Yesterday in Ethereum - Wednesday, March 5, 2025

It looks like Ethereum will be well represented at the White House crypto summit on Friday. We expect Coinbase's Brian Armstrong; representatives from Kraken (both have Ethereum rollups), Chainlink, World Liberty Financial (an ETH-centric Trump-family crypto project), and Robinhood; and Matt Huang of ETH-centric VC Paradigm.

It also looks like Danny Ryan will be there. He recently rejoined Ethereum. He'd been vying for the position of Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation (EF), but Vitalik wanted to keep the EF's focus narrow. Instead, Ryan joined Etherealize as a co-founder. It's a for-profit, funded by Vitalik and others, that intends to evangelize Ethereum to governments, institutions, and businesses and give them the tools they need to use it.

The EF went with co-Executive Directors instead. I don't know much about the two, but Wang is supposedly technically excellent and Stanczak built Nethermind into a successful company with over 350 employees. Nethermind has almost caught up with Geth as the leading Ethereum execution client.

Both houses of the US Congress have voted to repeal the IRS's ridiculous attempt to classify DeFi as brokers and attempt to make it report information on their customers.

All the $1.3 billion in ether from the Safe hack targeting a Bybit wallet has been sold by now.

The Sepolia testnet also had a problem, though apparently not as serious as the one that borked Holesky. Last I heard, they're still in the process of rescuing Holesky, as a learning exercise in case anything that serious happens on mainnet someday. Another testnet was spun up as well. Developers have been testing Pectra, the next upgrade of Etherereum, which is due in April. None of these problems have actually been with the upgrade, just configuration issues, as I understand it.

MegaETH is going to testnet. "What is quite interesting is that the plan to have 15ms block times and 1.68 GGas/s throughput. This is about 1000 times faster than Ethereum mainnet or 17k tps (!!!)." It's a high-performance L2 backed by Buterin, Lubin, Sreeram Kannan, Cobie, and Hasu. It uses EigenDA. I've read it's "Taking being a server with proofs to the extreme. Entire massive state all in RAM, sequencer has to be a supercomputer. Makes solana look like it's made for consumer hardware." It uses ZK proofs. If you go to the MegaETH discord you can register your address and you get testnet tokens as soon as it start.

Polymarket recently had a market determine that Trump fired Elon Musk, which made me skeptical of their market resolutions.

The Wall Street Journal had a piece about the Tether/USDC competition that made it sound like Circle's Jeremy Allaire is trying to get the government to ban his competition.

Light clients, which can run on low-powered hardware, are coming soon from Lighthouse, which has recently become the #1 consensus client, surpassing Prysm.

The Nethermind team has a good writeup on what they want to see in Fusaka, the fork after Pectra. I've seen at least one writeup from another team as well, and the consensus is to focus on PeerDAS (more data space for rollups), but EOF (improvements to the Ethereum Virtual Machine, making future improvements easier too) will make it, and Nethermind would like a few other minor things as well. They also go into what we should focus on for the fork after that, Glamsterdam.

GridPlus, maker of maybe the best hardware wallet out there, had a good piece on how Bybit could have prevented the Safe hack from exploiting them: good hardware wallets can display readable information that can't be faked. There's some good discussion of it here too.

There's also an interesting new hardware wallet, Keycard. It's basically a smart card that works with the Status wallet through NFC. They've just added a cheap hardware device, Keycard Shell, that works with it and can integrate with standard software wallets through QR codes. For security, they print cards that look innocent, like for your gym or garden store. It does, however, seem to use WalletConnect, which is centralized and censors.

Tangem is another option that uses a card or ring(!). And of course GridPlus uses cards, and they're working on a more compact model.