Welcome to the protocol, Coindesk’s weekly wrapping of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I am Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter in Coindesk.
In this number:
- Monad opens AirDrop Portal in front of token -launch
- Ethereum’s Fusaka rolls out on Sepolia; Hood Testnet Up Next
- Monero releases privacy against sneaky network nodes
- Ethereum Foundation Expands Privacy Push with dedicated research cluster
Network news
Monad AirDrop comes closer when the portal opens: Monad is ready for one of the most expected token launches of the year. The Layer-1 Blockchain project has opened its Mon Airdrop Portal and invites eligible users to control their status prior to the official token distribution. While AirDrop itself has not gone live yet, the Monad Foundation said that users can now verify eligibility and connect their wallets with the window, users who reward those who have helped grow the Monad ecosystem. Distribution is performed through a multi-track system spanning five categories: Monad communities, onchain users, crypto communities, crypto-contributors and curious and monad-barley lords. Those who qualify across multiple tracks can stack their allocation, giving more weight to active participants. The team also said it will combine activity data on chain (such as DEX volume and NFT ownership) with verification outside the chain through platforms such as Twitter, Discord and Telegram. AirDrop marks a step towards Monad’s upcoming mainnet launch, although the details of when it will happen, and the number of tokens assigned to these communities is still unknown. – Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
Fusaka goes live on Ethereum’s Sepolia TestNet: Ethereum developers launched the second test of the upcoming Fusaka upgrade earlier this week at the Sepolia network, marking another step towards the upgrade’s main debut. The test follows a successful roll -out on Holeky test network two weeks ago. Developers are planning a last general test on the HOODEnet on October 28, after which they set a date to activate Fusaka at Ethereum’s most important blockchain. If only a few months after Ethereum’s largest pectra upgrade, Fusaka is designed to lower the cost of institutions using the network. One of its key features, Peerdas, allows validators to verify only parts of data rather than the whole “clatter.” This improvement reduces bandwidth requirements and helps reduce costs for both LAG-2 networks and validators. Testnets like Sepolia play a crucial role in Ethereum’s development cycle, giving developers a reliable environment for testing upgrades under conditions in the real world before going live on the main network. – Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
Monero releases privacy against sneaky network nodes: Leading Privacy Blockchain Monero has released an important upgrade that significantly strengthens user protection against spy nodes. Blockchain announced Cli V0.18.4.3 ‘Fluor Fermi’ on X and called it a highly recommended release that improves protection against spy nodes. Monero is dependent on a decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) network where nodes (computers) connect directly to each other to share and verify transactions and blocks. Privacy is secured through several key technologies: Each transaction uses unique stealth addresses, leaving the recipient’s actual address hidden; Rings signatures blend a sender’s transaction with other lure transactions, making it unclear who really sent the funds; and ring -confidential transactions (Ringct) hides the amount transferred. Still noted a paper published on the Arxiv Research Sharing Platform in September, the growing presence of non-standard nodes in the network. These nodes pose as honest nodes, but are probably intended to monitor the network and espionage on other nodes, thereby jeopardizing privacy. The Fluor Fermi update tackles this challenge by implementing an improved peer committee algorithm that reduces the chance that users connect to multiple nodes within the same IP undernet, a common spy nodet tactic. It discourages connections to large clusters of suspicious IP addresses, controls users against safer nodes. – Omrar Godbole Read more.
EC makes privacy a pillar of his work: The Ethereum Foundation makes privacy a formal pillar in its roadmap and is expanding research efforts to a dedicated cluster that now covers private payments, proof, identity and business cases. Ethereum has supported Privacy Research through its privacy and scaling of Explorations (PSE) -team since 2018, with experiments as a semaphore for anonymous signaling, Maci for private polls, Zkemail and Zktls and Anon Aadhaar project. These have become reference points for developers across the ecosystem that spawn hundreds of forks and integrations. The new “Privacy Cluster”, coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments during a single umbrella together with new initiatives per year. Blog posts. These include private readings and writing for payments and interactions, laptops of identity and asset ownership, ZKID systems for selective disclosure, UX work to normalize privacy and kohaku, an SDK and wallet designed to make strong cryptography as standard. An institutional assignment for privacy is also part of the cluster that translates compliance and operational requirements for specifications that larger companies can test. The fund framed privacy as important to Ethereum’s credibility. Blockchains are transparent of design, but widespread adoption requires users and institutions to have the opportunity to implement, manage and build without revealing sensitive data. – – Shaurya Malwa Read more.
