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Odaily News: Researchers from institutions including the Ethereum Foundation, Theta Labs, and StarkWare have jointly published a paper, using AI coding agents to deeply optimize the core operations of Shor's algorithm. The computing resources required for a potential quantum attack on Bitcoin and Ethereum (secp256k1 cryptographic system) have been reduced by more than 50% compared to Google's benchmark in March of this year. The number of logical qubits required for the circuit has been compressed to 1,151, and later versions have even been reduced to 813. Although current quantum hardware still cannot directly break public chains, the research shows that pure algorithmic optimization is significantly narrowing the time window for the quantum threat. The researchers emphasize that quantum-resistant upgrades take a long time and cannot be applied retroactively, and the industry needs to prepare defenses in advance. (Coindesk)
According to CoinDesk, the U.S. Department of Commerce is allocating up to $100 million each to three quantum computing companies—Rigetti, D-Wave, and Quantinuum—through the CHIPS Act, totaling up to $300 million. The funding will support the expansion of hardware, manufacturing, and error-correction systems, alongside the simultaneous acquisition of minority stakes in all three firms. Meanwhile, Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are accelerating post-quantum cryptography upgrade initiatives. The Ethereum Foundation has set December 2029 as the deadline for foundational-layer quantum-resistant upgrades encompassing the execution, consensus, and data layers. While Bitcoin has no unified timeline, two proposals—BIP-360 (post-quantum output types) and BIP-361 (phasing out ECDSA and Schnorr signatures)—are advancing rapidly, with researchers likewise identifying 2029 as the critical window to complete a trusted migration path.
The Ethereum Foundation announced that Trezor now supports clear signing via ERC-7730. This feature aims to improve the readability of transaction content, helping users better understand what they are signing when transacting on Ethereum. Previously, the Ethereum Foundation's "Trillion Dollar Security Plan" detailed progress from the Clear Signing Working Group and encouraged more wallets and decentralized applications to participate in developing this standard.
According to The Block, the Ethereum Foundation Protocol Cluster has released a list of EIP ratings for the upcoming Hegotá upgrade, setting December 2029 as the target milestone for achieving full quantum resistance. The two S-tier (mandatory delivery) proposals for the upgrade are: FOCIL (EIP-7805) at the consensus layer, which enhances censorship resistance by requiring validator committees to enforce the inclusion of public mempool transactions; and framework transactions (EIP-8141) at the execution layer, which natively integrates account abstraction, supporting custom signatures, sponsored gas, and batch operations to improve security and quantum resistance. The Ethereum Foundation stated that this timeline aligns with the independent migration targets of Google, Cloudflare, and Microsoft, and the December 2029 deadline will be considered non-negotiable prior to January 2027. Hegotá is not the final quantum-safe fork, but rather a critical milestone determining whether subsequent upgrades can proceed on schedule. From the Q4 2026 Glamsterdam upgrade to December 2029, the average fork cycle is only about 7.2 months, leaving extremely limited execution slack.
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has officially selected EIP-7805 (FOCIL) and EIP-8141 (Frame Transactions) as two key mandatory proposals for the Hegotá upgrade, with these two updates forming the core of this hard fork.
Odaily News: The Ethereum Foundation has stated that the Protocol Cluster has published two articles providing a systematic assessment of the next network upgrade, Hegotá. Among them, "Hegotá EIP Opinion Post and Tier List" evaluates and grades the 62 EIPs currently proposed — marking the first time the team has released a unified EIP rating list for a network upgrade. Approximately 60 researchers, engineers, and domain experts from 9 teams under the Protocol Cluster participated in the review, submitting a total of 397 rating opinions, and engaging in discussions on controversial proposals. The current and future key focuses of the Ethereum protocol layer include advancing quantum resistance for Ethereum L1 by December 2029. The Protocol Cluster will host an AMA on September 16 at 14:00 UTC to discuss the Hegotá EIP ratings and protocol development priorities.
Odaily News: 0xbow.io, a privacy and regulatory compliance tool supported by the Ethereum Foundation, has awarded a $5,000 bounty to researcher ross.wei for disclosing a vulnerability in the Privacy Pools v1 SDK. The vulnerability reduced the entropy of user account master key generation and was fixed in March. The team has provided a migration process, and no user funds were lost.
The Ethereum Foundation stated that the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade will adjust the gas costs for creating and accessing on-chain state through EIP-8037 and EIP-8038. After conducting replay tests on historical mainnet transactions, the team found that a small number of smart contracts rely on existing gas cost assumptions and may experience execution failures or performance degradation under the new rules. However, the vast majority of smart contracts remain unaffected, and most issues can be resolved by increasing the gas limit.
