Week in Ethereum News - August 02, 2025
Week in Ethereum News
August 02, 2025
Highlight of the Week
- Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary on July 30, 2025, marking a decade since the genesis block and mainnet launch. What began as a whitepaper has evolved into a decentralized platform powering thousands of applications worldwide.
Eth R&D Protocol Call(s)
- All Core Devs - Execution (ACDE) #217 on July 31, 2025:
- Fusaka upgrade:
- Devnet-3 stability improved to ~94% participation with ongoing debugging of client-specific and MEV-related issues.
- Extensive debate over the proposed 16.8M transaction gas cap (EIP-7825), with concerns raised about breaking existing DeFi aggregation use cases.
- Target schedule: client binaries by September 1, 2025; testnet forks through September and October; Mainnet by mid-November.
- Glamsterdam upgrade:
- Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) considered for inclusion as the EL headliner.
- Debate between enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS) versus delayed execution (EIP-7862) for CL headliner.
- Fusaka upgrade:
- FOCIL Breakout #16 on July 29, 2025:
- Presentation on ePBS and FOCIL compatibility.
- Discussion on how ePBS's payload separation feature can be useful for FOCIL, particularly regarding payload constraints.
- All Core Devs - Testing (ACDT) #47 on August 4, 2025:
- Continued discussion on Fusaka upgrade progress and stability testing.
- Further debate on transaction gas limit cap (EIP-7825) and potential increase from 16.8M to 30M.
Fusaka upgrade
- Fusaka devnet-3 stability testing shows improved participation at ~94%, with ongoing debugging of client-specific and MEV-related issues.
- Transaction gas limit cap (EIP-7825) debate continues, with concerns from DeFi projects like 0x about breaking existing DEX aggregator functionality.
- Proposed rollout schedule targets client binaries by September 1, 2025; testnet forks through September and October; and mainnet deployment by mid-November (before Devconnect).
- Discussion on increasing BALANCE_PER_ADDITIONAL_CUSTODY_GROUP from 32 ETH to 128 ETH, with concerns about impacts on home stakers and fractional staking products.
Glamsterdam Upgrade
- Block-Level Access Lists (EIP-7928) considered for inclusion as the Execution Layer headliner for Glamsterdam, with strong community and developer consensus.
- Consensus Layer headliner debate between:
- Community feedback being solicited on Ethereum Magicians for Glamsterdam headliners.
Layer 1
- Partial history expiry announced on July 8, 2025, with all Ethereum execution clients now supporting partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444, reducing disk space requirements by 300-500 GB.
- Justin Drake unveiled "lean Ethereum" as a vision for the next 10 years, focusing on how Ethereum can achieve extreme performance with uncompromising security and decentralization through next-generation cryptography.
- Checkpoint #5 published on July 29, 2025, providing high-level updates on Ethereum core development.
Research
- LMD GHOST with ~256 validators and a fast-following finality gadget - Vitalik Buterin explores a consensus mechanism design with a smaller validator set.
- The Glamsterdam equation - Research on scaling considerations for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade.
- A practical proposal for Multidimensional Gas Metering - Exploring more nuanced approaches to gas pricing in Ethereum.
- An Ethereum Prover Market Proposal - Research on creating markets for zero-knowledge proof generation.
- Does Ethereum have a zk-verifiability problem? - Discussion on challenges in zero-knowledge verification within Ethereum.
Layer 2
- Arbitrum One TVL increased by 4.24% over the past week, reaching $16.95B, while maintaining its position as the leading Layer 2 solution with 38.15 UOPS (user operations per second).
- Base Chain continues to show strong growth with a 7.45% increase in TVL to $13.39B, and leads in activity with 117.18 UOPS, demonstrating its growing adoption for everyday transactions.
- OP Mainnet (formerly Optimism) saw a 7.58% increase in TVL to $3.42B, with activity metrics showing a 25.1% increase to 15.85 UOPS.
- Woo X suffered a security breach on July 28, 2025, losing $14 million when a phishing attack compromised a team member's device, giving hackers access to wallets across multiple blockchains.
Stuff for Developers
- Ethereum Foundation unveiled "lean Ethereum" on July 31, 2025, as a vision for the next 10 years of Ethereum development. The vision focuses on using next-generation cryptography to achieve extreme performance while maintaining security and decentralization.
- Checkpoint #5 was published on July 29, 2025, providing high-level updates on Ethereum core development progress from the weekly All Core Developer calls.
- EIP-7773 was updated on July 30, 2025, to propose EIP-2926 for inclusion in the upcoming Glamsterdam hard fork, potentially bringing new capabilities to Ethereum developers.
- EIP-7937 received a fix for a typo in its test cases section on July 30, 2025, improving documentation clarity for developers implementing the proposal.
Security
- GMX experienced a significant security incident on July 9, 2025, where $42 million appeared to vanish from GMX V1 via a cross-contract reentrancy exploit. The vulnerability was introduced by a 2022 bug fix that manipulated globalShortAveragePrices to inflate GLP pricing. Fortunately, funds were later recovered in a coordinated disclosure, with a $5M bounty paid to the white hat hacker.
