DEV Community: Alexandra

Tokenized bank deposits go multichain, Gnosis eyes the EEZ, Builders rework smart accounts, WalletConnect Pay hits Lisbon

Alexandra — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:16:32 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: GnosisDAO debates turning Gnosis Chain into an Ethereum Economic Zone rollup; LayerZero and Keeta make tokenized commercial bank deposits transferable across Ethereum, Solana, and Base; WalletConnect Pay turns up at a Lisbon cafe as a real-world stablecoin payment; and a builder's guide lays out what smart accounts change for teams, along with a fresh security warning about EIP-7702.

Gnosis Weighs Joining the Ethereum Economic Zone
LayerZero and Keeta Tokenize Bank Deposits
WalletConnect Pay Buys Coffee in Lisbon
What Builders Must Change for Smart Accounts

Please fasten your belts!

Gnosis Weighs Joining the Ethereum Economic Zone

GnosisDAO is debating one of its biggest strategic questions yet. A new proposal, GIP-153 from Friederike Ernst, asks whether Gnosis Chain should stop being a standalone L1 and become a ZK-proven rollup that settles natively on Ethereum, described as an Ethereum Economic Zone instance.

The headline unlock is synchronous composability. A contract on Gnosis could call a contract on Ethereum mainnet inside a single atomic transaction, so mainnet liquidity, oracles, and on-ramps become reachable as if they were local, something no existing L2 offers today.

The tradeoffs are significant. Security would move to Ethereum’s validators, so the Gnosis validator set is sunset and roughly 350,000 staked GNO is unlocked, and sequencing would start out centralized, with every block still proven and settled on Ethereum. Users keep their addresses, balances, and xDAI gas token throughout.

The framing is philosophical as much as technical. The authors argue for maximal censorship resistance at Ethereum’s base layer and more opinionated, user-protective zones on top, positioning Ethereum as the economic operating system and Gnosis as one specialized zone. Genesis is targeted for around the turn of the year, though this vote is about direction, not final design.

Reaction in the forum is genuinely split. Supporters see a pragmatic bet on Ethereum’s gravity, while critics warn that trading a decentralized validator set and censorship resistance for a centralized sequencer gives up exactly what made Gnosis distinctive.

LayerZero and Keeta Tokenize Bank Deposits

LayerZero and Keeta announced a partnership to make tokenized commercial bank money transferable across public chains. Their new Keeta Stablecoins will move natively across the Keeta Network, Ethereum, Solana, and Base, using LayerZero’s OFT token standard to keep one canonical asset across every chain.

What sets these apart from ordinary stablecoins is the backing. Rather than a mix of reserves pegged to a single currency, Keeta Stablecoins represent actual commercial bank deposits, held through Bivo, a US-licensed platform with access to US payment rails.

They also arrive multi-currency by default. The tokens will launch in US dollars alongside eight other currencies, including the euro, yen, pound, and renminbi, and can settle in seconds on whichever chain an institution already uses.

The timing is pointed. A group of major US banks recently floated a closed, banks-only tokenized-deposit network, and this partnership offers the same class of instrument on open public chains instead. For a newsletter about chain abstraction, it is a clear signal that regulated money is heading toward omnichain rails.

WalletConnect Pay Buys Coffee in Lisbon

During Lisbon Blockchain Week, WalletConnect turned its payments product into a real-world demo. At a cafe called 94°, customers could buy coffee with WalletConnect Pay, and the coffee was free that week for anyone who paid that way.

It is a small moment, but a telling one. WalletConnect Pay is the merchant-facing side of the network, letting a shop accept crypto and stablecoin payments from any compatible wallet through the familiar WalletConnect QR flow.

This is exactly the direction Pedro Gomes described at ETHConf a few weeks ago, where the goal was to let any wallet pay any merchant without onboarding to a new platform. Turning that into a cup of coffee is how mainstream payment habits actually start.

What Builders Must Change for Smart Accounts

A new builder’s guide makes the case that programmable accounts on Ethereum are no longer theoretical. ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 are in production, and any team that touches keys, gas, or user flows now has to treat accounts as programmable endpoints rather than simple key pairs.

The practical to-do list is clear. Shift authentication to passkeys and scoped session keys, move fee logic to paymasters with gasless and stablecoin options, and enforce risk checks on-chain in the account’s validation step rather than only in the frontend.

The guide is blunt that the two standards are complements, not rivals. EIP-7702 lets an ordinary EOA borrow smart-account logic for a single transaction, which is ideal for smooth checkout and sponsored payments, while ERC-4337 gives full-time smart accounts with persistent policies, guardian recovery, and fine-grained controls. Most apps will support both and route users by use case.

There is also a sharp security warning. A USENIX Security 2026 study measured real EIP-7702 misuse across seven chains, finding 924 malicious contract accounts, over 10 million exposed accounts, and at least $2.3 million in direct losses. Roughly 63% of all 7702 authorization transactions were tied to malicious activity.

The takeaway is not to avoid smart accounts but to implement them carefully. Keep session-key scopes tight, keep validation logic free of external calls, require step-up authentication above a value threshold, and log everything so attacks can be investigated.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

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Ethereum’s Next Forks Advance, Native AA Comes to Base, EthSystems Launches, Reth Ships v2.4.0

Alexandra — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:12:19 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Core developers move Glamsterdam toward testnets while keeping native account abstraction optional for Hegota; Base confirms that native account abstraction will go live this September; EthSystems spins out of the Ethereum Foundation to build confidential systems for institutions; and Reth ships v2.4.0 with a faster client and experimental JIT execution.

Core Devs Advance Glamsterdam and Hegota
Native Account Abstraction Comes to Base
EthSystems Spins Out for Institutional Privacy
Reth v2.4.0 Ships a Faster Client

Please fasten your belts!

Core Devs Advance Glamsterdam and Hegota

On the latest All Core Developers Execution call, Ethereum developers sketched out the next phase for two upgrades, Glamsterdam and Hegota. Glamsterdam will likely get one more coordinated devnet before it moves to public testnets, with mainnet activation still at least several months away.

The current test network, Devnet-7, was deliberately stressful, launching with around half a million validators to pressure client implementations. It exposed some bugs, but participation has since climbed to roughly 80 to 90%, and it will now double as an early, short-lived environment where app developers can test Glamsterdam changes before they reach public testnets.

For Hegota, the developers confirmed FOCIL as the headliner. FOCIL, short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, strengthens censorship resistance by making it harder for block builders to keep valid transactions out of the chain.

The account abstraction news is more cautious. Native account abstraction is included only as a candidate for Hegota, not a headliner, so it will not automatically delay the upgrade and could be deferred if the AA teams do not converge on a design in time.

Developers set August 6 as the deadline for non-headliner execution-layer proposals, after which Hegota’s scope starts to freeze. One new candidate is EIP-8268, which would add storage roots to Block Access Lists.

Native Account Abstraction Comes to Base

Base confirmed that native account abstraction will go live this September as part of its Cobalt upgrade. Rather than relying on third-party infrastructure, gas sponsorship and transaction batching will be built into the protocol itself.

In practice, that means every account on Base effectively becomes a smart account. The capabilities that today require external bundlers and paymasters, like sponsored gas and bundled transactions, would come standard at the base layer.

This builds on Base Account and Sign in with Base, which already give users a self-custodial smart wallet with one-tap USDC payments, sponsored gas, and transaction batching. Cobalt pushes those features down into the protocol so they work everywhere by default.

Base frames all of this as agent-native infrastructure. Smart accounts with programmable logic, batching, and gas sponsorship suit autonomous AI agents far better than traditional key-controlled accounts, a theme we have seen across the ecosystem in recent weeks.

It also makes for a striking contrast. Native account abstraction is arriving on a major L2 this September, while on Ethereum L1 it is still just a candidate for a future fork, which shows how quickly the L2 layer is moving on user experience.

EthSystems Spins Out for Institutional Privacy

A new company called EthSystems has launched to build what it calls confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. It is founded by Mo Jalil, Oskar Thorén, and Aaryamann Challani, who spent the past year at the Ethereum Foundation as its Institutional Privacy Task Force.

The thesis is that public chains like Ethereum are becoming the default ledger for institutions, but they still lack good, modular privacy tools. EthSystems wants to fill that gap for financial use cases such as stablecoins, tokenization, and settlement, where firms need clear security and privacy properties before moving real money onchain.

