December SQUID Drop
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🦑 December is here! 🪂
Once per month, the monstrous and magickal Leviathan floats through town, dropping $SQUID on everybody who helps us build the world's preeminent decentralized news organization.
Key Updates
The launch of our daily SQUID Digest
We launched our first auction on mainnet
An update on our ongoing tagging project below
This newsletter provides a full update on Leviathan’s monthly accomplishments broken down into the following categories being submitted for a monthly DAO vote:
News: Posting, editing and approving headlines via Telegram or web
Dev: Any development relating to our Telegram bots or the website
Moderation: Moderating, upvoting, and/or flagging website comments, responses, discussions
Auction: Participating in an auction.
DAO: Voting on Snapshot.
Social: News comments and responses
Liquidity: Bootstrap liquidity on mainnet
Plus livestreams!Vibe Building with johnnyonline: We build a fixed-rate lending market (Flex) live in the open.
Llama Party: A Friday morning open invite livestream focused on Curve and the broader DeFi ecosystem
This newsletter provides an update on each category, so you may cast a fully informed vote. We are hosting a public discussion on the website before the vote opens, so you may ask questions.
1. News
In October, 32 contributors posted 489 approved articles throughout the month. The top ten stories are as follows:
At the top of the news funnel, congrats to DanicJade who took the top of the leaderboard for posting great news.
Meanwhile, the stalwart 0xpmm.eth easily earned top spot as the most active editor
2. Dev
Have you subscribed to SQUID Digest?
Getting this newsletter to post to Substack may prove challenging, but in the meantime you can enjoy our daily recap and trading signals in many places:
Read directly on https://digest.leviathannews.xyz/ or subscribe to receive in your inbox
Directly in your terminal… our repo updates daily with the top headlines: https://github.com/leviathan-news/squid-digest
Published to our Digest Telegram group
RSS feed now available to read in your favorite reader!
The other notable public-facing initiative was the launch of auctions on mainnet (covered in the Auctions section), as well as the Llama Party livestream that featured a live deployment of the contracts.
If you want a peek into some of the other behind the scenes development work, check out the (partial) release of our API documentation. We’re slow-walking the release of some of the more sensitive features while we get some security features in place, but if you are curious and want a sneak peek just ask!
Second Set Maze provides an update on our tagging project:
What cult of characters continuously and actively searches more than DeFi enthusiasts? We hunt for airdrops, alpha, analysis, signals, news, trends, yield. During our search we try not to fat finger, FOMO buy, fumble the bag, panic sell, paper hand, or round trip.
To aid you on your search, the Leviathan News team tags news posts with key words and phrases from the headline. Getting this right has felt like battling a hydra barefoot on a floor littered with legos. Ensuring script-selected tags align with their news item and are useful for search has demanded delicate headline tagonomics.
Tags for efficient searching are created and maintained by… searching. The Leviathan News tag database uses regular expression (regex) matching to detect text strings in a headline. At the Leviathan compound, where headline strategy out on the risk curve is key to piquing reader interest, tag matching gets complicated. Accurately tagging is an extreme sport.
Search using tags will get better and better and we’re looking forward to expanding tag functionality in the coming months. If you’d like to join the Leviathan Tag Team, please reach out through Telegram.
Reflecting on all Leviathan’s accomplished in 2025, it’s a joy to participate and an honor to be invited to add to this newsletter. I’m inspired by the news and digest teams, all who read and comment, the auction bidders, and everyone on live streams. CurveCap, you hold us all together and you’re such a generous educator.
In 2026, seize the opportunity to ease someone else’s search and, in turn, I wish you all smooth sailing towards anything you are looking for.
Bug Bounties:
DanicJade and KTodjam for bug reports that got our bot back up to health quickly
w00tcake for development help getting SQUID Digest off the ground
3. Moderation
Moderation combines two activities:
Antispam efforts in the SQUID Cave social channel
Voting on articles and comments (including flagging)
No progress yet on our new SQUID-denominated upvoting system just yet… but please continue to help by upvoting the news on Telegram (via the 👾 icon) and on the website! Thanks especially to Danicjade for keeping the community tidy this month!
