Balancer Exploited for ~$129M

️ On today's Top Picks:

Crypto News

• ⭐️ MEXC returns $3M to trader The White Whale; MEXC previously froze The White Whale's funds for violating MEXC's Terms of Service.

• Sam Bankman-Fried says FTX was never insolvent; alleges external lawyers seized control of FTX and forced it into bankruptcy.

• ⭐️ Wintermute CEO Evgeny Gaevoy says they never had plans to sue Binance $BNB; adds rumors are baseless.

• Digital Asset Investment Products saw ~$360M of outflows last week; Bitcoin $BTC ~$946M outflows, Ethereum $ETH ~$58M inflows, Solana $SOL ~$421M inflows, Ripple $XRP ~$43M inflows.

• Tether releases Q3 2025 Attestation Report; highlights include ~$10B+ in net profits (Q1-Q3), ~$174B of issued USDT, ~$135B+ in US treasuries, & more.

• Ripple acquires Palisade, a digital asset infrastructure company, for an undisclosed amount; to expand Ripple’s custody capabilities.

• Ripple $XRP launches digital asset spot prime brokerage for US markets; offers OTC trading for XRP, RLUSD, and other tokens.

• Zerohash secures MiCA license in the EU; Mastercard $MA to reportedly acquire Zerohash for up to $2B.

Alpha

• MetaMask clarifies MetaMask Rewards program & future MetaMask $MASK TGE are two different things; says "The TGE will celebrate those helping shape the MetaMask ecosystem today, including OGs..."

• Polymarket announces Polymarket Builders Program; to distribute $1M+ to builders via grants & rewards.

• ⭐️ Farcaster launches No Fee November; 0% wallet fees when swapping on Base, Solana, BSC, & more.

• Brevis launches Proving Grounds Phase 2: Field Operations; earn Sparks by completing onchain tasks across 10+ protocols.

• Blockscount launches Streak Badges; complete the daily claim consistently to unlock exclusive badges.

• ICYMI MegaETH $MEGA public sale closes; ~50K bidders committed ~$1.39B; allocations to be revealed on November 5th.

Airdrops

• ⭐️ Fogo teases "Something in November" on X; to potentially launch mainnet, TGE, & airdrop in November.

• Intuition to launch $TRUST airdrop claim on November 5th; IQ points holders; high-signal Ethereum users, & more were eligible to register.

• Folks Finance launches $FOLKS airdrop eligibility & allocation checker; users with 1M+ Folks points, Founders Pass NFT holders, & more are eligible.

• Espresso announces two more paths to $ESP airdrop eligibility; Rarible/RARI Chain power users & Across power users to be eligible.

• ICYMI Espresso announces two paths to $ESP airdrop eligibility; Infinite Garden participants & Brew House participants to be eligible.

• ICYMI Noble launches $NOBLE airdrop claim process; Step 1 requires eligible users to link an Ethereum address by December 31st; Season 1 & Season 2 points participants are eligible.

Finance News

• OpenAI & Amazon $AMZN announce $38B deal; OpenAI to start using AWS compute with all capacity targeted to be deployed before the end of 2026.

• Strategy $MSTR buys an additional 397 Bitcoin $BTC for ~$45.6M at ~$114,771 per BTC; holds 641,205 BTC (~$68B) acquired for ~$47.49B at ~$74,057 per BTC.

• IREN $IREN signs $9.7B AI cloud contract with Microsoft $MSFT; to provide Microsoft with access to NVIDIA GB300 GPUs.

• Cipher Mining $CIFR signs ~$5.5B lease agreement with Amazon $AMZN Web Services; to provide data center space & power for AI workloads.

• Bitmine $BMNR buys an additional 82,353 Ethereum $ETH (~$297M); now holds 3,395,422 ETH (~$12.2B).

• Tharimmune $THAR raises ~540M via private placement to fund digital asset treasury holding Canton Coin $CC; investors include DRW, Liberty City Ventures, ARK Invest, Kraken, Polychain Capital, among others.

• Nasdaq warns TON Strategy $TONX for violating shareholder approval rules; failed to get shareholder approval for recent $500M private stock sale.

• Animoca Brands to go public via reverse merger with Currenc Group $CURR; companies expect merger to close in 2026.

Security and Exploits

• ⭐️ Balancer $BAL exploited for ~$129M due to smart contract exploit; to release full post-mortem soon.

• Chainalysis announces Wallet Compromise Detection Kit, a "behavior-based Web3 security defense tool" built for crypto exchanges.

• OpenAI announces Aardvark, an agentic security researcher powered by GPT‑5; currently in private beta.

Token Unlocks

• Sui $SUI / ~$104M / NOV 01st
• EigenCloud $EIGEN / ~$34M / NOV 01st
• Ethena $ENA / ~$16M / NOV 02nd
• Ethena $ENA / ~$56M / NOV 05th
Sourced from Tokenomist

Funding

• Donut raises $15M in Seed funding from several investors.

• KapKap raises $10M in Seed funding led by Animoca Brands.

• Standard Money raises $8M in Strategic funding led by YZi Labs.

• Liquid raises $7.6M in Seed funding led by Paradigm.

• Semantic Layer raises $2M in Series A funding led by Greenfield Capital.

The Degen Farmer