This week, Ethereum’s ecosystem saw major developments across onchain finance, protocol upgrades, security, and institutional adoption. The NYSE moved closer to tokenized securities with a new onchain settlement platform, while Bitcoin ETF outflows highlighted shifting institutional sentiment. Security remained a key concern as the Harmony ONE exploit, a $100K address-poisoning scam, and the Trezor-ShipMonk data breach exposed different risks facing crypto users. Ethereum also advanced its technical roadmap, with Glamsterdam’s 200M gas limit confirmed, Hegota proposals progressing, and native Account Abstraction decisions moving toward upcoming developer meetings. At the same time, new research around blockchain-powered AI, Ethereum upgrade tracking, and Vitalik Buterin’s roadmap showed how the ecosystem continues to evolve beyond scaling toward privacy, security, and broader real-world adoption.

Catch up on last week's edition here.

This Week at a Glance

• NYSE Builds Onchain Platform for Tokenized Securities: NYSE is building an onchain settlement platform with Pillar and Securitize to support tokenised securities while preserving traditional shareholder rights.
• Bitcoin ETFs See $145M Outflows Led by BlackRock: Bitcoin ETFs saw $144.6M in outflows as Bitcoin held near $64,000. Explore what ETF redemptions, whale activity and investor behavior mean for institutions.
• Harmony ONE Token Crashes After $4B Unauthorized Mint: Harmony ONE crashes over 30% after an unauthorized $4 billion token mint, with $2.8 billion moved to exchanges as Harmony investigates.
• Crypto User Loses $100K to Address Poisoning Scam: A crypto user lost $100K in an address poisoning scam after sending 101,100 USDT to a fake wallet address planted 66 days earlier.
• Trezor ShipMonk Data Breach Exposes Customer Data: Trezor’s ShipMonk data breach exposed customer names, addresses, phone numbers and emails, affecting 13,689 customers across seven countries.
• Ethereum’s Roadmap Just Changed. Here’s What’s Next: Vitalik Buterin’s updated Ethereum roadmap puts privacy, quantum safety, STARKs, formal verification & leaner protocol design at the center of Ethereum’s future.
• ZachXBT Exposes Alleged $5M Crypto Scam: ZachXBT traces an alleged $5M crypto theft network using fake support calls, social engineering, wallet drains & onchain evidence.
• Grayscale Research Head Bets on Blockchain for AI: Grayscale’s Head of Research says autonomous AI agents could drive new demand for public blockchains through programmable wallets, payments, identity & decentralized infrastructure.
• EIPsInsight Just Changed How You Track Ethereum Upgrades: EIPsInsight’s new Upgrade Explorer brings Ethereum’s entire fork pipeline into one view, making it easier to track which EIPs are proposed, progressing, declined, or actually shipping.

Ethereum Protocol

All Core Developers (ACD)

• Meeting highlights: ACDE #243 focused on finalizing the Glamsterdam gas limit and repricing parameters, reviewing glamsterdam-devnet-8 progress, discussing history expiry for high-gas-limit nodes, and evaluating new EIPs proposed for the Hegota fork. Native Account Abstraction options, including EIP-8141 and EIP-8130, were also discussed.
• Key decisions: The 200M gas limit for Glamsterdam was confirmed, with gas repricing specifications finalized. EIP-8261 will move forward as an optional CL configuration parameter, while several Hegota EIPs received PFI status. The decision between EIP-8141 (Frames) and EIP-8130 for native AA was deferred to the August 25 AA breakout and August 27 ACDE meeting.
• Action items: EL client teams will coordinate on a common history-expiry window and submit their Hegota PFI preferences by September 10. L2 teams and Frames authors will prepare a detailed EIP-8141 vs. EIP-8130 comparison for the August 25 breakout, while Nixo will follow up with Helkomine on the remaining non-PFI'd EIPs.

AllCoreDevs - Testing #91

• Meeting highlights: ACDE focused on DevNet 7 stability and DevNet 8 preparation, including the payload-flooding attack, Glamsterdam gas-limit planning, repricing benchmarks, and EIP-8070. Developers also reviewed circuit-breaker implementations and additional testing planned for the upcoming public-facing DevNet 8.
• Key decisions: The payload-flooding retest was deferred to DevNet 8, with affected clients required to implement the duplicate-envelope IGNORE rule. DevNet 8 launch will wait until the Glamsterdam repricing numbers are confirmed final. EIP-8070 was confirmed mandatory for DevNet 8 with no objections. The proposed 200M gas limit remains unresolved due to concerns about pre-fork activation and dual gas-limit flags.
• Action items: Toni Wahrstätter will document the payload-flooding attack and coordinate the DevNet 8 retest, notifying clients so they can capture live profiles. Client teams will implement the duplicate-envelope fix and continue DevNet 8 preparations, including SSZ and circuit-breaker testing. lightclient will approve the relevant EIP pull request to unblock EIP-8282 updates for Glamsterdam.

