The Ether: Tuesday, October 20, 2026

Drift exploiter sends 25,700 ETH (about $61M) through Tornado Cash in two hours, still holds roughly $198M more

The attacker behind April's $295 million Drift theft is now using Tornado Cash, a mixing service that hides where crypto came from, which makes recovering the funds harder.

More: Cointelegraph · Decrypt

Bitwise: record 43.8 million ETH staked in Q3, nearly 36% of supply, as staking yields fall to 2.63%

More ether is locked to secure the network than ever, even as the reward for doing so shrinks, which matters to funds weighing staking income.

More: The Defiant

Privacy Pools V2 goes live on mainnet, adding private transfers, payment requests, swaps and Aave yield for depositors

Privacy Pools lets people move funds privately on Ethereum, and this upgrade adds private transfers, swaps and earning yield through Aave.

Optimum says its mump2p block propagation layer is live on mainnet, with ether.fi making it standard for all its operators

A faster way for validators to share new blocks is now running on Ethereum, covering 16 operators and about 1.4 million ETH of stake.

More: The Defiant

Blockaid: issuer blacklists recovered nothing in 60 exploits, victims got back $9.8M of $1.18B traced through August

Issuer blacklists did not return any stolen money in the study, and every recovered dollar came from governance votes or validator action instead.