GM, frens! ☕️
Here’s what we’re getting into this week in 30 seconds:
🥷 How crypto won its political battle but became the villain
Crypto’s biggest companies bought real political power in the US, only to turn industry support from a winning ticket into evidence that a politician had been bought [here]
🏢 Corporate giants push back on tokenized stocks
Some of the world’s largest companies are blocking tokenized versions of their shares as concerns over control, liquidity and round the clock trading collide with the demand for more open markets [here]
✉ Ambire takes private transfers to Devcon
Private transfers are coming to Ambire, with a new video showing how they work ahead of Vitalik’s live demo at Devcon [here]
🪧 A16z takes crypto off the sign
A16z is removing crypto from the name of its $9.8 billion investment arm and widening the mandate to AI, robotics and whatever technology attracts the next wave of money [here]
⛽ Ethereum prepares its biggest gas limit jump yet
Ethereum is preparing to raise its gas limit from 60 million to 200 million, but the final testnet step has been postponed while devs check a possible contract issue [here]
Plus:
Other worthy reads: good reads from elsewhere in crypto that deserve a spot this week [here]
Memes: OC shitposts and stuff we came across this week [here]
If you want to argue about this week’s nonsense with actual humans, come find us in our Discord 🤠
And if you like our newsletter, we’d love for you to share it with someone who’d enjoy it too:
How crypto won its political battle but became the villain
Money changes how politicians talk to you.
Crypto companies found that out in the US, where regulators were suing them, banks were cutting them off and politicians had little interest in fixing the rules. The damage rarely stopped at the US border, but the people causing it still had no reason to listen.
For a while, the industry responded in the usual way - by hiring lawyers, meeting with politicians and trying to explain why operating through lawsuits was ridiculous. Very little changed 🫣
By 2024, the biggest firms had changed tactics. Coinbase, Ripple, Andreessen Horowitz and others poured serious money into Fairshake, a group created to support candidates who were friendly toward crypto (and attack those who stood in its way 😶)
And yes it was not built to win an argument about crypto. It was built to make ignoring the industry politically dangerous.
It gave the industry something legal complaints never had: consequences. Supporting crypto could bring campaign money. Opposing it could bring millions in attack ads and a serious risk of losing an election.
Trump and his team saw the opening 🕵
He had previously called crypto a scam, but that was before the industry had organized voters and campaign money to offer him. Once supporting it became useful, his opinion changed.
Trump began accepting crypto donations, promised to fire SEC Chair Gary Gensler and appeared at a major BTC conference where around $21 million was raised. One national poll later showed him leading Kamala Harris by 12 points among crypto owners while Harris led by the same amount among everyone else 🍊
Crypto did not elect Trump by itself, but it gave him another group of frustrated voters and plenty of money to reach them. He gave them a simple promise in return: help put him back in power and the crackdown would end.
When Trump won, it looked like the strategy had worked. The industry had gone from being ignored to having the next US president repeat its complaints on stage. Since American banks, regulators and investors influence the market as a whole, that change mattered far beyond the people who could vote for him 🗳
It would have been easy to assume other countries were about to follow the same path. They did not.
Across the EU, crypto still has little power over elections. Politicians argue about MiCA, taxes, stablecoins and licenses, but there is no aggressive European lobbyists paying to remove candidates. There is also no large group of voters choosing who runs a country mainly because of crypto 🤔
Part of that comes down to how European elections are funded. Companies cannot pour unlimited money into political ads as easily as they can in the US. Crypto businesses still lobby politicians, but they cannot hang the threat of a multimillion dollar attack campaign over every vote.
Britain came closest (by drama size) although it is outside the EU now. BitMEX cofounder Ben Delo and major Tether investor Christopher Harborne gave a combined £72 million to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
The money gave Reform a huge advantage, but it did not inspire other companies to copy them. Instead, Britain moved toward banning crypto donations and limiting money coming from voters living abroad. The closest European attempt at following the American model mostly convinced politicians that the door needed to be closed 🇬🇧
Asia followed another route.
