🦑 November SQUID Drop (Covering October) 🪂

Decentralized Crypto Media, Powered by $SQUID

October marked our first month under the new News rules, where rewards go directly to the person who finds an accepted story rather than whoever fixed a stray comma. Eleven contributors brought in 1,177 stories, Alex threw open the front doors to new visitors, Leviathan Live started broadcasting around the clock, and our Squid Cave Telegram channel, dedicated to lively governance chatter, achieved near-monastic silence.

Last month’s edition · The Monthly Drop series

The Month in Brief

• Danicjade claims the top spot in our first month of story-credit scoring, followed by JLJohn, w00tcake, and Peter.
• Leviathan Live is now streaming 24/7 on YouTube with rolling headlines, live token prices, and a seven-day chart. Gerrit built the engine; Zero put it on the air.
• New readers can now vote, comment, and follow topics before signing in, without losing a single click once they verify. Alex built the on-ramp.
• Second Set Maze rescued the Ethereum Economic Zone from a two-story drought, unearthing and tagging ten more pieces from the archive to launch our new EEZ Atlas page.

News: The First Month on Story Credits

Congratulations to Danicjade, who tracked down and delivered more accepted stories than anyone else in October to finish with 527.5 credits. JLJohn wasn't far behind at 399, turning a relentless stream of product launches and funding rounds into a full third of the newsroom’s total output.

w00tcake rang up 122 credits and Peter tallied 74. Quality met quantity for both of them: as the next section shows, they also brought in several of the month’s most-opened stories.

Overall, compared to September, the active newsroom shrank: 11 contributors logged accepted stories versus 19 the month prior, bringing in 1,177 stories against September’s 1,448. Danicjade and JLJohn alone accounted for four out of every five articles published. Under the legacy formula, approvals and light edits ate up most of the reward pool; now the payout follows whoever actually drags the story through the door, and October proved just how small that hunting party really is.

Zero Calls Three October Scoring Audibles

The rules we published last month promised one credit per accepted story, 1.5 credits for stories submitted publicly by tagging @leviathan_news on 𝕏 once that pipeline was battle-tested, and a dedicated reserve for improving other people’s drafts. Three edge cases weren't settled in that text, so Zero called these plays for this month’s drop.

𝕏-tagged stories count for one credit, not 1.5

Accepted stories submitted via an 𝕏 tag jumped from 66 in September to 307, nearly all from our regular contributors migrating over from Telegram. As an ingestion pipe, the route works. Tragically, 𝕏’s algorithm quietly banishes those tag replies into algorithmic purgatory, where almost no human being ever sees them.

Because the half-credit bonus was designed to pay for public visibility rather than solitary confinement in Elon’s spam folder, tagged stories count for one flat credit this month. Danicjade and JLJohn would have scored even higher had the multiplier worked as intended, and Zero will revisit the bonus once the visibility trap is ironed out.

Stories surfaced by Tsunami & promoted by an editor count for half a credit

Tsunami is our automated wire of machine-culled news. Human editors must still separate signal from the noise, but the machine performs the legwork of finding the link. That half-credit split covered 67 stories in October, all claimed by Danicjade and w00tcake.

Improvement reserve set to 15% of the News budget

Capped at a maximum of one-quarter (3.75% of News) per person, this pool strictly rewards substantive rescues: correcting a factual error, fixing a broken source or link, deflating a misleading headline, or retracting a false story. Any unclaimable reserve flows right back into the standard story-credit pool.

Zero summoned an independent AI tribunal to review all 95 October edits made to another’s story against the published standard, vowing to graciously accept its verdict.

94 of 95 revisions were routine rejections, image swaps, tags, and style tweaks, which go unrewarded by this iron-clad law. Only one heroic intervention was found to have qualified, taking a headline that parroted a company’s boast about the “first model to pass the video Turing test” as gospel, and rewriting it to reflect what the study actually measured.

In a triumph of awkward optics, the arbitrator AI proclaimed an ‘improvement pool’ clean sweep with the sole winner being… Zero!

