A busy week across crypto projects brought updates in protocol design, governance, lending products, wallet security and payment infrastructure. Robinhood Chain posted $3.13 million in daily NFT volume, overtaking Ethereum, while its average daily transactions hit 11.6 million and TVL rose to $473 million. ENS token holders passed and executed the “Next Era of ENS DAO” proposal, turning ENS Foundation into a formal operating body with a full-time executive director, staff and a five-member board. On Solana, Jupiter rolled out Lend v2, a lending upgrade that lets deposited and borrowed assets also serve as trading liquidity. Other notable developments included Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake saying Ethereum L1 will stop pursuing Poseidon and instead move toward SHA or BLAKE-based hashing options; Hyperliquid outlining a plan to route idle HLP USDC into its native lending pool; Uniswap redirecting creator fees tied to a test token into an automatic buyback-and-burn contract; UniSat raising the default seed phrase length for new wallets from 12 words to 24; a USENIX study finding security-rule violations across 15 x402 payment providers; MegaETH’s native stablecoin USDm dropping to roughly $18 million in supply from a peak near $600 million in May; and World Liberty Financial delaying a yield-token launch tied to a Trump-branded Maldives resort project.

Foresight News’ latest weekly Web3 roundup pulls together a dense mix of stories that shaped industry conversation over the past several days. At the center were the death of Quantum Fintech Group founder Harry Yeh in Paraguay, a fresh count showing that more than 300 Web3 projects have gone quiet over roughly 588 days, and renewed attention on Li Lin’s return through Avenir Group-backed UMX. Bitcoin also saw an old fault line reopen after BIP-110 triggered a chain split and cost Luke Dashjr his BIP editor role. The security section was just as busy. A DeFi whale lost roughly $25 million to $26 million in minutes, Trezor disclosed a ShipMonk-related data breach affecting close to 14,000 customers, Harmony was hit by an exploit that expanded ONE supply, and ZachXBT detailed a social-engineering scam tied to at least $5 million in losses. Foresight also reviewed Bybit’s effort to recover funds from the 2025 theft attributed to Lazarus Group, with recovered and frozen assets totaling about $78.9 million so far. On the project side, Vitalik Buterin’s updated Ethereum Strawmap elevated privacy and post-quantum security, Justin Drake said Ethereum would drop Poseidon at L1, Bitwise continued launching products while shutting eight ETFs and cutting staff, and Trump Media & Technology Group showed how far it has moved beyond a pure social-media business.

StarkWare co-founder and CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said he agrees with Ethereum’s decision to move in the direction of STARKs, described here as hash-based SNARKs, but argued that the framing left out two important points and included one misleading claim. In a post on X, he said the debate between STARKs and SNARKs has been going on for years, with much of the related research previously led by StarkWare and funded by the Ethereum Foundation. He also said small binary fields were introduced to the zero-knowledge proof field in the 2018 ZK-STARK paper, rather than being original to Binius and Flonk. Ben-Sasson added that prime-field STARKs do not require large primes, pointing to Stwo’s use of the 31-bit prime field M31 as an efficient example. He further argued that binary-field multiplication performs poorly on GPUs, while multiplication over small prime fields such as M31 is more efficient, which he said could create hard-to-overcome challenges for GPU designs built on binary fields.

Ethereum is moving away from Poseidon at Layer 1, ending years of work around a hash function long favored in SNARK-based systems. On Aug. 13, Ethereum researcher Justin Drake said on X that the Ethereum Foundation had decided to abandon Poseidon in favor of traditional hash functions such as SHA2 or BLAKE2. The change comes after eight years of research, tens of millions of dollars in spending, and a broader reset of Ethereum’s post-quantum roadmap. The key technical driver is progress in binary-field SNARK design, which allows traditional hash functions to perform inside proving systems at speeds that were previously associated with SNARK-optimized designs. Drake said a laptop can now verify about 1 million conventional hash calls per second in a SNARK setting, while recent benchmarks from projects including Flock and SNARK.fast point to sharply improved throughput. The roadmap itself remains in place. Ethereum still expects a production-grade leanVM in 2027, followed by deployments across the consensus, execution, and data layers in 2028. The Foundation has also expanded its post-quantum work through pq.ethereum.org, weekly interoperability devnets involving more than 10 client teams, and two $1 million research prizes. The shift also comes as Solana and Starknet advance their own post-quantum plans using Falcon and BLAKE2-based transitions.

ChainFeeds published its Aug. 14 research roundup, pulling together five feature pieces selected from its Aug. 13 Web3 briefing. The package spans Bitcoin market structure, crypto venture and trading narratives, wallet design for AI agents, Ethereum’s long-term cryptography roadmap, and startup advice from Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. The Bitcoin section, citing Glassnode, says BTC remains stuck between two key on-chain cost bases: the Median Realized Price near $63,000 and the Short-Term Holder Cost Basis near $68,700. Spot activity has fallen to one of the lowest levels in years, ETF demand has yet to show a convincing return, and leveraged longs in derivatives have built up ahead of a broader recovery. The report says a downside break would put focus on the June low around $58,500. Other pieces in the roundup argue that stablecoins and perpetuals remain crypto’s clearest native product-market fits, examine how products such as x402 and MetaMask Agent Wallet try to give AI agents controlled spending and execution power, and frame recursive STARK aggregation as a key tool for Ethereum’s post-quantum, privacy, and scaling agenda. The final feature highlights Garry Tan’s warning that chasing hot sectors can pull founders away from areas where they have genuine edge, while AI-driven coding is changing what counts as a durable moat.

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.