New Week in Ethereum 2025-11-28

Week in Ethereum News

November 28, 2025

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Highlight of the Week

• Vitalik Buterin proposed a new targeted gas-cost model that could lead to a roughly 5× increase in block gas limit for heavy operations — signalling the next wave of scaling ahead of the scheduled Fusaka hard fork on December 3.

Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)

• All Core Devs – Consensus (ACDC) #170 (Nov 27, 2025)

  • Fusaka: test status, mainnet plan & incident response

    • Client teams reported successful Fusaka shadow-fork tests, with 100% participation noted in at least one run, and no new blockers flagged at the consensus layer.

    • Agreed to tighten incident-response coordination, with action items for client teams to submit PRs clarifying who does what if issues arise during the Dec 3 upgrade.

  • Glamsterdam: ePBS progress, devnets & trustless payments

    • Multiple consensus-client teams shared implementation progress on enshrined PBS (ePBS, EIP-7732) for Glamsterdam; several are aiming for late December or early January devnet testing of their ePBS work.

    • Ongoing community questions about trustless payments in ePBS, referencing earlier breakout discussions around EIP-7732 variants.

  • FOCIL (EIP-7805) & fork scoping across Glamsterdam and Heka/Bogotá

    • Revisited EIP-7805 (FOCIL) and its role in upcoming forks, debating process labels like SFI (Soft For Inclusion) vs CFI (Candidate For Inclusion) and how they interact with “headliner” vs “non-headliner” features.

    • Agreed to:

      • Treat FOCIL as DFI (Definitely For Inclusion) for Glamsterdam, elevating it to a core part of that upgrade’s censorship-resistance roadmap.

      • Use CFI (rather than SFI) as the right process label for FOCIL in the post-Glamsterdam “H-star” / Heka-Bogotá fork, signalling strong interest but leaving room for more testing and spec work.

Layer 1

• Proposed lightweight design for in-protocol distributed history & state storage using blobs, reducing per-node storage to ~80 GB/year and outlining a path to “verifiability on a smartwatch.”

• EIP-7928 Breakout #7 (summary published this week) details progress on Block Access Lists, SnapSync requirements, and preparations for testing extremely high-gas (300M+) blocks to evaluate future scalability ceilings.

Research

• MEV and Proposer-Builder Separation:

  • Trustless payments: right vibe, more trust? - Analysis of trust assumptions in trustless payment systems.

• State Management and Storage:

  • Integrated in-protocol distributed history and state storage - Proposal for a protocol-level solution to history and state storage.

  • State Locks as Proposer Commitments - Exploration of using state locks as a mechanism for proposer commitments.

• Layer 2 and Cross-Chain Interoperability:

  • EIL: Trust minimized cross-L2 interop - Proposal for trust-minimized interoperability between Layer 2 solutions.

Stuff for Developers

• Foundry (nightly) / Anvil improvements: Refactor of the local chain node (anvil), simplifying fee-history reward calculations — which helps reduce overhead and improve reliability when simulating chain replay or tests.

Security

• MegaETH pre-deposit incident - A $250 million pre-deposit imploded into 156 seconds of chaos after infrastructure failed, parameters broke, and MegaETH's team collected all required multisig signatures too early, resulting in deposits reaching $500 million. No hack occurred - just human error at scale.

• GANA Payment exploited - $3.1 million was drained from GANA Payment via leaked owner keys and an EIP-7702 delegation exploit, just nine days after launch.

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

• 🚨 Lido at 24.12%, 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 v8.0.1: hotfix addressing bugs and performance issues discovered in v8.0.0, including preventing unnecessary state advances pre-Fulu and fixing a rare custody context initialization race condition.

Execution layer:

• Nethermind v1.35.3 — This mandatory update readies nodes for Fusaka (Osaka, BPO1, BPO2 upgrades) and includes multiple fixes to trie storage, block-range updates, session handling, and state-consistency issues that could cause instability.

EIPs/Standards

EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):

• EIP-7594: PeerDAS (Data Availability Sampling) - enables validators to verify rollup blob data without downloading everything, reducing bandwidth requirements.

• EIP-7892: Blob Parameter Only Hardforks - allows for more flexible and frequent adjustments to blob capacity.

• EIP-7825: Transaction Gas Limit Cap - caps the gas a single transaction can use.

ERCs (Application Layer):

• EIP-7951: Precompile for secp256r1 Curve Support - adds native support for P-256 signatures used by Apple's Secure Enclave, Android Keystore, and FIDO2/WebAuthn passkeys.

• EIP-7883: ModExp Gas Cost Increase - reprices the MODEXP precompile to prevent block stalling.

Onchain Stats

• Fees (via ultrasound.money):

  • Gas: 0.0 to 4.0 gwei, 0.1 gwei average; zero net issuance at 13.9 gwei

  • 18.46 ETH net issuance this week

• ETHUSD: $2,707 – $3,072, currently $3,007, all-time high $4,946

• ETHBTC: currently 0.033 (Flippening at ~0.165)

Regulation/Business/Tokens

• Ethereum validators have pushed the block gas limit to 60 million, the highest level in four years. Over 513,000 validators signaled support for the increase, which expands network capacity ahead of the Fusaka upgrade.

• Ethereum ICO whale cashed out $60 million after achieving a 9,500x gain, while data shows the top 1% of ETH holders continue to accumulate despite the recent market downturn.

• ERC-20 stablecoin supply has preserved its $185 billion record high despite recent market volatility, which analysts interpret as a bullish signal for the crypto market.

Miscellaneous

• ETH traders have ramped up leverage as futures dominance surged, with many setting a price target of $3,400 despite current price hovering around $3,083.

• Vitalik Buterin commented on the gas limit increase, stating that he expects network growth to continue next year "in a more targeted and less uniform way," focusing on increasing capacity while making inefficient operations more expensive.

Upcoming Dates of Note

• December 3, 2025: Fusaka mainnet fork - Ethereum's next major upgrade bringing PeerDAS and other improvements

• December 9, 2025: BPO1 fork - First Blob Parameter Only fork increasing blob target/max to 10/15

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

• January 7, 2026: BPO2 fork - Second Blob Parameter Only fork increasing blob target/max to 14/21

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