• Balancer V2 suffers a $110m exploit.

• EF ESP team reopens grant applications.

• S-two prover launches on Starknet.

• ZKP2P releases V3.

Balancer, an AMM protocol and pioneer of the 80/20 weighted pool design, suffered a smart contract exploit on November 3, 2025, at 7:48 AM UTC, resulting in over $110 million in assets being drained from its V2 Composable Stable Pools and Balancer V2 forks. The hack impacted multiple chains, including Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, Sonic, and Berachain. The majority of stolen assets consist of WETH and liquid staking tokens (LSTs) like wstETH, osETH, and rETH. Launched in 2021, Balancer V2 introduced a singleton Vault for enhanced capital efficiency. Balancer V2 underwent multiple audits by OpenZeppelin, Trail of Bits, and Certora. Balancer V3, deployed in December 2024, and non-composable V2 pools remain unaffected. Balancer V2 users should immediately withdraw funds and revoke token approvals.

The Balancer V2 exploit triggered various responses across affected chains and protocols to mitigate damage and freeze stolen funds. Balancer immediately paused all pausable V2 Composable Stable Pools and entered recovery mode, isolating the issue to legacy V2 infrastructure. Berachain coordinated validators for an emergency hard fork, blacklisted attacker addresses, and recovered assets from compromised pools. Sonic activated a new onchain account freeze mechanism to lock the attacker’s wallet without a hard fork, pausing affected pools. Downstream protocols like Beefy and YieldFi paused V2 integrations. Security teams from PeckShield, Nansen, and BlockSec are tracing funds, with some already blacklisted on exchanges.

The Ethereum Foundation’s Ecosystem Support Program (ESP) has reopened grant applications for Ethereum builders with a new model featuring two main grant tracks: Wishlist grants and Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Wishlist grants target broad areas of opportunity and high-level goals for the Ethereum ecosystem. RFP grants outline specific problems or opportunities with defined deliverables, timelines, and expected outcomes. ESP had paused open grants earlier to reassess priorities and ensure funding aligns more closely with the Ethereum Foundation’s strategic goals. Builders can now apply for grants across domains like cryptography, privacy, application development, security, and community growth.

StarkWare launched S-two, its next-gen open-source ZK prover written in Rust, on Starknet. S-two now proves every Starknet block, delivering 100x faster proofs and over 90% in cost reduction compared to its predecessor, Stone. The prover leverages Circle STARK technology and supports both Cairo and direct AIR definitions. S-two enables client-side proving on low-powered devices such as smartphones, supporting scalable privacy-preserving applications. It eliminates proving bottlenecks, allows anyone to sequence and prove transactions, and removes single points of failure. Future releases will include further cost optimizations.

• ACDT #60 notes

• Ethereum hits tx ATHs

• ZKP2P V3 release

• MetaMask dev hub

• Bridge Atlas episode 2

• Ethereum upgrades illustrated

• 8004 architecture outline

• Bitmine buys the dip again 

• Share goes live on Base

• Maple assets hit $500m on Fluid

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.

Gm frENS. Happy Thursday, you're almost through the week!

• Tuyo universal smart account.

• Fusaka confirmed for December 3rd.

• Anchor DVT client live on mainnet.

• ECF releases BlobKit v3.

Tuyo launched its Tuyo rewards program, introducing incentives for users of its self-custodial money account and wallet. Users can earn TUYO points by depositing assets into Tuyo Earn vaults, paying with the Tuyo Card, trading within the Tuyo app, and referring new users. Tuyo positions itself as a universal bank account. Tuyo is a smart wallet with support for deposits on Ethereum, Base, OP Mainnet, Polygon, and Arbitrum, and integrates with Yield, Morpho, and Aave for yield generation. Trading is powered by Relay Protocol and 0x. Tuyo is founded by former Aragon co-founder and EIP-1271 author Jorge Izquierdo. In my opinion, Tuyo looks like a promising wallet and makes onboarding a breeze for non-crypto-natives.

