The Protocol: AWS Outage Halts Some Crypto Apps

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Margaux Nijkerk, a reporter at CoinDesk.

In this issue:

• Crypto’s ‘Decentralized’ Illusion Shattered Again by Another AWS Meltdown
• Monad’s Fast EVM Chain Promises ‘Night and Day’ Performance Gains
• Quantum Computing Is ‘Biggest Risk to Bitcoin,’ Says Coin Metrics Co-Founder
• Securitize Unveils MCP Server to Power AI Access to Onchain Assets

Network News

AWS OUTAGE REACHES CRYPTO INDUSTRY: On the morning of Oct. 20, 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage that cascaded into widespread service disruptions across thousands of websites and applications. Several large exchanges and crypto-service providers rely heavily on cloud infrastructure like AWS to power their trading platforms, wallets, analytics tools and matching engines. The ripple effect hit the crypto world: Coinbase reported that its trading platform and its Base layer-2 network both went down. ConsenSys’ Infura and Robinhood similarly suffered during the outage. Almost immediately, the crypto community took to social media to sound the alarm that some of the industry’s most recognizable companies are too reliant on centralized infrastructure. This wasn’t the first time the cloud giant caused tremors across the crypto landscape. In April 2025, AWS suffered another widespread disruption that knocked several crypto exchanges and infrastructure providers offline. Meanwhile, infrastructure provider Infura, which offers backend JSON-RPC and WebSocket APIs that help wallets and apps connect to blockchains, shared on Monday that the outage disrupted multiple network endpoints. “Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Linea, Base and Scroll” were all affected due to a “reoccurring issue … related to an ongoing AWS outage.” With Infura’s support impaired, front-end access for many applications stalled. Even though the distributed consensus layers remained intact, the gateways through which most users interact with blockchains went offline, amplifying the disruption. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.

INSIDE MONAD’S BLOCKCHAIN ARCHITECTURE: Monad’s long-awaited airdrop has the crypto community buzzing, but beneath the hype lies an ambitious engineering effort for the blockchain. Ahead of the much anticipated token release and the mainnet launch, CoinDesk explored how the team’s reimagined virtual machine combined with its fast execution could set up Monad to compete with some of the fastest layer-1s. As it prepares to go head-to-head with competitors like Solana or Aptos in the race for speed and scalability, Monad is betting that its technical breakthroughs can bring in new applications and use cases for on-chain finance. — Margaux Nijkerk Read more.

CAN BITCOIN SURVIVE QUANTUM COMPUTING?: Nic Carter says quantum computing is the biggest long-term risk to bitcoin’s core cryptography and urges developers to treat it with urgency, not as science fiction. In an essay, the Coin Metrics cofounder explains in plain language how bitcoin’s keys work and why quantum matters. Carter writes that users start with a secret number (a private key) and derive a public key with elliptic-curve math on the secp256k1 curve, the basis for ECDSA and Schnorr signatures. He describes that transformation as deliberately one way: easy to compute forward, infeasible to reverse under classical assumptions. “Bitcoin’s entire cryptographic premise is ‘there exists a one-way function that’s easy to compute in one direction, and infeasible to invert,’” he writes. To build intuition, Carter likens the system to a giant number scrambler. Going from private to public is efficient for honest users, he says, because they can use a shortcut known as “double and add” to reach a result quickly. He adds there is no comparable shortcut in the opposite direction. For non-specialists, he offers a deck-shuffle analogy: you can repeat the same sequence of shuffles to reach an identical final order, but an observer cannot look at the shuffled deck and infer how many shuffles were used. Carter argues the concern is that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could erode that asymmetry by making progress on the discrete logarithm problem that underpins bitcoin’s signatures. In his telling, routine network behavior also raises exposure: when coins are spent, a public key is revealed on-chain. — Siamak Masnavi Read more.

