Around October 30, 2025, Beaconcha.in data provided by Hildobby, showed that the share of validators on the Ethereum beacon chain operated by Lido had fallen below 22%. 22% is regarded as a critical threshold for entity size, because larger entities represent a centralization and governance risk to the network. We welcome Lido as an aligned actor and we celebrate the robustness of the beacon chain.

On October 23rd, 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned convicted founder of Binance Changpeng Zhao. Janet Yellen, former Treasury Secretary said of CZ and Binance, "Binance turned a blind eye to its legal obligations in the pursuit of profit… Its willful failures allowed money to flow to terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers through its platform." When CZ stepped down from Binance, he stated, "I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility.” He paid a $50million dollar fine and spent four months in prison, though he was allowed to keep his stake in Binance.

This week we discussed the AWS outage and the pain of setting up an environment for mobile testing. We also reviewed some of the defunct subdomains being removed, including a spooky and mysterious one 👻

This POAP commemorates my second year working at POAP, inc. It seems like only yesterday I was thinking about the 1st anniversary drop and I'm already writing the description for the second one. Funny how time works! Yes, it was a busy year, but a fun one. Here's to many more 🥂. Thank you! ~~~ "Who said crypto was stressful? I'm 42 and I feel great".

It ain't much, but it's an honest demo

This week, the Tech Weekly revolved around a couple of really minor hiccups, some NFC surprises, and the handling of our vast infrastructure. Thankfully, it didn’t involve ads for women’s shaving products 🪒.