A new Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-8363, has triggered a sharp debate over staking rewards, issuance policy, and validator incentives. The proposal, put forward by Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake, Jérôme de Tychey, and four other researchers and developers, would gradually burn consensus-layer rewards as total ETH staked approaches 60.25 million ETH, or about 50% of supply, over an 18-month transition period. Its authors argue that unchecked issuance and rising staking participation could concentrate liquidity in large custodians and liquid staking providers while diluting non-stakers. Grayscale research head Zach Pandl has backed the proposal, saying lower staking rewards could support ETH’s long-term price by making supply growth more constrained and predictable, especially alongside EIP-1559 and blob-related burn mechanisms. Critics have pushed back hard. Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the change would weaken institutional demand for ETH and reduce DeFi lending activity, while Ether.Fi CEO Mike Silagadze warned it could push out independent validators and leave staking dominated by large centralized entities. The proposal was published on Aug. 4, just two days before the Aug. 6 deadline for additional EIPs for the Hegotá upgrade, though community organizer Trent Van Epps said that date is not the final cutoff for selection. EIP-8363 has not been approved, scheduled, or included in Hegotá.

A heavy 24-hour news cycle in crypto and adjacent tech markets was led by SpaceX’s first earnings report as a public company, which showed $7.8 billion in second-quarter revenue, 18,712 BTC on its balance sheet, and roughly $540 million in unrealized losses after Bitcoin fell 33% in the quarter. Coldcard’s wallet security incident kept escalating as the company urged users to migrate funds, while Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn said at least 15 attackers have now been identified through victim reports and on-chain tracing. In South Korea, Upbit and Bithumb both moved to list QUID, while on-chain flows highlighted a new wallet buying CASHCAT, a 40x leveraged BTC short on Hyperliquid, HYPE unstaking, and another Strategy-linked BTC transfer. Elsewhere, U.S. crypto policy centered on the CLARITY Act and fresh political friction around Trump’s TRUMP meme coin, while institutions expanded tokenized finance, staking, and custody services through Wells Fargo, BNY Mellon, Circle, Dinari, and Cloudflare. Markets also tracked BIP-110 activation risk, lower Bitcoin implied volatility, Ethereum staking policy debate, major AI infrastructure deals, and a long list of company, macro, and semiconductor updates.

Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov has spoken out against an Ethereum Improvement Proposal submitted to the Ethereum community, arguing that it would fail to achieve its intended objective and instead damage Ethereum. In his view, the proposal would cap ETH staking yield at 0% once the staking ratio exceeds 50%, making staking returns unpredictable and, for many participants, potentially not worth pursuing at all. He said that would create a negative signal for institutional buyers considering ETH positions, as some may prefer other networks with more predictable cash flows, raising a meaningful adoption cost for Ethereum. Kulechov also argued that a drop in yield to 0 would make ETH lending strategies largely unworkable, effectively killing ETH lending and yield use cases. Under that setup, he said, the main reason to borrow ETH would be to short it, while holders seeking both ETH beta and yield could rotate into yield-bearing assets such as stablecoins. From his personal perspective, he said the proposal would weaken ETH’s viability as an asset and limit its potential, adding that Ethereum should not be punished for its growth.

This week’s project updates spanned layoffs, product launches, protocol restructuring, security findings, and corporate actions across the crypto sector. Pump.fun was reported to have cut staff in early April, about two months before its first PUMP token unlock, with at least one former employee allegedly missing out on token allocations worth more than $1 million at current prices. Uniswap rolled out a beta token launch aggregation feature called Launches on Robinhood Chain and, separately, introduced Earn in partnership with Morpho, allowing users to deposit USDC, USDT, and ETH into Gauntlet-managed vaults from the Uniswap app and wallet. Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the protocol has brought in Zapper’s entire engineering team and is preparing to launch Aave Pro. At the same time, Aave plans to retire 50 low-adoption reserves, wind down deployments on Sonic, Scroll, zkSync, Metis, Soneium, and Aptos, and delist 21 expired Pendle PT positions. Other developments included 1inch opening its self-custodial liquidity layer Aqua to all users, Storj Labs filing for Chapter 11 reorganization in the United States, Metronome’s msUSD briefly trading about 11% below its peg, Ondo Finance reviewing a potential $250 million to $500 million acquisition, and Nansen’s CEO saying AI trading agents could outnumber human traders within about two years.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the protocol plans to reduce its economic and technical risk exposure through a new risk framework and a technical asset listing framework. He said the move should not be read as a reversal of Aave’s multichain expansion, but rather as a strategic refocus on selected protocols. Kulechov also said Aave will keep conducting ongoing risk assessments across all assets already deployed on the protocol. The comments come after Aave launched on Avalanche earlier this month and as it prepares to deploy its V3 lending market and the GHO stablecoin on Monad, according to Cointelegraph. The remarks point to a narrower and more selective approach to expansion while keeping existing deployments under review.

July 31 brought a dense mix of crypto, equity-market, and policy headlines. On the corporate side, Coinbase reported $1.22 billion in second-quarter revenue, down 14% from the prior quarter and below the $1.29 billion expected by the market, while Strategy posted an $8.2 billion quarterly loss tied mainly to unrealized losses on its Bitcoin holdings and said it held 843,775 BTC at the latest disclosure. In one of the day’s most closely watched cross-market stories, people familiar with the matter said Citadel had acquired most of the equity portfolio of Situational Awareness, the $24 billion hedge fund founded by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, after losses tied to AI-related trades. Elsewhere, Aave said it would retire 50 low-adoption reserves and wind down deployments on six chains, Uniswap launched a beta product for token launches, and ENS DAO proposed creating a full-time operating foundation. On the policy front, U.S. senators submitted a new compromise proposal tied to ethics provisions in the Clarity Act, while South Korea said it had completed a draft digital asset framework bill and is also considering rules that could cover AI agent payments and suspicious-account payment freezes.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov said on X that Aave Pro has hired Zapper’s entire engineering team, while welcoming Justin D'Errico to the company. In the same post, Kulechov wrote, "If you liked Zapper, you will love Aave Pro," signaling a direct link between the incoming team and Aave Pro’s product direction. Separately, D'Errico said he has joined Aave as chief backend engineer and will help the team build a data-first foundation that can support future scale. The update comes after earlier reporting from Foresight News that DeFi portfolio management platform Zapper plans to shut down on Aug. 3.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov said the protocol’s recent move to gradually phase out low-adoption assets and network deployments should not be read as a view on any Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain. In a post cited by PANews on July 30, Kulechov said the decision is aimed at cutting Aave’s operational, technical and economic risk surface so the team can focus on priorities with greater impact. Those priorities include growing existing high-value markets and expanding into securities financing. Kulechov also pushed back against the idea that the changes signal a negative stance on scaling networks. He said Layer 2 networks remain critical to Ethereum’s user experience, adding that Aave App’s stable vault uses an L2 as its accounting layer, a setup he said can help bring mainstream users into DeFi. He also pointed to networks such as Avalanche, saying they play an important role in bringing real-world assets on-chain through institutional business development, an area he said Ethereum has historically lacked. The comments came after earlier news that Aave would retire 50 low-adoption asset reserves and shut down deployments on six chains.