Chain Check 10 Oct: Solana hits 200ms slots, Cardano and XRPL add issuer controls

Chain Check is our Saturday round-up of the week’s most important moves on blockchains other than bitcoin and Ethereum. This week’s list runs from Saturday 3 Oct to Friday 9 Oct. Market figures are as of 00:15 UTC on 10 Oct.

1. Solana finishes its move to 200 millisecond slots

Solana’s final slot-time cut, from 250 to 200 milliseconds, went live at the start of epoch 1053 on Friday afternoon UTC, according to Solana’s upgrade page. A slot is the short window in which one validator, one of the computers that produce blocks, may add a block. By our read of the public RPC, slots averaged about 219 milliseconds in the hours after the switch, skipped slots included. See our report on the change.

2. Solana’s tokenized-stock trading keeps concentrating

Solana tokenized stocks have traded $12.4 billion on decentralized exchanges this year, with Raydium handling $6.1 billion, Crypto Briefing reported on 4 Oct. We could not check those figures against a primary dashboard. Much of the activity comes from one product line, Kraken-owned xStocks. More on the concentration.

3. Cardano’s CIP-113 goes live

The Cardano Foundation said on 7 Oct that CIP-113, a programmable-token standard, is live on mainnet. Issuers can write rules such as identity checks, freezes, seizures and transfer limits into their tokens, and the ledger checks them on every transfer. No hard fork, a network-wide rule change every node must adopt, was needed. The details.

4. Veridian becomes the first company to tokenize its shares on it

Two days later the foundation spun out Veridian, its digital-identity project, as a Swiss company and tokenized most of its one million shares under CIP-113. The shares are not offered to the public. Read the Veridian story.

5. The XRP Ledger lets accounts delegate narrow permissions

An amendment called PermissionDelegationV1_1 activated in ledger 107,524,865 at 21:29:50 UTC on 8 Oct. An account can now let a helper account perform specific tasks, such as approving customers, without sharing its keys. A separate fix for the PaymentBurn permission has gained validator majority but is not yet active. How delegation works.

6. Evernorth’s XRP treasury company goes public

Evernorth closed its merger with Armada Acquisition Corp. II on Friday with about 473 million XRP and about $300 million in gross cash, the company said. Its 8-K shows holders redeemed about 80.3% of the SPAC’s public shares. Shares are expected to trade on Nasdaq as XRPN from Monday. Our report.

7. Tether’s three-hour freeze on THORChain’s Tron vaults

The USDT contract on Tron added four THORChain vault addresses to its blacklist at 12:09 UTC on Friday and removed them at 15:30 UTC, by our read of the chain. Tether has not explained either step. The episode put a spotlight on issuer freeze powers, the same kind of control Cardano and the XRPL are now offering to issuers by design. What the chain shows.

8. Most of the 79thVault loot on BNB Chain comes back

79thVault said on Friday it had recovered 15,000 BNB from the attacker who drained its 79AU pool on PancakeSwap on 7 Oct, about 92% of the 16,249 BNB taken. PeckShield, a security firm, confirmed the transfer. How the attacker obtained the operator key has not been disclosed. The original alert.

9. Zcash developers target January for post-quantum signatures

Zakura, a Zcash engineering team, plans to add post-quantum signature opcodes for transparent addresses in January, according to its engineering post. Opcodes are the basic instructions a transaction script can use. No activation date or approval path has been given. What the plan covers.

10. Starknet floats becoming its own layer 1

Starknet, a layer 2 that settles to Ethereum, said on 8 Oct it is “actively considering becoming an L1”, targeting full quantum resistance in 2027. There is no proposal or vote yet. STRK was up about 71% over seven days on CoinGecko. Our report.

The week in numbers

Prices and TVL as of 00:15 UTC on 10 Oct. TVL is total value locked in DeFi applications on each chain. We have left active addresses blank this week because we could not verify a consistent source for all seven chains at publication.

Next week: Aerodrome and Velodrome’s merger into Aero on 21 Oct sets its first deadlines on 14 and 15 Oct, and Evernorth plans to ring Nasdaq’s closing bell on 14 Oct.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.