voting

The 2026 U.S. midterm elections are being held today, with voters deciding the allocation of all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 seats in the Senate, which will shape the power dynamics of President Trump's remaining term.As of around 8 PM Eastern Time on November 3, early results have begun to emerge: approximately 10 Senate races have been called, with the Democrats holding 43 seats, the Republicans 32 seats, and the Democrats achieving a net gain of 1 seat; about 64 House races have been called, with the Democrats at 45 seats and the Republicans at 19 seats.Early voting and partial counts in Eastern states show strong Democratic performance, with the Democrats temporarily leading in some Republican-held seats in Ohio, South Carolina, and Texas, but polling places in the West are still open or counting, and results in many key swing states are not yet in, leaving overall control undetermined. The fierce election battle may take several days or even longer to reveal the final outcome.If the Republicans suffer losses in the 2026 midterm elections (especially if swept by the Democrats in both chambers), it would mean a significant limitation on Trump's legislative dominance for the remainder of his term, pushing him into a "lame duck" status sooner: the Democrats would gain committee investigative powers, initiating oversight and even impeachment attempts regarding the Iran conflict, government spending, and family business interests (including crypto-related projects), while a Senate flip would also hinder his personnel and judicial nominations.For the crypto market, this outcome is overall negative but not catastrophic. The Trump administration had previously pushed for frameworks like the GENIUS Act for stablecoins and appointed friendly regulators, but the key CLARITY Act (market structure bill) has failed in the Senate procedural vote. If the Democrats control Congress, it is likely that committees will be led by skeptical figures like Elizabeth Warren, leading to further delays or shelving of regulatory legislation, and increasing scrutiny of the industry and Trump-related crypto projects, which could exacerbate policy uncertainty and create price pressure in the short term.

The Bell upgrade of Stellar has been launched on the test network, and the mainnet voting will follow. This upgrade requires wallets and indexers to update their software to adapt to the network changes.The upgrade also introduces an optional post-quantum signature verification feature for smart contracts, which developers can enable as needed. The launch on the test network means that this upgrade has entered the verification phase before the mainnet voting.

As of 11 AM Eastern Time, all states in the U.S. have begun in-person voting except for Hawaii, which is expected to open polling stations in less than an hour. In New York's critical swing district, some voting machines in Westchester County have malfunctioned, while flooding in Florida has forced multiple polling locations to relocate temporarily.The Westchester County Board of Elections in New York stated that local voting machines are currently unable to read paper ballots, and voters can also choose to fill out ballots by hand. Republican Congressman Mike Lawler told CNN that he expects the related issues to be resolved soon. In Central Florida, 21 polling locations have been forced to relocate due to severe flooding, and the Secretary of State's office has confirmed this news.The U.S. Department of Justice has dispatched federal election monitors to several swing states and the largest cities and counties with higher Democratic support. Former President Obama released a new automated phone recording to campaign for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as part of the final phase of election support efforts.

The public chain NEAR Protocol stated on X that its decentralized on-chain governance body, House of Stake, has voted to approve a proposal to reduce the annual maximum issuance rate of NEAR from 2.5% to 1.6%, to be implemented in phases over 24 months. Token holders adjusted this core parameter through public voting, and the new rate will take effect gradually per epoch according to the announced schedule.The proposal, numbered HSP-029, was put forward by Sal Ternullo from SVRN, and its forum status is approved. The proposal retains the original allocation ratio, with 90% going to staking participants and 10% entering the treasury, only adjusting the issuance cap parameter. Officials stated that the long-term issuance will decrease, and the supply schedule is available for verification.The subsequent process is as follows: the House of Stake Security Committee reviews the voting results before approval; after approval, there will be a grace period of about 90 days; the changes will only become binding after validators adopt them through protocol upgrades. Thereafter, the issuance rate will be gradually reduced each epoch, reaching 1.6% in the 24th month, and quarterly reports will track the actual issuance against the schedule.

