The midterm election could reshape the outlook for companies tied to Washington, notably in defence, healthcare, crypto, and artificial intelligence. Democratic control of either chamber would bring more investigations and leverage over federal spending, though President Donald Trump would keep his veto and broad regulatory powers. Historically, stocks have done well under divided government. Under Republican presidents, the S&P 500 gained an average of 23% in the year after midterms when Congress was split, against 16% when Democrats controlled both chambers, according to Morgan Stanley. Exposure is high. Lockheed Martin gets about 70% of its sales from the US government, and Medicaid made up 75% of Molina Healthcare's 2025 premium revenue. The White House has requested $1.5 trillion for national defence in fiscal 2027. Crypto firms such as Coinbase want clear rules after the Senate failed to advance the Clarity Act in September.

Coinbase's third-party vendor problem strikes again with Amplitude leak. SlowMist's 23pds says over 70,000 users had contact data exposed in the Amplitude incident, a figure Coinbase has not confirmed, days after the exchange posted $1.22 billion in Q3 2026 revenue. Barely 18 months after paying contractors leaked data on nearly 70,000 customers, Coinbase is facing eerily similar numbers from a different vendor's security failure. Coinbase confirmed on October 28, 2026, that a security incident at Amplitude, the analytics vendor it uses to track customer behavior on its platform, exposed contact details including emails and phone numbers for an unknown number of customers. The exchange says its own systems were never touched and that no funds were at risk. What it hasn't said is how many people were actually affected, when the intrusion happened, or how long the data sat exposed before anyone noticed. That gap got filled, sort of, by someone else. 23pds, the chief information security officer at blockchain security firm SlowMist, posted that hackers had accessed contact information belonging to more than 70,000 Coinbase users. Coinbase hasn't confirmed that figure, and SlowMist's claim remains unverified. But the number landed hard, because it's almost identical to the one Coinbase itself disclosed after its last vendor breach. In May 2025, Coinbase revealed that contractors working for outsourcing firm TaskUs had been bribed, at roughly $200 a photo according to Dark Reading, to snap pictures of customer data on their screens and hand it to criminals. That breach hit 69,461 people. The stolen records included names, home addresses, dates of birth, masked Social Security numbers, and government ID images. Attackers demanded $20 million to stay quiet. Coinbase refused, disclosed the breach publicly, and later estimated remediation could cost as much as $400 million, according to the company's own filings. A leaked email and phone number sounds minor next to a Social Security number. In crypto, it isn't. Phone numbers tied to known Coinbase accounts are the raw material for SIM-swap attacks, where a criminal convinces a mobile carrier to port a victim's number to a new SIM, then uses it to intercept two-factor codes and drain exchange accounts or wallets. Email addresses feed phishing campaigns built to look exactly like Coinbase's real security alerts, timed to arrive while a user is still anxious about the breach itself. Coinbase account holders are a uniquely attractive phishing list precisely because everyone on it is already known to hold crypto. Coinbase Prime, the exchange's NYDFS-qualified custody arm, will hold the USDC balances, while Bastion converts funds for bank payouts in more than 60 countries. Solana and Sui will handle the transfers once the feature launches in late October 2026. - how to use USDC on Samsung Galaxy phones - Coinbase USDC wallet integration Samsung devices Coinbase, for its part, is leaning hard on the distinction between a breach of its own infrastructure and a breach of a vendor's. "Coinbase has not had a data breach," the company said, according to reporting from Decrypt and CoinGape, framing this as an Amplitude problem rather than a Coinbase problem. Amplitude also serves other companies beyond Coinbase, and the incident reportedly touched a broader pool of its customers, not Coinbase alone. That framing is technically accurate and also beside the point for anyone whose phone number is now circulating. Coinbase chose Amplitude, gave it customer data to process, and is the name a phishing email will spoof when it uses that data. The corporate boundary between "our systems" and "our vendor's systems" means nothing to the person who gets a fake security alert a week from now. The timing is awkward in a way Coinbase can't spin. The company reported Q3 2026 earnings on October 29, just a day after the Amplitude disclosure, posting revenue of roughly $1.86 billion and beating Wall Street estimates by a wide margin, according to Finance Magnates. Trading volume hit $295 billion for the quarter, up from $185 billion a year earlier. Coinbase stock climbed on the news. The business, by every financial measure available, is working better than it has in years. The security posture around that business is a separate question, and this is the second time in under two years the honest answer has involved a vendor, not Coinbase's own infrastructure, leaking tens of thousands of customers' information. A pattern like that doesn't show up in a quarterly earnings deck. It shows up later, in the inbox of someone who trusted the exchange with their phone number. Join the discussion. No replies yet. Start the discussion. Elroy is a digital marketer and developer from Goa, with over a decade of experience web development and marketing. He has been associated with several startups and serves currently as an Editor to the Asia Pacific Industrial magazine. He occasionally writes on Startup Fortune about technology and automation.

