EVM Gazette – February 19, 2026
Issue #23
Highlights
Monad has released their own fork of Foundry
LUCID, an encrypted mempool, is proposed for Hegota
Solidity released v0.8.34 with an important bug fix
Tomasz steps down as EF Co-Executive Director
AllCoreDevs Update
Two modifications to the eth p2p protocol, eth/70 and eth/71, are now CFI for Glamsterdam.
Regarding Hegota, Justin Florentine and Anders Elowsson presented LUCID, an encrypted mempool, as a headliner proposal.
Ethereum News & Discussion
The Ethereum Foundation released a blog post on updated priorities for the Protocol organization in 2026.
The Ethereum Protocol Studies program is returning for 2026.
The Ethereum Foundation introduced the Platform team, focused on delivering “the strongest possible Ethereum platform, where L1 and L2s are best positioned to support users, apps, and all organizations building on Ethereum.”
The Ethereum Foundation’s leadership is changing: Tomasz is stepping down and Bastian Aue is serving as interim Co-Executive Director.
A new account on X, Blockspace Forum, has quickly gained attention, and appears to be dedicated towards improving Ethereum’s block construction infrastructure.
The L1 zkEVM team had their first breakout call.
OpenAI and Paradigm have collaborated on EVMbench, a new benchmark for AI agents finding vulnerabilities in EVM code.
Research Update
RLNC Optimizations by Gottfried Herold
The post analyzes communication overhead in Random Linear Network Coding for Ethereum data dissemination and proposes several linear-algebraic and randomness-structure optimizations—such as reducing transmitted coefficient data, using projective coordinates, exploiting shared sender/receiver subspaces, and carefully restricting coefficient distributions—that preserve RLNC’s high success probability while significantly lowering bandwidth and computational costs in adversarial settings.
PrivateX402: Privacy-Preserving Payment Channels for Multi-Agent AI Systems by Conor McMenamin and Artem Grigor
PrivateX402 is a privacy-preserving, cost-efficient payment channel protocol for multi-agent AI systems that allows a single user deposit to fund many agents while hiding per-agent allocations from on-chain observers, ensuring verifiable settlement and dispute resolution without a trusted intermediary through a combination of Merkle-committed budgets, off-chain cumulative receipts, TEE/ZK-verified settlement proofs, and batched epoch-based claims.
Attempt for a new Economic Model: Audit Ready Yet? by SkopiaOutis
A deterministic, causally grounded economic protocol (“The Ontological Protocol v1.0”) is proposed that replaces token-balance-based value with graph-structural value attribution via burn-based thermodynamic costs, ripple propagation in a causal DAG, and an ontological stasis mechanism coupled to planetary constraints, formalized in a 75-page audit-ready specification with fixed-point arithmetic and a canonical execution pipeline, for which the author now seeks expert review, implementation collaboration, and economic simulation/attack analysis.
ZK API Usage Credits: LLMs and Beyond by Davide Crapis and Vitalik Buterin
The post proposes a zero-knowledge, stake-based credit system for API metering in which users make a single on-chain deposit and then issue many unlinkable, rate-limited requests—proving solvency via ZK-STARKs over accumulated refunds and enforcing both economic anti-spam guarantees and policy compliance through dual staking and slashable-but-not-seizable collateral, thereby enabling privacy-preserving, Sybil-resistant, and efficiently metered access to services such as LLM inference and Ethereum RPC.
New EIPs/ERCs
EIP-8158 – Invariant Layout Guard Opcode
EIP-8159 – eth/71 - Block Access List Exchange
EIP-8163 – Reserve
EXTENSION (0xae)opcodeEIP-8164 – Native Key Delegation for EOAs
ERC-8160 – Primary Agent Registry
ERC-8161 – Transferable Tokenized Vault Requests
ERC-8162 – Agent Subscription
Client and Client-Related Updates
Erigon released v3.3.8.
Nimbus released v26.2.1.
go-ethereum released v1.17.0.
Reth released v1.11.0.
Teku released 26.2.0.
Lodestar released v1.40.0.
mev-boost released v1.12-alpha1.
Tooling, Languages & Libraries
L2s and EVM Alt-L1s
LayerZero announced their new blockchain, Zero. It appears to use the EVM.
L2BEAT has updated their stage 1 requirements, and formerly stage 1 L2s that are no longer stage 1 per the new criteria have approximately 6 months to fulfil the new criteria before they are downgraded to stage 0. Read the thread here.
Optimism is partnering with Succinct to accelerate ZK proving on the Superchain. Read the blog post here.
Monad has released Monad Foundry, a custom fork of Foundry specifically catering to Monad.
Base is moving away from the OP Stack towards their own, unified stack.