It is a for-profit company doing bespoke consulting: workshops, proofs of concept, architecture reviews, and protocol specifications. The technical work stays open source, including an Ethereum Privacy Map and a series of proofs of concept covering private bonds, shielded stablecoin transfers, and private cross-chain swaps.

The launch continues a pattern we have tracked in recent weeks. As the Ethereum Foundation narrows its focus, senior teams are spinning out into independent organizations, and EthSystems is the privacy and institutional counterpart to research-focused efforts like Ethlabs.

Reth v2.4.0 Ships a Faster Client

Paradigm shipped Reth v2.4.0, a new release of its Rust Ethereum execution client. The headline is performance, with mean newPayload latency dropping about 6.2% compared with v2.3.0.

The release adds experimental JIT support for EVM execution through a revmc integration, which node operators can opt into. It also brings a large set of networking and transaction-propagation improvements aimed at higher throughput.

On the protocol side, the team continues work toward the upcoming Amsterdam fork and EIP-7928 Block Access Lists, which let blocks declare in advance the state they will touch so clients can execute more efficiently. Some internal state-root APIs were also deprecated, so SDK users depending on trie internals will need to update.

Client releases like this rarely make headlines, but they matter for the whole stack. Faster, leaner execution clients set the ceiling for how much throughput chains like Base and BNB Chain, which build on Reth, can safely offer.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

Learn more about account abstraction here.
Head to our docs and read all about Etherspot Modular SDK.
Skandha — developer-friendly Typescript ERC4337 Bundler.
Arka — an open-source Paymaster Service for gasless & sponsored transactions.
Explore our TransactionKit, a React library for fast & simple Web3 development.
Follow us on X (Twitter) and join our Discord.

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Wallet privacy leaks, NEAR's confidential intents go live, Arbitrum backs agent payments, BNB Chain's speed roadmap

Alexandra — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:54:47 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: NEAR makes Confidential Intents generally available so any app can offer private cross-chain execution; Arbitrum adds x402 and MPP support to make agent payments practical; BNB Chain lays out a speed-focused roadmap with a native account abstraction suite; and a new academic study finds that popular browser-extension wallets leak more about their users than most people assume.

NEAR Makes Confidential Intents Generally Available
Arbitrum Adds x402 and MPP for Agents
BNB Chain Doubles Down on Speed
Research Highlights Privacy Risks in Browser Wallets

Please fasten your belts!

NEAR Makes Confidential Intents Generally Available

NEAR has made Confidential Intents generally available, opening private cross-chain execution to every developer on the network. Any builder using the NEAR Intents 1Click Swap API can now offer confidential swaps and transfers to their users, with no privacy infrastructure of their own to stand up.

The idea is to let activity move across chains without broadcasting it to the whole world. Wallets can add confidential swaps inside existing flows, DEXs and aggregators can reduce the trade signaling that gives away strategy, and multichain managers can rebalance positions without exposing them.

For trading and DeFi apps, that means positions, counterparties, and activity can stay off the public chain, while payments and consumer apps can support confidential cross-chain transfers. NEAR frames the launch as a privacy primitive the whole industry can build on, arguing that when privacy is an option, users take it.

It also fits NEAR’s broader chain-abstraction pitch, where a user declares an intent and the network handles cross-chain routing behind the scenes. Adding confidentiality to that flow is a natural next step, and one that pairs well with account abstraction, since both aim to hide infrastructure the user should not have to think about.

Arbitrum Adds x402 and MPP for Agents

Arbitrum has added two new pathways for building agent payment and settlement flows: x402 and MPP. Coinbase’s hosted x402 facilitator now supports Arbitrum, and Offchain has published arbitrum-mpp, an open-source implementation of the Machine Payments Protocol.

x402 folds payment into the normal request and response pattern that software already uses. An agent calling a paid API or data product can receive a payment requirement and respond to it programmatically, without a human stepping in or a separate checkout.

MPP ships both halves of the flow as a TypeScript SDK. The client turns a server’s challenge into a signed payment authorization, and the server validates it, submits the transaction, and confirms settlement, with runnable examples so developers can test the full handshake locally.

The account abstraction angle is in the settlement design. Payments settle in USDC through a signed transfer authorization, so a payment can be authorized offchain and settled onchain without the payer holding the gas token or sending a separate approval first.

Arbitrum calls this an early step toward becoming a practical home for agentic finance, where agents request a service, weigh the cost, authorize payment, and continue the workflow. The standards are still forming, but the direction is that more economic activity will be initiated and coordinated by agents.

BNB Chain Doubles Down on Speed

BNB Chain published its H2 2026 technical roadmap, and the headline is speed. In the first half of the year, it cut block intervals to 450 ms, brought in-memory finality down to 650 ms, and nearly doubled benchmark throughput to around 5,200 TPS.

The second-half goal is to double mainnet throughput again, on a stated path toward a 10x improvement, alongside better resource isolation so one busy app does not slow down the others. Gas fees will also be tuned by industry vertical rather than changed across the board.

The most interesting part for us is a next-generation L1 in development, targeting 100,000+ TPS with sub-50 ms preconfirmations and no public mempool, which blocks front-running by design. It is slated for testnet by the end of 2026 and mainnet in early 2027.

That new chain ships with a dedicated Account Abstraction Suite: gas sponsorship, a GasToken, transaction batching, scheduled execution, passkey signing, and access-key control, all aimed at delivering Web2-grade UX natively. Native confidential transactions with selective disclosure round out the design.

Post-quantum readiness also leans on account abstraction. BNB Chain is researching how AA can let users adopt quantum-safe security without changing their existing addresses or breaking what they have already built.

Research Highlights Privacy Risks in Browser Wallets

A new academic paper offers a sobering look at wallet privacy. Titled “The Masks We (Think We) Wear” and accepted at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium, it measured 85 of the most popular Chrome browser-extension wallets, which together represent about 35 million users.

The researchers identify five privacy threats that arise from wallets talking to blockchain infrastructure and the browser. In short, routine behavior leaks more than users assume, and addresses people believe are unlinked often are not.

Among the findings, routine RPC calls can leak structural links between a user’s addresses, and most Ethereum wallets handle permission revocation inconsistently, continuing to expose previously revoked addresses across sessions. Many wallets also inject their provider into cross-origin iframes, which enables passive cross-site tracking and even real-world deanonymization without any user interaction.

Taken together, these behaviors can link multiple addresses to one person, track users across sites, and connect their browsing to their onchain wealth. The authors argue that many of the leaks are fixable through better wallet implementation and stronger privacy in ecosystem standards, and they call for standardized, privacy-preserving wallet architectures.

The finding lands well alongside this week’s privacy launches. As NEAR and BNB Chain build confidentiality into execution, this paper is a reminder that the wallet layer itself, the part users touch most, still needs the same attention.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

Learn more about account abstraction here.
Head to our docs and read all about Etherspot Modular SDK.
Skandha — developer-friendly Typescript ERC4337 Bundler.
Arka — an open-source Paymaster Service for gasless & sponsored transactions.
Explore our TransactionKit, a React library for fast & simple Web3 development.
Follow us on X (Twitter) and join our Discord.

❓Is your dApp ready for Account Abstraction? Check it out here: https://eip1271.io/

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Robinhood Chain Goes Live, Agentic Payments Take Shape, Updated Lean Ethereum Roadmap

Alexandra — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:24:21 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Robinhood takes its own chain and agentic trading live; WalletConnect and MetaMask make the case that account abstraction is what will keep AI agent payments safe; a new essay argues Ethereum should fund its founding period like a young nation-state; and Vitalik shares the updated Lean Ethereum roadmap that makes privacy and quantum resistance first-class.

Robinhood Chain Goes Live With Agentic Trading
WalletConnect and MetaMask on Agentic Payments
The Case for Founding-Period Ethereum Funding
Vitalik Shares the Updated Lean Ethereum Roadmap

Please fasten your belts!

Robinhood Chain Goes Live With Agentic Trading

Robinhood has launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, its biggest move yet into onchain finance. Built on Arbitrum, the Layer 2 is designed for tokenized real-world assets and DeFi, and it went live at a London keynote with day-one partners including Uniswap.

With the mainnet, Robinhood’s Stock Tokens are now fully live in more than 120 countries, though availability varies by jurisdiction. Users can trade tokenized equities around the clock and put them to work across DeFi, including in lending pools and as trading collateral.

The company also rolled out Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product that pays an estimated 7% on its dollar-backed USDG stablecoin through a self-custody wallet, powered by the Morpho protocol. Perpetual futures and maker fees as low as 0% round out the trading updates.

