WuBlockchain released its July technology report, outlining key protocol and infrastructure developments across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Zcash, NEAR, Cardano, Uniswap and Sui.
Bitcoin: Core v31.1 shipped as BIP-110 drew governance attention
Bitcoin Core v31.1 was released on July 8, 2026, with new features, bug fixes, performance improvements and translation updates.
According to the report, the release fixed a problem in which the chainstate database repeatedly rewrote large amounts of its own data during normal operation, driving high disk read and write activity. It also fixed an IP address leak tied to the -privatebroadcast feature, where connections could in some cases be established over the clearnet instead of an enabled privacy network.
BIP-110 became a central governance issue in Bitcoin during July. The proposal would use a one-year soft fork to limit inscriptions, OP_RETURN and other non-monetary data. Miner signaling was below 1% in mid-July. On July 18, Saylor published “110 reasons against,” arguing that the proposal would damage network neutrality and create censorship and fork risks.
Foundry later started a hashpower-weighted vote. By July 27, signaling had reached about 2.64%, still well below the 55% threshold. The debate then shifted toward the mandatory signaling window in August.
Ethereum: Glamsterdam neared final testing while Hegota remained open-ended
WuBlockchain described the Glamsterdam upgrade as centered on aggressive L1 scaling and MEV fairness. The work has moved into its final round of integration and performance testing.
Developers largely completed the DevNet 7 specification in early July, confirming ePBS, BAL, gas repricing and other core changes, while adopting 3-, 6- and 9-second parameters for block propagation and proof timing. DevNet 7 launched in mid-July with roughly 3,000 validators, and initial participation was around 80% to 90%.
The network later stabilized, but testing exposed a set of issues: performance degradation in progressive SSZ containers, BAL RPC inconsistencies, Builder API issues, circuit-breaker questions and payload propagation problems. As of July 30, DevNet 7 had reached close to 100% participation, but gas repricing benchmarks still showed potential performance regressions. The team therefore delayed the final public DevNet 8, also referred to as the Platåberget testnet, pending benchmark work and Discovery v5 readiness. The official timeline still says only that the upgrade is planned for the second half of 2026, with no formal mainnet date.
Hegota, which is framed around censorship resistance, stronger privacy and leaner nodes, is still in the process of collecting proposals and narrowing its scope. In July, the emphasis was on deciding what belongs in the upgrade rather than shipping code.
Among the core items, the anti-censorship mechanism FOCIL has been included, while the native account abstraction design Frame Transaction remains under consideration. Other additions or discussion topics during the month included private transactions, delayed state roots, BAL sidecars, SSZ execution blocks, removal of log blooms, Hash-Chain RANDAO and bundled proof propagation. The submission deadline for non-core EIPs was set for Aug. 6, leaving Hegota in what the report called a broad selection stage, with neither the final feature set nor a mainnet timetable locked in.
Vitalik Buterin outlined Lean Ethereum and validator privacy changes
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote that Lean Ethereum would be the network’s third major iteration after The Merge and would roll out gradually over the next three to four years.
He listed several core directions: making recursive STARK verification native to the protocol, advancing quantum-resistant designs, introducing more scalable state structures, and exploring low-level virtual machines such as RISC-V or leanISA to support programmable privacy and higher scalability. He also said Ethereum would raise gas limits, expand blob capacity and shorten slot times multiple times over roughly the next five years, adding that the Glasterdam upgrade is expected to bring a sizable gas-limit increase.
In another post, Buterin laid out a path to reduce consensus-layer state requirements and strengthen validator privacy in the context of the Lean roadmap. The proposal includes removing validator public keys from beacon-chain state through STARK-based aggregation, having validators generate daily STARK proofs to update balances, compressing each validator’s state to 1 byte of effective balance and 5 bytes of public-key index, and reducing processing load at the end of each epoch.
Buterin said the design could support millions of validators. In a more advanced version, privacy could be increased through daily re-anonymization of validators, ZK-STARK balance-update proofs and commitments that hide withdrawal addresses, breaking the public link between deposits, staking activity and withdrawals. On balance-update timing, he said one hour is the lower bound and one day is the more conservative cadence.
Other Ethereum ecosystem proposals and launches
A new proposal titled Native UTXOs on Ethereum suggested introducing native UTXOs alongside the account model, storing UTXO data in history while keeping only a spent-or-not marker onchain. The report said this could cut the permanent state footprint of one-time payments by about 99.8%.
The design is based on EIP-8141 Frame Transactions and supports self-paid gas for UTXOs, trustless gas sponsorship, and use cases involving ERC-20 tokens and private payments.
Ethereum proposal EIP-8222, or Lean Staking, aims to use STARK cryptography to separate staking deposits from withdrawal information, reducing the linkage between validator identity and fund flows to improve privacy for institutional staking. The report said that under the current system, institutional stakers’ deposit addresses, validators and withdrawal credentials can all be tracked publicly, allowing outside analytics firms to infer staking scale, timing and strategy.
If implemented, the proposal could give institutions stronger privacy while also creating more complex deposit and withdrawal workflows, transaction delays, higher operating costs and additional compliance demands. EIP-8222 remains at the discussion stage, with no launch date set.
Starknet, an Ethereum layer-2 network, announced the launch of STRK20, a privacy framework that lets users apply privacy features to any asset, while developers can integrate through an SDK and wallet APIs. Users must be screened before entering the privacy pool, activity inside the pool stays encrypted, and disclosure would occur only after a valid legal request and an independent review, limited to a specified user, transfer or time range. Starknet said the design can be used in source-of-funds audits and stolen-asset investigations without exposing unrelated user data.