South Korea has more than 16 million crypto users. By its 2025 presidential election, both leading candidates supported spot ETFs and friendlier rules because ignoring that many voters would have been stupid 🤷♂
Japan has also lowered the planned tax burden, recognized crypto as a financial product and opened the way for possible spot ETFs. Those changes came without a giant political operation 💰
In Asia, enough people owned crypto that politicians adjusted around them. Nobody needed to turn the industry into an election weapon first.
The US remains the only place where the industry turned election money into real political power. It is also where that “success” started working in the opposite direction 👇
Currently, crypto companies have already put around $189 million into the 2026 elections. That is more than a third of all corporate political money currently tracked.
The same companies keep paying for ads that avoid admitting that they’re campaigning for crypto, i.e voters see a candidate being attacked over crime, jobs or some local issue and have 0 idea that the exchanges and crypto VCs are behind this 🤷♂
Anti-crypto politicians are now using that against them
Virginia Senator Mark Warner is running an ad about Trump making hundreds of millions from his memecoin and calling it grifting. Former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, who is running to get his seat back, says the "exchanges and tech billionaires” spending roughly $40 million against him are trying to buy Republican Jon Husted’s seat because they know Brown will not work for them 🙄
Florida congressional candidate Oliver Gilbert did a similar thing after Fairshake spent more than $2 million trying to remove him. He accused “Trump and his crypto con artist billionaires” of putting a target on his back and trying to buy the election with dark money. In the end, Gilbert won the primary 👇
Illinois Senate candidate Juliana Stratton also won after telling voters that a “MAGA backed crypto PAC” was spending millions on attack ads against her. Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan made her opponent’s backing from crypto interests part of her campaign too 🪙
And if it seems like a nothingburger at first (a couple of guys claiming something?) it isn’t - the sentiment is actually becoming increasingly popular 🤦♂
Many candidates who showcased the attack narrative behind the industry money have won primaries despite Fairshake spending heavily against them 💵
More candidates have bought ads mentioning crypto this year than during the previous five years combined, and most of those candidates are against it. Even one unnamed crypto executive admitted to one of the news outlets that attacking Democrats “didn’t do us a lot of good” 🙅♂
Being affiliated with crypto has become useful political dirt. And yeah the exchanges brought this on themselves. They could have openly supported better rules and explained why those rules would help ordinary users. Instead, they copied every other grabby industry and began paying politicians while hiding the real subject from voters 🤐
Prediction markets are now doing the same thing
Polymarket, Kalshi and their founders have given at least $5 million to political groups during the current election cycle. Republicans received around $2.7 million while the rest went to Democrats. Polymarket also gave $1 million to a group that does not reveal who funds it.
More than a third of the money went to groups supporting state politicians. Their concern is that those politicians may help decide whether prediction markets are treated as financial products, gambling sites or something else entirely 🃏
So the companies taking bets on elections are paying the people who decide whether those bets remain legal.. they are not even trying to hide what the money is for.
These platforms already make money from people betting on every degen topic possible, wars, deaths, criminal cases and political disasters. Now they want to sponsor whichever politician might keep the whole thing open. It is hard to think of a better example of the industry becoming exactly what everyone used to hate about finance 🤥
But the biggest blow is that the current US president sits at the center of it.
Reports estimate that the Trump family made around $2.3 billion from WLFi TRUMP coins and other related “businesses” between mid 2024 and April 2026 (investors lost roughly the same amount 🙄 )
A notable situation mentioned by his political rivals is when a company linked to an Abu Dhabi royal bought a $500 million stake in World Liberty. The UAE backed MGX later used World Liberty’s stablecoin for a $2 billion Binance investment. It’s when Trump pardoned Binance founder CZ.
It’s true that politicians created this game and crypto had every right to defend itself when they were attacking the industry. But nobody forced exchanges to hide behind scummy political ads. Nobody forced prediction markets to bribe people. Nobody forced Trump to turn the presidency into a place to sell shitcoins.