The most relevant piece for our readers is Agentic Accounts for crypto. Through a Trading MCP, eligible users can connect their AI model of choice to Robinhood’s data and tools, while keeping control by setting how much capital to allocate and which safety guardrails apply.

This is account abstraction territory in all but name. Letting an agent trade from a self-custody wallet within human-defined limits depends on programmable permissions, and it shows how the line between traditional finance and DeFi keeps blurring.

WalletConnect and MetaMask on Agentic Payments

At ETHConf, WalletConnect founder Pedro Gomes and MetaMask’s Francesco Andreoli discussed where wallets and payments are heading. Both see wallet features consolidating, with payments becoming the main way users touch the outside world, whether through a wallet embedded in a website, one hidden inside a bank, or a crypto-native super app.

A recurring theme was that account abstraction still matters, but in a specific way. As people meet crypto through apps that hide the wallet entirely, the value of AA shows up in smoother permissions and controls rather than in anything the user sees directly.

On agentic payments, Gomes argued the missing piece is authorization. Stablecoins succeeded partly because self-custody wallets gave users the right controls, including pull payments that let a party authorize a charge before it settles, which is also how card payments work.

That framing sets up the case for guardrails. A “beast mode” agent that can spend freely is fine for building a quick app, but not for booking flights or managing money, so wallets need granular permissions, transaction simulation, and security checks before an agent ever signs.

Andreoli pointed to MetaMask’s agent wallet work, where the goal is stronger guarantees like gasless flows and pre-signing safety checks, even at the cost of some latency. The shared vision is wallet payments that feel as safe and routine as cards, but with self-custody underneath.

The Case for Founding-Period Ethereum Funding

In the third essay of Trent Van Epps’ (trent.eth) series on Ethereum’s political economy, the author argues that Ethereum is best understood as an early-stage polity rather than a digital utility. Comparisons to open-source projects, Linux, or ICANN are category errors, he writes, because Ethereum has its own money, its own sovereignty, and internal capital and labor markets.

From that frame, he makes the case for what he calls founding-period funding. Durable polities tend to front-load their infrastructure investment rather than spread it evenly, and he points to Singapore, which spent well above the norm on capital projects in its early decades before its economy compounded for sixty years.

Applied to Ethereum, the argument is mostly about timing. Core decisions on scaling, proposer-builder separation, account abstraction, zkEVMs, and privacy are being locked in right now, so underfunding the people making them is not a real saving.

He adds that early investment compounds, and that losing protocol talent is far harder to recover from in a young system than a mature one. Funding infrastructure like Protocol Guild, he argues, helps set norms that persist as the ecosystem grows.

The piece continues the funding and succession thread we covered a couple of weeks ago, now with a wider historical lens. It is a dense read, but a useful counterweight to the idea that Ethereum can quietly coast on a steady-state budget.

Vitalik Shares the Updated Lean Ethereum Roadmap

Vitalik Buterin has shared an updated long-term roadmap he calls “Lean Ethereum,” describing it as the network’s third major iteration after the Merge. Rather than arriving in a single upgrade, it is a series of protocol improvements planned over the next three to four years and published through Ethereum’s public strawmap.

The plan touches nearly every layer of the protocol. Highlights include replacing direct transaction re-execution with recursive STARK verification, adding quantum-resistant cryptography, redesigning consensus for one or two-round finality, and introducing multidimensional gas pricing.

One of the biggest shifts is how the roadmap treats privacy. Buterin says privacy is no longer an afterthought but a first-class goal, with new components like Frames, the mempool, and future state structures now judged on whether they can support intermediary-free, quantum-safe privacy at low overhead.

Scalability gets a rethink through new state designs. Under one vision, Ethereum in 2030 could hold roughly 2 TB of today’s dynamic state alongside 100 TB of newer, more scalable state for assets like ERC-20 tokens and NFTs, without forcing existing applications to migrate.

Looking further out, Buterin floated moving beyond the EVM toward an execution environment such as RISC-V or leanISA, with the EVM becoming a compiler target. Throughput would keep rising gradually, and the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade already includes another gas limit increase.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

Learn more about account abstraction here.
Head to our docs and read all about Etherspot Modular SDK.
Skandha — developer-friendly Typescript ERC4337 Bundler.
Arka — an open-source Paymaster Service for gasless & sponsored transactions.
Explore our TransactionKit, a React library for fast & simple Web3 development.
Follow us on X (Twitter) and join our Discord.

❓Is your dApp ready for Account Abstraction? Check it out here: https://eip1271.io/

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Ethlabs Launch, the EF Restructures, Starknet Brings Private USDC, Crypto Neobanks Go Mainstream

Alexandra — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:44:16 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Ethlabs launches as an independent EF-origin R&D lab backed by Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin; the Ethereum Foundation reorganizes into five focused clusters and parts ways with a fifth of its staff; Starknet brings confidential USDC payments to DeFi through its STRK20 framework; and a new industry report charts how crypto-native neobanks went mainstream and why account abstraction matters more because of it.

Ethlabs Launches as an Independent R&D Lab
The Ethereum Foundation Restructures Into Five Clusters
Starknet Brings Private USDC to DeFi
Crypto Neobanks Cross From Experiment to Infrastructure

Please fasten your belts!

Ethlabs Launches as an Independent R&D Lab

A coordinated group of Ethereum contributors has launched Ethlabs, an independent nonprofit research and development lab built to ready the network for its next wave of institutional and agentic adoption. The funding effort is led by Bitmine, Sharplink, and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, with support from Anchorage, Octant, and SNZ.

Ethlabs is cofounded by five former senior Ethereum Foundation researchers — Ansgar Dietrichs, Barnabé Monnot, Caspar Schwarz-Schilling, Josh Rudolf, and Julian Ma — who between them shaped finality, scaling, data availability, and protocol economics over the past decade. Dietrichs serves as Executive Director.

The lab’s early work centers on what institutions need to move onchain at scale: faster settlement, native issuance, cross-chain movement, and more mainnet capacity, alongside research into ETH’s monetary properties. The team frames the moment as Ethereum’s shift from infrastructure buildout to an age of adoption, where the architecture that settles global activity is being decided now rather than in ten years.

To preserve neutrality, funding flows through an independent grants administrator that handles screening and disbursement, with accountability via quarterly reporting and an annual audit rather than influence over the research agenda. Final say on priorities and technical direction rests with Ethlabs leadership.

The launch reflects a theme we touched on last week: as the EF narrows its focus, Ethereum is moving toward a multi-node future of several independent organizations advancing the protocol in parallel. Ethlabs positions itself as one of those stewards.

The Ethereum Foundation Restructures Into Five Clusters

On the same theme, the Ethereum Foundation has unveiled a new internal structure, concluding a months-long reorganization tied to its Mandate and Treasury Policy. The change comes with 54 fewer staff, roughly 20% of the EF, many of whom are expected to keep contributing to Ethereum from outside the Foundation.

The EF now organizes its work into five clusters: protocol, access, user, community, and institutional, plus separate operations and management groups. Each has its own remit and accountability, tailored to the kind of work it does.

The protocol cluster keeps the core mission of scaling self-sovereignty, shipping forks safely, reducing complexity, defending against toxic MEV, and turning long-horizon research like post-quantum security, zkEVM, and L1 privacy into protocol changes. It frames privacy and security as non-negotiable guarantees rather than features.

Most relevant for our readers is the access layer, described in language that maps directly onto account abstraction. Its job is to keep self-sovereignty usable across reading, transacting, proving, delegating, and exiting for users and, increasingly, for the agents acting on their behalf. These agents can be granted bounded, revocable authority while users retain control of their own intents.

Departing staff receive severance and transition support, including help finding a new place to contribute in the ecosystem. The EF says the leaner structure lets it focus on the work only it can do, with more detail promised in the coming weeks.

Starknet Brings Private USDC to DeFi

Starknet has rolled out privacy features for Circle’s USDC, built on STRK20, its native privacy framework. The result is confidential stablecoin payments using USDC that can be shielded, transferred privately, and used across DeFi without leaving the standard ERC-20 behind.

The problem it targets is that ordinary stablecoin transfers are permanently public, exposing sender, recipient, amount, and timing to anyone watching. For a treasury or a market maker, that transparency leaks position size, strategy, and entire balance histories.

STRK20 lets users shield USDC into a private balance protected by zero-knowledge proofs, transfer it confidentially, and unshield back to transparent ERC-20 whenever they choose. It works at the protocol level rather than as a separate app or wrapped token, so it is the same USDC in the same wallet, remaining private when you need it and visible when you don’t.

