From Oct. 11 to Oct. 17, a series of project updates landed across the crypto sector, spanning zero-knowledge proving, naming infrastructure, privacy tools, MEV protection, liquid staking, NFT trading and lending, and protocol governance.
Robinhood Chain reports first 100-day operating figures
Robinhood Crypto released operating data for Robinhood Chain roughly 100 days after launch. As of Oct. 12, the chain had recorded more than $99 billion in cumulative DEX trading volume, more than $1 billion in total value locked, and more than $1 billion in deposits on Morpho.
On tokenized equities, more than 190 stock tokens have gone live on the chain, with 200,000 holders across more than 120 countries. Related DEX trading volume has reached about $15 billion. Robinhood said the chain has been the L2 with the highest number of daily active traders since launch.
ZKsync launches Airbender Prime Ethereum prover
ZKsync introduced Airbender Prime, an Ethereum zero-knowledge prover. According to ZKsync test data, using a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU, Airbender Prime proved 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks, with 99% of blocks completed in under 10 seconds and all blocks completed within 12 seconds. The figures include witness data preparation time.
The prover is built on the open RISC-V standard and uses hash-based STARK proving technology. ZKsync said it is designed for post-quantum security and includes an independent verifier to support independent verification.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin congratulated the ZKsync Airbender team on the technical progress and said competition on zkEVM proving speed has reached a decisive result. He said the top priority should now shift fully to security. In his view, zkEVM efforts should use formal verification to address three issues: ensuring the arithmetization used by the proving system is fully equivalent to the Ethereum protocol specification; setting a strict upper bound on proof-generation cost relative to block gas consumption; and verifying the security of the zero-knowledge proving system itself.
In Buterin's framing, once proving performance has made major progress, the next phase for zkEVM should move from speed optimization to security assurance.
Starknet rolls out Shadow Accounts
Starknet launched Shadow Accounts, a privacy feature that lets users take part in public DeFi activity through a separate address while hiding the link between that address and the main wallet.
Shadow Accounts are funded by privacy-protected STRK20 balances. Balances, transaction history, and protocol positions remain publicly visible on-chain, but the connection to the main wallet is shielded. Planned use cases include providing liquidity, opening trading positions, bridging assets across chains, and collateralized borrowing and lending. The first integrated application is scheduled to go live on Oct. 15, with more integrations to follow.
Aptos brings Encrypted Mempool to mainnet
Aptos said Encrypted Mempool is now live on mainnet. The feature lets users choose, on a per-transaction basis, to encrypt the called function and parameters of pending transactions. Validators then decrypt and execute them collaboratively after transaction ordering and block finalization, reducing the risk of frontrunning and other MEV attacks.
The feature is integrated natively into the Aptos consensus protocol and does not require an additional trusted third party. Sender addresses and gas fees remain public. Petra Wallet already supports the feature, and perpetuals trading platform Decibel plans to integrate it later.
ENS DAO submits draft proposal to activate ENSv2 on mainnet
ENS DAO representative nick.eth submitted a draft executable proposal to activate ENSv2 on Ethereum mainnet. The plan would stop new .eth registrations under ENSv1 and transfer ownership of the original registrar contract to a contract that supports renewals only.
If executed, ENS Labs would complete synchronization of existing name data, open ENSv2 registrations, switch name resolution services, and then hand full administrative control of ENSv2 to ENS DAO. ENSv2 will use a hierarchical registry structure that supports more granular subdomain permission management.
Existing .eth names would not be forced to migrate and could continue to be used and renewed. Once migrated to ENSv2, however, they could not be moved back.
PancakeSwap proposes higher LP fee share and lower CAKE emissions
PancakeSwap proposed raising the liquidity provider fee share to 88% across all 11 supported chains running v3 and Infinity, while cutting the protocol fee to 12% and directing it to the treasury. v2 would remain unchanged.
Based on estimated 2025 trading volume, LPs are expected to receive about $62 million in additional fees. Trader fee rates would stay the same, while liquidity depth is projected to improve by as much as 30% and price impact could fall by as much as 20% to 25%.
The proposal also calls for reducing daily CAKE emissions from 22,500 tokens to 7,000, a cut of about 69%. The daily 7,000 CAKE would be allocated to the ecosystem growth fund Pantry, reducing annual minting by about 5.7 million CAKE. PancakeSwap said total CAKE supply has already fallen 11.5% since Tokenomics 3.0 passed in April 2025, and the proposal is intended to keep the protocol on track for a roughly 20% supply reduction by 2030.
Implementation would begin in November 2026, starting within two weeks after approval. The process is expected to take about three months and finish by the end of January 2027. The proposal is still in the community discussion stage and will later be submitted to a Snapshot vote.
Osmosis proposal seeks to end OSMO inflation
An Osmosis community proposal calls for ending OSMO inflation by stopping daily new token issuance and pausing daily unlocks of developer tokens, leaving staking rewards to be funded entirely by protocol revenue such as trading fees.
At present, the relevant module distributes about 121,800 OSMO per day. Of that amount, about 9,740 OSMO goes to staking rewards, 30,400 OSMO is used for unlocking previously allocated developer tokens, and the remaining roughly 81,600 OSMO goes to the community pool. If the proposal passes, about 51.9 million OSMO in still-locked developer tokens would remain locked, and any future release would require a separate governance decision.
Lido adds native staking access from four L2 networks
Liquid staking protocol Lido said its official staking frontend now supports native direct ETH staking from four Layer 2 networks: Arbitrum, Base, Linea, and Optimism.
The feature is powered by Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, or CCIP. Users can obtain wstETH directly on their local L2 without manually bridging ETH back to Ethereum mainnet. Deposited ETH is used by a dedicated local liquidity pool to deliver wstETH, with the exchange rate anchored by Chainlink price feeds to the official protocol ratio rather than secondary-market pricing.
The underlying ETH is then automatically bridged through CCIP to Ethereum mainnet for Lido staking, while native bridges on each L2 return wstETH to replenish pool liquidity.
Blur to shut frontend in November 2026, Blend to stop new loans
NFT marketplace Blur said it will shut down its frontend on Nov. 12, 2026. The on-chain marketplace protocol will continue to operate, and the BLUR token will retain control over the protocol fee switch.
Its NFT lending protocol Blend will stop matching new loans on the same date. Borrowers must repay before then or their loans will enter default. Afterward, Blur said it will provide frontend tools to help users withdraw assets from Blend.
Following the announcement, BLUR fell sharply for a short period, touching a low of 0.01405 USDT. It was later quoted at 0.01548 USDT, down about 15.31% over 24 hours.
Blur previously raised $11 million in a seed round in March 2022, with investors including Paradigm, eGirl Capital, and 0xMaki.
Yuga Labs vice president of blockchain 0xQuit urged users to revoke NFT approvals granted to Blur contracts as soon as possible. He said NFT approvals worth tens of millions of dollars are still outstanding to Blur contracts. While his review did not find vulnerabilities in the current contracts, he warned that the contracts are upgradeable and could introduce malicious logic through future upgrades.
0xQuit also said the Blur team appears to be disbanding. In his view, the safety of related NFTs depends to a large extent on the team's operational security. He recommended that users immediately revoke approvals through tools such as revoke.cash to guard against potential contract exploits or malicious upgrades.
Network School to acquire Farcaster
Neynar co-founder Rish said Network School will acquire the decentralized social protocol Farcaster. The Farcaster app, protocol codebase, and related products will be transferred to Network School.
Most of the Neynar team will join Network School and continue building Farcaster, while Rish, Manan, and some other team members will leave and move on to new directions.