4. Auction
Final month of Fraxtal Auction stats in the books:
Bid Volume: 517,965.00 SQUID
Proceeds: 124,420.00 SQUID
We close the book on Fraxtal auctions… for at least this week. As we go to press, our first mainnet auction is about to conclude! Enjoy the blistering 12 second block times as we hold our first SQUID Pass auction, denominated in WETH with the option to bid directly using crvUSD.
Our UI receives a nice overhaul to accomodate our multichain future:
Wait, no SQUID bidding? Is there any reason to hold onto SQUID anymore?
Maybe, maybe not… depends if the devs respect the will of the voters…
But if nothing else, we do expect to support SQUID as a bidding token on mainnet soon… via our Curve pool.
We encourage everybody to spread awareness of the SQUID Pass our weekly ticket to own prominent ad inventory across the website, 𝕏, Telegram, and QR codes on any livestreams.
Prior winners of the SQUID Pass can be seen on the auction page and the news archives. Congrats to winners this month:
Curvance is live on Monad mainnet!
Deposit, borrow, and access leverage with capital efficiency up to 3x higher than legacy lending platforms.
Month one features over $750,000 in liquid incentives across supported vaults! Try the system and see how far lending mechanics can go when built for performance.
Embrace our decentralized future with AIOZ, learn more in this CoinDesk feature
Stimmies? AIOZ? New interview just dropped.
You think you are smart ? or at least smarter than Alice ? This is your purrfect occasion to tell her why she is wrong!
If you’d like to suggest your own auctions to run via Leviathan, click the “Auction Recommendations” link on the auctions section of the website.
5. DAO
Thank you to the 20 voters on last month’s SQUID Drop!
Last month simply voting in the DAO earned voters SQUID just for casting a vote. We’ll see this month if voters again choose to reward themselves for their hard work.
6. Social
A total of 1106 comments, down a tick from last month’s record 1293. Congrats to Reply Guy champ Spencer420 for the top tier punditry.
Buoyed by the success of commenting, particularly attaching TL/DRs which have been exceedingly helpful (and a great use of AI to boot!). We’ve formalized the process of posting a TL/DR… if you have a good summary of the article try tagging it…
7. Liquidity
Mainnet SQUID has proven itself a bedrock of stability amidst volatile times. Somehow it’s like a time machine into prices pre-crash…
OK, we confess, we only got liquidity incentives last week and haven’t yet delivered them to mainnet. Expect to see some updates soon for brave LPs in the MEV-infested waters of mainnet, with plenty of news announcing when they go live.
Livestreams
Leviathan hosted two livestream series this month.
8. Vibe Building with JohnnyOnline
A new DeFi Primitive emerges, try it at https://flexmeow.com/
Proposal: SQUID Allocation for Vibe Building
We propose a SQUID allocation to support and scale the Vibe Building livestream series - where we build a fixed-rate lending market (Flex) live in the open.
Past episodes: E0 · E1 · E2 · E3 · E4 · E5 · E6 · E7 · MVP Launch · E8 · E9 · E10 · E11 · Thanksgiving Special · The Show Must Go On
Allocation:
10% - johnnyonline
90% — 2/3 multisig (johnnyonline / CurveCap / Leviathan multisig) to accumulate SQUID until Flex launch, then used to incentivize lending
Any unused funds will be returned to the DAO.
9. Llama Party
Llama Parties are open conversations about headlines from the past week. Anybody is welcome to join! At the start of the stream we drop the link, and send out SQUID to everybody brave enough to join.
Thanks to DEO and Joe for joining, whether because you actually enjoyed the conversation or just because you wanted to get some party favors…
The SQUID Drop
Put it all together, and the December SQUID Drop (covering October) has been tallied. The full leaderboard is presented in detail here for all 107 proposed recipients across all 10 categories.
To better help you prepare your vote, SecondSetMaze created a handy worksheet. Try copying the spreadsheet and updating the default even weighting in column D. The final tallies on the full breakdown tab update automatically.
Once the final DAO vote is completed, we’ll record the final weighting and update the master sheet, which you may browse for historical reference.
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!
Asks
Ask not what SQUID can do for you… ask what you can do for SQUID!
Try out Flex Protocol and report any bugs
Join our Tag-of-War room and help us slay this kraken…
Try out mainnet auctions and let us know how they are working for you
Further Info:
Related reading for curious squiddos:
