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Vanguard to allow crypto access to brokerage clients
Crypto Trends

Vanguard prepares to open brokerage doors to crypto ETFs

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Vanguard, the most formidable holdout in asset management, is drafting plans for a strategic retreat. The $10 trillion giant is reportedly preparing to grant its brokerage clients access to crypto ETFs, signaling a profound shift in institutional acceptance.

Summary

  • Vanguard is reportedly preparing to let brokerage clients access third-party crypto ETFs, reversing its 2024 ban.
  • The shift follows rising client demand, regulatory changes, and new CEO Salim Ramji’s influence.
  • The firm still has no plans to launch its own crypto products.

On Sept. 26, crypto journalist Eleanor Terrett reported that Vanguard has initiated internal groundwork and external discussions to facilitate access to select third-party crypto ETFs for its brokerage clients.

According to a source familiar with the plans, the firm is acting in response to mounting client demand and a notably shifting regulatory landscape. The source emphasized that Vanguard is being “very methodical” in its approach, acknowledging the market dynamics that have evolved since the landmark ETF approvals in 2024.

Crucially, the report indicates this move does not include plans for Vanguard to launch its own proprietary crypto products.

From rejection to reconsideration

This potential pivot marks a stark departure from Vanguard’s firm stance in January 2024, when the firm blocked client access to the newly approved spot Bitcoin ETFs. At the time, the asset manager stated the products conflicted with its offering focused on traditional asset classes like equities, bonds, and cash, which it considered the essential building blocks of a long-term portfolio. It deemed Bitcoin’s volatility incompatible with its investment philosophy.

The road to this reversal, however, has been paved with telling clues. As Bloomberg Senior ETF analyst Eric Balchunas noted, the appointment of Salim Ramji as CEO in mid-2024 was a critical signal.

Ramji, who personally oversaw the launch of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), brought an insider’s understanding of the digital asset market to Vanguard’s top role. Balchunas had previously speculated that Ramji’s leadership could lead to a reversal of the ETF ban within a year or two, characterizing it not as a radical shift but as an incremental change for a platform that already offers gold ETFs.

This context makes the current developments appear less like a sudden about-face and more like the execution of a deliberate, CEO-led strategy. Further complicating Vanguard’s public skepticism was its quiet ascent to becoming the largest shareholder in Strategy, which is widely regarded as a publicly traded Bitcoin proxy.

According to Bloomberg, through its various funds, Vanguard accumulated an 8% stake in the firm. This substantial investment stood in sharp contrast to its public statements, suggesting a nuanced, if not contradictory, approach to gaining exposure to the digital asset ecosystem through traditional equity channels.



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Black Ops 7 blows the doors wide open on its multiplayer mode ahead of Call of Duty: Next
Game Reviews

Black Ops 7 blows the doors wide open on its multiplayer mode ahead of Call of Duty: Next

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Black Ops 7 is a little far off still, but if you thought next week’s big Call of Duty: Next multiplayer reveal event was going to be where most remaining information would be revealed, you’d actually be a little off base this time.

That’s because Treyarch and Raven have unveiled practically all details about the game’s multiplayer mode ahead of Next, showing off the hardware, the multiplayer arenas, and even going deep on movement and map design.

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The blog post has to be one of the largest I’ve ever seen for a Call of Duty game. It’s split into several different sections covering all aspects of multiplayer, essentially leaving very little a mystery.

The post walks us through all 18 maps coming to Black Ops 7 at launch – 16 core (6v6) multiplayer maps, and two Skirmish maps. Of those 16, three are Black Ops 2 remakes; those being Express, Hijacked, and Raid.

Skirmish is the new, big-player-count mode in Black Ops 7, offering 20v20 matches on two large maps that include team objectives, vehicles, and more. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, and it’s actually one of the least discussed in the blog post. The other new addition to the mode gallery is Overload, which is a riff on Capture the Flag.

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In terms of loadout-building, the big new feature this year is Overlock. It lets you modify tacticals, lethals, Field Upgrades, as well as Scorestreaks. You can have up to two Overclock abilities, which offer upgrades that could boost the damage of equipment, the way it interacts with the world, its cost (such as for Scorestreaks), how quickly it charges up (Field Upgrades) or give you the ability to carry more of it.

There’s also a section on progression in the post, which covers how the camo grind is going to work this time around, alongside several other details about the return of Weapon Prestige, and how progression is being tweaked in the game across the board.

We’re getting a similar deep dive into Zombies this week, but you can catch up on what’s been revealed so far about multiplayer at the link at the top of the post. Black Ops 7 arrives November 14 on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.



