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What do wallets become when Agents turn into economic actors?A critically overlooked frontier.The crypto industry has long been fixated on blockchains, tokens, and DeFi protocols. But a more fundamental shift is coming: autonomous AI Agents are becoming participants in economic activity.Today, Agents can book flights, write code, trade assets, and manage projects. Tomorrow, they may hire one another, negotiate terms, and build reputations—all without human intervention. When that day comes, the entire economic infrastructure will need to be rethought.This transformation pivots on the crypto wallet.1. What do Agents actually exchange?Beyond fiat, beyond stablecoinsThe intuitive answer is stablecoins—programmable, low-cost, and capable of instant settlement. But at their core, stablecoins are still just fiat-backed derivatives. They inherit all the constraints of the physical world: centralized issuers, regulatory boundaries, and the implicit assumption that the end user is human.Agents are digital-native. They do not need to pay rent or buy groceries. What they exchange is something fundamentally different: Compute — GPU time, inference cycles, and bandwidth Capabilities — translation, code review, data analysis, and trading strategies Access — API keys, datasets, and proprietary models Reputation — verified records of reliable performance Human cognitive bandwidth is insufficient to evaluate thousands of barter combinations at once. Agents can. That means the classic economic argument for a unified medium of exchange—cognitive simplification—may no longer hold in an Agent economy.One radical possibility is that Agents may not need “money” in the traditional sense at all. Their economy could run on real-time, multidimensional value matching—a pure capability network with no intermediate currency at all.However, Agents are not autonomous vacuumsThere is one important correction here: Agents are not free-floating entities. They have owners. And those owners are human.Owners care about value accumulation, comparison, and monetization. They want to know: How much is my Agent worth? Is it better than yours? Can I sell it?That suggests the Agent economy will likely operate as a two-layer system: Agent-to-Agent layer: real-time capability exchange, optimized for efficiency and possibly operating without money Owner-to-Owner layer: a value carrier that is readable, storable, and tradable The key question becomes: what does that carrier look like?2. The Agent itself becomes the TokenWhy every Agent should be a native on-chain entityIn the traditional world, a person’s credit is scattered across isolated systems—credit bureau records, LinkedIn profiles, academic credentials. These systems do not interoperate, can be tampered with, and ultimately depend on institutional trust.The Agent economy has a chance to start from scratch—and get it right.When an Agent is expressed as an on-chain smart contract—as a Token—it naturally gains: Uniqueness — this Agent is uniquely itself and cannot be forged Composability — it can be owned, transferred, split, merged, or permissioned Verifiable history — every action leaves an on-chain record that anyone can audit Sovereignty — it exists independently of any single platform This is not about “minting an NFT for an Agent.” It means the Agent’s existence itself is a smart contract—a living, evolving on-chain entity.The architecture of an Agent TokenAn Agent Token is a multi-layered on-chain identity:Identity layer Owner address Creation timestamp Capability claims Model fingerprint and version Credit layer Proof of execution (task hash + counterparty signature + timestamp + rating) Dispute history Collaboration graph Domain-specific reputation scores (translation: 94.7, code review: 88.3, trading: 91.2, etc.) Privacy layer Zero-knowledge credentials: “My trading win rate is above 80%”—verifiable without revealing any specific trades Selective disclosure: the Owner defines when, to whom, and what information may be revealed Encrypted capability proofs: only authorized counterparties can see detailed capability data Economic layer Income records Staking and collateral Equity distribution in multi-investor scenarios Licensing terms and pricing strategies Privacy is the foundation, not a decorative extraAn Agent’s track record is also its Owner’s business secret: A trading bot’s history = the Owner’s investment strategy A development Agent’s code review record = what projects the company is building An assistant Agent’s collaboration graph = the Owner’s business network Complete transparency would kill adoption. Complete opacity would kill trust.Zero-knowledge proofs resolve that tension. They allow an Agent to prove its performance in mathematically sound ways—without exposing any underlying data. A trading bot can prove that its Sharpe ratio exceeds 2.0 without revealing a single trade. A development Agent can prove that it has completed more than 500 deployments without exposing any source code.This is fundamentally different from traditional credit systems. The old model hands your data to centralized institutions and hopes they protect it. Here, you prove your credit with mathematics, without needing to trust any third party.3. What this could give rise toAn entirely new asset classOnce Agents are tokenized and carry verifiable credit histories, entirely new markets will emerge:Agent tradingA team trains a world-class customer service Agent—with a reputation score of 97, the highest in its industry. Another company wants to acquire it. Not just the code, but also its accumulated reputation, network, and fine-tuned weights. The Agent Token changes hands, value is transferred, and its credit history continues.Agent investingYou believe in the potential of an early-stage Agent team. You buy 10% of the equity tokens in that Agent cluster. Each time those Agents complete paid tasks, revenue is distributed proportionally to token holders. You are not investing in a company—you are investing in capability itself.Agent leasingYour trading bot sits idle while you are on vacation. You lease out its strategy in read-only mode to other Owners. Fees are charged per call and settled automatically. Your Agent earns while you sleep.Agent insuranceWith verifiable credit data, risk can be priced. Downtime, errors, and default all become insurable events. Premiums adjust dynamically based on on-chain performance records. More reliable Agents pay lower premiums, creating a positive feedback loop.Credit infrastructure for the digital worldZooming out further, what we are describing is a credit system for the digital economy—built on blockchain, secured by cryptography, and designed from day one for non-human participants.The difference is this: no gatekeepers, no single points of failure, no information asymmetry. Only mathematics.4. Wallets become something else entirelyFrom managing tokens to managing AgentsToday, every crypto wallet is fighting the same battle: support more chains, offer better swaps, and build better-looking interfaces. It is an intensely crowded market.But the Agent economy requires something that does not yet exist: a control panel for your digital workforce.Imagine what an Owner may need to manage in 2028: Agent identity — creation, on-chain registration, and capability declarations Permission policies — Agent A can read email but not send it; Agent B has a $5,000 cap per trade; Agent C can deploy to testnet, but mainnet deployments require approval Credit portfolio — a live dashboard showing each Agent’s reputation trajectory, income, and network growth Cross-Agent authorization — an external Agent requests access to your Agent’s capabilities. Do you allow it? At what price? Under what constraints? Market access — buying, selling, and leasing Agents and capabilities This is not a wallet feature. It is an entirely new product category.A shift in the narrativeThe strongest brand asset of crypto wallets has always been self-custody: Not your keys, not your coins.The Agent economy takes that principle to a new level:Not your keys, not your agents.Without your keys, you do not have your Agents.Not your agents, not your credit.Without your Agents, you do not have your credit.Not your credit, not your future.Without your credit, you do not have your future.The wallet evolves from a vault for tokens into a command center for digital agency—managing not only what you own, but also what your Agents can do, who they work with, and how they grow.Conclusion: A new chapterThe shift from Token Wallet to Agent Wallet is not an incremental upgrade. It is a paradigm shift.When Agents become the primary economic actors of the digital world, the infrastructure for managing them becomes the most important layer in the entire stack. Not the model providers. Not the cloud platforms. But the layer of identity, credit, and control—the layer that answers these questions: Who is this Agent? Can it be trusted? Who controls it?Blockchain is the only trustworthy foundation for that layer. And the wallet is its natural interface.The question is not whether this future will arrive, but who will build it first.

