• Zora announces $ZORA token.

• The EF appoints co-Executive Directors.

• Nethermind supports history expiry.

• Celo announces its L2 launch date.

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NFT creation platform Zora announced plans for its upcoming ZORA token, anticipated to launch on Base in Q2 2025. The token will have a total supply of 10 billion, with 10% allocated for a retroactive airdrop. An initial snapshot for the airdrop was taken on March 3rd, and another is scheduled just before the token's launch. The distribution of ZORA tokens includes 20% for community incentives, 20% for a community treasury, 5% for liquidity, and the remaining 45% for the Zora team and contributors. The ZORA token is a memecoin and will not hold governance rights or ownership in Zora products. Zora has facilitated over $376 million in secondary sales volume and generated over $27 million in creator rewards.

The Ethereum Foundation changed its leadership structure, transitioning from a single Executive Director role, previously held by Aya Miyaguchi, to dual Executive Director roles. The new co-Executive Directors are Hsiao-Wei Wang, a former Ethereum research lead, and Tomasz Stańczak, the CEO of Nethermind, a key Ethereum execution layer client. Together, Hsiao-Wei and Tomasz are set to lead the Ethereum Foundation in fostering the growth of the ecosystem while upholding Ethereum values. Meanwhile, Danny Ryan, a former researcher who was highly sought by the community to be the next Executive Director, has joined Etherealize as a co-founder to grow Ethereum's institutional adoption.

Nethermind released history expiry support on its execution layer client in the 1.31.* releases. The feature allows for the deletion of historical, pre-merge data via ERA files. A consensus among all clients is required to activate the change. All client teams have agreed to remove pre-merge history from full nodes on May 1st. Currently, over 80% of the disk space in Ethereum full nodes is estimated to be occupied by redundant historical data that is not required to validate new blocks. Implementing history expiry will significantly reduce the storage requirements for full nodes, freeing up to 320 GB of disk space and allowing a full node to operate on less than 200 GB.

Celo announced the mainnet activation date of its migration from an EVM-compatible Layer 1 to an OP Stack Layer 2 network, scheduled for March 26th at 3 AM UTC. The upgrade to Celo L2 reduces the block times from 5 seconds to just 1 second, enabling faster transactions for users. The migration also preserves historical transactions from its Layer 1 network. Full nodes on the Celo network are required to upgrade to the new Layer 2 client.

• EF introduces zknox

• SEC closes Yuga investigation

• Nimbus v25.3.0 release

• Blockscout v7.0.0 release

• Holesky alternative devnet

• Third week of Protocol Study

• Coinbase FOIA request on SEC

• Trump approves crypto reserve

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• EF introduces an advisory group.

• Vitalik Buterin outlines steering mechanisms.

• Safe restores services for Arbitrum.

• ZKsync introduces a community program.

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The Ethereum Foundation launched the EF Silviculture Society, an advisory group consisting of eleven external individuals who will offer informal feedback to the foundation. The inaugural members include MilliΞ, Lefteris, Vectorized.eth, and Polar. Vitalik Buterin stated that the roles are unpaid and will serve for one year. The society establishes channels for Ethereum Foundation employees to seek advice from the group. Vitalik also mentioned that there are future plans to include more initiatives and frameworks to involve the community in a broader range of issues and formats.

Vitalik Buterin released a new blog post discussing the integration of AI into democratic systems, where AI serves as an operational tool while humans guide strategic decisions. Emphasizing the importance of credible neutrality, Buterin outlined three steering mechanisms: Futarchy, Distilled Human Judgment, and Deep Funding. In Futarchy, governance decisions are driven by prediction markets. Distilled Human Judgment involves a jury system that answers a large number of questions, focusing on providing high-quality responses to a select few. Deep Funding employs human judgment to allocate credits within a graph structure to reward contributions. The AI and human mechanisms can allow DAOs to operate under human direction without burdening voters with an overwhelming number of decisions.

Safe, the leading provider of smart contract wallets, has restored its wallet services for transactions on Arbitrum One via the safe.global interface. Safe users can also conduct transactions on Ethereum Mainnet. The Safe.Global interface was temporarily disabled last weekend following the $1.5 billion ByBit exploit. Users are urged to thoroughly verify transaction signatures on their hardware devices before approving them. Safe smart accounts are also accessible through alternative interfaces like OnChainDen. Safe plans to restore its front end services on more networks in the coming weeks.

ZKsync introduced the ZKsync Community Program, a six-month initiative designed to recognize and reward significant contributions to the ZKsync ecosystem. The program allocates a total of 5 million ZK tokens in rewards, distributed monthly based on the impact of contributions. Roles such as Moderators, Captains, and Mateys are eligible for rewards, with their contributions being assessed and verified on Gitcoin. The program will kick off on March 7th.

• OpenSea supports Unichain

• OP Labs deprecates custom gas tokens

• Base’s view on the Fusaka fork.

• Holesky recovery update

• BLS consensus issue report

• Fileverse ddocs updates

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• Base implements Flashblocks on testnet.

• Base introduces Smart Wallet Sub Accounts.

• SEC dismises lawsuit against Conensys.

• Holesky validators agree on slashing plan.

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Base implemented Flashblocks on the Base Sepolia testnet, which cuts block times to 200 milliseconds, a significant enhancement from its current 2-second block time. Flashblocks is part of Flashbot's Rollup Boost software that provides sub-blocks that are streamed to nodes at 200-millisecond intervals. It provides fast confirmation times and includes native revert protection. The upgrade will position Base as the fastest EVM-compatible chain, surpassing Solana's speed. Developers can start experimenting with Flashblocks by integrating them via the Base Sepolia Flashblocks RPC endpoint. Uniswap is also adopting Flashblocks to achieve 250-millisecond block times on Unichain. Base plans to implement Flashblocks on Base mainnet in Q2 2025.

Base also introduced Smart Wallet Sub Accounts as part of recent updates aimed at optimizing performance and usability. The feature, incorporated into the Coinbase Smart Wallet, is designed to minimize the complexity of handling multiple accounts and approvals by providing unified account management. Sub accounts simplify the user experience by reducing the number of wallet pop-ups. They feature hierarchical account ownership and customizable spending permissions across applications. Sub accounts are currently live for testing on the Base Sepolia testnet.

Consensys founder Joseph Lubin announced that the SEC has agreed to end its lawsuit against Consensys. The lawsuit, initiated by the SEC in June 2024, accused Consensys of unregistered securities violations, specifically concerning MetaMask Swaps and MetaMask Staking services. The SEC plans to file a formal stipulation to dismiss the case in the coming weeks. Previously, Consensys had sued the SEC for overstepping its authority following subpoenas that demanded extensive details about Consensys's role in the Ethereum Merge. The SEC subsequently withdrew its investigation into Ethereum in 2024. Today’s dismissal follows a trend of the SEC ending enforcement actions against crypto platforms, including Coinbase, OpenSea, and Uniswap.

Holesky testnet validators agreed on a coordinated plan to temporarily disable slashing protection on February 28 at 15:00 UTC. The action aims to quickly finalize an epoch and establish a clean synchronization checkpoint. Validators are advised to continue syncing to the correct chain and maintain their slashing protection until slot 3737760. The Pectra fork on Sepolia will proceed as planned on March 5th at 7:29 UTC. Validators on Sepolia using Geth, Besu, Nethermind, or Lodestar clients must update their software before the scheduled upgrade.

• SEC statement on meme coins

• MetaMask releases logo refresh

• 161.4k ETH laundered via ThorChain

• Growthepie application level metrics

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