New Week In Ethereum 2025-07-18

• 18 July 2025

The Ethereum community is preparing for the upcoming Fusaka upgrade, with a tight timeline targeting mainnet deployment in early November 2025 (before Devconnect).

Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)

• All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #216 (July 17, 2025):
  • Fusaka upgrade:
    • Devnet-2 is running stable with minor issues mainly from Consensus Layer clients.
    • Decision to remove EIP-7907 (increase contract code size) from Fusaka due to complexity and timeline risks.
    • Client teams agreed to launch devnet-3 by July 23.
    • Timeline discussion for Fusaka targeting mainnet in early November (before Devconnect), with concerns about sufficient testnet stability and audit time.
  • Glamsterdam upgrade planning:
    • Execution Layer client teams favor Block-Level Access Lists paired with gas repricing.
    • Consensus Layer teams strongly favor ePBS.
    • FOCIL is popular but potentially conflicts with ePBS in implementation complexity.
    • Teams agreed to finalize headliners by August 21, with continued discussions in upcoming calls.

Fusaka upgrade

• EIP-7907 (increase contract code size) was removed from Fusaka during the ACDE #216 call due to significant unresolved complexity and timeline risks.
• Fusaka-devnet-3 is scheduled to launch by July 23, with client teams reporting stable progress on devnet-2 despite minor issues.
• The upgrade is targeting a tight timeline for mainnet deployment in early November 2025 (before Devconnect), requiring client releases by late August.

Glamsterdam Upgrade

• Client teams are actively discussing potential headliners for the Glamsterdam upgrade, with preferences documented at forkcast.org.
• Execution layer client teams favor Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) with significant gas repricing to achieve meaningful scaling improvements.
• Consensus layer client teams strongly favor ePBS, with wide but not unanimous support.
• FOCIL is popular but seen as potentially conflicting with ePBS in terms of implementation complexity and scope.
• Teams agreed to finalize headliners by August 21, with continued discussions in upcoming ACDE calls (July 31 & August 14).

Layer 1

• A new research post titled "The Glamsterdam equation" was published, exploring scaling approaches for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.
• "A practical proposal for Multidimensional Gas Metering" was published, suggesting improvements to how gas is metered in the EVM to better reflect actual resource usage.
• "Revisiting Secure DAS in One and Two Dimensions" was shared, exploring improvements to data availability sampling techniques that will be critical for Ethereum's scaling roadmap.
• "Block Constraints Sharing: Multi-Relay Inclusion Lists & beyond" was published, proposing mechanisms to improve censorship resistance in block building.

Research

• Multidimensional Gas Metering:

  • "A practical proposal for Multidimensional Gas Metering" was published, building on previous research to propose practical implementations for more accurate resource pricing in the EVM.
  • This follows the earlier research "Going multidimensional - an empirical analysis on gas metering in the EVM" which provided empirical data on EVM resource usage.

• Data Availability Sampling:

  • "Revisiting Secure DAS in One and Two Dimensions" was published, exploring improvements to data availability sampling techniques that will be critical for Ethereum's scaling roadmap.

• Rollups and Layer 2:

  • "Preemptive Provable Assertions" was shared, proposing a new approach to rollup sequencing.
  • Discussion continued on "Native rollups—superpowers from L1 execution", exploring how L1 execution capabilities could enhance rollup performance.

• Cryptography and Privacy:

  • "BITE Protocol: On-Chain Decryption via Precompiled Contracts" was discussed, proposing mechanisms for on-chain decryption operations.

Layer 2

• Arbitrum One TVL reaches $17.47B, growing 12.2% over the past year as the leading Layer 2 solution continues to attract users and developers.

• Base surpasses 124 UOPS (user operations per second), showing a 15% increase in activity over the past week, cementing its position as the most active Layer 2 network.

• Starknet activity jumps 34.8% in the past week, as the ZK rollup continues to gain traction with developers building on its Cairo programming language.

• Paradex sees 79.1% activity growth in the past week, making it one of the fastest-growing Layer 2 platforms for decentralized derivatives trading.

Stuff for Developers

• Realtime Proving for L1 zkEVM announced by the Ethereum Foundation, marking the first step toward migrating to ZK proofs at all levels of the stack, from consensus layer signature aggregation to onchain privacy.

• Partial history expiry now supported by all Ethereum execution clients in accordance with EIP-4444, reducing disk space requirements by 300-500 GB by removing block data prior to the Merge.

• EIP-7907 updated to consider empty code as always warm, improving gas efficiency for contract interactions.

