Ethereum And Base Split On Account Abstaction

Happy Monday, September 14, 2026.

Ethereum core developers and Base remain split on a unified account abstraction standard. Balancer governance proposes an orderly protocol wind down. Robinhood outlines plans for 1:1 in-kind stock token redemptions and proxy voting. And 0x warns that over 80% of analyzed Uniswap v4 hooks are malicious or spoof aggregator quotes.

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Ethereum Base AA Standards Diverge

Ethereum core developers and Base engineers were unable to agree on a unified account abstraction standard and have decided to pursue their own implementations, according to Ethlabs member Derek Chiang. The decision comes as teams planned to collaborate on a unified standard amid scoping decisions for Ethereum's Hegotá upgrade. Base engineer Lukas confirmed that Base will proceed in shipping EIP-8130 in an upgrade later this year, bringing native batch transactions, gas abstraction, performant key types, and key rotation via portable Keystores. In parallel, Ethereum L1 contributors have advanced EIP-8141 Frame Transactions as a headliner of the Hegotá upgrade.

Builders view the parallel paths as a natural decoupling of execution layers. ZeroDev engineer Taek noted that AllCoreDevs is designed for Ethereum core protocol development rather than mandating execution semantics across independent EVM chains. Allowing networks to optimize for distinct architectural tradeoffs enables rollups to deliver commercial UX and immediate scaling while L1 hardens base-layer guarantees. As distinct account models deploy across ecosystems, multi-chain wallets and application developers will need to decide how they will approach abstraction and chain-specific transactions.

Balancer Proposes Orderly Wind Down

A new governance proposal is seeking to wind down the Balancer protocol and dissolve its DAO, with $9 million in remaining treasury assets slated for BAL token holders. The proposal comes from Balancer core contributor Marcus Hardt, who outlined challenging headwinds since the Balancer exploit in November 2025. The orderly wind down proposal would transition pausable contract pools into withdrawals-only mode and set protocol fees to zero for non-pausable pools.

If approved, the Balancer DAO's treasury will be distributed in kind and pro rata to circulating BAL holders. The proposal requests a capped budget of $400,000 to fund a minimal transition team and manage an eight-month phased sunset from November 1, 2026 through June 30, 2027. No action is required from Balancer users while discussion is underway. BAL token holders will vote on whether to proceed with the wind down, with Snapshot voting expected to open as early as September 24, 2026.

Robinhood Adds In-Kind Redemptions

Robinhood plans to add 1:1 in-kind share redemptions and shareholder voting rights for eligible Robinhood Stock Token holders, according to Johann Kerbrat, SVP and GM of International and Crypto at Robinhood. All Stock Tokens are currently backed 1:1 by physical shares held in custody, with the economic equivalent of dividends added to the asset backing. When a new token mints, Robinhood purchases a share on secondary equity markets.

Kerbrat stated that redemptions and corporate governance features are in active development as the company scales token adoption. Robinhood plans to route shareholder voting through Say by Robinhood, its native shareholder engagement and proxy voting platform. The announcement comes as Robinhood Stock Tokens surpass $170 million in total value locked and near $50 billion in DEX volume on Robinhood Chain.

0x Warns Of Malicious Hooks

0x Project warned that an alarming surge of malicious Uniswap v4 hooks are actively manipulating quotes to steal from traders across DeFi aggregators, wallets, and trading interfaces. 0x conducted an analysis of 84,163 hooks across six networks using static, dynamic, and settlement-level trade observation. It determined that only 19.4% of hooks are safe, while 54.2% are malicious and another 26.4% are likely malicious.

Bad actors can leverage v4 hooks to display tight quotes to aggregator routing engines, only to then alter pricing parameters or inject punitive fee spikes at trade execution. 0x says these spoofing tactics inspect the EVM execution environment or randomly alternate parameters, causing settled trades to deliver as much as 50% less capital than originally quoted. The team documented live hooks charging hidden fees as high as 18% on active pairs, extracting hundreds of thousands of dollars from users with loose slippage tolerance settings.

Misc News

Ethlabs delivered its week 12 update. Glamsterdam successfully activated devnet-11. Etherscan supports Robinhood Chain. Vitalik shares a post on governance design for AI safety. Zoth goes live on Base. And Token Terminal releases an Ethereum Q2 report.

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