Week in Ethereum News

October 24, 2025

See this newsletter in your browser

Highlight of the Week

Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)

  • All Core Devs

    • Execution (ACDE) #223, October 23, 2025

    :

  • Fusaka upgrade:

    • Sepolia BPO1 recap showed successful implementation with no major issues

    • Tentative mainnet dates were proposed: client releases on November 3, mainnet fork on December 3, BPO1 on December 9, and BPO2 on January 7

    • Client teams agreed to prepare for releases by November 3, pending successful completion of the Hoodi testnet fork next week

  • Glamsterdam upgrade:

    • Established a deadline for EIP proposals: intent to propose within one week, actual EIP and proposal merged within two weeks

    • Client teams to provide lists of EIPs and opinions by November 6 to help prioritize proposals

    • Discussed two potential solutions for addressing rounding errors in gas pricing: a 1000x rebase of all gas values and a fractional gas proposal

    • Decided to remove EIP-7667 and EIP-6873 from the PFI (Proposed for Inclusion) list as they were not relevant for the Glamsterdam fork

    • Presented EIP-8058, which proposes a deduplication mechanism for contract deployments using access lists

Fusaka (Osaka + Fulu) upgrade

Research

  • Variants of Mempool Tickets- RIG summary of ticketing/lease designs (wholesale, leases, simple, loyalty) to bound vertically-sharded blob-mempool bandwidth ahead of PeerDAS; implementable via a contract without a hard fork.

  • Nonce Bitmap- proposal to allow up to 256 parallel tx per account by reusing nonce bits + a bitmap; keeps legacy wallets compatible and targets mempool nonce-gap issues

  • zkzkevm: private evm—introduces pload/pstore ops and private state trees on top of zkEVM to enable private user-state with EVM compatibility; active discussion on co-SNARK/MPC alternatives.

Layer 2

  • Optimism released new documentation, completely transforming their developer resources to improve the onboarding experience for builders on the OP Stack.

Stuff for Developers

  • Foundry:

    • Released v1.0.0-rc.3 with improved gas profiling and better support for the latest EVM features.

  • EIP-8059: Gas Rebase for High-precision Gas Metering was proposed, offering a new approach to gas metering that enables more precise calculations.

  • Contract Bytecode Deduplication Discount EIP proposal was submitted, aiming to reduce gas costs for contracts that reuse existing bytecode.

Security

  • Paxos accidentally minted $300 trillion of PYUSD stablecoins (more than 2.5x global GDP)through a single key with unlimited minting power. The tokens were burned 22 minutes later, raising serious questions about centralized control in regulated stablecoins.

  • AWS outage revealed serious centralization issues in crypto infrastructure, affecting Coinbase, MetaMask, and multiple L2 networks. While blockchains continued operating, user access was severely impacted, highlighting that approximately 37% of Ethereum infrastructure relies on Amazon's servers.

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

  • 🚨 Lido at 23.47%, 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

  • Execution layer:

    • Geth v1.16.5: Adds conversion path for blob proofs submitted via eth_sendRawTransaction, fixes for log and transaction indexing, and adds support for transactionReceipts subscription in eth_subscribe.

    • Nethermind v1.35.0: Updates default Ethereum mainnet gas limit to 60M, hardens code DB and trie persistence mechanisms, and optimizes RPC workflows, pruning, and snap sync reliability.

    • Besu v25.10.0: Fusaka testnet release with support for Holesky, Sepolia and Hoodi upcoming hardforks, performance improvements to EQ opcode, and fixes for eth_subscribe RPC.

    • Erigon v3.2.1: Fixes validators producing bad blocks on Hoodi, raises Ethereum mainnet default block gas limit to 60M, and resolves RPC issues with traces retrieval.

EIPs/Standards

  • EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):

    • EIP-7916(SSZ ProgressiveList): Moved to Review status

    • EIP-7773(Hardfork Meta – Amsterdam / Glamsterdam): Proposes EIP-8045 for inclusion in Glamsterdam

    • EIP-8037(State Creation Gas Cost Increase): Clarifies gas accounting for contract deployment

    • EIP-8038(State-access gas cost increase): State-access gas cost update

  • ERCs (Application Layer):

    • EIP-8032(Tree-Depth-Based Storage Gas Pricing): Changed to size-based pricing

    • EIP-7928(Block-Level Access Lists): Clarifies COINBASE tracking in BAL

    • EIP-8030(P256 transaction support): Adds reference to EIP-7951 in comment

Onchain Stats

  • Fees (via ultrasound.money):

    • Gas: 0.1 to 3.1 gwei, 0.2 gwei average; zero net issuance at 16.2 gwei

    • 18.34k ETH net issuance this week

  • ETHUSD: $3,750 – $4,080, currently $4,349, all time high $4,946

  • ETHBTC: currently 0.035 (Flippening at ~0.165)

Regulation

  • The Financial Stability Board (FSB) published a new thematic review on an international regulatory framework for crypto-asset activities (including stablecoins), highlighting “significant gaps” in cross-border cooperation and disclosure frameworks.

  • India and the South Asia region were ranked among the fastest growing for crypto adoption (≈ 80% year-on-year growth) in a study captured by Fortune India; while not regulation per se, rapid adoption raises regulatory/governance implications for networks like Ethereum globally.

Job Postings

  • Ethereum Foundation – Open Application (all domains, full-time/part-time/contract/internship): A general recruitment post enabling candidates to apply broadly across research, software development, ecosystem/community roles.

  • Nethermind – Senior Engineer (Advanced Problem Solver, Remote): A job listing at Nethermind for a senior engineer role, marked as recently posted.

Upcoming Dates of Note