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On Friday, Solana shortened the target slot time from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds, increasing the network clock speed by nearly 17%. A slot is a short window designated for validators to add blocks. After the adjustment, Solana aims to produce about 4 blocks per second, up from about 3.3 blocks previously, allowing wallets, exchanges, and trading applications to obtain a more real-time network status.Validators will still lead for 4 consecutive slots, so each leader's control window has been reduced from 1.2 seconds to 1 second, and the transaction ordering rights will be handed over to the next validator earlier. For applications such as oracle-driven markets and automated market makers, stale prices or hundreds of milliseconds of uncertainty can affect trade execution, and a faster clock is expected to reduce failed transactions and price deviations. However, the speed increase did not result in a 17% increase in original capacity; according to SIMD-0525, the allowed computation and data volume per slot has decreased by the same proportion, and the overall processing limit of the network remains basically unchanged.This adjustment is the third phase of Solana's gradual reduction from 400 milliseconds to 350 and then to 300 milliseconds. Since the epoch is still fixed at 432,000 slots, its expected duration has decreased from about 36 hours to about 30 hours, leaving less time for offline signing and delayed approvals. There is currently no timeline for the proposed further reduction to 200 milliseconds to go live on the mainnet, and the network will advance only if the block skip rate remains acceptable at the 250 milliseconds stage.

Ethereum developers warn: Attackers can exploit free testnet ETH and one-time builder identities to win Sepolia block auctions and withhold transaction payloads during the Glamsterdam testing period.This attack does not threaten mainnet funds but may disrupt infrastructure testing. The Sepolia public test is scheduled to launch on October 6, with the Hoodi test tentatively set for October 27, and the mainnet activation time is still undetermined.

Binance founder CZ posted on X: Why do some people think banks need to be afraid of blockchain, or that banks need protection? Blockchain is a faster, cheaper, and easier way to transfer value. Blockchain is an open technology that anyone can use, including banks.

The Zcash development team plans to activate the NU7 mainnet upgrade on November 5, after various organizations and engineering teams have reached a consensus on the upgrade content and expected timeline. Zcash developer Sean Bowe stated that the upgrade will be activated on the testnet on October 6. The team plans to finalize the mainnet upgrade and activation block height after evaluating the performance of the NU7 testnet on October 20.The upgrade will shorten the target block interval from 75 seconds to 25 seconds, disable version 4 transactions, and integrate a network sustainability mechanism. The selected network sustainability mechanism will retain the Zcash halving cycle, with the previously removed supply being reintroduced starting February 2031. NU7 does not introduce a new transaction format, resulting in limited impact on wallets, but full nodes, indexers, and block explorers may need adjustments.

According to the token unlock data from the crypto asset data platform RootData, ChainOpera (COAI) will unlock approximately 8.32 million tokens at 0:00 Beijing time on September 25, worth about 2.44 million US dollars.

According to a report by Chainalysis, the method of storing malicious payloads or C2 configurations in on-chain transactions and smart contracts, referred to as "blockchain dead letter box," has increased by approximately 420% over the past 12 months. The average daily malicious writes have risen from 2.06 to 11.1, with over 15 active instances identified across five major public blockchains.As of the second quarter of 2026, state-backed actors account for about two-thirds of the new activities: North Korea's UNC5342 has been targeting cryptocurrency developers with fake recruitment since February 2025, redundantly using TRON, Aptos, and BSC; entities linked to the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence have been encoding data using Bitcoin OP_RETURN since the end of 2024; and Russian criminal groups are operating on Polygon in a malware-as-a-service model.

StablecoinX announced on X that it has submitted Form 8-K, reporting the waiver signed with Ethena OpCo and Ethena Foundation. Starting from October 5, 2026, all locked ENA held by StablecoinX will be permanently released, which is the same date previously announced by the foundation for the release to other ENA holders.StablecoinX stated that ENA will still be held as treasury assets, and any sale must obtain prior written consent from the foundation. Ethena is a stablecoin protocol, and its governance token is ENA.

During an interview with The Block at the New York Avalanche Summit, Bart Smith, CEO of Avalanche Treasury Co., stated that the view that block space is not infinite will be tested as AI agents enter the financial market. He pointed out that as long as AI agent activities reach the lower end of market expectations, relevant activities will occur on the blockchain, "there is not enough block space, and block space is no longer infinite."Smith believes that the expected demand for block space will make the technical differences between Layer 1 networks like Avalanche, Solana, and Ethereum even more important. He stated that theoretically, there are many subtle differences between these L1s, which users currently do not need to pay much attention to due to sufficient capacity, but "these differences will become important." The former executive, who worked at Susquehanna for nearly 14 years, also believes that Avalanche is best suited for business applications involving privacy and security.Smith expects that by mid-2027, traditional financial markets will shift to trading five days a week, 24 hours a day, and existing financial infrastructure will be unable to cope with round-the-clock trading. He stated that new infrastructure must be created, and it will not be built in the old way, "but rather built on the blockchain."

According to The Defiant, Blockworks announced the launch of the Agentic Detection feature, allowing cryptocurrency exchanges and banks to receive compliance alerts directly from AI agents without waiting for human analysts to review. This feature went live on Thursday in Messari Monitoring, with each alert marked as generated by the agent or verified by an analyst.Blockworks stated that previously, analysts took about 5 minutes to verify each dynamic, while their proprietary model, trained on years of work by Messari analysts, can identify alerts in seconds. Agentic Detection is turned off by default, and clients can enable it view by view. Co-founder Jason Yanowitz mentioned that as on-chain activity scales, the market prices events in seconds rather than minutes, and clients need near real-time alerts.This detection layer is built on seven years of analyst coverage data, and the agent can read X, GitHub, governance forums, Discord, Telegram, project blogs, and over 1,000 news sources, covering more than 1,000 assets. Blockworks acquired Messari for over $10 million on June 12, after Messari completed a Series A extension financing led by ParaFi and Reciprocal Ventures in April, with a valuation of $192 million, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, MoonPay Ventures, and others.

