Gm frENS. It's been rough to say the least. Today's brief goes slightly beyond Ethereum. Keep your head up and keep building! This also marks our 800th episode!

• $19b in crypto liquidations

• Aave executes $180m in liquidations.

• A whale nets $192 million in profits.

• Keyring launches a donation vault.

The cryptocurrency market suffered a historic $19 billion liquidation event on Friday, October 10, 2025, marking the largest in its history, surpassing the Covid, FTX, and Luna crashes. Long positions accounted for $16.6 billion, with shorts losing $2.4 billion, including $5.5 billion wiped out in a single hour. The crash intensified after President Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports effective November 1, causing Bitcoin and Ethereum to plummet about 12%. Bitcoin fell by nearly $20,000 amid the flash crash. Altcoins faced even more severe losses, with some seeing extreme down wicks due to thin liquidity.

Roughly thirty minutes before President Trump’s October 10, 2025, announcement of 100% tariffs on Chinese imports, a newly created Hyperliquid account opened massive short positions on BTC and ETH with 8-12x leverage. The trades, executed on the decentralized perps exchange, netted $192 million in profits within hours amid the crypto market crash. The precise timing of the trade has sparked allegations of insider trading.

Aave, the leading DeFi protocol with over $40 billion in TVL, processed $180 million in liquidations in a one-hour period during the historic crypto market crash triggered by Trump’s 100% tariff announcement on Chinese imports. Founder Stani Kulechov praised Aave’s flawless performance, marking the largest single-day stress test for the DeFi protocol. The AAVE token itself plummeted 64% in the flash crash, but has mostly recovered since.

The Ethereum Foundation’s Funding Coordination Team, in partnership with Keyring Network, launched a donation initiative to support the legal defense of Tornado Cash developers Roman Storm and Alexey Pertsev. Over the next two months, 100% of protocol fees from Keyring’s zkVerified vaults on the Ethereum mainnet will be allocated to their legal defense funds. Keyring’s zkVerified permissioned vaults enable compliant, privacy-preserving DeFi lending. Users can deposit USDC into these vaults to earn rewards, while the collected fees are directed to support the privacy-focused developers. So far, the vaults have generated $22,109.52 in fees.

• L2s hit ATH TPS

• EF EcoDev update

• IPFT open-sourced

• Democrats’ market structure proposal

• a16z leads Kalshi Series D

• Morgan Stanley removes restrictions

• Binance performance issues

• Hyperliquid HDL explained

• Crypto investor found dead

• China clarifies export controls

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

• Kohaku privacy initiative roadmap.

• Robinhood Token Stocks go live in EU.

• Concrete launches Staked EIGEN Vault.

• EIP-8032 for depth-based SSTORE pricing.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0rz4TXaNAwcBvOmWMThD4c

The Ethereum Foundation released a roadmap for Kohaku, an open-source initiative designed to make crypto wallets both secure and private, while minimizing reliance on trusted third parties. The project is led by Vitalik Buterin and Nicolas Consigny, a protocol support member at the Ethereum Foundation. Kohaku aims to make privacy a normal and accessible feature for everyone, enabling users to transact privately and securely without sacrificing decentralization or usability. The roadmap includes a wallet SDK and a reference implementation that wallet teams can adopt to integrate private and secure transaction capabilities.

Robinhood has launched trading for tokenized stocks and ETFs for its European customers, enabling users to access to more than 200 U.S. equities onchain. The launch includes zero-commission trading, dividend payouts, and 24/5 market access. Currently, tokenized stocks are live on Arbitrum One, with plans to migrate them to Robinhood Chain, the company’s upcoming Layer 2 network built on the Arbitrum Orbit stack. For every share purchased, a corresponding token is minted onchain. In future updates, users will be able to transfer stock tokens to self-custodial wallets.

Concrete, a DeFi yield infrastructure provider, launched the Staked EIGEN Vault, a yield-optimizing product that turns EIGEN tokens into productive assets within the EigenLayer ecosystem. The vault combines EigenLayer’s native restaking yields with Concrete’s delta-neutral trading strategies, targeting 6–8% USD-denominated returns. By depositing EIGEN, users earn yield and ecosystem incentives while receiving sEIGEN, a liquid vault token representing their share of the underlying strategy. EIGEN serves as the native staking, governance, and incentive token of the EigenLayer restaking protocol.

• ACDE #222 minutes (EIP-8032) | highlights

• Counter market-structure bill leaked

• Ethereum Privacy Stack sunrise

• ERC-8004 explainer

• Blockscout OP Stack tools

• OP September retro funding

• Roger ver settles with DOJ

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

• Coinbase launches DEX trading.

• MetaMask launches perps trading.

• Ethereum Foundation commits to Privacy.

• Succinct introduces Private Proving.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5a2crFzsI68XgxDOD4Ts92

Coinbase launched DEX trading directly within its centralized exchange for all U.S. users, excluding NY residents. The integration allows users to trade existing tokens on Base as well as newly launched tokens moments after they appear onchain, without having to wait for a traditional Coinbase listing. Users can now search, trade, and manage DEX assets seamlessly through the Coinbase mobile app, with DEX trade gas fees covered by Coinbase.. The feature leverages a DEX aggregator to optimize trades and minimize slippage. Coinbase plans to expand DEX trading support to additional networks in the future.

MetaMask, the largest self-custodial browser wallet developed by ConsenSys, launched perpetual trading on its mobile wallet. The integration supports trading on over 150 tokens with up to 40x leverage. Users can fund their account using any EVM token, which is swapped to USDC for trading. Positions incur a 0.1% MetaMask fee. Perpetual futures allow traders to take leveraged long or short positions on a token’s price without expiry. The launch comes about a week after Rainbow Wallet, which also integrated perps. MetaMask will also activate its rewards program for traders in the coming weeks. Last month, MetaMask launched its native mUSD stablecoin.

The Ethereum Foundation published an article reaffirming its commitment to privacy, calling it a core focus and essential to human freedom and digital trust. The piece explains why privacy matters across individuals, developers, institutions, and society. It emphasizes that its principles of credible neutrality, security, and openness are most valuable when paired with privacy. The foundation has expanded privacy efforts through the new Privacy Cluster, which brings together 47 leading researchers and engineers. Ethereum’s privacy work spans the entire stack, from research, protocol, applications, institutional, and user experience. Looking ahead, the EF views privacy as a shared responsibility across the Ethereum ecosystem.

Succinct introduced Private Proving, a new feature on the Succinct Prover Network that enables privacy-preserving proof generation using trusted execution environments (TEEs). All inputs are encrypted and processed inside secure enclaves, ensuring that neither provers nor the network can access private data. The upgrade aims to scale ZK applications while preserving privacy, unlocking new use cases in stablecoins, exchanges, identity, and financial computation. Built on SP1, Succinct’s zkVM allows developers to write private applications in Rust without complex ZK circuit engineering.

• Succinct introduces private state

• Charon v1.7 release

• Ready for merge goes live

• L2Beat analysis on Lighter

• BALs breakout call

• ETH staking withdrawal queue

• Introducing A2A x402 (TypeScript)

• Discord data breach

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