News linked to both this project and an event.
TownSquare, an infrastructure platform focused on institutional yield and cross-chain lending brokerage services, has announced a $100 million USD1 token liquidity program—a strategic initiative designed to bring institutional-grade and cross-chain yield opportunities to a broader user base via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin and institutional yield strategies. Previously, TownSquare collaborated with the World Liberty Financial DeFi team to integrate the USD1 token onto Monad, a high-performance EVM-compatible chain, and received official incentives from the Monad Foundation. The team stated that this new liquidity program marks TownSquare’s continued commitment to expanding DeFi’s real-world applicability and delivering institutional strategy yields to more assets. Currently, the project’s official website has launched its cross-chain lending functionality, while its yield vault product is listed as “Coming Soon.” According to official information, the project has previously completed a funding round backed by Monad, a16z, Aptos, Solana Bonk, and other U.S. and European angel investors and VCs. The founding team includes alumni from Coinbase, Meta, Accenture, and market-making firms. Details about the project’s next funding round have not yet been disclosed.
The Ethereum Foundation announced that Clear Signing has officially launched, aiming to eliminate “blind signing” by defaulting Ethereum transaction signatures to human-readable formats—thereby enhancing both user experience and security. Spearheaded by the Ethereum Working Group, the initiative includes: ERC-7730 for generating human-readable transaction descriptions; a neutral, mirrorable descriptor registry; ERC-8176, a proof framework enabling auditors to verify descriptor integrity; and open development tools for wallets, protocols, and auditors. Participants include Ledger, Trezor, MetaMask, and WalletConnect.
According to official announcements, Brevis—a ZK-powered intelligent verifiable computation platform—has launched Pico Prism 2.0, now live on Ethereum’s mainnet under the current 60-million-Gas block limit. Benchmarking results show that, under Ethereum’s current 60-million-Gas block limit, Pico Prism 2.0 achieves an average proof time of 6.1 seconds per block, with 99.9% of blocks completing final proofs within 12 seconds. The entire system runs on just two machines equipped with a total of 16 RTX 5090 GPUs, at an aggregate hardware cost of approximately $100,000. Compared to Pico Prism 1.0, Pico Prism 2.0 delivers roughly a 5.3× improvement in per-block proof efficiency—even while using only one-quarter of the hardware configuration—further fulfilling the Ethereum Foundation’s two primary objectives for real-time proving: “average proof latency under 10 seconds” and “on-premises hardware cost under $100,000.” Previously, Brevis was selected for the Ethereum Foundation’s “On-Prem Proving Initiative,” a program launched in May 2026 to test whether ZK proofs can scale as decentralized infrastructure without reliance on a handful of cloud service providers—the most L1 zkEVM-integration-ready rehearsal to date. Moving forward, Brevis will continue focusing on robustness.
According to The Block, the Ethereum Foundation is restructuring its Protocol team, appointing Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik as the new co-leads of the Protocol cluster. This reorganization comes as Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko plan to depart the organization, and Alex Stokes begins a sabbatical. The Protocol team is the Ethereum Foundation’s core team responsible for the design, research, development, and coordination of Ethereum’s base layer, covering areas such as security, cryptography, zkEVM, and peer-to-peer networking. The team is currently advancing Ethereum’s next major scalability upgrade, Glamsterdam, which aims to raise the gas limit ceiling and floor to 200 million and introduce ePBS. Subsequently, the team will shift its R&D focus toward the Hegotá upgrade and the FOCIL prototype to enhance Ethereum’s censorship resistance.
the Ethereum Foundation has disclosed the outcomes of a recent interoperability meeting among core developers held in Svalbard, Norway, and provided an update on the key technical progress of the next upgrade phase, "Glamsterdam." During the meeting, multi-client teams collaborated on network scaling and execution layer optimization, making progress in several areas. Developers confirmed that a "credible path" post-Glamsterdam has been agreed upon, based on the combined results of ePBS, BAL optimizations, and the EIP-8037 repricing mechanism.On the execution layer side, ePBS (External Proposer Separation) has been running stably on the multi-client Glamsterdam-devnet. The external block builder process has completed end-to-end testing, covering nearly all client implementations. Meanwhile, EIP-8037 has been finalized, establishing the fixed cost_per_state_byte model and completing the full repricing parameter output on bal-devnet-6.The expansion track "Hegotá" has also made progress. FOCIL-related prototypes now have operable implementations. The scope of requirements for Account Abstraction (AA) has been defined, and the next phase will move to multi-client devnet verification. Current development efforts remain focused on the final delivery of Glamsterdam, while simultaneously advancing the Hegotá expansion design and the subsequent Strawmap roadmap evolution. The devnet is now live, and features like FOCIL are expected to be further deepened in the next phase of testing.At an organizational level, this interop meeting also marked the official start of leadership restructuring within the Protocol Cluster. The new leads include Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik. Will Corcoran will oversee zkVM proofing and post-quantum consensus coordination, Kev Wedderburn will lead zkEVM research and development, and Fredrik will be responsible for protocol security and the Trillion Dollar Security project. Former Protocol Cluster leadership team members Barnabé Monnot and Tim Beiko will gradually step back from management roles, while Alex Stokes is entering a sabbatical cycle. The Foundation stated that during their tenure, the Protocol team successfully advanced modularization and drove the Fusaka upgrade to launch (December 2025), introducing PeerDAS and increasing mainnet gas capacity.
