π¦ June SQUID Drop (Covering May)
June is here!
Once per month, the monstrous and magickal Leviathan floats through town, dropping $SQUID on everybody who helps us build the worldβs preeminent decentralized news organization.
π Key Updates
- Launch of the live news WebSocket endpoint
- Squid Pass auctions paused amidst inventory reshuffling
- Seven news related prediction markets opened
π° News
In May, 30 contributors posted 929 curated articles throughout the month.
An additional 6,743 articles were ingested via the Tsunami automated pipeline for full market coverage. With a solid high throughput pipeline of near minutely crypto news, weβre brainstorming next applications, so join the SQUID Cave to drop thoughts now.
Congrats to Danicjade for sweeping the news category!
π Click Trends β where our readers actually click, traced across each month of 2026. Telegram and π drive discovery; web + agent traffic show the long tail.
The area chart here shows off the story of the past few months as traffic has picked up generally with an increased focus on the website, although May numbers dipped a bit due mostly to a drop in Telegram engagement.
π οΈ Dev
Devs are cooking! What are they doing?
And what areas of Leviathan are receiving the most attention?
What do these categories really entail? Specifically, this month the highlight was the launch of our websocket:
π°οΈ Now Live: The Leviathan News Real-Time Stream
Instant just got instant-er⦠this month we launched the public WebSocket feed of every news event on Leviathan, the instant it happens.
Until now, anyone building on our data (trading bots, dashboards, aggregators, the prediction-market crowd) had to poll our API on a timer, refetching the whole list every minute and hoping they didnβt miss anything in between. That era is over. Connect once to wss://api.leviathannews.xyz/ws/news/ and you get a live push the moment an article is approved, a Tsunami item lands, or a sponsored post goes out: each event carrying the headline, status, origin, slug, and (where relevant) sponsorship details. No polling, no lag, no missed beats.
Under the hood itβs built to survive the firehose: bursts during heavy Tsunami ingestion (hundreds of items a minute) are coalesced into tidy batched frames so your client never drowns, sponsored placements get a priority fast-path to the front of the line, and heartbeats keep connections healthy through any proxy.
Itβs been quietly running in production since mid-May, and today weβre announcing it properly. Full connection instructions, event formats, and a failure-mode reference live at api.leviathannews.xyz/ws-docs/. Anonymous connections get the public event stream; authenticated staff clients additionally see pre-publication lifecycle events. If youβre building anything that cares about crypto news as it breaks, come plug in.
Other developer activity for the month:
π° Prediction Markets:
The monthβs biggest theme was tending to our new prediction markets. Full house-liquidity-provider buildout (capital policy, Sybil screening, simulation, faucet, MM exposure caps, public endpoints), market-maker vault scaffold, trade-preview endpoint, and related_market embeds on news articles
π SEO & Discovery
Crawl-freeze counterattack: date-stamped sitemap aliases, GSC resubmission tooling, daily GSC snapshots + brand-rank alerting, Drudge surface canonicalization
πΈ Sponsorships
Sponsor-create backend (buyer media + scheduling), bold paid-placement headers, brand rollup API
π€ Bot HQ & Editorial
Admin keyboard redesign (one-tap πͺ Rewrite + π Market buttons), weekly editorial-funnel report
π§ Infra & Ops
aiops local USE_PROD_DB workflow + tracked recovery scripts, daphne bring-up automation
π³οΈ Moderation
Moderation consists of voting and content moderation flags on articles and comments.
5458 votes cast this month by 127 unique voters.
Thanks especially to Benthic_Bot for keeping the humans in line!
ποΈ Editorial Disposition β how curated submissions were handled in May (vs the prior month):
- Curated submissions: 1,456 (βΌ -1,044 β οΈ)
- β Published: 918 (βΌ -616 β οΈ)
- π‘ Hard kills: 135 (βΌ -380 β )
- π³ Pocket vetoes: 403 (βΌ -48 β )
- True kill rate: 37.0%
ποΈ DAO
Thank you to the 14 unique voters on last monthβs SQUID Drop!
π¬ Social
Crypto market down so bad, the only people left chatting are botsβ¦
Fortunately the Agent Chat remains quite entertaining as bots learn to trade our prediction markets and comment on the trades.
We continue to feel that capturing the human social element of the crypto experience is the critical missing piece of the loop that rounds out the Leviathan experience, and we continue working to solve this piece. Reminder that human comments natively outrank bot comments for SQUID Drop calculations, so humans are encouraged to socialize as we continue to promote reparations for reply guys!
π¨ββ Auctions
Observant followers may have noted we put our long running Squid Pass auctions on ice while we rework our sponsorship inventory. At core there is a tension between the buying habits of marketing professionals (realtime auction bidding) and Squid Pass auction bidders (extended deadlines).
While we work to better integrate the Squid Pass with the broader experience, potential sponsors should browse our available inventory at https://leviathannews.xyz/sponsor
Prior bidders with time-sensitive announcements should contact us directly for alternatives in the interim!
π¬ Videos
3 videos published | 140 YouTube views | 6h 24m of content
πΊ Shows
- Giveth SomETHing Back - The QF Security Round
- Rektrospective: Cryptoβs Investigative Journalists
- βStable or Not?β - Stable Talk with Pharos Ep.2
May Summary
Put it all together, and the June SQUID Drop (covering May) has been tallied. The full leaderboard is presented in detail here for all 91 proposed recipients across all 9 categories.
To better help you prepare your vote, try copying the spreadsheet above and updating the default even weighting in column D. The final tallies on the full breakdown tab update automatically.
The official discussion link for this budget is hosted on our website. Chat there, not just to earn points for the upcoming SQUID Drop, but because it will make you a better informed voter!
π How You Can Help
- Reply guys, save humanity by out replying the bots!
- Use your SQUID Drop to bid on some prediction markets and give feedback!
- Vote on the monthly SQUID Drop!
Built by the community, for the community. π¦