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Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.
In this issue:
MONAD AIRDROP COMES CLOSER AS PORTAL OPENS: Monad is gearing up 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 official token distribution. While the airdrop itself hasn't gone live yet, the Monad Foundation said that users can now verify eligibility and connect their wallets, with the window remaining open until Nov. 3, 2025. "There is NO incentive to claiming really fast, so take your time. Triple check everything," said Keone Hon, the co-founder of Monad, on X. The Monad Foundation shared in a blog post that it will target around 5,500 core community members and 225,000 broader crypto users, rewarding those who've helped grow the Monad ecosystem. Distribution will be done through a multi-track system spanning five categories: Monad Community, Onchain Users, Crypto Community, Crypto Contributors & Curious and Monad Builders. Those who qualify across multiple tracks can stack their allocations, giving more weight to active participants. The team also said it will be combining 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 toward Monad's upcoming mainnet launch, though the details of when that will happen and the number of tokens allocated towards these communities are still unknown. -- Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
FUSAKA GOES LIVE ON ETHEREUM'S SEPOLIA TESTNET: Ethereum developers launched the second test of the upcoming Fusaka upgrade earlier this week on the Sepolia network, marking another step toward the upgrade's mainnet debut. The test follows a successful rollout on the Holesky testnet two weeks ago. Developers plan one final rehearsal on the Hoodi network on Oct. 28, after which they'll set a date to activate Fusaka on Ethereum's main blockchain. Coming only a few months after Ethereum's major Pectra upgrade, Fusaka is designed to lower costs for institutions using the network. One of its key features, PeerDAS, allows validators to verify only portions of data rather than entire "blobs." This improvement reduces bandwidth demands and helps cut costs for both layer-2 networks and validators. Testnets like Sepolia play a crucial role in Ethereum's development cycle, giving developers a reliable environment to test upgrades under real-world conditions before they go live on the main network. -- Margaux Nijkerk Read more.
MONERO RELEASES PRIVACY BOOST AGAINST SNEAKY NETWORK NODES: Leading privacy blockchain Monero has released an important upgrade 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 release that enhances protection against spy nodes. Monero relies 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 stealth addresses so that the recipient's actual address stays hidden; ring signatures mix a sender's transaction with other decoy transactions, making it unclear who really 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 in the network. These nodes pose as honest nodes but are likely intended for monitoring the network and spying on other nodes, thereby endangering privacy. The Fluorine Fermi update tackles this challenge by implementing an improved peer selection algorithm that reduces the chance users connect to multiple nodes within the same IP subnet, a common spy node tactic. It discourages connections to large clusters of suspicious IP addresses, steering users toward 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 into a dedicated cluster that now covers private payments, proofs, identity, and enterprise use cases. Ethereum has supported privacy research through its Privacy and Scaling Explorations (PSE) team since 2018, with experiments like Semaphore for anonymous signaling, MACI for private voting, zkEmail and zkTLS, and the Anon Aadhaar project. These have become reference points for developers across the ecosystem, spawning hundreds of forks and integrations. The new "privacy cluster," coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings these experiments under a single umbrella alongside new initiatives, per a blog post. Those include private reads and writes for payments and interactions, portable proofs for identity and asset ownership, zkID systems for selective disclosure, UX work to normalize privacy tools, and Kohaku, an SDK and wallet designed to make strong cryptography usable by default. An Institutional Privacy Task Force is also part of the cluster, translating compliance and operational requirements into specifications that larger enterprises 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.