The Ether: Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Blocks: 26,237,242 - 26,244,424
Slots: 15,476,399 - 15,483,598

Onchain record· ?

Attested this day's snapshot (download json file, ) with EAS on Base ().

Posted to Farcaster and X.

The day in review

Protocol

Clients raced to ready Hoodi for Glamsterdam's Oct 26 fork, and Obol rushed a Charon patch after a CA key leak.

Apps

Safe launched a bonded security jury called Safenet to vet multisig transactions before execution.
Stolen Drift funds kept flowing into Tornado Cash while researchers warned Solana protocols of fake exploit scams.

World

A Korean brokerage studied tokenized assets on OP Stack as a bank settled a loan via tokenized deposits in minutes.

Charon releases:

Obol urges immediate Charon upgrade after CA key compromise, v1.11.2 updates certificate checks and drops emSign roots

Charon is the software that lets groups of operators run one Ethereum validator together, and a compromised certificate authority key could let attackers fake trusted connections.

More: The Defiant

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Geth releases:

Geth v1.17.9 schedules Amsterdam on Hoodi, speeds up the EVM interpreter and newPayload, adds Gloas support to Blsync

Geth, the most widely used Ethereum execution client, is the latest to ready Hoodi nodes for the Glamsterdam fork.

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Top podcasts this day

Unchained:
Could AI Break Cryptography Soon? Yes, but 'Bunker Mode' May Not Be the Solution
video · protocol · 9d ago
chapters (12)
1. 0:00Intro
2. 2:20Why Justin Drake's 'bunker mode' tweet adds AI to quantum as a crypto threat
3. 6:01What ECDSA is and why its hidden 'trapdoor' structure worries people about AI
4. 8:33Why Conor says no scheme is broken yet, even as two cryptographic schemes fell to AI
5. 13:06Matthew Green's encryption warning and why privacy chains like Zcash are exposed
6. 17:20Nexo: Generate daily interest on your crypto or borrow funds against your assets at
7. 18:04Where Conor lands between Yehuda Lindell and Justin Drake on AI breaking curves
8. 25:53Can blockchains recover if ECDSA breaks? Alex on the ETH Classic fork precedent
9. 29:59Curves, lattices, isogenies, or hashes: why NIST still prefers lattices
10. 48:14Alex's updated Q-Day window and why Conor says 'A-Day' may already be here
11. 53:05Haseeb Qureshi's 'cryptographic wartime' and Balaji's rollback idea
12. 58:41Strongpoint: Project Eleven's crypto-agile custody and pricing quantum risk

Also in the news this day

Stories that gathered new coverage this day but broke earlier, so they live on their own day's page.