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Ethereal news weekly #30

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Ethereum basics for governments & institutions, Ethereum Institutional launched, Robinhood Chain live

Ecosystem

  • EF Global Policy Strategy team: Ethereum basics for governments & institutions, non-technical primer covering foundations, governance, comparison with permissioned & permissionless chains, economic implications and environmental considerations
  • Ethereum Institutional (non-profit to accelerate institutional adoption) launched:
    • Founding team (ex-EF Enterprise): David Walsh, Marius Smith & Matthew Dawson
    • Focus areas: engagement, research, marketing, discovery & events
    • Anchor funding by Bitmine, Sharplink & Joe Lubin
  • Ethlabs (non-profit R&D lab) FAQ:
    • Work domains: chain (execution scaling, blob scaling & faster Ethereum), platform (interop, block construction market & EVM) and growth (go to market for Fast Confirmation Rule)
    • 2-3 years of runway including hiring
  • ETH.sh Ethereum orgs: directory of foundations, labs, guilds, collectives & treasury companies
  • ETH metrics:
    • Gas (gwei): 0.2 average, 0 - 5.2 (13 for zero net issuance)
    • ETH supply change: 19.6k net issuance (7 days)
    • ETHUSD: $1,524 - $1,746 (all time high $4,946, August 24, 2025)
    • ETH ETFs: 5.2% of ETH supply
    • ETHBTC: 0.028 (0.166 for the Flippening)

Crypto Security Report

Crypto Security Report: June 2026

Featuring MetaMask’s new security-first agentic wallet, live address poisoning detection, Consensys Diligence’s AI-augmented Chonky auditing methodology, a reminder on fake recovery service scams, and the malware spreading via USB drives.

Crypto Security Report: June 2026

Enterprise

  • Open Standard Open USD (OUSD consortium stablecoin): no cost to mint/redeem, partners share earnings from reserves (less management fee) & board made up of partners; live later this year
  • Crédit Agricole EURO eXchange Token (EURXT euro stablecoin): MiCA compliant ERC20, used to settle a subscription to Amundi money market fund
  • Cloudflare monetization gateway: charge callers for assets protected by Cloudflare (web pages, datasets, APIs or MCP tools) in stablecoins over x402; early access waitlist

Applications

Developers

  • Argot Collective:
  • Foundry (dev framework) symbolic testing: MVP for early use
  • Nomic Foundation Hardhat (dev framework):
  • Remix Pro (dev framework): paid tiers with Claude Sonnet & Opus; Pro adds security & gas agents, connectors and unlimited dapp hosting
  • Viem tokens (TypeScript) token actions & utilities
  • Pashov Fizz (fuzzing): generates invariants, writes stateful fuzz tests, reports on coverage & vulnerabilities; works with Foundry/Hardhat projects on Echidna & Medusa
  • ETH.sh testnet faucets: aggregated list, track cooldown & vote on non-working faucets
  • Application layer standards (ERCs):
    • ERC8318: Tokenized fund lifecycle metadata
    • ERC8319: Regulatory compliance protocol
    • ERC8320: Regulated asset claim

Security

  • Artificial Financial Intelligence (AFI) May 30 exploit post mortem, vulnerability report submitted by impersonator with trojan Foundry test suite (ffi = true + malicious ERC20 constructor) to gain remote access
  • Elliott Alexander (Ethereum Foundation): Solidity security skill benchmark of 6 AI security review skills, plain prompting beat skills; use best model plus second pass, treat output as triage list (due to false positives)

All core devs (main protocol calls)

All core devs - execution (ACDE) #240

  • Glamsterdam upgrade (targeting 2026):
    • glamsterdam-devnet-7 (spec): targeting next week; disable/re-enable functionality being added to EIP8282 builder execution requests contracts; repricing numbers stable (pending benchmarking); ePBS payload deadline set to 6 seconds
    • Reminder: Mascot needed, vote on Eth Magicians, closes July 8
  • Hegotá upgrade (targeting 2027):
    • Non-headliners proposed for inclusion (deadline for proposing is August 6):

All core devs - testing (ACDT) #85

Layer 1

  • Glamsterdam upgrade (targeting 2026):
  • Hegotá upgrade (targeting 2027):
    • FOCIL breakout #37, spec getting closer
  • execution-specs tests v20: first mainnet release after execution spec tests migrated, covers Osaka + BPO1 + BPO2 (BPO2 is 20th mainnet upgrade, hence v20)
  • EIP8142 Block in Blobs: prototype on ethrex & Lighthouse

Staking

  • EthStaker staking survey results, ~78% stake majority of their ETH, consensus layer client diversity a concern
  • Bitcoin Suisse migrating to Obol Distributed Validators
  • EtherFi spillover withdrawals: exit queue bypassed via consolidating into validators at 2,048 ETH ceiling; ~543k ETH (~20% of TVL) processed in 33 days
  • beaconcha.in MEV analysis: timing breakdown & distribution and network average
  • Client diversity:
  • Staking market share: Lido 21% [Note: dual governance]
  • Validators: 882k active (target 128k), 15k accumulating (0x02 withdrawal credentials)
  • Client releases:
    • Consensus layer:
      • ChainSafe Lodestar v1.44.0 (recommended): fast confirmation rule (experimental, performance intensive), performance improvements, v1 beacon API endpoints removed & Glamsterdam upgrade work
      • Consensys Teku 26.7.0 (recommended): QUIC p2p enabled by default & Windows no longer supported
      • Offchain Prysm v7.1.6 (patch): targeted gossip validation, sync & operator facing improvements and Glamsterdam upgrade work
      • Grandine 2.0.5 (high): security fixes & performance optimizations
      • Status Nimbus v26.6.2 (medium): mitigates regressions in attestation performance & bandwidth usage in v26.6.0
    • Execution layer:
      • Erigon v3.5: parallel block execution enabled by default, Glamsterdam upgrade work, leaner full nodes by default, faster RPC & adds GraphQL
      • Lambda ethrex v19.0.0 (recommended): fixes memory leak for long running nodes, hardens P2P stack & zkEVM related performance improvements

Research

Layer 2

  • Robinhood Chain (Arbitrum based) live
  • Base outages post mortem, June 25 (116 minutes) & June 26 (20 minutes); bug in sequencer allowed stale journal state to persist after transaction validation failure, then race condition in engine restart prevented sequencers catching up to the tip
  • Taiko back online after June 21 security incident
  • Maurelian OP Stack predeploy upgrades using network upgrade transaction bundles
  • Loopring (ZK rollup) sunset, relayer offline, final balances to be returned centrally

Regulation

  • UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) crypto rules in force from October 25, 2027, firms (exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers & staking providers) must obtain authorization to operate in UK

General

  • Vitalik obfuscation part 1, tech tree behind indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) protocols
  • Nicholas Fett Unstoppable Markets book, examines market failures through short stories & historical examples via fictional narrative of a crypto founder

Editor: @abcoathup
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Ethereal news weekly #29