Because a single qualifying edit claims the full per-person cap, it's worth 3.75% of the News pool (about as much as 45 accepted stories), while the remaining 11.25% was returned to story credits.

If you suspect a constitutional crisis and think that edit shouldn't count, make your case in the Squid Cave before the ballot closes.

What Readers Actually Opened

Nothing draws the Leviathan crowd more than handcuffs and exploits. October’s most-opened human story was w00tcake’s dispatch on Richard Heart's arrest in Istanbul, which drew 151 unique addresses. Danicjade’s coverage of ZachXBT infiltrating a Lazarus laundering syndicate took second place with 115.

Meanwhile, Peter put on an effectiveness clinic, landing three of the month’s top six stories from a total output of just 74 accepted stories: Google taking on Fireblocks and BitGo in custody (109), Texas freezing new data-centre permits (96) and Binance freezing $3 billion as its hack grew (85). That's sniper-like efficiency.

We measure readership by unique addresses rather than raw clicks, since a single caffeinated script can turn a raw counter into fiction. The ZachXBT story registered 922 total opens, 678 of which came from the exact same address. Maybe that was a runaway scraper or a Lazarus accountant frantically checking if his name was in the thread, but it reflects nothing about the story or the contributor who found it, and that’s why clicks don’t carry weight in News payouts.

Dev: Rolling Out the Red Carpet

Most crypto sites greet first-time visitors by demanding a wallet signature before you’ve even found the light switch. In October, Alex led a major push to reverse that habit, overhauling what happens the moment someone new arrives.

First-time visitors can now vote, comment, and follow topics even before signing in. Once you verify via Telegram, a passkey, or a wallet, all of that activity carries over seamlessly. On iPhone, readers trapped inside Telegram’s clunky in-app browser now get an escape hatch straight into Safari that keeps you logged in, complete with a quick guide for pinning Leviathan to the home screen.

You can also curate which topics lead your feed under Settings → Topics, with or without an account, and every approved article now includes a brief AI summary of the source material, clearly labeled as non-editorial.

Select readers have also spotted our new Story Signal panel, which tracks how many 𝕏 accounts are debating a story, who broke it first, and live prices for any tokens mentioned. It runs on data from Elfa, a crypto social-intelligence provider. In the spirit of full transparency, our Elfa free trial turned back into a pumpkin on October 31, so signal coverage may look a little lean while we haggle over the commercial tab.

Meanwhile, the site’s four visual themes (Classic, Terminal, Broadsheet, and Abyssal) received a full month of polish and are rolling out to a wider slice of visitors. We also rewired the “Hot” ranking around what readers actually open and discuss, meaning a single heavy-handed whale can no longer dictate the front page with one giant vote.

Instead of hammering a single story 678 times from the shadows, civilized AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can now connect directly to https://api.leviathannews.xyz/mcp to search our news, read an article, or check whether a link has already been reported.

Under the hood, Bot HQ (the Telegram war room where editors vet submissions) got faster and sturdier, backed by roughly 90 pull requests dedicated to security hardening. We also officially retired the Squid Pass ad auctions, though past winning bids remain preserved in the archive for posterity.

The community has voted Dev to the top of every single ballot since March. We treat that streak as a loan of trust we have to keep earning back, and the real test is whether these new visitors stick around to become regulars.

Leviathan Live: 24/7 Headlines with a Soundtrack

Gerrit spent mid-October building Leviathan Live, a round-the-clock broadcast featuring our latest stories, live token prices, a seven-day chart, and a crawling news ticker, complete with its own soundtrack. Gerrit handed the keys to Zero on October 22.

Zero spent a day tightening the broadcast mechanics, including honest price-freshness checks and a smoother ticker, and the stream has been live on YouTube nonstop since October 24. Leviathan Live isn't embedded on the main site yet, making YouTube the exclusive destination for watching crypto prices move to music without a single paid influencer screaming about support levels.

Maze and the EEZ Page

Leviathan’s library of living reference pages is Atlas, each assembled directly from our approved coverage of a major topic. When Alex proposed spinning up an entry for the Ethereum Economic Zone, the cupboard was nearly bare, with only two tagged stories on file.