a16z Crypto published a post explaining its investment rationale for Arc, noting that stablecoins have evolved from crypto-native trading tools into the foundational layer of global financial infrastructure—and are now driving blockchain’s evolution from “application-layer finance” to a “system-level economic operating system.” Last year, stablecoin transaction volume reached approximately $9 trillion—placing it on par with global payment networks such as Visa and PayPal. The total supply of USD-pegged stablecoins has surpassed $270 billion. Cross-border payments, B2B settlements, and foreign exchange transactions are emerging as core use cases for stablecoins, positioning them increasingly as the “global capital flow upgrade layer.” a16z Crypto stated that existing blockchain infrastructure remains primarily geared toward crypto-native users and individual developers, lacking native support for large-scale institutional requirements. Its participation in building the ARC token ecosystem stems from the expectation that, as global finance gradually migrates on-chain, only a select few public blockchains will be capable of serving as the foundational bedrock for “on-chain economic systems.”
Odaily News Executives from PayPal and Google Cloud stated that in the future, commerce driven by AI Agents will operate on crypto payment rails, as AI Agents cannot use traditional bank accounts like humans.Richard Widmann, Head of Web3 Strategy at Google Cloud, stated that AI Agents are unable to open bank accounts from both a technical and regulatory standpoint, while cryptocurrencies offer an "excellent machine-readable payment interface." He revealed that Google has launched the open-source Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2) and donated it to the FIDO Foundation, with over 120 partners, including PayPal, already joining.May Zabaneh, Senior Vice President of Crypto at PayPal, indicated that the company views AI Agents as the next generation of commerce entry point following offline, online, and mobile payments. She noted that PYUSD, as PayPal's stablecoin, provides a naturally programmable payment layer for AI-native payments and global transactions.A PayPal survey shows that 95% of merchant websites currently see traffic from AI Agents, but only about 20% of merchants have machine-readable product catalogs. Zabaneh believes that merchants need to adapt to the AI Agent era as quickly as possible, or they will miss out on the next wave of commercial infrastructure upgrades.Additionally, the two also discussed the security and responsibility issues of AI Agents. Widmann stated that multi-party custody will become an important solution for Agent fund management. AI Agents should not have full control over private keys but should only hold a portion of the key fragments to reduce financial risk. (CoinDesk)
The Aptos Foundation and Aptos Labs announced an investment of over $50 million to support first-party products, research, protocol infrastructure, and a strategic fund for trading and AI partners. Aptos stated that Decibel has launched on the Aptos mainnet, with cumulative trading volume exceeding $1 billion. The stablecoin market cap on the Aptos network stands at $1.93 billion, and real-world asset (RWA) tokenization totals $1.2 billion, with asset management firms including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and Apollo Global already deployed on the network. Upcoming initiatives include encrypted mempools, FIX and CCXT connectivity, multi-leader consensus, and confidential perpetuals.
According to The Block, BNY announced the expansion of its crypto custody business into the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) in the UAE through partnerships with Finstreet and the ADI Foundation, offering institutional clients crypto-asset custody services. Initially, the service will support custody for BTC and ETH. The three parties will subsequently explore extending these services to the ADI Foundation’s underlying blockchain infrastructure and gradually expand to stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and other regulated digital instruments.
: According to official sources, the Jito Foundation is partnering with Solana Company (NASDAQ: HSDT) to provide institutional-grade Solana infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. The two parties will operate BAM validators using Pacific Backbone in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and South Korea. This low-latency infrastructure network supports staking, validation, and trading services in the Asia-Pacific region. Additionally, they will jointly develop an institutional-grade JitoSOL staking product, delivered through Solana Company's consulting service model, to meet the compliance requirements of large capital allocators. The head of the Jito Foundation for the Asia-Pacific region stated that this collaboration aims to combine Jito's market layer technology with Solana Company's regional experience and institutional network, laying the foundation for scalable and compliant participation within the Solana ecosystem.
