New Week in Ethereum 2025-10-10

Week in Ethereum News

October 10, 2025

See this newsletter in your browser

Highlight of the Week

• The Fusaka upgrade testnet rollout has officially begun with the Holesky testnet fork on October 1, followed by scheduled deployments on Sepolia (Oct 14) and Hoodi (Oct 28). This major upgrade includes PeerDAS (Peer Data Availability Sampling) which will dramatically reduce Layer 2 transaction costs and enable scaling to many more blobs per block over time.

Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)

• All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #222, October 9, 2025:

  • Fusaka update:

    • Sepolia Shadow Fork reported to be running smoothly with no missed blocks

    • Discussion on BPO schedule configuration and blob parameter consistency across clients

    • Client behavior regarding blob proof conversions at the fork boundary was reviewed

  • Scaling updates:

    • Ongoing work on state access benchmarks and investigation of slow blocks on mainnet

    • Updates on BlockNexis Access List (BAL) development with Besu, Geth, Reth, and Nethermind clients close to interop

  • Glamsterdam update:

    • Detailed discussions about Ethereum repricing efforts, including EIPs related to state growth and storage costs

    • Presentation on EIP-8032 (Tree-Depth-Based Storage Gas Pricing) and its implementation in Geth

    • Discussion on EIP-7791 (GAS2ETH) for on-chain payments

Fusaka (Osaka + Fulu) upgrade

• Fusaka $2,000,000 Audit Contest is currently running and will end on October 13, inviting security researchers to find vulnerabilities in the upcoming upgrade.

• Blob Parameter Only (BPO) Hardforks implementation is being tested on Holesky, creating a new lightweight process to adjust blob storage parameters without waiting for major upgrades, allowing Ethereum to make smaller, more frequent adjustments to blob capacity.

• Blob base fee bounded by execution cost is being implemented to address blob fee market problems by introducing a reserve price tied to execution costs, preventing the blob fee market from becoming ineffective at 1 wei.

Glamsterdam (Amsterdam–G-Star) Upgrade

• Repricing EIPs are being developed for Glamsterdam to harmonize costs across EVM operations and address scaling bottlenecks, including EIP-7904 (reducing compute prices), EIP-8037 (increasing state creation costs), and EIP-8038 (adjusting state access costs).

Layer 1

• Deterministic proposer lookahead is being implemented to make Ethereum's block proposer schedule completely predictable ahead of time, improving reliability for preconfirmation protocols and MEV mitigation strategies.

• RLP Execution Block Size Limit is being added with a maximum size limit of 10MB to Ethereum blocks to prevent network instability and denial-of-service attacks, ensuring blocks stay within a reasonable size that the network can efficiently process and propagate.

• Transaction Gas Limit Cap is being implemented with a 16,777,216 gas (2^24) cap for individual transactions, preventing any single transaction from consuming most of a block and ensuring fairer access to block space.

Research

• The Economics of Instant: An Exploration of Real Time Ethereum: A study examining the economic implications of real-time transaction finality on Ethereum, analyzing tradeoffs and potential implementation approaches.

• Ethereum needs Standards-Punk discusses the importance of standards development for Ethereum's ecosystem growth and interoperability.

Stuff for Developers

• Foundry v1.4.0 — Introduces a new Solar-based forge fmt formatter, ~10–11% speed improvements for tests/coverage, improved multi-chain config and deployment support, better backtraces, new Anvil endpoints, Osaka-readiness, and forge now available on npm.

Security

• The Ethereum Foundation's Commitment to Privacy was published, outlining the foundation's stance on privacy as a fundamental right and detailing initiatives to enhance privacy protections in the Ethereum ecosystem.

• Abracadabra - Rekt III - Abracadabra suffered a $1.8 million exploit on October 6 when attackers exploited a logic bug in deprecated Cauldron contracts, allowing them to borrow uncollateralized MIM tokens. This marks the protocol's third hack, bringing total losses to $21 million.

• $2,000,000 Fusaka Audit Contest continues, with increased rewards for findings reported in the first two weeks. The contest aims to identify vulnerabilities in the upcoming Fusaka upgrade before it impacts the network.

Ecosystem

• Supporting privacy with new funding mechanisms announced by the Ethereum Foundation's Funding Coordination team, introducing a joint initiative with Keyring Network to support privacy-focused projects.