The Ethereum Foundation announced on Twitter that it will sponsor the inaugural Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Technologies (WPPT 2026). The workshop is an affiliated event of Asiacrypt 2026 and will be held in Hong Kong in December 2026. Organized by staff from the Ethereum Foundation, it focuses on topics such as ZK, MPC, FHE, PIR, privacy identity, blockchain privacy, and practically deployed privacy systems, aiming to connect theoretical research with practical applications. Official calls for demonstration papers are now open; submissions require abstracts of no more than three pages, with a deadline of September 25.
According to Cointelegraph, the Ethereum Foundation Protocol DevOps team issued a warning that due to significant adjustments to the Ethereum gas model in the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade, some wallets, indexers, and gas estimators may experience malfunctions. Any tools relying on hardcoded maximum Gas limits will face the risk of becoming non-functional and need to be updated as soon as possible. EIP-8037 will introduce an independent "state Gas dimension" to handle operations that create new state—transfers to existing accounts will still be 21,000 Gas, but transfers to new accounts will incur additional state Gas fees. The Foundation recommends developers complete system testing on the public testnet Plataberget (launched on August 13) as soon as possible. The Glamsterdam fork is scheduled to activate on this testnet this Thursday, subsequently deployed to the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets, and finally launched on the mainnet. This upgrade also covers the Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) mechanism, block-level access lists, as well as increases in contract and initialization code size limits.
Odaily News: The Ethereum Foundation (EF) has warned that the Gas model changes in the Glamsterdam upgrade may cause some wallets, indexers, and gas estimation tools to malfunction. The EF Protocol DevOps team stated that tools relying on hardcoded maximum gas limits will fail, and developers need to update their systems and test on the Plataberget public testnet. Plataberget went live on August 13 and is expected to run for several months. The Glamsterdam fork is scheduled to activate on the Ethereum network on Thursday, followed by deployment to the Sepolia and Hoodi testnets. EIP-8037 will introduce a separate state gas dimension for operations that create new state. Transferring ETH to an existing account will still require 21,000 gas, while transfers to new accounts will incur additional state gas; developers should also re-examine software that treats 21,000 gas as the cost for all ETH transfers, or that estimates transaction fees using only a single gas dimension. (Cointelegraph)
Justin Drake stated that Ethereum L1 will no longer adopt the SNARK-friendly hash function Poseidon, which has dominated since 2019, shifting toward traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2s. This adjustment is based on progress in the SNARK design space, with the focus shifting from "SNARK-friendly hashing" to "hash-friendly SNARKs." By natively aligning Boolean operations in traditional hashing with binary fields, the proving performance of traditional hashes in SNARKs has reached 1 million operations per second, with an overhead of approximately 100x. Research efforts such as Binius and Flock have driven related progress. The Ethereum Foundation's post-quantum team is advancing this roadmap, which includes deploying a production-grade leanVM in 2027 and deploying across the consensus layer, execution layer, and data processing layer in 2028. Justin Drake also noted that AI's enhanced capabilities in cryptanalysis have recently dealt successive blows to the lattice-based scheme HAWK and the isogeny-based scheme SQIsign, with hash-based schemes being used for blockchain post-quantum signatures. The trend of open-source automated research is also accelerating, with SNARK.fast achieving 1.8 million BLAKE3 proofs per second.
Odaily News, SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom has formally opposed Ethereum Improvement Proposal EIP-8363, stating that if passed, the proposal could weaken the DeFi ecosystem, limit institutional interest in Ethereum, and erase a key advantage ETH holds over Bitcoin.EIP-8363, also known as "Tapered Issuance Burn," works by gradually increasing the proportion of consensus layer validator rewards that are burned as ETH staking ratios rise. When approximately 50% of ETH's supply is staked, the reward burn ratio would reach 100%, meaning issuance returns would drop to zero. If passed, the mechanism would be phased in gradually over roughly 18 months.The proposal, introduced earlier this week, has sparked significant controversy. Supporters argue it could limit the scale of ETH staking through market-based means while reducing the dilution problem faced by non-stakers. Proposal authors include Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, EthCC founder Jérôme de Tychey, and others.However, critics argue the mechanism could disproportionately harm solo stakers and weaken Ethereum's security. Chalom stated that the proposal's authors are all serious researchers and long-term Ethereum supporters, but "well-intentioned people can also be wrong."
The Ethereum Foundation (EF) is globally recruiting Protocol Security Researchers (Remote Full-time), a role within the Protocol Security team. The team is responsible for identifying and intercepting vulnerabilities before they reach mainnet, with work covering Execution Layer/Consensus Layer security reviews, AI-assisted vulnerability discovery, fuzzing, specification audits, and coordinating vulnerability disclosure. Candidates are required to have deep experience with the Ethereum protocol, be familiar with EL/CL specifications and client implementations, and be proficient in languages such as Go, Rust, Java, C#, Nim, or Python. There are no hard requirements on years of work experience, with technical depth being the core consideration.
