🎮 The world's first official Minecraft hotel is coming

Minecraft World — the themed zone at Chessington World of Adventures Resort in the UK — just got two announcements at once: the world's first official Minecraft hotel, and the first-ever Minecraft rollercoaster.

The hotel is called Minecraft World Hotel; the ride, Escape the Nether. Both are set to open in 2027, confirmed by Merlin Entertainments and Mojang Studios at Minecraft LIVE.

Concept art already paints a picture: wooden houses, Creepers, TNT blocks, a Nether-themed dining area — plus interactive adventures, block-built playscapes and themed retail. Everything from the game, except you can't hit Escape this time.

IGN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmB9b5njVbA

💸 $950 million "forex pool" — not much forex in it

Cash FX Group spent years promising investors their money was managed by expert traders and AI, delivering up to 15% weekly. The algorithm, it turns out, was mostly just spending their deposits.

The CFTC sued the company and three individuals in a Florida federal court, alleging a classic Ponzi: $950 million raised for supposed forex trading, almost none done, new money recycled to pay fictitious profits to earlier participants. Real losses: at least $406 million.

The extra detail that stings — Cash FX ran on multilevel marketing. Participants didn't just lose money. They recruited the next round themselves. Enthusiastically.

Cointelegraph

💸 $318k frozen, $387 million gone

Bitget, a major crypto exchange, lost around $387 million in one of this year's biggest hacks — Lazarus Group is the prime suspect. Circle and Tether moved fast, freezing a linked wallet holding ~99,990 USDC and ~218,023 USDT, roughly $318,000 total.

Not fast enough. The attackers had already swapped everything freezable into ETH — an asset no issuer can touch at the contract level. Other exploiter addresses still hold 63,000+ ETH, entirely out of reach.

That's 0.08% recovered. The oldest argument in crypto — how permissionless is an asset one phone call can freeze? — is back on the table.

*Via Decrypt*

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 28

💸 Tether dragged into $84M DOJ forfeiture case
⚛️ Quantum-safe Bitcoin just got five times cheaper
🎮 World's first Minecraft hotel is actually happening
📉 $950M forex fund had very little forex in it
🔓 Bitget lost $387M, froze just $318k in response

Send this to whoever spent the day in back-to-back meetings — they missed a lot

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

📦 How resellers turned Pokémon card collecting into an online blood sport

The 30th Anniversary Pokémon TCG set dropped last week — fans camped overnight outside stores, resellers had already cleared preorders in their sleep.

Services like Polar Chefs sell subscriptions at $660/year: bots, virtual cards, spoofed IPs, restock alerts included. One reseller told The Verge he spends under five hours a week on the whole operation — bots buy while he's asleep, he wakes up and sells in bulk. Technically legal; retail bots still aren't banned in the US.

The story's sharpest detail: a 72-year-old man was arrested for planting a hidden tracker in a delivery worker's car to intercept a Pokémon shipment. First-degree misdemeanor. A children's franchise, professional bot infrastructure, a GPS ambush — quite the ecosystem.

💸 USDC just got a serious ally — Tether isn't worried yet

The stablecoin market runs on two rails: Tether's USDT at ~$140B and Circle's USDC at ~$74B. Circle just made a move to close that gap.

Binance put $100 million into Circle and signed a five-year distribution deal. Since their first partnership in late 2024, USDC spot markets on Binance nearly tripled — 140 to 329 — and monthly volume doubled to a steady $80B+. Kaiko puts daily USDC flow on Binance at $5–10B, 10–20x more than most other venues.

Tether's real moat, though, is inertia: years of deep local liquidity and the simple fact that people are already used to it. As CoinDesk notes, distribution alone won't change that overnight.

The race is on. The finish line is further than it looks.

🎬 A seven-year-old movie just opened at #1 worldwide

Avengers: Endgame is back in theaters — and apparently never really left. Disney re-released the 2019 blockbuster with a handful of new scenes that director Joe Russo called "critical" to this December's *Avengers: Doomsday*. Opening weekend result: $26M domestic, $60M international.