• EIP-7910 updated to change BN256 to BN254, reflecting the more accurate naming convention for the curve used in cryptographic operations.

Ecosystem

• The Future of Ecosystem Development at the EF outlined by the Ethereum Foundation, focusing on maximizing Ethereum adoption while preserving its underlying values and resilience.

• Ethereum Season of Internships launched, offering over 30 paid, fully-remote summer internships across 19 teams in the Ethereum ecosystem to help establish more paths for the next generation of contributors.

• Ethereum World's Fair tickets now available for the event in Buenos Aires, November 17-22, 2025, showcasing how Ethereum can bring a nation onchain with stablecoins, DeFi, decentralized identity, and more.

• Devconnect Scholars Program announced to welcome 100 leaders expanding Ethereum's reach by connecting it to new communities, industries, and ideas at Devconnect ARG 2025.

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

• 🚨 Lido at 25.84%, still too close to the 33.3% threshold.
• Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
  • Execution layer: Geth ~41% & Nethermind ~38%
  • Consensus layer: Lighthouse 42.71% & Prysm 30.91%
  • Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality.
• Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe.

Client Releases

• Consensus layer:

  • Lighthouse v7.1.0: hierarchical state diffs for hot state (4x less disk I/O, 10x less data during non-finality), optimized processing of Electra SingleAttestation messages, default gas limit of 45M, and light client updates broadcasting improvements.

• Execution layer:

  • Geth v1.16.1: fixes for abigen v2, live tracer, blockTimestamp hex encoding in eth_getLogs, eth_getLogs address limit, eth_getTransactionReceipt performance, and snap sync with archive node.
  • Nethermind v1.32.2: addresses Linux and CPU compatibility issues from previous releases.

EIPs/Standards

• EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):
  • EIP-7819: Updated with location to accessed_addresses.
  • EIP-7928: Added statically inferrable nonce changes back.
  • EIP-7607: Removed EIP-7907 from Fusaka.
  • EIP-2926: Moved to Draft status.
  • EIP-7825: Moved to Draft status.

Onchain Stats

• Fees (via ultrasound.money):
  • Gas: 0.2 to 9.5 gwei, 1.0 gwei average; zero net issuance at 20.5 gwei
  • 2.7k ETH net issuance this week
• ETHUSD: $2507 – $2598, currently $2,582, all time high $4,878
• ETHBTC: currently 0.0236 (Flippening at ~0.165)

Regulation/Business/Tokens

• Energy Web Chain Zurich hard-fork set for block 36871000, expected on August 5, 2025.
• Ethereum Foundation published "The Future of Ecosystem Development at the EF," outlining goals to maximize Ethereum adoption and infrastructure resilience.
• Partial history expiry announced by the Ethereum Foundation, allowing nodes to reduce disk space by 300-500 GB by removing pre-Merge block data.
• Ethereum Season of Internships launched with 19 teams offering over 30 paid, remote internship opportunities across development, research, design, and more.
• Ethereum World's Fair tickets now available for the event in Buenos Aires, November 17-22, 2025.

Miscellaneous

• Shipping an L1 zkEVM #1: Realtime Proving - Ethereum Foundation blog post on the first step toward migrating to ZK proofs at all levels of the stack.
• Berlinterop - Ethereum core devs and researchers gathered for an interop hacking week to make progress on Fusaka upgrade and gas limit increases.
• Ethereum Foundation Treasury Policy published, outlining how capital deployments should balance returns and ecosystem stewardship.

Job Postings

• Sr. Backend Engineer - Across, Remote
• Smart Contract Engineer - Across, Remote
• Status Network DevRel & Community Manager (South Korea) - Logos, Remote
• Solidity Developer - Serokell, Remote
• Node Operations Lead - Nimbus, Remote
• Social Media Contractor - OP Labs, Remote
• Ecosystem Engagement Manager - Consensys, Remote - EMEA, US

Upcoming Dates of Note

• Jul 17-19 - NapulETH (Naples, Italy)
• Aug 4-6 - The Science of Blockchain Conference 2025 (Berkeley, USA)
• Aug 4-16 - ETH Enugu '25 (Enugu, Nigeria)
• Aug 9-10 - ETHVietnam 2025 (HCMC, Vietnam)
• Aug 14 - Pragma New York (New York, USA)
• Aug 15-17 - ETHGlobal New York (New York, USA)
• Aug 19-23 - ProdFest Jos (Jos, Nigeria)
• Aug 28-30 - Web3 Lagos Conference (Lagos, Nigeria)
• Nov 17-22 - Devconnect & Ethereum World's Fair (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

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