Hayes exits, Aave lends against stocks, and Vitalik retires the precompile: October 18-25, 2026

From October 18, 2026 at 6:00 p.m. through October 25 at 6:00 p.m. in UTC-05:00, crypto fell with the rest of the risk market. On October 22 the Nasdaq had its worst day since June, and the 10-year Treasury yield fell 19 basis points, its largest one-day drop since March 2023. 1

By the next morning Brent crude traded above $116 a barrel for the first time since late April, and gold fell below $4,000 an ounce for the first time since July, about 30% under its January high. Bitcoin sat near $81,000 after U.S. spot ETFs lost $635 million the previous day, their biggest daily outflow since June. 1

On October 24 bitcoin slid to about $79,700, its weakest level in more than a month, after the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States was evacuating embassies and bases across the Middle East on intelligence that Iran was preparing attacks. Ether, XRP and Solana fell 3% to 4% the same day. 2

The builders kept shipping anyway. Uniswap turned its v4 liquidity pools into an aggregator, Aave and Coinbase pushed lending against tokenized stocks, BNB Chain published the spec for a second, faster chain, and Coinbase put agents in front of the account. The one who stopped being long was Arthur Hayes, who sold his directional book on October 24, two days after naming three of the same tokens as his top picks.

No tracked leader published an essay in the window. Buterin's blog feed ends at "The cryptographic world computer" from September 27, and Hayes's Substack at "Safety First" from September 21. The long-form material this week is one podcast appearance and one televised interview.

Hayes runs Flop Labs and the Maelstrom fund. At 1:18 a.m. Eastern on October 24 he wrote: "I dumped it all. The Maelstrom directional book, took profits on $ETH, $ENA, $UNI and other shitcoins." 4

His stated reason was the macro and geopolitical backdrop. "I think we gotta go down to go up," he wrote, and said he would wait on the sidelines for "the all clear signal." 4

Two days earlier he had named those three tokens as his picks. On The Sujal Show, published October 22 and running just under 14 minutes, he said Ethereum "could go to 10,000 by the end of the year," Ethena a dollar by then, and Uniswap $20. 10

He laid out the bailout thesis on the episode. Asked what an AI crash would do, he said: "I think that the AI bubble might wobble, but it's not going to burst because governments are going to bail out all the companies." 10

He put the reckoning on a calendar. Data centers ordered this cycle finish in late 2027 and early 2028, he said, and the companies that ordered the compute then have to find hundreds of billions to pay for it. "I don't think they're going to have the money." 10

He gave the trading instruction that follows from it: "Don't short SpaceX. Don't short Anthropic when it lists. Don't short OpenAI if it ever lists. Don't short Nvidia." Play the bailout instead, because the assets that benefit are the scarce ones. 10

Read on its own, the October 24 post looks like a reversal of the October 22 picks. His own account ties them together. He had already sold Zcash, Hyperliquid and NEAR earlier and rotated the proceeds into Ethereum, Ethena, Uniswap and ether.fi, he said on the podcast. 10 On his own account, taking profit is the strategy, and October 24 was the second round.

FLOP, his agent-payments network, has its own calendar. On October 21 he warned: "THERE IS NO FLOP TOKEN," and said anyone claiming otherwise is a scammer. 11 On the podcast he gave the mechanics: no pre-sale and no venture investors, an airdrop in late October or early November, and 25% of a ten-year supply going to participants in the 90-day testnet. 10

Flop Labs spent the week on the product behind that. Compute futures sold elsewhere are cash-settled against a survey of rental quotes, the company wrote on October 22, with no way to take delivery. Its own contracts would settle against prices agents actually paid for verified work, or deliver the compute at expiry, measured as work on whatever card runs it. 12

Aave held its quarterly livestream on October 22. According to BlockBeats, Kulechov used it to announce Aavenomics 3.0, which will include AAVE buybacks, staking and burns. 5

The background explains why buybacks were off. Aave paused them on April 19, the day after the rsETH vulnerability incident. Since then the DAO has committed 25,000 ETH to DeFi United to cover losses and secured a credit line of up to 30,000 ETH from Mantle, and a forum proposal had already cut the annual buyback budget from about $50 million to $30 million. 5

The protocol's public face this week was the equity business. On October 23, Base promoted borrowing against tokenized stocks through Aave, and Kulechov restated it in his own words: "Borrow USDC against stocks on @base with @aave. Powered by @coinbase Tokenized Stocks." 1314

His number for the addressable market came a day earlier: "A $150T+ market ready to run on financial rails powered by @aave." 15 The $150 trillion describes the asset class; the lending sits inside it.

