• Ethereum Validators Association announced.

• Article on benchmarking zkVMs.

• State of Crypto 2025 report.

• Octant announces Epoch 9 results.

The Ethereum Validators Association (EVA) announced its organization for improving Ethereum validator representation in protocol development. Created by the Ethereum Community Foundation (ECF), the EVA provides a unified structure for validator coordination, research, transparency, and governance. The EVA will build open dashboards for validator performance, conduct research on validator economics and MEV, and launch a verified signaling system for validators to cast non-binding votes on EIPs. Membership is open to any node operator with at least one active validator. The association will formally launch at an event during Devconnect ARG on November 20th.

The Ethereum Foundation’s zkEVM team published an article outlining benchmarking principles and framework components for zkVMs. The goal of zkVM benchmarking is to ensure Ethereum’s scalability and security by validating that ZK-based block proving is both feasible and performant in real-world and worst-case scenarios. The main objective is to determine whether zkVMs can achieve real-time proving (RTP), generating proofs quickly enough to keep up with block production. zkVMs should be tested using Ethereum-specific workloads, stressing hashing, precompiles, and state access patterns, rather than synthetic benchmarks. The long-term goal is to make zkEVMs viable for use on Ethereum Layer 1.

Investment firm a16z released the State of Crypto 2025 report, highlighting how the crypto industry has matured this year, driven by global adoption, regulatory clarity, institutional participation, and technological readiness. The report ranks Ethereum and Base as the #1 and #2 ecosystems chosen by builders. The industry reached all-time highs in market capitalization, active users, and developer activity, while financial institutions are adopting crypto through stablecoins and tokenized assets. The report also highlights a shift in U.S. policy that has legitimized crypto. Looking ahead, a16z predicts crypto will be integrated into everyday finance, payments, and consumer applications.

Public goods funding platform Octant announced the results of its Epoch 9 funding round, distributing roughly $1 million in matching funds to 30 Ethereum content creators. Conducted in collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation, it marks Octant’s first round dedicated specifically to Ethereum-focused creators. The top three recipients were onchain investigator ZachXBT, tech media outlet The Rage, and web3 education collective Crypto Altruists. Octant funds public goods using ETH staking yields generated by the Golem Foundation.

• Ethereum Berlin Hub

• a16z TVL dashboards

• Prysm client optimizations

• zkVM verifiers are open-source

• SharpLink buys 19k ETH

• Lido Direct Staking on Linea

• Fed mentions x402

• Gemini on open banking rule

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed

• Code Is Law film is now streaming.

• Coinbase acquires Echo for $375m.

• Debates over Polygon PoS’s L2 status.

• Shutter introduces Permanent Private Voting.

Code Is Law, a feature documentary exploring crypto hacks through the lens of the “code is law” philosophy, is now streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vimeo, and YouTube. The film traces key hacks, including The DAO hack in 2016, the Indexed Finance exploit in 2021, and the KyberSwap exploit in 2023. The film features Ethereum community members Griff Green and Lefteris Karapetsas, who both played crucial roles in The DAO’s creation and recovery efforts. The film also traces hackers Andean Medjedovic and Avi Eisenberg, both of whom invoked “code is law,” the notion that if code executes as written, its outcomes are valid, as part of their legal defense.

Coinbase acquired Echo, the onchain capital-raising platform founded by crypto influencer Cobie, in a deal valued at $375 million in cash and stock. The total includes a $25 million NFT purchase by Coinbase for a new season of UpOnly TV, which is co-hosted by Cobie. Echo enables direct community-driven fundraising through both private and public token sales. Coinbase plans to integrate Echo’s tools to simplify how crypto teams raise capital from their communities while giving investors early access to emerging opportunities. Since its launch in April 2024, Echo has facilitated over $200 million in funding across more than 300 deals. 