The Ethereum Foundation's "Trillion Dollar Security" initiative announced a grant to the Freedom of the Press Foundation to support the continued development of the open-source tool WEBCAT. This tool helps browsers verify whether the frontend code actually delivered by a website matches the version released by the developer, reducing security risks associated with frontend tampering.
During the 11th year of Ethereum, the Ethereum Foundation underwent organizational restructuring, including leadership departures, layoffs, the introduction of a new CROPS mandate, and the spin-off of EthLabs, Ethereum Systems, and Ethereum Institutional as independent entities. The Ethereum Foundation seeks to further decentralize its role within the ecosystem. Concurrently, Ethereum continued to advance its technology and institutional adoption, launching the Fusaka upgrade and attracting participation from Wall Street institutions such as BlackRock and JPMorgan; cumulative inflows into US spot Ethereum ETFs have exceeded $11.23 billion.
Odaily Odaily A new study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance reveals that approximately 31% of Ethereum node activity is located in the United States, with another 39% distributed across EU countries excluding the UK, indicating that the geographic distribution of Ethereum nodes remains relatively concentrated in Western nations.Lead researcher Alexander Neumuller stated that while node distribution is not currently concentrated in any single country, it is heavily reliant on a few major cloud service providers, including Hetzner, Amazon AWS, and OVH. Notably, the Ethereum network does not require half of its validators to fail for problems to arise. If more than one-third of validators go offline simultaneously, the network may be unable to finalize block checkpoints (finalization). Neumuller pointed out that nodes and validators do not have a one-to-one correspondence; a single node may run multiple validators. Therefore, it is currently impossible to precisely assess the actual impact on the validator network from the failure of a specific node or service provider.Furthermore, the study reassessed the energy consumption of Ethereum following The Merge. Data shows that Ethereum's current annual energy consumption is approximately 7.9 GWh, equivalent to a continuous power draw of about 1 MW. This represents only about 0.02% of pre-merge levels, a reduction of approximately 99.98%. Currently, over 56% of the energy used by the Ethereum network comes from sustainable sources, exceeding the global average.The study also noted that client software diversity is another potential risk. If a dominant client software has a vulnerability, it could affect a large number of network participants. The report was published by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and supported by the Ethereum Foundation. (The)
EthSystems announces its official establishment. The company was founded by the original team of the Ethereum Foundation's "Institutional Privacy Working Group" and has received support from Bitmine, Sharplink, Joe Lubin, and others. It primarily develops Ethereum-based privacy and compliance technology for regulated entities such as banks and asset management institutions, aiming to support institutions in conducting on-chain financial activities without disclosing sensitive information such as transaction details and client identities.
EthSystems, an institutional privacy technology company for Ethereum, has officially launched, securing strategic funding from ecosystem supporters including Bitmine, Sharplink Gaming, and Joe Lubin.EthSystems focuses on developing privacy technologies tailored for banks, asset management firms, and other regulated institutions, enabling them to execute financial transactions at scale on the Ethereum network while protecting sensitive information such as transaction details and client identities. The company was founded by the core team of the Ethereum Foundation's Institutional Privacy Task Force (IPTF). The team had previously conducted a year-long open-source research and development effort on the EthSystems official website and established collaborations with multiple central banks, regulatory bodies, large banks, and asset management institutions.EthSystems stated that while institutions have begun exploring stablecoins, tokenized assets, and Ethereum-based settlement solutions, widespread adoption still faces privacy and compliance challenges. Financial institutions require more than just access to the blockchain network; they need a complete infrastructure that meets the requirements for protecting trade secrets, complying with regulations, and ensuring compatibility with existing financial systems. The goal is to build a "selective disclosure" privacy architecture, allowing transaction participants to view only the information they are authorized to access, while preserving Ethereum's core advantages of decentralization, security, and openness, and complementing two other organizations:Ethlabs: Focused on core Ethereum protocol and infrastructure research and development;Ethereum Institutional: Responsible for institutional collaboration, education, market research, and ecosystem coordination;EthSystems: Concentrated on application-layer technology, translating institutional needs into operational privacy protocols and financial systems.
EF Protocol Support tweeted that the Ethereum Foundation Protocol Support team has been disbanded. The team was primarily responsible for coordinating the Ethereum protocol development process, including organizing and coordinating core developer meetings, tracking network upgrade progress, supporting EIP progression, operating the Ethereum Protocol Fellowship (EPF) program, and providing education, community, and infrastructure coordination support. This adjustment is part of the Ethereum Foundation's recent organizational restructuring, as the foundation has recently seen multiple team and personnel changes.