Security risks around crypto custody returned to the spotlight this week as Liquid investigated the movement of nearly 4,000 BTC, Osmosis contained an nBTC double-spend incident, a Chrome-extension compromise drained roughly $90K, and Trezor warned users about a highly convincing phishing campaign sent through a compromised third-party email provider. Ethereum’s next upgrade also became clearer as the Ethereum Foundation ranked 62 Hegotá proposals, placing FOCIL and Frame Transactions at the top. Meanwhile, India moved deeper into both crypto-policy discussions and real-world asset tokenisation, while ZKsync opened its institutional privacy infrastructure and stablecoins continued pushing into payments.

Catch up on last week's edition here.

This Week at a Glance

A. Regulation

• India’s Parliament to Question Finance Ministry on Crypto: India’s Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance will question the Finance Ministry on September 16 as lawmakers continue examining the country’s regulatory approach to Virtual Digital Assets.
• Are Gift Cards Quietly Normalizing Crypto in India?: Crypto-funded gift cards are emerging as an indirect bridge between digital assets and everyday spending, raising fresh questions about India’s tax rules, enforcement and the growing gap between crypto ownership and permitted real-world usage.
• SEBI Launches Demat 2.0 for Tokenised Corporate Bonds: India has moved its corporate-bond tokenisation experiment forward with a private, permissioned distributed-ledger infrastructure connecting tokenised securities with digital-rupee settlement. REC Limited, L&T and IIFL Finance have already raised a combined ₹1,025 crore through the infrastructure.

B. Security

• Liquid Network Loses 4,000 BTC in Security Breach: Liquid Network is investigating the withdrawal of almost 4,000 BTC, worth roughly $320 million, from its Federation wallet. The parties controlling the funds have described themselves as white-hat hackers while Blockstream attempts to establish contact through an on-chain signed message.
• $90K Crypto Loss After Chrome Extension Hack: Crypto creator Bold reportedly lost around $90K after malware compromised browser extensions and exposed passwords and wallet seed phrases, with stolen funds moving through Ethereum and Zcash.
• Osmosis Freezes $1.79M After nBTC Exploit: Osmosis froze 22.65 BTC linked to an attacker after a vulnerability in Nomic’s custom forwarding mechanism enabled the double-spending of nBTC. Around 39.84 nBTC were affected, creating a roughly $3.15 million backing shortfall.
• Trezor Email Breach Sparks Crypto Phishing Fears: Trezor warned users about a convincing phishing campaign after a third-party email provider was compromised. Attackers circulated a fake “STM32 Entropy Vulnerability” warning designed to trick hardware-wallet users into exposing their recovery phrases.

C. Privacy

• ZKsync Open-Sources Prividium Engine for Institutions: ZKsync has open-sourced the core permissioning engine behind Prividium, allowing institutions to deploy self-hosted blockchain environments while keeping sensitive data and infrastructure under their own control. Deutsche Bundesbank is among the first institutions testing the technology.

D. Global

• Arya.ag Puts $2B Crop Loans on Avalanche: Indian agricultural-finance platform Arya.ag is testing tokenised warehouse receipts on Avalanche, connecting grain ownership, collateral, insurance and lending records to help financial institutions verify crop-backed loans.
• US Treasury $12.5B Buyback Boosts Bitcoin Expectations: The U.S. Treasury scheduled a debt buyback of up to $12.5 billion as markets watched whether improving Treasury liquidity could support Bitcoin and other risk assets. The operation is distinct from Federal Reserve quantitative easing.
• Can Stablecoins Replace International Bank Transfers?: Stablecoins are increasingly challenging traditional cross-border payment rails with 24/7 settlement and potentially lower transfer costs, although banks and payment providers are still likely to remain important for compliance, fiat conversion and local payouts.
• Nasdaq Invests $100M in Kraken Parent Payward: Nasdaq invests $100 million in Kraken parent Payward at a $21 billion valuation, deepening their push into tokenized equities and 24/7 trading.

Ethereum Protocol

1. Ethereum Foundation Ranks 62 EIPs for Hegotá

• Roughly 60 researchers and engineers across nine Protocol teams participated, producing 397 individual grades.
• EIP-7805 FOCIL and EIP-8141 Frame Transactions were the only proposals placed in the highest S-tier.

2. Ethereum's 2027 Upgrade Plans Stablecoin Gas Payments

• EIP-8141 Frame Transactions could allow users to settle transaction fees using stablecoins while applications or sponsors handle the underlying ETH gas payment.
• Frames also aim to support atomic batching, programmable transaction flows and improved wallet recovery.

