New Week in Ethereum 2025-12-19

Week in Ethereum News

Core developers have decided to change the H-star name for the upgrade after Glamsterdam from "Heka" to "Heze" (an actual IAU star).

Nonce Gap Simulation Report for EIP-8077, providing data on how nonce gaps affect transaction propagation
Observation on Ethereum's blockspace market examining MEV, proposer-builder separation, and censorship resistance

Post-Quantum Cryptography:
- Gas/Security-Bit for PQ Signatures on EVM: A new dataset and methodology for evaluating the gas cost vs. security tradeoffs for post-quantum signatures on Ethereum
- The road to Post-Quantum Ethereum continues to be actively discussed, with recent updates focusing on Account Abstraction as a pathway
MEV and Transaction Processing:
- Universal Enshrined Encrypted Mempool EIP: A proposal for a protocol-level encrypted mempool to address MEV issues
- On In-Protocol Gas Futures: Research on implementing gas futures directly in the Ethereum protocol
Economics and Public Goods:
- Staircase Unrestricted Uncle Maker Attack: Analysis of a potential economic attack vector on consensus incentives

Ethereum Foundation outlines zkEVM security milestones - The EF cryptography team published a roadmap for zkEVM security, shifting focus from performance to security. Three key milestones were announced: soundcalc integration by February 2026, 100-bit provable security by May 2026 (Glamsterdam), and 128-bit provable security by the end of 2026 (H-star).

Yearn Finance exploited for $293k - Yearn suffered its second hack in six weeks and fourth exploit overall. The attack recycled a 2023 vulnerability to drain funds from the protocol.
Aevo (formerly Ribbon Finance) lost $2.7 million - A proxy admin vulnerability in old vaults allowed an attacker to hijack the oracle, manipulate prices, and drain the contract in a single atomic transaction.

The Future of Ethereum's State - The Stateless Consensus team published a proposal addressing Ethereum's state growth challenges. The article outlines three approaches: state expiry, state archive, and making it easier to hold and serve state, with a focus on reducing state as a performance bottleneck.
2025 upgrade process retrospective - The Ethereum community is discussing lessons learned from this year's protocol upgrades, with multiple contributors sharing insights over the past week.
ENS Trust Registry for Agent Coordination proposed - A new ERC proposal aims to create a trust registry using ENS for coordinating AI agents and services on Ethereum.

🚨 Lido at 24.25%, still too close to the 33.3% threshold.
Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):
- Execution layer: Geth ~41% & Nethermind ~38%
- Consensus layer: Lighthouse 53.66%
- Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality.
Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe.

Consensus layer:

Prysm v7.1.1: Fixed potential deadlock scenario in data column batch verification and improved processing and metrics for cells and proofs.

Execution layer:

Nethermind v1.35.8: Optimized getProofs RPC endpoints for better performance and efficiency, and added build-time signing of release artifacts to improve release security and authenticity.

EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):

EIP-7917 (Deterministic proposer lookahead): Moved to Final status. Implements stable proposer lookahead.
EIP-8081 (Hardfork Meta - Heka/Bogotá): Portmanteau selected (Hegota).

ERCs (Application Layer):

EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists): Updated missing components in size analysis and updated sizes with 60m block gas.
EIP-7932 (Secondary Signature Algorithms): Migrated to new registry.
EIP-7745 (Trustless log and transaction index): Added proof format and wire protocol specs.

Fees (via ultrasound.money):
- Gas: 0.0 to 2.3 gwei, 0.1 gwei average; zero net issuance at 12.1 gwei
- 18.56k ETH net issuance this week
ETHUSD: $2,781 – $3,158, currently $2,979, all-time high $4,946
ETHBTC: currently 0.033 (Flippening at ~0.165)

United Kingdom crypto regulatory regime timeline — The UK Treasury and Finance Ministry announced the country will bring cryptoassets under formal regulation starting in October 2027, including oversight by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to enhance consumer protection and market integrity.
Erebor Bank regulatory milestone — Erebor Bank, a crypto-oriented finance startup founded by Palmer Luckey, received conditional approval from the FDIC, bringing it closer to launch pending final Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) approval. This signals regulatory progress for crypto-bank-linked institutions in the U.S. financial system.
JPMorgan tokenized fund on Ethereum — JPMorgan Chase launched a tokenized money-market fund called the My OnChain Net Yield Fund built on the Ethereum blockchain, marking a significant institutional push into tokenized traditional financial products despite historical skepticism from its leadership.

Dec 19-20, 2025: ETHDenver Hackathon Registration deadline for the February 2026 event.
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.