

Crypto hack after crypto hack

Binance was hacked for $6.3 billion earlier this month and is currently in the process of opening up further withdrawals and replenishing the stolen funds. 

Already this month, Brazilian crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin was hacked, as was BitMart. 

Read more: Crypto survived cybersecurity awareness month… just

SignalPlus is partnered with major crypto firms such as Bybit, Gate.io, and OKX. 

Update November 5, 14:07 UTC: Updated this article to include SignalPlus’ hack disclosure.

Elon Musk funneled $474 million into Tuesday’s US midterms, and based on polling estimates after a definitive Democratic sweep, approximately 98% of that money went to losing candidates.

A trace of Musk’s midterm donations by Wired estimated even higher: 99% to losers.

Even worse, Musk ended up losing an additional $33 billion of personal net worth within 24 hours of polls closing, as spooked investors in Tesla and SpaceX sold down shares in fear of political tides turning after the blue wave.

Most of Musk’s donations went to Republican super PACs, political action committees that can raise unlimited amounts of money.

Federal filings trace Musk’s money through three main pipes. His own America PAC collected roughly $216 million, the Senate Leadership Fund took $168 million, and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which backs House Republicans, took $30 million. 

Musk steered at least $225 million into Texas, by OpenSecrets’ count, including Ken Paxton’s doomed campaign for Senator. Paxton lost to Democrat James Talarico by a double-digit margin in a surprising upset for the historically conservative state.

Ad-tracking firm AdImpact called Tuesday’s Texas Senate seat contest the costliest Senate race on record for political advertising, with $573 million in spending and reservations through October 30.

Musk was the largest single donor to that race, and his candidate lost.

Political Polls

@PpollingNumbers

X / Twitter ↗

New - 98% of the money musk spent in the midterms went to candidates who lost yesterday

Musk $33 billion poorer after midterms

Both of Musk’s publicly traded companies, Tesla and SpaceX, sank in Wednesday’s trading session as news of Musk’s political losses disseminated.

Tesla fell more than 5% in early trading before closing 3.3% lower than Tuesday’s close. SpaceX, public only since June, dropped more than 7% premarket and closed 3.8% lower than Tuesday. 

Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index put his one-day net worth decline at $33.5 billion, a 3.7% drop to $865 billion, even while the broader market rallied.

XTB research director Kathleen Brooks explained, “There is now a political risk premium attached to both Tesla and SpaceX that could weigh on their share prices.”

Read more: Justin Sun takes on Elon Musk in race to be Trump’s top donor

Musk responded by posting, “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” a reference to xAI and Grok’s AI infrastructure that might become threatened in Texas.

Then he added, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time.”

In addition, he quietly deleted his election day plea to vote Republican.

This cycle, The Atlantic estimated Musk’s giving at about a quarter of all donations Republicans received for this week’s midterm campaigns.