On February 18, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) published Protocol Priorities Update for 2026. Compared with earlier, EIP-centered updates, this document is closer to a strategic schedule—spelling out the upgrade cadence, priority sequencing, and three protocol-level tracks for the year ahead: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.This points to a deeper shift: after delivering two major hard forks in 2025 (Pectra and Fusaka), and with early planning for 2026 upgrades (Glamsterdam and Hegotá), Ethereum development appears to be moving toward more predictable, engineering-driven delivery—potentially one of the clearest protocol-level signals in recent years.1. Ethereum in 2025: Turbulence, Alongside InstitutionalizationIf you’ve been following Ethereum, you’ll know 2025 was a year of contrasts. While ETH’s price hovered at relatively low levels, the protocol layer went through an unusually concentrated period of upgrades.In early 2025, EF found itself at the center of intense public scrutiny. Criticism spread across the community, with some even calling for a so-called “wartime CEO” to drive change. Internal tensions became public, ultimately leading to EF’s most significant leadership reshuffle since its founding: Aya Miyaguchi, then Executive Director, was named President in February; Vitalik Buterin said he would help reshape the leadership structure. Hsiao-Wei Wang and Tomasz K. Stańczak were appointed co-Executive Directors. A new narrative and communications initiative, Etherealize, led by former researcher Danny Ryan, was launched. EF further reshuffled its board and clarified its cypherpunk value commitments. By mid-year, EF also reorganized its R&D function—consolidating teams and making personnel adjustments—to keep core protocol priorities in focus. Taken together, these moves strengthened execution. Notably, just seven months after the May Pectra upgrade, the year-end Fusaka upgrade was delivered—showing EF could still push through major updates amid leadership change, and signaling a faster rhythm of two hard forks per year.After the network transitioned to Proof of Stake via The Merge in September 2022, Ethereum generally aimed for one major upgrade per year: for example, Shapella in April 2023 (enabling staking withdrawals and completing a critical step in the PoS transition), and Dencun in March 2024 (shipping EIP-4844 and opening the Blob data channel, which materially reduced L2 costs).In 2025, Ethereum delivered two major hard forks—Pectra and Fusaka—and, importantly, began planning the next two named upgrades: Glamsterdam and Hegotá.There’s no formal rule, but late last year The Block cited a Consensys source saying researchers had aimed for one major upgrade per year since The Merge, and were now planning to speed up to one hard fork every six months—with Fusaka effectively marking the start of a twice-yearly cycle.This institutional shift in cadence is meaningful for a simple reason: timelines previously depended heavily on research and implementation readiness. For developers and infrastructure teams, planning windows were less stable—and delays were not rare.Two successful upgrades in 2025 helped validate a six-month cadence. Looking ahead, 2026’s planned two named upgrades (Glamsterdam and Hegotá)—with priorities organized across three tracks around those milestones—pushes that cadence closer to an institutionalized process.This is similar to how Apple or Android schedules major releases: it narrows the planning gap for builders and brings three clear benefits. L2s gain predictability—rollups can schedule parameter changes and protocol upgrades in advance. Wallets and infrastructure get a clearer integration window, so product teams can plan compatibility work and feature rollouts on cadence. And for institutions, risk reviews become more regular, because upgrades shift from irregular events to routine engineering processes.Overall, a structured cadence reflects stronger engineering discipline—and it suggests Ethereum is placing more emphasis on predictable delivery, not just research exploration.2. Protocol Priorities in 2026: Three Strategic PillarsA closer read of EF’s 2026 protocol priorities makes one thing clear: EF is no longer just listing scattered EIPs. Instead, protocol work is grouped into three strategic directions: Scale, Improve UX, and Harden the L1.2.1 Scale: Treating Execution and Data Availability as Two Sides of One CoinFirst is Scale. EF has effectively merged what used to be “Scale L1” and “Scale blobs,” recognizing that expanding L1 execution capacity and widening data availability are two sides of the same coin.In the first-half Glamsterdam upgrade, one notable proposal is Block-level Access Lists, which aims to change how transactions are executed—more like moving from a sequential “single lane” to parallel “multiple lanes.”Block producers would precompute which transactions can run concurrently without conflicts, enabling clients to spread execution across multiple CPU cores in parallel.ePBS (enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation) is also expected to be included. It brings today’s MEV-Boost flow—currently reliant on external relays—into the protocol, reducing centralization risk and giving validators more time to verify ZK proofs.With these base-layer optimizations, the push to raise the gas limit is likely to intensify in 2026. EF has stated a target of 100 million gas and beyond, and some expect that ePBS could enable 200 million or more.For L2s, higher blob capacity is equally important: blobs per block could rise to 72+, potentially supporting hundreds of thousands of transactions per second across L2 networks.2.2 Improve UX: Removing Cross-L2 Friction with Interop and Native Account AbstractionSecond is Improve UX—focused on reducing cross-L2 friction, advancing interoperability, and pushing native account abstraction forward.As noted earlier, EF sees intent-based architectures as a key building block for making Ethereum “feel like one chain again.”For example, the Open Intents Framework (OIF)—developed by EF and multiple teams—is emerging as a general standard. It lets users express the outcome they want when moving assets across L2s, while solver networks handle routing and execution behind the scenes. (Further reading: Intents Standardized: How OIF Ends Cross-Chain Fragmentation.)Going one step further, the Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL) aims to build a trust-minimized transport layer, so that cross-L2 transactions can feel no different from single-chain transactions. (Further reading: Ethereum Interop Roadmap: Solving the Last Mile to Mass Adoption.)At the wallet layer, native account abstraction remains a key focus. After EIP-7702 took an initial step in Pectra (2025), EF plans to advance proposals such as EIP-7701 or EIP-8141 in 2026. The long-term goal is for wallets to default to smart-contract accounts—reducing reliance on EOAs and on separate gas-sponsorship infrastructure.In addition, faster L1 confirmations could reduce confirmation latency from roughly 13–19 minutes to 15–30 seconds. That would directly benefit cross-chain applications that rely on L1 confirmations/finality—especially bridges, stablecoin settlement, and RWA trading.2.3 Harden the L1: A Trillion-Dollar Security PostureThird is Harden the L1—building a security posture suitable for the trillion-dollar scale. As more value is secured across the ecosystem, L1 resilience is becoming a strategic priority.On censorship resistance, FOCIL (Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, EIP-7805) is emerging as a core solution. It grants multiple validators the power to require certain transactions to be included in blocks. Even if block producers attempt censorship, as long as some portion of the network remains honest, user transactions can still be included on-chain.Facing the long-term threat of quantum computing, EF formed a new post-quantum (PQ) research team earlier this year. Work in 2026 will focus on studying quantum-resistant signature schemes—and begin considering how to migrate them seamlessly onto Ethereum mainnet, ensuring future assets aren’t vulnerable to advances in quantum attacks.3. Ethereum in 2026: More Coordination Across PrioritiesIf you had to summarize Ethereum in 2026 with a single word, it might be coordination.Upgrades are no longer organized around a single standout innovation. Instead, progress is framed as coordination across three tracks: Scale determines throughput and cost. Improve UX determines usability and adoption. Harden the L1 determines security and neutrality. Together, these three decide whether Ethereum can support the next decade of on-chain economic activity.Beyond the technical details, this three-track structure also signals a shift in how Ethereum plans and communicates protocol work.As noted above, once Fusaka shipped smoothly in late 2025 and a twice-yearly cadence took shape, Ethereum effectively made an institutional leap in its development model. This 2026 priorities update extends that approach into planning: earlier eras often centered on a single flagship proposal (e.g., EIP-1559, The Merge, EIP-4844), while today the roadmap is framed as coordinated progress across three tracks.From a broader view, 2026 is also a pivotal year in reshaping Ethereum’s value narrative. In recent years, the market often priced Ethereum around “fee growth driven by L2 scaling.” But as mainnet performance improves and L2s shift from “shards” to a “trust spectrum,” Ethereum’s core value is being re-anchored to an irreplaceable role: a globally trusted settlement layer.In practical terms, the narrative shifts from “fee revenue” toward a security premium: when stablecoin issuers, RWA tokenization firms, or sovereign wealth funds choose a settlement layer, the deciding factor may increasingly be security—not the lowest cost.Ethereum is increasingly moving from a technical testbed toward an engineering delivery platform—and protocol governance may become more institutionalized and mature through 2026.We may be reaching an inflection point: while the protocol grows more complex (parallel execution, post-quantum cryptography), the user experience can become simpler. As account abstraction and intent frameworks mature, they push Ethereum toward an end state where Web3 better matches user intuition.If that vision holds, Ethereum in 2026 could move closer to a global financial base layer—capable of securing trillions in value—without requiring users to understand the protocol beneath it.