: The Solana Foundation and Google Cloud have jointly launched the AI payment gateway Pay.sh, allowing AI agents to pay for API services on a per-request basis using Solana on-chain stablecoins, eliminating the need for traditional account systems. The system is built on the x402 protocol and supports the Machine Payments Protocol developed by Tempo and Stripe.Currently, AI agents can access Google Cloud services such as Gemini, BigQuery, and VertexAI through Pay.sh. The platform also supports AI tools including Anthropic Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and OpenClaw, along with over 50 community API providers. Additionally, it integrates infrastructure and data services such as Helius, Alchemy, Dune Analytics, and Nansen. (Decrypt)
Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated that transaction fees on the TON network have been reduced by 6 times. He also revealed that Telegram will replace the TON Foundation to become the largest validator on the network, and plans to launch new development tools and performance upgrades within the next 2 to 3 weeks.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov tweeted that TON network fees have dropped by approximately 6x, approaching zero. Next, Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the primary driver of TON and become its largest validator, shifting its development focus toward technical performance. Additionally, TON plans to launch an updated official website, developer tools, and performance upgrades within the next 2–3 weeks.
According to the voting results of the dYdX Foundation governance proposal, the markets for four trading pairs—AKT-USD, GNO-USD, MNRY-USD, and MOG-USD—have been approved for delisting. A total of 16 out of 31 active validators and 124 accounts participated in this governance vote, with an overall voter turnout of 46.86%. Among the votes, 90.96% supported the delisting proposal, 0% opposed it, and 9.04% abstained. The proposal ultimately passed successfully.
The Ethereum Foundation published a summary of the Soldøgn Interop work, stating that key objectives for the Glamsterdam upgrade have now been largely achieved. These include reaching consensus on a post-upgrade gas limit floor of 200 million, achieving stable operation of the external builder process for ePBS, and finalizing the gas repricing parameters defined in EIP-8037. The primary focus of the Glamsterdam upgrade is to safely increase the gas limit—thereby expanding Ethereum’s throughput capacity—while EIP-8037 aims to prevent unbounded state growth under high gas limits by increasing the cost of state creation. The Ethereum Foundation also noted that most clients have achieved stable operation on glamsterdam-devnet-2 and have successfully tested the full external builder workflow. Additionally, substantial progress has been made on FOCIL, native account abstraction, and the Hegotá upgrade. Over the coming weeks, core developers will continue strengthening clients, refining tests, and merging code; final parameters will be publicly confirmed at the AllCoreDevs meeting.
The Zcash Foundation officially announced the release of Zebra 4.4.0, which addresses multiple critical consensus-level security vulnerabilities. All node operators are strongly advised to upgrade immediately. The vulnerabilities include a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw that could permanently halt the discovery of new blocks; a signature operation (sigop) counting error in block validation that may cause consensus divergence; abnormal handling of transparent transaction signature hashes; and a memory allocation amplification attack risk. The Zcash Foundation stated that some of these vulnerabilities could cause Zebra nodes to accept blocks rejected by zcashd, potentially triggering a chain fork. Without timely upgrades, nodes risk interruption of block discovery, consensus forks, and amplified resource consumption. No alternative mitigations are currently available.
The Foundation stated that the proceeds from this sale will support EF’s core operations and activities, including protocol development, ecosystem growth, and community grants.
Odaily, Berachain Foundation issued a warning on the X platform, stating that the Wasabi Protocol experienced a cross-chain security incident due to a deployer's private key leak, which has impacted multiple blockchains including Berachain. To prevent the risk from spreading, Berachain has suspended and blacklisted all affected Wasabi Reward Vaults within its network, immediately halting the distribution of BGT staking rewards to the compromised contracts and blocking the flow of new BGT into the affected vaults.The official team requires all users who have previously interacted with Wasabi on Berachain to immediately revoke token approvals for the specified contracts to avoid the risk of asset theft. Berachain also emphasized that the BGT reward funds within the native Reward Vaults remain secure and users can claim them normally; this incident does not affect core ecosystem interests.
According to an official announcement by Sui, Aftermath Finance’s perpetual contract protocol deployed on the Sui network was exploited due to a vulnerability, and the affected protocol has been immediately suspended. The Sui Foundation, in collaboration with Mysten Labs, stated that it will actively assist Aftermath Finance in recovering user funds and is committed to ensuring the continued operation of the Aftermath protocol. Aftermath Finance will provide further updates on the fund recovery progress in the near future.
, RWA tokenization protocol KAIO announced on X platform the launch of its native token KAIO, and simultaneously established the KAIO Foundation as the governance and operational body under the ecosystem chain, responsible for protocol governance, treasury management, and ecosystem development, working alongside KAIO Labs to advance core infrastructure and product innovation. KAIO is positioned as an open infrastructure protocol for institutional-grade Real World Assets (RWA), dedicated to bridging traditional finance and DeFi to build a compliant, auditable, cross-chain tokenized asset network. The platform has currently listed 5 tier-1 institutional funds, covering managers such as BlackRock, Brevan Howard, and Hamilton Lane, with approximately $100 million in TVL deployed across 10+ blockchain networks.In terms of tokenomics, KAIO has a total supply of 10 billion tokens, with community and liquidity incentives accounting for 37.5%, making it the largest allocation portion; team and early investor tokens are subject to locking and staggered release mechanisms, with zero initial release at TGE, and the foundation allocation accounts for 17%, designated for long-term ecosystem development.