Soluna’s Texas wind site and Ethereum’s Hoodi clock shared the desk on October 22. Soluna said it signed a 50 megawatt AI data-center joint venture with Applied Digital at Project Dorothy 3, still waiting on a Briscoe County tax abatement by year-end. Empery Digital posted contested meeting tallies and a Delaware Section 225 complaint. Node operators got Geth v1.17.9 and Lighthouse v8.3.1 ahead of Hoodi’s October 26 fork. Aave asked for a V3.8 reentrancy guard, researchers posted SEACAST, Grove wants larger Morpho deposit limits, and Kraken set another 60-minute order-entry pause for 10:00 UTC on October 26.
Market context from our live snapshot at 2026-10-22T04:08:39+00:00: Bitcoin at $82,855 (about +0.18% over 24 hours), Ethereum at $2,443.46 (+0.04%), Solana at $105.54 (−0.21%). Global market cap sat near $2.79 trillion with bitcoin dominance about 59.5% and 24-hour volume near $87.9 billion. See our Bitcoin history, Ethereum history, and layer 2 notes. Related: how to read a crypto market snapshot and the Crypto News hub.
Soluna and Applied Digital agree on a 50 MW Texas AI hall
Soluna Holdings said on October 21 it signed a definitive agreement to form a jointly owned company with Applied Digital for a planned 50 megawatt AI and HPC data center at Project Dorothy 3, near Silverton in Briscoe County, Texas. After closing, Applied is expected to hold 51% and Soluna 49%, with Soluna contributing land and power assets and Applied expected to put in development capital. The deal still needs a Briscoe County tax abatement, title policies, corporate approvals, an operating agreement, leases, and power contracts, and the companies said they expect to close by year-end. ChronoScale Holdings (Nasdaq: CHRN), majority-owned by Applied, signed a non-binding letter of intent to lease the hall, which would sit next to the 150 megawatt Briscoe Wind Farm and draw power from that farm and the grid in phase 1.
Empery shareholders reject the 2025 equity plan as ATG files a Section 225 suit
Empery Digital said its October 14 annual meeting elected nine directors, including ATG Capital Management nominee Aaron T. Morris, and rejected the 2025 Equity Incentive Plan by 8,897,192 votes for, 11,798,429 against, and 4,991,973 abstentions. That plan would have reserved 6,846,589 common shares. Shareholders did ratify MaloneBailey, LLP as auditor for the year ending December 31, 2026. Two days later, on October 16, ATG Capital Opportunities Fund LP filed a Delaware Section 225 action seeking to sterilize enough votes held by Empery Asset Management to remove director Ian Read and replace him with Gabriel Gliksberg, according to the October 19 8-K.
Geth v1.17.9 turns on Amsterdam for Hoodi at 17:42 UTC October 26
The go-ethereum team published v1.17.9 (Universal Semiconductor) on October 21. The release sets the Amsterdam execution-layer fork on the Hoodi testnet at timestamp 1793036568, which is 17:42:48 UTC on Monday, October 26, 2026, and recommends the binary for Hoodi operators. It also says EVM opcode dispatching is about 16% faster, archive nodes can set transaction-index history with --history.transactions, and it includes power-failure database fixes plus snap/2 and mempool patches. This is a testnet clock, not a mainnet fork date.
Lighthouse v8.3.1 is a high-priority certificate patch for every network
Sigma Prime tagged Lighthouse v8.3.1 (Rick J-22) at 02:53 UTC on October 22. The notes call it a high-priority update that refreshes trusted certificates after the eMudhra certificate authority was compromised, and they tell every Lighthouse user on every network to upgrade as soon as practical, especially setups that use HTTPS for checkpoint sync, Web3Signer, or validator-client to beacon-node links. Staking users are listed as high priority on both the beacon node and the validator client. Hoodi operators still must be on v8.3.x before Monday, October 26, 2026; this tag is the certificate patch on top of v8.3.0's Gloas binary, not a new mainnet fork.
Aave Labs files an ARFC to ship V3.8 with a transient-storage reentrancy guard
Aave Labs posted an ARFC on October 21 to upgrade live Aave V3 instances to V3.8, a security-focused release whose headline change is a reentrancy guard on Pool operations that uses EIP-1153 transient storage. The post lists Ethereum Core and Lido, Plasma, Avalanche, BNB, Monad, Base, Arbitrum, Mantle, X Layer, Polygon, Linea, Optimism, Gnosis, MegaETH, and Celo among the active instances in scope, and frozen pools with caps going to zero are excluded. V3.8 would ship under a Business Source License, with the Change Date stored at v38.aavelicense.eth once governance sets it, and would move to Snapshot and then an AIP only after Certora and third-party audits. The upgrade is not executed.
Ethresear: SEACAST aims to broadcast big Ethereum objects without waiting on the last chunk
Csaba Kiraly posted SEACAST on Ethresear.ch on October 21 as a follow-up to Informed Diffusion, arguing that today's gossip makes every node wait for a whole object before forwarding it, so a 1 MiB payload from a home builder can arrive seconds late at the last nodes. SEACAST forwards coded chunks immediately, lets nodes advertise what they hold, and adds data-availability sampling so a node can request a sample instead of the whole object. In the author's measurements, cutting every uplink from 50 Mbps to 10 Mbps kept delay at 2.2 to 2.5 times a link-imposed lower bound and traffic near 1.7 copies per node; a formal model of spec version 0.5 had already closed eight of ten safety gaps. This is a research post with an executable spec, not a mainnet fork.
Grove asks to lift Morpho USDC deposit limits to 100 million a day
An October 21 Spark forum post sets technical scope for a November 5, 2026 Grove spell that would raise the Grove x Steakhouse USDC Morpho Vault V2 deposit rate limit on Base and on Ethereum from 20,000,000 USDC (max and per day) to 100,000,000 on both figures, because a large allocation at the current slope takes weeks. The same spell would swap the Grove SubProxy's entire USDC balance of 1,484,740.589999 USDC, measured at Ethereum block 26,227,383, into the same amount of USDS through the Sky PSM. Ethereum actions would run when the Sky Executive Vote that includes the spell executes, and the Base raise waits on that message's delivery. The spell is proposed, not executed.
Kraken schedules another 60-minute order-entry pause at 10:00 UTC October 26
Kraken posted a scheduled maintenance window for its order-entry system on Monday, October 26, starting at about 10:00 UTC and expected to last up to 60 minutes. During that window, Kraken Pro web, mobile, and desktop clients may see a very small number of rejected order submissions or modifications, WebSocket API clients may see a small number of rejects plus extra latency, and FIX API clients may see several seconds of rejected submissions and modifications. No customer action is required. This is a new window, created October 21 at 11:21 UTC, after the October 21 09:00 UTC pause completed.
