• Coinbase Ethereum validator report.

• Hoodi Ethereum testnet goes live.

• Mantle Network integrates EigenDA.

• Ethereum PoS CO² savings.

Coinbase published its first Ethereum validator performance report, detailing its staking operations, including uptime, participation rate, client diversity, and validator distribution. The report highlights that Coinbase stakes 3.84 million ETH across 120,000 validators, representing 11.42% of total staked ETH. With a 99.75% uptime and participation rate, Coinbase has maintained a track record of zero-slashing events. Its validators are distributed across five countries—Japan, Singapore, Ireland, Germany, and Hong Kong—and operate on Lighthouse, Prysm, Geth, and Nethermind clients. Coinbase says it plans to release Ethereum validator performance metrics more regularly.

Hoodi, a new long-term Ethereum testnet, is now live, providing staking operators and infrastructure providers with a reliable environment for validator testing. The Pectra hard fork will activate on Hoodi on March 26, 2025. Hoodi replaces the Holesky testnet, which encountered extensive inactivity leaks and a prolonged exit queue due to a deposit contract configuration issue. Hoodi is now the primary testnet for infrastructure and staking provider testing. Holesky will be phased out by September 2025. Hoodi features a similar configuration and validator count to Ethereum. Meanwhile, Sepolia will continue to serve as the primary testnet for applications, with a planned replacement expected in 2026. Hoodi is named after the Hoodi metro station in India.

Mantle Network, an EVM-compatible rollup, has fully integrated EigenDA for data availability, making it the largest network by TVL to adopt EigenDA. The upgrade provides Mantle a 20x improvement in censorship resistance, expanding from 10 to over 200 operators securing data, significantly reducing downtime risks. EigenDA now safeguards $1.3 billion in TVL and enables 15MB/s throughput capacity for Mantle. EigenDA’s economic security is backed by 4.3 million restaked ETH and 391.6 million restaked EIGEN on EigenLayer. Mantle functions similarly to a Validium by processing both computation and data storage offchain.

• Ethereum PoS CO² savings

• Celo L2 hard fork party

• Liquity V2 audit competition

• Flaunch introduces revenue manager

• Base gas target is 29 Mgas/s

• Privy raises $40m in total funding

See disclosures

• Obol launches a token incentives program.

• Coinbase introduces Verified Pools.

• Moonwell launches on OP Mainnet.

• Spark announces RWA winners.

Obol launched the OBOL Incentives Program, allocating 12.5 million OBOL tokens in incentives to reward users who stake ETH on Obol Distributed Validators. For the first year, 240,000 OBOL tokens will be distributed each week to participating ETH stakers. OBOL serves as the protocol’s governance, staking, and utility token. To participate, users can stake ETH on Obol Distributed Validators (DVs) through a qualified partner like Chorus One, EtherFi, Swell, or Stakewise, or by running their own distributed validator via Squad Staking. Rewards are based on the total ETH supplied and will begin accruing on March 24, 2025.  

Coinbase introduced Verified Pools, a curated set of onchain liquidity pools accessible only to users with Coinbase Verifications credentials. Built on Uniswap v4, Verified Pools use hooks to integrate compliance via Coinbase Verifications while optimizing liquidity management. The pools are now live on Base. Users can connect to Verified Pools through Prime Onchain Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, or select third-party wallets. Coinbase Verifications, powered by the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS), attests to the ownership of a verified Coinbase account and country of residence, enhancing security and sybil resistance.

Moonwell, a lending protocol built on Morpho, launched its first lending vault on OP Mainnet. Users can now deposit into the Moonwell Flagship USDC vault on OP Mainnet, which is designed to provide optimized, risk-adjusted returns from blue-chip collateral markets. The vault is curated by BlockAnalitica and B Protocol, who strategically allocate funds across Morpho Markets. The vault offers liquidity for the ETH/USDC and wstETH/USDC Morpho Isolated Markets on OP Mainnet, generating interest for depositors. Moonwell also launched Virtual Accounts on OP Mainnet, enabling users to receive payments in a U.S. bank account that are converted to USDC. Moonwell is a top 10 DeFi protocol on Base, with over $100 million in TVL.

Spark announced the winners of the Tokenization Grand Prix, a competition that directs $1 billion in reserves toward tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). The three selected winners are BlackRock's BUIDL fund, Superstate's USTB fund, and Centrifuge's JTRSY fund, with $500M allocated to BUIDL, $300M to USTB, and $200M to JTRSY. The final allocations are subject to approval by Sky governance in April 2025. The initiative aims to drive stablecoin adoption in DeFi by boosting liquidity and diversification within the Spark Liquidity Layer. The competition evaluated 39 applications, focusing on pricing, liquidity, and strategic alignment.

• EigenLayer launches on ZKsync

• Interopolis onsite in Athens

• U.S. Treasury defies court ruling

• Technical deep dive into ZKP2P

• ENS $27.8m revenue in 2024

• Harvard research on OSS

See disclosures

• Besu postmortem on Holesky chain split.

• Offchain Labs introduces Onchain Labs.

• Aave V3 goes live on Celo.

• ELI5 on Ethereum validator exits.

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The Besu team released a postmortem analyzing changes in Ethereum’s specifications and Besu’s codebase that led to the omission of the deposit contract address for the Holesky and Sepolia testnets, which led to a supermajority chain split on Holesky. The report found that EIP-6110 only specified the Mainnet deposit contract address, leaving testnet addresses unspecified. There was also no cross-client verification mechanism for contract configurations. By default, the Besu client uses the Mainnet address when no testnet address is provided. To prevent similar issues, Besu recommends that Ethereum clients standardize configurations, avoid relying on defaults, fail early when values are missing, and explicitly include testnet configurations in specifications.

Offchain Labs, in collaboration with the Arbitrum DAO, introduced Onchain Labs—an initiative dedicated to supporting emerging apps on Arbitrum. Onchain Labs will provide early-stage teams with general product and go-to-market guidance, leveraging Arbitrum’s 100-250ms block times and broad compatibility through Stylus to foster industry-leading innovation. Committed to fair launches, Onchain Labs will focus on experimental projects. The first project will be unveiled soon.

Aave V3 is now live on Celo, an L2 built on the OP Stack, making it the 14th supported chain on Aave. Users can now supply or borrow CELO, USDC, USDT, cUSD, and cEUR on the network.  Aave is the largest DeFi lending protocol with over $17 billion in TVL. Celo will complete its migration to an L2 on March 26, 2025.

• ELI5: Ethereum Validator Exits

• OKX shuts down DEX aggregator

• Wolrdcoin introduces Razer ID verified

• Namespace releases Dev Portal

• Ekubo Protocol V2 goes live

• Ethena introduces Converge

• Robinhood launches prediction markets

• Khalani introduces HyperFlow

See disclosures