Ethereum's state growth, often seen as a scaling bottleneck, can be sustained for at least a decade with modern consumer hardware. State, the set of data necessary for building and validating fresh Ethereum blocks, can be kept under control using rollups, Verkle tries, and state expiry. There is a need for empirical methods to engineer Ethereum’s gas limit and facilitate endgame scaling solutions.

This article outlines a comparison between Solana and Ethereum's transaction mechanisms. Solana's advantages include a minimal transaction fee and quick execution time. However, Solana's fee mechanics are insufficient for scalability, unlike Ethereum's dynamic transaction fees which are efficient and resourceful. Despite Solana's continuous block building and multi-threaded scheduler, weak inclusion guarantees and less reliable prioritization make substantial network improvements necessary.

Ethereum has activated the Dencun upgrade, which is expected to catalyze growth on L2 networks like Arbitrum and Polygon by reducing fees. The hard fork accomplished this through "proto-danksharding", adding a new place for data storage on the blockchain at a lower cost. The upgrade is expected to make transaction settlements more efficient and cheaper for rollup networks, which will in turn bring down fees for end users.

The CFTC’s complaint against KuCoin for illegal commodity transactions and failing to register refers to both Bitcoin and Ethereum as commodities.

Blobs, the new storage type for Ethereum L2s introduced in the March 13 Dencun upgrade, have been overrun by the inscriptions mania that previously congested several other chains earlier this year. BlobScriptions caused blob gas fees to spike to around $18, though it has since fallen to around $1.20. The fees should return to normal levels as the true value of blobs becomes evident after this price discovery phase.

EIP-3074 is an approved upgrade to Ethereum that will allow externally owned accounts to act like smart contract wallets without deploying a contract. This enables single transaction approvals, batch transactions, wallet asset recovery, sponsored transactions, and more.

This flowchart explains the different entities involved in BlackRock's Ethereum-based money market fund. Securitize is used as the transfer agent to tokenize the fund, which invests in overnight repos and Treasury Bills and issues dividends. Stablecoin issuer Circle plans to implement USDC-based investments and redemptions, which are currently taking place in USD.

Ethereum's daily ETH burn rate has hit a yearly low, mainly due to significantly reduced gas fees (gas on Ethereum is now 5 to 10 gwei). The decrease in gas fees, the lowest this year, is affecting the network's deflationary mechanism established by the London hard fork.

Revolut has announced Revolut X, a dedicated cryptocurrency exchange catering to professional traders, making it the first banking institution to venture into this arena. With a user base of 40 million worldwide, Revolut aims to provide specialized trading experiences with lower transaction fees and access to digital assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP, initially available on desktops for UK customers with plans for further expansion.

EIP-3074 is an upgrade for normal Ethereum wallets that adds some smart wallet functionality. It was slated for inclusion in the next Ethereum upgrade. After it was approved, Vitalik Buterin and other Ethereum researchers expressed concern about compatibility between 3074 and 4337 (standard smart contract wallet) wallets and the potential of 3074 to be broken by quantum computers. EIP-7702 fixes both of these issues.

Vitalik Buterin discusses how Ethereum has traditionally used gas to manage computational resources (computation, storage, data transmission, and cryptographic proof generation) and represent them as a cost metric. He argues that this approach has some limitations given it doesn't effectively describe the limits of each computational resource. By shifting towards a "multi-dimensional gas system", Ethereum will be able to better align costs with the actual demands and capacities of these computational resources.

Ethereum gas is under 5 gwei – the lowest daily average since February 2020.

The U.S. Department of Justice has arrested Anton and James Pepaire-Bueno, charging them with using a maximal extractable value (MEV) exploit to illicitly obtain $25 million from Ethereum blockchain transactions in just 12 seconds. This unprecedented scheme involved manipulating pending transactions to redirect funds, a significant manipulation of blockchain technology.

Ethereum has been criticized for block builders' increasing dominance over their chain control, which is a consequence of how time-discrete systems create varied value in their storage slots. This author proposes a specification for native transaction bundling for onchain applications, which gives more control over sequencing.

Ethereum's next hard fork, Pectra, consists of updates to the Prague execution layer and Electra consensus layer. It will be released in Q1 2025 and feature PeerDAS data availability sampling to improve rollup scaling and upgrades to the EVM Object Format (EOF) to support a better UX. It should help to alleviate pressure on the networking layer and support increased blob demand.

Starknet has released plans to settle simultaneously on Bitcoin and Ethereum, becoming a single self-custodial decentralized L2. StarkWare is launching a $1 million fund to spur the development and introduction of OP_CAT, the Bitcoin opcode needed to make a trustless L2 possible. Beyond scaling Bitcoin to thousands of transactions per second, simultaneous settlement would allow for BTC/ETH atomic swaps and private BTC transactions, along with many other possibilities.