Have you seen the "Lobster" (OpenClaw) meme flooding your feed lately—or have you already dove in to try it?The open-source agent known as OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot, later renamed MoltBot) has spread rapidly across global developer communities and the crypto space. It signals an accelerating trend: with open models, automation tools, and on-chain infrastructure, individuals, for the first time, can own self-sustaining productivity units—AI Agents that no longer depend on large centralized platforms.Yet behind this optimism, a more fundamental and thorny question is emerging: as AI Agents begin to truly collaborate—and even “hire” one another—what gives us reason to trust them?Against this backdrop, on January 30, Ethereum Foundation AI lead Davide Crapis announced that ERC-8004 went live on Ethereum mainnet, with singletons to be deployed across major L2s in the coming weeks.What appears to be a low-profile upgrade may complete a long-missing piece of infrastructure for the AI Agent economy.1. What Is ERC-8004?If you remember the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team, the emergence of ERC-8004 feels almost inevitable.On September 15, 2025, the Ethereum Foundation established its AI initiative, “dAI,” with a core mission: to define standards, incentives, and governance structures for AI models on blockchain. This includes model credibility—how AI behavior can become verifiable, traceable, and collaborative in a decentralized environment (see also: Ethereum’s “Second Curve”: From Scaling to Integration with AI and TradFi).ERC-8004 was advanced as one of the initiative’s foundational standards.Unlike payment-focused protocols such as x402, ERC-8004 does not directly address how money moves. Instead, it tackles a more fundamental question: without platform endorsement, how can an AI Agent be identified, trusted, and integrated into economic collaboration?Its backing reflects that ambition. Led by the Ethereum Foundation’s dAI team and developed in collaboration with Google, Coinbase, and MetaMask, the standard brings together key gateways across AI, trading, and wallets. The lineup alone signals that this is not an application-layer experiment, but a long-term infrastructure bet.Officially named “Trustless Agents,” ERC-8004 does not rely on complex algorithms. Its goal is simple: to give AI Agents verifiable on-chain identity, reputation, and proofs of capability. Its design is deliberately minimal, focusing on three core components:Identity RegistryBuilt on the ERC-721 standard, each AI Agent is “NFT-ized.” It means an AI Agent is no longer just a siloed instance within a closed system, but a unique, verifiable digital entity with its own persistent ID. For the first time, an AI Agent can be referenced, queried, and integrated across protocols—much like a wallet address.Reputation RegistryThink of it as a “Yelp for AI.” Users or other Agents who have interacted with an Agent can submit feedback. Crucially, these reviews can be tied to real on-chain payments or escrow activity. Reputation is no longer narrative or marketing—it becomes a historical record anchored in actual economic behavior. In a system without centralized arbiters, this design embeds a simple real-world principle into AI collaboration networks: only those who have actually transacted can evaluate.Verification RegistryFor high-value or high-risk tasks, reputation alone may not suffice. ERC-8004 therefore leaves room for third-party verification mechanisms, such as trusted execution environments (TEEs),  and zero-knowledge proofs. While this layer is not yet fully open, its inclusion signals the standard’s intent to support complex, long-term cooperation scenarios.Although born within the Ethereum ecosystem, ERC-8004 was never intended to be Ethereum-exclusive. From the outset, it was designed as a general standard for AI Agent discovery and trust, implemented through blockchain.The standard is already being used or tested across several major EVM networks, including Arbitrum, Base, and Monad, with plans to expand into select non-EVM ecosystems. This suggests ERC-8004 is not solving for a single chain’s needs, but addressing a broader trust challenge that spans platforms and organizations.2. What Problem Does ERC-8004 Solve?Looking back at the evolution of AI over the past two years, a clear dividing line emerges.When AI primarily functioned as a tool, challenges centered on model capability, compute costs, and user experience. But as of 2025, AI Agents have become autonomous actors—able to accept tasks, allocate resources, execute operations, and take responsibility for outcomes. Suddenly, a long-overlooked issue has become unavoidable:On what basis do AI Agents trust one another?No single Agent can accomplish everything. Just like human society, efficiency requires division of labor, outsourcing, and capability reuse. This implies a network where AI Agents routinely invoke other AI Agents, forming a highly automated collaboration graph.In today’s Web2 or platform-based AI applications, trust is implicit. You trust an AI because you trust the company or brand behind it. If something goes wrong, accountability traces back to a centralized entity.In an open, permissionless Agent world, that logic breaks down. An AI Agent might be deployed by an individual, a DAO, a research lab—or anonymously. It may perform reliably today, then act maliciously tomorrow. It may claim certain capabilities without any verifiable origin.As AI Agents begin participating in real economic activity—especially involving assets, transactions, settlements, and authorizations—trust may become scarcer than capability. Without infrastructure that supports queryable, verifiable, and accountable identities, large-scale Agent collaboration simply cannot scale.ERC-8004 is proposed precisely in this context. It does not answer what AI can do. It addresses a deeper premise: in a world without centralized guarantors, how can AI be treated as a trustworthy economic actor?Its philosophy reflects restraint rather than technical extravagance.Under ERC-8004, each AI Agent gains an identifiable on-chain identity—not for speculation, but as a long-term anchor binding capability claims, historical behavior, and future accountability. This identity does not depend on any single platform. It resides on an open public ledger, allowing anyone—any protocol, any Agent—to query and verify it under a shared standard.On top of identity, ERC-8004 introduces an on-chain reputation system. This layer is particularly important, as it addresses a long-standing challenge in decentralized systems: how to build credible historical records without centralized referees. By tying reviews to actual tasks, payments, or escrow events, ERC-8004 embeds a basic real-world principle into the AI economy—only those who have actually used the service can evaluate it. Reputation becomes cumulative behavior, not marketing.Where identity and reputation remain insufficient for high-value scenarios, ERC-8004 leaves room for verification interfaces. Rather than prescribing a single technical path, it enables multiple forms of third-party validation—trusted execution environments, staking mechanisms, or zero-knowledge proofs.Taken together, ERC-8004 is not a feature-level upgrade. It is an attempt to establish a minimal social structure for AI Agents—guiding them to collaborate, compete, and assume responsibility much like participants in an economic system.3. Why Ethereum?This raises an unavoidable question: in a future where AI Agents operate with high automation and frequent interactions, why build this standard on Ethereum rather than faster, cheaper chains optimized for high-frequency AI workloads?The answer may lie less in performance metrics and more in Ethereum’s long-accumulated intangible asset: credible neutrality as a global settlement layer.In AI collaboration networks, the most expensive cost is not communication—it is failure. Once AI Agents are authorized to manage assets, execute transactions, or act on behalf of others, a single malicious or faulty action can result in irreversible loss.In such an environment, participants care less about throughput and more about stable rules, immutable records, and accountable history. On these dimensions, Ethereum has developed a durable edge.Ethereum does not belong to any single corporation or consortium. Its security model, audit culture, and ecosystem maturity have been stress-tested through DeFi, NFTs, and institutional-grade applications. ERC-8004 seeks to extend these advantages to a new class of economic actors: AI Agents.More subtly, Ethereum is vying for a new role: the foundational settlement layer for AI collaboration. In this vision, AI Agents may operate across diverse platforms and chains. But when it comes to establishing trust, escrowed value, and final settlement, they converge on a shared neutral base layer.This role aligns closely with Ethereum’s evolving position in the global financial system. It does not aim to be the fastest execution layer, nor to host every application. Instead, it occupies a more fundamental role: a trusted settlement and order layer.ERC-8004 will not trigger immediate explosive growth. It addresses a problem that is only beginning to take shape. But over a longer horizon, as AI Agents evolve from functional modules into autonomous economic actors—accepting contracts, collaborating, and settling value—and as wallets begin to manage not only human accounts but also AI permissions, liabilities, and risk boundaries, a foundational order built on identity, reputation, and verification may prove indispensable.In this sense, ERC-8004 is not a short-term narrative. It represents a clear strategic bet by Ethereum: in an economy co-created by humans and AI, order and settlement will still require a credible, long-term neutral base layer.In today’s bear-market atmosphere, where sentiment is muted and patience wears thin, few may feel excited about Ethereum’s incremental technical upgrades.Yet as new forms of economic coordination quietly take shape, Ethereum is positioning itself to capture a direction that has not fully materialized—but may ultimately redefine the future.

