November 2025 Tech Recap: From Aztec To Monad, The Builders Took Back The Spotlight

In Brief

Despite a quiet market in November 2025, blockchain and Web3 projects delivered infrastructure and ecosystem advancements that quietly shaped the future of the industry.

November 2025 had the energy of a waiting room. Bitcoin drifted, ETH hovered, and most altcoins looked like someone had unplugged their spark. But while the trading screens felt embalmed, the actual ecosystem kept grinding in that quiet, unglamorous way that usually ends up mattering more than any green candle.

So, let’s walk through the stuff that actually moved the needle.

Aztec — Privacy stepping out of the shadows

Aztec finally pushed Ignition to mainnet, and the rollout felt different from the usual “privacy tool for people who understand command line.” They made decentralized sequencing a day-one feature — not a promise for later — which gives the whole project a seriousness most privacy experiments never managed

And with Noir, devs suddenly have a way to build private apps that sit comfortably inside the Ethereum ecosystem rather than orbiting it. It’s the first time in a while that privacy on Ethereum doesn’t feel like a guilty detour but something that might become part of how the network actually works.

Monad — A new L1 that arrived like it meant it

Monad showed up in the notoriously overstuffed L1 arena but did something rare: it launched with receipts. Not the usual “trust us, benchmarks are coming,” but real numbers — 10,000 TPS, sub-second finality — and a lineup of heavyweight dApps waiting at the door

Even its token sale, which pulled in $269M, carried that sense of early-infrastructure momentum we haven’t seen since the 2021 era chains. Suddenly the question isn’t “do we need another L1?” but “how much of Ethereum’s execution model is historical baggage?” Monad didn’t solve that debate, but it certainly reopened it.

Lighter — The DEX that behaves suspiciously like a CEX

Lighter kept surfacing all November with stats that made people stop mid-scroll. Millisecond-level execution, negligible fees, and weekly volume brushing past the $700B mark — numbers you’d normally associate with centralized engines, not an on-chain protocol

The $68M round it closed didn’t feel like hype chasing so much as investors acknowledging that someone may finally have cracked the “CEX performance, DEX guarantees” dilemma. If even half of this performance holds steady under stress, the expectations around on-chain trading shift dramatically.

EtherFi — A protocol handling its business like an adult

EtherFi had a rough month price-wise, but the team’s response made the whole situation look oddly composed. Instead of filing the usual vaguely motivational DAO posts, they approved a $50M buyback — something only a protocol with real, recurring revenue can pull off

And they do have it: roughly $70M a year from staking, plus integrations with Visa and FalconX that make it clear institutions aren’t treating this as a niche LSD sideline. EtherFi behaved less like a project in damage-control mode and more like a company with an actual plan to be around in a decade.

Aero — A DeFi merger that feels strangely logical

Velodrome and Aerodrome deciding to merge into Aero was one of those stories that made people double-take — not because it was shocking, but because it was… sensible. DeFi usually moves in the other direction: forking, fracturing, multiplying. Aero flips that by trying to stitch liquidity across chains instead of letting it splinter apart

Their choice to funnel MEV revenue back to users hints at a future where liquidity providers actually feel less punished for participating. With Base gaining traction and further expansion in play, the whole thing feels like the early outline of a network rather than a chain-specific DEX.

Folks Finance — Cross-chain lending that doesn’t fry your brain

Folks Finance has been nibbling at the cross-chain UX problem for a while, but November was the first time it felt like the pieces clicked. Borrowing across chains starts looking like something you can do without hovering over tutorial tabs

Their token launch drew quick attention by doubling out of the gate, but the more surprising twist was the regulated mobile app — a DeFi protocol willingly building a compliant, consumer-grade product with KYC and everything. Not exactly the cypherpunk dream, sure, but it’s an interesting attempt at making multi-chain lending feel civilized instead of chaotic.

MapleStory N — A Web3 game that doesn’t collapse under its own tokenomics

MapleStory N entered the scene with more side-eye than applause, mainly because we’ve been burned by “this game will bring Web3 to the masses” promises before. Yet, somehow, it started accumulating players — actual players, not just wallets waiting for an airdrop

Nexon leaned into its traditional strengths: anti-bot systems, economy tuning, real content cadence. And the $50M ecosystem fund is being used like a studio investment pool rather than a bag-inflation mechanism. For once, the game seems to exist first and the on-chain layer second, which is a refreshing reversal.

BlockDAG — The presale that refuses to behave like a footnote

BlockDAG is the outlier of the month — the project you hear about whether you want to or not. With $435M raised across 32 presale phases and hardly a testnet in sight, it sits in that surreal zone where the money arrives long before the product

The pitch is a hybrid PoW/DAG architecture with compliance built in, which could either rewrite some assumptions or collapse into the archives of “ambitious L1s that never materialized.” But ignoring it would be dishonest: the scale of interest alone says something about what the market thinks it wants next cycle, even if it’s wrong.

Final Thought

The charts hid the story this month. Underneath the sleepy candles and half-hearted volatility, these eight projects were busy sketching out parts of the future — privacy that feels native, L1 performance without bravado, DEXs that stop making traders choose between speed and decentralization, and games that don’t exist solely to farm tokens. November wasn’t loud, but it was productive, and those months tend to matter more than we admit.