The growth figure came on October 25, quoted from Luigi D'Onorio DeMeo, Aave's chief strategy and business officer: the protocol now has the second-largest market for tokenized stocks and expects to be first, with cross-margining as the differentiator. Kulechov's own line was shorter: "Strong growth on stocks on Aave. Climbing to become the largest market." 1617

A second product change landed the same week. On October 22 the first markets curated by an outside risk manager went live on Aave V4, with Sentora running the hub: three markets on Ethereum where users borrow RLUSD, PYUSD and OUSD against yield-bearing and blue-chip collateral. 1819

Aave also shipped Earn on October 23, which sorts every V4 market by yield so a depositor can compare rates and deposit from one screen. 20 And Linda Jeng, Aave Labs' chief legal and policy officer, said Aave had answered the UK Financial Conduct Authority on tokenized gold, where £52 million of the metal already works as collateral on the protocol. 21

The counterweight to all of it came from issuers. Twenty-two public companies have now objected to having their shares traded on the tokenized venue being built by OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, including Microsoft, Alphabet, McDonald's, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Cisco. Under the SEC's exemption a venue must notify an issuer and give it 30 days to object, and silence counts as consent. 22

Armstrong's description of Coinbase starts with the agent now. "It may seem quaint to manually click through a financial app in the near future," he wrote on October 22. "Everyone can have their own private banker." 6

The company shipped the page behind that line the same day. Coinbase for Agents now documents two ways in: Coinbase Advisor as a first-party interface, and any outside agent — ChatGPT, Grok or another model — connected to a Coinbase account to research, manage a portfolio and trade crypto and stocks. 23

Payments were the second half. On October 21 Armstrong announced work with Mastercard on agentic commerce, with Coinbase supplying the payments infrastructure for Mastercard agents over Cloudflare, using x402 and the Coinbase facilitator. 2425 x402 is the payment protocol Coinbase has been building for machine-to-machine transactions.

Trading through agents was already live. On October 19 he pointed customers at it: "Now your agent can trade perps for you on Coinbase." 26

His argument for why any of this matters is about time. "Crypto settles instantly. No more T+1, T+2," he wrote on October 19. 27 A day later he listed what that removes: stablecoins crossing borders at weekends, tokenized stocks trading around the clock, exchanges settling in real time, and onchain lending that skips the loan officer. 28

He also put Coinbase's prediction market in front of the midterm elections, pointing users at a "Predict" tab and a midterms dashboard. 29

Uniswap made its v4 pools route to outside liquidity on October 22. Aggregator Hooks wrap external venues and turn them into Uniswap pools, live on Ethereum, Base and Robinhood Chain in the web app and API. 30

Adams explained the design in his own words. "We took the logic of an aggregator and smushed it into a Uniswap v4 hook," he wrote. 7 A hook is a contract that runs around a v4 pool and can add behavior to it; an aggregator is the router that shops across venues for the best price. Uniswap put the router's job inside the pool.

The fee split is where UNI holders come in. Adams said native Uniswap liquidity carries "zero margin," while routes out to external sources charge "a couple basis points of UNI protocol fees," and those routes still burn UNI. 7

Institutional plumbing advanced in parallel. UNI became the first DeFi protocol token with futures on CME Group, announced October 19. 31 The contracts opened October 20 with an inaugural block trade between FalconX and GSR. 32 Adams called it "a first for any DeFi token" and noted the trade executed through regulated traditional-finance rails. 33

On October 23 he answered a trader who said aggregators beat Uniswap on large orders. He priced 1,000,000 USDC into ether on both: 417.5 ETH through Uniswap and 417.3 through Matcha, then asked, "am I doing something wrong?" 34

Buterin's one original post in the window, on October 19, is an argument about where new cryptography should live on Ethereum. "Ultimately, precompiles and EVM are both the wrong place to put most cryptography support into Ethereum," he wrote. 3

A precompile is a built-in contract that performs one specific cryptographic operation faster than the EVM could. Buterin's objection is about the data. Anything a precompile or the EVM touches has to reach the chain as calldata, and even with PeerDAS and blocks-in-blobs he puts a practical ceiling of about 8 MB per second on that space. 3

His alternative is to move the work off the main thread. Compute heavy self-contained work on the client, prove it with a STARK — a succinct proof that the computation ran correctly — and push the proof through the aggregation mechanism in EIP-8288. "The chain sees the fact that the computation was done and what the result is," he wrote. 3

