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:
- Monad opens Airdrop portal ahead of token launch
- Ethereum’s Fusaka Launches in Sepolia; Hoodi Testnet below
- Monero launches privacy push against stealthy network nodes
- Ethereum Foundation Expands Privacy Push with Dedicated Research Group
Network news
MONAD AIRDROP CLOSES AS THE PORTAL OPENS: Monad is preparing for one of the most anticipated token launches of the year. The Layer-1 blockchain project has opened its MON airdrop portal, inviting eligible users to check their status ahead of the token’s official distribution. While the airdrop has not yet been implemented, the Monad Foundation said users can now check eligibility and connect their wallets, and the window will remain open until November 3, 2025. “There is NO incentive to claim very quickly, so take your time. Triple check everything,” Monad co-founder Keone Hon said on X. The Monad Foundation shared in a blog post that it will address to around 5,500 core community members and 225,000 broader cryptocurrency users, rewarding those who have helped grow the Monad ecosystem. Distribution will be carried out through a multi-way system covering five categories: Monad Community, Onchain Users, Crypto Community, Crypto Contributors and Curious, and Monad Builders. Those who qualify in multiple pathways can stack their allocations, giving more weight to active participants. The team also said it will combine on-chain activity data (such as DEX volume and NFT ownership) with off-chain verification through platforms like Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. The airdrop marks a step towards Monad’s upcoming mainnet launch, although the details of when it will happen and the number of tokens allocated to these communities are still unknown. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
FUSAKA GOES LIVE ON SEPOLIA ETHEREUM TESTNET: Ethereum developers launched the second test of the upcoming Fusaka upgrade earlier this week on the Sepolia network, marking another step towards the upgrade’s mainnet debut. The test follows a successful launch on the Holesky testnet two weeks ago. The developers plan a final test on the Hoodi network on October 28, after which they will set a date to activate Fusaka on the main Ethereum blockchain. Fusaka, which launched just a few months after Ethereum’s major Pectra upgrade, is designed to reduce costs for institutions using the network. One of its key features, PeerDAS, allows validators to verify only parts of data instead of entire “blobs.” This improvement reduces bandwidth demands and helps reduce costs for both Layer 2 networks and validators. Testnets like Sepolia play a crucial role in the Ethereum development cycle, providing developers with a reliable environment to test updates under real-world conditions before they go live on the mainnet. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
MONERO LAUNCHES PRIVACY INCREASE AGAINST DIFFERENT NETWORK NODES: Monero, the leading privacy blockchain, has released a major update that significantly strengthens user protection against spy nodes. The blockchain announced CLI v0.18.4.3 ‘Fluorine Fermi’ on X, calling it a highly recommended version that improves protection against spy nodes. Monero is based 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 ensured through several key technologies: each transaction uses unique hidden addresses so that the recipient’s actual address remains hidden; ring signatures mix a sender’s transaction with other decoy transactions, leaving it unclear who actually sent the funds; and Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) hide the amount being transferred. Still, a paper published on the research sharing platform arXiv in September noted the growing presence of non-standard nodes on the network. These nodes pose as honest nodes, but are probably intended to monitor the network and spy on other nodes, thus compromising privacy. The Fluorine Fermi update addresses this challenge by implementing an improved peer selection algorithm that reduces the possibility of users connecting to multiple nodes within the same IP subnet, a common tactic of spy nodes. Discourages connections to large pools of suspicious IP addresses, directing users to safer nodes. — Omkar Godbole Read more.
