Show me the reserves
By Silas Fenner · Monday, November 2, 2026
In The News
>Binance: The Proof, and the Wait
Binance completed its latest proof-of-reserves check on Monday, four days after hackers stole about $6.3 billion from the exchange.
The check covers ten tokens, including bitcoin, ether, and the dollar-pegged tokens USDT and USDC. Holders of those tokens can now verify that their own balances are backed, one for one. Binance says it has replaced about 95 percent of what was stolen, using company money to buy replacement tokens, and that the remaining 5 percent is in less liquid tokens it is still acquiring.
More withdrawals open on Tuesday, with another reserves snapshot planned for Wednesday. Withdrawals reopened in phases on Sunday, starting with bitcoin, and the first day back moved billions of dollars out of the exchange. Hundreds of smaller tokens are still locked, and Binance has given no date for the next phase beyond Tuesday.
The full proof for every token is still to come. What Monday proves is narrower than that: for the ten largest tokens, the balances check out. For the rest, customers are still waiting.
From a crypto exchange still proving itself, the question tonight moves to the companies building the machines — and to the money that is starting to ask harder questions of them.
>Investors Get Choosier
OpenAI has cut the target for its new funding round from $30 billion to $20 billion, and its target valuation from $1.4 trillion to $1.25 trillion.
The round is not closed, and the first close is expected to come in below $20 billion. Some large investors have shrunk their checks, and some are waiting to see what price Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, fetches when it lists on the stock market — expected within weeks — before they put more money into OpenAI.
Anthropic filed publicly for its own stock market listing last week. Its filing shows a first-half net loss of $80.7 billion, most of it from changes in the value of convertible notes and derivatives, alongside sales growth of 1,300 percent in a year. One forecast, reported from a major investor in a chip-financing deal, puts Anthropic's expected credit rating in the top tier of speculative grade — a “junk” rating, in market language — which would make borrowing more expensive.
None of this means the money has stopped. It means the terms have changed. A year ago, the pitch was growth at any price. Today, investors are asking what the price buys, and what it costs to keep the machines running.
That same question — what the machines are doing, and who is watching — comes to a head tomorrow, when Americans vote.
>The War Rooms Before the Vote
OpenAI and Anthropic have each set up a dedicated team — a “war room,” in the industry's language — to watch their platforms through the United States midterm elections on Tuesday.
This is the first time either company has done this for a midterm election. The teams will monitor for misuse of their chatbots and for false election information, including misleading images made by artificial intelligence and inaccurate answers from AI-powered search tools. Anthropic says its team will watch for misuse and respond quickly to incidents ahead of the vote. Meta, which first used the war-room idea in 2018, has activated its own Election Operations Center for the week.
The test is a practical one. Millions of voters now ask a chatbot, not a search engine, where to vote and what is true. A war room can catch a false image or a wrong polling place after it spreads. Whether it can catch it before is the question voters will answer for themselves, one query at a time.
The War, Together
The war stories belong together tonight, because they share one question: what happens when a pause ends — and who gets to say what is true while it lasts.
>Oleshky: The Fighting Returns After the Pause
The six-day local ceasefire around Oleshky has expired, and the fighting is back.
The pause ended at 9 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Sunday, midnight Moscow time. Russia refused an extension. On Monday morning, a drone struck the centre of Kherson city, across the Dnipro River from Oleshky. No casualties were reported from that strike.
Kherson's regional governor said Russian forces shelled or attacked 16 settlements in Ukrainian-held parts of the region in the 24 hours to early Monday morning. Ukraine's General Staff said Russian forces used the truce to strengthen their positions — rotating units, fortifying positions, expanding anti-drone measures along roads, and increasing deliveries of ammunition and supplies. Moscow's side, as reported, assumed Kyiv had done the same.
Nearly 800 people were evacuated in total during the pause. Ukraine's human rights commissioner said both sides upheld their obligations throughout the truce. Russia's human rights commissioner said fewer than 750 people were left behind after the evacuations, and that there would be monthly humanitarian aid deliveries to the town. No Ukrainian confirmation of the monthly-deliveries claim has been seen.
As the pause ended, the warnings themselves were tampered with. Ukraine's Air Force said late Sunday that its public air-raid alert app had been hacked and briefly showed Kyiv and other areas under a nuclear alert. It said there is no radiation threat. Russia said its own alert app was hacked overnight as well, sending false warnings about air raids and chemical and nuclear attacks. Who hacked the apps is not settled in these reports.
From a pause that ended in gunfire, the road leads to Gaza, where a ceasefire that exists on paper has not stopped the killing.
>Gaza: Three More Killed on Monday
Israeli strikes killed at least three Palestinians in Gaza on Monday and wounded several others, according to medics and Gaza health officials.
Two people were killed and six others wounded in two separate airstrikes in Khan Younis, in the south. A third person was killed in an airstrike in Al-Mussadar. Israel's military said it carried out two strikes, targeting Palestinian militants.
