Aztec launched its Ignition mainnet with no centralized operators, opening community staking amid its major token sale and positioning itself as a fully decentralized L2. Ethereum layer-2 network Aztec launched its mainnet Wednesday — albeit with partial functionality — marking the launch of one of the few fully decentralized networks in the ecosystem. According to an Aztec email viewed by Cointelegraph, Aztec has launched its “Ignition” mainnet chain, a functional consensus-producing chain that generates blocks, but without the smart contract execution layer. According to L2Beat, only the trustless, optimistic rollup network Facet v1 and Aztec’s old decentralized finance (DeFi) anonymization project, Zk.Money are classed as a stage 2 system with full decentralization. Read more
BlackRock is now pursuing a new staked Ethereum ETF, offering more lucrative returns, approximately 15 months after launching its flagship ETH fund, ETHA. BlackRock has registered for a new staked Ethereum exchange-traded fund in Delaware, signalling that the $13.5 trillion asset manager is now ready to expand beyond its flagship Ethereum ETF product. A Delaware name registration is one of the first steps that a fund issuer needs to take to file for a new ETF. BlackRock, however, still needs to file other relevant documents to put the proposed product on track for regulatory approval. It would also complement BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA), which has attracted $13.1 billion worth of inflows since launching in July 2024. BlackRock did not add staking to its spot Ethereum product, stating on its website: Read more
Kohaku brings practical privacy to Ethereum wallets with safer recovery, private modes and shared standards designed for real-world use. When Vitalik Buterin walked on stage at Devcon 2025 to demo Kohaku, he summed up Ethereum’s situation bluntly. The network has strong security and privacy research and solid layer-1 security. But it still hasn’t “leveled up the last mile,” the wallets and apps people actually use. On paper, Ethereum has spent a decade leading the way. Elliptic-curve precompiles in 2018 opened the door to zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) and privacy tools like Tornado Cash and Railgun. The DAO hack in 2016 pushed the ecosystem toward serious audits, helped drive demand for robust wallets such as Gnosis Safe and turned multisigs from a niche idea into standard practice. Yet everyday private use in 2025 still feels clumsy. People juggle extra seed phrases, install special wallets, hope public broadcasters don’t fail and often fall back to centralized ex...
How Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade scales the L1 and the L2s — explained for ordinary crypto fans without the usual baffling technical jargon. After three successful trials on the Holesky, Sepolia and Hoodi testnet, Ethereums Fusaka hardfork will go live on mainnet on December 3. Its the most eagerly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum since the last one, Pectra although Fusaka will have a much more significant impact, enabling rollups to scale in the space of a month up to 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) and to 100,000 TPS over time. Its actually two separate hard forks: the Fulu upgrade to the consensus layer (the part of a blockchain where validators in the network agree on what happened) and the Osaka upgrade to the execution layer (the part that actually processes transactions). In the future, the consensus layer will be rebuilt as Lean Consensus (formerly known as Beam Chain but renamed after a trademark dispute) and hardened for security and decentralization with finality in seconds. As part of the Lean Eth...
How Ethereum’s Fusaka upgrade scales the L1 and the L2s — explained for ordinary crypto fans without the usual baffling technical jargon. After three successful trials on the Holesky, Sepolia and Hoodi testnet, Ethereums Fusaka hardfork will go live on mainnet on December 3. Its the most eagerly anticipated upgrade to Ethereum since the last one, Pectra although Fusaka will have a much more significant impact, enabling rollups to scale in the space of a month up to 1,000 transactions per second (TPS) and to 100,000 TPS over time. Its actually two separate hard forks: the Fulu upgrade to the consensus layer (the part of a blockchain where validators in the network agree on what happened) and the Osaka upgrade to the execution layer (the part that actually processes transactions). In the future, the consensus layer will be rebuilt as Lean Consensus (formerly known as Beam Chain but renamed after a trademark dispute) and hardened for security and decentralization with finality in seconds. As part of the Lean Eth...