News linked to both this project and an event.
Ethereum Layer 2 infrastructure Optimism has officially announced a tripartite strategic collaboration, joining forces with Upbit operator Dunamu, fintech platform Toss, and DB Securities to comprehensively expand into the Korean market. On the cooperation front with Dunamu, both parties will upgrade the GIWA public chain based on the OP Stack and promote its global development. A three-month technical verification will be conducted with Toss to build a compliant Korean won digital financial infrastructure. Optimism and DB Securities are focusing on the STO and RWA sectors, planning to transform Jeju Island's smart agriculture, livestock assets, and Korean intellectual property into tokenized securities and real-world asset products. This will facilitate the phased on-chain commercialization of local physical assets, with the entire cooperation framework tailored to align with Korea's financial regulatory framework.
Odaily Planet Daily reported that Korean fintech company Toss has announced a partnership with Optimism and Sunnyside Labs to jointly explore a Korean won-pegged stablecoin.In the coming months, the three parties will conduct a Proof of Concept (PoC) test to evaluate the feasibility of building compliant blockchain-based digital financial infrastructure on OP Stack, providing technical verification for applications related to a Korean won stablecoin. (The Block)
Ink, an Ethereum Layer 2 network incubated by Kraken, has reached a multi-year infrastructure agreement with Optimism, upgrading to OP Enterprise Fully Managed.Under the agreement, Optimism will be responsible for running Ink's production infrastructure, while the Ink Foundation will focus on ecosystem growth and new financial products. Additionally, Ink will serve as a deep design partner for OP Enterprise, jointly advancing roadmap plans including programmable block construction, one-day Ethereum withdrawals, and sequencer-level compliance tools.Currently, applications built on the Ink network generate nearly $40 million in annual revenue. This partnership makes Ink another exchange-related blockchain network to join the fully managed layer service, following Bitpanda's Vision Chain. (The Block)
BofA believes that current global corporate earnings expectations have clearly outpaced macroeconomic fundamentals, and the market is betting that AI will reshape the global labor market and boost corporate profit margins—much like China’s accession to the WTO did in its time. However, this logic still faces multiple risks related to demand, costs, and policy.
According to The Block, Base—the Ethereum Layer 2 network operated by Coinbase—has officially activated the Azul upgrade on its mainnet. This marks Base’s first independent network upgrade following its separation from the Optimism Superchain. The Azul upgrade introduces a multi-proof system that combines TEE (Trusted Execution Environment) proofs with zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs, reducing the shortest possible withdrawal finalization time to just one day. Both proof types can independently confirm proposals; in case of conflict, permissionless ZK proofs override TEE proofs—further enhancing the network’s censorship resistance. Additionally, Azul integrates Base into a single execution client, <code>base-reth-node</code>, and introduces a new consensus client, <code>base-consensus</code>, built on OP Kona. Following the upgrade, the number of empty blocks has plummeted from approximately 200 per day to roughly 2 per day, and the network has achieved a sustained peak throughput of 5,000 transactions per second.