The sad fact is that the political image of the industry slowly became detached from the people actually using and building it 👷
A handful of exchanges, lobby groups and billionaire gamblers became its public face because they had the money to force themselves into politics. That does not mean everyone in crypto signed up for their BS. It just means everyone else stayed out long enough for them to claim they spoke for the whole space 🙊
That can still change. Builders and users need to be clearer about what they actually want from politics, whether that is privacy, self custody, open access or simply the freedom to build useful software without begging for permission. Supporting someone just because they repeat a few friendly lines at a conference is not enough 🤪
This space was meant for something bigger than becoming another toy for people chasing money and influence. It is certainly bigger than Trump, Shayne Coplan, Brian Armstrong, the Winklevoss twins and whatever each of them hopes to squeeze out of it. They may be enjoying their turn at the top, but they do not get to decide what the whole thing was for.
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Corporate giants push back on tokenized stocks
The biggest companies on earth are perfectly comfortable selling shares to the public. They become less relaxed when those shares start trading somewhere they did not choose.
Microsoft, Alphabet, McDonald’s, Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm and Caterpillar have joined a growing group objecting to tokenized versions of their shares appearing on OKXICE. Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth and several large tech companies had already refused 🪙
Sixteen companies have now objected, removing 17 of the original 63 stock symbols the platform wanted to offer 👇
OKXICE is a joint project between crypto exchange OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the company that owns the New York Stock Exchange. It plans to let people trade tokenized shares around the clock through Uniswap v4 pools on OKX’s X Layer, with payments settled in stablecoins 💲
A registered broker would hold the real shares one for one, while token holders would receive the same dividends and voting rights as ordinary shareholders.
The SEC opened this route through a five year trial that gives approved tokenized venues lighter rules than normal stock exchanges. Companies receive 30 days’ notice before their shares are added and can object before trading begins 📜
That veto is now being used by some of the largest businesses in the world.
Their concern is that OKXICE will not be registered as a normal securities exchange or follow the full system that connects stock prices and reports trades across American markets. The platform can also update its smart contracts without advance notice.
Nasdaq says it does not want its shares trading somewhere that cannot show investors the best available price in real time or report every trade to the main market record. Applied Optoelectronics said it could not tell how tokenization might affect liquidity, volatility or its stock price 🔍
Trading through the weekend creates another problem for them. The normal stock market could close on Friday while a much smaller token market keeps going. One rumor on Saturday could knock the tokenized price around with very little money, leaving everyone waiting until Monday to see whether the real market agrees.
Another noteworthy part is that Nasdaq is building its own tokenized securities pilot in the meantime. Evidently, tokenization is interesting when Nasdaq controls it and deeply concerning when someone else does 🤷♂
Public companies also do not normally choose every broker, app or exchange where investors can trade their shares. Once the stock is public, shareholders are generally free to move it through the market. The SEC’s new system gives companies an unusual chance to block a new venue before investors can decide whether they want it 🥴
But undeniably, this is an argument about control.
Tokenized shares could let people trade outside traditional market hours, settle with stablecoins and use stocks inside onchain applications. They could also split liquidity across too many venues, confuse investors and create prices that drift away from the main market 🔓
Both sides have a point, but only one side already owns the “highway” 🤔
Ambire takes private transfers to Devcon
Moving money privately should not require bouncing between different apps and praying you clicked the right buttons. Ambire is bringing private transfers directly into the wallet, letting users move funds without leaving the usual public trail behind 👇
The team has released a short video showing how it all works and what the experience will look like:
Also, Vitalik Buterin and Nicolas Consigny will demonstrate privacy features on mainnet using Ambire Wallet at Devcon 8. The talk, called “Kohaku: privacy for everyone, by default,” takes place on November 3 👀
For an industry built around financial freedom, letting people decide who sees their transfers should be the bare minimum ❣
A16z takes crypto off the sign
Andreessen Horowitz launched a16z Crypto in 2018 with a $350 million fund and a clear message: crypto was large enough to deserve its own investment business 🫡
Eight years and $9.8 billion later, the crypto name is coming down.
