Four researchers from Arbitrum developer Offchain Labs have challenged Vitalik Buterin's proposal to adopt RISC-V for Ethereum's execution layer. In a November 20 post on Ethereum Research, they argue WebAssembly (WASM) offers superior long-term benefits as Ethereum's smart contract format. The team supports reducing ZK proving costs but questions whether a single instruction set architecture can optimally serve both ZK-proving and smart contract delivery functions.

Cardano suffered its first major chain split in eight years on November 21 after a malformed delegation transaction exploited a 2022 deserialization vulnerability. The network fragmented into two competing chains for several hours before converging through natural consensus by November 22. A developer publicly acknowledged causing the incident, while founder Charles Hoskinson's decision to involve the FBI prompted an IOG employee to resign over concerns about legal liability for coding errors.

Wormhole Labs has launched Sunrise, a liquidity gateway designed to facilitate seamless transfers of external assets to the Solana network. The platform debuts with support for Monad's MON token, which begins trading tomorrow. Sunrise utilizes Wormhole's Native Token Transfers framework to provide unified liquidity across Solana-based decentralized exchanges.

The Monad token sale on Coinbase raised approximately $216 million against a $187 million target as of November 23, reaching 115% subscription. Participation surged in the final 24 hours before the scheduled close, with over $43 million in commitments recorded during that period.

Aerodrome and Velodrome, leading decentralized exchanges on Base and Optimism, reported front-end compromises early Saturday morning. Both platforms warned users to avoid primary domains and use decentralized mirror links while investigations into the DNS hijack continue. Smart contracts remain secure and unaffected.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed civil forfeiture complaints for $15.1 million in USDT seized from North Korean military hacking group APT38. The stablecoin was stolen in 2023 attacks against four international virtual currency platforms. Separately, five individuals pleaded guilty to facilitating a scheme in which North Korean IT workers used stolen identities to fraudulently secure employment at 136 U.S. companies.

Harvard University held 6.8 million shares of BlackRock's IBIT spot bitcoin ETF as of September 30, representing a 257% increase from the previous quarter. The position was valued at $442.8 million on that date, making IBIT Harvard's largest disclosed U.S. investment. The holding accounts for approximately 0.6% of the university's $57 billion endowment.

Spanish crypto influencer Álvaro Romillo, known as CryptoSpain, was arrested Thursday and ordered held without bail on charges of orchestrating a $300 million fraud through Madeira Invest Club. Prosecutors allege Romillo defrauded approximately 3,000 investors of €260 million through a Ponzi scheme. A Singapore bank account containing €29 million linked to entities connected to Romillo raised flight risk concerns, prompting the detention order.

A Manhattan federal court declared a mistrial in the case against Anton and James Peraire-Bueno, two brothers accused of exploiting MEV-Boost software to extract $25 million from Ethereum in 12 seconds. The jury deadlocked after struggling to apply existing wire fraud and money laundering statutes to blockchain activity. Deliberations reportedly caused emotional distress among jurors, with some brought to tears.