Scouting April: Five Stories from the Chain
April's crypto news in one pass — restaking audits, an M&A deal, two mainnet launches, a hack aftermath, and what shipped on Blockscout.
TL;DR. As a block explorer, we explore all facets of the blockchain universe. Here are five stories that shaped April: a restaking L1 finally cleared its audit, two analytics players merged, Monad and Fluent went to mainnet, a DEX on zkSync got drained for an eight-figure sum, and Blockscout shipped MCP support for three more chains.
What moved the market
The restaking sector pulled out of its spring slump. After six weeks of flat TVL, the re-staked-ETH curve bent up again on the back of two catalysts: Symbiotic hit $4.2B in deposits, and EigenLayer shipped the slashing upgrade its operators had been asking for since January. If you're watching the category, the interesting number to track is not TVL but active validator set overlap — it tells you which restaking protocols are actually competing for the same security budget and which have carved out distinct territory.
Stablecoin supply kept climbing quietly. USDC crossed the $70B mark mid-month, and the ratio of on-chain circulating supply to centralized reserves stayed inside its healthy band. The story nobody talked about: PYUSD finally showed up outside the US-only corridor, with Solana volumes overtaking Ethereum for the first time.
The M&A moment
Dune acquired Spice in an all-stock deal that puts multichain analytics under one roof. Spice's dashboards had carved out a spot in the chain-team workflow — the kind that Dune's query engine never quite reached — and the combined product now covers the full span from raw indexing to dashboard publishing. Terms weren't disclosed; the press release used the word "aligned" three times in two paragraphs.
It's the second analytics consolidation of the quarter, after Nansen picked up the remains of Token Terminal's enterprise arm in February. The pattern: the survivors aren't the ones with the prettiest UI — they're the ones with the query infrastructure that chain teams can embed.
Launches — products, mainnets, upgrades
Monad mainnet went live on April 11. The 10k-TPS parallel-EVM pitch finally hit production, and block times settled at 400ms after the first forty-eight hours. Block explorer coverage was live from block zero — you can read more about the Monad launch in our ecosystem spotlight.
Fluent followed on April 18 with its first public mainnet of the blended-execution runtime (EVM + SVM + Wasm in one VM). It's early — the initial app set is small — but the pitch that you no longer need to pick a VM when you start building is finally something you can compile.
Base shipped sub-cent fees after a weeks-long rollout of blob-level optimizations. Median transaction cost on Base is now under $0.001 on quiet blocks, which puts it in the competitive range for chain-native consumer apps.
Security
A DEX on zkSync Era — we're not naming it until post-mortems settle — was drained for roughly $18M on April 19. The attack vector was a badly-bounded loop in a routing contract that a fork of another DEX had inherited and never re-audited. The protocol's token is down 70%; the team has announced a 90-day treasury-backed recovery plan.
Operational note for fork maintainers The verification of a base contract does not transfer to a fork unless the fork is re-verified byte-for-byte. If you maintain a fork, re-run the verification pass on every deployment.
What shipped on Blockscout
Three things this month worth your time:
- MCP Server now covers Monad, Fluent, and Base Sepolia. The same tool calls work across chains — no chain-specific plumbing. Read the docs.
- Pro API added a batch endpoint for token transfers — one request, up to 1,000 addresses. If you're building a portfolio dashboard or an on-chain CRM, this cuts your rate-limit bill meaningfully.
- Autoscout hit 100 deployed explorers mid-month. Small chains are onboarding faster than we can ship new features for them — which is the good kind of problem.
One deep read
If you read one thing from us this month, make it Who is Blockscout Pro API for? — the short version is: chain teams, analytics platforms, and any builder who got tired of paying for rate limits twice.
Build on 3,000+ chains with one API
Blockscout Pro API gives you multichain indexing, token metadata, and contract reads behind a single key. Free tier, no card.