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Ethereal news weekly #23

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Clear signing, CLARITY Act advanced out of Senate Banking committee, Ben Edgington fast finality plan

Ecosystem

  • Clear signing, display human readable descriptions of what a transaction will do:
  • Ethereum Foundation:
    • Protocol cluster new leads: Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn & Fredrik
      • Former leads: BarnabĂ© leaving EF & Alex Stokes on sabbatical
  • Devcon 8 tickets: student ticket applications open now, $349 early bird (ETH payment only) from May 20 & community discounts open in June
  • ETHPrague:
  • ETH metrics:
    • Gas (gwei): 0.5 average, 0.1 - 11.7 (12.8 for zero net issuance)
    • ETH supply change: 19k net issuance
    • ETHUSD: $2,238 - $2,374 (all time high $4,946, August 24, 2025)
    • ETH ETFs: 5.2% of ETH supply
    • ETHBTC: 0.028 (0.166 for the Flippening)

Consensys

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consensys.io

Enterprise

Applications

  • DeFi United (effort to restore rsETH backing):
    • Kelp rsETH withdrawals live & Aave rsETH unpaused enabling withdrawals
    • Restraining notice modified to permit transfer of frozen ETH to Aave LLC
    • LayerZero: apology, recommendations, trust & liveness assumptions and past instance of multi sig signer used for personal trade
  • Fileverse ddocs: adds suggestion mode
  • Gitcoin deploying $1M into Octant v2 vault, matched by Octant, yield to be used to fund campaign
  • Privacy Stewards of Ethereum (PSE): private transfers user research

Developers

  • Vyper (language):
    • v0.5.0a1 (alpha): adds abstract methods
    • Vyper-HOL: machine-checked formal semantics for Vyper in HOL4
  • Plank v0.1.1 (language): adds ecrecover, sha256, ripemd160 & modexp precompiles, addr & bytes32 types and experimental optional Sonatina backend (used by Fe)
  • Tamago (Verity contract library): formally verified sqrt, cbrt, log10 & log256 and ERC4626 vault
  • Ape v0.8.50 (dev framework): adds improved cache control for contract types, Aragon proxy detection & Ape to Brownie guide
  • Leo Alt: provably safe optimizations, Claude optimized assembly proved in Lean
  • Application layer standards (ERCs):

Agents

Security

All core devs (main protocol calls)

All core devs - consensus (ACDC) #178

  • Glamsterdam upgrade (targeting mid-2026):
    • bal-devnet-7 (spec) & glamsterdam-devnet-4 targeting next week
  • Hegotá upgrade (targeting late-2026):
    • Non-headliners proposed for inclusion:
      • Attestation propagation redesign
      • EIP8025 optional execution proofs; presentation; enshrine in future upgrade

All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #79

Layer 1

  • Ben Edgington: upgrading finality #1
    • Challenge: reduce time to finality from ~1000s to ~10s (100x speedup)
    • Fast finality plan: decouple finality from slot by slot fork choice (potentially as headliner for upgrade after Hegotá), then incrementally speedup, ideally without excluding home stakers & staking from remote locations
  • Glamsterdam upgrade (targeting mid-2026):
    • Glamsterdam repricings #7
  • Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs):

Research

Staking

  • Client diversity:
    • Consensus layer: Lighthouse ~54% (data may not be accurate)
  • Staking market share: Lido 21.7% [Note: dual governance]
  • Validators: 899k active (target 128k), 13k accumulating (0x02 withdrawal credentials)
  • Client releases:
    • Consensus layer:
      • Status Nimbus v26.5.0 (medium): improves performance & execution client compatibility
    • Execution layer:
      • LF Decentralized Trust Besu 26.5.0: Glamsterdam upgrade prep, log4j CVEs patched & Bonsai archive users will need full resync
      • Erigon v3.4.1: segfault fix
      • Ethereum Foundation Geth v1.17.3 (maintenance): eth/70 (partial block receipt lists) live, Glamsterdam upgrade prep & debug_trace structLog (opcode) tracer follows client-wide spec
      • Lambda ethrex v12.0.0 (recommended): faster snap-sync ingest & adds debug_trace prestateTracer

Layer 2

Regulation

General

  • pcaversaccio: zipped repo attack, once unzipped, git checkout/commit executes malicious hooks
  • TanStack npm supply chain attack via pull_request_target + GitHub Actions cache poisoning + OIDC token extraction
  • Claude recovered encrypted wallet using previous backup + password on old computer, after attempting brute force & password searches on multiple devices

Editor: @abcoathup
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Ethereal news weekly #22