Divided we stand, united we fall. September 18, 2018.

Last night came with a sharp drop in crypto market prices across the board. Bitcoin dropped $200 to $6,291, Ether dropped back below $200 after its prodigious regains last week, and altcoins sustained losses ranging from two to ten percent. EOS, meanwhile, proved a worthy contender for “market’s biggest catastrophe,” snapping at the heels of rival ETH’s 9.27 percent decline with a feisty 9.33 percent decline of its own.  (Update: both have reversed around five percent of that damage since around 12pm UK time/4am Pacific time.)

While racing Ethereum to the bottom, EOS did, at least, manage to court the Ethereum-powered app Bancor. Bancor automates liquidity to remove human error from transactions, and this new intersection, dubbed BancorX, should allow it to facilitate “cross-chain” transactions between Ethereum and EOS-held wallets.

The reason for the move is simple, but slightly sad (for Ethereum). “EOS has had 11,428 total users over the last 24 hours, as compared to 10,562 on the Ethereum Network,” Nate Hindman, director of communications, tells Debrief. Hindman couches the development in epic terms, saying the time has come “to unleash the power of Bancor’s automated cross-chain liquidity across the EOS and Ethereum ecosystems” and bridge two “enormously powerful shared global infrastructures.”

Feasibly, the development could diffuse the tensions between EOS and Ethereum and herald a new age of blockchain-agnostic super-adoption. Which we just made up, but sounds cool, right?

Bancor, as we have written, battles with scam bots. But Twitter scam bots—which masquerade as crypto-rich public figures, put out false offers (“send 1 ETH for 100 ETH in return), and make off with the profit—are outside Bancor’s jurisdiction. Will the unlikely duo of Elon Musk and, er, the creator of novelty cryptocurrency Dogecoin step into the breach and save the day? Yes, bizarrely.

Though Musk had previously expressed his admiration for the bots’ chutzpah (“mad skillz”), he is now taking a harder line. In a tweet sent Monday, Musk asked Dogecoin’s creator, Jackson Palmer, to “help get rid of the annoying scam spammers.” The two promptly agreed to speak using direct messages, and within minutes—according to Palmer—Elon was given access to a “script” that would tackle the pretenders for good. Nicely done lads! Now, if only the Musk-Doge Bot Deprogramming Squad (MDBDS) could take down the pesky bot that keeps libellously calling Vernon “Rescuer of Thai children trapped in cave” Unsworth a "pedophile" in Musk’s good name.

But malignant code dies hard. Security researchers found that several municipal government websites in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have been infected by so-called “Crypto-Jacking” scripts, which allow hackers to commandeer the processing power of visitors’ computers and use it for crypto-mining. Chief among those infected was www.ap.gov.in (probably best not to click), which has a monthly traffic of around 160,000. That’s two Wembley football stadiums’ worth of unsuspecting netizens involuntarily mining cryptocurrency. What a time to be alive.

What a time to be an ironically self-titled fraudster, too. “Robinhood,” a mobile-based crypto trading platform notable for its zero commission on trades, in reality “takes from the millennial and gives to the high-frequency trader,” says journalist Logan Kane of Seeking Alpha. Kane explains that Robinhood has dinged its low-frequency customers on brokerage fees, which are “ten times” higher than those at regular trading posts. It’s an affront to Satoshi’s, and the Merry Men’s, vision.

Are you, like us, desperate for a real, use case you can really sink your teeth into? Sure, Palestinians are using bitcoin. But leathery old man John McAfee has mysteriously "received" details of an even better project: a White Paper for a “Trout Flavored” carbonated soda. Presumably, the Trout Flavor is pegged to a primary reserve of trouts stashed in a Puerto Rican vault somewhere. To avoid a trout bear market, let’s hope they’re using an SEC-backed stabletrout.