Base deploys Denim upgrade on mainnet, replacing Flashblocks with 200ms block times

The WuBlockchain summarizes key developments in the blockchain technology space for August:

The controversial Bitcoin BIP-110, or Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, entered its actual activation phase in August. The proposal sought to temporarily restrict certain forms of non-financial data inscription through a soft fork, in response to concerns surrounding Ordinals, inscriptions, and blockchain data usage. However, once mandatory signaling began, miner support stood at only around 2.5%. Starting from block height 961,632, nodes enforcing BIP-110 began rejecting Bitcoin blocks that did not signal support, effectively creating a separate minority chain. That chain produced only around two blocks before largely stalling, while the main Bitcoin network continued operating normally. The episode once again demonstrated that inclusion in the BIP repository, or even the existence of executable code, does not equate to Bitcoin-wide social consensus; protocol changes still require sufficiently broad coordination among miners, nodes, users, and economic participants.

Bitcoin Core v32 reached feature freeze on August 20. Developers are now primarily focused on bug fixes and minor optimizations, with the final release targeted for October. Major improvements in v32 include parallel block validation across multiple CPU cores, increasing validation speed by as much as roughly 3x; a global transaction queue and rate-limiting mechanism to improve node stability during sudden transaction surges; and a mempool-state-based fee estimation mechanism designed to reduce fee overestimation. The release does not introduce changes to Bitcoin’s network-level consensus rules.

Core Lightning released version 26.06.7 and recommended that all node operators upgrade. The release fixes multiple vulnerabilities reported over the previous three weeks. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin open-source ecosystem has seen a sharp increase in AI-generated vulnerability reports. Details of the vulnerabilities are currently subject to a two-week disclosure embargo and will be published once the embargo expires.

Quantum-Safe Bitcoin (QSB), a proposal developed by StarkWare researcher Avihu Levy, completed its first confirmed transaction on the Bitcoin mainnet. The scheme requires neither a soft fork nor changes to existing consensus rules. Instead, it uses an additional hash-based locking mechanism to shift transaction security away from elliptic-curve cryptography toward the collision resistance and preimage resistance of hash functions, reducing future risks posed by Shor’s algorithm to public-key cryptography. QSB remains experimental. Offline computation for a single transaction currently costs several hundred dollars, and the transaction format is non-standard, requiring direct submission to miners through channels such as MARA Slipstream.

Glamsterdam upgrade: extreme L1 scaling and fairer MEV. Progress: In August, Glamsterdam formally moved from the internal DevNet stage into public testing. On August 13, Glamsterdam DevNet 8 / Platåberget launched, followed by activation of the Gloas fork on August 20. The network opened validator participation to the public and began full testing of core changes including ePBS, BAL, and Gas repricing. The Ethereum Foundation positioned it as a stable public testing environment ahead of longer-lived testnets such as Sepolia and Hoodi. During the second half of August, testing increasingly shifted from “whether the protocol works” toward edge cases and client compatibility, including BAL decoding and RPC behavior, the Engine API, Builder and Remote Signer APIs, Inclusion List sizing, EIP-8037 state Gas rules, eth/72 transaction sizes, and gossip checks designed to prevent missed blocks under ePBS. By August 31, developers were already discussing a subsequent DevNet 9, suggesting that Platåberget itself had entered a relatively stable continuous-testing phase. The schedule also began to converge: developers proposed September 28 for Sepolia and October 26 for Hoodi activation of Glamsterdam, and these dates are currently being advanced as testnet targets. However, as of the end of August, no formal mainnet activation date had been set. The most accurate characterization is therefore that “the core specification is largely frozen and the upgrade has entered public testing and final pre-mainnet validation.”