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Put your neighbours under surveillance in automation horror game Beyond The Doors
Game Updates

Put your neighbours under surveillance in automation horror game Beyond The Doors

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“Horror” and “automation” are concepts I’m used to seeing together in fiery/weepy essays about late capitalism. I’m less used to seeing them together in videogame marketing blurbs. Horror, in an automation-based game? Why, games with automation are supposed to deliver the finest and most methodical of chemical highs. They are supposed to feel like building yourself a better brain out of candy-coloured conveyor belts and smelters. They are not supposed to make you afraid.

The game that inspires these ruminations is Beyond the Doors, out this year, which has an alpha demo on Steam. It casts you as a lonely greasemonkey working in the basement of a dour, weed-hung apartment building. Your job is to bug your neighbours, in the sense of placing them under surveillance. Every night, somebody emails you to request that you set up a listening device near somebody else’s door, then send them a recording of any activity within.

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Gathering these recordings is a ponderous challenge, partly thanks to cumbersome, MicroProsaic interface design, but also because Beyond The Doors wants to be ponderous. You have to daisy-chain devices, copying and pasting codes to synch them together. Then you have to select and save the file using DOS commands on your server computer, before wiring it to your desktop for analysis.

The fiddliness of all this is intensified, of course, by the nape-tickling awareness that Something Is Wrong. The apartment block is all greyspace and neglect, built around a central chasm with a webbed glass ceiling. You fear to turn your back on any particular door, any particular corner.

There are boulders of trash that sort of multiply like amoeba when you pick them up, but may have useful objects beneath them. The worst part, possibly, is that I can’t find a way to listen to the files I’m recording. I have no idea whether this is deliberate, or a limitation of the demo, but I think Beyond The Doors is more powerful for refusing to satisfy the very voyeurism it kindles.

I didn’t get far enough to experience this in the demo, but going by the above header image and the trailer, it all gets a bit freaky later on. I’m intrigued to see how that freakiness gels with the absorbed tinkering that defines most automation-based games. In this case, you’ll be overhauling your surveillance network with cash from each job – merging chains and installing upgrades.

“This alpha version includes the core gameplay loop: placing recorders, building receiver networks, collecting sounds, and sending reports,” write developers Dream Error on Steam. “There’s much more to come, this is just the beginning.” There’s a development roadmap, if you’re into that kind of thing, but Beyond The Doors is probably more fun if you preserve your ignorance before taking the plunge.



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Jesse Hamilton
NFT Gaming

Crypto Firms That Left U.S. Can Open Doors Here as Foreign Boards of Trade

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The Commodity Futures Trading Commission — under its ongoing “crypto sprint” to open a wider path for U.S. crypto business — issued an advisory on Thursday that firms residing outside the U.S. that are willing to register with the agency as foreign boards of trade can deal directly with U.S. customers.

“American companies that were forced to set up shop in foreign jurisdictions to facilitate crypto asset trading now have a path back to U.S. markets,” said CFTC Acting Chairman Caroline Pham in a statement with the advisory, which didn’t make any changes to agency policy but was meant to serve as a “reminder” of a possible approach for such companies.

“Since the 1990s, Americans have been able to trade on non-U.S. exchanges that are registered with the CFTC as FBOTs. Starting now, the CFTC welcomes back Americans that want to trade efficiently and safely under CFTC regulations, and opens up U.S. markets to the rest of the world,” said Pham, who is holding the regulator’s leadership spot until a permanent replacement selected by President Donald Trump can be confirmed by the Senate.

She called the advisory, which was issued by the CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight, “another example of how the CFTC will continue to deliver wins for President Trump as part of our crypto sprint.”

The agency has been receiving increased interest in such registrations, the statement said, and the CFTC aims to make clear that firms eligible for FBOT status don’t have to register as U.S. designated contract markets (DCMs) in order to let U.S. clients directly access their electronic trading services. The firms do have to be rigorously regulated on their home turf, according to the CFTC regulations.

Trump had nominated Brian Quintenz, a former CFTC commissioner, to take over the chairman spot, but the White House paused his confirmation process before the Senate’s summer recess. He’s expected to return to that process as soon as next week, but if he’s confirmed, he’ll be the only member of what’s meant to be a five-person commission. Republican Pham has said she’s set to leave, and the commission’s only Democrat, Kristin Johnson, is exiting next week.

Meanwhile, Pham has been using much of her time atop the commission to pursue crypto-friendly initiatives.

Read More: While CFTC Awaits New Chairman, Acting Chief Pham Gets Rolling on Crypto



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