Infrastructure
Blockchains, upgrades, layer 2s, bridges and mining.
Ether fell 14% in a week, yet 912,000 ETH is waiting in line to be staked
Ethereum's entry queue holds 3.5 times more ether than its exit queue, Validator Queue data show. SharpLink's labeled wallet staked another 128 ETH on November 12 as the price slid.
Bitcoin Core discloses 3 bugs fixed in 2025. The worst could stop a node building blocks
Bitcoin Core published three security advisories on November 10, one rated high. All were fixed in releases from October 2025, and the advisories describe no theft of coins.
6 crypto projects are giving up their own chains for Solana, Ethereum, Base, Sui and Arc
A table of nine "chain migrations" is going viral. We checked each row against the projects' own posts: six are confirmed, three are not. Here is where each one is going and what its token did since.
Bitcoin fell 5% in four hours. Fees peaked at just 12 sats after a 67-minute wait
mempool.space data shows the November 5 sell-off barely stressed the Bitcoin network. The biggest fee jumps came when blocks were slow, not when panic peaked.
Base now aims for five blocks a second. What does the Denim upgrade break for apps?
Base's Denim upgrade was set to switch mainnet from one block every 2 seconds to one every 200 milliseconds on November 5. Anything that counts blocks to measure time now runs 10 times faster.
Arbitrum vote could unfreeze Stylus Rust contracts, but each needs an audit and sign-off
New Stylus contracts on Arbitrum have been frozen since October 2 over fears of AI-assisted attacks. A DAO poll closing November 5 weighs a way back: every new program would need an auditor's pass and an Arbitrum Foundation signature.
Send USDC on 12 blockchains, get dollars: OnePay adds Stripe-powered checking deposits
Since October 30, 2026, select US OnePay customers can send USDC from an outside wallet straight into OnePay Checking. Stripe's Bridge converts it to dollars with no conversion fee at launch, but the coins are not FDIC insured on the way in.
Zcash NU7 makes blocks 3x faster around November 5. Old nodes will split off
Zcash's NU7 hard fork activates at block 3,543,405, expected around November 5, 2026. It cuts block time from 75 to 25 seconds without changing supply, sends 60% of fees to a reserve and invalidates version 4 transactions. Nodes that do not upgrade split off.
Stellar votes on Bell November 3: wallets must learn a new "W" address
Stellar's Protocol 30 upgrade, Bell, faces a testnet validator vote on November 3 and a mainnet vote on November 23, 2026. It adds a new "W" address, post-quantum signature checks for smart contracts and millisecond ledger timing, and Stellar says apps must update their SDKs.
Sui promised Hashi in October with $500 million pledged. Its own page still says testnet
Hashi is Sui's plan to let native bitcoin back loans on Sui. The Sui Foundation said mainnet would go live in October. On November 2, the official Hashi page still read "Now on Sui Testnet".
Base's next upgrade makes blocks 10 times faster. The code says November 5
Coinbase's layer 2 switched on its Cobalt upgrade on September 30. Next is Denim, which cuts block times from 2 seconds to 200 milliseconds and could break contracts that count time in blocks. Base's code sets November 5, 1:00 p.m. ET, though Base still calls November only a target.
Bitcoin hashrate is back above 1 zettahash: two difficulty jumps in 13 days
Mining difficulty rose 5.92% on October 16 and another 5.54% on October 29, ending seven months below the 1 ZH/s line. A new record is about 5% away, but miners earn far less per machine than a year ago.
BNB Chain's Jenner hard fork walls off 5% of every block for payments. Who gets in?
Jenner went live on the BSC testnet on October 28, 2026. It reserves block space for payments, adds a native token standard with freeze and seizure powers, and gives smart contracts millisecond time. Mainnet has no date yet.
Bitcoin Core 32.0 never shipped. Version 32.1 is out with 200 peer slots and a wallet fix
The new major release of Bitcoin's main node software arrived on October 27 under a different number than planned. It raises default peer slots to 200, speeds up block checks and closes a wallet bug that could run commands on a node. Nodes on 29.x or older are now out of support.
Ethereum pulls Glamsterdam from its last testnet four days out. Is gas pricing the problem?
Client teams removed the October 26 Glamsterdam fork from the Hoodi testnet after security concerns were raised on a core developer call. No new date is set, mainnet users need to do nothing, and the mainnet date now waits on Hoodi.
Solana swapped its consensus engine mid-flight: finality fell from 12.8 seconds to 150 ms
Alpenglow went live on Solana's main network on October 21, 2026, replacing the voting system the chain had run since day one. Payments now settle for good in a fraction of a second, validators pay a new fee, and the second half of the upgrade has no date.
Polygon claims 11 million payments per second. Almost none of them touch the chain
Polygon Labs says its new agent pay channels processed more than 11 million payment updates per second in tests. The number is real, but it measures offchain hubs on a devnet, not Polygon's blockchain.
Optimism rewired fault proofs on 4 chains to prepare for interop. Just 0.13% voted no
Upgrade 20 moved OP Mainnet, Ink, Soneium and Unichain to a new dispute game format on September 24, 2026. Interop is still switched off, but the proof system it needs is now in place. Users had nothing to do; some developers and operators did.
Circle's Arc is live with Visa and BlackRock as validators. Why mint 10 billion ARC?
Circle opened Arc, its own blockchain where every fee is paid in USDC, on September 16. It also minted 10 billion ARC tokens, yet says there is no promise of a public token launch.