Yesterday in Ethereum, Saturday, March 8, 2025

Good news for stablecoins at the crypto summit: the Treasury Secretary, sitting next to Trump, said "We are going to keep the USD the dominant reserve currency in the world and we will use stablecoins to do that." Stablecoins primarily reside on Ethereum. Credit to barthib.

The Trump administration continues to deregulate crypto: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that it's ok for banks to custody crypto, hold stablecoin reserves, and run nodes.

Trump issued an executive order about a bitcoin reserve. It will consist of seized assets (though much of government bitcoin will need to be returned to crime victims). However, they "shall develop strategies for acquiring additional Government BTC provided that such strategies are budget neutral and do not impose incremental costs on United States taxpayers." Other digital assets, such as ether, are treated differently and could be sold. I'm glad that Ethereum won't be subject to the influence a government stockpile of it would give to the government.

The latest All Core Developers Call (Christine Kim's writeup) was mostly about testing the Pectra upgrade in the aftermath of the Holesky testnet failure. The plan is to clone Holesky, as that's apparently the only testnet with enough things deployed on it to test everything properly. The clone, or shadow fork, will run until the original Holesky recovers in a few weeks. We don't yet know how this affects the timing of Pectra, but you can assume there will be a delay. There's some good commentary on the situation in the Daily, e.g. "Clients improved quite a bit in just these 10 days" on how much we're learning from this.

Coinbase is developing privacy primitives for Base.

Did you know you can already buy stocks and bonds on the blockchain? Backed Finance offers them, recently adding Coinbase stock, which you can trade on decentralized exchanges like CoW Swap.

LogrisTheBard has a terrific, simple argument for why Bitcoin's policy of halving its security budget regularly dooms it (see the comment comparing it to a gold vault).

See also the previous Yesterday in Ethereum. You may have missed it because Reddit decided it violated their content policies. After deleting a link to a DAO proposal it went up again, but about 18 hours after I originally posted it.