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 31 Oct to Friday 6 Nov, with market figures as of about 10:46 UTC on 7 Nov. Last week’s Chain Check covered 24 to 30 Oct.
1. Zcash’s NU7 is live, with blocks three times faster
Zcash’s Network Upgrade 7 activated on mainnet early on Friday 6 Nov at block 3,543,405, and the chain now targets a block every 25 seconds instead of 75, the Zcash Foundation said. Node operators are told to run Zebra 7.0.0, the foundation’s node software. The upgrade also leaves coins still sitting in the Sprout pool, Zcash’s oldest privacy pool, unspendable.
2. Akash’s move to Solana passes
Akash Network’s Proposal 346, to move the AKT token from Akash’s own Cosmos chain to Solana, passed when voting closed on 2 Nov at 15:02 UTC, according to the chain’s governance record. The final tally was about 59.98 million AKT yes and 0.80 million no, or 98.7% of yes, no and veto votes, with 0.89 million abstaining. As we explained in what the vote decides, the compute marketplace itself would only move after a second vote.
3. The Algorand Foundation closes its forum and drops supply-cap plans
The Algorand Foundation said on 6 Nov that it closed the Algorand Forum that day, leaving a read-only archive, and concluded its Ecosystem Advisory Council. Its xGov grants programme, in which holders voted on funding proposals, is paused indefinitely from 6 Dec, and it has stopped sponsoring the Algorand Technical Council. It also shelved Project King Safety, so lifting ALGO’s supply cap, enabling and capturing MEV (the profit from ordering transactions) and raising the minimum fee are “no longer being considered at this time”, while staking rewards remain committed through January 2028, the foundation said.
4. Polymarket and Binance ask Polygon for a recovery fork
A Polygon Improvement Proposal posted on 4 Nov and listing Polymarket and Binance as proposers asks validators, the operators who confirm transactions, to approve a hard fork that would move about 70.49 million POL out of five blocked attacker addresses into recovery wallets: the proposal. It is a proposal only; when we reported it on 5 Nov, no fork block had been set. Changing balances by hard fork is rare and contested on any chain, which is why the validator decision matters more than the sponsors’ names.
5. Solana: a halted Shanghai event and a fake app
China’s central bank said Solana Accelerate China 2026 was halted before it opened and that those behind Solana’s advertising on a Lujiazui office tower will be investigated, according to a People’s Bank of China official quoted by Financial News: the PBoC’s remarks. Earlier in the week, Solana Mobile said a malicious “SKR Claim” app asking for seed phrases sat in its dApp Store for about an hour after someone accessed its publishing portal: the fake app.
6. THORChain carries the Binance hackers’ XRP
THORChain, a network for swapping native coins across blockchains, resumed swaps late on 3 Nov after its 31 Oct halt, and has since been the main route for stolen XRP being turned into bitcoin, according to Elliptic’s latest count. About $100 million of the stolen XRP had been swapped by 08:00 UTC on 7 Nov, mostly through THORChain, the firm said. The protocol has not been accused of wrongdoing; its swaps are permissionless, which is what makes it useful to anyone moving coins between chains.
7. Core: 97 million staked CORE withdrawn through b14g
b14g, a hub for staking bitcoin and CORE together on the Core blockchain, said about 97 million CORE staked through it was withdrawn without authorisation on 31 Oct: the b14g incident. It paused the affected contracts, exchanges froze about 9 million CORE, and bitcoin staked through b14g was not affected, the project said.
8. Core rewrites balances with a hard fork
Two days later, b14g said a hard fork of the Core blockchain had recovered 68,146,177.22 CORE from three attacker addresses, about 70.2% of the 97,045,563 CORE affected. It described the fork as a one-time state adjustment with no rollback, no new tokens and no change to supply.
As of that update, nothing had been returned to users and no claims process had been announced. It is the step Polygon is now being asked to take.
9. Hyperliquid’s treasury company asks to become a futures broker
Hyperliquid Strategies, the Nasdaq-listed company that holds HYPE, said a subsidiary has applied to register as a futures commission merchant, a broker that can hold US client accounts, so it can serve permissioned HIP-3 markets: the FCM filing. It reported $620.6 million of quarterly net income, driven by HYPE gains. Registration is not approval.
10. A login provider pauses, and Cosmos users feel it
Web3Auth, which lets apps create wallets behind a Google or Apple sign-in, paused its embedded wallet service at 21:13 UTC on Friday over a security issue. By Saturday morning, Keplr, a widely used Cosmos wallet, had confirmed unauthorised transactions on some social-login accounts and paused that option: our Security Alert.
The week in numbers
| Chain | Token | 7-day change | TVL | Active addresses | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zcash | ZEC | +4.2% | $3.2M | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| Akash | AKT | +5.7% | n/a | — | CoinGecko |
| Algorand | ALGO | −0.6% | $29.7M | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| Polygon | POL | −0.9% | $629.9M | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| Solana | SOL | −5.6% | $5.25B | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| THORChain | RUNE | −10.5% | $32.6M | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| Core | CORE | −14.6% | $3.3M | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| Hyperliquid | HYPE | −10.4% | $2.47B | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
| Cosmos Hub | ATOM | −8.3% | $0.12M | — | CoinGecko, DefiLlama |
Prices as of 10:46 UTC and TVL as of about 10:50 UTC on 7 Nov. TVL is total value locked in DeFi applications on each chain; the Hyperliquid figure is DefiLlama’s Hyperliquid L1, and the Cosmos Hub figure covers the Hub only, not the wider Cosmos ecosystem Keplr serves. DefiLlama lists no TVL for Akash. We have left active addresses blank because we could not verify one consistent source for all nine chains at publication.
On prices, AKT and ZEC were the only gainers on this list over seven days, while CORE fell 14.6% and RUNE and HYPE each lost about 10%, according to CoinGecko. We found no announcement that explains any of those moves.
Next week: Binance aims to reopen withdrawals for HYPE, NEAR and several other tokens by the end of the week, it said on X, as reported by The Block; we also watch for Web3Auth’s promised details and whether Polygon validators set a fork block. Algorand’s xGov pause takes effect on 6 Dec. SOL was trading at $89.81 as of 10:46 UTC, according to CoinGecko, down 5.6% over seven days.
Related: Solana's draft SIMD-0723 would remove durable nonces no earlier than 5 May 2027
Related: Zcash developers have now proposed cutting block spacing from 25 to 20 seconds
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.