Decrypt’s Morning Minute said Pump.fun’s PUMP token is showing its first golden cross since launch, with the 50-day EMA moving above the 200-day EMA after a prolonged downturn. The token fell to $0.001491 in July, traded as high as $0.003 intraday on Monday, and later changed hands near $0.002733. The report tied the move to improving business performance rather than price action alone. According to DefiLlama data cited in the piece, Pump.fun generated $11.52 million in revenue over the past seven days, ranking fourth among all crypto protocols behind Tether, Circle, and Canton. The newsletter also said annualized revenue stands at $458 million against a $1.09 billion market cap, while August 10 to 16 fees reached $10.74 million, up 7% week over week. Pump said Tuesday’s $1.73 million marked its strongest single revenue day since January 30. The article also highlighted Pump.fun’s buyback-and-burn structure, recent product changes including Callout Rewards and lower trading fees, plus broader market, macro, ETF, memecoin, token, and NFT developments covered in the daily roundup.

Ethereum core developers have begun planning the network’s next annual upgrade, Hegotá, with 66 Ethereum Improvement Proposals now on the candidate list, according to a post on X by Ethereum developer Toni Wahrstätter. The selection process will play out over the next several core developer meetings, where proposals will be narrowed down based on whether they can be implemented, tested on devnets, deployed to testnets, and realistically made ready for a 2027 launch. Proposals that do not make the cut for Hegotá will be pushed to the following hard fork. One item is already confirmed: FOCIL, short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists. Developers also see native privacy as a key area of interest. They said combining EIP-8141 for framed transactions, EIP-8250 for keyed nonces, and EIP-8272 for root references could help build privacy features that do not rely on third-party intermediaries. Scaling is another major track. Proposed changes include repricing data resources through EIP-8131 and EIP-8279, along with repricing state growth costs via EIP-8368, as preparation for raising the gas limit to 600 million in the future. Other proposals under discussion include shorter block times, issuance changes, anti-correlation penalties, EVM simplification, and early discussion around zkEVM- and post-quantum-related EIPs.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has compared his 2023 Ethereum roadmap with the Ethereum Foundation’s latest Strawmap and says the network’s upgrade priorities have shifted in meaningful ways. Privacy protections and post-quantum security now rank higher, while some earlier items, including verifiable delay functions and several EVM-related improvements, have moved down the list. Some ideas have also been replaced by different technical paths, including a move from Verkle Tree plans toward a unified binary tree and later a segmented binary tree, while state expiry has given way to new state types. Buterin said the updated Strawmap includes several areas that were not part of his 2023 roadmap at all. Those additions include stronger privacy features, leanSPHINCS signatures and aggregation, zkzk frames for post-quantum signatures combined with STARKs, native rollups, and concepts such as blockspace and gas futures. He also said recursive STARK verification and AI-assisted formal verification are now seen as core pieces of Ethereum’s future technical base. The Strawmap, a living draft used as a reference for protocol planning rather than a fixed delivery schedule, currently extends to 2029 and was last updated on Aug. 4.

ChainFeeds’ Aug. 12 research digest pulled together five separate crypto narratives that are shaping current market and product discussions. The report focused first on Hermes, arguing that its breakout did not come from a decisive infrastructure lead over OpenClaw, but from solving operational pain points for users who wanted personal agents without taking on configuration, maintenance and recovery burdens themselves. It framed Hermes’ appeal around delegation trust, built through reliability, safety controls and verifiability. The digest also featured Andreessen Horowitz’s view that crypto payment cards have moved well beyond novelty status. Monthly card spending topped $759 million in July 2026, up from $306 million a year earlier, while transaction count approached 9 million. The mix of settlement chains has diversified from an early concentration on Gnosis to a broader spread across Optimism, Solana and Base, and dollar stablecoins now dominate usage, led by USDC and USDT. A third section summarized Vitalik Buterin’s updated Ethereum roadmap thinking. The piece said privacy, post-quantum security, protocol simplification and AI-assisted formal verification are taking on greater weight, while new state types, native rollups and possible non-EVM instruction set designs are entering the conversation. The digest also reviewed pressure on corporate Bitcoin buyers such as Strategy and Trump Media, and outlined how meme coin issuance and trading platforms including Pump.fun, Pons, GMGN, Axiom and Fomo are still generating sizable fee income despite a cooler market.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has published an updated view of his 2023 roadmap and compared it with the current "Strawmap," saying the two still overlap heavily but now differ in priority, design choices and several newly introduced areas. He said quantum security has moved up the list, while VDFs and many EVM improvement ideas have moved down. Some older proposals have also been replaced by new designs, including the shift from Verkle trees to unified BT and then PBT, as well as a move away from state expiry toward new state-type design. Buterin said the clearest change is the number of directions now present in the Strawmap that were absent from the 2023 roadmap. Those include stronger native privacy support through designs such as Keyed Nonces, Recent Roots, FOCIL-related work, Lean Privacy Pool and Wormholes; post-quantum scaling approaches using LeanSPHINCS signatures, signature aggregation and zkzk frames; protocol "leanification" to support formal verification; Blob and Gas futures mechanisms; deeper protocol-level integration of rollups; and possible long-term alternatives to the EVM, including LeanISA or RISC-V with the EVM serving as an intermediate representation layer.