Encrypt The Mempool #008

• Meeting highlights: The meeting covered Gloas client readiness, sparse blob pool testing, the proposed Waggle gossip protocol, and new Hegota EIPs. Teams also discussed Merkle-based payload distribution.
• Key decisions: Client teams continued work on partial data columns and sparse blob pools. Waggle gained interest as a potential gossip-sub replacement, while its upgrade path remains under discussion. EIP-8C71 was proposed for Hegota.
• Action items: CL teams will verify the empty-mempool edge case, review the Waggle specification, and provide feedback. Kamil Salakhiev will update the payload-distribution EIP with the Merkle-commitment approach.

P2P Networking #006

• Meeting highlights: The discussion focused on DKG and committee design, classical vs. post-quantum encryption, censorship resistance, and collusion risks for encrypted mempools.
• Key decisions: No decision was reached on the classical vs. post-quantum approach. Client teams will determine whether they are willing to implement a non-post-quantum-secure interim solution, which will guide the next steps.
• Action items: Justin Florentine will poll client teams on the interim classical approach. Anders Elowsson will publish the directed-graph censorship-resistance design for EIP-8105 on Ethereum Magicians and Telegram.

Ethereum Standards Updates

Ethereum standards activity picked up this week, with several proposals moving into Review, new Drafts entering the standards process and previously Stagnant EIPs returning to active development. Glamsterdam advanced through final gas repricing work and the launch of Devnet 8, while Hegota moved deeper into proposal selection with new PFI discussions and stricter champion requirements.

Account abstraction also remained a key open question, with EIP-8141 and EIP-8130 set for further discussion. The week also saw notable editor activity, progress around EIP-8363 and an upcoming Last Call deadline for EIP-5516.

Read the full update on EIPsInsight.

Client & Infrastructure Updates

• Execution Layer:

  • Nethermind 1.39.3
  • Geth 1.17.5
  • Erigon 3.5.5
  • Besu 26.7.1
  • Reth 2.5.0
  • EthereumJS 10.1.2

• Consensus Layer:

  • Teku 26.8.0
  • Nimbus 26.7.0
  • Prysm 7.1.8
  • Lodestar 1.46.0
  • Lighthouse 8.2.1

• Latest from Clients:

1. Lodestar: Lodestar is moving compute-heavy workloads to Zig to reduce JavaScript worker overhead. Native threads can share memory directly, enabling faster parallel processing, less data copying, and more efficient coordination on performance-critical paths.
2. Erigon: Erigon uses BitTorrent and HTTPS webseeds to distribute Ethereum’s historical data, making snapshot downloads faster, verifiable, and more scalable as adoption grows.

Podcasts

1. How Spark Dodged the KelpDAO Hack While the Rest of DeFi Got Hit | Laura Shin | Sam MacPherson
   Sam MacPherson, cofounder and CEO of Spark, joins Laura Shin to unpack the conservative playbook, rate limits, a triple redundant oracle, and a governance process built to move slowly on purpose, that turned a near miss into a footnote while rivals absorbed the damage.
2. Ethereum’s New EIP Could Break DeFi | Stani Kulechov | Mike Silagadze
   Aave founder Stani Kulechov and EtherFi CEO Mike Silagadze join David to break down why stake tapering could push ETH yield toward zero, weaken solo staking, drive capital out of DeFi, and make ETH less attractive to institutions. They debate Ethereum’s monetary policy, whether the network is overpaying for security, and why trying to make ETH more like Bitcoin could undermine what makes Ethereum valuable in the first place.

Good Reads

• Government Blockchain Pilots Keep Failing. Here's Why.: Why do government blockchain pilots fail to scale? Explore Sweden, Sierra Leone and Venezuela’s experiments and the lessons for successful adoption.
• Why Institutions Are Suddenly Taking Ethereum Seriously?: Discover why institutions are turning to Ethereum for staking, ETFs, stablecoins and tokenisation, and whether its growing influence can last.
• Can Crypto Fix Its Biggest Security Problem: Humans?: Can better wallets, protocols and UX reduce crypto’s biggest security risk? Explore how technology can fight social engineering and scams.
• All you need to know about Ethereum Hegota Upgrade: Curated resources by EtherWorld for Hegota Upgrade
• All you need to know about Ethereum Glamsterdam Upgrade: Curated resources by EtherWorld for Glamsterdam Upgrade

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Jobs

• Announcing the Avarch Internship Program: A professional internship program by Avarch offering students real project experience, open-source contributions, expert mentorship & industry-ready portfolio development.

Community Spotlight

Ethereum is leaving Poseidon behind after years of post-quantum research, with SHA or BLAKE now favored for L1. The shift could reshape Ethereum’s cryptographic foundation while advancing its vision for a leaner, simpler, and more quantum-resistant protocol.

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