Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly roundup of the most important stories in cryptocurrency technological development. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, CoinDesk reporter.
In this number:
- Cryptocurrency’s ‘decentralized’ illusion shattered again by another AWS crash
- Monad’s fast EVM chain promises “day and night” performance improvements
- Quantum computing is the “biggest risk to Bitcoin,” says Coin Metrics co-founder
- Securitize Introduces MCP Server to Power AI Access to On-Chain Assets
Network News
AWS DISRUPTION COMES TO THE CRYPTO INDUSTRY: On the morning of October 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage, causing widespread service outages across thousands of websites and applications. Several large exchanges and crypto service providers rely heavily on cloud infrastructure like AWS to power their trading platforms, wallets, analysis tools, and comparison engines. The domino effect hit the cryptocurrency world: Coinbase reported that its trading platform and base layer 2 network went down. Infura and ConsenSys’ Robinhood suffered similarly during the outage. Almost immediately, the crypto community took to social media to sound the alarm that some of the industry’s most well-known companies are overly reliant on centralized infrastructure. This was not the first time the cloud giant sent tremors through the crypto landscape. In April 2025, AWS suffered another widespread outage that took several crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline. Meanwhile, infrastructure provider Infura, which offers backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs that help wallets and applications connect to blockchains, shared on Monday that the outage disrupted multiple network endpoints. “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base and Scroll” were affected due to a “recurring issue… related to a rolling AWS outage.” As Infura support was affected, front-end access to many applications stopped. Although the distributed consensus layers remained intact, the gateways through which most users interact with blockchains went offline, amplifying the disruption. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
INSIDE MONAD’S BLOCKCHAIN ARCHITECTURE: The long-awaited Monad airdrop has the crypto community excited, but behind all the hype lies an ambitious blockchain engineering effort. Ahead of the long-awaited token launch and mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine combined with its fast execution could set Monad up to compete with some of the fastest layer 1s. As it prepares to take on competitors like Solana or Aptos in the race for speed and scalability, Monad is betting that its technical advances can generate new applications and use cases for on-chain finance. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
CAN BITCOIN SURVIVE QUANTUM COMPUTING?: Nic Carter says quantum computing is the biggest long-term risk to bitcoin’s core cryptography and urges developers to treat it with urgency, not as science fiction. In an essay, the co-founder of Coin Metrics explains in plain language how bitcoin keys work and why quantum matters. Carter writes that users start with a secret number (a private key) and derive a public key with elliptic curve mathematics on the secp256k1 curve, the basis for ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. He describes that transformation as deliberately unidirectional: easy to calculate forward, infeasible to reverse under classical assumptions. “Bitcoin’s entire cryptographic premise is ‘there exists a one-way function that is easy to compute in one direction and not feasible to invert,'” he writes. To develop intuition, Carter compares the system to a giant number scrambler. Going from private to public is efficient for honest users, he says, because they can use a shortcut known as “duplicate and add” to arrive at a result quickly. He adds that there is no comparable shortcut in the opposite direction. For non-specialists, it offers an analogy to the shuffled deck: the same sequence of decks can be repeated to arrive at an identical final order, but an observer cannot look at the shuffled deck and infer how many decks were used. The concern, Carter argues, is that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could erode that asymmetry by advancing the discrete logarithm problem underlying bitcoin signatures. According to his account, routine network behavior also increases exposure: when coins are spent, a public key is revealed on the chain. — Siamak Masnavi Read more.
SECURITIZE THE MCP SERVER: Securitize, a leading platform for tokenized real-world assets (RWA), has introduced Securitize MCP Server, a new integration layer designed to make your asset data easily accessible to both enterprise systems and AI tools. The server is based on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an emerging open standard that connects large language models such as Claude or ChatGPT with external data sources and APIs. The new MCP server acts as a secure gateway between Securitize’s RWA data sets and modern applications. Instead of developers manually integrating with raw blockchain endpoints or custom APIs, the MCP server translates data requests into simple, standardized calls, the team shared. That means financial platforms, institutional investors, or even AI assistants can obtain real-time information such as supply, distribution, and asset token metadata with just a few function calls. For cryptocurrency investors, it means faster and easier access to trusted on-chain information, without the need to code or navigate complex blockchain explorers. The MCP server allows users to instantly retrieve lists of tokenized assets, search for specific values, and access blockchain-level data in a structured format. For example, an AI agent could query details about BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, or ACRED, Apollo’s tokenized credit fund, and feed those insights directly into portfolio analytics or compliance systems. – Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
In other news
- Blockchain.com, a cryptocurrency exchange and wallet provider, recently held talks about going public in the US through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) listing, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The company named Cohen & Company Capital Markets to advise on a potential SPAC deal, said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is private. It is unclear if any talks are ongoing at this time. Blockchain.com declined to comment. Cohen & Company Capital Markets did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication. While the valuation of a potential deal is unknown, over the years the company has raised funds at different valuations due to market volatility. In March 2021, it raised $300 million at a post-money valuation of $5.2 billion. The following year, its valuation rose to $14 billion after another round of financing. However, in November 2023, a $110 million increase valued Blockchain.com at $7 billion, according to Bloomberg. — cunning will Read more.
- Coinbase acquired Echo, a startup focused on on-chain capital formation, for approximately $375 million. Founded by a long-time crypto figure known by his pseudonym Cobie, Echo has helped projects raise more than $200 million in approximately 300 deals since its launch. The platform allows startups to raise funds directly from their communities, either privately or through self-hosted public token sales using a product called Sonar. In a statement announcing the acquisition, Coinbase said the deal would help it build a “complete” solution for crypto fundraising. For startups, that means easier access to capital and tools that align fundraising with their user base. For investors, it opens the door to early-stage opportunities that were often hidden behind private networks. — francisco rodrigues Read more.
Regulation and policy
- Although the US government remains closed, the Senate is a hive of crypto activity this week, with Republican lawmakers now converging on a planned Democratic meeting with industry leaders scheduled for today. After CEOs like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov meet with up to 10 Democratic senators, according to people familiar with the plans, they will move on to a similar meeting with those lawmakers’ Republican counterparts. The main topic of conversation is the cryptocurrency industry’s top policy priority: legislation that would establish US regulation for the cryptocurrency sector as a whole. The bill, known in the version already passed by the House of Representatives as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, had been moving through the usual process in the Senate, where legislative efforts generally have to lean toward bipartisanship to overcome the 60-vote threshold. Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee produced a working draft, but Congress then became embroiled in a budget dispute that shut down the government. — jesse hamilton Read more.
- British Columbia said it plans to permanently ban new cryptocurrency mining operations from connecting to its power grid, citing the need to protect energy supplies for industries that generate jobs and public revenue. The move by the government of Canada’s third most populous province is part of a broader legislative and regulatory reform unveiled that also imposes new limits on electricity use by data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The province said the restrictions will help prevent strain on the grid and ensure industrial development is powered by clean electricity. — francisco rodrigues Read more.
Calendar
- November 17-22: Devconnect, Buenos Aires
- December 11-13: Solana Breakpoint, Abu Dhabi
- February 10-12, 2026: Consensus, Hong Kong
- February 17-21, 2026: EthDenver, Denver
- From March 30 to April 30. 2, 2026: EthCC, Cannes
- April 15-16, 2026: Paris Blockchain Week, Paris
- May 5-7, 2026: Consensus, Miami