The payoff he names is that Ethereum stops adding precompiles at all, and anyone can use whatever signature scheme they want. 3

EIP-8288 itself is a draft standards-track proposal by Buterin and Thomas Coratger, created June 3, 2026: it lets a transaction declare cryptographic dependencies, and has one recursive STARK at the block level prove all of them. 35

The arithmetic explains the design. A hash-based signature costs roughly 150,000 to 200,000 gas, and a hash-based STARK takes 128 kB of data or more, which no block can carry one transaction at a time. 35

It requires EIP-8141 and EIP-2718, both of which remain unshipped, so nothing in the proposal is scheduled for a fork yet.

BNB Chain's documentation carries a New L1 section: a specification, with no launch date attached. There is no public testnet, faucet or explorer yet; developers work against a local devnet. 36

Blocks arrive every 200 ms, so block numbers advance about five times a second, and a validator-signed pre-confirmation lands in roughly 20 ms, revocable and advisory. 36 The chain carries native account abstraction through a 0x76 transaction envelope with passkeys and gas sponsorship, an opt-in shielded pool for private transfers, reserved gas quotas per traffic class, and BLS fast finality. 36

Two differences from a standard EVM chain matter to anyone porting code. There is no global mempool, so no pending-transaction feed exists, and state is committed with an LtHash accumulator, which means no trie proofs and no eth_getProof. 36 The gas asset and the staking and governance contracts carry over unchanged from BSC. 36

CZ's contribution was a single line on October 25: "Multiple chains, one coins." 8

His other posts tracked the price. On October 23, with bitcoin near $81,000: "'bitcoin is dead' was said by many, many times before. Those were also the best times to buy bitcoin." 37

He answered the AI-hacking worry with a comparison: the internet and banking systems already rely on weaker encryption. The damage from AI comes from leaked data feeding phishing and social engineering, he wrote. 38

Wallet safety came up twice. On October 22 he wrote that "no crypto wallet is 100% safe" and that there are risks in everything. 39 Two days later he amplified hardware wallet maker Keystone's apology, which disclosed that a third party had obtained customers' names, contact details and shipping addresses through its website. 40

He sat for a Japanese television interview published October 24 on PIVOT, running 36 minutes. Its chapters cover his ties to Japan, tax reform and asset tokenization, his resignation and prison term, the free-education project Giggle, and AI with crypto. 41 His own summary of it was that the conversation was about "why today is the best day in history to build." 42

His advice to founders: "99% of ideas are good if the team can execute well. The problem is, 98% of teams fail at execution." 43

Flying Tulip's founder spent the week publishing the rates its lending markets pay, chain by chain. On Ethereum: 1.69% on ETH, 3.69% on USDC, 0.70% on BTC, 3.66% on USDT, 2.04% on crvUSD, 2.44% on USDG and 7.61% on an asset he identifies only by contract address. 9

On Sonic the same post lists 2.44% on S, 9.42% on USDC and 16% on that same contract address, with the claim that this is the most liquid lending market on that chain. 44

The design claim is the collateral terms. Every stablecoin carries a 1.5% maintenance margin — the buffer a position keeps before liquidation — which he calls "highest LTV available anywhere," and a deposit can serve as margin for spot, leveraged trading and total return swaps from one balance. 9

His highest published number came from looping, and he discounted it himself. With staked ftUSD looped through Morpho and KPK, the displayed rate reached 24.11% APY; he said he expects it "to normalize around ~12%." 45

Capacity expanded too. The ftUSD borrow cap on Ethereum rose to 900,000 on October 21. 46 By October 23 the staked version paid 6.37% on Ethereum, 12.36% on BNB Smart Chain and 9.64% on Sonic, paid in bought-back ether. 47

The Federal Reserve meets October 27 and 28. After Thursday's 19-basis-point fall the 10-year yield edged back up to 4.99% on Friday, and traders overwhelmingly expected the Fed to hold rates unchanged. 1

FLOP's airdrop falls in late October or early November by its founder's account, with the testnet running 90 days. 10

Aavenomics 3.0 is a livestream claim until it becomes a governance proposal, and the buyback budget in that proposal is the number to read. 5

BNB Chain's second L1 has a spec and a devnet. A public testnet is the next thing that can be dated. 36

The tokenized-stock argument now runs on a 30-day clock per issuer, and 22 issuers have used it. 22

Hayes has given no re-entry level, only a signal he will wait for. 4