New Week in Ethereum 2025-12-26

Week in Ethereum News

December 26, 2025

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Highlight of the Week

• The Ethereum core developers have chosen "Hegotá" as the official portmanteau for the upcoming network upgrade after Glamsterdam, combining "Heze" (the H-star name) and "Bogotá" (the Devcon city name).

Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)

• Holiday schedule:

  • Core developers agreed on a reduced meeting schedule for the holiday period, with several calls canceled between December 22, 2025, and January 1, 2026

Research

• “Demystifying Blockchain KV Lookups: From O(log N) to O(1) Disk I/O”: reports controlled Pebble experiments (22GB → 2.2TB) arguing that once Bloom filters + top index blocks are cached, random lookup I/O collapses toward ~1–2 disk reads (and can further approach ~1–1.3 when index blocks fit), materially changing how we should model EL database bottlenecks.
• “Wormholes and the cost of plausible deniability”: argues wormholes’ “plausible deniability” property appears in tension with Ethereum’s 160-bit address space, and that EIP-7503’s implied anonymity set is lower than expected in practice; ends with a sketched alternative direction using beacon-chain deposits.
• “Does FHE deserve this much attention?”: surveys why FHE is resurging (general computation over encrypted state), but highlights that many “FHEVM-style” designs still rely on MPC committees for key management/decryption; points to newer directions aiming to reduce committee trust (e.g., the linked “Root iO” paper).

Security

• Gnosis Chain hard fork to recover ~$9.4M frozen after the Balancer exploit: Multiple reports state the hard fork activated Dec 22, 2025, with the announcement following shortly after; it’s framed as a governance-approved recovery of funds that were frozen post-exploit.

Ecosystem

• Ethereum NFT trading volume rebounds week-over-week: Ethereum-based NFT collections saw a notable rebound in activity this week, with reported trading volume rising roughly week-over-week and Ethereum retaining the largest share of total NFT sales across chains
• Ethereum address growth reaches new local highs": On-chain metrics published this week show Ethereum averaging close to 200,000 new addresses per day, signaling continued ecosystem participation despite broader market volatility.

Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH

• 🚨 Lido at 24.31%, still too close to the 33.3% threshold.

• Client diversity (via clientdiversity.org):

  • Execution layer: Geth ~41% & Nethermind ~38%
  • Consensus layer: Lighthouse ~51.24% & Prysm ~25.06%
  • Any client bug over 33.3% could mean loss of finality.

• Better geographic diversity is optimal, particularly outside of North America & Europe.

EIPs/Standards

• EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):

  • EIP-8081: Update portmanteau for Hegotá.
  • EIP-7998: Avoid pre-fork randao seed computation.
  • EIP-8032: Use S_pre in SSTORE gas formula.

• ERCs (Application Layer):

  • EIP-7932: Fix undefined SIZE in EIP-7932.
  • EIP-7928: Clarify wording around 7702.
  • EIP-7942: Correct Python syntax errors in pseudocode.

Onchain Stats

• Fees (via ultrasound.money):

  • Gas: 0.0 to 1.1 gwei, 0.0 gwei average; zero net issuance at 12.2 gwei
  • 18.64 ETH net issuance this week

• ETHUSD: $2,901– $3,060, currently $2,930, all-time high $4,946

• ETHBTC: currently 0.033 (Flippening at ~0.165)

Regulation/Business/Tokens

• ETHZilla sells $74.5 million of ether to trim debt load, their second sale following a $40 million sale in October for share repurchases.
• BitMine buys $300 million in ether, crossing the 4 million ETH treasury milestone as crypto markets slid.
• Boxing Day options expiration will see $27 billion in bitcoin and ether options reset, with a bullish bias indicated by a put-call ratio of 0.38.

Miscellaneous

• Ethereum's 'Glamsterdam' upgrade aims to fix MEV fairness with enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) and Block-level Access Lists, targeted for 2026.
• Aave community split over tokenholder rights debate, described as the "most important tokenholder rights debate" in the protocol's history.
• Uniswap's token burn and protocol fee proposal backed overwhelmingly by voters, transforming UNI into a value-accruing asset with more than 125 million votes in support.

Upcoming Dates of Note

• Dec 31, 2025: Year-end options expiration for $27 billion in bitcoin and ether contracts
• Jan 7, 2026: BPO2 fork activation on Ethereum mainnet - increases blob count to target/max 14/21
• Jan 15-17, 2026: ETHDenver BUIDLWeek - applications and hackathon registrations open
• Feb 23-Mar 3, 2026: ETHDenver main event - world's largest web3 #BUIDLathon
• Q2 2026: Glamsterdam upgrade - targeting MEV fairness improvements