Abdullah Umar 🕸️

Crypto governance is a lot more political than you think Right under our noses, a dramatic battle played out between @wormholecrypto and @LayerZero_Labs last week Where did this take place? On the Uniswap forums Let’s break down the politics behind the recent proposal👇

BREAKING: Solana processed a record $650 billion in Stablecoin transactions in February 2026. As a result, aggregate Stablecoin transaction volume is now nearly a record $2 trillion per month. Stablecoin volumes on Solana nearly TRIPLED month-over-month, with another surge expected in March amid the Iran War. The surge in volume comes after the launch of Western Union's $USDPT, Jupiter's $JUPUSD, which has gained traction amid its goal of returning a yield back to the ecosystem. To put this into perspective, CME Group futures trading in gold just hit a record $208 billion per month. In other words, Stablecoin transaction volumes are now nearly 9 TIMES the size of gold futures traded on CME.

S&P Dow Jones Indices and trade[XYZ] have joined forces to launch the first official S&P 500 perpetual contract, available exclusively on Hyperliquid. For 69 years, the S&P 500 has been a defining reference point for global finance. Until now, access to that benchmark has been shaped by market hours, intermediaries, and geography. Today, that changes. The S&P 500 perp is now available 24/7/365, anchored by the official index data required for deep liquidity and institutional confidence at scale.  SPDJI helped define modern indexing. They are stewards of an iconic benchmark, the standard against which portfolios across the globe are measured. We are honored to bring that legacy on-chain. Trade[XYZ] is bringing the world's most iconic assets towards a future of global, continuous markets — a future powered by Hyperliquid.

TODAY 🚨: The Commission issued an interpretation that clarifies the application of federal securities laws to crypto assets. This is a major step to provide greater clarity regarding the Commission’s treatment of crypto assets. Read the release here: ow.ly/XhhV50YvxvO

Today we are proposing the Aave Will Win Framework, a new alignment framework that directs 100% of product revenue to the Aave DAO treasury under a token-centric model.

Tip of the spear: The anticipated SEC token safe harbor (for non-security tokens) will formalize cash-flowing DeFi tokens as an asset class, making them institutionally investable. At the same time, traditional assets are moving onchain, in part, thanks to forthcoming rule making on security tokens. $UNI is the first crypto asset Blackrock has bought directly for its balance sheet. Many will follow.

BREAKING: Hyperliquid is quietly outgrowing Coinbase. Trading Volume (Notional): • Coinbase: $1.4T • Hyperliquid: $2.6T That’s nearly 2x Coinbase’s volume… from an onchain exchange. And the market is noticing. YTD Price Performance: • Hyperliquid: +31.7% • Coinbase: -27.0% A +58.7% divergence in just weeks.

At long last, we have built The Gig Economy from Zero HP Lovecraft’s famous story “Don’t Build The Gig Economy”