Polygon Foundation said the Ithaca hard fork had been successfully deployed to the Amoy testnet and was planned to go live on Polygon mainnet at about 14:00 UTC on July 29, at block height 50,185,000. The upgrade is intended to improve network reliability through automatic failover, restrictions on transactions that may affect network stability, and stronger monitoring tools for node operators.
Solana: Agave v4.2, onchain governance and SIMD-0286 moved ahead together
Solana development firm Anza published its Agave v4.2 release plan, with Aug. 17 set as the target date for the first stage of the upgrade. The release is meant to prepare the network for 200-millisecond block times, greater transaction capacity and a lower-rent mechanism, while also pushing forward the Alpenglow consensus-upgrade effort.
Solana Foundation also announced the formal launch of Solana Governance Proposals, or SGP. Validators can now submit, support and decide core protocol matters through an onchain system that uses stake-weighted voting and Merkle-proof verification.
Any validator with at least 100,000 delegated SOL can initiate an SGP. Unlike Solana Improvement Documents, or SIMD, which focus on technical and protocol changes, SGP is designed mainly to express ecosystem governance views. A proposal must receive support from at least 15% of total network stake before it can enter the formal voting stage.
Anza CEO Brennan Watt wrote that Solana mainnet is expected to activate SIMD-0286 at the start of Epoch 1009. The change would raise the single-block compute limit from 60 million compute units to 100 million CU, an increase of about 66.7%. Solana uses CU to measure the computational work needed to execute transactions. The proposal is intended to expand block capacity so validators can process more computation in one block, though the actual increase in throughput would still depend on transaction mix, network demand and validator operating conditions.
BNB Chain: Pasteur entered testnet and the second-half roadmap raised the bar
BNB Chain said the Pasteur upgrade has entered testnet. It fixes an issue under which duplicate validators could bypass cross-chain signature thresholds, strengthens staking, governance and legacy consensus-key security, and introduces builder proposals and validator blind-signing. The mainnet upgrade is planned for Aug. 25.
BNB Chain also published its technology roadmap for the second half of the year. BSC’s current block interval has been reduced to 450 ms and test throughput is about 5,200 TPS. The target for the second half is to double that again while advancing resource isolation, parallel execution, dedicated transaction channels, lower gas fees and a next-generation L1 architecture.
Zcash, NEAR and Cardano reported mainnet-level changes
Zcash Open Development Lab, or ZODL, said the Zcash Ironwood NU6.3 upgrade was activated on mainnet at block height 3,428,143. The upgrade introduced a newly formally verified privacy pool and restricted the older Orchard pool. New funds will no longer enter Orchard, and existing funds must pass through the Turnstile mechanism before moving to Ironwood, strengthening the verifiability of circulating ZEC supply.
The upgrade is intended to address the Orchard soundness vulnerability identified earlier. The official statement said there is currently no evidence that the issue was exploited or that user funds or the total ZEC supply were affected.
NEAR released mainnet version 2.13.0. The update adds support for the NIST-standard ML-DSA-65 quantum-resistant signature scheme, making it the third protocol key type after ed25519 and secp256k1. It also supports dynamic resharding, allowing the network to split heavily loaded shards automatically at epoch boundaries based on shard-state size.
The release also introduced Gas Keys under NEP-611, allowing access keys to carry independent prepaid gas balances and 1,024 parallel nonce lanes, and to work with DelegateV2 meta-transactions for gas sponsorship. In addition, contracts can assign deterministic yield IDs, and node state sync has switched to a peer-to-peer mode.
The Zcash ecosystem also released Zakura 1.0.0, a new full-node client that supports data pruning, fast sync and compatibility with existing zcashd interfaces. The team said a snapshot of about 11 GB can cut startup time to under two minutes, improving speed by around 680x. Zakura is described as the first deployed component in Zcash’s scaling plan, whose long-term goal is to lift processing capacity to more than 50,000 transactions per second while preserving privacy and full validation.
Cardano Protocol Version 11, the van Rossem hard fork, has activated at an epoch boundary. According to the report, this is Cardano’s first hard fork approved entirely through onchain governance, with votes from DReps, SPOs and the Constitutional Committee. The upgrade lowers smart-contract costs, introduces new Plutus built-ins and cryptographic built-ins, and lays the groundwork for the later Dijkstra phase.
Uniswap and Sui announced new infrastructure and testnet developments
Uniswap Labs announced a new v4-based hook standard called Permissioned Pools. It is designed to give automated market makers infrastructure for trading permissioned assets with compliance rules enforced onchain.
The first partners include Superstate, Securitize and Dowgo, which integrates the ERC-3643 standard. The standard allows issuers to manage whitelists at the protocol layer rather than on the front end or offchain, and to verify wallet permissions every time a trade or liquidity-add action takes place. It also uses Uniswap v4’s flash accounting model to keep underlying permissioned assets securely held. The report said the framework broadens the route for tokenized funds, securities and equities to access DeFi.
Sui said the Hashi testnet is now live, allowing developers and institutions to test lending and credit applications backed by native Bitcoin collateral without moving BTC off the Bitcoin network. Hashi also introduced Guardian Layer, which uses a 2/2 multisig design to protect collateral.