Highlights
Ethereum Foundation’s Privacy & Scaling Explorations team has been renamed “Privacy Stewards of Ethereum” and has a renewed mandate to ensure “privacy is treated as a first-class feature at the application layer”.
Fusaka devnet 5 is now live.
With an update to the protocol upgrade process, a new tentative timeline has emerged for Fusaka, starting at September 22 for client releases, Sepolia fork on the week of October 13, and Hoodi fork on the week of October 27.
Protocol Guild has released the first-ever compensation report regarding Ethereum core developers.
A new high performance EVM, Guillotine, has been released in early alpha status by the Tevm team.
Public Calls
ACDT #52 – September 8, 2025
~82% participation rate on Fusaka devnet 3 (it took 6 days since the previous unfinality test to re-finalize). Nimbus and Erigon in particular are encountering issues. However, no one from Nimbus addressed this issue on the call at this point
Barnabas solicits a thumbs-up from every client on whether their trunk branch is ready for devnet 5, and everyone is ready except for Nimbus which will probably be ready by tonight or early tomorrow morning. Barnabas shooting for devnet 5 second half of this week
Shadow forks for testnets planned during devnet 5. However, blocked by geth and Erigon. lightclient is working on the geth fix; Erigon will try to have it done by second half of the week.
Considered releases for Holešky, but having a release ready by next week would be difficult for Erigon. Won’t necessarily have a full release for Holešky
Marcin reported on gas limit testing; Kamil is away
Running EEST tests; ran some experiments on Hoodi and trying to run on mainnet
Glamsterdam testing updates
BAL devnet readiness: Jared Wasinger reports that he thinks geth is very close to ready. Łukasz from Nethermind states a prototype is ready. Mario Vega shared v1 release of EEST spec tests.
ePBS: specs still under review
ACDE #220 – September 11, 2025
Tim Beiko is taking leave and Ansgar will be substituting
Fusaka devnet
Parithosh: It looks like non-finalizing on devnet 3 doesn’t have much to do with Fusaka
devnet 5 is running: 99.9% participation; 6 days from now the last BPO goes live
Barnabas was able to do a local Holesky shadow fork
Protocol Upgrade Process PR (https://github.com/ethereum/pm/pull/1715)
When happy with devnet 5, pick blocks for testnets
Once Hoodi is safely upgraded, pick mainnet block
PR merged later today
Summary of timeline assuming devnet 5 has no issues: 22 sep RC client releases, week of 29th Holesky, Week of 13th Sepolia, Week of 27th Hoodi, TBD: mainnet (min 30 days from RC)
Glamsterdam headliners
BALs – Toni gave a breakdown of a proposal related to transaction index inclusion discussed on the most recent BALs breakout call and the plan to discuss it on the next call. Should be ready to go for a first devnet by the end of September.
ePBS – Terence reported that they’re “working on the spec and the spec tests and finalizing the scope for devnet 0 which is end of October”
STEEL team merging testing and specs repo (the weld)
Discussion on including EIP 7932 and EIP 7980 in Glamsterdam
The author is absent. Danno Ferrin raises concerns around SSZ (use RLP instead) and Ed25519 (non-quantum-resistant shouldn’t be added going forward). He has an exchange with Felix.
EIP-7976 and EIP-7981 were brought up by Toni
EIP-2780 defended by Ben Adams
Ethereum News & Discussion
Protocol Guild has released the first-ever report on compensation for Ethereum core developers. Read the full report here.
Forkcast now includes a page on Protocol Calls, including “synced videos, transcripts, chat logs” for the ACDT, ACDE, and ACDC.
Porto, an EVM wallet using account abstraction, is now production-ready.
As part of Kiln’s response to an incident on Solana, they have begun exiting all their Ethereum validators. This has pushed the validator exit queue wait time to an all-time high of approximately 46 days. See the chart here.
PSE published a post on Ethereum Magicians detailing their effort in refocusing to make privacy the default on Ethereum by driving practical, ecosystem-wide solutions.
Nethermind’s v1.33.1 release comes with a new dashboard feature for Ethereum node runners.
The Tevm team has released Guillotine, a high performance EVM written in Zig. Read the introductory thread on it here.
tcoratger solicits contributions to the Lean Consensus Python spec.
Research Update
The following includes LLM-generated summaries that may be slightly edited.
Open, Application-Driven FHE for Ethereum by miha-stopar
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) offers the potential for confidential computation in Ethereum smart contracts, rollups, and AI applications, yet its practical adoption is hindered by performance limitations, decentralized key management difficulties, and the need for compelling use cases where privacy justifies the overhead; progress depends on technical innovation, sustainable economic models, and the development of interoperable standards tailored to specific application requirements.
The Privacy Trilemma by kladkogex
Achieving privacy, ease of use, and classic consensus in blockchain systems is constrained by a trilemma, where only two of these properties can coexist, necessitating the integration of privacy into consensus mechanisms to avoid prohibitive complexity.
BITE Phase 2 MVP Spec by kladkogex
BITE Phase 2 introduces Contract-Action-Transactions (CATs), enabling Ethereum smart contracts to automatically decrypt and act on encrypted data in the next block, improving privacy, automation, and deterministic execution without performance overhead.
New EIPs/ERCs
Nothing of note this past week.
Client and Client-Related Updates
Teku released 25.9.2
Nethermind released v1.33.0 and v1.34.0-rc
rbuilder has released v1.2.10
Lodestar has released v1.34.1
Erigon has released v3.0.17
Tooling, Languages & Libraries
Foundry released v1.3.5
pcaversaccio’s safe-tx-hashes-util tool now includes a feature to simulate Safe transactions locally. It requires Foundry v.1.3.5. See the post written about it.
Soldeer has released v0.7.0
Solarity has released v3.2.5
Solar has released v0.1.7
Remix Project has released v0.71.0
L2s and EVM Alt-L1 News
Eugene Chen has left Scroll and DAO operations have been paused. Scroll’s X account has posted an official announcement.
Celestia’s v6 upgrade is live on Arabica testnet
Base released a technical deep dive on their Flashblocks upgrade
Gelato is testing using Gattaca’s “delegated gateway model” to power based sequencing for ink. Read an article about Gelato’s use of Gattaca here.
Shibarium’s bridge has suffered an attack resulting in a loss of close to $3M.