mini #1 | Ethereal news

Vitalik: updated Strawmap explainer, Ethlabs & Ethereum Institutional hiring, Devcon 8 speaker applications open

Vitalik: updated Strawmap explainer
- Lean Ethereum is collection of improvements replacing almost every piece of the protocol over 3-4 years, Hegotá likely last pre-Lean upgrade
- Includes privacy as first class goal, formal verification for security, quantum safety, medium scaling of current dynamic state, large scaling of new types of state, gas limit increases, blob increases & slot time decreases
EF Protocol Support team dissolved
Hiring: Ethlabs (R&D lab) ~10 near term, ~20 medium term & Ethereum Institutional (accelerate institutional adoption)
Devcon 8 speaker applications open, August 6 deadline
ETHConf videos
ETH metrics:
- Gas (gwei): 0.1 average, 0 - 1.1 (13 for zero net issuance)
- ETH supply change: 19.8k net issuance (7 days)
- ETHUSD: $1,714 - $1,827 (all time high $4,946, August 24, 2025)
- ETH ETFs: 5.2% of ETH supply
- ETHBTC: 0.028 (0.166 for the Flippening)

Consensys

A complete suite of trusted products to build anything in web3.
consensys.io

Aave stable vaults: embed fixed rate stablecoin yield into a product, converts variable lending rates to fixed, integrate any ERC4626 strategy, powers Aave mobile savings app
Rysk v12 (covered calls & cash secured puts) expands to mainnet
Ammalgam (oracleless lending) live on mainnet
Zapper shutting down August 3
Privacy pools v2 trusted setup ceremony, contribute entropy, sign in with GitHub
ETH.sh privacy (dashboard): tracks privacy protocol fees, wait times & supported chains
Name services:
- Wei DAO: owned by name holders, onchain voting, weighted by ETH cost
- Gwei zkpassport subdomains: free name per passport, gated by ZKPassport
Paragraph (publishing) AI agent: helps with editing, social & SEO

Argot Collective Solidity 0.8.36 (language): Amsterdam EVM version support, fixes for medium severity bugs (unsound spill in mutual recursion & inheritance order reversal on storage end warning), experimental SSA CFG stack to memory spilling (mitigate stack too deep) & experimental EOF backend removed
Paradigm Solar v0.2.0 (Solidity compiler): adds unstable implementations of type checking, LSP & codegen
Christoph Burgdorf deposit contract rewritten in Fe, lower bytecode size, deployment cost & call gas than optimized Solidity
Ethereum-names (library): resolve ENS, .wei (WNS) & .gwei (GNS)
Joseph Delong Bash version of EVM
Application layer standards (ERCs):
- ERC8322: Notary backed confidential token
- ERC8323: Source token agent binding for ERC8004
- ERC8324: Priority update registry
- ERC8325: Asset anchor registry
- ERC8326: Canonical document bundle anchor
- ERC8327: Directional transfer domain registry
- ERC8328: Subject linked compliance event log
- ERC8329: Subject linked impact snapshot log
- ERC8330: Subject linked NAV snapshot oracle
- ERC8331: Role grouped operation restriction policy
- ERC8332: Physical reserve registry
- ERC8335: Account level transfer with authorization

ETH.sh skills: directory of skills, MCP servers, CLIs, wallets, models, plugins & APIs

Lazy Summer ~$6M exploit of two USDC vaults via NAV manipulation
Hinkal ~$800k exploit
Gnosis Pay post mortem of June 1 exploit via Zodiac modules vulnerability
Austin Griffith one dollar security review, AI first pass (not a replacement for external security reviews), reports on vulnerabilities, logic errors, access control & gas notes

Glamsterdam upgrade (targeting 2026):
- glamsterdam-devnet-7 (spec): targeting early next week
- Public Glamsterdam devnet: targeting early August
Hegotá upgrade (targeting 2027):
- Deadline for proposing non-headliner EIPs is August 6

EF Protocol Security team running AI agents on protocol code, triage is the hard part, found remotely triggerable panic in libp2p gossipsub (CVE-2026-34219)
Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs):
- EIP8321: Hash chain RANDAO
- EIP8333: Align checkpoint with epoch boundary block
- EIP8334: Bundled attestation propagation

Lodestar Fast Confirmation Rule implementation, experimental & performance intensive
Client diversity:
- Consensus layer: Lighthouse ~52% (data may not be accurate)
Staking market share: Lido 21% [Note: dual governance]
Validators: 880k active (target 128k), 16k accumulating (0x02 withdrawal credentials)
Client releases:
- Execution layer:
  - Lambda ethrex v20.0.0: performance improvements via block data persistence deferral, improvements to transaction pool admission process & Glamsterdam upgrade block level access lists optimizations
  - Nethermind 1.39.0: node robustness, Flat DB durability, eth/71 wire protocol, reworked discovery stack, JSON RPC improvements, Glamsterdam upgrade block level access lists improvements & broad round of performance work

Vitalik: minimize state requirements in Lean consensus, move responsibility to stakers to manage & occasionally ZK prove their state, removes end of epoch processing and may allow scaling to millions of validators
Toni Wahrstätter: native UTXOs, one shot payments with minimal state, could reduce permanent state usage for payments by ~99.8%

Base Beryl upgrade live, adds B20 native tokens
L2Beat: Ronin now Stage 0 Optimium
Lighter latency improvements, 55ms end to end p99, under 1ms transaction processing p99 & 100-250µs hot path apply time

Paradigm amicus brief in Lewellen v Blanche appeal on use of money transmission laws against non custodial software developers

Vitalik: challenge to find document completed, identified by style of math & algorithm explanation, EIP7503 update written in Chinese then translated to English by local LLM
npm v12: install defaults changed to improve supply chain security, allow scripts defaults to off and allow git & allow remote both default to none

Ethereal news mini #1