- Woo X lost $14 million on July 28, 2025, when a phishing attack compromised a team member's device. This marks the third major security incident for the WOO ecosystem, following the $25 million Kronos and $8.5 million WooFi breaches.
- ArcadiaFi was exploited on July 17, 2025, when an attacker used crafted swapData to trigger arbitrary calls through a trusted rebalancer contract, draining $3.6 million from user vaults. The exploit occurred during a pause cool down period, leaving ArcadiaFi unable to intervene before the funds were bridged out.
Ecosystem
- Ethereum celebrated its 10th anniversary on July 30, 2025, marking a decade since the genesis block and mainnet launch. What began as a whitepaper has evolved into a decentralized platform now powering thousands of applications, tools, and communities worldwide.
- The Future of Ecosystem Development at the EF was outlined by the Ethereum Foundation on July 10, 2025, focusing on two key goals: maximizing the number of people who benefit from Ethereum's underlying values and maximizing the resilience of Ethereum's technical and social infrastructure.
- GENIUS Act was analyzed on July 30, 2025, suggesting it might be Wall Street's victory disguised as crypto's win. The analysis indicates DeFi protocols may be squeezed into compliance boxes while traditional finance absorbs the revolution.
Notable at app layer
- Kinto experienced an exploit on July 15, 2025, where hackers used a hidden proxy backdoor to mint 110,000 $K tokens on Arbitrum, draining $1.55 million from liquidity pools and causing the price to crash by 95%.
- ResupplyFi lost $9.8 million on June 27, 2025, when an attacker manipulated a newly deployed market's exchange rate to zero by donating a small amount of funds, then drained the entire market using 1 wei of worthless shares as collateral.
Centralization watch: threatening the value of your ETH
- 🚨 Lido at 25.84%, 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 v1.16.1: Patch release fixing regressions from v1.16.0, including improvements to eth_getLogs, eth_getTransactionReceipt, and fixes for abigen v2.
- Geth v1.16.0: Major release introducing path-based archive node and state database improvements, with archive node storage reduced from 20TB to ~1.9TB.
- Consensus layer:
- Lighthouse v7.1.0: Maintenance release with hierarchical state diffs for hot state, optimized processing of Electra SingleAttestation messages, and default gas limit of 45M.
EIPs/Standards
- EIPs (Core, Networking, Interface):
Onchain Stats
- Fees (via ultrasound.money): * Gas: 0.2 to 9.5 gwei, 1.0 gwei average; zero net issuance at 20.5 gwei * 2.7k ETH net issuance this week
- ETHUSD: $2507 – $2598, currently $2,582, all time high $4,878
- ETHBTC: currently 0.0236 (Flippening at ~0.165)
Miscellaneous
- Celebrating 10 Years of Ethereum: The Ethereum community marked a major milestone on July 30, 2025 - ten years since Ethereum's genesis block and mainnet launch.
- lean Ethereum: Justin Drake unveiled a vision for the next 10 years of Ethereum, focusing on extreme performance with uncompromising security and decentralization through next-generation cryptography.
- Partial history expiry announcement: All Ethereum execution clients now support partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444, reducing disk space requirements by 300-500 GB.
- Shipping an L1 zkEVM #1: Realtime Proving: Sophia Gold details the first steps toward migrating to ZK proofs at all levels of the Ethereum stack, starting with an L1 zkEVM.
- Checkpoint #5: July 2025: Nixo provides high-level updates on Ethereum core development from the past month.
- The Future of Ecosystem Development at the EF: The Ethereum Foundation outlines its approach to ecosystem development, focusing on removing bottlenecks to real-world use and helping users get onboarded.
Job Postings
- OP Labs: Event Manager (Remote) - $140K-$160K
- Offchain Labs: Talent Sourcer (Remote)
- Optimism: Director, BD Fintech (Remote)
- Uniswap: Senior Policy Associate, APAC (Remote)
- Across: Sr. Backend Engineer (Remote) - $100K-$200K
- CoW DAO: Senior Backend Engineer (Rust) (Remote)
Upcoming Dates of Note
- Aug 4-6: SBC (The Science of Blockchain Conference 2025) - Berkeley, USA
- Aug 4-16: ETH Enugu '25 - Enugu, Nigeria
- Aug 9-10: ETHVietnam 2025 - HCMC, Vietnam
- Aug 14: Pragma New York - New York, USA
- Aug 15-17: ETHGlobal New York - New York, USA
- Aug 19-23: ProdFest Jos - Jos, Nigeria
- Aug 28-30: Web3 Lagos Conference - Lagos, Nigeria
- Sep 1-7: Builders Week Istanbul - Istanbul, Turkey
- Sep 3-6: EthAccra - Accra, Ghana
- Sep 4-7: ETHWarsaw - Warsaw, Poland
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