According to CoinDesk, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced a partnership with Wall Street financial services giant Broadridge Financial Solutions to provide on-chain governance and digital transfer agent services for its planned tokenized stock trading platform, covering functions such as shareholder record management, investor communication, and proxy voting.In the future, investors will be able to participate in shareholder voting through supported wallets, brokerage platforms, or Broadridge's existing ProxyVote service. Broadridge will help retain the shareholder rights of traditional markets while enabling tokenized stocks to trade on-chain. The company currently serves over 10,000 publicly traded companies worldwide and processes over $150 trillion in securities transaction settlements daily. Previously, Securitize and tZERO have also been included in the transfer agent service layout for the NYSE tokenized platform.

The TRON network super representatives (SR) initiated the voting for proposal number 108, which aims to enable the smart contract storage optimization feature introduced in GreatVoyage-v4.8.2.4 (Empedocles). If the proposal passes smoothly, it is expected to take effect on November 2, further enhancing the stability and reliability of contract storage operations and improving the network's performance in relevant execution scenarios.In case of abnormal node block synchronization, please first check whether the node has been upgraded to version v4.8.2.4 and complete the version update in a timely manner to ensure normal synchronization of the node. Community developers can refer to the proposal discussion page for specific technical details and continue to monitor the voting and official implementation progress.

According to Bloomberg, the prediction market platform Polymarket is investigating a series of timely and profitable trades that emerged during this week's Israeli elections. According to Bloomberg's analysis, shortly before the voting ended on Tuesday, hundreds of new accounts concentrated their predictions, believing that Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party would perform better than their competitors.After some exit polls indicated that Netanyahu's camp won more seats than earlier reports suggested, these trades quickly turned profitable, with some accounts cashing out over $100,000. This is the latest case in the prediction market that has raised concerns about insider trading, as Polymarket has previously faced extensive scrutiny from regulators and public opinion for its accurate predictions related to sports, the U.S. elections, and geopolitical events.

According to Bitcoin.com News, shareholders of the Bitcoin holding company Strategy will vote on October 28 to decide whether to adjust the terms of STRC, STRF, STRK, and STRD, allowing for the daily setting of dividend record dates. The proposal requires majority support from all issued common stock voting rights, with abstentions and broker non-votes counted as opposition; preferred shareholders do not have voting rights.Michael Saylor currently holds 32.9% of the total voting rights, and the proposal needs approximately 17 percentage points of support from other shareholders. If approved, STRC holders can receive daily dividends from November 1 to 30, totaling $1 per share, with an annualized rate of 12%; if not approved, daily dividends will not be implemented.Strategy will announce its third-quarter performance on October 29. As of October 25, the company holds 848,517 bitcoins and $5.1 billion in assets.

According to Slow Fog monitoring, Yapeswap suffered an attack, resulting in a loss of approximately $21,900. The root of the incident lies in the WorkersUnion governance mechanism, where the quorum requirement is zero, allowing a proposal that received only about 0.000055% voting support to transfer the feeToSetter authority of YapeFactory to the attacker.The attacker subsequently deployed a malicious Registry contract, causing latestVault() to return a forged vault address, while vaults() still listed the real vault. YapePair accounted for the deposits to be transferred as farm assets, but did not receive redeemable shares, ultimately leading to a loss of funds. This incident involves contracts such as YapeFactory, YapePair, and YapeWrapper.

Stellar updates the Bell upgrade guide in preparation for Protocol 30. Wallets, exchanges, and infrastructure operators need to upgrade their software before the network vote in November to support new contract addresses starting with W; JavaScript SDK v17.3.0 has been released, providing encoding, decoding, and verification tools.Bell supports contract addresses carrying customer identifiers, and indexers and browsers also need to adapt to the changes in ledger header format; this upgrade also adds ML-DSA post-quantum signature verification and millisecond-level ledger timestamps, while regular transactions still use Ed25519, and the current block interval remains unchanged. The testnet validator vote is scheduled for November 3 at 17:00 UTC, and the mainnet vote is scheduled for November 23 at 17:00 UTC, effective upon approval, with dates subject to change.

