OVERVIEW

AWS Crash Shows ETH And Others As Decentralized As Russia's Economy 🤦

Before we dive in, here’s today’s crypto market heatmap:

And here’s a look at crypto’s total market and altcoin market cap charts:

NEWS
When ‘Decentralized’ Means ‘At the Mercy of AWS’ 🤦 

Well, today sucked. Not Sucktober 10 suck, but for the word ‘decentralized’ it sucked. 🥹 

What actually happened?

AWS’s US‑East‑1 region misfired thanks to a DNS issue, breaking 58 services. Downdetector lit up with more than 8 million reports. Reuters called it the worst internet disruption since the CrowdStrike fiasco.

And this was AWS’s second major face‑plant of the year.

Who felt the pain?

• Coinbase - The app choked. Users couldn’t log in, trade, or cash out. It took hours to recover.

• Robinhood - APIs stalled; trade executions lagged. “Working with AWS,” they said. Translation: we’re powerless.

• Base (Coinbase’s L2) - Its own post blamed AWS for shrinking its capacity.

• Infura‑backed L2s - MetaMask and other wallets couldn’t talk to Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base, or Scroll.

• Traders - Locked out for over two hours. Missed moves. Some threatened lawsuits.

• Ethereum mainnet - Kept chugging, well, chugging-ish. But it still kept going.

• Stocktwits - Yes. Even us, damnit.

Why Did “Decentralized” Services Wobble Or Topple?

Because a huge chunk of the crypto stack squats on Jeff Bezos’ lawn. 2,368 Ethereum execution nodes (about 37%) live on AWS. Add up AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and you’ve got 69% of hosted Ethereum nodes.

Plus, nearly 60% of nodes sit in the U.S. and Germany. All of this centralization means one DNS hiccup knocks out whole layers.

I mean, the hosted ETH nodes are still decentralized, but it’s more like how Russia’s economy is decentralized.

Why Does It Keep Happening?

Running your own nodes is expensive. Data centers eat money and power. AWS is cheap and convenient. So projects cut corners and hope no one notices the single point of failure.

But every outage makes the hypocrisy obvious - they sell decentralization while renting servers from the same three oligarchs.

Aren’t There Alternatives?

Yes, kind of. $FIL.X ( ▼ 3.73% ) , $AR.X ( ▼ 4.37% ), $STORJ.X ( ▼ 1.48% ), $AKT.X ( ▼ 4.03% ), $ICP.X ( ▼ 4.53% ), and a smattering of others - all pitch decentralized storage or compute.

And unless Filecoin, Storj or some of the others say to the contrary, not even all of those blockchains combined could probably touch the capacity and needs currently provided by Microsoft, AWS, etc. 😭 

XRP
Evernorth Raises $1B+ To Build an XRP Treasury That Actually Does Something (Allegedly) 🤔

Evernorth Holdings announced it's going public via SPAC merger with Armada Acquisition Corp II, pulling in over $1 billion in gross proceeds to build what they're calling the world's largest institutional XRP treasury.

Ticker's gonna be XRPN on Nasdaq when this closes - probably Q1-ish 2026.

The cap table's stacked: $200 million from SBI, plus checks from Ripple, Pantera Capital, Kraken, GSR, and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen.

Most of that cash goes straight into open-market XRP buys. You know, the open market where retail's been holding bags since 2018 waiting for institutional adoption. Good news, guys - it's here. You're the liquidity (tis’ but a joke).

Not Your Passive ETF

XRP-buyers-being-Ripple-Excec’s-exit-liquidity jokes aside, the Evernorth/XRP/Rippple/Armada love child isn't just about sitting on XRP like a digital dragon hoard.

They're planning to put it to work - institutional lending, liquidity provisioning, DeFi yield farming. It’s about growing XRP per share over time, not just tracking spot price.

CEO Asheesh Birla (ex-Ripple, ran their cross-border payments biz) frames it as symbiotic: generate returns for shareholders while juicing XRP ecosystem growth. Use TradFi yield strategies where they fit, deploy into DeFi where the upside lives, contribute to the ledger's maturity along the way.

It's ambitious. Also requires XRP DeFi to actually deliver yields worth the smart contract risk - and for institutional players to trust decentralized protocols with treasury-scale capital.

Let’s see if they deliver. 👀 

DEFI
dYdX’s Comments On Sucktober 10th 🦜

DeFi markets love to brag about being unstoppable until they stop (vis a vi, today). So it’s worth a look at how one DEX is responding to the horror show from October 10. 😐️ 

dYdX released a breakdown on what happened on October 10: TL;DR a rare bug and extreme volatility made the dYdX Chain slam on the brakes.

An isolated market’s entire open interest got liquidated at once. Because of a dumb ordering mistake in the code, the system flagged a negative balance even though the insurance fund was fine. The protocol’s failsafe said “nope” and halted the chain.

Funds stayed safe, but everything froze until engineers pushed a patch and validators upgraded around 1:41 AM ET on October.

Decentralization turns out to be both a strength and a pain.

Validators control protocol changes, and 67% voting power is needed to do anything.

After the restart, some validators didn’t reboot their oracle sidecar services, so price feeds went stale until enough of them came back online. The dYdX team is asking impacted traders to submit claims by October 24 and expects the insurance fund to compensate losses.

