Chain Check 24 Oct: Alpenglow goes live, Starknet’s vote passes, Initia halts

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 17 Oct to Friday 23 Oct, with market figures as of 09:54 UTC on 24 Oct. Last week’s Chain Check covered 10 to 16 Oct.

1. Solana’s Alpenglow takes over

Solana’s new consensus system, the method its validators use to agree on which blocks are final, replaced TowerBFT at about 13:54 UTC on Wednesday, Anza said on X. Anza gave the genesis slot as 459,653,000 and said 654 validators took part. Vote transactions, which made up about 60% of Solana’s transaction count, fell to zero within minutes: Alpenglow’s first minutes.

2. Starknet’s stakers back post-quantum research

Starknet’s non-binding Snapshot poll closed on Thursday with 93.5% in favour of researching whether it should become an independent post-quantum layer 1, a chain of its own built to resist future quantum computers. StarkWare and the Starknet Foundation will form a working group and publish a paper “in the coming months”, the team posted. “Any move to an L1 would require a community vote,” it added.

3. Initia halts after a MoveVM bug

Initia stopped its layer 1 and rollups on Friday after an attacker credited themselves with unbacked WETH, iUSD and USDC and bridged about $2.7 million out to Ethereum, as we reported in Initia’s halt. In an update on Saturday, Initia blamed a bug in MoveVM’s script caching, the part of its virtual machine that stores compiled code, and said no native INIT was minted. The proceeds were swapped into 1,135.52 ETH, which still sat in the attacker’s Ethereum address at about 09:52 UTC on Saturday by our node read.

4. Franklin’s Singapore fund grows fourfold on the XRP Ledger

The wallet holding all of Franklin Templeton’s sgBENJI tokens, shares of its Singapore-domiciled US dollar money-market fund, received two transfers of 72,184,793.07 shares on Thursday, at 02:58 and 04:13 UTC, by our read of the XRP Ledger. Its balance is now 192,698,409.62 shares, up from 48,327,856.18. CoinDesk, citing RWA.xyz, puts the position second on the XRP Ledger behind Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin.

5. The XRP Ledger slows, and a fix slips

Some XRP Ledger ledgers took 40 to 50 seconds to close on Tuesday and Wednesday, against a usual pace of about 3.9 seconds, before operators rolled out a configuration change: what happened. Separately, the fixCleanup3_4_0 amendment, which stops some delegated accounts from minting tokens, lost its validator majority, so it missed its 23 Oct date. Its new majority, dated 21 Oct at 14:46 UTC, still held on Saturday morning, which points to 4 Nov at the earliest: the delay.

6. Zcash fixes a height for NU7

Zcash’s ZIP editors merged a change on Wednesday that sets the NU7 network upgrade for block 3,543,405. The upgrade triples block speed and leaves any coins still in the old Sprout pool unspendable. At the current pace that height falls around 5 or 6 Nov: what NU7 changes.

7. Qubic opens claims for drained wallets

Qubic restarted after a halt caused by an attacker draining 1,404 wallets whose seeds, the secret phrases that control them, had been made with weak randomness in Safari on Apple devices. Its Computors, the operators who run the network, approved moving weak-seed wallets into escrow, and a reclaim site is open until 1 May 2027: how to claim.

8. Aero goes live on seven chains

Aero, the exchange formed by merging Aerodrome and Velodrome, launched at 00:00 UTC on Thursday on Base, Ethereum, OP Mainnet, Arc, Ink, Arbitrum and Robinhood Chain. One AERO converts to one new AERO and one VELO to 0.044 AERO, though most liquidity had not moved on day one: the launch.

9. Sophon sets a shutdown date

Sophon, a consumer-focused Ethereum layer 2, will switch off its mainnet on 30 Nov, its team said on Monday. Users who hold liquid SOPH, ETH or USDC there have to withdraw them by hand before 25 Nov, when websites start going offline: what to do.

10. Sophon and STRK lead the week’s falls

SOPH fell about 31.7% over seven days and STRK about 31.0%, the largest drops in this list, according to CoinGecko. QUBIC lost 22.3% and AERO 19.2%. INIT was the only token here to rise, up 15.3%, even with its chain halted; we found no announcement that explains the move.

The week in numbers

Prices and TVL as of 09:54 UTC on 24 Oct. TVL is total value locked in DeFi applications on each chain; the Base figure is the whole chain, not Aero alone. DefiLlama’s Starknet figure dropped in one step from $157.8M on 22 Oct to $42.1M on 23 Oct; we could not establish whether that reflects withdrawals or a change in what DefiLlama counts. Initia’s figure is from a halted chain. DefiLlama lists no TVL for Qubic or Sophon. We have left active addresses blank because we could not verify one consistent source for all eight chains at publication.

Next week: Franklin’s bitcoin dividend ETFs take effect on 27 Oct, Initia’s promised fix and post-mortem, and the run-up to Zcash’s NU7 in early November. SOL was trading at $101.24 as of 09:54 UTC, according to CoinGecko, down 3.0% over seven days.

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