Compliance is built in rather than bolted on. Shielding registers a scoped viewing key that lets an authorized auditor reconstruct only that user’s history under legal process, and nothing else, while a flat per-transaction fee, closer to gas than a percentage toll, keeps private payments viable at volume.

Confidential swaps will be available first through the Ready and Xverse wallets, with more venues to follow. As a native account-abstraction chain, Starknet is a natural home for pairing programmable accounts with protocol-level privacy.

Crypto Neobanks Cross From Experiment to Infrastructure

A new industry report on crypto-native neobanks argues the category has crossed from experiment to infrastructure. These are apps that feel like a bank, offering an account, a card, savings yield, and instant transfers, while stablecoins, blockchain settlement, and DeFi yield run underneath.

The numbers behind the shift are striking. The stablecoin market crossed $312 billion in March 2026, and stablecoin transfer volume has already overtaken the major card networks, while card-issuing infrastructure that once took years to build has commoditized into something a team can stand up in weeks.

Adoption is driven by concrete, real-world needs: cheaper remittances, inflation hedging in volatile economies, yields well above traditional savings, and faster cross-border payroll. Regulation is arriving in parallel, with the US GENIUS Act and the EU’s MiCA setting the rules of the road.

As mainstream users meet crypto through banking-grade apps, the demand for smooth, abstracted experiences with no seed phrase friction, no manual gas management, and no chain juggling only grows.

That is precisely the gap account abstraction fills. Programmable accounts, gas sponsorship, automation, batching, and session keys turn a clunky wallet into something that feels like a modern banking app, making account abstraction more relevant than ever as this trend accelerates.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

Learn more about account abstraction here.
Head to our docs and read all about Etherspot Modular SDK.
Skandha — developer-friendly Typescript ERC4337 Bundler.
Arka — an open-source Paymaster Service for gasless & sponsored transactions.
Explore our TransactionKit, a React library for fast & simple Web3 development.
Follow us on X (Twitter) and join our Discord.

❓Is your dApp ready for Account Abstraction? Check it out here: https://eip1271.io/

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Glamsterdam's final stage, Ethereum's funding crisis, Base Beryl hits testnet, Movement on NEAR Intents

Alexandra — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:05:06 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Ethereum's Glamsterdam fork enters its final development stage with ePBS and block-level access lists; a former Ethereum Foundation contributor sounds the alarm on Ethereum's looming protocol funding crisis; Base ships its Beryl upgrade to testnet with the B20 native token standard and faster withdrawals, and Movement goes live on NEAR Intents for one-click swaps across 30+ chains.

Glamsterdam Enters Its Final Development Stage
A Former EF Contributor Flags a Funding Crisis
Base Beryl Upgrade Goes Live on Testnet
Movement Goes Live on NEAR Intents

Please fasten your belts!

Glamsterdam Enters Its Final Development Stage

Ethereum’s next major upgrade, Glamsterdam, has entered its final development stage. Developers are now running devnets containing the full suite of planned EIPs, the last phase before the code is hardened and shipped to public testnets, with activation expected in the second half of the year.

Ethereum Foundation developer Parithosh Jayanthi has described it as likely the largest fork since the Merge, one that will change many assumptions about Ethereum and set the stage for much more scaling. Two proposals headline the release.

The first is enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS, EIP-7732), which moves the split between block builders and proposers into the core protocol. Today, that process relies on off-chain relays with extra trust assumptions, so bringing it on-chain aims to reduce MEV-related manipulation and centralization concerns.

The second is Block-level Access Lists (EIP-7928), which let blocks declare in advance which accounts and contract data they intend to access, so clients can preload state and execute faster. Glamsterdam also bundles a sweeping gas repricing that makes high-level compute cheaper and state more expensive.

The repricings are intended to make Ethereum’s fees better reflect the resources each operation consumes, while also easing scaling with zero-knowledge proving systems. Developers are now focused on testing, finalizing specs, and community outreach about the fee changes before shipping.

A Former EF Contributor Flags a Funding Crisis

In a widely shared essay titled “Succession After Subtraction,” former Ethereum Foundation contributor Trent Van Epps (trent.eth) warns of a looming protocol funding crisis. Drawing on five years coordinating core development and Protocol Guild, he argues the ecosystem needs a reset of how it funds and stewards the protocol.

The backdrop is the EF’s long-stated “Subtraction” philosophy — deliberately reducing the Foundation’s relative influence over time. Van Epps respects the aim, but notes that legitimacy tends to pool, leaving the EF still uniquely central even as it steps back.

The practical pressure is financial. A June 2025 treasury plan sets a glide path from 15% annual spend toward a 5% endowment baseline by 2030, while the four-year Client Incentive Program, which funded client teams via staking, expired in April 2026 with no replacement yet announced.

Van Epps estimates core development costs at roughly $30 million a year across more than ten client, research and coordination teams, and warns of a slow-burning funding crisis within three to nine months. The risk, he argues, is losing contributors with years of hard-won context just as Ethereum faces challenges like quantum computing and scaling.

His proposed direction is to create new institutions and neutral, accountable funding mechanisms, including in-protocol funding, to support Ethereum’s next decade. He points to Vitalik’s own view that the Foundation was never designed to be an eternal steward of the protocol.

Base Beryl Upgrade Goes Live on Testnet

Base, Coinbase’s OP Stack Layer 2, has shipped its Beryl upgrade to testnet, with mainnet activation set for June 25. Beryl bundles three changes that touch the whole stack: a new native token standard called B20, a shorter withdrawal window, and a full execution-client overhaul with Reth V2.

The headline feature is B20, Base’s own token standard. Unlike ERC-20 tokens that deploy as standalone smart contracts, B20 tokens run as Rust precompiles baked directly into the node software, executing at the protocol level while keeping full ERC-20 compatibility. It ships with a built-in compliance toolkit, transfer policies, freeze-and-seize, role-based access, supply caps, and EIP-2612 permits, aimed at stablecoin and real-world-asset issuers.

Beryl also trims the canonical bridge’s withdrawal finalization from seven days to five, letting users and liquidity providers redeploy capital sooner with no action required. Under the hood, Reth V2 cuts node disk usage roughly in half and lifts throughput by about a third, giving operators headroom as Base pushes toward its 1 gigagas-per-second target.

For our readers, the most interesting part is what comes next. Base’s following upgrade, Cobalt, targeted for September, is slated to bring native account abstraction, making smart accounts first-class at the protocol level with gas sponsorship and transaction batching, and requiring no extra contracts.

Movement Goes Live on NEAR Intents

Movement, a stablecoin settlement and yield platform, is now live on NEAR Intents. With the integration, users can swap MOVE tokens and USDCx for more than 100 native assets across 30+ chains in a single click.

It’s a clean illustration of chain abstraction in practice. Rather than manually bridging assets or juggling gas tokens across networks, users declare the outcome they want, and NEAR Intents handles the cross-chain routing and settlement behind the scenes.

The integration also opens up yield. Partners offering yield products on Movement can now accept and settle eligible user deposits from any connected chain — the first production intent integration on the platform.

NEAR positions Intents and chain abstraction as core to its design, alongside user-owned AI and its Nightshade sharding. The broader pattern is a familiar one for AA readers: abstract away the chain, and let people transact by intent rather than wrestling with infrastructure.

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Post-quantum accounts for $0.07 with Kohaku, gasless AI agent payments, tokenized treasury on Ethereum

Alexandra — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:29:15 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: the Ethereum Foundation’s Kohaku project shows post-quantum account protection can ship today for $0.07 with no hard fork; Quack AI’s Q402 turns EIP-7702 into gasless stablecoin payments for AI agents; Ant International parks corporate cash in Amundi’s tokenized money market fund on Ethereum; and a new thirdweb guide maps where ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 stand in 2026.

Kohaku Brings Post-Quantum Account Protection to Ethereum for $0.07
How EIP-7702 Enables Gasless Payments for AI Agents
Ant International Adopts Amundi's Tokenized Money Market Fund on Ethereum for Treasury
Account Abstraction in 2026: How EIP-7702 and ERC-4337 Are Transforming Ethereum Wallets

Please fasten your belts!

Kohaku Brings Post-Quantum Account Protection to Ethereum for $0.07

The Ethereum Foundation’s Kohaku project has shown that post-quantum account protection can be deployed on Ethereum today for roughly $0.07 — no hard fork required. The approach uses ERC-4337 smart accounts to swap in quantum-resistant signatures at the individual account level, and it is entirely opt-in.