They also concede the validator coordination needs work and will tighten incident‑response procedures. Perspective: it’s their first big outage in 18 months, and the protocol has done over $1.5 trillion in trading volume.

Still, it’s a reminder that even well‑tested DeFi platforms can hit a pothole - so have a Plan B.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
AI, Stablecoins, & Privacy News 🕵️

🏛️ Dusk Focuses on EVM, Regulated Trading, and On-Chain Licensing

Dusk is pushing its privacy-focused ecosystem into a new phase with DuskEVM, STOX (a regulated trading platform), and the DLT-TSS regulatory exemption with NPEX. The goal? Trade stocks, bonds, and money market funds directly onchain, backed by licenses real enough to make TradFi blush. Imagine DeFi that can legally list securities - that’s where Dusk’s headed. Dusk Network.

🗳️ Zano Launches Privacy-Preserving Onchain Voting

Zano stakers can now vote directly on ecosystem proposals without revealing their identities - starting with which confidential assets to whitelist in wallets and DEXes. It’s like blockchain democracy meets Tor. Zano.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Real World Asset Tokenization (RWA) News 🪙

💹 Sentora Brings DeFi Strategies to Aave Horizon’s RWA Markets

Sentora launched the first institutional yield strategies using Aave Horizon’s RWA lending system, channeling millions in ETH and BTC into tokenized Treasury-backed stablecoin pools. The result: stable yields, lower liquidation risk, and a credible bridge between DeFi and traditional finance. It’s how crypto’s blue chips now earn “real” yield - onchain. Aave.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Metaverse, NFT, & Gaming News 🎮️

🎃 Decentraland’s Fright Night 2025 Takes the Metaverse Full Spooky Mode

Hooray for the metaverse version of trick-or-treating - but with NFTs instead of candy. Decentraland’s Halloween event brings haunted parkour, eerie art shows, and Día de los Muertos festivals to Genesis Plaza. Players can collect wearables, design haunted houses, or dance under ghostly moons for prizes. Decentraland.

🌐 Metis Champions the User-First Web3 Revolution

Forget clunky wallets and yield farms - Web3 is finally turning fun. Metis’s LazAI and LazPad bring user-first design to AI-native dApps, where agents remember, learn, and earn for you. It’s a shift from protocols built for devs to experiences built for humans. The blockchain fades into the background - where it belongs. Metis.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
DeFi, DEX, & Lending News 🏦

🏦 Berachain Adds BEND - The Credit Engine for Its Onchain Economy

Berachain’s ecosystem just got its missing puzzle piece: credit. BEND turns HONEY holders into lenders, borrowers, and liquidity loopers, expanding what Proof of Liquidity started. Think of BEND as Berachain’s central bank - it prices time, moves capital, and powers programmable credit where liquidity never sits idle. Berachain.

💡 UniswapX’s Dutch Auctions Put Your Swap First

Well it’s about damned time this happened. Intents-based trading is changing how DeFi works, and UniswapX’s Dutch auctions are leading the charge. Instead of batching swaps, fillers compete to fill your trade instantly at the best price. The result: faster execution, gasless swaps, and 80% of trades settling better than quoted. Uniswap.

🔗 Starknet & Alpen Labs Build Bitcoin’s Most Trust-Minimized Bridge

STRK is one stop closer to being Bitcoin’s default DeFi layer.Starknet is partnering with Alpen Labs to launch Glock - a new verification protocol that bridges BTC to Starknet without multisigs or custodians. By verifying burns directly on Bitcoin, it turns BTC bridging from “trust us” into “prove it.” Starknet.

NEWS IN THREE SENTENCES
Protocol News 🏦

🔗 Chainlink’s Q3 Report: LINK Is Now Finance’s Operating System

In Q3, Chainlink partnered with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Deutsche Börse, and Swift while rolling out tokenized fund tools with UBS and new onchain identity standards with GLEIF. With $100B+ in secured value, ISO 27001 certification, and 70% oracle dominance, Chainlink’s basically the infrastructure underpinning the future of tokenized finance. And the BFF of TradFi. Chainlink.

⚙️ Kaspa On Kaspa: A Masterclass in Long-Term Discipline

Kaspa’s rise mirrors Jim Collins’ Good to Great: humility, discipline, focus, and no hype. Its devs are engineers first, marketers second, building scalable Proof-of-Work tech like DAGKnight and vProgs with transparency and patience. While others chase trends, Kaspa’s flywheel keeps turning - slow, deliberate, unstoppable. Kaspa.

⚡ Core Ecosystem Explodes: Dev Growth Up 2,800%, Institutions Pile In

Decentralized BTCFi paying its own in dividends now? Maybe. Core’s developer count has skyrocketed, its Hermes upgrade is live, and institutions like Solv and Cobo are using it for Bitcoin yield. CORE says they have 100+ live dApps and new tournaments pulling millions in volume. CoreDAO.

LINKS
Links That Don’t Suck 🔗

🧌 Patent troll wins Bitcoin logo trademark, now claims online copyright infringement

🧱 Don’t just dream it. Build it, with Yaru.

🤝 Hedera partners with UAE for decentralized IDs as HBAR tests key support

🪙 Wyoming tests FRNT stablecoin across seven blockchains in multi-chain deployment

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Author Disclosure: The author of this newsletter holds positions in ADA, IMX, COPI, MIN, AGIX, ALGO, ZEC, XLM, and NEAR. 📋