标签：#ethereum

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 limit

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

Quando comecei a trabalhar com aplicações descentralizadas há mais de uma década, lembro bem da frustração de pagar US$ 50 em taxas de transação para mover alguns tokens na rede Ethereum durante um pico de congestionamento. Era um problema técnico que ameaçava inviabilizar todo o ecossistema. Hoje, observo com entusiasmo profissional como as soluções de Layer 2 transformaram radicalmente esse cenário, abrindo portas para casos de uso que antes eram economicamente impraticáveis — especialmente aqui no Brasil, onde a tokenização de ativos e os pagamentos em stablecoins crescem em ritmo acelerado. O problema fundamental: o trilema da escalabilidade Para entender por que as soluções de segunda camada são tão importantes, precisamos compreender o trilema da blockchain proposto por Vitalik Buterin. Uma rede precisa equilibrar três pilares: descentralização, segurança e escalabilidade. O Ethereum, em sua arquitetura original, priorizou os dois primeiros, processando apenas cerca de 15 a 30 transações por segundo (TPS) na camada base. Para se ter dimensão, redes de pagamento tradicionais como a Visa processam milhares de transações por segundo. Quando o DeFi explodiu em 2020 e 2021, e novamente com o boom dos NFTs, a rede simplesmente não dava conta da demanda. As taxas de gas dispararam, e usuários comuns foram literalmente expulsos pelo custo. Em meus projetos de consultoria, atendi empresas brasileiras que desistiram de iniciativas Web3 justamente porque os custos operacionais inviabilizavam o modelo de negócio. A pergunta que sempre me faziam era: "Como cobrar R$ 5 de um cliente se a taxa da transação custa R$ 30?". A resposta estava — e está — nas camadas de segunda geração. Como funcionam as soluções de Layer 2 O conceito central das soluções de Layer 2 é elegante: em vez de processar todas as transações diretamente na blockchain principal (Layer 1), executamos a maior parte do processamento "fora da cadeia" e depois enviamos apenas uma prova compacta de volta para o

Sometime in 2024 I had a Coinbase wallet on my laptop. I had created the wallet some months back, backed up and all, and just sent very little amount of $ETH to the wallet. Then in 2024 I was paid $100 for a gig which I sent to this wallet, I also sent another $650 worth of cryto as "savings". The next morning I decided to check my "savings", wallet was empty. At first I didn't believe that I was hacked, because I had some $1.50 or so worth of $ETH in the wallet for months and it was safe, so what happened? I traced the transaction history and there was the full detail of how someone sent some $ETH to the wallet, then moved out my "savings" and afterwards also took back the remaining $ETH from the one they had sent in for the attack. I checked on Twitter and saw many other posts of people who had experienced the same exploit, exactly the same pattern... and some of the people who lost their funds were experienced blockchain developers and crypto guys. I made a post about it, told my friends to avoid the wallet and tried to forget about the experience. Blockchain hit instant PMF for many, especially people in parts of the world where there are crazy high fees and bank charges. The moment people tried sending crypto and for a few cents in gas fees, there was no going back for them. The only issue has always been how to secure users' funds, desperate people will always find a way no matter how complex the UX was. After losing my savings I stopped using self custodial wallets and only used Centralized Exchanges for a while. I thought, even though that was a non-custodial wallet, the builders still should have ensured strong security and secure backups, so users don't lose funds unnecessarily. This happened to me when AI and LLMs were still at their early development stages. You can only imagine how sophiscated the attacks have gotten, now that AI and LLMs are very advanced and more capable. To put things in perspective, more than $640 million was lost to deFi hacks and

Most token scam detectors, including the one I work on, share one implicit assumption: the contract you analyze at launch is the contract people will trade. Read the source, simulate a buy and a sell, cluster the deployer, score it, done. That is a snapshot. And a snapshot is exactly what a patient scammer plays against. Two token designs pass every launch-time check and then turn hostile later. This is how they work, and the two on-chain techniques we shipped this week to catch them. Design 1: the delayed honeypot A honeypot is a token you can buy but cannot sell. The classic version is non-sellable from block one, so a buy-then-sell simulation catches it instantly. The patient version is sellable at launch. Early buyers sell fine, the chart looks healthy, the token earns a clean verdict from every checker that judged it at T0. Then, days later, the operator flips a switch: a timed blacklist that rejects transfers after a block height or timestamp, a setTrading(false) / pause() kill switch pulled once liquidity has accumulated, a fee setter cranked to 100% on sells. From that moment it is a honeypot. But the only verdict on record is the clean one from launch day. The detection ran once, at the worst possible time to run it. Fix: re-simulate at J7 We keep post-launch snapshots of every token at J0, J7 and J30 (originally to catch slow rugs: volume collapse, late LP burns). The new piece re-runs the full buy/sell honeypot simulation at J7, but only for tokens that were genuinely sellable at J0. A clean-to-honeypot flip is the signal: // Only for tokens sellable + tradable at J0 - a clean->honeypot flip is the point. // Bounded per run because it is RPC-heavy. const eligible = ! j0 . risk_flags . some (( f ) => J0_SKIP_RESIM_FLAGS . has ( f )); if ( rpc && eligible && resims < resimLimit ) { const isNowHoneypot = await detectLateHoneypot ( rpc , tokenAddress ); if ( isNowHoneypot ) flags . push ( " late_honeypot " ); // +40 risk at J7 } One rule we hold to: an RPC hi