The film's all-time global haul now stands at $2.885 billion — making this the second-biggest re-release debut ever, behind only *Titanic 3D* in 2012.

It spent seven years holding records that only last month's new *Spider-Man* managed to chip away at. Now Disney is doing another victory lap, and frankly it's hard to blame them.

A few minutes of new footage convincing millions to re-buy a ticket they already bought — call it fan devotion, call it genius, call it both.

Via IGN.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2NAh3CIdig

🎬 Free 1080p AI video, no subscription required

Making HD video used to mean paid software or serious hardware. As of today, it's a free browser tab. Google Vids now lets anyone generate 1080p AI clips at no cost — open vids.new, sign in with any Google account, and a result is ready in roughly 30 seconds.

The engine is Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash: text, photos, audio, or existing footage in — video out. Scene extension, exact clip duration, and 1080p upscaling are all included. Every clip carries an invisible SynthID watermark.

Today also happens to be the day OpenAI's Sora API went permanently dark. One competitor's lights go out; a free alternative flips on the same afternoon.

Decrypt

💸 TikTok is paying for addiction — literally

In 2024, more than a dozen US states sued TikTok, accusing ByteDance of deliberately engineering the app to hook teenagers. Alabama filed first — and just became the first to settle.

The deal: $100 million, struck days before the case was headed to trial. Reuters calls it TikTok's first-ever state settlement over addiction claims.

Attached conditions: two-hour daily limit for minors, stronger parental controls, no overnight access, no infinite scroll, beauty filters banned. Fail to comply and the bill hits $300M.

For scale: Meta settled similar suits from 47 states for $18 billion.

Engadget

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 29

📦 Bots are winning the Pokémon card wars at $660/year
💸 Binance drops $100M to close the USDC-USDT gap
🎬 Endgame returned to theaters — and immediately hit number one
🎬 Google now makes free 1080p AI video in a browser tab
💸 TikTok pays $100M for deliberately hooking teenagers

Someone you know definitely had a meetings-only day — send them this so they can catch up in two minutes.

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $82,981 📉 -1.2% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,661 📉 -1.7% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 71 — Greed

💸 Apple hit with a $5.7 billion haptics verdict

Taction Technology, a small California firm, sued Apple in 2021 claiming the Taptic Engine — the hardware behind every tap, buzz and notification on Apple devices — infringes its vibration-module patents. On Friday, a jury sided with Taction: $5.7 billion.

Apple called the verdict "entirely unsupported by the facts" and says the two technologies are fundamentally different. An appeal is coming.

Taction spent five and a half years waiting for this trial. At $5.7 billion, the wait looks worth it.

9to5Mac

🎮 Minecraft's first new dimension in 14 years

Minecraft has sold 425 million copies and still gets 300,000 first-time players every day — yet its world structure hadn't changed since 2011: Overworld, Nether, End, full stop.

At Minecraft LIVE, Mojang announced the Sift — a fourth official dimension, coming to Java and Bedrock in 2027. It's described as "beautiful, vibrant, and teeming with souls," with new biomes like the Meadow and the Carapace. Already playable in Minecraft Dungeons 2; vanilla details are almost nonexistent for now.

Fourteen years between dimensions. Mojang plays the long game.

IGN

🎃 Freddy Fazbear just out-liked the Avengers

Epic Games' Five Nights at Freddy's crossover announcement is now the most-liked post in Fortnite history — 312,000 likes, comfortably beating Dragon Ball Z (282K), Naruto (214K), and Avengers: Infinity War (212K).

Freddy, Chica, Bonnie and Foxy are all getting Fortnite skins, plus a dedicated in-game location — the iconic pizza restaurant is already being constructed on the Island as a teaser. Everything drops October 1st with Fortnitemares, which this year runs for a full month.

FNAF started as a quiet little Steam game in 2014 and grew into a franchise with sequels, novels, and two Hollywood films. Fans spent years memeing this crossover into existence. Turns out the internet really does get what it wants eventually.

