Morning digest: November 9, 2026
Bitcoin touched its lowest level since August overnight before bouncing, and more than $1 billion in leveraged bets were wiped out. Much of the $6 million first reported stolen from Keplr wallets turns out to have been moved to safety by Web3Auth. In health, a 24-week trial found that twice-weekly resistance training on unstable surfaces improved two executive-function tests in older adults with probable mild cognitive impairment. Locally, Manassas City Council takes up the Center Street rezoning tonight, where the interim mayor could cast the deciding vote. A decades-old quantum computing conjecture has been proved with heavy help from AI.
Blockchain: a three-month low, a wallet rescue and a vault drain
Bitcoin dips to a three-month low. BTC fell to about $73,761 late Sunday, its lowest since August, before bouncing back above $75,000. Ether briefly dropped below $2,100 and then recovered to about $2,144. More than $1 billion of leveraged positions were liquidated in 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and $913 million of that was bets on rising prices. Ether liquidations ($448 million) were nearly double bitcoin’s ($272 million). CoinDesk tied the swing to Nvidia’s board opening an independent investigation into reports about CEO Jensen Huang and to Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying talks with Iran had stalled. The rebound stalled quickly, leaving bitcoin between its 200-day average near $73,150 and its 100-day average near $77,430. (CoinDesk)
Keplr’s “stolen” $6 million is partly a rescue. A flaw at Web3Auth, the Consensys-owned service behind Keplr’s Google and Apple sign-in, exposed private keys for some social-login wallets. Keplr co-founder Josh Lee estimated about 20% of those accounts were affected. Web3Auth says it then swept vulnerable wallets “using the same path of the original attacker” before the attacker could reach them. Its 12 published recovery addresses held about $5.6 million on Sunday, per The Block’s onchain review, mostly ATOM on Cosmos Hub. Bitquery had reported a thief collecting about $6 million from more than 44,000 Keplr wallets, but all eight addresses it flagged are on Web3Auth’s recovery list. Web3Auth’s mention of an “original attacker” means some funds were taken; it has not said how much. Wallets set up with a recovery phrase or hardware device were not affected. Keplr is telling Google and Apple login users not to send funds to those accounts and to move what remains. (The Block)
ACryptoS drained, then shut down. The yield aggregator says about $665,000 was taken Sunday from 77 of its 126 concentrated-liquidity vaults on Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Base and Optimism. The deposit function never checked that both tokens were supplied, so a tiny one-sided deposit could mint most of a vault’s shares; the project’s own test turned 10 USDC into 66.84% of one vault. The bug dated to the vaults’ first deployment. After the first exploit, copycats joined in: 135 addresses took part. Deposits are off, withdrawals are open, no reimbursement has been announced, and the project says it is now deprecated. Depositors should withdraw through the official app and revoke old approvals. (CryptoWatchDesk)
Japanese government bonds head toward Canton. Progmat and Digital Asset signed a memorandum of understanding to connect Progmat’s issuance platform to the Canton Network and develop tokenized JGBs that keep their legal status as book-entry bonds, with round-the-clock settlement as the goal. A working group of more than 68 organizations plans to move to hands-on testing around November, in a Canton sandbox using test tokens for bonds, deposits and stablecoins. This is an agreement and a roadmap, not a live integration. (CoinPost)
Briefly:
- A Swiss franc stablecoin on Solana. Zug-based Safirum has launched CHF-S, backed 1:1 by francs held in segregated accounts at Berner Kantonalbank and Banque Richelieu and available only to verified users. Coverage so far comes from a single trade outlet. (Codego News)
Health: lifting for cognition, cooling for heat, home blood pressure
Cooling helps performance in the heat. General evidence (healthy adult men, lab heat): a meta-analysis of 51 reports and 480 participants exercising at 30 °C or hotter found cooling before or during exercise was associated with small gains in self-paced performance (g = 0.24) and repeated sprints (g = 0.20), and longer time to exhaustion (g = 0.57, with high heterogeneity). The review did not rank cooling methods or timing, included men only, and says the estimates do not guarantee an individual benefit. (Journal of Thermal Biology)
Unstable-surface lifting and cognition. Clinical trial (adults 65 and older with probable mild cognitive impairment): 162 physically independent older adults (average age 70) were randomized to 24 weeks of twice-weekly resistance training on balance pads and Bosu balls (seven exercises, 3 sets of 10–15 repetitions) or light stretching and functional exercise. Versus control, the training group gained 1.2 letters on a verbal-fluency test and 0.7 points on forward digit span. Other executive-function and memory tests did not differ. The changes are small, only 2 of many outcomes improved, and the impairment was screening-based (average MoCA 20.1), not a clinical diagnosis. Use stable support if your balance is limited. (Journal of Nutrition, Health and Aging)
Measure blood pressure at home after a high reading. General (workplace) pilot trial: 58 Japanese municipal employees with elevated blood pressure at a workplace checkup got two physician-led lifestyle-counseling sessions, with or without home monitoring and feedback. At the next annual checkup, systolic pressure had fallen 9.9 mmHg more in the home-monitoring group, or 7.7 mmHg after excluding three people who started medication. It is a small pilot with wide confidence intervals and a single follow-up reading, and the abstract does not specify how often participants measured. It does not replace medical evaluation of persistently high pressure. (Journal of Clinical Hypertension)
Small-sided soccer for type 2 diabetes. Clinical trial: in the Faroe Islands, 111 adults aged 40–70 with type 2 diabetes played three 60-minute small-sided soccer sessions a week for 14 weeks or continued usual care. VO2peak rose 2.80 mL/kg/min more than in the usual-care group. The primary outcome, lean body mass, did not change, and neither did fat mass or HbA1c. Lower insulin-resistance markers were exploratory and need confirmation. (Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports)