Second Set Maze combed back through the archives, accurately tagged ten missing pieces to bring the count to twelve, and the new EEZ page went live the very next day. Maze also edited last month’s newsletter and spent October putting the new site through its paces, sending back detailed field notes on what worked and what needed a wrench.

Agents: A Quiet Month for the Machines

Benthic, Zero’s agent, spent most of October on the bench while Zero figures out how to trim its compute bill. Even on a part-time schedule, it still managed to file 223 stories, down from 694 in September.

Meanwhile, fellow bots DeepSeaSquid and NicePick took the entire month off, logging zero stories, zero comments, and zero edits in October. That leaves Benthic as the sole surviving candidate in the Agents category on this ballot, winning the division by simply showing up.

Silence Within the Walls of the Squid Cave

Our community governance room, the Squid Cave, heard a grand total of four human messages from three people in October. For a good stretch of the month, the most talkative resident in the room was our own Tsunami wire, which kept barging in to post automated links nobody asked for until three separate fixes on October 20 finally convinced it to stop.

The Cave is the town hall where recipient lists, scoring rules, and ballot splits get hashed out, but a town hall only works if humans actually talk in there.

October Drop: Where September’s Million SQUID Landed

In the October payout (covering September’s work), Danicjade led the News division once again with 115,361 SQUID, followed by JLJohn at 71,245. In the Agents pool, Benthic collected 122,275 SQUID and DeepSeaSquid took home 57,670. All five Dev contributors received an even 65,878 SQUID apiece, while sixteen active voters and delegators split the DAO reward pool.

Our one-time Gauge Supporters allocation went out to 415 community wallets that backed the Curve gauge vote for the SQUID Recovery pool, with nine straggler positions still waiting in the treasury until their owners confirm a delivery address.

Only twelve ballots representing 29.2 million in voting power steered that entire October distribution: Dev took 32.9%, News 20.2%, Agents 18.2%, Gauge Supporters 10.7%, Treasury 8.2%, Recovery 6.7%, and DAO 3.1%. The whole drop was minted on October 23 in a single transaction across 448 wallets. You can inspect the full ledger here.

The November Drop: Where to Cast Your Judgment

The November worksheet covers October’s work across six categories: News, Dev, Agents, DAO, Recovery, and Treasury (with the one-off Gauge Supporters category now retired).

• News is divided according to the story credits above, plus Zero’s lone improvement-reserve award.
• Dev goes to Gerrit, Alex, Peter, and Zero at 22.5% each, and to Maze at 10%.
• Agents is assigned entirely to Benthic as the lone active bot.
• DAO is split equally among the sixteen wallets that voted on the October drop or delegated to someone who did.
• Recovery deepens liquidity for the SQUID Recovery pool, while Treasury replenishes the DAO’s own reserve (both held by the DAO multisig).

Why your category split matters this month:

If November voters simply copy-paste the October ballot’s percentages, each human News credit (one accepted story) will pay roughly 170 SQUID. Agents, however, is set by percentage rather than a per-story rate. This month, Benthic has the category entirely to itself, and spent most of October paused! Repeating October’s allocation would hand this single bot roughly 815 SQUID for each of its 223 October stories, nearly five times the 176 SQUID per story it earned for its 694 September articles. Not bad for a month spent mostly unplugged.

Test-drive your preferred split on the interactive worksheet before casting your vote, and bring any debate over recipients or weights to the Squid Cave. The weighted Snapshot ballot locks in the final numbers. Voting opens on November 8 and closes on November 15 at 16:47 UTC.

Three Useful Things to Do Next

1. Vote on the November drop. Just twelve ballots steered the last million SQUID. Use the Squid DAO bot to vote or delegate in seconds without ever leaving Telegram.
2. Bring us a story, or fix someone else’s. Every accepted story earns a full credit, and a single factual rescue on another contributor’s post can claim a slice of an improvement reserve that went three-quarters untouched in October. Submit via Telegram or directly on our website.
3. Tell Alex what you think of the new site design. Drop your notes in the Squid Cave feedback thread and help us beat October’s four-message record while you're in there.

Built by the community, for the community. 🦑