Topic
Protocols, stablecoins, on-chain activity and the mechanisms behind them, including the failure modes that matter.
A draft proposal would strip durable nonces out of Solana, a feature that lets a signed transaction sit unspent for weeks. Attackers used it to drain at least $270 million from the Drift trading platform in April. Custodians that sign offline would have to rebuild how they move funds.
A blockchain oracle feeds outside prices to smart contracts, and that number is often the real target. How price feeds work, why attackers manipulate them, and what the Mango Markets, KiloEx and Ostium cases show.
Zcash turned on its NU7 upgrade at block 3,543,405, cutting block times to 25 seconds and starting a fee reserve meant to pay for security after 2031. One old privacy pool holding about 12,224 ZEC is now frozen.
Base activated its Denim upgrade on November 5, cutting block time from two seconds to 200 milliseconds. The network now mints five blocks a second and has retired Flashblocks, a change that quietly shrinks any contract that still counts time in blocks.
Lisk closed its Ethereum layer-2 chain on 2 November 2026 after close to a decade, moved the LSK token fully onto Ethereum, and reinvented itself as a payments platform for businesses. Coins left on the old chain face a manual claims process no earlier than January 2027.
The Liquid Federation says LBTC is backed one to one by bitcoin again, nearly two months after a software bug let an attacker drain about 4,000 BTC. It has not said who covered the roughly 600 BTC the attacker kept.
A flaw in the XRP Ledger let an account allowed only to burn tokens mint new ones instead. A fix backed by 33 of 35 validators can activate no earlier than November 4. There is no public sign the flaw was ever used.
Attackers hijacked the domains of about a dozen DeFi sites registered with Name.com late on October 30, pointing visitors to fake pages that drained their wallets. No smart contract was breached. Early estimates of the theft run from about $138,000 to $202,386.
A minting bug on the Initia blockchain let an attacker create unbacked tokens and move about $2.7 million to Ethereum before the network was stopped. A day later the chain and its rollups stayed offline, with no restart date and no final loss figure.
Five Ethereum researchers filed a draft consensus design on October 21 that aims to cut the time a transaction takes to become final, from about 16 minutes to roughly four. The proposal, EIP-8453, is only seeking a number to enter the formal upgrade process.
A token on another chain backed one-for-one by bitcoin held elsewhere. Just over one per cent of all bitcoin is wrapped. The mechanics, the live supply figures, and what the WBTC custody fight showed about the risk.
Zero-knowledge computing project Cysic suspended its cross-chain bridge on October 17 after an attacker minted 10 million CYS tokens and cashed part of the supply out for about 306 ETH. The foundation says user wallets and its mainnet were untouched.