3. AllCoreDevs - Execution #245

• EIP-8141 Frame Transactions was formally confirmed as the Hegotá headliner, moving beyond its earlier SFI status and establishing native account abstraction as a defining feature of the upgrade.
• EIP-8253 will not be added to Glamsterdam. Developers agreed it was too late in the fork cycle and instead moved it to SFI for Hegotá.

4. P2P Networking #008

• EIP-8411, Fast Payload Broadcast / Execution Payload Segmentation, was submitted for PFI for Hegotá, with the actual inclusion discussion moved to the following ACDC meeting.
• ETHP2P payload-broadcast integration into Prysm was considered ready for Glamsterdam devnet testing, moving the chunked-broadcast approach from research toward live-network experimentation.

5. L1-zkEVM Breakout #008

• For the EIP-8025 devnet, Consensus Layer clients only need to implement proof verification. Supporting proof generation on the CL side will remain optional.
• EIP-8025 Consensus Layer integration is targeted for Gloas Devnet 8 or the following devnet, establishing the next concrete integration milestone.

6. Native Account Abstraction #004

• Geth, ethrex and Nethermind were confirmed ready for Frames Devnet 0, with all three clients successfully passing the published test suite.
• The proposal to replace the expiry VERIFY frame with a native transaction-level features field was deferred to Ethereum Magicians/EthMAC for further design discussion rather than being adopted during the call.

7. RPC Standards #034

• PR #875, removing RPC error code -39001, was approved for merge after Geth and Nethermind gave their approval during the call.
• PR #873, clarifying fee recipient versus coinbase in the eth_simulate payload, was approved for merge with no objections.

Ethereum Standards Updates

Ethereum standards activity remained active this week, with three new Draft proposals and ten pull requests merged across the EIPs and ERCs repositories. EIP-8288 stood out for its focus on post-quantum signatures and STARK aggregation, bringing cryptographic resilience into the standards discussion.

Protocol coordination continued through ACDE #245, L1-zkEVM Breakout #008 and P2P Networking #008. Editor reviews, Last Call deadlines and new Draft activity kept the standards pipeline moving across both protocol and application layers.

Read the full update on EIPsInsight.

Clients Latest Releases

• Execution Layer:

  • Nethermind 1.39.3
  • Geth 1.17.5
  • Erigon 3.6.1 - NEW RELEASE
  • Besu 26.8.1
  • Reth 2.5.2
  • EthereumJS 10.1.3

• Consensus Layer:

  • Teku 26.8.0
  • Nimbus 26.8.0 - NEW RELEASE
  • Prysm 7.1.8
  • Lodestar 1.47.0 - NEW RELEASE
  • Lighthouse 8.2.2

Podcasts

1. Uneasy Money: Is OpenAI Training on Your Private Chats to Win the AI Race?: Alex Thorn and Jon join Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan to discuss the Liquid Network Bitcoin breach, frontier AI models, privacy concerns around AI chats and the growing overlap between crypto security and artificial intelligence.
2. The Chopping Block: FOMO’s Co-Founder Defends the Memecoin Trenches, Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP, and AMC vs Robinhood: FOMO co-founder Paul Erlanger joins Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt and Tarun Chitra to debate social crypto trading, Robinhood Chain, tokenized stocks, memecoin launchpads and AMC’s dispute with Robinhood.
3. Robinhood’s Tokenized AMC Shares Spark a Fight Over What Stock Tokens Really Are: Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia and Chris Perkins examine AMC CEO Adam Aron’s criticism of Robinhood’s tokenized shares and debate what investors actually own when they buy stock tokens.
4. The New Economics of Crypto Tokens | Austin Barack: Relayer Capital founder Austin Barack discusses how crypto-token investing is changing, including the economics behind Hyperliquid, Ether.fi, Pump and other protocols where value increasingly depends on revenue, distribution and token design.

Upcoming Events

• ETHRome 2026: Sep 11–13
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Jobs

• Ondo Finance: Blockchain Engineer
• Coinbase: Senior Software Engineer, Blockchain Network
• OpenZeppelin: Head of Information Security
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• OKX: Staff/Senior Java Engineer, Web3 Wallet
• Wormhole Labs: Junior Trader

Community Spotlight

The Ethereum Foundation Protocol Cluster has invited the community to participate in its September 16 Reddit AMA, where Ethereum researchers and developers will answer questions about Glamsterdam, Hegotá, the recently published EIP tier list and Ethereum’s longer-term protocol roadmap.

Read the Ethereum Foundation announcement

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