Chain Check 17 Oct: Mysten changes CEO, Starknet votes on going solo, Cardano’s budget runs low

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 10 Oct to Friday 16 Oct. Market figures are as of 03:49 UTC on 17 Oct. last week’s Chain Check covered 3 to 9 Oct.

1. Sui’s developer gets a new chief executive

Mysten Labs, the company that built the Sui blockchain, has made its president Kevin Boon chief executive, co-founder Evan Cheng said in a letter published on Friday. Cheng stays on as chief technology officer and will lead a new AI business unit focused on “agentic trust products”, software that lets AI agents act within limits users set. Boon joined Mysten at the start as its lawyer, the letter says.

2. Starknet asks its stakers whether to leave Ethereum

Starknet, a so-called layer 2 that posts its transaction proofs to Ethereum, opened a seven-day Snapshot poll on Thursday asking STRK stakers and delegators whether it should research becoming an independent post-quantum layer 1. The forum proposal says a yes vote starts research only and is not approval of a move. Early in the vote 99.91% of about 177.6 million STRK cast backed yes, The Block reported; the poll closes at 09:32 UTC on 22 Oct. Background: StarkWare’s ‘clearest path forward’.

3. NEAR Intents explains its $3.8 million exploit

NEAR Intents, a cross-chain swap service on NEAR, published a postmortem on Friday tracing the incident of 29 Sep to 1 Oct to a feature that notified other contracts when deposits arrived. According to summaries by The Defiant and The Crypto Times, an attacker made those notifications fail 23 times, so tokens were returned while the deposits stayed on the books, and withdrew about $3.8 million against them. The team says all funds were recovered and that its monitoring now pauses the contract automatically when recorded balances and actual holdings disagree.

4. Cardano’s spending cap is 91% used

Cardano’s treasury, the on-chain fund that pays for development, has paid out 457.4 million ADA of the 500 million ADA allowed under its current net change limit, which runs to epoch 713, about July 2027, according to the DRepTalk tracker, which reads the chain’s governance records. That leaves about 42.6 million ADA for roughly 260 days. The largest single withdrawal in the period was 120 million ADA for a project called Cardano PRIME; CryptoSlate reported the squeeze on Friday.

5. Solana’s Alpenglow is set for Wednesday

Solana’s new consensus system, the method validators use to agree on blocks, is due to activate at the start of epoch 1064 on 21 Oct, about 15:00 UTC by the Solana Foundation’s estimate. It replaces TowerBFT and targets finality, the point after which a transaction cannot be reversed, in about 150 milliseconds. Alpenglow explained.

6. Aptos hides transactions until blocks are final

Aptos switched on an optional encrypted mempool on Monday, so a transaction’s contents stay hidden from validators until its block is final. The design targets bots that trade ahead of users. How it works.

7. Stripe’s Privy adds XRP Ledger wallets

Privy, the wallet company Stripe owns, now lets apps create XRP Ledger wallets for their users under a deal with Ripple announced on Tuesday. Ripple pitches the wallets for XRP and RLUSD payments and for AI agents that pay their own way. The details.

8. Evernorth’s XRP treasury company starts trading

Evernorth, which holds about 473 million XRP, closed its first Nasdaq session as XRPN on Monday at $16.91. A treasury company is a listed firm whose main asset is a cryptocurrency. Day one.

9. Most new Meteora pools on Solana were drained, Bitquery says

Bitquery, a blockchain-data firm, said on Saturday that 818,094 of the 1,015,687 pools opened on Meteora’s DAMM v2 design between 30 Oct 2025 and 5 Jul 2026 were later drained, most within an hour. A pool is a pot of a new coin and SOL that traders buy from and sell into. Bitquery does not allege fraud by Meteora. The study.

10. Celestia and Injective top the week’s moves

Celestia’s TIA rose about 44.9% over seven days and Injective’s INJ about 25.8%, the largest gains in this list, according to CoinGecko; TIA added about 20.9% in the last 24 hours alone. We found no single announcement that explains either move. Starknet’s STRK fell about 15.5% in 24 hours as its poll ran.

The week in numbers

Prices and TVL as of 03:49 UTC on 17 Oct. TVL is total value locked in DeFi applications on each chain. Celestia, a data-availability network, has no DefiLlama chain TVL. We have left active addresses blank because we could not verify one consistent source for all nine chains at publication.

Next week: Solana’s Alpenglow switch on 21 Oct, the Aerodrome and Velodrome merger into Aero the same day, and the close of Starknet’s poll at 09:32 UTC on 22 Oct. SOL was little changed at $105.02 as of 03:49 UTC, according to CoinGecko.

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