In other news
- Crypto Exchange backpack said it adds SEC-registered US shares to his trading platform with superstate, Blockchain Finance startup led by compound founder Robert Leshner. The deal is embedding Superstate’s opening clock platform in the backpack, allowing non-American users to trade tokenized shares in public companies Onchain. With the addition, the backpack claimed the boasting rights by being the first centralized crypto exchange to list issuer-supported, SEC-registered shares naturally onchain. Supported shares and the roll -out date will be announced in the coming weeks, the companies said. These offers are not synthetic or wrapped derivative products, the companies said, but real shares issued under US Securities Act with the same CUSIP identifiers as their traditional colleagues at Nasdaq or Nysse. “For dealers, it means more assets to buy, sell and use as security – with better margin opportunities than traditional markets,” Robert Leshner said in a statement. “For issuers, it extends range to millions of crypto-native investors and connects them directly with modern capital markets infrastructure.” – Kristzian Sandor Read more.
- Blackrock (BLK), the asset management giant, which oversees more than $ 13 trillion assets, raises the efforts to bring traditional funding (tradifi) onchain, seeking a greater role in tokenization as a way of locking access to markets and streamlines how assets are traded. Teams across the company is investigating how to use tokenization to make markets more efficient and accessible, with leadership that suggests greater movements ahead, CEO Larry Fink said during a revenue call after its earnings release. “I think we have some exciting messages in the coming years about how we could play a bigger role in this whole idea of ​​tokenization and digitization of our assets,” Fink said. Fink said he is looking digitally asset – a market that is currently worth over $ 4.5 trillion – growing “significantly” in the next few years. – Helene Braun & Kristzian Sandor Read more.
Legislative and politics
- US authorities dropped a legal hammer at the global company Prince Group as a operator of forced labor operations-Inclusive notorious pig-butcher schemes-with base in Cambodia, which accuses the company’s manager and imposed sanctions. UK and Cambodian National Chen Zhi, the founder and chairman of the Prince Group, were indicted in New York on Tuesday for allegedly conspiring of money laundering and committee wire fraud, according to the Ministry of Justice. In this case, DOJ took what it said was its biggest crypto attack ever at 127,271 Bitcoin, worth about $ 14.4 billion to the current value. “Today’s action represents one of the most significant strikes ever against the global scourge of human trafficking and cyber-activated financial fraud,” US lawyer Pamela Bondi said in a statement. And in a coordinated effort, the US Ministry of Finance said that the sanctioned Prince Group, designating it to a transnational criminal organization and blocking its economic activity and the ability to do people to do business with it without US consequences. – Jesse Hamilton Read more.
- Russia is moving closer to formally integrating crypto into its financial system as officials recognize widespread adoption, and the central bank is preparing to let banks handle digital assets under tight control. According to a report from Tass, Deputy Finance Minister Ivan CheBeskov said about 20 million Russians are now using Cryptocurrencies “for different purposes”, describing them as a reality that the government has to address rather than resist. Tass reported that CheBeskov claimed that the state has to develop domestic infrastructure both to protect users and to ensure “economic and technological benefits” for the country. The extent of this adoption was highlighted by new figures, Tass quoted from Bank of Russia. According to the news agency, Russian citizens’ combined balance of cryptocurrency was 827 billion rubles (about $ 10.15 billion) at the end of March 2025, an increase of 27% from the same period a year earlier. – Siamak Masnavi Read more.
Calendar
- 16.-17. October: European Blockchain Convention, Barcelona
- November 17-22: DevConnect, Buenos Aires
- 11-13. December: Solana Breakpoint, Abu Dhabi
- 10-12. February 2026: Consensus, Hong Kong
- 17-21 FEBRUARY 2026: ETHENVER, Denver
- 30 March-A-APR. 2: ETHCC, Cannes
- 5-7 May 2026: Consensus, Miami