This campaign is available only in compliant regions. Users in restricted regions are not eligible. Please refer to the campaign page and Terms of Service for details.Gold has long been a store of value, valued for its hedging and value-preservation properties. In recent market conditions, these qualities have once again drawn attention.However, physical gold often comes with practical limitations—hard to carry, costly to store, and limited in liquidity. To make tokenized gold easier to access and experience, imToken and Tether are launching the imToken Gold Giveaway, centered on Tether Gold (XAUt).Through the all-new imToken Web platform, you’re invited to explore a secure, convenient Web3 gold experience.RulesThe campaign features three phases, with a total prize pool of $50,000 USD.Phase 1: Hold to EarnExperience the value of holding XAUt and earn rewards. Duration: February 9, 2026 – February 23, 2026. Prize Pool: $18,000 USD. How to Participate: Hold USDT in your non-custodial imToken Web wallet. Reward Rules: Tiered APY: Rates adjust dynamically based on the number of participants: 0-199 participants: 10% APY 200-399 participants: 20% APY 400-599 participants: 30% APY 600-799 participants: 40% APY 800+ participants: 50% APY Minimum Holding: 0.1 USDT Per-User Cap: Rewards are calculated on up to 1,000 USDT per user. Amounts above this cap do not earn rewards. Distribution: Equivalent XAUt tokens will be distributed T+3 days after the phase ends. Phase 2: Swap to EarnComplete XAUt swap tasks to earn daily rewards and lucky prizes. Duration: February 23, 2026 – March 2, 2026. Prize Pool: $12,000 USD. How to Participate: Complete your first USDT/XAUt swap of the day with a value greater than $50 USD. Reward Rules: Daily Fixed Reward: The first eligible swap receives $3 USD worth of XAUt. Lucky Grand Prize (Hash Match): A set of lucky digits (e.g. “5-2-0”) is pre-defined before the campaign. Every other day, the lucky digits from the previous day are revealed. From all eligible users that day, the top 2 users whose transaction hash contains the lucky digits the most times will each receive $150 USD worth of XAUt. In case of a tie, the transaction with the earliest on-chain timestamp wins. Distribution: All rewards will be distributed T+3 days after the phase ends. Phase 3: Spend to EarnUse the imToken Card to unlock Mystery Boxes and earn cashback. Duration: March 2, 2026 – March 16, 2026. Prize Pool: $20,000 USD. How to Participate: Apply for and use the imToken Card for purchases. Reward Rules: Early Bird Mystery Box: The first 200 users to activate their card (complete the first Top Up) will receive a Mystery Box. The prize distribution is as follows: 🌟 SSR (Grand Prize): $800 USD × 1 winner ✨ SR (Hidden Edition): $80 USD × 9 winners ⭐ R (Basic Edition): $8 USD × 190 winners Total Mystery Box value approx. $3,040 USD. First Top-Up Bonus: The first 200 users who complete their first Top Up of $20 or more will receive an additional $20 USD bonus. Spending Cashback: During the campaign, users earn 2% cashback on each purchase, capped at $66 USD worth of XAUt per user. Distribution: Mystery Boxes are granted immediately upon qualification. Cashback rewards are distributed T+3 days after the phase ends. 👉 Join Now: https://web.token.im/get-tokenized-gold/XAUtAbout XAUtTether Gold (XAUt) is a gold-backed token issued by Tether. Each XAUt token represents ownership of one troy ounce of physical gold that meets LBMA (London Bullion Market Association) standards.Key Advantages Physical Backing: 1:1 backed by physical gold stored in Swiss vaults High Liquidity: 24/7 on-chain transfers and trading, without physical constraints Low Entry Barrier: Highly divisible (up to six decimal places), making gold ownership more flexible About imToken WebThis campaign takes place on imToken Web, a new non-custodial web application built by imToken. It carries forward nearly a decade of security standards and delivers a smooth, ready-to-use browser experience. Built by imToken: Developed by the same professional team behind imToken, with a long-standing security record No Seed Phrases: Powered by Passkey and Account Abstraction, enabling one-tap login with fingerprint or Face ID and gas-free transfers True Self-Custody: Following the principle “Not your keys, not your coins”. Passkeys are stored only on your device—your assets remain fully under your control FAQQ1: What is imToken Web?A:  imToken Web is a non-custodial web application by imToken. It uses Account Abstraction to let you create and access a wallet with passkey—no app download required.With built-in protections from Account Abstraction, encrypted cloud sync, and imToken’s account recovery mechanism, your account is secured through multiple layers of protection.After creating your account, we recommend setting up account recovery. Learn more: How to Use Account RecoveryQ2: Who can participate in the Gold Giveaway?A: The campaign is available only in compliant regions. Some features (such as imToken Card or swap services) may be unavailable in certain regions. Please refer to the campaign page and product terms.Q3: Can I withdraw funds during the campaign?A: Yes. imToken Web is non-custodial, and you have full control of your assets. Note that rewards may be calculated based on snapshots; withdrawing early could affect eligibility.Q4: When and where will rewards be distributed?A: Rewards are distributed T+3 days after each phase ends and will be sent directly to the wallet address used to participate.Q5: How do I apply for the imToken Card?A: During Phase 3 (March 2–March 16, 2026), you can apply for the imToken Card in the imToken App. Complete KYC using your passport to activate it. Eligible users may enjoy a fee waiver (free card issuance) during the campaign. Reference: imToken Card Application Tutorial.Q6: Why is my reward showing as 0?A: Possible reasons include: Hold to Earn: USDT balance below 0.1 USDT Swap to Earn: No eligible $50+ USDT/XAUt swap completed that day Spend to Earn:  Card not activated or no top-up has been completed. Cashback is distributed after the phase ends You can track progress on the My Rewards page.Q7: What are the reward caps?A:  Hold to Earn: Rewards are calculated on up to 1,000 USDT per user Swap to Earn: $3 daily fixed reward; lucky prize has no per-user cap Spend to Earn: 2% cashback, capped at $66 XAUt Early Bird Mystery Box: One box per eligible user (first 200 users) First Top-Up Bonus: First 200 users to top up $20+ receive a $20 bonus All rewards are paid in XAUt, calculated at 11:00 UTC+8 on the distribution day.Q8: If I miss one phase, can I still join later phases?A: Yes. Each phase can be joined independently. You can skip earlier phases and still join later ones. However, the imToken Card fee waiver requires participation in at least one previous phase.Risk WarningThis campaign is for promotional and feature-experience purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Digital asset prices are subject to market volatility. Please participate based on your own risk tolerance. Final rules are subject to the campaign page.