Hegotá upgrade: censorship resistance, privacy/account abstraction, and further L1 scaling. Progress: The key shift in August was from open proposal collection toward candidate filtering and CFI convergence. The submission window for non-Headliner EIPs closed on August 6. FOCIL (EIP-7805) remained a confirmed censorship-resistance Headliner, while developers began removing proposals lacking active champions and asked client teams to rank non-Headliner EIPs by September 10. The month’s most substantial development came from Frame Transactions (EIP-8141): Nethermind added support, the first standalone frames-devnet-0 launched on August 13, and a dedicated breakout session resumed on August 25. This means native account abstraction has moved from the conceptual-candidate stage into real client interoperability and testing, although whether it ultimately becomes part of Hegotá remains subject to later CFI decisions. Meanwhile, on August 17, the Ethereum Foundation’s Protocol Architecture team outlined clearer priorities. Beyond FOCIL, it recommended Frame Transactions, Keyed Nonces, and Recent Roots to improve privacy and account UX, while also considering BAL Sidecars and data/state repricing to support a further increase toward a 500–600M Gas Limit, alongside continued work on zkEVM readiness and Quick Slots. By the end of August, Hegotá was therefore no longer in a fully open “beauty contest” phase, but had entered a stage where the candidate pool was largely formed and developers were beginning to rank and eliminate proposals. The final feature set, CFI list, and mainnet schedule remain undecided.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake said the EF will no longer pursue Poseidon as the hash function for Ethereum L1, and will instead move toward conventional hash functions such as SHA or BLAKE. Recent breakthroughs in binary-field SNARK designs have enabled traditional hash functions including SHA2 and BLAKE2s to achieve performance in SNARKs comparable to Poseidon, reducing dependence on specialized SNARK-friendly hash functions and pushing Ethereum toward a more hash-centric post-quantum cryptography roadmap. Drake said the EF’s post-quantum team is advancing development along this path, with a current roadmap targeting production-grade leanVM in 2027 and deployment across the consensus, data, and execution layers in 2028.

Vitalik Buterin updated Ethereum’s roadmap, saying that priorities have changed significantly compared with the 2023 version. Post-quantum security has moved much higher on the agenda, while VDFs and some EVM improvements have been deprioritized, with new state types, PBT, and other designs replacing parts of the older roadmap. Newly emphasized areas include strong privacy, scaling in a post-quantum environment, AI-assisted formal verification, Blob and Gas futures, native Rollups, and exploration of simpler and more efficient execution architectures such as leanISA and RISC-V. Vitalik said Ethereum’s future core priorities will include STARKs, privacy, post-quantum security, safety, censorship resistance, and high-performance scaling.

The Ethereum Foundation warned that Glamsterdam will modify Ethereum’s Gas model, potentially breaking wallets, indexers, and Gas estimation tools that rely on fixed Gas assumptions. EIP-8037 introduces separate State Gas charges for operations that create new state. For example, transferring ETH to an existing account would still cost 21,000 Gas, while transferring to a new account would incur additional State Gas. The Foundation has urged developers to complete compatibility testing on the Platåberget testnet in advance.

Ethereum developer kevaundray submitted EIP-12188, proposing a shorter consensus-layer block retention window to reduce node storage requirements. The proposal is currently under public review, with developers from clients such as Lighthouse expressing support. Discussion suggests that even if the execution layer later prunes more historical data, the primary impact would be on historical block query capabilities rather than network security or normal node operation.

The Ethereum community has proposed a new deposit contract EIP designed for the post-quantum era. The proposal would support variable-length public keys and credential metadata, using scheme identifiers to distinguish between different cryptographic systems, with scheme 0 reserved for the existing BLS deposit format. The new contract would no longer depend on the old deposit contract’s Merkle Tree, instead using the execution-layer request mechanism introduced by EIP-7685 to pass deposit data to the consensus layer. It would also introduce an irreversible migration switch that could first enable and later permanently disable new BLS deposits on a predetermined schedule, laying the groundwork for an eventual migration to post-quantum signature schemes. Ethereum is currently researching post-quantum migration for critical cryptographic components including consensus-layer BLS.

Arbitrum disclosed that real Arbitrum mainnet blocks can now be proven using SP1-generated ZK proofs, while Stylus WASM execution has also been integrated into the proving system. More importantly, BoLD has been extended to accept ZK proofs. In the future, when a proof is available, settlement can bypass the slower traditional challenge-window path; if no proof is generated, the system can still fall back to fraud proofs. Arbitrum is therefore effectively building a multi-proving architecture combining ZK proofs, attestations, and fraud proofs.

