ZKsync Introduces Airbender Prime

Happy Tuesday, October 13, 2026.

ZKsync introduces the Airbender Prime real-time Ethereum prover. Lido consolidates 1.8 million ETH. Rain introduces embedded wallets. And Interactive Brokers enables ETH staking on its brokerage.

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ZKsync Introduces Airbender Prime

ZKsync introduced Airbender Prime, its latest Ethereum prover capable of real-time proving on a single GPU. Airbender Prime is open-source, based on RISC-V, and built for post-quantum security by using hash-based STARKs with GKR sumcheck, WHIR polynomial commitments, and BLAKE2s; its planned L1 proofs will use Keccak-256 commitments instead of BN254 pairings.

In a test on one NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell, it proved 99% of 7,200 consecutive Ethereum mainnet blocks in under 10 seconds each, including witness preparation. Every block finished in under 12 seconds. The release leads ETHproofs’ public leaderboard for reported average proving time, GPU efficiency, and cost, with two- and four-GPU configurations listed alongside the single-GPU test.

Lower proof-generation hardware requirements make independently verifiable ledger updates practical for more institutions and operators. Today every validator re-executes the whole block to check it. With real-time proofs, they can simply verify a small proof in milliseconds. Real-time proving will replace re-execution with ZK proofs at the L1.

Lido Migrates 1.8m ETH To 0x02

Lido has migrated 1.8 million ETH from Lido Core validators with 0x01 withdrawal credentials to 0x02 credentials over the past month. The migration is part of its 8.4 million ETH validator consolidation to Lido's new Curated Module v2. Network-wide, 0x02 validators now hold roughly 40% of Ethereum’s staked ETH.

The move follows Lido’s first onchain migration and its Lido Core upgrade. The full migration is intended to move more than 265,000 legacy validators into roughly 4,000 active validators with compoundable balances. EIP-7251 (MaxEB), shipped in Pectra, allows validators with 0x02 withdrawal credentials to hold an effective balance of up to 2,048 ETH. Lido estimates its completed migration could reduce Ethereum’s validator set by about 30% and cut consensus attestation traffic by approximately 29% per epoch.

Rain Introduces Embedded Wallets

Rain, a stablecoin card issuer, introduced embedded, non-custodial wallets. Projects can integrate the wallet into their apps and can enable access to Rain's cards, virtual accounts, onramps, offramps, rewards, and payout integrations. The wallet keys are stored in the device's secure enclave. Users can sign in using passkeys, email, or SMS. Apps can choose whether to sponsor gas for each transaction.

Rain allows users to spend stablecoin balances using its Visa cards. The embedded wallets are now available with support for Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Celo, Optimism, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche, Arbitrum, ZKsync, Monad, Solana, and Plasma. Rain says it plans to add yield-generation for stablecoin balances later this year.

Interactive Brokers Adds ETH Staking

Interactive Brokers launched ETH staking for eligible clients through its Client Portal, with zerohash providing the custodial staking service. ETH is the only asset available for staking among the 20 digital assets supported by the brokerage. Staking rewards are credited as additional staked ETH and can compound while the position remains staked. Interactive Brokers is a U.S. brokerage with about 5.5 million client accounts and roughly $964 billion in client equity.

Misc News

Protocol Guild has distributed $40M in total funding to Ethereum core contributors. L2BEAT releases its privacy challenge results. Sourcify introduces Onlay, a view-only tool for checking Ethereum transaction data before signing.

ETHConf is hosting Ethereum Stablecoin Summit on 19th October. Alchemix releases its Q2 2026 Financial Report. LF Decentralized Trust publishes its 2026 report. infiniFi announces its INFI token and TGE. Trezor reduces its number of resellers.

The OCC fined Bank of America $1.2 billion for money laundering, which probably means the bank laundered hundreds of billions or even trillions. Base introduces earn and borrow as a product. And Aave approves incentives for Coinbase Tokenized Stocks.

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