The privacy Layer 2 network Aztec, based on zero-knowledge proofs, announced that its V6 upgrade proposal has been approved, but the governance panel currently still shows that voting is open, with the execution date listed on the panel as October 26.According to disclosures, the upgrade will enhance the messaging speed between Ethereum and Aztec, and will provide 30 days of operational funding for the V5 version during the migration period.

According to The Block, holders of Starknet (STRK) supported a research proposal with over 93.5% of the voting power, which aims to explore the transformation of Starknet from an Ethereum Layer 2 network to an independent Layer 1 network with quantum resistance.StarkWare plans to release a draft white paper in November to further investigate the relevant technological pathways. It is important to note that this vote only supports the initiation of transformation research and does not mean that the transformation plan has been officially approved. Further governance approval will still be required to advance the related transformation.

According to the American financial media Semafor, Meta Platforms may officially announce a non-voting stock plan as early as Wednesday during the release of its quarterly financial report, aimed at financing investments in AI, a move that does not dilute Zuckerberg's control.

The NEAR ecosystem governance proposal HSP-029 has entered the voting stage, proposing to gradually reduce the maximum annual issuance rate of NEAR tokens from 2.5% to 1.6%. This proposal was put forward by SVRN CEO Sal Ternullo, planning to linearly decrease by approximately 3.75 basis points per epoch over 24 months, while maintaining a 90/10 allocation ratio between stakers and the treasury. After the vote passes, there will be a 90-day grace period before the reduction officially begins.The proposal's calculations indicate that this plan is expected to reduce the issuance of approximately 11.8 million NEAR tokens over two years, with a cumulative reduction of about 66.1 million tokens over six years, equivalent to a 4.36% decrease in supply compared to the current situation. The annualized staking yield will gradually decrease from the current 5.268% to 3.372%. The author points out that this move aims to reduce the degree of dilution for non-staking holders and responds to discussions regarding the protocol's discretion risk following the withdrawal of the previous Sovereign Fund proposal.This proposal must go through a dual process to take effect: after passing the House of Stake vote, validators must also independently adopt it through the standard protocol upgrade process. The proposal cites Solana's SGP-0002, which was passed in August 2026 with a staking weight approval of 67.001% for a similar issuance reduction, as a precedent. Currently, the NEAR network has a total of 406 active validators, with a staking rate of 42.71%.

Solana's official announcement states that in Q3 2026, the number of non-voting transactions on the Solana chain reached 8.92 billion, an increase of 104% compared to Q4 2025.

The ENS official announcement states that the ENSv2 Ethereum mainnet activation proposal has opened for DAO voting, which is scheduled to close on October 25. If the proposal is approved and executed, new domain registrations for ENSv1 will stop, but existing domains can still be renewed.ENS Labs will open ENSv2 registration and existing domain upgrades after completing the final synchronization and will transfer the remaining management rights to the DAO. ENS indicates that existing .eth domains can continue to be used, and there is no deadline for upgrades. ENSv2 will enhance the management of domains and subdomains through a layered registry and flexible permission settings.

According to the summary from the Arbitrum Foundation governance forum, the Arbitrum DAO currently has 4 temperature check votes ending on October 22, involving the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade adaptation, L1 governance recovery mechanism, treasury ETH transfer, and USDG strategic plan.Among them, the Entropy proposal suggests setting USDG as one of the core strategic plans of the Arbitrum DAO and additionally allocating 100 million ARB from the DAO treasury to the DRIP budget, while adjusting the project cycle and allowed uses. Furthermore, it is proposed to direct the net fees from AEP into ATMC and convert them into USDG to support the growth of USDG on Arbitrum.

Snapshot posted on platform X, stating that ENS is voting to activate ENSv2 on the Ethereum mainnet through an on-chain proposal that includes 15 calls. This proposal is executed in one go by the execution contract controlled by the ENS DAO, which, if passed, will freeze new registrations of version 1 while allowing un-migrated domain names to continue renewing.After the upgrade, ENSv2 will allow owners to customize the subdomain registry and grant resolution rights individually without transferring domain ownership. In addition, ENS Labs will synchronize eligible domain names, open v2 registrations and migrations, and transfer the remaining management rights to the ENS DAO.