• Optimism releases a guide to Season 7 governance.

• Discussion on increasing the gas limit.

• EF seeks to hire a Protocol Security Engineer.

Optimism released its guide to Season 7 Governance, the next phase of the Optimism Collective, starting on January 16, 2025. Season 7 focuses on advancing the Superchain Product Vision, with interoperability as the core intent. The goal is to achieve Stage 1 interoperable chains processing $250m in monthly cross-chain asset transfers. Key priorities for the season include governance enhancements to facilitate interoperability, protocol upgrades to enable cross-chain functionality, delegation of funding decisions through missions and councils, and continued progress toward technical decentralization. OP Delegates will soon vote on Missions and the ratification of the Interoperability Blockspace Charter.

Ethereum educator Anthony Sassano called for a community temperature check on raising the block gas limit on Ethereum. Sassano supports a phased increase in increments of 10 million, starting from the current 30 million gas limit to 60 million. Gnosis founder Martin Köppelmann also advocates for an increase to 40 million. A 10 million gas increment could potentially reduce Layer 1 transaction fees by an estimated 15-33%. Notably, implementing a gas limit increase does not require a hard fork; validators can adopt the change by adjusting their node configurations. Several solo stakers, including mariano.eth—who spearheads the pumpthegas.org initiative—have already set their gas limit to 40 million.

The Ethereum Foundation is looking to hire a Protocol Security Engineer to join its Protocol Security Research Team. The role focuses on enhancing the security of the Ethereum protocol through activities such as auditing the software stack (including execution and consensus layer clients), developing fuzzers for the protocol’s networking layer, conducting security research, and collaborating with client teams and researchers to mitigate security risks. The position is fully remote and open to candidates worldwide.

• Support Roman Storm’s defense

• Introducing Lens Groups

• Bonsai AI agent

• Presentation: Ethereum as a commons

• Base surpasses $80b volume on Uniswap

• 15 open roles at Arbitrum

• SEC Chairman Gary Gensler resigns.

• Court strikes down the SEC’s Dealer Rule.

• The Graph introduces GRC-20.

• Celestia outlines its Lazybridging endgame.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler announced his resignation from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), effective January 20, 2025. Appointed in April 2021, Gensler gained a reputation for aggressively pursuing enforcement actions against crypto projects, including ConsenSys, Uniswap, Coinbase, and Kraken. Gensler faced criticism for inconsistent statements about what constitutes a security and for urging crypto projects to “come in and register” while providing little regulatory clarity on digital asset classifications. The resignation coincides with the inauguration of a new administration, signaling a shift toward more friendly crypto regulation.

A U.S. court ruled against the SEC’s recently implemented Dealer Rule, striking it down and rendering it unenforceable. The lawsuit was brought by the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas and the Blockchain Association, two nonprofit organizations advocating for cryptocurrency policy. The plaintiffs argued that the rule unlawfully targeted entities operating in DeFi markets. The court found that the SEC exceeded its statutory authority under the Exchange Act, concluding that the rule’s definition of "dealer" improperly included activities that fall outside the traditional scope of securities dealing. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams said the decision was a big win for DeFi. 

The Graph, a blockchain indexing protocol, introduced GRC-20, a proposed data standard aimed at structuring, sharing, and connecting information across applications. By creating a common language for knowledge, GRC-20 seeks to enable verifiable, open, and composable applications. The framework is built around three key components: Spaces, Entities, and Types. Spaces organize knowledge into public, personal, or private groups. Entities represent concepts or objects as nodes, with relations connecting them. Types provide structure by defining the fields and attributes of entities. GRC-20 is currently in a draft phase and is open for public feedback.

Celestia outlined its Lazybridging endgame, a proposed feature designed to deliver a seamless user experience for interacting across multiple rollups and blockchains. Lazybridging seeks to simplify interactions, making them as intuitive and straightforward as using a single chain. The feature leverages Celestia's single-slot finality and advancements in ZK proving to enable fast and efficient asset transfers across chains.

• Case for EIP-7732 in Fusaka

• MORPHO delegation is live

• Presentation: ETH is permissionless money

• L2Beat integrates UOPS metric

• Introducing too many bridges

• Renzo integrates Coinbase validators

• Charles Schwab gets into spot crypto market

• Solana ETF 19b-4 filings

• Coinbase Wallet supports USDC rewards.

• Trump team considers a crypto policy role.

Coinbase Wallet, Coinbase's non-custodial wallet, now offers USDC rewards with an APY of up to 4.7%. Users can earn rewards by holding USDC in their Coinbase Wallet and activating the feature on the USDC asset page. Rewards are available for USDC held on Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, and Optimism. Reward payouts are made monthly to a user’s wallet on Base. The feature is available to most users globally, with support for U.S. users being rolled out this week. Coinbase Wallet also offers zero-fee USDC transfers on Base. USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market cap and the largest natively minted asset on Base.

President-Elect Donald Trump's team is evaluating the creation of a dedicated White House role for cryptocurrency policy, according to Bloomberg. If established, the role would be the first position of its kind, with responsibilities spanning crypto regulation. The role would also act as a bridge between Congress, the White House, and federal agencies like the SEC and CFTC. Trump has supported the crypto industry, pledging to dismiss SEC Chair Gary Gensler as part of his campaign promises. This week, he reportedly met with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and crypto lawyer Teresa Goody Guillén is under consideration for the role of SEC Chair.

• Geth v1.14.12 release

• Superlane to support SuperERC20

• New Farcaster onboarding flow

• Protocol Guild plans a new logo design

• Ethereum the real dope song

• 60k tokens launched on pump.fun today

• Bitcoin protection strategy ETF

• Bitcoin hits $94,800 ATH