Ethereum Bets Its Technical Future On Privacy and Quantum Defense

gm, Defiers!

These were the biggest crypto and DeFi stories today:

Vitalik Buterin moves quantum safety up Ethereum's roadmap and drops Verkle trees
Trepa and Fireplace wind down 90 minutes apart as Kalshi and Polymarket take 93% of volume
BIP-110's fork chain has not mined a block since Saturday, and its only miner walked
Crypto ETPs took $600M in July, and ether products got $350M of it

Vitalik Buterin laid his 2023 Ethereum roadmap diagram over the Ethereum Foundation's current draft plan on Monday. The most striking part of the comparison, he said, is the set of items missing from the 2023 diagram in any form: privacy, defenses against quantum computers, and an execution engine that reaches past the Ethereum Virtual Machine.

The strawmap is the Foundation's rolling draft for upgrading Ethereum's base layer, revised roughly quarterly, and it now lays out seven network upgrades by 2029. Quantum safety got pulled forward. Verkle trees and state expiry, two projects that anchored the 2023 diagram, were replaced outright. Verifiable delay functions and most EVM improvement work went the other way. Buterin named STARKs and AI-accelerated formal verification as the two things “we are okay betting the technical future of Ethereum on.”

The throughput targets sit against a shrinking fee base: Ethereum's base layer collected $8.3 million in July, down 79% from August 2025. And nothing in the five north stars touches issuance. The tapered burn that consumed Ethereum's week does appear on the diagram, penciled into a 2027-2028 fork and marked with the legend's symbol for uncertainty about ever shipping.

Read more below!

WATCH

Robinhood Chain Hit 200M Transactions In 30 Days

Seong Lee, head of product for Robinhood Crypto, sat down with Chris Storaker to explain how the chain went from zero to 200 million transactions in a month, why its permissionless stock tokens can be redeemed even if Robinhood disappears, and where the yield in its insured DeFi lending product comes from.

BLOCKCHAINS

Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum Roadmap Prioritizes Quantum Readiness and Privacy

Buterin compared the 2023 roadmap with the Foundation's current strawmap on Monday and listed seven items with no 2023 antecedent, privacy and post-quantum scaling among them. The strawmap is maintained by Justin Drake, Thomas Thiery, Toni Wahrstätter and Buterin, and sets five long-range targets: settlement in seconds, 10,000 transactions per second on the base chain using zkEVMs, 10 million on layer 2s, cryptography that holds for centuries against quantum computers, and shielded transfers on the base chain. Verkle trees give way to the unified binary tree specified in EIP-7864, and state expiry is replaced by new state types that Buterin describes as a different approach to scaling altogether. He also floated demoting the EVM to an intermediate representation on top of leanISA or RISC-V, which would end its status as a hard-coded part of the protocol.

	TICKER	VALUE	24H
	Vitalik Buterin's Ethereum Roadmap Prioritizes Quantum Readiness and Privacy Quantum safety moved up the queue, VDFs and most EVM improvement work moved down, and Verkle trees and state expiry were dropped for other constructions. thedefiant.io

Why this matters: Ethereum's plan for the next four years now rests on STARKs and on AI tooling proving the protocol correct, two dependencies that carried no weight in 2023.

DEFI

Two Prediction Markets Shut Down Hours Apart as Kalshi and Polymarket Take 93% of Volume

Trepa and Fireplace announced wind-downs 90 minutes apart on Monday morning, both giving users until Sept. 30 to withdraw. Trepa ran a pari-mutuel mechanism on Solana that paid by how close a numerical guess landed, live one hour a day in 60-second rounds on bitcoin's price; Fireplace ran a trading terminal on top of Polymarket and charged a 1% taker fee. Kalshi and Polymarket took $13.87 billion of the $14.87 billion traded across the 40 venues DefiLlama tracks over the past 30 days, with Kalshi alone at 75.7%. Trepa's founders published a 1,200-word post-mortem: retention degraded the longer someone stayed, referrals and paid KOLs returned almost nothing, and “the genuinely active audience for a product like this is in the hundreds of thousands at the moment, not the millions.”

Why this matters: Two venues closed the same morning, one with its own mechanism and one built on Polymarket, and the duopoly that squeezed both now holds 93% of the category's volume.

BLOCKCHAINS

BIP-110 Bitcoin Fork Stalls at Two Blocks as Its Only Miner Quits

The chain enforcing BIP-110 has not produced a block since Saturday night, two blocks after the split at height 961,632. Both were mined by a crew called Roughnecks through Ocean's BIP-110 stratum endpoint; the group stopped six hours later, said it would resume on Monday, and has produced nothing since. Activation is arithmetically out of reach: lock-in sits 2,015 blocks away at full network difficulty, with no date-based timeout. Signaling peaked at 2.53% of a retarget period against the 55% the proposal needed, and every one of those 51 blocks came from Ocean, which returned its default endpoint to Bitcoin on Sunday and promised roughly 0.3 BTC in rebates to miners pointed at the fork for about 18 hours. Luke Dashjr and BIP author Dathon Ohm are now discussing a proof-of-work change; no BIP or code for one has been published.

Why this matters: Some 3,125 listening nodes are stuck on the dead tip at 961,633, seeing no new blocks or transactions, and the campaign's own site now publishes instructions for leaving.

TRADFI

Ether Products Lead $600M Crypto ETP Flow Rebound in July

Global crypto exchange-traded products drew a net $600 million in July, their first positive month since April, according to a 21Shares report published Monday. Ether-native products took $350 million of it, roughly twice the $176 million that went into bitcoin-native products, with XRP at $34 million and Solana at $13 million. The month follows $2.5 billion of redemptions in May and $4.4 billion in June. Bitcoin still accounted for 78.5% of the $133.3 billion in global crypto ETP turnover, against Ethereum's 11.1%, so ether's flow lead came off a much smaller activity base. 21Shares analyst Matt Mena tied the turn to price: bitcoin closed July up about 8% and ether up 19%, while the Nasdaq 100 fell 7%.

Why this matters: Ether led creations in a month when bitcoin still took four of every five dollars traded, and Farside data shows the ether bid held through the first week of August.