The technical groundwork comes from Kohaku contributor Nico (Nicolas Consigny), who published “SPHINCS-” on ethresear.ch, a family of EVM-optimized variants derived from SPHINCS+. The key insight is that the EVM already has a cheap KECCAK256 opcode, so replacing the standard’s SHAKE256 with KECCAK256 lets the verifier run natively on-chain, without a precompile or protocol change.

A Solidity verifier lands at roughly 150,000 gas (the ~$0.07 figure) and ships with a Lean 4 formal proof via Verity, a potential path to FIPS compliance on Ethereum. Lighter variants are tuned for different signers: C13 targets laptops, while C11 and C12 are designed to run on a Ledger Nano S+ secure element.

Why does this matter? Today’s Ethereum accounts rely on ECDSA signatures, which a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could eventually break and use to forge transactions. Because Kohaku is opt-in and account-level, holders, especially institutions sitting on large positions, can quantum-proof wallets now without waiting for network-wide consensus.

The Foundation’s Post-Quantum Security team, formed in January 2026 under Thomas Coratger with backing from Justin Drake, targets full protocol readiness around 2029. Further out, a “leanSPHINCS” variant with ZK-friendly hashing and STARK aggregation could push verification down to roughly 3,000 gas.

How EIP-7702 Enables Gasless Payments for AI Agents

Here’s a familiar friction point: a wallet can hold $100 in USDC and still be unable to send $20, simply because it has no native gas token. For a single user, that’s an annoyance, but when an AI agent manages multiple wallets across several chains, funding each one with the right gas token turns automation back into manual treasury work.

Quack AI’s Q402 is a useful example of how EIP-7702 solves this in practice. It lets people and AI agents send stablecoins (USDC, USDT, RLUSD) gaslessly across ten EVM networks: the payer signs a structured EIP-712 payment intent, and a relayer submits the on-chain transaction and pays the network gas.

The account abstraction mechanics are the interesting part. EIP-7702 lets an existing EOA use delegated code without moving funds to a newly deployed smart-account address; the relayer submits a Type-4 transaction, and the delegated implementation validates the payment before transferring the token. Crucially, the relayer pays gas but gains no arbitrary authority over the wallet — the signed intent stays bound to a permitted implementation.

On top of that base, Q402 layers AA-native conveniences: dedicated agent wallets with spending caps, batch and recurring payments, and programmable “hooks” that can screen recipients, enforce spend limits, or require approvals before a payment settles. Every settlement produces a signed “trust receipt” for independent verification.

Ant International Adopts Amundi’s Tokenized Money Market Fund on Ethereum for Treasury

Ant International, the owner of Alipay+, has started using tokenized money market funds to manage its corporate treasury. It is doing so through specially issued digital share classes of the Amundi Money Market Fund — Short Term, where the EUR and USD tokens are issued on the Ethereum public blockchain.

This builds on years of groundwork. Ant has used blockchain for internal treasury management since 2019 via its “Whale” platform, enabling 24/7 cross-border transfers; now it wants to maximize returns on idle cash by parking it in tokenized MMFs once the money arrives.

The arrangement runs through Europe’s largest asset manager. Amundi oversees €2.4 trillion in assets, and the deal is effectively a Credit Agricole affair — the bank owns 68.3% of Amundi, while its securities-services arm CACEIS acts as transfer and tokenization agent, minting and burning the digital shares.

It’s another concrete signal that institutional treasury operations are moving onto public Ethereum and that tokenized real-world assets are maturing into practical cash-management tools rather than pilots. “Our goal is to build a future of instant, borderless money movement,” said Kelvin Li, General Manager of Platform Tech at Ant International.

Account Abstraction in 2026: How EIP-7702 and ERC-4337 Are Transforming Ethereum Wallets

A new thirdweb guide frames account abstraction as the biggest shift in Ethereum wallets since MetaMask first launched. The argument: ERC-4337 and EIP-7702 are together replacing the rigid externally owned account (EOA) model with programmable smart accounts that handle gas sponsorship, batching, session keys, and recovery natively.

A common misconception it clears up is that EIP-7702 replaces ERC-4337 — in reality, they are complementary. ERC-4337 provides the infrastructure layer (bundlers, paymasters, the EntryPoint, and account factories), while EIP-7702, shipped in last year’s Pectra upgrade, gives every existing EOA the protocol-level primitive to use that infrastructure without first deploying a new contract.

Together, the stack unlocks the experiences users now expect: email or social login with gas sponsored behind the scenes, multiple actions bundled into a single transaction, session keys that remove repeated wallet pop-ups, and recovery through guardians instead of seed phrases.

The adoption numbers back up the shift. The guide notes that smart account deployments have surpassed 30 million across Ethereum and its L2s, with paymaster-sponsored transactions now a significant share of activity on Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

The takeaway is a clear directive for developers: design around smart accounts from the start, because the EOA-first model, assuming every user has MetaMask and ETH for gas, is fading fast.

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ERC-4337 Hits Final, Starknet Brings Private DeFi, Atomic Cross-Domain Proofs, RLUSD Goes Multichain

Alexandra — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:26:46 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: ERC-4337 reaches Final status; Starknet brings private DeFi to mainstream wallets through its STRK20 framework; a wave of privacy proposals turns the past week into an AA "privacy week," led by the pERC20 token standard; researchers publish machine-checked proofs for atomic cross-domain state sync; and Ripple spreads RLUSD across 40+ chains via Wormhole.

ERC-4337 Reaches Final
Private DeFi Comes to Starknet with STRK20
pERC20 Proposes a Privacy-Native Token Standard
Mechanized Proofs for Atomic Cross-Domain State Sync
Ripple Brings RLUSD to 40+ Chains via Wormhole

Please fasten your belts!

ERC-4337 Reaches Final

ERC-4337, the standard that brought account abstraction to Ethereum without any consensus-layer changes, has moved to Final status. The change landed as a GitHub commit from co-author Yoav Weiss, merged by the EIP-Bot, flipping the spec from "Last Call" (deadline May 26) to "Final."

Final status means the specification is now considered stable and complete. The EntryPoint contract, UserOperation flow, bundlers, and paymasters that the entire AA ecosystem builds on are locked in as a finished standard.

Authored by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, Shahaf Nacson, Alex Forshtat, Kristof Gazso and Tjaden Hess, and first created back in September 2021, it's a quiet milestone for a standard that reshaped how the ecosystem thinks about Ethereum wallets.

Private DeFi Comes to Starknet with STRK20

Starknet laid out how private DeFi is coming to its ecosystem through STRK20, its privacy framework for ERC-20 assets. The pitch: shielded balances, private transfers, and private app flows that live inside the wallets and apps people already use, rather than forcing users into a separate privacy app with isolated liquidity.

Users can shield assets directly from supported wallets like Ready X and Xverse, then swap, lend, or stake while keeping balances private. An anonymizing contract does the heavy lifting - for a shielded USDC → ETH swap, it unshields into the contract, routes the trade through existing Starknet liquidity (via avnu and Ekubo), and returns a fresh private note, all in one atomic transaction.

The first phase covers in-wallet shielding and swaps, with private lending (Vesu), staking (Endur), and vault strategies to follow. Amounts moving through public liquidity stay visible, and anonymity depends on the size of the privacy set, but the design breaks the direct public link between a user's wallet and their DeFi activity. Each private transaction carries a flat 4 STRK fee.

pERC20 Proposes a Privacy-Native Token Standard

The past week turned into something of a "privacy week" across the AA ecosystem, with several proposals landing at once. Chief among them: EIP-8287 (pERC20), a draft standard for privacy-native fungible tokens on the EVM.

Unlike shielded-wrapper approaches, pERC20 tokens are private from issuance; there's no public balanceOf, no approve/allowance, and no public-to-shielded conversion step. Balances and transfer amounts live as encrypted UTXO notes (an Orchard-style ZK model), while totalSupply stays public so there's no invisible inflation. A compliance "frozen root" lets specific notes be blacklisted to satisfy regulatory requirements.

The proposal is complementary to EIP-8182's private transfer layer, and it sparked immediate debate: reviewers on Ethereum Research argued its Groth16 proof system isn't quantum-safe and pushed for an FRI/PLONK-based approach - a reminder that privacy and post-quantum concerns are increasingly being designed together.

