Weekly crypto roundup covering AI agent payments, staking milestones, bot-driven RLUSD activity, a Qubic wallet exploit, lending vault growth, regulatory moves, and AI-assisted smart contract auditing.
Security & Exploits ·
Automated transactions on the Ripple stablecoin continued to dominate payment volume this week: 99.6% of RLUSD transfers originated from 110 bot wallets, with 7.79M of 7.82M payments classified as dust—amounts under $1. Meanwhile, AI agents expanded their operational scope across multiple blockchains. Mastercard piloted an autonomous agent that executed 9 transactions across two merchants on Base without requiring a traditional checkout interface, while Ethereum-based auditing systems validated 8 active smart contracts in a fortnight, including detection of a vulnerability in Curve's 2023 code.
Staking and regulatory development advanced in parallel. Ethereum's staked balance reached 43.8M ETH—a new high—though annualized yield contracted from 2.81% to 2.63%. Deposits in lending vaults nearly tripled since early 2025, climbing from $4B to over $10B. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission closed comment periods on two regulatory pathways: a $5M venture track and a $75M capital-raising framework. In France, parliament voted 38 to 37 to impose taxes on crypto-to-stablecoin exchanges, though the measure has not yet become law.
Network vulnerabilities emerged alongside these gains. Qubic disclosed that a flawed random-number generator exposed 1,404 wallets to theft, resulting in $1.4M in losses. Lightning Network topology showed concentration risk: the loss of a single ACINQ node would degrade performance four times more severely than the removal of all 619 Core Lightning nodes. Stellar announced a forthcoming mainnet ballot on November 23 regarding a new "W" address format that could break compatibility with legacy wallets.