The ceasefire took effect in October last year. Since then, at least 1,580 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to the territory's health officials, while Israel says four of its soldiers have been killed. Israel says Hamas has been rearming and launching attacks in violation of the truce. Hamas denies trying to carry out attacks or rebuild its arsenal.
The wider deal has stalled. Negotiators have not agreed terms for Hamas to disarm or for Israel to withdraw its troops, who control about two-thirds of the territory.
From Gaza, the same unresolved waterway runs through the Gulf, where claims about tankers are still multiplying faster than anyone can verify them.
>Hormuz: Two Tankers, Still Unverified
Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy said on Sunday that two oil tankers exploded after striking mines while travelling through an unauthorised route in the Strait of Hormuz. It did not name the vessels or give any information about their crews.
The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman through which a large share of the world's seaborne oil passes. Iran has imposed restrictions on vessels passing through it and has attacked ships it says break those restrictions.
The claim could not be independently verified. Earlier on Sunday, Britain's maritime trade agency said the master of a merchant ship had relayed a mayday call reporting that another vessel had been struck by an unknown projectile in the strait. It was not clear whether that alert and the Guard's statement referred to the same vessels.
From the waterway to the power grid, the same war took a new form on Sunday — not a battle, but a complaint.
>Sudan: A Complaint to the World, and the Lights Out
Sudan has lodged formal complaints against Ethiopia with the United Nations Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council, after a series of drone attacks on civilian sites and power stations.
Sudan's foreign ministry said late Sunday that the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, which it has fought in a civil war since April 2023, are launching drones from Ethiopian territory. A report from Sudan's army-led Transitional Sovereignty Council said 70 attacks involving 187 one-way attack drones, launched from Ethiopian territory since February 15, killed or wounded 484 civilians and killed 176 Sudanese soldiers. The report named launch sites at Asosa Airport in western Ethiopia, the Kurmuk-Gizen border area, and Bahir Dar air base in the north-west.
Ethiopia has not publicly responded to the complaints. It denies backing the Rapid Support Forces, and has in turn accused Sudan's army of backing rebels linked to the Tigray People's Liberation Front, an allegation Khartoum rejects.
The strikes continued on Monday. Local sources said drones hit power distribution stations in Kassala state in the east, cutting power across the state, and a further strike hit a distribution station near the Merowe dam in Northern state. Power stations across several states have been hit in the past week, leaving whole areas without electricity.
The Editorial
Every story tonight is, underneath, the same story.
Binance asks its customers to check a proof. Investors ask OpenAI to check its price. Two AI companies set up rooms to check their own chatbots before an election. Sudan asks the United Nations to check a neighbour's drones. And in Ukraine, the alert app itself — the thing people check when the sirens should sound — was hacked, and lied.
A proof, a price, a war room, a complaint: these are all ways of asking someone else to confirm what you cannot confirm yourself. They work only when the checker is separate from the checked. A company checking its own balances, a lab checking its own chatbot, a government checking its own war — each of these is a check with one hand tied.
That is not a reason to fear the machine, and it is not a reason to worship it. It is a reason to understand it, and to ask, every time: who built this, who benefits from it, and who gets to look inside?
The reader decides. But the reader can only decide what the reader can see.
From Silas Fenner
What was checked: Binance's Monday proof-of-reserves update and its Tuesday and Wednesday timetable were checked against the exchange's recovery update and same-day reporting. The OpenAI funding cut and the Anthropic filing figures were checked against reporting from the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and CNBC. The election war rooms were checked against Semafor's reporting and same-day coverage. The Oleshky expiry, the resumed fighting, and the hacked alert apps were checked against the day's Reuters reporting and the desk's morning and midday war-block briefs. The Gaza Monday toll was checked against the Reuters Cairo dispatch. The Sudan complaints and Monday power-station strikes were checked against same-day reporting of Sudan's foreign ministry statement and local sources.
What is printed as a claim: the OpenAI funding figures and the Anthropic credit-rating forecast, which are reported, not confirmed by the companies; Iran's Revolutionary Guard Navy account that two tankers struck mines, which no independent source has verified; Sudan's account that Rapid Support Forces drones were launched from Ethiopian territory, which Ethiopia denies; and Russia's claim of monthly humanitarian aid deliveries to Oleshky, which has no Ukrainian confirmation.
What was left out and why: the Bowen Wan case was left out tonight, because no new November 2 development was found — the lawsuit and the Times reporting stand from October 27, and repeating them would not have been news. The Mark Cuban interview clip was left out for the same reason — it dates from late October, and no verbatim quote has yet been verified at transcript level. Reports differ on whether Binance's full proof for every token is complete or due Tuesday; the copy follows the exchange's Monday update and its Tuesday timetable, and does not claim every token is verified.
— Silas Fenner