SECURITIZE MCP SERVER: Securitize, a leading platform for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), has unveiled the Securitize MCP Server, a new integration layer designed to make its asset data easily accessible to both enterprise systems and artificial intelligence tools. The server is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — an emerging open standard that connects large language models like Claude or ChatGPT to external data sources and APIs. The new MCP Server acts as a secure gateway between Securitize’s RWA datasets and modern applications. Instead of developers manually integrating with raw blockchain endpoints or custom APIs, the MCP Server translates data requests into simple, standardized calls, the team shared. That means financial platforms, institutional investors, or even AI assistants can pull real-time information, such as asset supply, distribution and token metadata, with just a few function calls. For crypto investors, it means faster, easier access to reliable on-chain information, without needing to code or navigate complex blockchain explorers. The MCP Server allows users to instantly retrieve lists of tokenized assets, search for specific securities and access blockchain-level data in a structured format. For example, an AI agent could query details on BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, or ACRED, Apollo’s tokenized credit fund and feed those insights directly into portfolio analytics or compliance systems. – Margaux Nijkerk Read more.

In Other News

• Blockchain.com, a cryptocurrency exchange and wallet provider, has recently held talks about going public in the U.S. via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) listing, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The company appointed Cohen & Company Capital Markets to advise on a potential SPAC deal, one of the people said, who spoke on condition of anonymity as the matter is private. It’s unclear if any talks are ongoing at present. Blockchain.com declined to comment. Cohen & Company Capital Markets didn’t respond to a request for comment by publication time. While the valuation of a potential deal is unknown, throughout the years the firm has raised funds at different valuations due to market volatility. In March 2021, it raised $300 million at a post-money valuation of $5.2 billion. The following year, its valuation climbed to $14 billion after another funding round. However, by November 2023, a $110 million raise valued Blockchain.com at $7 billion, according to Bloomberg. — Will Canny Read more.
• Coinbase has acquired Echo, a startup focused on onchain capital formation, for approximately $375 million. Founded by a longtime crypto figure known by its Cobie pseudonym, Echo has helped projects raise over $200 million across roughly 300 deals since launch. ​​The platform allows startups to raise funds directly from their communities, either privately or through self-hosted public token sales using a product called Sonar. In a statement announcing the acquisition, Coinbase said the deal would help it build a “full-stack” solution for crypto fundraising. For startups, that means easier access to capital and tools that align fundraising with their user base. For investors, it opens the door to early-stage opportunities that were often gated behind private networks. — Francisco Rodrigues Read more.

Regulatory and Policy

• Though the U.S. government remains shut down, the Senate is a hive of crypto activity this week, with Republican lawmakers now matching a planned Democrat meeting with industry leaders set for today. After CEOs such as Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong and Chainlink’s Sergey Nazarov meet with as many as 10 Democratic senators, according to people familiar with the plans, they’ll jump to a similar meeting with those lawmakers’ Republican counterparts. The chief topic of conversation is the crypto industry’s top policy priority: the legislation that would establish U.S. regulation for the broader crypto sector.The bill — known in the already-approved House of Representatives version as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — had been advancing through the usual process in the Senate, where legislative efforts generally have to lean into bipartisanship to clear the 60-vote threshold. Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee produced a working draft, but Congress then got mired in a budget dispute that shut down the government. — Jesse Hamilton Read more.
• British Columbia said it plans to permanently ban new cryptocurrency mining operations connecting to its electricity grid, citing the need to protect power supplies for industries that drive jobs and public revenue. The move from the government of Canada’s third-most populous province is part of a broader legislative and regulatory overhaul unveiled that also places new limits on electricity use by data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) companies. The province said the restrictions will help prevent grid strain and ensure industrial development is powered by clean electricity. — Francisco Rodrigues Read more.

Calendar

• Nov. 17-22: Devconnect, Buenos Aires
• Dec. 11-13: Solana Breakpoint, Abu Dhabi
• Feb. 10-12, 2026: Consensus, Hong Kong
• Feb. 17-21, 2026: EthDenver, Denver
• Mar. 30-Apr. 2, 2026: EthCC, Cannes
• Apr.15-16, 2026: Paris Blockchain Week, Paris
• May 5-7, 2026: Consensus, Miami

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