EVM Gazette – December 18, 2025

Issue #15

Highlights

• Trustless payments staying in ePBS

• EF exploring directions to mitigate state growth

• Postmortem on Prysm incident published

• New research on Ethereum’s blockspace market

AllCoreDevs Update

Blob parameter only fork 1 went live on December 9 and went well. The issue with Prysm that occurred on December 4 has been addressed with subsequent releases.

Some may be aware of the recent debate on X about whether trustless payments should be included in ePBS. However, on this last ACDC #171, the core devs decided on keeping the feature in, pending any development on whether there are security issues.

FOCIL has been declined for inclusion in Glamsterdam, and it remains considered for inclusion in Heka.

CFI’d EIPs for Glamsterdam now include EIP-7688, EIP-8080, and EIP-8061.

Ethereum News & Discussion

• The Ethereum Foundation blog published a post from the Stateless Consensus team arguing that Ethereum’s state growth threatens decentralization, resilience, and censorship resistance, and outlining complementary directions – state expiry, state archiving, and partial statelessness with improved RPC – aimed at bounding active state, lowering storage/serving costs, and sustaining higher throughput without compromising network neutrality.

• In a new post, Vitalik argues for a future of diverse “tribes,” permanent hubs, and government‑hosted zones that collaboratively innovate culture, governance, and rules—distributing progress beyond today’s centralized power centers.

• The Prysm team released a postmortem on the incident that occurred shortly after the Fusaka mainnet fork.

• Charles Cooper of Vyper shared his opinion against the inclusion of EIP-8024 in Glamsterdam.

• nixorokish is soliciting reflections on the upgrade processes followed for Ethereum through 2025.

Research Update

• Staircase Unrestricted Uncle Maker Attack by JingansiHandsomeman

  • A refined risk framework for timestamp-based Nakamoto consensus reveals that “riskless” uncle-maker attacks incur overlooked difficulty growth risk, and introduces minimal risk control with two new strategies—UUM and SUUM—that calibrate timestamps to remain cost-free while boosting adversary rewards (to 28.41% and 33.30% at 25% hash power), supported by simulations and on-chain evidence of real-world timestamp manipulation by multiple mining pools.

• TrustMesh: Consensus as Emergence, Security from Behavior by YanAnghelp

  • TrustMesh proposes a locally driven, reputation-weighted consensus architecture where rounds produce independently valid history without global views or forks, demonstrating emergent convergence—averaging 88.7% agreement among 30 nodes under adversarial, randomized reputations—through monotonic score aggregation and diluted influence, with theoretical final synchronization, Sybil-resistant reputation dynamics, and applicability to non-consistent consensus domains rather than monetary ledgers.

• Post Quantum Signature Aggregation: a Folding Approach by tcoratger

  • A decentralized, post-quantum signature aggregation framework for Ethereum replaces BLS with XMSS and achieves scalable, accountable attestations by using SNARK-backed recursion—contrasting full recursive SNARK verification with specialized folding/accumulation schemes (Neo, WARP)—to produce a single succinct proof tied to a global participation bitfield while distributing Aggregate and Merge operations across a P2P network.

• Trustless payments by BrunoMazorra (joint w/ jcschlegel, quintuskilbourn, boz1, LuisVCorreia)

  • Advocating for enshrined, trustless payments in EIP-7732, the authors argue that despite manageable capital and operational costs, sealed-bid dynamics, and free-option considerations, the mechanism enhances permissionless proposer–builder coordination, improves fairness and resilience, and should be implemented now given the lack of viable alternatives and the risks of entrenching out-of-protocol trust.

• An Observation on Ethereum’s Blockspace Market by Kubi Mensah, Alexander Tesfamichael, Kevin Lepsoe, Justin Drake

  • An analysis of Ethereum’s out-of-protocol blockspace market under PBS identifies misaligned price discovery, fragile relay economics, concentration risks, latency instability, and gated services as core deficiencies, and proposes principles for transparent pricing, sustainable incentives, end-to-end robustness, fair access with privacy, proposer agency, explicit capacity discipline, portability without proximity lock-in, and open, verifiable service interfaces to incrementally increase realized blockspace value while preserving credible neutrality and decentralization.

New EIPs/ERCs

• EIP-8101 – Payload Chunking with Chunk Access Lists

• ERC-8102 – Permissioned Pull

• EIP-8105 – Universal Enshrined Encrypted Mempool

• EIP-XXXX – Ethereum Virtual Machine File System

• ERC-XXXX – Event-based Compliance Framework for RWA

• ERC-XXXX – ENS Trust Registry for Agent Coordination

Client and Client-Related Updates

• Nethermind released v1.35.7

• Helios released 0.11.0

• Erigon released v3.3.2

• Teku released 25.12.0

• Besu released 25.12.0

• Prysm released v7.1.0

• Lodestar released v1.38.0

• rbuilder released v1.3.1

Tooling, Languages & Libraries

• alloy-core released v1.5.0

• Echidna released 2.3.0

• Hardhat released v2.28.0 and v3.1.0

  • osaka releases

• Solarity released v3.3.1

• remix-project released v1.4.1

L2s and EVM Alt-L1s

• StarkWare – cairo-contracts released v3.0.0

• The Arbitrum blog published a post describing how WebAssembly via Arbitrum Stylus delivers near-native, predictable, and safer onchain execution as a delivery ISA that coexists with the EVM.

• The Gelato blog published a post on Turbo, a new sequencer for rollups that is already deployed on Kraken Ink, Reya, and Camp.

• The Tempo project unveiled “Tempo Transactions” in a new blog post.