• Privacy Cluster Leadership Announcement revealed a new leadership structure for privacy-related efforts at the Ethereum Foundation, with Igor Barinov joining as coordinator of Privacy @ EF and Andy Guzman serving as coordinator of the PSE team.

• Model Submissions for Ethereum Deep Funding saw active discussion this week, with new proposals for funding critical open-source infrastructure.

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

• 🚨 Lido at 23.54%, 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:

  • Prysm v6.1.2: fixes for peering, stability, and attestation inclusion on mainnet and testnets, including optimized pending attestation processing and improved peer management.

EIPs/Standards

• EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):

  • EIP-7607: Hardfork Meta – Fusaka, Moved to Last Call status

  • EIP-7910: eth_config JSON-RPC Method, Moved to Last Call status

  • EIP-7892: Blob Parameter Only Hardforks, clarified blob schedule usage in base fee computations

Onchain Stats

• Fees (via ultrasound.money):

  • Gas: 0.1 to 547.2 gwei, 2.8 gwei average; zero net issuance at 16.3 gwei

  • 15.41k ETH net issuance this week

• ETHUSD: $3,753 – $4,747, currently $3,766, all-time high $4,946

• ETHBTC: currently 0.034 (Flippening at ~0.165)

Enterprise

• BitMine Immersion added $821M in Ether, bringing cash and crypto holdings to $13.4B, extending its lead as the largest ether treasury with over 2.83 million ETH tokens.

Regulation/Business/Tokens

• Grayscale adds staking to Ethereum and Solana investment products in U.S. first, applying to Grayscale's Ethereum Trust ETF, Ethereum Mini Trust ETF, and Solana Trust, which have a combined $8.25 billion in assets under management.

• Senate Democrats' leaked crypto position would strangle DeFi according to industry insiders, potentially imposing severe restrictions on decentralized finance operations.

• Morgan Stanley opens crypto access to all clients amid Wall Street shift toward digital assets, according to CNBC, marking a significant expansion of traditional finance into cryptocurrency markets.

Miscellaneous

• Ethereum Foundation expands privacy push with dedicated research cluster, framing privacy as essential to Ethereum's credibility. The new "privacy cluster," coordinated by Igor Barinov, brings existing experiments like Semaphore and MACI under a single umbrella alongside new initiatives.

• Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade could cut node costs and ease adoption. Fusaka – a blend of the names Fulu and Osaka – consists of two simultaneous upgrades to Ethereum's consensus and execution layers, set to go live at the end of November or beginning of December.

Job Postings

• Ethereum Foundation — Developer / Protocol roles — Hiring for Developer Experience (Account Abstraction & Interop), Protocol Tester (Consensus layer), Researcher/Engineer (Formal Verification), and Developer Tooling Coordinator.

• Foundry — Engineering & Site Operations — Open roles in Software Engineering, Mining Technician, and Site Manager / Operations.

• CoW DAO — DevOps Engineer (Remote) — Remote position to support infrastructure for CoW Protocol’s trade aggregation and MEV tooling.

• Ether.fi — Smart Contract Engineer — Role focuses on designing, developing, and deploying smart contracts on Ethereum and L2s.

• Uniswap Labs — Senior Data Analytics Engineer — Position centered on supporting Uniswap’s data and analytics systems.

Upcoming Dates of Note

• Oct 14: Fusaka testnet run on Sepolia, Ethereum protocol milestone, activating PeerDAS, gas limit expansion and UX EIPs.

• Oct 28: Fusaka testnet run on Hoodi, second testnet activation for upcoming Ethereum hard fork.

• Oct 28–29: Blockchain Life in Dubai, UAE – One of the world’s largest blockchain and crypto forums, uniting global leaders, investors, and innovators to explore Web3, DeFi, and the future of digital assets.

• Nov 5–6: ETHWomen Florida 2025 in Florida, USA – A women-focused Ethereum hackathon and summit driving inclusion and innovation.

• Nov 10–13: Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Portugal – Global tech event with dedicated blockchain and Ethereum programming tracks.

• Nov 17–22: Devconnect Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires, Argentina – A week-long Ethereum gathering with deep dives, workshops, and the Ethereum World’s Fair.

• Dec 11–13: Solana Breakpoint 2025 in Abu Dhabi, UAE – While Solana-focused, it includes multi-chain ecosystem discussions relevant to Ethereum builders.

• ← Previous
  New Week in Ethereum 2025-10-03
• Next →
  New Week in Ethereum 2025-10-17