Dataline raises $10.6M to give AI agents data they can trust. Dataline announced a $10.6 million funding round alongside the initial cohort of AI Data Launch partners, marking a major step toward becoming the data lifeline in the era of AI. October 31, 2026 06:58 ET | Source: DATALINE Road Town, BVI, Oct. 31, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - The round was co-led by Lattice and Samsung-backed Dispersion Capital, with participation from AI fund Symbolic Capital. Dataline also drew a deep bench of strategic backers spanning web2 and web3, including Coinbase Ventures, Anagram, a former Head of the CFTC, and founders and partners from Robinhood, Venmo, Anchorage, NEA, General Catalyst, Jump Capital, and FalconX. The Data Launch cohort brings together a roster of leading AI and web3 projects to establish the best data for AI, including Kite, Aerodrome, B3OS, Sentient, Sahara, Hyperliquid, Polymarket, Kalshi, Primus, Cluster, Apro, Base, Robinhood Chain, BNB, Sui, TON, and others. As part of the launch, Dataline co-announced with Base and Robinhood Chain that builders on both chains will get free Dataline access. The raise builds on early traction that has already validated demand for the network. To date, Dataline has powered 19.4 million onchain transactions with a 96.4% agent task success rate and grown a community of more than 300,000 people worldwide. The protocol was also named a winner of the 2025 BNB Chain AI Hackathon. Community participation is growing alongside network usage. Dataline's first quest with Legion drew over 1,000 unique participants, who completed over 750 quests and over 1,000 raids. Quest 2 begins October 15, providing the community with another chance of earning rewards. In November, Dataline plans to hold a Uniswap Continuous Clearing Auction (CCA) on Base and on Robinhood Chain. OpenRouter for data Autonomous AI agents are only as good as the strength of the data behind them. Dataline is the decentralized network for agent-payable data, providing a two-sided marketplace where anyone can publish a feed and any agent can pay per call with x402. Just as OpenRouter is the routing layer for AI tokens, Dataline is the routing layer for AI data. Via a single integration, every API response carries an AI confidence score weighing source reliability, freshness, and consistency, so agents can flag or refuse bad data before acting on it. Bringing more data online In addition to Dataline's curated and verified feeds, the protocol also lets anyone publish data and price it per call, like a job board for data where AI agents and humans alike can post and pick up work. A requester posts a bounty for the data they need, and any fulfiller in the network claims it, supplies the data, and gets paid. Payments settle instantly through x402, sellers' credentials never leave the gateway, and an optional zero-knowledge attestation tier lets providers attach a verifiable proof bundle to every response. Quality is enforced economically rather than by any central authority. Fulfillers stake tokens to submit their responses: good data earns the bounty, while bad data gets the stake slashed. The result is a constantly expanding marketplace of cross-verified, custom-fetched data on demand. Data is the lifeblood of AI "After building AI agents ourselves, we realized that clean and reliable data is the lifeblood of AI," said Nuo Shi, cofounder of Dataline. "Today's AI is capable enough to know what data it needs, sometimes better than we do. So we built an open network that not only delivers the most reliable data streams, but also lets AI request help to gather the data it can't reach on its own." About Dataline Dataline is the decentralized data network for AI agents, providing one integration for all markets. The protocol delivers cross-verified data sources with AI-generated confidence scores, along with a network of custom-fetched data requests to power a smarter AI workforce.