According to VanEck's head of digital assets, Matthew Siegel, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) reportedly calls Bitcoin ‘Digital Gold' and Ethereum ‘Digital Oil.' ICBC acknowledges Ethereum's current scalability problems but expresses optimism about future upgrades. It notes a strong demand for digital assets driving continuous innovation.

Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Stellar, and Base are public blockchain tokenization leaders. RWA-specific public chains like Provenance, Plume Network, and XDC offer features catered toward issuers and have seen some adoption. JP Morgan's Onyx, R3's Corda, Canton Network, and Kinto are private alternatives that restrict access to authorized participants and are better for enterprise-grade tokenization.

ePBS, a change to the Ethereum protocol that separates blocks into consensus and execution parts, now has an EIP number. Introducing this feature gives attesters more time to execute transactions, makes proposer-builder interactions trustless, and removes the need for staker middleware.

ERC-5564 and ERC-6538 introduce stealth address payments on Ethereum, providing Monero-like privacy by allowing transactions to be received at one-time, non-reusable addresses generated via cryptographic methods to enhance user privacy. Using this approach, transaction histories aren't visible to the public, which would cater to the next billion users who prefer confidential transactions and enable a range of use cases, from private payments to discrete NFT transfers.

Nearly half of the $25 billion in orderflow volume over the past month on Ethereum has come from private or proprietary applications. The trend started with DeFi summer, when transaction aggregators, wallet swaps, Telegram bots, and solver networks launched. This development supports the fat app thesis, where applications controlling user attention and order flow would accrue the most value in the ecosystem.

This mechanism of selling block building and execution rights in advance is the latest development in enshrined proposer builder separation for Ethereum. In this model, builders purchase a proposal slot, with the final price dynamically determined by the amount of outstanding purchases. The payment is burned, similar to EIP-1559.

Ethereum maintained its dominance among Layer 1 blockchains in the first half of 2024, while Solana saw a resurgence. Bitcoin enjoyed renewed interest due to Ordinals and Layer 2 solutions. Startups are increasingly focused on infrastructure, DeFi, payment, and AI x crypto products. There has been a noticeable geographic shift toward Asia and Africa due to regulatory challenges in the US.

Vitalik Buterin is urging the Ethereum network to implement automated responses to potential 51% attacks to reduce the reliance on social consensus and improve the network's resilience. He also highlighted the importance of adopting light clients, ensuring quantum resistance, and simplifying protocols for enhanced security and usability.

This bull cycle, Ethereum may be the only tokenization platform with a spot ETF classified as a commodity, giving it a massive advantage in onboarding institutions like BlackRock's BUIDL fund. It is also the chain of choice for Coinbase, as evidenced by the Base L2. Institutions will pay premium transaction fees for its stability and liveness, and they will value its high cash flow and real yield.

This thread highlights some of the most innovative rollups with technological and cultural differentiations from Ethereum. It includes a chain for halal finance, one with an MEV-free crosschain DEX, and another with EVM and SVM apps running in parallel. There are also L2s requiring all users to KYC and designed for banks.

Cross-L2 interoperability problems require considerable effort, but we should quickly achieve a seamless UX across Ethereum-based rollups. Work is being done on chain-specific addresses, cross-L2 sends using liquidity providers, L2 light clients, and replayable account state updates. In Phase 2 of the roadmap, shared key management and proof aggregation will further improve the experience.

A small 25 basis point interest rate hike by the Bank of Japan triggered a massive sell-off in risk assets, including a sharp drop in Ethereum, due to the unwinding of the carry trade. This trade, where investors borrow cheap Yen to invest in higher-yield assets, is now collapsing as higher interest rates strengthen the Yen, forcing traders to sell assets to cover their more expensive Yen-denominated loans, leading to a cascade of liquidations.

Ethereum's reliance on Layer 2 (L2) solutions is leading to its downfall by fragmenting the ecosystem, pushing users towards centralized L2s, and undermining the original promise of decentralization. L2s are siphoning off Ethereum's fees and users, making it impossible for Ethereum to scale effectively at Layer 1, which could ultimately lead to Ethereum's demise while benefiting L2s and their backers.

Ethereum is currently facing challenges like regulatory uncertainty, competition from Solana, and declining revenues due to Layer 2 growth. However, despite these issues, Ethereum remains dominant in key sectors like DeFi, stablecoins, and corporate adoption, making it a contrarian bet with potential upside.