Ethereum

Aave saw its strongest single day of Ethereum wallet creation in nearly five years on Tuesday, adding 1,806 addresses even as bitcoin closed under $60,000 and the fear-and-greed index sat at 13. The trigger is a mix of the V4 rollout, Smart Value Recapture revenue, and a Standard Chartered price note that circulated for a week.

Citigroup's second downgrade of 2026 tells clients the ETF bid it had been counting on has now evaporated. The bank's bear case now sees $53,000 bitcoin and $1,094 ether.

Kleros founder Clément Lesaege posted a 'Validator Redirected Revenue' proposal to ethresear.ch on June 21 that would let validators redirect 0-10% of staking rewards to public goods. If a majority signals support, the redirect becomes mandatory for the entire validator set.

Every cirBTC is backed 1:1 by native BTC at a regulated Circle entity, with Chainlink Proof of Reserve verifying the float on chain. The launch is calibrated to siphon institutional flow away from WBTC and Coinbase's cbBTC.

Former Ethereum Foundation researcher Dankrad Feist wants a new institution funded with at least $1 billion in ETH and sustained by staking revenue. He posted the proposal days after the EF confirmed its eighth senior departure of the year.

Ethereum's co-founder published a long essay on Sunday arguing that machine-checkable mathematical proofs, generated and verified by AI, could become the foundational security layer for blockchains, cryptography and critical internet infrastructure — even as the same AI capabilities accelerate vulnerability discovery on the offence side.

NUVA, co-developed by Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs, has linked $19 billion of Figure Technologies' tokenised assets — including a $18.4 billion HELOC portfolio — to Ethereum DeFi through two new products: nvYLDS and nvPRIME.

Base announced on May 4 that its Azul upgrade would integrate Succinct's SP1 zero-knowledge prover alongside its existing TEE proof system, with mainnet activation planned for May 13. The change cuts withdrawal finality from a multi-day challenge window to roughly one day — and makes Base the largest single Ethereum operator to put ZK proofs in production.

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko told Ethereum Layer 2 users to "abandon all hope" of being quantum-safe over the weekend, citing fresh production hardening on Solana's Falcon-512 verification suite. The dig is more than tribal — the cryptographic argument has merit.

Bitcoin's first push above $80,000 since January lasted only hours. A report by Iran's Fars news agency that two Iranian missiles had hit a US patrol boat near the Strait of Hormuz reversed the move; CENTCOM denied any ship was hit, but the price still hasn't recovered.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies disclosed on May 4 that it acquired 101,745 ether last week, taking its treasury to 5.18 million ETH and pushing total holdings to $13.1 billion. Chairman Tom Lee used the announcement to declare that crypto spring had commenced.

Coinbase Asset Management opened a stablecoin-linked institutional credit fund on Thursday, with investors able to hold their shares either through traditional channels or as tokens minted on Ethereum, Solana or Base via Superstate's FundOS platform.

MegaETH's native token launches on Thursday, with 53.3 per cent of supply locked behind on-chain performance milestones rather than calendar dates. Pre-market perpetuals on Hyperliquid have been trading at an implied $1.5 to $2 billion fully diluted valuation.

Aave on Tuesday published the technical proposal that will determine whether DeFi can claw back the $292 million Kelp DAO lost to North Korean hackers ten days ago. The two-part plan re-collateralises rsETH with fresh ETH and uses a temporary oracle adjustment to liquidate seven attacker positions stranded across Aave and Compound.

The $12 trillion brokerage has begun a phased rollout of Schwab Crypto, offering direct bitcoin and ether trading through the same interfaces its clients already use for equities, with Paxos handling execution and custody sitting at its Premier Bank subsidiary.

Bitmine moved roughly $320 million worth of ether into staking over 48 hours, putting more than 70 per cent of its nearly five million ETH hoard to work generating yield — and positioning itself to earn $330 million a year from validator rewards alone.

The crypto trading firm's new Crypto Core3 ETF — ticker BESO — charges a 1 per cent fee, rebalances weekly, and earns staking rewards on Ethereum and Solana holdings.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought 101,627 ether last week — its largest weekly purchase of 2026 — bringing its total holdings to 4.97 million ETH and within striking distance of its stated goal of controlling 5 per cent of Ethereum's circulating supply.

Ethereum's base layer handled 200.4 million transactions between January and March 2026, surpassing 200 million for the first time. Yet ether remains more than 50 per cent below its August 2025 peak, exposing a structural disconnect between network usage and token value.

Lido DAO transferred the first $1.81 million tranche of its $20 million LDO buyback programme on Wednesday, routing tokens through centralised exchanges in a bid to retire up to 8 per cent of the circulating supply at historically depressed prices.

Ethereum now hosts 60 per cent of the global stablecoin market after its on-chain supply reached an all-time high of $180 billion, according to Token Terminal data, driven by a 150 per cent increase over three years.

Kevin Warsh's ethics filing reveals stakes in DeFi protocols, Ethereum scaling networks, a Bitcoin Lightning startup, and prediction markets — all of which he must divest before taking the job.

The foundation's new subsidy programme covers up to 30 per cent of audit costs for any Ethereum mainnet team, with more than 20 firms including Certora, Quantstamp and Spearbit ready to take on the work.

US spot bitcoin ETFs shed $325.8 million on 13 April while ether funds posted their strongest weekly inflows of 2026, and on-chain data shows Ethereum daily transactions jumped 41 per cent in a single week.

The mutual termination, effective 8 April, ends what would have been the largest crypto-focused SPAC deal since 2021. Dynamix receives a $50 million break fee and has until November to find an alternative target.

Morpho has opened a beta interface designed to let autonomous AI agents read, simulate and execute transactions on its lending markets without the week of integration work the protocol's SDK previously demanded.

Europe's largest asset manager has quietly built the fastest-growing tokenised fund on record, with Amundi and Paris-based Spiko disclosing that SAFO has crossed $400 million in assets under management less than a month after launching on Ethereum and Stellar.

Ethereum's proof-of-stake participation rate passed 30 percent of circulating supply this week, with roughly 37 million ETH now committed to validators and the cost of attacking the network pushed beyond $120 billion in collateral alone.

A Nasdaq-listed public company has put its ordinary shares on two blockchains through Securitize, giving tokenised equities their most direct test yet of whether 24/7 trading can coexist with US securities law.

The new Ethereum execution client processes 1.7 billion gas units per second on a disk footprint of just 240 gigabytes, delivering a 20-fold improvement in block persistence and removing the execution layer as a bottleneck for the network's scaling roadmap.