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 t

🏦 Day 6 of 7: Building a Mini Uniswap in 80 Lines of Solidity Imagine a vending machine. It has 1,000 coffee beans and 1,000 coins. No menu, no cashier — just one iron rule: the product of the two numbers inside must never decrease. That's it! This is how Uniswap works — and this is what I built on Day 6, coming from .NET. Here's how, why it's elegant, and where you can step on a rake. Why an Order Book Doesn't Work on a Blockchain Traditional exchanges — Binance, NYSE, any CEX — run on an order book . Market makers post bids and asks. A matching engine pairs them. Millions of updates per second, all in a centralised database. In a blockchain, this is impossible. Transactions take 12 seconds. Every state change costs gas. Storing millions of constantly changing orders would eat all the profit before a single trade completes. Uniswap's solution: replace the order book with a liquidity pool — a smart contract holding two tokens — and replace the matching engine with pure math. Just a formula — below. x · y = k — The Formula That Broke Finance The Constant Product Invariant : x · y = k Where x is the reserve of Token0, y is the reserve of Token1, and k is a constant that must never decrease during swaps. When a trader sells Token0 into the pool, x increases. To keep k constant, y must decrease — the contract sends out Token1. The price is determined automatically by the ratio of reserves. Live example with numbers: Pool: 1,000 Token0, 1,000 Token1. k = 1,000,000. Trader sells 100 Token0: amountOut = (reserveOut × amountIn) / (reserveIn + amountIn) amountOut = (1000 × 100) / (1000 + 100) amountOut = 100,000 / 1,100 amountOut ≈ 90.9 Token1 The trader gets ~90.9, not 100. That gap is slippage — and it's not a bug. It's the formula protecting the pool. The more you buy relative to pool size, the worse your price gets. Naturally. Mathematically. After the swap: pool has 1,100 Token0 and ~909.1 Token1. k ≈ 1,000,000. Invariant holds. The Contract: SimpleAMM Three functions.

Every line of your smart contract costs something. Some lines cost more than others. In this part of our gas saving series, we’ll explore how to write smarter Solidity code that keeps your contract lean and efficient. Here are six simple and practical ways to reduce gas costs while writing Solidity smart contracts. 1. Use payable Only When Needed, But Know It Saves Gas In Solidity, a function marked payable can actually use slightly less gas than a non-payable one. Even if you're not sending ETH, the EVM skips some internal checks when the function is marked payable. See this example: function hello() external payable {} // 21,137 gas function hello2() external {} // 21,161 gas That tiny difference may not seem like much, but across thousands of calls, it adds up. Only use payable when your function is actually meant to accept ETH 2. Use unchecked for Safe Arithmetic When You’re Sure Since Solidity 0.8.0, all arithmetic operations automatically check for overflows and underflows. While this makes contracts safer, it also uses extra gas. When you're certain that overflow won't occur, you can use the unchecked keyword to skip these safety checks. uint256 public myNumber = 0; function increment() external { unchecked { myNumber++; } } Gas used: 24,347 (much cheaper than using safe math) Warning: Use unchecked carefully. Only when you're confident there's no risk of overflow. 3. Turn On the Solidity Optimizer The Solidity Optimizer is like a smart helper that cleans up and tightens your compiled bytecode. It does not change how your contract works, but it removes waste and makes it cheaper to run. If you’re using tools like Hardhat or Remix, always enable the Optimizer before deploying to mainnet. 4. Use uint256 Instead of Smaller Integers (Most of the Time) Smaller types like uint8 or uint16 might look more efficient, but they can cost more gas during execution. That’s because the EVM automatically converts them to uint256 behind the scenes. So, if you're not tightly p