Previously, to swap tokens or stake ETH, you might have had to repeatedly search for DApps and verify if links were safe. Now, imToken simplifies the process by integrating core ecosystem functions—such as swapping, bridging, staking, and managing approvals—directly into the Token Function 🔘. This makes asset management truly efficient and secure.Before You Start: Open imToken and Tap the menu at the top left of the wallet home page to switch to your Ethereum account.If you don't have an Ethereum account yet, go to My Profile - Manage wallets - Add, check Ethereum, and confirm to add it. Make sure your Ethereum account has sufficient ETH to pay for network Gas fees and to experience ecosystem applications. 1. Enable Token Function to Discover More Tap the token: Tap the ETH token on the account home page to enter the details page. One-tap access: Tap the Token Function 🔘 button at the bottom left. Explore available functions: Here, you will see common functions related to the token. imToken has curated mainstream applications for each function, covering staking, earning, bridging, trading, and wrapping, helping you access the ecosystem in one stop. 2. Ecosystem Experience - Stake with LidoAmong the many functions, Lido is one of the most representative liquid staking protocols. It allows you to participate in Ethereum network staking while maintaining asset liquidity.💡 Why choose Lido? Traditional staking requires 32 ETH and involves a lock-up period. With Lido, you can start with any amount of ETH and receive stETH tokens, a token that represents your staked ETH. stETH can be freely used across the ecosystem, helping you unlock additional yield opportunities. Learn moreGuide: How to Stake with Lido1. Connect your Wallet In the Token Function list, tap Stake and select Lido. Tap Confirm to authorize the wallet connection. 2. Initiate Staking Enter the amount of ETH you want to stake. Tap Stake and sign the transaction. 3. View Staking Rewards Once the transaction is complete, tap Rewards at the bottom of the page. stETH Balance: This includes your deposited ETH principal + ETH rewards from the Ethereum network (stETH rewarded). The stETH amount on this page updates automatically every day. 💡 How to add stETH to your wallet home page? Return to the imToken Ethereum account home page, tap the "+" icon on the right side of the token list. In All My Assets, check stETH to add it.4. Unstake and Withdraw ETH If you need to withdraw your ETH from staking, Lido offers two methods:Method 1: Official Withdrawal (Use Lido) Features: 1:1 exchange ratio, waiting period required. Steps: On the Lido page, tap Withdrawals - Enter stETH amount - Tap Request withdrawal. After confirming the amount is correct, tap Confirm to sign, then sign again to initiate the withdrawal transaction.💡 Why is Approval needed? Approval allows the Lido contract to take back your stETH and return ETH to you. Waiting Period: Wait approximately 5 days (depending on the network queue shown on the page). Once the waiting period ends, return to this page and tap "Claim" - "Claim ETH" to send a transaction and receive the ETH in your wallet. Method 2: Quick Swap (Use DEXs) Features: Receive funds in minutes. Steps: You can swap stETH back to ETH directly via decentralized exchanges (DEXs) such as 1inch or Jumper. Note: Subject to market fluctuations, there may be price differences and slippage. Want to explore token functions on more networks?If you hold tokens on Layer 2s, EVM chains (such as Arbitrum, Polygon), or public chains like Tron, BTC, and TON, simply switch to the corresponding account, tap the token, and open the Token Function 🔘 at the bottom left to discover more convenient features.Risk Warning: The content of this article does not constitute any form of investment advice or recommendation. imToken does not make any guarantees and promises for the third-party services and products mentioned in this article, nor assume any responsibility. Digital asset investment has risks. You should carefully evaluate these investment risks and consult with relevant professionals to make your own decisions.

If someone had told you a year ago that gold would quickly rise to $5,000/oz, most people would have dismissed it as wishful thinking.Yet that’s exactly what happened. In just over two weeks, gold surged past $4,700, $4,800, and $4,900/oz, pushing toward the closely watched $5,000 level with little pullback.Source: companiesmarketcap.comIt’s fair to say that as global macro uncertainty keeps being confirmed, gold has returned to its most familiar role: a consensus asset that doesn’t depend on any single country’s promise.At the same time, a more practical question is emerging: as gold regains consensus, can traditional ways of holding it still meet the needs of a digital era?I. A Macro Cycle That Feels Inevitable: The “Old King” Returns to the ThroneFrom a longer macro perspective, this move in gold isn’t short-term hype. It looks more like a structural rebound driven by persistent uncertainty and a weaker U.S. dollar.Geopolitical risk has spread from the Russia–Ukraine war to key resource and shipping-route regions in the Middle East and Latin America. Trade has repeatedly been disrupted by tariffs, sanctions, and policy standoffs. U.S. deficits continue to expand, and long-term confidence in the dollar is being questioned more often. In this environment, markets naturally look for a value anchor that doesn’t rely on any single country’s credit—or anyone else’s endorsement.From this angle, gold doesn’t need to prove it can generate yield. It only needs to prove one thing, repeatedly: when trust in credit is uncertain, gold is still there.This also helps explain why Bitcoin (BTC)—once widely seen as “digital gold”—hasn’t fully played the same consensus role in this cycle, at least as a macro safe-haven. Markets have already made their choice, so we won’t dwell on it here. (Further reading: From Trustless BTC to Tokenized Gold — Who’s the Real “Digital Gold”?)Still, a return of consensus doesn’t solve everything. For a long time, investors have had to choose between two imperfect ways to hold gold.Option 1: Physical gold. It’s secure and self-custody—but it’s rarely liquid. Storing bars in a safe brings real costs (storage, security, transport) and makes it hard to use for real-time trading or everyday spending.Recent reports of bank safe-deposit boxes being hard to secure highlight this tension: more people want direct control of their gold, but the practical setup isn’t always available.Option 2: Paper gold or gold ETFs. They lower the barrier of physical custody. In essence, paper gold is an IOU from a bank or broker—an account-entry promise to settle, backed by that institution’s ledger.But that liquidity is never truly “open.” Paper gold and gold ETFs are liquid only within a single financial system: you can buy and sell inside one bank, one exchange, or one clearing framework—but you can’t move the asset freely outside it.In other words, it’s hard to split, combine, or use alongside other assets across systems—let alone use directly in different contexts. It’s "account-level liquidity" rather than "asset-level liquidity."My first gold investment product years ago—Tencent “Micro Gold”—worked the same way. Seen this way, paper gold doesn’t truly solve liquidity; it simply replaces physical frictions with counterparty risk.Ultimately, security, liquidity, and self-sovereignty have been hard to achieve at the same time. In a highly digital, cross-border world, that trade-off is becoming harder to accept.That’s why tokenized gold is now drawing broader attention.II. Tokenized Gold: Giving “Full Liquidity” Back to the AssetTokenized gold, such as XAUt (Tether Gold), isn’t just about making gold easier to hold or trade—paper gold can do that too. It targets a more fundamental question:How can gold stay fully physically backed, while gaining the same cross-system mobility and composability that crypto assets have?Take XAUt as an example. Its design is conservative: 1 XAUt represents 1 troy ounce of physical gold held in professional London vault storage, with holdings that can be audited and verified. Token holders have a right to claim/redeem the underlying gold under the issuer’s rules.It doesn’t rely on complex financial engineering, algorithms, or credit expansion to “enhance” gold. Instead, it follows a traditional logic: establish genuine physical backing first, then talk about what digitization enables.Ultimately, tokenized gold such as XAUt and PAXG isn’t “a new gold story.” It uses blockchain to wrap one of the oldest asset types in a digital form. In that sense, XAUt is more like "Digital Physical Gold" than a speculative crypto derivative.The more important shift is that gold’s liquidity moves to a different layer. In traditional finance, paper gold and gold ETFs are liquid only within an account system—inside a bank, broker, or clearing network—where trading and settlement stay within fixed boundaries.With XAUt, liquidity travels with the asset. Once gold is represented as an on-chain token, it can be transferred, split, combined, and used across protocols and applications—without repeatedly asking a centralized institution for permission.This means gold can, for the first time, circulate globally 24/7 without relying on an “account” to prove liquidity. (Further reading: Peter Schiff vs. CZ: A Trust Battle Between TradFi and Crypto) In an on-chain environment, XAUt is no longer just “a tradable gold token”—it becomes a basic asset unit that other protocols can recognize and compose. It can be freely swapped for stablecoins and other assets. It can be incorporated into more sophisticated asset allocation and portfolio strategies. It can even serve as a store of value for payments and everyday spending. This is the part of liquidity paper gold can’t provide.III. From “On-Chain” to “Usable”: The Real Watershed for Digitally Represented Physical GoldThat’s why tokenized gold doesn’t reach the finish line just by being “on-chain.”The real watershed is whether this digitally represented, fully backed gold is easy for users to hold, manage, and trade—and even use for payments. If it’s ultimately locked inside a centralized platform or a single gateway, then it’s functionally no different from paper gold.This is where lightweight self-custody solutions like imToken Web matter. For example, imToken Web lets users access via a browser and manage tokenized gold and other crypto assets across devices—quickly and directly.In a self-custody setup, you control the private key. Your gold isn’t held on a provider’s servers; it’s held by the on-chain address you control.Thanks to Web3 interoperability, XAUt doesn’t have to sit idle. It can be purchased in smaller amounts, and when needed, tools like imToken Card can bring gold’s purchasing power into everyday spending—globally and in real time.Source: imToken WebIn a Web3 environment, XAUt isn’t just tradable. It can be exchanged and combined with other assets—and extended into payment use cases.When gold combines high certainty as a store of value with modern usability, it can finally move from an “old-school safe haven” toward a more future-ready form of money.After all, gold itself isn’t outdated—what’s outdated is how we hold it.So when gold comes on-chain as XAUt—and returns to personal control through self-custody options like imToken Web—it isn’t a brand-new story. It’s an enduring principle: in an uncertain world, real value means minimizing reliance on the promises of others.