Growthepie co-founder Matze announced openness to adding Polygon PoS to its Ethereum ecosystem analytics tracker, following Polygon leadership's concerns about a lack of recognition within the Ethereum community. The debate was sparked by an Ethereum Foundation (EF) chart highlighting developer growth across Ethereum L1 and L2s, which categorized Polygon PoS separately. Polygon PoS has processed billions of transactions and powers apps like Polymarket, which is highlighted as a win for Ethereum. Per L2Beat standards, Polygon PoS is not yet classified as an L2 due to its lack of full data availability (DA) posting to Ethereum and the absence of a proof system anchored to Ethereum.

Shutter Network, an open-source threshold-encryption protocol, released a proof-of-concept for Permanent Shielded Voting in collaboration with Snapshot. The integration builds on its existing Shielded Voting mechanism on Snapshot to enable private voting for all DAOs. The implementation hides votes during and, in the upgraded model, after voting, while still enabling a verifiable audit.

• Gitcoin privacy round goes live

• Road to Core Solidity blog series

• EIP-7825 explained

• EF multisig migrates wallets

• Syndicate AVS Sequencer Network

• Maple syrupUSDT added to Aave

• Base is building private txs

• Farcaster channel spaces

• Trezor introduces Safe 7

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.

Gm frENS. It's only Monday, but it's been busy!

• The Holešky testnet begins its sunset process.

• An AWS outage impacts RPC providers.

• Primev releases a Fast RPC endpoint.

• Vitalik outlines the GKR Protocol.

• Nethermind v1.35 with 60m gas limit.

The Holešky testnet has started its scheduled shut down process. The testnet has been set to go offline two weeks after the Fusaka upgrade finalized on the testnet, which occurred on October 1. Application and tooling developers are encouraged to migrate to the Sepolia testnet, while staking infrastructure providers are advised to transition to the Hoodi testnet. Holešky was launched on September 28, 2023, as a proof-of-stake testnet intended to replace Goerli. At genesis, it featured an active validator set of 1.46 million, designed for staking infrastructure testing. The network allowed open participation as public validators. Ethereum testnets typically have a lifespan of up to five years.

Amazon’s AWS US-East-1 region experienced a major outage early Monday morning due to a DNS resolution failure in the DynamoDB API endpoint. The outage disrupted numerous AWS services that depend on the region’s endpoints, including DynamoDB Global Tables, IAM, and CloudFront CDN. RPC providers, such as Infura, were impacted, causing its users to experience delays or failures in sending transactions. Some Ethereum validators hosted on AWS also faced temporary disruptions. Notably, Ethereum’s mainnet has maintained near-100% uptime over the past decade.

Ethereum infrastructure provider Primev released a Fast RPC endpoint enabling millisecond transaction preconfirmations on Ethereum L1. Users can add the endpoint to their wallets for faster, more reliable transaction inclusion. In a demo, an ETH transfer was preconfirmed in 377 ms and included in the same block. The implementation leverages mev-commit, a decentralized network of block builders that issue and honor transaction commitments before block inclusion. Preconfirmations provide early transaction confirmation guarantees, improving the user experience. Dapps can also configure the Fast RPC endpoint.

Vitalik Buterin published an article outlining the GKR protocol, a protocol which can power ultra-fast Zero-Knowldege Proof (ZKP) generation used in ZK-EVM and zkML systems. The protocol achieves extreme efficiency by proving large, structured computations like Poseidon hashing or neural network inference without committing to intermediate states. GKR makes real-time zk-proofs feasible, significantly lowering computational overhead while maintaining succinctness.

• Nethermind client v1.35

• Peter shares his 2024 letter to EF

• Sandeep comments on Peter’s letter

• Vitalik praises Sandeep

• ERC-8004 Community Call #2

• Privacy app showcase

• Coinbase buys UpOnly NFT for $25m

• Vaneck files for Lido stETH ETF

• Week in EF protocol research

• Privacy on Ethereum #15

• SER adds payments section

• Hoffman on losing Dankrad

• Lubin comments on Dankrad

• Bitmine buys 63,539 ETH

Disclaimer: Content is for informational purposes only, not endorsement or investment advice. The accuracy of information is not guaranteed.