Ethereal news weekly #37

Glamsterdam upgrade repricing impact for contract developers, Revolut euro stablecoin rolling out, native account abstraction scheduled for inclusion in Hegotá upgrade

Ecosystem

• Ethereum Foundation:
  • EF Academic Secretariat hiring project manager (academic engagements)
  • Workshop on privacy preserving technologies (Asiacrypt, Hong Kong): call for presentations, 3 page abstract, deadline September 25
• Ethlabs (R&D lab): Mislav Javor joined
• ETH metrics:
  • Gas (gwei): 0.3 average, 0 - 9.3 (13.4 for zero net issuance)
  • ETH supply change: 20k net issuance
  • ETHUSD: $2,361 - $2,558 (all time high $4,946, August 24, 2025)
  • ETHBTC: 0.031 (0.166 for the Flippening)

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Enterprise

• Revolut euro stablecoin (EURR) rolling out, launch includes mainnet, issued by Bridge (Stripe)

Applications

• Coinbase tokenized stocks live on Base as B20 tokens, not available in US
• Ethena Foundation bought out locked tokens, released VC unvested tokens, agreement for protocol value to be assigned to Foundation & fee switch proposal to use 95% net revenue for token buybacks once USDe supply passes $7.5B
• DefiLlama universal token ratings dashboard, built with Forgd

Developers

• Glamsterdam upgrade repricing impact:
  • Small set of contracts may break or degrade without preventative updates
  • EIP8037 increases state creation gas cost & EIP8038 increases state access gas cost
  • Contract developers: check if address in affected mainnet contracts & test fixes on Platåberget testnet (glamsterdam-devnet-8)
  • Wallet, RPC & node tooling developers: update gas estimation for new schedule
• Foundry v1.8.0 (dev framework): opt in preview of native symbolic & mutation testing, isolate mode & dynamic test linking by default, embedded Solar language server and forge lint expanded with security & gas detectors (nearing Slither/Aderyn parity)
• Nomic Foundation Hardhat v3.15.0 (dev framework): faster Solidity test compilation (via porting inline config parsing to Rust) & default templates bumped to Solidity v0.8.34
• Remix v2.5.4 (IDE): LLM management moved to OpenRouter & AWS Bedrock; API keys from other services (such as Anthropic) will no longer work
• revm v43.0.0: additional Glamsterdam support (glamsterdam-devnet-8) & adds asynchronous database execution
• Kassandra kohaku-cli v0.0.4 (privacy focused terminal wallet): faster first sync of privacy protocols over Tor, tail calls on ERC20 unshields for Tornado & Railgun
• Kaan Uzdoğan (Sourcify): ERC7730 clear signing explainer, wallet developer input wanted
• IPFS ipfs.io & dweb.link gateways redirect to service worker that makes peer to peer connections & verifies content; rate limiting started for hotlinked & backend traffic
• Dune (data platform): free plan moving to view only, queries will require paid plan
• Farcaster mobile & web clients open sourced, MIT license, weekly snapshots, excludes wallet implementation
• Application layer standards (ERCs):
  • ERC8391: Execution delegation framework
  • ERC8392: Asset status for tokenized assets
  • ERC8393: Tokenized carbon credits with retirement
  • ERC8395: Delegated signed HTTP requests

Security

• Term Finance governance incident, $8.5M drained from 6 vaults via governance proposals, meta vaults shut down (withdrawals open); post mortem by RockawayX (curator of Tori ecosystem vault USDC)
• The Sandbox ~$1.5M bridge exploit, unbacked SAND minted on Base & BSC via token convenience feature allowing calls on behalf of users
• Ledger clear signing flow bug, fixed in Ethereum app 1.22.2 (released August 13), update app to 1.22.3+, app version updates separately to firmware

All core devs (main protocol calls)

All core devs - execution (ACDE) #244

• Glamsterdam upgrade (targeting 2026):
  • Platåberget (glamsterdam-devnet-8): testing (spamming) ongoing
  • glamsterdam-devnet-9 (non-finality devnet): launch when client trunk branches available
  • Public testnets: proposal to upgrade Sepolia September 28 & Hoodi October 26 to be confirmed at ACDC next week
  • mainnet: potentially early December, tight timeline, depends on testing & security reviews
  • History expiry: EIP4444 bound historical data in execution clients to be updated to prune at 33,024 epochs
• Hegotá upgrade (targeting 2027):
  • Native account abstraction scheduled for inclusion, weekly breakout to attempt to converge EIP8141 Frame transaction & Base (L2) proposed EIP8130 account abstraction by account configuration
    • Derek Chiang (Ethlabs): EIP8141 vs EIP8130 explainer
  • Non-headliners proposed for inclusion (execution layer client preferences due September 9):
    • EIP8360 TCREATE opcode, placeholder for ephemeral contract solution replacing SELFDESTRUCT refill (requested change to EIP8037 in Glamsterdam rejected as too late)
  • Non-headliners declined for inclusion as no champion present:
    • EIP7609 decrease base cost of TLOAD/TSTORE
    • EIP8058 contract bytecode deduplication discount (superseded by EIP8298 SETCODEFROM code reuse instruction)
  • Update on EIP8304 trustless log & transaction index
• Deposit contract: discussion on post quantum options

All core devs - testing (ACDT) #93 + consensus layer breakout

Layer 1

• Hegotá upgrade (targeting 2027):
  • Account abstraction breakout #2
  • Mike Neuder: ePBS distilled & impact on MEV market
• Chase Wright (EF): ENRScout node crawler, over DiscV4 & DiscV5 and IPv4 & IPv6 for mainnet, Hoodi testnet & Sepolia testnet
• Protocol Guild Q3 membership update: 190 members, 9 new & 15 alumni
• Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs):
  • EIP8390: Remove the sync committee
  • EIP8394: Post quantum ready deposit contract
  • EIP8396: Keystore expired actor pruning
  • EIP8397: Frame authenticator signatures
  • Composable native account abstraction:
    • EIP8398: Native account abstraction transactions
    • EIP8401: Portable account keystore
    • EIP8402: Advanced account controls
  • Proposal to create EIP Coordinator role

Staking

• Client diversity:
  • Consensus layer: Lighthouse ~51% (data may not be accurate)
• Staking market share: Lido 21% [Note: dual governance]
• Validators: 903k active (target 128k), 18k accumulating (0x02 withdrawal credentials)
• Client releases:
  • Execution layer:
    • Erigon v3.6: Caplin block production reliability increased, pruned nodes reclaim old state snapshots, plain commitment snapshots, faster state access & snapshot maintenance; receipts cache off by default
    • Lambda ethrex v25.0.0: EIP8079 native rollups initial implementation, optional historical chain backfill & signed stateless validator artifacts; transaction pool requires non zero priority fee & replacing a pooled transaction requires a fee bump

Layer 2

• Lighter (ZK rollup) block proving time reduced from ~5.3 minutes to ~1 minute

Regulation

• Roman Storm update: acquittal motion still undecided, retrial pushed to April 26, 2027

General

• OpenAI Hugging Face July incident: swarm of models coordinated via message boards they created, gained internet access & chained security exploits to access Hugging Face systems

Editor: @abcoathup
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