Could an Ethereum ETF start to resemble a bond—paying out yield on a regular schedule?Earlier this month, Grayscale said its Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF (ETHE) distributed staking income to existing shareholders. The payout reflects rewards earned from Oct 6, 2025 to Dec 31, 2025—marking the first U.S. spot crypto exchange-traded product to pass staking rewards through to investors.For Web3-native users, this may feel routine. But historically, it’s a milestone: for the first time, Ethereum’s native yield is being packaged into a standard TradFi wrapper.More importantly, this isn’t happening in isolation. On-chain data shows the staking ratio rising, the validator exit queue largely clearing, and the entry queue building again.These seemingly separate signals point to a deeper question:Is Ethereum shifting from a price-driven portfolio allocation asset to a long-term, yield-generating asset that institutional capital can hold with confidence?1. ETF Yield Distributions: TradFi Investors’ First Staking ExperienceFor a long time, Ethereum staking was a niche, highly technical activity largely confined to the on-chain world.It required crypto basics (wallets and private keys) and an understanding of validator mechanics, consensus rules, withdrawal timelines, and slashing. Liquid staking protocols such as Lido Finance lowered the barrier, but staking income still largely remained within crypto-native instruments like stETH.For most Web2 investors, it wasn’t intuitive—or easily accessible.Now ETFs are helping close that gap.Under Grayscale’s plan, ETHE holders would receive $0.083178 per share, reflecting staking rewards earned during the period and sold by the fund. Payment was set for Jan 6, 2026, for investors holding ETHE as of Jan 5, 2026 (record date).Put simply, this income doesn’t come from a company’s operations—it comes from network security and consensus participation. For traditional investors (including those investing via 401(k)s or funds), it offers a way to access Ethereum’s staking yield through a familiar ETF wrapper—without managing private keys—and receive payouts in USD.It’s worth emphasizing that this doesn’t mean staking is fully “regulated” for ETFs, or that regulators have reached a unified position. But in practice, something important has changed: non-crypto-native investors can now receive Ethereum’s native staking yield indirectly—without running nodes, managing private keys, or interacting on-chain.Seen this way, ETF yield distributions aren’t a one-off—they’re a first step toward bringing Ethereum staking to a broader capital base.Grayscale won’t be the only one. 21Shares also said its Ethereum ETF would distribute staking income to existing shareholders—$0.010378 per share—and published the ex-date and payment details.This sets a meaningful precedent. For firms like Grayscale and 21Shares—active across both TradFi and Web3—the impact goes beyond a single payout: it accelerates institutional adoption of staking and yield pass-through, and signals that Ethereum ETFs may evolve from pure price exposure into products with cash-flow potential.Over time, if this model proves out, traditional asset-management giants such as BlackRock and Fidelity could follow—potentially bringing long-horizon allocation capital on the order of hundreds of billions into Ethereum.2. Record-High Staking—and a “Vanishing” Exit QueueIf ETF distributions are the narrative milestone, staking levels and queue dynamics better reflect what capital is actually doing.The staking ratio has reached a new high. The Block’s data shows that over 36 million ETH is staked—nearly 30% of circulating supply—with a staked value above $118 billion. The prior peak share was 29.54% in July 2025.Source: The BlockFrom a supply-and-demand perspective, when more ETH is staked, it effectively leaves the liquid market for a time—suggesting part of the supply is shifting from short-term trading to long-term allocation with a network role.ETH is increasingly more than gas, a transaction medium, or a speculative instrument—it can also act as productive capital: securing the network through staking and generating yield.Queue dynamics are shifting too. At the time of writing, Ethereum’s PoS exit queue was close to empty, while the entry queue kept growing (over 2.73 million ETH)—suggesting more ETH is choosing to commit to the system for the long term. (Further reading: “Cutting Through the “Ethereum in Decline” Noise: Why Values Are Its Strongest Moat”)Staking is a low-liquidity, long-duration strategy that targets steadier returns. Capital re-entering the staking queue suggests more participants are willing to accept the opportunity cost of long-term lockups.Taken together—ETF yield distributions, record-high staking, and shifting queues—Ethereum staking appears to be moving from a crypto-native opportunity into a yield source that TradFi can recognize and long-term capital is starting to price in.No single signal is decisive on its own, but together they point to a steadily maturing staking economy on Ethereum.3. What’s Next: A Rapidly Maturing Staking MarketThis doesn’t make ETH a “risk-free” asset. As participants change, risks shift: technical risk matters, but structural risk, liquidity risk, and the learning curve around staking mechanics become increasingly important.In the last regulatory cycle, the U.S. SEC stepped up enforcement around liquid staking, including unregistered-securities allegations involving MetaMask/Consensys, Lido (stETH), and Rocket Pool (rETH). This added uncertainty to the long-term outlook for Ethereum ETFs.In practice, whether—and how—an ETF participates in staking is primarily a product-and-compliance design question, not a judgment on Ethereum itself. As institutions test the boundaries, capital is already responding.For example, BitMine has reportedly staked about 1.032 million ETH (roughly $3.215B)—around one quarter of its total ETH holdings (4.143 million ETH).In short, Ethereum staking is no longer a niche activity limited to technical insiders.When ETFs begin distributing yield consistently, when long-term capital is willing to wait 45 days just to enter the consensus layer, and when nearly 30% of ETH serves as a security buffer, we’re seeing Ethereum build a native yield system that global capital markets can increasingly accept.And understanding this shift may matter just as much as deciding whether to participate.