EF MAKES PRIVACY A PILLAR OF ITS WORK: The Ethereum Foundation is making privacy a formal pillar of its roadmap, expanding research efforts to a dedicated group that now covers private payments, testing, identity, and enterprise use cases. Ethereum has supported privacy research through its Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team since 2018, with experiments such as Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, zkEmail and zkTLS, and the Anon Aadhaar project. These have become benchmarks for developers across the ecosystem, spawning hundreds of forks and integrations. The new “privacy cluster,” coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments under one umbrella along with new initiatives, according to a blog post. These include private reads and writes for payments and interactions, portable proofs of identity and asset ownership, zkID systems for selective disclosure, UX work to standardize privacy tools, and Kohaku, an SDK and wallet designed to make strong cryptography usable by default. An institutional privacy working group is also part of the group, translating operational and compliance requirements into specifications that larger companies can test. The Foundation framed privacy as essential to Ethereum’s credibility. Blockchains are transparent by design, but widespread adoption requires that users and institutions have the option to transact, govern, and build without exposing sensitive data. – Shaurya Malwa Read more.
In other news
- Backpack said it is adding SEC-registered U.S. stocks to its trading platform with Superstate, the blockchain financial startup led by Compound founder Robert Leshner. The deal incorporates Superstate’s Opening Bell platform into Backpack, allowing non-U.S. users to trade tokenized shares of public companies on-chain. With the addition, Backpack claimed the bragging rights of being the first centralized crypto exchange to list issuer-backed and SEC-registered stocks natively on-chain. The shares backed and the launch date will be announced in the coming weeks, the companies said. These offerings are not synthetic or wrapped derivative products, the companies said, but rather real shares issued under U.S. securities law with the same CUSIP identifiers as their traditional counterparts on Nasdaq or NYSE. “For traders, that means more assets to buy, sell and use as collateral, with better margin opportunities than traditional markets,” Robert Leshner said in a statement. “For issuers, it expands reach to millions of crypto-native investors, connecting them directly to modern capital markets infrastructure.” — Kristzian Sandor Read more.
- BlackRock (BLK), the asset management giant that oversees more than $13 trillion in assets, is stepping up efforts to mainstream traditional finance (TradiFi), seeking a larger role in tokenization as a way to unlock access to markets and streamline the way assets are traded. Teams across the company are exploring how to use tokenization to make markets more efficient and accessible, and leadership is hinting at bigger moves ahead, CEO Larry Fink said during an earnings call following the release of its results. “I think we’ll have some interesting announcements in the next few 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 believes digital assets, a market currently worth more than $4.5 trillion, will grow “significantly” in the coming years. — Helene Braun and Kristzian Sandor Read more.
Regulation and policy
- US authorities have brought down a legal hammer on global company Prince Group as the operator of global forced labor scam operations (including infamous pig slaughter schemes) based in Cambodia, charging the company’s leader and imposing sanctions. British and Cambodian national Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of Prince Group, was indicted in New York on Tuesday for allegedly conspiring to launder money and commit wire fraud, according to the Department of Justice. In that case, the Justice Department took what it said was the largest cryptocurrency seizure in its history: 127,271 bitcoins, worth about $14.4 billion in today’s value. “Today’s action represents one of the largest attacks ever against the global scourge of human trafficking and cyber financial fraud,” US Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in a statement. And in a coordinated effort, the U.S. Treasury Department said it sanctioned the Prince Group, designating it a transnational criminal organization and blocking its financial activity and people’s ability to do business with it without repercussions in the United States. — jesse hamilton Read more.
- Russia is moving closer to formally integrating cryptocurrencies into its financial system, as officials acknowledge their widespread adoption and the central bank prepares to allow banks to handle digital assets under strict controls. According to a TASS report, Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov said that around 20 million Russians now use cryptocurrencies “for various purposes,” describing it as a reality that the government must address rather than resist. TASS reported that Chebeskov argued that the state needs to develop national infrastructure both to protect users and to ensure “economic and technological benefits” for the country. The scale of that adoption was highlighted by new figures cited by TASS from the Bank of Russia. According to the news agency, the combined balances of Russian citizens in cryptocurrency exchange wallets amounted to 827 billion rubles (about $10.15 billion) at the end of March 2025, a 27% increase over the same period a year earlier. — Siamak Masnavi Read more.
Calendar
- October 16-17: European Blockchain Convention, Barcelona
- 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: EtCC, Cannes
- May 5-7, 2026: Consensus, Miami
