Post quantum & post AI urgency at DEFCON 2-3, Ethlabs proposed pqai27 & withdrew quick slots from Hegotá upgrade, Glamsterdam gas repricing findings due November 16
Ecosystem
- Post quantum & post AI:
- Potuz (Prysm): commit to post quantum as priority
- Ethlabs pqai27: proposal for post quantum & post AI Ethereum in 2027
- Ship execution layer upgrade (Bogotá) as soon as ready, with Frame transactions, post quantum signature scheme & account EIPs
- Ship consensus layer upgrade (Heze) separately with post quantum consensus (Gasper or decoupled consensus), potentially without FOCIL
- Glamsterdam upgrade:
- Marius van der Wijden (EF) EIP8037/EIP8038 update:
- Vitalik: ETH as store of value (SoV) better to focus on than ETH as fee burning token due to decentralization & CROPS and fee burning never as strong as it seemed
- ETHGlobal:
- ETHGlobal Mumbai hackathon finalists from 622 projects
- IRL 2027 hackathons: Cannes (April 14-16), New York (June 14-16), Tokyo (August 23-25) & Lisbon (October 13-15)
- ETH metrics:
- Gas (gwei): 0.2 average, 0 - 4.5 (13.7 for zero net issuance)
- ETH supply: 122.2M, 21k net issuance
- ETHUSD: $1,905 - $2,249 (all time high $4,946, August 24, 2025)
- ETHBTC: 0.028 (0.165 for the Flippening)
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Enterprise
- Deutsche Bank digital asset custody live for European corporate & institutional clients, includes ETH & selected stablecoins (USDC, EURC & EURAU)
- PNC incoming USDC payments pilot for eligible corporate & institutional clients, auto converted into USD, powered by Coinbase Payment products
Applications
- Aave: LlamaRisk proposal to focus Aave V3 Core on liquid, blue chip collateral
- Phylax circuit breakers on mainnet, applications define rules (outcomes they don’t want) & Titan Builder won’t include transactions that violate rules in blocks they build
- RollingChat: private messaging board on Aztec Network
Developers
- Argot Collective Fe (language):
- Fe 26.6.0: adds I/O as effects for native programs, destructors, HashMap, improved text processing, packed contract fields (breaking storage layout change), Solidity panic codes & experimental WebAssembly backend
- Reminder: Fe builders challenge, $5k in prizes, register by November 17
- Nomic Foundation Hardhat v3.22.0 (dev framework): expands & improves experimental Glamsterdam upgrade support (adds EIP8038 state access repricing)
- Application layer standards (ERCs):
- ERC8489: Agent information flow paradigm
- ERC8490: Agent meditation mechanism
- ERC8492: Settlement deductions for task escrows
- ERC8493: Onchain URI scheme
- ERC8494: Institution managed user payment ledger
- ERC8495: Token metadata JSON schema
- ERC8498: Namespaced state transitions for soulbound tokens
- ERC8499: Hash based key derivation from BIP-39
Security
- Reminder: TheDAO Security Fund ETHSecurity initiatives round, $915k+ pledged so far, initiatives need 25% of budget raised & $200k or less funding gap to qualify for share of up to 400 ETH (all or nothing) allocation voted by badge holders starting mid November
All core devs (main protocol calls)
All core devs - consensus (ACDC) #191
- Post quantum & post AI:
- Recap of Mumbai L1 R&D workshops & working sessions: what could aggressive roadmap look like, Q day estimate now 2029 down from 2032 just 12 months ago
- DEFCON: urgency between 2 & 3
- Justin Drake (EF): investigating if cryptographic breaks already found & withheld
- FOCIL: potentially postpone depending on post quantum impact & Frame transactions interaction
- Decoupled consensus: can only be post quantum, BLS decoupled consensus is dead
- LeanVM: targeting production readiness in January for security reviews in February
- Post quantum TLS: ~80% of consensus layer network already using it
- Hegotá upgrade (targeting 2027):
- 1 EIP Proposed for Inclusion (PFI) out of band:
- EIP8483 post quantum material registration, can start accepting registrations prior to upgrade
- 1 EIP Declined for Inclusion (DFI):
- EIP8198 quick slots, withdrawn by Ethlabs due to post quantum focus
- 1 EIP Proposed for Inclusion (PFI) out of band:
- I* upgrade:
- Naming: signal preferences for I* name
- Ben Edgington first call as ACDC facilitator
Layer 1
- Glamsterdam upgrade:
- Ethereum improvement proposals (EIPs):
Staking
- Ethereum Validators Association (EVA) issuance change debate: Jérôme de Tychey for & Pol Lanski against
- Client diversity (proposed blocks over 7 days based on graffiti):
- Consensus layer: Prysm 37%, Lighthouse 36%
- Execution layer: Geth 60%
- Validators: 804k active (target 128k), 25k accumulating (44% of active ETH)
- Client releases:
- Consensus layer:
- Sigma Prime Lighthouse v8.3.3 (high priority): security fixes; bug reports behind the scenes
- Execution layer:
- Paradigm Reth v2.11.0 (high priority): unbounded RPC calls can be capped or cancelled, parallelized EIP7702 authorization recovery, P2P skips decoding unrequested responses, cheaper overlay provider setup & correctness fixes
- Consensus layer:
Regulation
- US Department of Justice: coordinated actions against North Korean crypto theft schemes, includes seizure of FaceStealer infrastructure & court authorization to seize/restrain $1.2B+ stolen from Binance
- US FinCEN: prohibits transmitting funds involving MEXC Global (CEX), effective December 10
General
- Gnosis Pay data breach of legacy system powering Gnosis Pay branded cards
- Across domain compromise via Namecheap (domain registrar)
- Ledger: signing SDK sends transaction details to Ledger servers for Clear Signing lookup, transaction data isn’t stored
- Trezor (hardware wallet) CryptoBilis investigation, 3 Trezor Safe 5s bought between August 20 & September 23 found with implant, no customer funds reported lost, firmware update stops implant from capturing data, reseller network cut by ~80%
Editor: @abcoathup
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