The Protocol: Monad Airdrop Portal Opens as Token Launch Nears

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 Opens Airdrop Portal Ahead of Token Launch
• Ethereum’s Fusaka Rolls Out on Sepolia; Hoodi Testnet Up Next
• Monero Releases Privacy Boost Against Sneaky Network Nodes
• Ethereum Foundation Expands Privacy Push With Dedicated Research Cluster

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.

• Crypto exchange Backpack said it is adding SEC-registered U.S. equities to its trading platform with Superstate, the blockchain finance startup led by Compound founder Robert Leshner. The deal embeds Superstate’s Opening Bell platform into Backpack, allowing non-U.S. users to trade tokenized shares of public companies onchain. With the addition, Backpack claimed the bragging rights of being the first centralized crypto exchange to list issuer-backed, SEC-registered equities natively onchain. Supported equities and rollout date will be announced in the coming weeks, the firms said. These offerings are not synthetic or wrapped derivative products, the firms said, but real equities issued under U.S. securities law with the same CUSIP identifiers as their traditional counterparts on Nasdaq or the NYSE. “For traders, that means more assets to buy, sell and use as collateral — with better margin opportunities than traditional markets,” Robert Leshner said in a statement. “For issuers, it expands reach to millions of crypto-native investors, connecting them directly with modern capital markets infrastructure.” — Kristzian Sandor Read more.
• BlackRock (BLK), the asset management giant overseeing more than $13 trillion of assets, is ramping up efforts to bring traditional finance (TradiFi) onchain, seeking a bigger role in tokenization as a way to unlock access to markets and streamline how assets are traded. Teams across the firm are exploring how to use tokenization to make markets more efficient and accessible, with leadership hinting at bigger moves ahead, CEO Larry Fink said during an earnings call following its earnings release. “I do believe we have some exciting announcements in the coming years on how we could play a larger role on this whole idea of the tokenization and digitization of our assets,” Fink said. Fink said that he sees digital asset — a market currently worth over $4.5 trillion — growing “significantly” over the next few years. — Helene Braun & Kristzian Sandor Read more.

• U.S. authorities dropped a legal hammer on global firm Prince Group as an operator of forced-labor global scam operations — including infamous pig butchering schemes — based in Cambodia, indicting the company’s leader and imposing sanctions. UK and Cambodian national Chen Zhi, the founder and chairman of Prince Group, was indicted in New York on Tuesday for allegedly conspiring to launder money and committee wire fraud, according to the Department of Justice. In that case, the DOJ took what it said was its largest-ever crypto seizure of 127,271 bitcoin, worth about $14.4 billion at current value. “Today’s action represents one of the most significant strikes ever against the global scourge of human trafficking and cyber-enabled financial fraud,” said U.S. Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in a statement. And in a coordinated effort, the U.S. Department of the Treasury said it sanctioned Prince Group, designating it a transnational criminal organization and blocking its financial activity and the ability for people to do business with it without U.S. repercussions. — Jesse Hamilton Read more.
• Russia is moving closer to formally integrating crypto into its financial system, as officials acknowledge widespread adoption and the central bank prepares to let banks handle digital assets under tight controls. According to a report by TASS, Deputy Finance Minister Ivan Chebeskov said around 20 million Russians now use cryptocurrencies “for various purposes,” describing them as a reality the government must address rather than resist. TASS reported that Chebeskov argued the state needs to develop domestic infrastructure both to protect users and to secure “economic and technological benefits” for the country. The scale of that adoption was highlighted by new figures TASS cited from the Bank of Russia. According to the news agency, Russian citizens’ combined balances on cryptocurrency exchange wallets totaled 827 billion rubles (about $10.15 billion) at the end of March 2025, a 27% increase from the same period a year earlier. — Siamak Masnavi Read more.

• Oct. 16-17: European Blockchain Convention, Barcelona
• Nov. 17-22: Devconnect, Buenos Aires
• Dec. 11-13: Solana Breakpoint, Abu Dhabi
• Feb. 10-12, 2026: Consensus, Hong Kong
• Feb. 17-21, 2026: EthDenver, Denver
• Mar. 30-Apr. 2: EthCC, Cannes
• May 5-7, 2026: Consensus, Miami