New Week in Ethereum 2025-08-29
Week in Ethereum News
August 29, 2025
Highlight of the Week
- The Fusaka upgrade is progressing with fusaka-devnet-3 expected to finalize, while client teams work on fixes for sync issues. A new non-finality test is planned for next week, with devnet-5 potentially launching by the end of next week if issues are resolved.
Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)
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All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #219 on August 28, 2025:
- Fusaka upgrade: devnet-3 expected to finalize with CL teams working on sync issue fixes
- Blob schedule PRs to be merged for Holesky, Sepolia, Hoodi, and Mainnet
- Holesky testnet to be deprecated a few weeks after Fusaka activates there
- Gas limit: Teams working toward 60M target before Fusaka, with blockers being tracked
- Glamsterdam PFI discussions: Client teams to prioritize EIPs for future calls, with Besu sharing preferences
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All Core Devs - Consensus (ACDC) #164 scheduled for September 4, 2025:
- Will focus on Fusaka and Glamsterdam upgrades
- Fusaka upgrade continues with fusaka-devnet-3
- Glamsterdam upgrade headliners include EIP-7732 (ePBS) and EIP-7928 (Block-level Access Lists)
Fusaka upgrade
- PeerDAS (EIP-7594) implementation progressing with devnet-3 testing, enabling nodes to specialize in storing different pieces of data while maintaining security
- Client teams working on fixes for sync issues in fusaka-devnet-3, with another non-finality test planned for next week
- Blob schedule PRs being merged to update the Osaka-style blob schedule across all networks
- Teams discussing the timeline for Fusaka rollout, with a goal to follow the established upgrade process
- Targeting mainnet release potentially before Devconnect, with client releases planned for early October
Glamsterdam Upgrade
- Block-level Access Lists (EIP-7928) implementation progressing as a headliner for the execution layer
- ePBS (EIP-7732) development continuing as the consensus layer headliner
- Repricings Meta EIP proposed to track gas price repricing EIPs, serving as a version-controlled document for early devnets
- Client teams reviewing PFI proposals with Besu sharing preferences
- EIP-2926 (chunk-based code Merkleization) presented, introducing code chunking in the MPT to enable larger contracts
Layer 1
- Gas limit increase toward 60M being actively worked on, with blockers being tracked
- Holesky testnet to be deprecated a few weeks after Fusaka activates, with an announcement expected next week
- EIP-7934 (RLP Execution Block Size Limit) adds a 10MB maximum size limit to Ethereum blocks to prevent network instability
- EIP-7825 (Transaction Gas Limit Cap) introduces a 16,777,216 gas cap for individual transactions to ensure fairer access to block space
- EIP-7939 (Count Leading Zeros opcode) adds a new CLZ opcode to the EVM for efficient bit manipulation operations
Research
- Ethereum's Leaky Gas Tank: Research identifying 13 costly gas model inconsistencies in Ethereum
- Generalized base fee update fraction: Proposal for improving the base fee update mechanism
- SCOPE - Synchronous Composability Protocol for Ethereum: New protocol for enabling synchronous composability across Ethereum
- Ethereum Prover Market: Proposal for creating a market for ZK provers on Ethereum
- Parallel Auctions on Commit-Boost: Research on improving MEV auctions with parallel processing
Layer 2
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Protocol Update 003 focuses on improving UX across the Ethereum ecosystem, with interoperability identified as the highest leverage opportunity. The EF's Protocol team is concentrating on intent-based architecture and general message-passing to drive down latency and cost.
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The Ethereum Foundation website was updated on August 27, 2025 with refreshed Layer 2 information, emphasizing the network of networks approach and how L2s provide $0.003 average transaction costs compared to $0.26 on mainnet.
Stuff for Developers
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Solidity 0.8.30 was released, introducing
pragueas the new default EVM version along with NatSpec documentation improvements for enum values in the AST. -
The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol Update 002 outlines their approach to blob scaling, which is critical for L2 data availability. The update details incremental changes to Ethereum's blob architecture to accelerate scaling for use cases like real-time payments, DeFi, social media, and AI applications.
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The Trillion Dollar Security project entered Phase 2, focusing primarily on UX security issues. The initiative is launching a combination of high-leverage short-term actions and long-term projects targeting crucial areas in UX security.
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The EF Protocol team announced a Reddit AMA scheduled for August 29th, 2025, providing developers an opportunity to engage directly with core contributors about ongoing protocol development work.
Security
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BetterBank lost $5 million on August 28th due to a reward logic flaw in their protocol. The exploit occurred just three weeks after launch, demonstrating how quickly incentive design flaws can lead to catastrophic losses.
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A sophisticated AI-based attack was reported on August 22nd, where developers were compromised through fake Solidity extensions. The attack used prompt injection techniques to manipulate AI assistants into moving ETH.
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Coinbase lost $550K on August 20th after granting ERC-20 approvals to 0xProject's permissionless Settler contract. An MEV bot exploited these permissions to drain hundreds of tokens.
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Turkish cryptocurrency exchange BTCTurk suffered a $51.7 million breach on August 19th due to a private key leak, marking their second major security incident after losing $55 million in June 2024.
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Odin.fun lost $7 million on August 12th through basic AMM manipulation, their third breach in six months despite having a PhD founder.
Ecosystem
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The Ethereum Foundation celebrated Ethereum's 10th anniversary on July 30th, marking a decade since the genesis block and mainnet launch.
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The Ecosystem Support Program announced its next chapter on August 29th. In 2024 alone, ESP awarded close to $3M in funding to 105 projects through their open grants program, supporting work in developer tooling, research, community building, infrastructure, and open standards.
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The US Treasury's proposed KYC requirements for DeFi have sparked debate, with an October 17th comment deadline that could significantly impact the future of permissionless finance. Some protocols may already have infrastructure like admin keys and blacklist functions that could be repurposed for compliance.
Notable at app layer
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Credix lost $4.5 million on August 5th when a compromised admin account minted worthless acUSDC tokens, borrowed against phantom collateral, and transferred the funds to Ethereum.
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Arkham Intelligence uncovered that 127,426 BTC (worth $14.8 billion at current prices) vanished from LuBian's mining pool in 2020, making it one of the largest single-event crypto thefts that remained undetected for years.
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WOO X exchange lost $14 million on July 28th due to a phishing attack that compromised a team member's device, giving hackers access to wallets across multiple blockchains. This marks the third major security incident for the WOO ecosystem.
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
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Execution layer:
- Geth v1.16.2: Implements Fusaka EIPs including EIP-7825 (Transaction Gas Limit Cap), EIP-7934 (RLP Execution Block Size Limit), EIP-7939 (CLZ opcode), EIP-7918 (Blob base fee bounded by execution cost), EIP-7951 (Precompile for secp256r1 Curve Support), and EIP-7883 (ModExp Gas Cost Increase).
- Nethermind v1.32.4: Fixed peer discovery issues and improved network operations.
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Consensus layer:
- Lighthouse v7.1.0: Introduces hierarchical state diffs for hot state, optimized processing of Electra SingleAttestation messages, and removal of legacy eth1 deposit contract logic.
EIPs/Standards
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EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):
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ERCs (Application Layer):
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)
Upcoming Dates of Note
- Sep 6-8, 2025: ETHGlobal Singapore - Hackathon and conference
- Sep 15-17, 2025: DeFi Security Summit - Stanford, CA
- Oct 28-30, 2025: Devcon 7 - Bangkok, Thailand
- Nov 15-17, 2025: ETHGlobal Istanbul - Hackathon and conference
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New Week in Ethereum 2025-08-22