During this week’s All Core Devs call, Ethereum developers agreed to officially keep the activation date for the Fusaka upgrade on the Ethereum mainnet at epoch 411392, scheduled for December 3, 2025, at 21:49:11 UTC. Despite an unresolved bug discovered in the Prysm consensus layer client, developers decided to maintain the planned mainnet activation date. The Prysm bug, first identified during the Hoodi fork, was missed in testing on Holesky and Sepolia. The issue causes Prysm nodes to disconnect non-responsive peers. All client teams expect to have mainnet-ready releases available by Monday, except for Prysm. Developers also named the following consensus layer H-Star fork as Heka, with Bogotá as the execution layer upgrade. 

Ethereum client developer Sigma Prime launched Anchor on mainnet, a Rust-based distributed validator technology (DVT) client for the SSV Network. Anchor marks the second DVT client for the network, following SSV Labs' implementation, and builds on the Lighthouse Ethereum consensus client codebase.  Anchor is fully interoperable with existing clients on public testnets. SSV Network is a permissionless Ethereum staking protocol that splits validator private keys into keyshares, distributing them among multiple independent nodes. SSV Network currently powers 14% of all Ethereum mainnet validators. 

• ECF releases BlobKit v3

• Crecimiento statement

• Octant DeFi Summit Day 1

• Samsung enables ETH staking

• OP Mainnet as Enterprise Launch Pad

• Coinbase Q3 financials

• Unichain non-EVM tokens

• Bhutan accepts Ethereum payments

• BNY Mellon tokenized credit fund

There will be no daily briefing tomorrow, October 31st. Follow @ethdaily on X for the latest.

Happy Halloween!

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed

• EF publishes an institutional resource site.

• Fluidkey releases a new app on mobile.

• Optimism diversifies its treasury into LSTs.

The Ethereum Foundation’s Enterprise Acceleration team launched a new website to track and support institutional adoption of Ethereum. The site serves as a resource hub for businesses integrating Ethereum, showcasing real-world use cases across tokenized assets, DeFi, stablecoins, and compliance. Ethereum currently supports over $5 billion in tokenized assets, more than $1 billion in annual stablecoin transaction volume, and a stablecoin total value locked (TVL) exceeding $177 billion. Platforms such as eToro and Robinhood leverage Ethereum to offer hundreds of tokenized stocks. The site also features dedicated sections on privacy-preserving and Layer 2 solutions.

Fluidkey, a privacy-first smart account platform, launched a new release of its wallet app on iOS, Android, and web. The Fluidkey wallet offers auto-generated yield, stealth address privacy, bank transfers, swaps, and biometric security. For November, Fluidkey is providing a 50% yield boost on deposits made before November 1. The app integrates with ENS for account naming and Summer Finance, Morpho, and Gauntlet for yield vaults. Each incoming payment to a user’s primary address is automatically assigned a unique stealth address, ensuring transactions remain private and fully controlled by the user, with no public link between payments.

The Optimism Collective opened a Request for Proposals (RFP) for liquid staking projects as part of its ongoing treasury management initiative. The Collective currently holds 21.5K ETH in its treasury, with approximately 10K ETH already natively staked on Ethereum. The initiative aims to generate sustainable yield for the Collective and enhance liquidity on OP Mainnet. Roughly 6.4k ETH remains available for deployment into liquid staking solutions on OP Mainnet. Proposals are open through November 7, and submissions will be evaluated using a Risk-Adjusted Return framework designed to balance benefits against risk exposure.

• zAMM introduces Predictions AMM

• Ethereum tech roadmap deep dive

• A brief history of EEA

• Base Chain hits 100 Mgas/s limit

• Maple hits $5b AUM 

• Fed cuts rates by 25bps

• Consensys plans to IPO

• Blockworks shuts down news arm

• MasterCard to acquire Zerohash

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.