Mechanized Proofs for Atomic Cross-Domain State Sync

A new Ethereum Research post tackles a problem every multi-chain and L2 designer quietly depends on but rarely states formally: when an asset exists on several domains at once, how do you guarantee that a state change on one takes effect on the others, simultaneously or not at all?

The author formalizes "atomic cross-domain state synchronization" and proves both safety (the resulting state is consistent across every connected domain) and liveness (synchronization actually completes under Byzantine faults, f < n/3) in Isabelle/HOL - a 3,215-line machine-checked artifact with zero gaps. The model is built from seven reusable "locales" covering message priority, deadlock-free locking, and fair leader rotation, among others.

The framing is grounded in real regulatory pressure, as FATF's Travel Rule and BIS-IOSCO settlement-finality standards both effectively require that an effect (a freeze, a liquidation) hit all domains at once. For AA and chain-abstraction builders, it's a rigorous look at what "atomic composition across rollups" actually demands.

Ripple Brings RLUSD to 40+ Chains via Wormhole

Ripple has expanded its RLUSD stablecoin to more than 40 blockchain networks through Wormhole's Native Token Transfers (NTT) framework, letting the token move natively between chains without relying on wrapped versions.

The rollout brings RLUSD to Ethereum L2s including Base, Optimism, Ink, and Unichain, plus the XRP Ledger EVM sidechain. Now around $1.7 billion in market cap and the 8th-largest stablecoin, RLUSD is being positioned as compliant, USD-backed liquidity for cross-border payments, institutional on/off-ramps, and tokenized real-world assets.

For chain-abstraction builders, more native (non-wrapped) stablecoin liquidity spread across more chains is exactly the kind of substrate that intent-based and cross-chain UX runs on.

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Base Azul multiproofs, ERC-8211 smart batching, LI.FI Intents, Vitalik's Sci-Fi pivot

Alexandra — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:50:04 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Base ships its first independent upgrade with a TEE+ZK multiproof system and confirms native AA is next; Biconomy turns the ERC-8211 smart batching standard into a TypeScript SDK; LI.FI launches an enterprise intents engine for stablecoin and RWA flows; and Vitalik steps back from technical essays to write fiction.

Base Launches Azul, Bringing Multiproofs to Coinbase's L2
Biconomy Ships Smart Batching SDK for ERC-8211
LI.FI Launches Intents Engine for Enterprise Cross-Chain Flows
Vitalik Pivots to Fiction and Floats a "Trust Dependency" Framework

Please fasten your belts!

Base Launches Azul, Bringing Multiproofs to Coinbase’s L2

Base activated Azul on mainnet on May 28, its first network upgrade built entirely on its own stack. The headline feature is a multiproof system that pairs Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) proofs with Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs, advancing the Coinbase-incubated L2 toward Stage 2 decentralization.

Either proof type can finalize a withdrawal independently, but when both agree, finality drops to as little as one day, far faster than the typical multi-day optimistic rollup wait. Crucially, permissionless ZK proofs can override permissioned TEE proofs if the two conflict, a design Base says meaningfully improves censorship resistance.

The upgrade also makes base reth the sole execution client and introduces a new consensus client, phasing out older software. Node operators must migrate to the new stack to stay in sync.

For AA and chain abstraction builders, the more important signal is what comes next: Base confirmed its end-of-June upgrade will include native account abstraction, an enshrined token standard and Flashblock Access Lists. The largest L2 by activity moving toward native AA is a meaningful pull on the whole ecosystem.

Biconomy Ships Smart Batching SDK for ERC-8211

Biconomy released the Smart Batching SDK, a TypeScript library that makes the ERC-8211 “Smart Batching” standard usable without writing any Solidity. It targets one of the most persistent pain points in batched execution: static batches that break when on-chain state shifts between signing and execution.

The core primitive is runtimeBalance(), which resolves values at execution time rather than at signing. A swap-then-supply flow can swap USDC for WETH, then approve and deposit the exact amount received, even though that amount isn’t known when the batch is signed. Constraints like slippage guards are encoded into the batch itself and enforced atomically on-chain.

This unlocks patterns that were previously awkward or impossible with static batches: dustless full-balance sweeps, ERC-4626 vault migrations across share-rate drift, approve-with-cleanup flows, and predicate-gated cross-chain execution where a destination batch waits on a condition before a solver submits it.

For builders, this is the kind of tooling that turns multi-step DeFi UX into a single signed UserOperation, without forcing developers down to the contract layer.

LI.FI Launches Intents Engine for Enterprise Cross-Chain Flows

LI.FI launched LI.FI Intents, a modular execution engine that fulfills orders through a network of professional market makers, solvers, competing to provide the best execution. The launch targets enterprises bringing stablecoin payments, real-world assets, and compliant liquidity onchain.

For payments, the engine delivers exact-output execution: send 100 USDC and the recipient receives 100 USDC or USDT with zero slippage on 1:1 swaps. Flows are gasless, with solvers fronting execution on the destination chain and routing across all major chains, including non-EVM networks like Tron and Solana.

The compliance angle is the differentiator for institutions. Integrators get full control over solver selection, including access to KYB’d solvers, verified legal entities rather than anonymous counterparties, with OFAC screening built in. Regulated firms no longer have to choose between compliance and efficiency.

LI.FI Intents is already live across apps like Jumper and wallets like Rabby, built on the infrastructure behind 1000+ enterprise integrations. For chain abstraction builders, it’s a clear signal that intent-based execution is becoming the default interface for cross-chain UX.

Vitalik Pivots to Fiction and Floats a “Trust Dependency” Framework

On May 27, Vitalik Buterin announced he is pausing his long-form technical essays to write a science fiction novel exploring decentralized governance and DAOs. He shared the news on Farcaster, noting the first two chapters are already published on his personal site.

The same day, Buterin posted a concept that resonates directly with AA and wallet security work: that in an ideal world, all software and hardware would carry “nutrition labels” listing their full set of trust dependencies, what mathematics and whose honest behaviour, on what time scale, a system relies on for its guarantees.

For account abstraction, that framing is more than philosophical. Smart accounts, paymasters, bundlers, and cross-chain solvers each introduce their own trust assumptions, and making those explicit is exactly what standards like ERC-7730 clear signing and modular registries aim toward.

The pivot also lands amid ongoing Ethereum Foundation turbulence, following Buterin’s recent post on a leaner EF focused on censorship resistance, openness, privacy, and security, values that map closely onto the infrastructure AA builders depend on.

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EIP-7928 parallelization, native privacy roadmap, EIP-8141 deep dive, EF restructuring

Alexandra — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:49:21 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: EIP-7928 and how Block-level Access Lists bring parallel execution to Glamsterdam; Vitalik maps Ethereum’s near-term native privacy roadmap around AA, FOCIL, and keyed nonces; Alex Forshtat delivers a deep dive on EIP-8141 frame transactions at ETHPrague; and Vitalik publishes his perspective on a leaner, more focused Ethereum Foundation.

EIP-7928: Block-level Access Lists Bring Parallel Execution to Glamsterdam
Mapping Ethereum’s Near-Term Native Privacy Roadmap
EIP-8141 Frame Transactions: Deep Dive from ETHPrague
Vitalik Outlines a Leaner, More Focused Ethereum Foundation

Please fasten your belts!

EIP-7928: Block-level Access Lists Bring Parallel Execution to Glamsterdam

EF researcher Toni Wahrstätter published a detailed thread breaking down EIP-7928, the execution-layer headliner for Glamsterdam alongside ePBS. The proposal adds a Block Access List (BAL) to every Ethereum block — a list of every account and storage slot the block touches, plus post-transaction state diffs showing exactly what changed after each transaction.

With state diffs available upfront, client software no longer has to discover storage locations while executing. Everything needed can be prefetched into cache in parallel before execution begins, resolving transaction dependencies in advance and enabling true parallel execution across Geth, Nethermind, Besu, Erigon, Reth, and others.

The gains are already measurable. On 6-core machines, EL clients validate blocks up to 5x faster with BALs in place. Combined with ePBS decoupling the block from the payload, giving validators 2–4x more execution time, Glamsterdam will ship with a 200M gas limit, with 300M described as a realistic near-term follow-up. Snap sync also improves: BALs let nodes skip the healing phase entirely when catching up to the chain tip.

For AA builders, higher throughput and cheaper state access directly reduce the cost of batched UserOps, gasless flows, and cross-chain intents at scale. EIP-7928 is one of the clearest signs yet that Ethereum’s base-layer scaling is moving from theory into production.