Following governance approval, Arbitrum activated the ArbOS 61 “Elara” upgrade. It adds optional protocol-level transaction filtering, priority fee support, and an alternative data availability interface for dedicated chains, while increasing the Stylus contract code-size limit from 24 KB to 96 KB. Compliance filtering is disabled by default and can be enabled by dedicated-chain owners after selecting and configuring a compliance service provider. Arbitrum One and Nova have not enabled the feature. Priority fees on Arbitrum One still require a separate DAO vote, while the base-fee management range has been adjusted to 0.01–0.10 gwei.

Polygon Labs issued a security review and urgent client upgrade notice, warning that Polygon PoS nodes still running older binaries had fallen out of canonical consensus following the Austin and Kyoto hard forks completed in August. Node operators must upgrade and resync. On the consensus layer, the Heimdall client activated the Kyoto upgrade at block height 51,533,000 on August 18, requiring an upgrade to v0.11.0. The upgrade primarily fixed nested-message abuse, fee-token scanning, and checkpoint edge cases.

OP Mainnet completed a sequencer-infrastructure upgrade from 250ms Flashblocks to 200ms Subblocks. The network remained operational throughout the upgrade.

Base unveiled plans for 200ms Native Blocks, aiming to reduce the native L2 block production interval to 200ms. Unlike the current Flashblocks design, which only provides intermediate pre-confirmation results while a full block is being built, Native Blocks would produce a genuine canonical L2 block every 200ms, each with its own block number, hash, state root, and receipt. Base plans to gradually replace Flashblocks with Native Blocks in the upcoming Denim upgrade. The feature remains in the planning stage and has not yet been activated on mainnet.

Researchers disclosed a clock attack targeting Solana’s legacy Proof-of-History (PoH) and TowerBFT consensus mechanisms at USENIX Security 2026. The attack allows a malicious validator to re-anchor the PoH time state, extending its valid block-production window and, under certain conditions, interfering with block proposals from honest validators. Because the attack relies on the legacy consensus mechanism that the planned Alpenglow upgrade is designed to replace, Anza’s 50,000 SOL Alpenglow security competition may not cover the vulnerability. Researchers said the Solana team received the disclosure in December 2025 and believes the future Alpenglow upgrade will remove the conditions required for the attack, although no public implementation analysis specific to the vulnerability has yet been released. The research did not demonstrate that the attack had been exploited on mainnet, nor did it identify any loss of funds or compromise of consensus safety.

Solana developer Brennan Watt said the network’s first reduction in mainnet slot time was about to take effect, lowering slot time to 350ms starting from epoch 1020. Because some SDK constants had not yet been updated, and because the feature uses delayed activation — becoming pending in epoch E, activating in E+1, and only taking effect in E+2 — applications that depend on SDK constants matching mainnet parameters may require additional adaptation during the transition. The team plans to release updated SDK parameters after activation and is considering moving these parameters on-chain in the longer term so clients can query them directly.

Solana’s first round of on-chain governance voting concluded with SGP-0001, the Solana Constitution, and SGP-0002, Double Disinflation, passing, while SGP-0003, Resource and Inclusion Fee, failed. SGP-0001 received 86.0% support, while SGP-0002 received 67.0%, narrowly clearing the two-thirds approval threshold. SGP-0003 received 53.9% support and therefore failed to pass. SGP-0002 proposes increasing the annual SOL inflation reduction rate from 15% to 30%. If later implemented, it is expected to bring forward the point at which inflation reaches the terminal 1.5% rate from around 2032 to 2029 and reduce newly issued SOL by approximately 18.9 million tokens over six years. SGP-0003 had proposed splitting the existing base transaction fee into a fixed Inclusion Fee and a usage-based Resource Fee that would be burned.

