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Greetings! 👋

A lot happened this month, and not just on the price charts. From quantum resistance roadmaps to Ethereum’s role in an AI-driven future, the conversations shaping the ecosystem are getting sharper.

Here’s what matters, from every corner of the globe.

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🗺️ Regional Adoption

Fun experiment

• Prague, Czechia: Our friend Mario Havel successfully raised $180k through a Bordel crowdloaning campaign to fund a DeFi mortgage for a new hacker community space. It’s a kind of peer‑to‑peer lending where individuals lend money directly, instead of relying on donations. There are no banks, no loan sharks, and no middlemen, just the power of Ethereum making it all possible.

Policy

• Hong Kong SAR: Hong Kong to issue first stablecoin issuer licenses in March 2026.

• Japan: Bank of Japan to test blockchain-based reserve settlement.

• Malaysia: Malaysia’s central bank to launch three stablecoin and tokenized deposit initiatives in 2026.

• Europe: European bank consortium targets 2026 launch for euro-backed stablecoin.

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🪐 Global Ecosystem Update

Scale L1, Scale Blobs and Improve UI/UX

• Protocol Priorities Update for 2026 - 3 new tracks: Scale, Improve UX and Harden the L1.

• Justin Drake introduced the “strawmap” roadmap, built around five north stars: a fast L1 with short slots and finality in seconds; a gigagas L1 hitting 1 gigagas/sec (10K TPS) via zkEVMs and real-time proving; a teragas L2 reaching 1 gigabyte/sec (10M TPS) via data availability sampling; a post-quantum L1 with durable cryptography via hash-based schemes; and a private L1 with first-class privacy via shielded ETH transfers. For a plain breakdown, check out James’s Idiot’s Guide to Ethereum’s 2029 Strawmap.

  

• Vitalik lays out the quantum resistance roadmap targeting four areas: consensus-layer BLS signatures, data availability (KZG commitments and proofs), EOA signatures (ECDSA), and application-layer ZK proofs (KZG or Groth16).

DeFi, Stablecoins & Payments

• ‘Ethereum Foundation believes in Defipunk‘, with focus on strengthening builder relationships and advancing security, decentralization, openness, privacy, standards, risk clarity, research, and content. The initiative spans domains such as DeFi × AI, institutional DeFi adoption, stablecoins and payments, and emerging financial primitives that don’t fit neatly into existing categories.

• Ethereum Foundation has begun staking part of ether treasury, with approximately 70,000 ETH being staked and rewards directed back to the EF treasury.

• In the past 30 days, x402 has processed 75.41M transactions with $24.24M volume.

• Visa and Stripe plan global expansion of stablecoin card issuance product to over 100 countries.

• Fintech and insurance giant TruStage pilots stablecoin geared for credit unions.

• Ether.fi shifts non-custodial crypto card product to OP Mainnet from Scroll.

• Stripe adds x402 integration for USDC agent payments on Base.

• Robinhood launches public testnet for blockchain built on Arbitrum.

• Barclays exploring blockchain settlement tools as banks brace for stablecoin growth.

• Ethereum’s tokenized RWA market jumps more than 300% year over year as value tops $17 billion.

• Defending DeFi in the Age of AI Offensive Tooling: A reality check on AI-powered attack tools, human audits, and defense strategies, before hype and panic lead to poor security decisions, by BlockThreat.

• For more on enterprise + Ethereum, check out the Enterprise Onchain Newsletter by James and David Walsh.

AI + Ethereum

• Introducing clawd.atg.eth, an AI agent with a wallet, building onchain apps and tools, by Austin Griffith.

• ETH2030: Agentic Coding ETH Client for 2030+ Roadmap, YQ single-handedly coded an Ethereum client using agentic coding, targeting the entire 2030+ roadmap.

• Cool experiment by Raul: two trustless agents discover each other over P2P (BitTorrent Mainline DHT) and agree on a content-addressed Wasm program as their shared state machine. They then transact in turns, emitting provable traces along the way.

• A better explanation on what ERC-8004 is by Vitto Rivabella.

• Web4.0: The Birth of Superintelligent Life and the Autonomous Web, by Sigil Wen. Is it better than Web3.0?

• A great read: AI Needs Crypto - Especially Now by a16z Crypto.

• Vitalik sketches a near-term vision for Ethereum’s role in an AI-driven future. His updated view focuses on the shorter term, where Ethereum plays an important role but remains just one piece of a bigger puzzle: building tooling for more trustless and/or private interactions with AIs, using Ethereum as an economic layer for AI-related interactions, making the cypherpunk “mountain man” vision a reality, and building better markets and governance.