News linked to both this project and an event.
Blockchain researcher and investor William Mougayar has come to the defense of the Ethereum Foundation, arguing that the public has long misunderstood its role and that it is "executing its mission precisely."Mougayar stated that ETH, the Ethereum network, and the Ethereum Foundation itself are three distinct entities: ETH is an asset, Ethereum is a shared computing infrastructure, and the Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for driving protocol development, with one of its goals being to "gradually make the founder irrelevant."He pointed out that many critics want the Foundation to take on responsibilities like marketing ETH or attracting institutional capital, which would be akin to "expecting the IETF to run a Super Bowl ad for TCP/IP." He emphasized that the Ethereum Foundation is currently on a "subtraction path," strengthening the network by advancing protocol upgrades, funding fundamental research, and reducing its own centralized influence.Recently, the Ethereum Foundation has faced community criticism for selling ETH, unstaking, and a lack of public communication. Data shows that the Foundation has completed its third OTC sale this month to BitMine Immersion Technologies, cumulatively selling approximately 25,000 ETH worth about $47 million. Additionally, the Foundation has recently unstaked over 38,000 ETH in total, with a combined value nearing $90 million. (Cointelegraph)
According to The Block, Foundation, a Bitcoin hardware wallet manufacturer, has raised $6.4 million in funding. The round was led by Fulgur Ventures, with participation from Arche Capital. The company plans to accelerate its expansion from Bitcoin self-custody wallets into identity authentication, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and AI agent authorization. Following this round, Foundation’s total funding has reached $16.5 million. Meanwhile, Foundation has announced the full commercial launch of its flagship device, the Passport Prime, and opened its KeyOS platform SDK to developers. The device integrates a Bitcoin hardware wallet, FIDO security key, 2FA storage, secure vault, and 50 GB of encrypted storage.
Odaily Y Combinator has launched the YC Crypto Deals program to help startups secure grants, Gas fee credits, and crypto infrastructure support from partners such as the Solana Foundation, QuickNode, Helius, and Phantom.
: Digital asset infrastructure platform Fireblocks announced the launch of the "Agentic Payments Suite" to support the AI Agent payment framework of the x402 protocol, and simultaneously announced its joining of the x402 Foundation. It is reported that this suite covers the entire AI Agent payment process, including wallet infrastructure for Agents to initiate transfers, a merchant receiving layer, and settlement and risk control functions for compliant financial institutions. (Cointelegraph)
The Zcash Foundation released its Q1 2026 report, disclosing total liquid assets of approximately $36.7 million, including roughly $12.11 million in cash, 506,556 USDC, 85,412 ZEC (valued at ~$21.2 million), 41.8 BTC (valued at ~$2.85 million), and 12.02 ETH (valued at ~$25,000). The Zcash Foundation added that, although the first quarter of this year saw personnel changes within the Electric Coin Company’s development team and governance-related disputes, network operations remained unaffected, with transactions and block production continuing normally. On the regulatory front, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has concluded its investigation without taking any enforcement action, thereby resolving long-standing regulatory uncertainty.
Adam Hollander, Chief Marketing Officer of OpenSea, stated that the next cycle of NFTs could look very different from the speculative frenzy of 2022, which saw over $1.6 billion in trading volume. Speaking to The Block at Consensus Miami, Hollander noted that it "makes perfect sense" to put assets like collectible cards, luxury watches, and digital tickets on-chain for trading, and that these could be the core drivers of a new wave of NFTs.Adam Hollander emphasized that although avatar-based NFTs like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks have experienced a value crash, NFT technology still has potential to prove ownership of both digital and physical assets. He believes the previous NFT boom relied too heavily on speculation, with buyers treating NFTs more like a digital casino rather than focusing on their technology and real-world value. The future application of NFTs will be driven by actual demand for collectibles, in-game items, AI tools, and more. The development of artificial intelligence will also lower the barrier to creating digital art, animations, and games, thereby accelerating NFT adoption.Regarding platform development, OpenSea is working to build an ecosystem that allows users to manage all their crypto assets and NFTs across different wallets and chains, while optimizing the user experience. This includes simplifying the onboarding process, supporting Apple Pay-like fiat payments, and displaying NFT prices in US dollars. When asked about the delay in launching the much-anticipated SEA token, Hollander stated that the decision lies with the OpenSea Foundation, and he personally has no further information on the timeline. He emphasized that if the token were merely an "airdrop meme coin," it would not create value for users. (The Block)
Odaily Odaily, Nasdaq-listed HYPE treasury company Hyperion DeFi released its Q1 financial report, disclosing a Q1 net profit of $8.8 million, an improvement from a net loss of $39.8 million in Q4 2025. Since the end of Q1, it has increased its holdings by approximately 60,000 HYPE tokens. Currently, its HYPE token holdings have exceeded 2 million, and its validator node has been delegated 10.2 million HYPE, ranking among the top six validators, second only to the Hyperliquid Foundation. In addition, the company holds 1.92 million KNTQ tokens and 10 million HPL tokens. (Globenewswire)
Anthropic and the Gates Foundation have entered into a 4-year partnership, jointly committing $200 million to support projects in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility. This collaboration will provide grants, Claude usage credits, and technical support.In the realm of global health, the two parties will leverage AI to accelerate the research and development of vaccines and therapies for diseases such as polio, HPV, and preeclampsia, and assist governments in utilizing health data for decision-making. In the field of education, they are developing educational tools for K-12 students in the United States, Sub-Saharan Africa, and India, covering areas like math tutoring and career advice. Regarding economic mobility, the partnership aims to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers by enhancing agricultural productivity, and to provide career guidance and skills certification tools for the U.S. labor market. Additionally, Anthropic will offer discounted Claude access to non-profit organizations and educational institutions, and develop AI public goods such as public health datasets.
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.