Solana developer team Anza said the first phase of SIMD-0437, which aims to reduce Solana rent costs, has gone live on testnet. The proposal will be implemented in five stages and ultimately aims to reduce Solana’s per-byte storage cost by 90%, lowering lamports_per_byte from 6,960 to 696. For a token account, the rent-exempt deposit is expected to fall from around $0.16 to $0.016, reducing the cost of account creation and application deployment.

BNB Smart Chain activated the Pasteur hard fork on mainnet at 10:30 on August 25 (UTC+8). The upgrade strengthens cross-chain bridge verification, validator key rotation, and governance security through BEP-682 and BEP-695, while BEP-675 increases block transaction capacity. Testnet data showed throughput rising from 1,237 TPS to 2,324 TPS without changing block time or the Gas limit, although these figures do not yet represent actual mainnet performance.

Hyperliquid founder Jeff Yan said the testnet implementation of HIP-4 has introduced three updates: support for sub-deployer permission delegation, allowing a primary deployer to assign specific operational permissions to different addresses; separation of Outcome market deployment from spotDeploy into an independent top-level action, representing a breaking change to the testnet specification; and support for Outcome balances in the HyperEVM spot-balance precompile, allowing developers to query related token balances through the L1Read Solidity interface.

Hyperliquid founder Jeff said permissionless HIP-4 deployment will be enabled in the next network upgrade, after which related templates will gradually be opened through validator voting.

Hyperliquid’s official developer documentation now specifies the Outcome market deployment mechanism on the HIP-4 testnet. Validators first vote on market templates, after which deployers can permissionlessly create YES/NO markets or multi-outcome question markets based on approved templates. Deployment itself does not incur Gas fees but is subject to capacity limits. HIP-4 also allows deployment and settlement permissions to be delegated to sub-deployers and lets deployers configure fee shares. On the current testnet, each deployer may have up to 10 active Outcome markets at a time and deploy up to 50 per day, while active deployers must continue meeting relevant staking requirements.

SlowMist warned that a VSCode extension targeting Solidity/Web3 developers, “Solidity Pro,” has a history of malicious supply-chain behavior. Analysis found that historical versions published under the identities helper-beeps and web3devtoolsx contained credential-stealing capabilities, remote payload execution, and remote VSIX update functionality. Although these malicious functions were removed from later versions, traces of malicious source code and previous publisher identities remain in the codebase. SlowMist noted that reviewing only the current version creates a security blind spot and may make plugins with a malicious history appear “clean” or low-risk. It emphasized that plugin security reviews should also cover version history, publisher changes, build provenance, and remote-control mechanisms.

Zodl 3.9.0 has launched on Android, introducing a guided migration tool that allows users to move ZEC from the Orchard privacy pool to the Ironwood privacy pool. Users can either split balances and migrate them in batches or move them immediately in a single transaction. Because funds can be observed on-chain while passing through the protocol “turnstile,” the project recommends staged migration to avoid exposing the entire balance at once. The release also adds Tor protection during migration, progress notifications, Keystone support, and the next-generation ZODL Slipstream v0.6.4 synchronization engine to improve wallet recovery and routine sync speeds. The iOS release is expected early next week.

Stacks co-founder Muneeb Ali said the Satoshi Upgrade I hard fork has been completed, with new signers further increasing network decentralization. Cycle 141 recorded approximately 392.4 million STX staked, equal to roughly 80% of the historical peak.

Cardano unveiled a phased hard-fork roadmap for the Dijkstra Era. The first phase targets code completion and mainnet readiness in Q4 2026, upgrading the protocol to version 12 and focusing on features including Ouroboros Linear Leios, Nested Transactions, and PlutusV4 Script Context, while also adding block structures and protocol parameters required for Peras. The second phase is targeted for Q2 2027 and would activate Ouroboros Peras through an internal hard fork within the Dijkstra Era to accelerate transaction finality. These dates refer only to code completion and mainnet-readiness targets. Actual mainnet activation will still require Preview and Pre-production testing, as well as on-chain governance approval from DReps, SPOs, and the Constitutional Committee.