A16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier. The group will continue investing in crypto, but its new mandate also covers artificial intelligence, robotics, biology and other technology that does not fit neatly into the firm’s existing categories 🕊
Chris Dixon will continue leading the group alongside Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. According to them crypto research, engineering and political work will continue too. Existing investments are not being abandoned and the firm still plans to back new blockchain companies 🤓
Interestingly though, A16z raised its fifth crypto fund in May with $2.2 billion. At the time, a spokesperson said it was completely dedicated to crypto entrepreneurs. Five months later, the same fund has a more wider *array of applications* all of the sudden 🤔
A16z says the old categories no longer make sense. Stablecoins are entering normal payment apps, banks are using blockchains and AI agents may eventually need wallets and payment infrastructure. According to them, under that view separating a crypto company from an AI or fintech company becomes less useful because one product may use all three.
AI, robotics and defense currently are attracting huge amounts of capital 💰
That could mean blockchain technology is finally becoming normal enough to disappear into the background. It could also mean its largest investors no longer want their entire identity tied to one market.
A16z gets to keep both explanations available.
If crypto produces the next generation of financial infrastructure, Frontier can point to the $9.8 billion it raised and say it never left. If AI and robotics produce better returns, the new name gives the fund permission to follow them 🔬
Ethereum prepares its biggest gas limit jump yet
Ethereum can fit more work into each block, but every increase comes with the same warning: somebody still has to verify all of it 🥸
That balance point is what Glamsterdam, Ethereum’s next major upgrade, is about. Devs have been preparing to raise the block gas limit from 60 million to 200 million, allowing much more computation to fit into every block 📦
The gas limit is basically Ethereum’s maximum workload for one block. Raising it means more transfers, swaps and contract calls can be processed before the block is full.
It does not automatically mean 3.3 times more transactions or fees becoming 3.3 times cheaper. Different transactions consume different amounts of gas, and prices still depend on how many people want the available space. It does create much more room before users begin bidding against one another ♻
Ethereum already raised its default gas limit from 30 million to 60 million through earlier upgrades. Jumping directly to 200 million is a much larger step, which is why Glamsterdam includes changes designed to make that workload different 🪨
Block level access lists will tell clients which accounts and storage areas each block touches. That lets them read data and check unrelated transactions in parallel instead of waiting for every operation to finish one after another.
Enshrined proposer builder separation changes how blocks are assembled and gives validators more time to check the execution payload. Other changes raise the gas charged for operations that create or access state, making sure heavy actions pay closer to what they actually cost the network 🔒
Together, those upgrades are supposed to stop a larger gas limit from simply dumping 3.3 times more pain onto node operators 🏋
Glamsterdam activated on the Sepolia testnet on October 6. Hoodi was supposed to follow on October 26 with its gas limit jumping to 200 million at the same time.
That is no longer happening on that date.
Ethereum devs postponed the Hoodi upgrade on October 22 while they investigate how EIP 8037, one of the new state creation gas rules, interacts with contracts already running on mainnet. The October 26 activation and gas increase were removed, with no replacement date announced yet 👨🔬
The mainnet upgrade never had a confirmed date, so nothing has been delayed for ordinary Ethereum users yet. Hoodi exists to catch exactly this kind of problem before code reaches real money.
But it does make the excited headlines slightly premature. Ethereum may still increase the limit to 200 million through Glamsterdam, but the final testnet first needs a new date and devs need to settle the contract issue. Researcher Toni Wahrstätter has suggested 300 million could become realistic later, although that remains an idea rather than part of the upgrade 🧐
This also shows why Ethereum cannot simply keep turning the number upward. Bigger blocks can lower congestion, but they demand more processing, storage and bandwidth. Push too far and running a node becomes harder, leaving verification to fewer powerful operators 🧠
Glamsterdam is trying to create more capacity without making that trade unacceptable. The important part is not whether Ethereum can produce one enormous block on a testnet. It is whether normal hardware can keep checking those blocks again and again without falling behind.
Other worthy reads
“Five DeFi Projects in the radar” - RightSide:
Fast post-quantum signature aggregation with lattice SNARKs” - a16z:
Perps Will Eat Options - DCo:
MEMES
That’s it for this week, frens.
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That’s us for this week. Keep an eye on the things that still matter after the excitement passes and we’ll see you next Friday.
Yours, The 🔥 Team