ChainFeeds’ Aug. 7 research brief pulled together five strands that are shaping the digital-asset market in very different ways, but all point to the same shift: crypto is being pushed out of its old liquidity-driven phase and into a more rules-based, value-tested one. The report says Japan has become a rare market where regulators, large banks and stablecoin issuers are all building around AI agents at the same time, with FIEA amendments, tax reform expectations and licensed yen stablecoins setting the backdrop. On Ethereum, imToken Labs examined FOCIL, a proposal that would move transaction inclusion power away from a single proposer and toward a validator committee, turning censorship resistance into something enforced by protocol rules rather than participant promises. Axel Adler Jr, writing on Bitcoin, argued that the recent price rebound still lacks demand confirmation: both the 30-day apparent demand-to-issuance ratio and 30-day net age flow have recovered from July lows, but remain below zero. The brief also highlighted growing concern over HYPE’s value capture model as HIP-3 trading becomes increasingly concentrated in trade.xyz, even as Hyperliquid’s broader volumes remain large. Finally, it argued that collapsing valuations and project shutdowns do not by themselves signal industry decline, but a repricing in which revenue, users and token value capture matter more than narrative alone.

Ethereum researchers are working on protocol-level anti-censorship designs centered on a basic question: who gets to decide whether a valid transaction makes it on-chain? In an article published by imToken and carried by Foresight, the discussion focuses on how block building power has become concentrated under proposer-builder separation, or PBS, even as the model helps reduce the effect of MEV on staking decentralization. According to the piece, more than 90% of Ethereum blocks are now produced by a small group of professional builders, raising the risk that legal or compliance pressure could lead them to filter specific contracts or addresses, including cases such as Tornado Cash. Two proposals are presented as answers to that problem. FOCIL would move inclusion power from a single proposer to a committee of validators and back it with fork-choice enforcement, so blocks that ignore required transactions could be rejected by the network. FairFIL takes a different route, pushing builders to publicly account for eligible transactions they leave out and exposing persistent omissions to economic penalties. As of August 2026, the article says EIP-7805, the proposal tied to FOCIL, remains in Draft status but has been selected by Ethereum core developers as the consensus-layer headliner for the Hegotá upgrade and moved into Scheduled for Inclusion, while FairFIL is still at the research stage following its release in July 2026.

ChainFeeds Research’s PRO issue #153 pulls together a broad set of Bitcoin and Ethereum research updates, led by three themes: a more granular circuit breaker design for Gloas builder markets, a discussion of proprietary AMMs on Ethereum, and a proposal to eliminate part of oracle extractable value through synchronized state transitions. Ethereum researcher Potuz argues that failures in payload delivery should not automatically force validators into self-building, and instead proposes a layered fallback system based on builder trust. Ethereum Foundation researchers Mike Neuder and Maryam Bahrani describe PropAMM as a middle ground between traditional AMMs and RFQ systems, preserving onchain execution while letting professional market makers update pricing parameters more actively. Oraclizer CPTO Jay Kim, meanwhile, frames OEV as a structural timing problem and outlines a model where updates and downstream consequences are bound into a single cross-domain atomic transition. The report also covers a Coldcard hardware signer warning tied to weak seed entropy, two denial-of-service bugs in Core Lightning, a zkPoH concept for proving ownership of at least 1 BTC without exposing specific UTXOs, native randomness sourcing for onchain games, selected items from The MEV Letter #148, and a phishing paper that says transaction simulation itself can become an attack surface.