Aptos Network, a Layer-1 blockchain, experienced a five-hour outage that halted on-chain transactions on its Move language-based blockchain. The outage occurred on Oct. 18 at block 104621314 and was confirmed by Aptos with a post on X. Crypto exchanges Upbit and OKX suspended APT deposits and withdrawals during the outage. Other blockchain networks, such as Theta Network and Coinbase's Base, have also experienced recent outages.

Aptos officials stated that currently the transactions on the network are affected, and the team is working hard to solve the issue. Users will be notified promptly after the problem is resolved.

According to Spot On Chain monitoring, whales 0x6f9 and 0x09d (possibly the same person) bought a total of 8.514 million RLB (approximately $1.27 million) and 818.9 ETH at an average price of $0.15 eight hours ago, causing a 9% price increase. It is worth noting that the whales previously earned $163,000 (+15.1%) by trading 11.856 million RLB. Current holdings: 8.514 million RLB ($1.36 million).

October 19th, DeFi protocol Ether.Fi plans to launch its mainnet on November 6th. Users can register to join the whitelist in advance, and early eETH stakers will receive loyalty points. Once the re-staking service is launched, they can receive higher staking rewards. In addition, the official stated that they plan to focus on integrating with other DeFi protocols.

The distributed stablecoin project Hope.money announced that the HopeLend protocol was hacked yesterday, but the hacker did not profit from this attack.

October 19th, Astria, a modular blockchain, launched a shared sequencer called Astria Dusknet, which allows users to deploy Rollups to a remote shared sequencer network without permission. Developers only need to run their Rollup nodes and configure them to use the remote shared sequencer network.

According to a 2023 Ethereum user trend report released by Nansen, the fastest-growing areas since the beginning of the year (YTD) are Layer2, bridging, and infrastructure, with a daily user activity growth of 149.28%. The DeFi field comes in second with a growth of 52%, indicating that users prefer scalability and DeFi solutions. The report shows that although most sectors have seen overall growth, the NFT and gaming sectors have seen a significant decline of 61.4% since the beginning of 2023. DeFi trading pairs make up the majority of new users' first actions on the chain, accounting for an average of 63% of first actions compared to Scaling and NFT entities, indicating that DeFi is still the primary entry point for new users in the ecosystem.

Origin Protocol, a DeFi project, announced that the community has passed a snapshot proposal to use 50% of OETH fees to buy back OGV on the open market. The proposal suggests that the remaining protocol fees will continue to be used to accumulate flywheel tokens held by the DAO, such as CVX.

According to DefiLlama data, MakerDAO's lending protocol Spark Protocol TVL has surpassed $500 million, reaching $504 million.

On October 18th, according to on-chain data, Uniswap activated the switch for collecting frontend trading fees about 10 hours ago. The total fees collected so far are approximately $11,511.44. Yearn core developer banteg reported that Uniswap will exchange all tokens extracted every 10 minutes for UDSC and store them at address 0x6460D14DbAeb27AEfec8eBeF85dB35DefA31c3b9.