There have recently been some discussions on the ongoing role of L2s in the Ethereum ecosystem, especially in the face of two facts: * L2s' progress to stage 2 (and, secondarily, on interop) has been far slower and more difficult than originally expected * L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gaslimits are projected to increase greatly in 2026 Both of these facts, for their own separate reasons, mean that the original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path. First, let us recap the original vision. Ethereum needs to scale. The definition of "Ethereum scaling" is the existence of large quantities of block space that is backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum - that is, block space where, if you do things (including with ETH) inside that block space, your activities are guaranteed to be valid, uncensored, unreverted, untouched, as long as Ethereum itself functions. If you create a 10000 TPS EVM where its connection to L1 is mediated by a multisig bridge, then you are not scaling Ethereum. This vision no longer makes sense. L1 does not need L2s to be "branded shards", because L1 is itself scaling. And L2s are not able or willing to satisfy the properties that a true "branded shard" would require. I've even seen at least one explicitly saying that they may never want to go beyond stage 1, not just for technical reasons around ZK-EVM safety, but also because their customers' regulatory needs require them to have ultimate control. This may be doing the right thing for your customers. But it should be obvious that if you are doing this, then you are not "scaling Ethereum" in the sense meant by the rollup-centric roadmap. But that's fine! it's fine because Ethereum itself is now scaling directly on L1, with large planned increases to its gas limit this year and the years ahead. We should stop thinking about L2s as literally being "branded shards" of Ethereum, with the social status and responsibilities that this entails. Instead, we can think of L2s as being a full spectrum, which includes both chains backed by the full faith and credit of Ethereum with various unique properties (eg. not just EVM), as well as a whole array of options at different levels of connection to Ethereum, that each person (or bot) is free to care about or not care about depending on their needs. What would I do today if I were an L2? * Identify a value add other than "scaling". Examples: (i) non-EVM specialized features/VMs around privacy, (ii) efficiency specialized around a particular application, (iii) truly extreme levels of scaling that even a greatly expanded L1 will not do, (iv) a totally different design for non-financial applications, eg. social, identity, AI, (v) ultra-low-latency and other sequencing properties, (vi) maybe built-in oracles or decentralized dispute resolution or other "non-computationally-verifiable" features * Be stage 1 at the minimum (otherwise you really are just a separate L1 with a bridge, and you should just call yourself that) if you're doing things with ETH or other ethereum-issued assets * Support maximum interoperability with Ethereum, though this will differ for each one (eg. what if you're not EVM, or even not financial?) From Ethereum's side, over the past few months I've become more convinced of the value of the native rollup precompile, particuarly once we have enshrined ZK-EVM proofs that we need anyway to scale L1. This is a precompile that verifies a ZK-EVM proof, and it's "part of Ethereum", so (i) it auto-upgrades along with Ethereum, and (ii) if the precompile has a bug, Ethereum will hard-fork to fix the bug. The native rollup precompile would make full, security-council-free, EVM verification accessible. We should spend much more time working out how to design it in such a way that if your L2 is "EVM plus other stuff", then the native rollup precompile would verify the EVM, and you only have to bring your own prover for the "other stuff" (eg. Stylus). This might involve a canonical way of exposing a lookup table between contract call inputs and outputs, and letting you provide your own values to the lookup table (that you would prove separately). This would make it easy to have safe, strong, trustless interoperability with Ethereum. It also enables synchronous composability (see: ethresear.ch/t/combining-pr… and ethresear.ch/t/synchronous-… ). And from there, it's each L2's choice exactly what they want to build. Don't just "extend L1", figure out something new to add. This of course means that some will add things that are trust-dependent, or backdoored, or otherwise insecure; this is unavoidable in a permissionless ecosystem where developers have freedom. Our job should make to make it clear to users what guarantees they have, and to build up the strongest Ethereum that we can.

HyperCore will support outcome trading (HIP-4). Outcomes are fully collateralized contracts that settle within a fixed range. They are a general-purpose primitive that are useful for applications such as prediction markets and bounded options-like instruments. There has been extensive user demand in both of these areas, and builders will likely think of novel applications as well. Outcomes bring non-linearity, dated contracts, and an alternative form of derivative trading that does not involve leverage or liquidations. The outcome primitive expands the expressivity of HyperCore, while composing with other primitives such as portfolio margin and the HyperEVM. Outcomes are a work in progress and currently only being tested on testnet. Canonical markets based on objective settlement sources will be deployed once technical development is complete. Canonical markets will be denominated in USDH. Pending user feedback, the infrastructure will be extended to permissionless deployment.