Remote band training for knee arthritis. Clinical trial: 80 adults with grade 1–3 knee osteoarthritis, all given one hyaluronic-acid injection, did 12 weeks of tele-supervised resistance-band exercise or got education only. The exercise group did 3.8 more chair stands in 30 seconds, was 1.9 seconds faster on the timed up-and-go and had better function scores, but pain did not improve. Sets and frequency were not in the abstract, and everyone had an injection. (Research in Sports Medicine)
Briefly:
- Balance training schedule for fallers. Clinical trial: 30 older adults who had fallen in the past six months did 96 treadmill perturbations either in four sessions over one week or spread across two weeks. The groups had 4 versus 11 falls over six months, a non-significant difference (p = 0.068). Both improved balance scores, but there was no untrained control group. This is supervised, equipment-based training, not a home routine. (Journal of Aging and Physical Activity)
General and local: a tie-break vote, a 15-vote race and a locked station
Center Street rezoning returns tonight. Manassas City Council meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall and takes up the rezoning of about 2.2 acres at 9007 Center Street for 162 apartments and a public parking garage. It failed on two 3–3 votes on Oct. 26. Two seats are now vacant: Ralph J. Smith became interim mayor, and Sonia Vásquez Luna joined the House of Delegates. Four members remain, so a 2–2 split would require Mayor Smith to break the tie, and he supported the rezoning in October. The vote is a first reading. Approval would set the zoning but not authorize construction or settle the garage financing. (Manassas Journal)
Business Council may be dissolved. The same meeting’s consent agenda includes dissolving the Manassas Business Council, a seven-seat volunteer advisory board created in 1994. The Appointments Committee recommended it unanimously Oct. 28, but the packet does not say which channels would take over its work. (Manassas Journal)
School Board gap now 15 votes. The state’s updated unofficial Manassas results (Sunday 2:12 p.m.) show Murina Dove at 5,951 and Sara Brescia at 5,936 for the last School Board seat, up from a 13-vote gap. Provisional ballots are still listed as not reported, and certification is expected as soon as Tuesday. (Virginia Department of Elections)
Triple-AAA again for Prince William. Moody’s, Fitch and S&P all reaffirmed the county’s top bond ratings, which only about 55 counties nationwide hold from all three. The ratings come ahead of a Nov. 10 bond sale for school capital projects. (Prince William County)
Futures bounce; CPI tomorrow. At 5:10 a.m. ET, Dow futures were up 376 points (0.73%), S&P 500 futures 0.40% and Nasdaq 100 futures 0.21% after last week’s post-midterm selloff. Nvidia fell 4.5% premarket. The October consumer price index comes out Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. ET. (Reuters via Investing.com · BLS)
Briefly:
- Bhatt back on the stand. Defense attorneys get another chance today to question Naresh Bhatt in Prince William County Circuit Court. He admitted dismembering his wife’s remains but denies killing her, and prosecutors spent hours Thursday challenging that account. (WTOP)
- Challenge to Question 1. A Tazewell County judge will hear arguments later this month on a bid to block certification of the voter-approved reproductive-freedom amendment. (WHRO / Radio IQ)
Locked in at Vienna. A catch-up from last Monday: Commanders fans riding the last Orange Line train home after the Sunday-night win over the Eagles reached Vienna to find the exit gates on both sides of I-66 chained shut. “Are you serious, dude? Now we’re locked in the Metro,” Chris Comerford, known online as DMV Adventures, said in a video. Metro said the station manager had locked an outside gate during a final check and riders couldn’t get out for five minutes after the train’s 1:39 a.m. arrival. The agency apologized. Comerford later called it a “minor inconvenience” and said he “just had to laugh.” (WJLA · NBC4 Washington)
Image: NBC4 Washington, via NBC4 Washington.
Science: an AI-found proof in quantum computing
The Aaronson–Ambainis conjecture is proved. Posed in 2009, the conjecture says every bounded low-degree polynomial on the Boolean cube has a variable with real influence. David Turturean of the startup Physical Superintelligence posted a proof showing some variable has influence of at least about 1/d⁶ (ε/d to the 7th power in the original form). His paper says the mathematical statements were produced by AI models, using a non-public Anthropic model inside the company’s research harness, and that he reviewed the result and takes responsibility for it. The main proof is checked in the Lean proof assistant. Scott Aaronson, who posed the conjecture with Andris Ambainis, wrote that he believes it is correct, citing the Lean certificate and experts at MIT and Stanford who have written an exposition. The result means quantum computers cannot get a superpolynomial speedup on yes-or-no problems that works for most inputs, relative to random oracles. As Aaronson stresses, that does not touch Shor’s factoring algorithm, quantum chemistry simulation or known speedups for search problems. It is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed. (arXiv · Shtetl-Optimized)
Russia: Moscow and Voronezh
Moscow airports restricted; Voronezh drones downed. Overnight, Rosaviatsiya restricted Domodedovo and Vnukovo to flights cleared by authorities, and early delays at Vnukovo stayed under two hours. Voronezh Governor Alexander Gusev said six drones were destroyed over the city and three districts, with no casualties or damage reported so far. The 12-hour drone alert was lifted at 7:02 a.m. local time. (MSK1 · AiF Voronezh)
Bottom line
Crypto starts the week with leverage flushed out and bitcoin near its 200-day average ahead of Tuesday’s inflation report. The Keplr scare looks smaller than first reported, and ACryptoS is a reminder to withdraw from unmaintained vaults. The health picture favors steady, measurable habits: train regularly, cool down in the heat and check blood pressure at home. In Manassas, tonight’s Center Street vote could come down to the mayor, and the School Board race now hinges on provisional ballots. Vienna’s late-night riders are free again.