New Week in Ethereum 2025-12-06

Week in Ethereum News

The Fusaka upgrade successfully activated on Ethereum mainnet on December 3, 2025, bringing PeerDAS for enhanced data availability and several other improvements. However, the upgrade was followed by some issues, most notably a participation drop affecting Prysm nodes.

All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #225, December 4, 2025
- Fusaka post-upgrade: Discussion of incidents following the fork, including the Prysm participation drop and other minor issues.
- Glamsterdam upgrade: Continued discussion of CFI/DFI candidate EIPs for the next upgrade.
- Housekeeping: Confirmed cancellation of ACDC call on December 25, and discussed whether to keep the ACDE call on January 1.
- FOCIL status: Temperature check on whether FOCIL should be included in Heka/Bogotá as CFI or SFI.

The Fusaka upgrade successfully activated on Ethereum mainnet on December 3, 2025, at epoch 411392 (slot 13164544).
Post-upgrade issues were reported, most significantly:
- Prysm participation drop: Prysm nodes were halted due to stale attestations triggering generation of older states. The solution was to restart nodes with a config flag, and the network began recovering quickly after the issue was identified.
- Missing data in Dasmon: Probing showed many reports of missing data, possibly caused by late blob deliveries.
- Nethermind bug with Nimbus: Nethermind reported a wrong invalid block at slot 13164552 when running with Nimbus CL.
- Late delivery reorgs: Some blocks arrived late but still became canonical due to fork choice evaluation.
- Reth bugs: Several issues were reported that may be related to the Fusaka upgrade.

Client diversity concerns were raised during the ACDE call, with data showing Lighthouse at 42.71% and Prysm at 30.91% of consensus clients, while Geth represents 41% of execution clients.
EIP-7708: ETH transfers emit a log received advocacy for inclusion in the next Ethereum upgrade to simplify the ability to query ETH value updates from transactions with just a vanilla Ethereum node.
State creation repricing approaches were summarized by Anders Elowsson, outlining three paradigms: Repricing, Metering, and Targeting.

Threshold Encrypted Mempools with mev-commit Preconfirmations introduces a combined Shutter + mev-commit design for frontrunning-resistant encrypted mempools. Builders commit blindly and are slashable if they fail to include transactions once decrypted. A live testnet demonstrates the design, with future work aimed at eliminating plaintext exposure at RPCs.
AltDA Integration Framework formalizes how rollups should verify external DA networks safely. It identifies commitment-binding, deterministic decoding, and DAV correctness as critical safety pillars. The post highlights timing attacks and proposes explicit recency checks to prevent data-withholding halts.
Continuous Verifiable Reality (CVR) outlines a system for continuously validated off-chain collateral using staked oracle networks. It introduces a “verification discount” that could significantly reduce Basel-style risk weights. The post models real capital-efficiency gains for stable RWA-backed credit.
ZK Secret Santa protocol uses ZKPs and nullifiers to privately match participants without revealing pairings. Its Sparse Merkle Tree registry ensures uniqueness and prevents double participation. Researchers frame it as a testbed for private governance, matching, and airdrops.

Native USDC and CCTP go live on Starknet. Starknet announced that Circle’s native USDC and Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol are now live, giving the L2 direct issuance of regulated USDC plus canonical bridging to 18+ chains without wrapped tokens.
Fusaka makes L2 data cheaper and denser. The Fusaka upgrade activated on December 3, introducing PeerDAS (EIP-7594) so validators only sample a fraction of blob data while still guaranteeing availability, which BeInCrypto notes enables up to an 8x effective scalability boost for rollups by expanding blob bandwidth.

Yearn Finance suffered its third exploit with $9 million drained from a forgotten yETH pool due to an unchecked arithmetic underflow in legacy code.

Fusaka mainnet upgrade scheduled for December 3, 2025, introducing improvements to L1 performance, increased blob throughput, and enhanced user experience.
Devconnect Buenos Aires concluded as the largest Ethereum Foundation event yet, bringing together developers, founders, creators, and newcomers from around the world.
EF Q3 grantees announced, sharing $12.8 million in funding across various projects.

🚨 Lido at 24.41%, still too close to the 33.3% threshold.
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth ~41% & Nethermind ~38%
- Consensus layer: Lighthouse ~57.61% & Teku ~14.26%
- Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality.
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe.

EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):
- EIP-7688: Move to Review: Important update to EIP status.
- EIP-7773: Update Glamsterdam scope: Refinement of the Glamsterdam hardfork scope.
- EIP-7569: Backlink hard fork Meta EIPs: Improved documentation for hard fork Meta EIPs.
- Hardfork Meta - Heka/Bogotá: New hardfork meta EIP added.
ERCs (Application Layer):
- EIP-8077: Improved rationale: Enhanced rationale for this application layer proposal.
- EIP-8071: Fix typos and grammar: Documentation improvements.
- EIP-7932: Remove RLP TX wrapper and add pythonic registry definition: Significant update to the proposal structure.

Fees (via ultrasound.money):
- Gas: 0.1 to 2.7 gwei, 0.1 gwei average; zero net issuance at 12.0 gwei
ETHUSD: $2,736 – $3,222, currently $3,032, all time high $4,946
ETHBTC: currently 0.033 (Flippening at ~0.165)

Bank of America to allow wealth-management clients exposure to crypto ETPs — Beginning January 5, 2026, Bank of America (including Merrill and Merrill Edge) will let advisors recommend crypto exchange-traded products (ETPs) to clients, expanding institutional access to crypto investments.

BizOps Lead at Lido: Remote position focusing on operations and strategy for the leading liquid staking protocol.
Senior Community Support Manager at Consensys: Remote position in Canada/US with salary range $123K-$153K.
Head of Security at Ethena Labs: Remote position focusing on security strategy and implementation for this DeFi protocol.
Enterprise Sales Lead, Institutions at OP Labs: Position in New York or San Francisco focusing on institutional partnerships for Optimism.
HR Generalist at Offchain Labs: Remote position supporting the team behind Arbitrum.

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
February 1-28, 2026: ETH Riyadh in Riyadh, KSA - the Middle East's premier Web3 summit.
June 8-10, 2026: ETHConf in New York, USA - gathering 5,000+ founders, speakers, industry leaders, and builders.