Today marks an inflection in the Ethereum Foundation's long-term quantum strategy. We've formed a new Post Quantum (PQ) team, led by the brilliant Thomas Coratger (@tcoratger). Joining him is Emile, one of the world-class talents behind leanVM. leanVM is the cryptographic cornerstone of our entire post-quantum strategy. After years of quiet R&D, EF management has officially declared PQ security a top strategic priority. Our journey began in 2019, with the "Eth3.0 Quantum Security" presentation at StarkWare Sessions. Since 2024, PQ has been central to the @leanEthereum vision. The pace of PQ engineering breakthroughs since then has been nothing short of phenomenal. It's now 2026, timelines are accelerating. Time to go full PQ: → PQ ACD: Antonio Sanso (@asanso) kicks off a bi-weekly All Core Devs PQ transactions breakout call next month. These sessions focus on user-facing security, covering dedicated precompiles, account abstraction, and longer-term transaction signature aggregation with leanVM. → PQ foundations: Today we are announcing a $1M Poseidon Prize to harden the Poseidon hash function. We are betting big on hash-based cryptography to enjoy the strongest and leanest cryptographic foundations. Check out our other $1M PQ initiative, the Proximity Prize. → PQ devnets: Multi-client PQ consensus devnets are live! Shoutout to pioneers @zeamETH, @ReamLabs, @PierTwo_com, @geanclient, @ethlambda_lean, as well as established consensus teams Lighthouse, Grandine, and soon Prysm. This incredible teamwork is coordinated by @corcoranwill via weekly PQ interop calls. → PQ workshops: Building on last year's PQ workshop in Cambridge (see photo), the EF is hosting another 3-day PQ event in October. Top experts from around the world will convene. In addition, a PQ day is set for March 29 in Cannes just ahead of EthCC. → PQ FV and AI: Last week Alex Hicks (@alexanderlhicks) ran a specialised maths AI for 8 hours, at a $200 cost. It one-shotted a formal proof one of the hardest lemmas in the foundations of hash-based snarks. Mind-blowing. Applied cryptography will never be the same. → PQ roadmap: A comprehensive breakdown of the EF's proposed PQ strategy will be shared soon™ on pq[.]ethereum[.]org. The roadmap targets a full transition in coming years with zero loss of funds and zero downtime. Stay tuned :) → PQ education: The ZKPodcast (@zeroknowledgefm) is producing a 6-part video series on Ethereum's PQ strategy. EF Enterprise Acceleration is also preparing material for enterprises and nation-states. Finally, Ethereum is now represented on the PQ advisory board that Coinbase announced yesterday. Believe in something. Believe in PQ security.

Crypto really in an existential crisis now. Everything we thought would happen on blockchain is now happening, but little if any of the value accrues to any stocks or tokens in our ecosystem. Fat protocol thesis is long dead BTC has nothing to do with ANY of the actual blockchain growth engines (no exposure to growth of stablecoins, DeFi or RWA tokenization). Continue to think a handful of DeFi tokens, token launchpad companies, and GLXY stock are the only clear winners from this trend — when all assets are on onchain, DeFi goes from niche experiment to the full financial plumbing engine

Today, NYSE is proud to announce the development of a platform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities. NYSE’s new digital platform will enable tokenized trading experiences, including 24/7 operations, instant settlement, orders sized in dollar amounts, and stablecoin-based funding. Its design combines the NYSE’s cutting-edge Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. Learn more: businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

Bank of America CEO on why stablecoins shouldn't pay interest: (TLDR: consumers shouldn't earn yield so banks can) Quick summary: Interest on stables -> mass deposit flight Fully reserved money -> no fractional leverage Banks lose free funding -> profits go bye bye!

Just submitted the Unification proposal for final governance vote Voting starts on 12/19 at 10.30pm EST and ends on 12/25 If it passes, after a 2 day timelock period: 🔥 100m UNI will be burned 🦄 v2 + v3 fee switches will flip on mainnet and begin burning UNI, along with Unichain fees 📜 Uniswap Labs will allign itself to Uniswap governance with a contractual agreement, recognized as legally binding in the state of Wyoming under their DUNA law Delegates: vote before Christmas or end up on Santa's naughty list! vote.uniswapfoundation.org/proposals/93

My $AAVE Alignment proposal: Ownership. If you are an $AAVE token holder, you should check it out governance.aave.com/t/arfc-aave-to…