According to Ethlabs, the Ethereum community is advancing the "Quick Slots" proposal (EIP-8198), which plans to remove the assumption of a fixed 12-second block time by restructuring once and first reducing the L1 block time from 12 seconds to 10 seconds, with further gradual reductions depending on network conditions.Ethlabs states that project teams such as DefiLlama, Doppler, Derive, Ondo, Railgun, Lido, Ethena, and infrastructure teams like Flashbots and Titan Builder generally believe that shorter slots will enhance DEX pricing efficiency, improve LP yields and user interaction experience, and strengthen transaction inclusion and censorship resistance when paired with FOCIL, while not significantly undermining geographic decentralization of nodes and the participation threshold for validators.

According to PR Newswire, S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI) announced the signing of an agreement to acquire the on-chain financial security standards company OpenZeppelin.OpenZeppelin was founded in 2015 and its open-source smart contract library has supported over $37 trillion in value transfers, covering mainstream stablecoins and tokenized funds globally, and has completed over 900 security audits, identifying more than 10,000 vulnerabilities.This acquisition will expand S&P Global's assessment capabilities in the on-chain technology risk layer, helping it to build a new generation of on-chain security assessment and benchmarking products. OpenZeppelin will continue to operate as an independent business unit, with CEO Demian Brener remaining in position and reporting to S&P Global's Ratings President Yann Le Pallec. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed and are expected to have no significant impact on S&P Global's financial performance.

Sources familiar with the negotiation situation revealed that the U.S. government is pressuring Mexican officials to accept new regulations on AI hardware exports to close loopholes that allow Chinese companies and other foreign enterprises to evade tariffs. According to this proposal, the number of components in AI hardware sourced from outside North America during the production process will be limited.AI hardware includes a range of products such as chips and servers, and this year it has surpassed automobiles to quickly become Mexico's top export to the U.S. AI hardware has become Mexico's largest export product to the United States.

According to token unlocking data from the crypto asset data platform RootData, SoSoValue (SOSO) will unlock approximately 25.96 million tokens at 10:00 AM Beijing time on September 24, worth about 7.92 million USD.

According to Fortune magazine, the blockchain private credit management platform Tare has completed a $13.25 million seed round financing, led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Janus Henderson, Strobe Ventures, the Venture Dept, Neoclassic Capital, and the Avalanche Foundation. Individual investors include Aave CEO Stani Kulechov, Tether co-founder Phil Potter, and Privy CEO Henri Stern.The funds will be used to build and expand loan management software, hire staff, and obtain the necessary licenses for its loan department Tare Credit LLC to operate nationwide.Tare was co-founded by Kevin Miao, Keerthi Moudgal, and Lucas Vogelsang, and plans to build software on the Avalanche blockchain to create digital records for loans and automate the management of related administrative tasks. Miao stated that the difference between the interest paid by borrowers and the returns received by investors is often absorbed by intermediaries, and the blockchain system can automate operational tasks and eliminate additional costs.

Etherscan announced the launch of the Arc blockchain explorer ArcScan, where users can query data such as transactions, addresses, and blocks on the Arc chain.ArcScan also provides API support, and the Arc network chain ID is 5042.

According to Blockaid monitoring, Flamingo Finance was attacked. The attacker borrowed approximately 18 million USDT through Morpho flash loans, staking Curve USDP LP into the Strategy during the transaction to inflate the price of VaultYUSDT shares, and then redeemed liquidity aUSDT.Currently, the attacker has realized a profit of approximately 345,900 USDT.

According to CoinDesk, Bitcoin Core 32 entered its final testing phase on September 14, with the first candidate version marked, and the official release is expected on October 10. This version will not change Bitcoin's consensus rules but will mainly optimize fee estimation, accelerate block processing, and fix several security vulnerabilities.In terms of fee estimation, Bitcoin Core 32 introduces a new estimator based on unconfirmed transactions, which can quickly lower the recommended fee rate when network congestion eases, compared to the original estimator based on historical block fees. Regarding block processing, nodes can now use multiple threads to fetch transaction data from the database simultaneously, with a default of 8 threads, reducing the waiting time for nodes to catch up with the blockchain.For security fixes, developers have addressed a command execution vulnerability that has existed in non-Windows systems since Bitcoin Core 24. This vulnerability could allow authenticated users to execute commands on the node host through specially crafted wallet names when the walletnotify feature is enabled. Additionally, four commands used to create partially signed transactions will default to using PSBT version 2 format; the new web server was found to have a memory exhaustion flaw during auditing, where 16 unauthenticated REST connections could raise the node's memory from 46 MB to about 3 GB in approximately one minute, and this issue has been fixed before the official release.

Market news reports that Blockfusion has signed a 15-year artificial intelligence campus leasing agreement with Coreweave (CRWV.O).

Founder of Strategy Michael Saylor stated that as the CLARITY Act faces obstacles, he expects the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and the Treasury Department to continue advancing digital asset regulatory rules based on existing laws, without waiting for Congress to complete legislation.Saylor anticipates that banks will expand Bitcoin custody and Bitcoin-collateralized loan services, with more funds flowing into Bitcoin and digital credit. He added that the GENIUS Act will support further adoption of stablecoins, and the development of the crypto industry does not need to be paused due to the stagnation of the CLARITY Act.