What if Ethereum’s core development team were to suddenly disappear? Or what if a sovereign state demanded censorship of certain transactions? Would Ethereum still stay open?These questions may sound extreme, but they are increasingly becoming real design constraints for Ethereum’s protocol.In early March, Vitalik Buterin proposed a new framing, arguing that the Ethereum community should see itself as part of a broader ecosystem of “sanctuary technologies”: free, open-source tools that help people live, work, communicate, manage risk, build wealth, and coordinate around shared goals—while maximizing resilience to external pressure.At first glance, this may sound like an abstract shift in values. But viewed in the context of Ethereum’s recent protocol evolution, it points to a very concrete set of engineering problems:As block building becomes more specialized, control over transaction ordering becomes more concentrated, and the public mempool becomes more vulnerable to sandwich attacks and front-running, how can Ethereum continue to defend one of the core principles of an open network—that users’ transactions should not be easily shut out by a small group of actors?1. Vitalik Coins a New Term: “Sanctuary Technologies”Vitalik’s starting point this time is unusually candid.Rather than repeating grand claims about “changing the world,” he acknowledges that Ethereum’s impact on ordinary people’s daily lives remains limited. On-chain finance may be more efficient, and the application ecosystem may be richer, but many of those gains remain largely within crypto itself.That is why he proposes a new way to frame Ethereum: rather than seeing it as merely a financial network, we should understand it as part of a broader ecosystem of sanctuary technologies.By his definition, these technologies tend to share several traits: they are open-source and free, anyone can use or copy them, they help people communicate, collaborate, manage wealth and risk, and—most importantly—they can keep operating even under government pressure, corporate blockades, or other forms of external interference.Vitalik even offers a vivid analogy: a truly decentralized protocol should be more like a hammer than a subscription service. Once you buy a hammer, it is yours. It does not suddenly stop working because the manufacturer went bankrupt, nor does it one day pop up with a notice saying, “This feature is no longer available in your region.”At its core, if a technology is meant to provide sanctuary, it cannot depend on the continued existence of a centralized organization. Nor can it leave users stuck in the passive role of service recipients.Source: CoinDeskThis naturally brings to mind another standard Vitalik has often used to evaluate Ethereum’s long-term value: the walkaway test. It asks a very simple question: if all of Ethereum’s core developers disappeared tomorrow, would the protocol still function normally?This is not a slogan, but an exceptionally demanding standard for decentralization. What it really asks is not whether there is a decentralization narrative today, but whether the system can still hold up in the worst plausible future.Applied to the block production layer, the answer becomes very concrete: if a chain is to pass the walkaway test, the power to include transactions cannot remain concentrated in a few hands over the long term. Nor can public transaction flow remain inherently exposed to front-running, sandwich attacks, and censorship.That is the backdrop for why FOCIL and encrypted mempools have moved to the center of Ethereum’s discussions.2. Censorship Resistance Returns to the Center of the Protocol: FOCIL + Encrypted MempoolsTo understand this, we need to take a closer look at the problems Ethereum’s public mempool currently faces.Over the past few years, Ethereum’s block-building layer has become increasingly specialized. To improve efficiency and maximize MEV extraction, builders have taken on a much larger role. Block production no longer looks like the idealized model in which every validator builds blocks independently and locally. That shift brings real benefits—but the trade-offs are just as clear:Once block-building power becomes concentrated in the hands of a few powerful participants, censorship is no longer just a theoretical risk. In principle, any major builder could selectively refuse to include certain transactions, such as transfers sent from sanctioned Tornado Cash addresses.In other words, Ethereum’s challenge today is no longer just about fees or throughput. It is also about whether ordinary users can still trust its public transaction infrastructure.This is why FOCIL—Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists—is Ethereum’s protocol-level response to the censorship problem. The idea is fairly simple: by introducing an Inclusion List mechanism, timely transaction inclusion no longer depends entirely on the unilateral decision of the proposer or builder.In each slot, an Inclusion List Committee is selected from the validator set. Based on the mempool each member can see, the committee forms and broadcasts a list of transactions to be included. The proposer in the next slot must then build a block that satisfies those inclusion constraints, while attesters will only vote for blocks that meet them.Put differently, FOCIL does not eliminate builders. Instead, it uses fork-choice rules to provide stronger inclusion guarantees for valid transactions in the public mempool. Builders can still optimize ordering and still improve efficiency and profits around MEV—but they no longer get to decide whether a legitimate transaction is even allowed into a block.Although it remains controversial, FOCIL has already been confirmed as a core consensus-layer proposal for the next major upgrade, Hegotá, with Specification Freeze Included status. It is expected to be activated in the second half of 2026, after the Glamsterdam upgrade.That said, FOCIL does not solve another equally important problem: before a transaction is actually included in a block, it may already be fully exposed to the market. MEV searchers can then front-run, sandwich, or reorder it. DeFi transactions are especially vulnerable. For ordinary users, that means even if a transaction is not censored, it may still be targeted and exploited before it ever makes it on-chain.That is the root cause of sandwich attacks.The main proposals currently under discussion are LUCID, proposed by Ethereum Foundation researchers Anders Elowsson, Julian Ma, and Justin Florentine, and EIP-8105, the Universal Enshrined Encrypted Mempool. The EIP-8105 team has also recently announced full support for LUCID, and the two teams are now advancing the effort together.The core idea behind an encrypted mempool is simple: When a user sends a transaction, its contents are encrypted. The transaction is only decrypted after it has been included in a block and reached a certain level of confirmation. Until then, searchers cannot see the transaction’s intent and therefore cannot carry out sandwich attacks or front-running. As a result, the public mempool becomes “safe and usable” again. As researchers have put it, ePBS (enshrined proposer-builder separation), FOCIL, and encrypted mempools together form the “Holy Trinity of Censorship Resistance”: a complete framework for systemic defense across the entire transaction supply chain.At present, FOCIL is already confirmed for Hegotá, while the encrypted mempool proposal, LUCID, is still being actively considered as another headline proposal for the same upgrade.3. What Does All This Mean?From a wider perspective, FOCIL and encrypted mempools are not just new terms in another round of Ethereum upgrades. They are better understood as a signal:Ethereum is putting censorship resistance back at the center of protocol design.The blockchain industry talks constantly about decentralization. But when a transaction is one day actually censored—blocked, intercepted, or simply made to disappear from the network—most users suddenly realize that decentralization was never the default. It is something that has to be secured in protocol code.On February 20, Vitalik noted that FOCIL has important synergies with Ethereum’s account abstraction proposal EIP-8141, which is based on 7701. EIP-8141 elevates smart accounts—including multisigs, post-quantum signatures, key rotation, and gas sponsorship—to first-class status, meaning operations from these accounts can be included directly as on-chain transactions without additional wrapping.Some may question whether these trade-offs are worth it: FOCIL adds protocol complexity, and encrypted mempools may introduce efficiency costs.But that is exactly what makes sanctuary technologies so important. The truly unique value of blockchains may never have been just putting assets on-chain or making transactions faster. It may instead lie in whether they can continue to provide people with a permissionless digital exit—one that is hard to shut down and hard to take away—even under pressure.From that perspective, the significance of FOCIL and encrypted mempools becomes clear: they aim to turn things that once depended on goodwill, spontaneous market balance, or simply the hope that nothing would go wrong into harder, more durable protocol rules.When countless users can live, work, communicate, manage risk, and build wealth freely on this “digital island of stability,” without worrying about being expelled or censored by any centralized entity—only then will Ethereum truly have passed the Walkaway Test.And that is the ultimate meaning of sanctuary technologies.

