Today’s crypto headlines mixed technical upgrades, institutional testing and portfolio shifts: Solana activated a major performance change on mainnet, the New York Stock Exchange continues year‑long tests of the Avalanche blockchain for tokenisation, Grayscale unveiled a new advisor-focused portfolio with a significant XRP allocation, and Bitcoin Core moved closer to a scheduled release.
Solana activates Transaction v1 and shortens slot time
Solana pushed two protocol-level changes live on mainnet. Transaction v1 increased the maximum transaction size for complex operations, such as zero-knowledge proof interactions, from 1,232 bytes to 4,096 bytes while keeping full compatibility with older transaction formats. Separately, the network reduced its slot time from 300 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds, a 17% speed increase. This change is the third staged improvement under proposal SIMD-0525, which started with 400 ms slots at network genesis and aims toward a 200 ms target that has not yet been activated. The slot reduction does not raise peak transaction throughput per slot but shortens Solana’s epoch length from 36 hours to roughly 30 hours.
NYSE evaluating Avalanche for securitisation plans
Ava Labs president Charley Cooper revealed that the New York Stock Exchange has been testing the Avalanche blockchain for about a year as part of plans to tokenise securities, though the exchange has not formally selected any technology. Michael Blaugrund of ICE, the NYSE’s parent company, said ICE remains “very engaged” with the Avalanche team and that Avalanche meets many of the exchange’s criteria. The NYSE announced in January that it intended to build an on‑chain settlement platform for tokenised shares and ETFs and has previously worked with tZERO on infrastructure; the latest comments indicate continued evaluation rather than a final decision.
Grayscale’s Next Gen portfolio assigns 26% to XRP
Grayscale launched four model portfolios aimed at investment advisers. The ‘Next Gen’ strategy excludes Bitcoin and allocates 42.34% to Ethereum, 26.11% to XRP, and 21.09% to Solana. According to Grayscale, the Next Gen portfolio recorded a net gain of 30.69% since July 27. Grayscale said it does not charge fees beyond the average 0.23% expense ratio of the underlying ETFs. Laurie Katz, Grayscale’s distribution executive, said advisers are seeking ways to incorporate digital assets without constructing single-asset allocations for each exposure.
Bitcoin Core 32.0 enters final testing stage
Bitcoin Core version 32.0 moved into its final testing phase ahead of a targeted October 10 release. The update introduces faster block validation by enabling parallel reads of the chainstate database and a new fee estimation approach that accounts for pending transactions. The release makes the newer PSBT v2 format the default for four wallet RPC commands while preserving existing consensus rules. Developers also fixed an issue that allowed command execution from wallets and patched an excessive memory use bug in the new HTTP server, the latter reported with assistance from an AI model called Kimi K3.
What this cluster of stories indicates
Together these items illustrate parallel trends: software-level performance improvements across layer‑1 networks, institutional experimentation with permissioned or enterprise-grade blockchains for tokenising traditional assets, and shifting institutional allocation frameworks that include non‑Bitcoin tokens. Meanwhile, continued maintenance and hardening of core infrastructure like Bitcoin Core remains part of the sector’s maturation.