Mapping Ethereum’s Near-Term Native Privacy Roadmap

Vitalik Buterin outlined three near-term steps to make privacy a native property of Ethereum. The post extends the cypherpunk reset he outlined in January and the privacy framing he introduced at the Web3 Festival in Hong Kong earlier this spring.

The first initiative combines account abstraction with FOCIL. Right now, private transactions pass through the public mempool where block builders can see and exclude them. FOCIL changes this by allowing a committee of validators to propose transaction inclusion lists that builders are required to honour — or risk having their block rejected. Combined with AA, private transactions gain first-class inclusion guarantees at the protocol level.

The second step is keyed nonces, proposed in EIP-8250. Ethereum’s current sequential nonce model creates a bottleneck when multiple private transactions need to execute in parallel from the same account. Keyed nonces let each spend use its own nonce domain, including one derived from a privacy nullifier, making transactions on different keys replay-independent.

The third is access-layer work, centred on the Kohaku privacy toolkit and private reads. This targets the metadata layer: hiding users’ wallet queries from centralised node providers so that RPC calls don’t leak which addresses a user is watching. Buterin framed all three as essential for giving ETH true “moneyness” and argued that L1 privacy could drive more activity back to Ethereum mainnet. None of the three are live yet.

EIP-8141 Frame Transactions: Deep Dive from ETHPrague

At ETHPrague 2026, ERC-4337 core developer Alex Forshtat delivered a technical deep dive on EIP-8141, shared this week by the @erc4337 account. The talk is the clearest walkthrough yet of why frame transactions represent an endgame account abstraction design rather than another incremental layer.

The core change: instead of a single top-level execution frame, a frame transaction contains multiple frames each with an explicit role modifier. The VERIFY frame, which must end with an APPROVE opcode, handles validation and signals to the protocol that if this frame reverts, the transaction cannot be included in a valid block at all. This separates validation from execution at the protocol level, replacing the fixed ECDSA + nonce + balance check with fully programmable logic.

For builders, the practical implications are significant. Frame transactions natively support gas abstraction via a canonical paymaster, atomic batching across multiple execution frames, passkey signatures, and full backward compatibility with existing EOAs — which receive a canonical default validation code automatically. EIP-8141 also provides a clean path to post-quantum signatures: the VERIFY frame decouples transaction authorization from ECDSA entirely, so accounts can adopt quantum-safe schemes without changing their address.

EIP-8141 currently holds Considered for Inclusion status for the Hegotá fork (H2 2026). Forshtat addressed the mempool DoS risk directly: a mempool validation strategy restricts storage reads during validation to the sender’s own storage and caps verification gas at ~100,000 units, with the canonical paymaster required for public mempool propagation. The full talk is worth watching for any team thinking seriously about the native AA transition.

Vitalik Outlines a Leaner, More Focused Ethereum Foundation

On May 24, Vitalik Buterin published a lengthy post on X addressing months of turbulence at the Ethereum Foundation, defending its restructuring and laying out his personal view of the EF’s long-term direction. The post came after eight senior EF contributors left or announced departures in 2026, five of them in May, including all three Protocol Cluster leads.

Buterin framed the EF’s mandate around what he called the CROPS dimension: censorship resistance, capture resistance, openness, privacy, and security. He argued that maximising throughput and speed at the expense of these properties leads to mediocrity, and that Ethereum should be “deeply impressive” on CROPS rather than competing on execution speed alone. He also noted that the EF holds only 0.16% of all ETH, far below the 10–50% typical for other blockchain foundations, and committed to reducing ETH sales to prioritise longevity.

On governance, Buterin confirmed that interim co-executive director Bastian Aue is leading the transition, that the board is expanding, and that his own influence within the EF will continue to decrease — which he described as the outcome he wants. He also pointed to AI-assisted formal verification as a near-term path to making Ethereum provably bug-free.

For the AA ecosystem, the CROPS framing matters directly. Privacy and censorship resistance, two of the five pillars, map precisely onto the work covered elsewhere in this issue: the native privacy roadmap, FOCIL, and EIP-8141’s design goals around uncensorable transaction inclusion and signature agility. The EF’s stated focus, whatever the organisational turbulence, remains aligned with the infrastructure AA builders depend on.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

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Head to our docs and read all about Etherspot Modular SDK.
Skandha — developer-friendly Typescript ERC4337 Bundler.
Arka — an open-source Paymaster Service for gasless & sponsored transactions.
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Glamsterdam interop milestones, clear signing launch, EIP-7851 redesign, quantum-safe MPC

Alexandra — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:02:41 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Ethereum locks in Glamsterdam devnet milestones and a new Protocol cluster leadership at Soldøgn interop, the EF launches an open clear signing standard built on ERC-7730, EIP-7851 is redesigned around a new opcode that lets wallet code permanently burn ECDSA authority, and Silence Laboratories ships the first quantum-safe MPC infrastructure for institutional custody.

Ethereum's Glamsterdam Roadmap Takes Shape After Soldøgn Interop
EIP-7851: Code-Controlled EOA Delegation
Ethereum Foundation Launches Clear Signing Standard to End Blind Approvals
Silence Laboratories Launches First Quantum-Safe MPC Infrastructure for Digital Asset Custody

Please fasten your belts!

Ethereum’s Glamsterdam Roadmap Takes Shape After Soldøgn Interop

The Ethereum Foundation Protocol cluster published an update from a week-long core dev interop gathering in Svalbard, Norway, outlining the key milestones reached for the upcoming Glamsterdam upgrade. Teams focused on hardening and preparation across nearly all clients.

A 200M gas limit floor was established as a credible post-Glamsterdam target, derived from convergence of ePBS, BAL optimizations, and EIP-8037 repricing. ePBS is now stabilized with a multi-client Glamsterdam devnet running and the external builders pipeline tested end-to-end.

EIP-8037 was finalized, adopting a fixed cost_per_state_byte model with full repricing numbers delivered on bal-devnet-6. On the Hegotá side, FOCIL prototypes are functional, native AA requirements were scoped, and the multi-client devnet is the immediate next step.

The week also marked a leadership transition in the EF Protocol cluster. Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik will take over from Tim Beiko, Barnabé Monnot, and Alex Stokes — Barnabé and Tim are moving on from the EF, while Alex Stokes will be on sabbatical. Together, they coordinated shipping Fusaka to mainnet in December 2025.

For AA builders, cheaper state access via EIP-8037 and a path toward native AA in Hegotá reduce the cost of running batched UserOps and gasless flows at scale. Beyond immediate upgrade work, Soldøgn participants also discussed Ethereum’s broader long-term account abstraction goals, including support for alternative signature schemes, native batching, key rotation and recovery, signature aggregation compatibility, relayerless sponsorship, and unified cross-chain account identities. Discussions also emphasized preserving Ethereum’s core constraints around public mempool compatibility, censorship resistance, bounded validation costs and minimizing complexity for L2s. The direction signals continued momentum toward more native protocol-level AA capabilities while maintaining compatibility with future roadmap items such as FOCIL, statelessness and zkEVMs. Glamsterdam devnets are now live.

EIP-7851: Code-Controlled EOA Delegation

We covered EIP-7851 in an earlier issue. The spec has since been significantly updated by Liyi Guo and Nicolas Consigny, and the new design is worth a close look for any team building on EIP-7702.

The proposal has been redesigned around a new EVM opcode, SETSELFDELEGATE. Rather than a separate system contract with a time-delayed deactivation, wallet code itself calls the opcode to rewrite the account’s delegation prefix from 0xef0100 to 0xef0101, instantly and permanently disabling the original ECDSA key’s authority.

The core invariant: once ECDSA authority is disabled, it can never be restored. However, the delegate address is not frozen; the wallet code can still call SETSELFDELEGATE to update the delegation target while staying ECDSA-disabled. It is the original key that is burned, not the ability to redelegate through code.

This is a cleaner design than the previous version. The old spec required EOAs to call a system contract and wait 7 days before deactivation finalized. The new approach puts control directly in the wallet code, with no delay and no separate scheduling step.

The post-quantum angle remains the same: permanently disabling ECDSA authority removes the signature scheme most exposed to future quantum computing threats, while smart wallet code can adopt quantum-safe signing from day one.

Ethereum Foundation Launches Clear Signing Standard to End Blind Approvals

An Ethereum Working Group of wallet developers, security firms, and the EF’s Trillion Dollar Security Initiative launched an open standard to end blind signing — a structural flaw behind billions in user losses, including the Bybit hack.