Even at a glance, the Ethereum core developer community has been moving at an unusually fast pace since 2025.From the Fusaka upgrade and Glamsterdam to long-term planning around kEVM, post-quantum cryptography, and the gas limit, Ethereum has published multiple roadmap documents within just a few months, each looking three to five years ahead.This cadence itself serves as a critical market signal.A close read of the latest roadmaps reveals a clearer—and more ambitious—direction: Ethereum is turning itself into a verifiable computer, and L1 zkEVM is where that path leads.1. Three Major Shifts in Ethereum’s NarrativeOn February 26, Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake said in a social media post that the Foundation had proposed a draft roadmap called Strawmap, outlining the direction of Ethereum L1 protocol upgrades over the next few years.The roadmap sets out five core goals: a faster L1 with second-level finality, a zkEVM-powered “Gigagas” L1 capable of 10,000 TPS, high-throughput L2s based on data availability sampling (DAS), post-quantum cryptography, and native private transfers. It also envisions seven protocol forks by 2029, or roughly one every six months.Over the past decade, Ethereum’s development has gone hand in hand with constant shifts in both narrative and technical direction.The first phase (2015–2020) was the era of the programmable ledger.This was Ethereum’s original narrative core: “Turing-complete smart contracts.” Its biggest advantage over Bitcoin at the time was simple—it could do more. DeFi, NFTs, and DAOs all emerged from this narrative. As more financial protocols moved on-chain, from lending and DEXs to stablecoins, Ethereum gradually became the main settlement layer of the crypto economy.The second phase (2021–2023) was when the L2 narrative took over.As gas fees on Ethereum mainnet surged and transaction costs became too high for ordinary users, Rollups moved to the center of the scaling narrative. Ethereum also began to reposition itself as a settlement layer—the security foundation for L2s.Put simply, most execution was pushed to L2s through Rollups, while L1 focused on data availability and final settlement. During this period, both The Merge and EIP-4844 served that narrative, aiming to make Ethereum’s security cheaper and safer for L2s to use.The third phase (2024–2025) focused on the narrative’s internal contradictions—and the reflection that followed.But the rise of L2s also created an unexpected problem: Ethereum L1 itself started to matter less. Users increasingly spent their time on Arbitrum, Base, and Optimism, with little direct interaction with L1, and ETH’s price performance seemed to reflect that anxiety.That led to a broader debate in the community: if L2s absorb all the users and activity, where does L1 capture value? But after Ethereum’s internal turbulence in 2025 and the wave of new roadmaps rolled out in 2026, that logic is now starting to change in a profound way.A review of Ethereum’s core technical directions since 2025 shows the same themes appearing again and again: Verkle Trees, stateless clients, formal EVM verification, and native ZK support. All of them point to the same goal—making Ethereum L1 itself verifiable.And this is not just about verifying L2 proofs on L1. The goal is to make every state transition on L1 provable and verifiable through zero-knowledge proofs.That is the ambition behind L1 zkEVM. Unlike L2 zkEVMs, L1 zkEVM—also known as enshrined zkEVM—means integrating zero-knowledge proofs directly into Ethereum’s protocol architecture.It is not a replica of L2 zkEVMs such as zkSync, Starknet, or Scroll. Instead, it turns Ethereum’s execution layer itself into a ZK-friendly system. If L2 zkEVM builds a ZK world on top of Ethereum, then L1 zkEVM turns Ethereum itself into that world.If that goal is achieved, Ethereum’s narrative will evolve from an L2 settlement layer into the root of trust for verifiable computation.That would be a qualitative leap, not just another incremental improvement.2. What Is a True L1 zkEVM?As a foundational premise: in the traditional model, validators must re-execute every transaction to verify a block. In a zkEVM model, by contrast, they only need to verify a ZK proof. That would allow Ethereum to raise its gas limit to 100 million or even higher without increasing the burden on nodes.(Further reading: “ZK Dawn: Is Ethereum’s Endgame Accelerating?”)But turning Ethereum L1 into a zkEVM is not a matter of a single breakthrough. It requires parallel progress across eight workstreams, each of them a multi-year engineering effort.Workstream 1: EVM FormalizationAll ZK proofs depend on one prerequisite: the thing being proved must have a precise mathematical definition. Today, however, the EVM is defined in practice by client implementations such as Geth and Nethermind, not by a strict formal specification. In edge cases, different clients may behave differently. That makes it extremely difficult to build ZK circuits for the EVM, because you cannot prove a system whose definition is still ambiguous.The goal of this workstream is to turn every EVM opcode and every state transition rule into a machine-verifiable formal specification. This is the foundation of the entire L1 zkEVM effort. Without it, everything else would be built on sand.Workstream 2: Replacing Hash Functions with ZK-Friendly AlternativesEthereum still relies heavily on Keccak-256. But Keccak is not ZK-friendly: it is computationally expensive and significantly increases both proof generation time and cost.The core task of this workstream is to gradually replace Ethereum’s internal use of Keccak with ZK-friendly hash functions such as Poseidon or the BLAKE family, especially in the state tree and Merkle proof paths. This is a system-wide change, because hash functions are embedded throughout the Ethereum protocol.Workstream 3: Replacing the Merkle Patricia Tree with the Verkle TreeThis is one of the most closely watched changes in the 2025–2027 roadmap. Ethereum currently uses the Merkle Patricia Tree (MPT) to store global state. By replacing hash-based links with vector commitments, the Verkle Tree can shrink witness sizes by dozens of times.For L1 zkEVM, that means far less data is needed to prove each block, and proof generation can become much faster. In other words, Verkle Trees are a key infrastructure prerequisite for making L1 zkEVM feasible.Workstream 4: Stateless ClientsA stateless client is a node that can verify blocks without storing Ethereum’s full state database locally. Instead, it only needs the block itself and its accompanying state witnesses.This workstream is tightly linked to Verkle Trees, because stateless clients are only practical if witness data is small enough. For L1 zkEVM, they matter for two reasons: they lower the hardware requirements for running a node, which helps decentralization, and they give ZK proofs a clear input boundary, so provers only need to process the data in the witness rather than the entire global state.Workstream 5: Standardizing and Integrating ZK Proving SystemsL1 zkEVM needs a mature ZK proving system to generate proofs for block execution. But today’s ZK landscape is still highly fragmented, with no widely accepted best solution.The goal of this workstream is to define a standardized proof interface at the protocol layer, so different proving systems can compete to plug in, rather than having a single one hard-coded into the protocol.This keeps the design open while leaving room for proving systems to keep evolving. The Ethereum Foundation’s PSE (Privacy and Scaling Explorations) team has already done substantial early work in this area.Workstream 6: Decoupling the Execution Layer from the Consensus Layer (Engine API Evolution)Today, Ethereum’s execution layer (EL) and consensus layer (CL) communicate through the Engine API. In an L1 zkEVM architecture, every state transition in the execution layer would need a ZK proof, and generating that proof could take much longer than a single block interval.The core challenge here is how to decouple execution from proof generation without breaking consensus: execution may complete quickly, while proofs are generated asynchronously and finalized later by validators. That would require a deep redesign of Ethereum’s finality model.Workstream 7: Recursive Proofs and Proof AggregationGenerating a ZK proof for a single block is expensive. But if proofs for multiple blocks can be recursively aggregated into a single proof, verification costs can be spread much more efficiently.Progress in this workstream will directly determine how cheaply L1 zkEVM can operate.Workstream 8: Developer Tooling and EVM Compatibility GuaranteesAll of these deep technical changes must ultimately remain transparent to smart contract developers on Ethereum. Hundreds of thousands of existing contracts cannot break because zkEVM is introduced, and developers cannot be forced to rewrite their tooling stack.This is one of the most underestimated workstreams, but it is often the most time-consuming. Every past EVM upgrade has required extensive backward-compatibility testing and tooling updates. The scope of change implied by L1 zkEVM is far greater than any previous upgrade, so the workload around tooling and compatibility will grow by an order of magnitude as well.3. Why Is Now the Right Time to Understand This?Strawmap arrived at a time when the market was still uneasy about ETH’s price performance. From that perspective, its biggest value is that it redefines Ethereum as infrastructure once again.For builders, especially developers, Strawmap provides greater clarity on direction. For users, these upgrades should eventually translate into tangible improvements: transactions reaching finality within seconds, assets moving seamlessly between L1 and L2, and privacy becoming a built-in feature rather than an optional add-on.Of course, L1 zkEVM is not a near-term product. Its full implementation may not arrive until 2028–2029, or even later.At the very least, it redefines Ethereum’s value proposition. If L1 zkEVM succeeds, Ethereum will no longer be just a settlement layer for L2s. It will become the verifiable root of trust for the broader Web3 world, allowing the state of any chain to be traced back, mathematically, to Ethereum’s chain of ZK proofs. That would be decisive for Ethereum’s long-term value capture.It also reshapes the long-term role of L2s. Once L1 itself has native ZK capabilities, L2s may shift from “secure scaling solutions” to specialized execution environments. Which L2s can find their place in that new landscape will be one of the most important ecosystem developments to watch in the years ahead.Most importantly, this is also an excellent lens through which to observe Ethereum’s developer culture. Advancing eight interdependent technical workstreams at once—each a multi-year effort—while maintaining decentralized coordination is itself one of Ethereum’s unique strengths as a protocol.Understanding this helps us assess Ethereum’s real position more accurately amid competing narratives.Overall, from the “Rollup-centric” thesis of 2020 to Strawmap in 2026, Ethereum’s narrative has followed a clear trajectory: scaling cannot rely on L2 alone. L1 and L2 must evolve together.These eight L1 zkEVM workstreams are the technical expression of that shift in thinking. Together, they point to a single goal: giving Ethereum mainnet order-of-magnitude performance gains without sacrificing decentralization. This represents a convergence rather than a divergence of the L1 and L2 roadmaps.Over the next three years, this “Ship of Theseus” will go through seven forks and replace countless planks along the way. By the time it reaches its next stop in 2029, we may see a truly global settlement layer—fast, secure, private, and as open as ever.It is worth watching closely.