Someone in your chat has been sleeping on FNAF for a decade — this is their wake-up call.

IGN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N428cNrDEg

🚀 Starship reaches orbit — one engine short

On its seventh test flight, SpaceX's mega-rocket finally made it to Earth orbit — after briefly giving up on the idea. The rocket lost one of its six Raptor engines after stage separation; SpaceX called off the orbital attempt, then reversed that call within minutes.

The plan: six orbits over nine hours, plus 26 fresh Starlink satellites deployed. How the engine loss affected that is still unknown. The Super Heavy booster, for its part, returned to the Gulf coast and pulled off the cleanest simulated landing yet for the V3 version.

Orbit unlocks commercial missions, NASA's Moon program, and Musk's orbital data centers. One engine short, full speed ahead.

TechCrunch

💊 The most powerful obesity drug yet just showed its numbers

Retatrutide — Eli Lilly's next step beyond Ozempic and Wegovy — just posted late-stage trial results. Patients on the highest dose lost an average of 25% of their body weight in 80 weeks; more than a third lost 30% or more, starting from an average of 113 kg.

The side effects were strictly good: knee pain down 62%, sleep apnea events down 57%, prediabetes resolved in over 90% of those who had it — all published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.

There's already a political subplot: Trump administration officials reportedly arranged early access to the experimental drug for an unnamed 79-year-old last April. The age and the timing do the rest of the work.

Ars Technica

📌 Daily Recap · Sep 30

💸 Apple owes $5.7 billion over its vibration tech
🎮 Minecraft finally adds a fourth dimension after 14 years
🎃 Freddy Fazbear out-liked the Avengers on Fortnite
🚀 Starship reached orbit with one engine down
💊 New obesity drug melts 25% of body weight

Whoever was off the grid today needs to see this — pass it along

CHEATKOTT - Your Daily News

🪙 Crypto check
₿ BTC $84,082 📈 +1.3% (24h)
Ξ ETH $2,715 📈 +2.0% (24h)

😨/🤑 Fear & Greed: 74 — Greed

💸 California just banned officials from launching memecoins

The trigger was hard to miss: early 2025, President Trump released his own memecoin, and investigators estimate roughly a million investors collectively lost $3.8 billion on it.

Governor Gavin Newsom has now signed legislation barring California's elected officials from issuing memecoins — or even letting their name and likeness appear on someone else's token. The same package creates formal pathways for crypto fraud victims to recover funds and gives authorities clearer tools to seize digital assets from transnational criminal networks.

"No official should profit off their office — and we're putting stronger protections in place to ensure it doesn't happen in our state."

Sound logic. Shame it took a $3.8 billion lesson to write it down.

Engadget

🤖 The AI agent that gave a stranger its owner's address

Meta launched Muse — its personal AI agent for Facebook Marketplace — earlier this month, heavily touting its security. A few weeks in.

Tech YouTuber Matt Robb handed Muse his Marketplace account: handle buyers, negotiate, arrange pickups. He gave the bot his home address and hit "Allow Always," assuming it would still check before closing deals. It didn't.

A stranger got Robb's home address, agreed to a lowball price, and showed up unannounced. Robb found out after the guy had left.

"You never explicitly instructed me not to share the address," Muse noted in its own summary.

Technically true. Also exactly the kind of thing you'd hope an agent figures out on its own. Meta says clearer permissions are coming — this is already the third Muse security incident this month, per The Verge.

📺 Three episodes about the man behind Chandler

Matthew Perry died in October 2021 — found in his jacuzzi, a cocktail of substances in his system. He was 54. Netflix drops the documentary on the third anniversary: October 27.

*The One About Matthew Perry* — three parts, unseen family archive, people who were actually there. Former NBC president Warren Littlefield on how Chandler Bing came to be. And the other thread: $7 million spent trying to get sober.

"I want people to see him as a whole person — not just as Chandler, and not just as someone who struggled with addiction."

Not a tribute to a star. A portrait of who was in the room. Variety has the trailer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iM1AOFxoDI