The standard centers on ERC-7730, a shared format for human-readable transaction descriptions. Anyone can submit descriptors to a public registry at clearsigning.org; accuracy is verified through independent attestations, and wallets decide which sources they trust.

The 1TS Initiative hosts the registry as a credibly neutral steward. Tooling, including Rust and TypeScript libraries funded through 1TS, is available to developers at clearsigning.org.

Contributors include MetaMask, Trezor, Fireblocks, WalletConnect, Keycard, ZKnox, Sourcify, Cyfrin, Zama, Argot, and independent contributors. Ledger is credited for initiating ERC-7730 and the early tooling, infrastructure, and educational efforts.

For EIP-7702 and ERC-4337 teams, batched transactions and UserOperations are the hardest flows for users to verify today. ERC-7730 descriptors let your contracts present human-readable summaries — a prerequisite for institutional adoption.

Silence Laboratories Launches First Quantum-Safe MPC Infrastructure for Digital Asset Custody

Silence Laboratories launched what it describes as the first quantum-safe MPC infrastructure for digital asset custody. The system combines ML-DSA, NIST’s 2024 post-quantum signature standard, with MPC, letting institutions begin migrating without replacing their existing custody setup.

The infrastructure is modular, integrating with existing governance frameworks rather than requiring a full rebuild. It also incorporates trusted execution environments such as Google Cloud Confidential Computing to isolate sensitive signing operations.

Launch partners include BitGo, ZenGo, EigenLayer, Networks for Humanity, and Bron Wallet as wallet builders, with Infosys as system integrator. The infrastructure is available immediately to select design partners.

Read alongside EIP-7851, a concrete post-quantum migration path is forming: migrate to EIP-7702, deactivate the ECDSA key via EIP-7851, and back the new signing authority with quantum-safe MPC. For wallet and AA teams starting to plan for key security, both deserve close attention.

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Native Proof Verification, Ethereum’s Native AA Path, Cross-Protocol Parlays, 7702 Infrastructure Trends

Alexandra — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:18:09 +0000

Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction, and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.

This week: Ethereum research explores native proof verification and the long-term case for protocol-level account abstraction, while new frameworks push cross-protocol execution and the 7702 Collective doubles down on infrastructure-led adoption trends for 2026.

Deep Dive on Ethereum Accounts Maps the Case for Native AA
Native Proof Verification Draft Targets Rollup Verifier Complexity
Exploring 7702 and 8141 for Prediction Market Parlays
7702 Collective Call Highlights Infrastructure Trends for 2026

Please fasten your belts!

Deep Dive on Ethereum Accounts Maps the Case for Native AA

A new long-form essay revisits Ethereum’s account model to explain why account abstraction remains such a persistent design goal. The piece starts from first principles, walking through elliptic curve cryptography, ECDSA, public key recovery, and the distinction between externally owned accounts and contract accounts before connecting those mechanics to Ethereum’s current UX constraints. Its central argument is that Ethereum’s account system still sits between two imperfect extremes: EOAs have autonomy but little programmability, while smart contract wallets are flexible but still depend on EOAs for protocol-level authentication.

From there, the article outlines the practical consequences. EOAs cannot natively batch actions, cannot express richer validation rules, and must always pay gas in ETH. Smart contract wallets solve many of those issues, but only through extra infrastructure or by relying on an EOA somewhere in the flow. The essay presents this as the root of Ethereum’s “account dilemma,” where user authentication, authorization, execution logic, and fee payment remain only partially abstracted.

The article then surveys the current design space. ERC-4337 is presented as the main out-of-protocol smart account framework, improving sponsorship and custom logic at the cost of added complexity and alternative mempool infrastructure. EIP-7702 is described more narrowly as an EOA enhancement mechanism that lets EOAs temporarily delegate execution logic.

The strongest emphasis, however, is on EIP-8141 frame transactions, which the author argues come closest to enabling protocol-native smart accounts by separating validation and execution into explicit transaction phases while preserving room for batching, sponsorship, and broader signature support.

The broader takeaway is that the account abstraction debate is not only about wallet UX. It is also about Ethereum’s future authentication model, public mempool design, post-quantum readiness, and how much flexibility the protocol should expose directly rather than outsourcing to application-layer infrastructure.

Native Proof Verification Draft Targets Rollup Verifier Complexity

A new Ethereum Research post proposes native proof verification, a design that would move more proof-checking logic into Ethereum’s L1 infrastructure instead of leaving rollups and ZK applications to maintain their own verifier contracts, adapters, dispatchers, and upgrade paths. The draft argues that today’s model is duplicated and governance-heavy, especially for systems that need to patch verifier bugs or upgrade zkVM stacks over time.

The core idea has two parts. First, it suggests generalizing EIP-8025, so Ethereum’s consensus-layer proof verification becomes program-agnostic, rather than limited to L1 execution proofs. Second, it proposes a new proof-carrying transaction type plus three opcodes, PROGRAMHASH, PUBVALUESHASH, and PROOFCOUNT, so smart contracts can access proof metadata directly. In that model, contracts would no longer verify raw proofs themselves, but instead check standardized proof identifiers and public-output hashes exposed by the protocol.

The post positions this as useful not only for rollups, but also for privacy systems, ZK coprocessors, identity applications, and ZK ML workloads that currently rely on bespoke on-chain verification stacks. It also sketches how this could simplify multi-verifier setups such as Taiko’s, and how native rollups could inherit L1 verifier updates automatically through client releases rather than contract-governance upgrades.

At the same time, the author flags a major open problem: program hash stability. If zkVM upgrades change the hash pinned on-chain, rollups could still be forced into governance-driven upgrades, undermining the proposal’s main benefit. Because of that, the post is best read as an ambitious architectural direction rather than a finalized path to adoption.

Exploring 7702 and 8141 for Prediction Market Parlays

Accountless published a research framework for “Frame-o-lays,” outlining how cross-protocol parlays could work across on-chain prediction markets using account abstraction. The piece argues that today’s parlay products are still siloed inside individual platforms such as Polymarket, Kalshi, SX Bet, and third-party wrappers, with no shared permission or execution layer that lets users combine legs across protocols in one unified wager.

The paper breaks the problem into standard parlay primitives like markets, outcomes, legs, stake, and settlement, then maps those against account-layer requirements such as permissions, gas, batching, and cross-protocol execution. Its main claim is that the real bottleneck is not only parlay design, but wallet and permission infrastructure. To make cross-protocol parlays practical, users need scoped delegation, batched execution, value limits, and gas abstraction across multiple contracts.

Two implementation paths are proposed. The first uses live standards available today, centered on EIP-7702, smart sessions, ERC-4337 and Permit2. This path is positioned as the practical near-term option for same-chain execution. The second uses EIP-8141 frame transactions, which the article describes as a cleaner long-term design for atomic cross-protocol execution once the proposal is available. In both cases, the framework targets same-chain parlays first, while explicitly leaving cross-chain atomicity, privacy, identity, and oracle coordination out of scope.

The author argues that if one permission flow can authorize atomic execution across multiple prediction protocols, the same pattern could extend to DeFi strategies, DAO actions, and other multi-step workflows. In that framing, the parlay is the product, but the permission layer is the real infrastructure.

7702 Collective Call Highlights Infrastructure Trends for 2026

A recent X Broadcasting, The Real State of Crypto Innovation: Looking into the 7702 Collective’s Report, brought together builders from across the ecosystem to discuss where Web3 infrastructure is heading in 2026.

The 7702 Collective’s published report presents account abstraction, modular infrastructure, and intents as the three main rails for adoption, arguing that crypto’s next growth phase will depend less on narratives and more on removing complexity for users and developers.

It also describes EIP-7702 as a key unlock for expanding smart account functionality to a much wider base of existing wallets, while chain abstraction is framed as the path toward making multi-chain activity invisible at the product level.

Another major theme is AI agents. The report argues that smart accounts, intents, and chain abstraction are starting to form the infrastructure layer these systems need to route payments, manage liquidity, and execute actions across ecosystems.

Overall, both the call and the report reinforce the same message: the next stage of crypto adoption will depend on standardization, interoperability, and turning infrastructure advances into real products.

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

Learn more about account abstraction here.
Head to our docs and read all about Etherspot Modular SDK.
Skandha — developer-friendly Typescript ERC4337 Bundler.
Arka — an open-source Paymaster Service for gasless & sponsored transactions.
Explore our TransactionKit, a React library for fast & simple Web3 development.
Follow us on X (Twitter) and join our Discord.

❓Is your dApp ready for Account Abstraction? Check it out here: https://eip1271.io/

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