• Vitalik outlines future improvements for Ethereum.

• Base becomes the largest rollup by TVL on protocols.

Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin published a blog post discussing potential improvements to Ethereum’s proof-of-stake (PoS) system, focusing on both technical and economic challenges. He emphasized the need for single-slot finality and a lower minimum staking requirement, noting that the current 32 ETH minimum is the main barrier preventing wider solo staker participation.

Buterin proposed achieving single-slot finality (SSF), which would allow blocks to be finalized within a single 12-second slot, and reducing the staking requirement to 1 ETH to encourage more solo stakers. Currently, block finality takes 2-3 epochs or about 15 minutes. To address the challenges of validating a large number of transactions and operational costs for validators, Buterin suggested three potential solutions:

The first is using ZK-SNARKs to process millions of signatures efficiently. The second is implementing Orbit Committees to reduce overhead by selecting a random subset of validators to finalize each block. And third, is introducing a two-tiered staking system where higher-tier stakers provide finality while lower-tier stakers participate in other roles.

Base has become the largest rollup by total value locked (TVL) across protocols on the network. According to Defillama, Base now holds $2.5 billion in assets locked across 366 protocols, surpassing Arbitrum’s $2.4 billion in TVL. Data from GrowThePie also reveals that Base leads in active addresses, with approximately 1.5 million users. Launched by Coinbase in August 2023, Base has gained traction, overtaking OP Mainnet in TVL within its first year. Recently, the network has maintained a throughput of 70 transactions per second (TPS) and achieved a new high of 6 million daily transactions.

• drand VRF available for all EVM chains

• Optimism introduces Supersim

• Unichain testnet is live on Uniswap

• Coinbase Wallet to support direct deposit

• Erigion blog on gas limit increase

• DeeKay suffers wallet compromise

• Introducing: NoirCon 0

• PUFFER claims go live

• Ithaca raises $20 million for its L2 project.

• Proposal to optimize for blob target increase.

• Dune will support data for World Chain.

• Base refreshes its website.

Ethereum community member Francis Li has shared a proposal to increase the blob target to 5 and the maximum blob count to 8 on Ethereum, with a focus on ensuring that local block builders have adequate upload bandwidth to support the increase. The proposal suggests three key optimizations to achieve this goal.

The first is the implementation of engine_getBlobsV1, an extension to the execution APIs that enables nodes to directly retrieve blobs from the execution layer, minimizing reliance on the Consensus Layer for data distribution and reducing upload bandwidth requirements. The second recommendation is to disable flood publishing, which would reduce the need to broadcast data to every peer.

Lastly, the proposal suggests adopting the IDONTWANT protocol, a feature of the libp2p networking stack that allows nodes to signal to their peers not to resend specific messages, thus cutting down on redundant network traffic. According to the proposal, the optimizations make the increase to a 5 target / 8 max blob configuration feasible.

Ithaca, a new spin-off project from Paradigm, raised $20 million to build a crypto technology stack that includes its own Layer 2 network built on the OP Stack, developed with Reth and Conduit. Coined as Odyssey, the L2 network is now live on the Sepolia testnet and supports features like EOF, EIP-7702, EIP-2537, and RIP-7212. Georgios Konstantopoulos, Paradigm's CTO, will lead Ithaca as CEO. Contributors and maintainers of open-source projects like Reth and Foundry are also part of the Ithaca team. Ithaca aims to accelerate crypto adoption by focusing on smart wallet development, including chain and bridging abstraction features.

Dune Analytics, a platform for querying blockchain data using SQL, announced plans to support World Chain, an identity-focused L2 network built on the OP Stack. Support will go live once World Chain goes live mainnet. Dune will provide tools for creating visualizations and analyzing onchain identity data specific to World Chain. World Chain will power the Worldcoin protocol, which currently operates on OP mainnet. The network will give priority block space to wallet addresses that are verified through World ID's Proof of Personhood credentials, aiming to reduce spam and bot activity. Nearly 7 million users have verified their World ID with a Worldcoin Orb.

• ACDC #198 summary

• ePBS Breakout #11 notes 

• Base.org website refresh

• TEE is a trustmebro model

• Blobs market will eventually saturate

• Base maintains 70 TPS

• Webhash launches a Genesis Pass

• Optimism vs Arbitrum comparison

Uniswap introduced Unichain, a DeFi-focused L2 built on the OP Stack. Unichain is now live on testnet with a mainnet launch planned later this year. Unichain will be part of the Superchain and Uniswap Labs will become a core contributor to the OP Stack. Unichain will also support native Superchain Interoperability. Native interoperability enables seamless cross-chain message-passing between OP Stack chains. The SuperchainERC20 standard will eliminate the need for multiple bridged asset versions. Unichain will also support cross-chain intents standard ERC-7683, extending interoperability to the broader Ethereum ecosystem. Unichain features an initial 1-second confirmation time, which helps mitigate MEV. By having faster block times, the chain creates more stable market conditions, thereby reducing opportunities for MEV exploitation. According to Uniswap, Unichain will be approximately 95% cheaper than Ethereum L1.

This story was featured in Episode 571.