Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.
This week: Core developers move Glamsterdam toward testnets while keeping native account abstraction optional for Hegota; Base confirms that native account abstraction will go live this September; EthSystems spins out of the Ethereum Foundation to build confidential systems for institutions; and Reth ships v2.4.0 with a faster client and experimental JIT execution.
- Core Devs Advance Glamsterdam and Hegota
- Native Account Abstraction Comes to Base
- EthSystems Spins Out for Institutional Privacy
- Reth v2.4.0 Ships a Faster Client
Please fasten your belts!
Core Devs Advance Glamsterdam and Hegota
On the latest All Core Developers Execution call, Ethereum developers sketched out the next phase for two upgrades, Glamsterdam and Hegota. Glamsterdam will likely get one more coordinated devnet before it moves to public testnets, with mainnet activation still at least several months away.
The current test network, Devnet-7, was deliberately stressful, launching with around half a million validators to pressure client implementations. It exposed some bugs, but participation has since climbed to roughly 80 to 90%, and it will now double as an early, short-lived environment where app developers can test Glamsterdam changes before they reach public testnets.
For Hegota, the developers confirmed FOCIL as the headliner. FOCIL, short for Fork-Choice Enforced Inclusion Lists, strengthens censorship resistance by making it harder for block builders to keep valid transactions out of the chain.
The account abstraction news is more cautious. Native account abstraction is included only as a candidate for Hegota, not a headliner, so it will not automatically delay the upgrade and could be deferred if the AA teams do not converge on a design in time.
Developers set August 6 as the deadline for non-headliner execution-layer proposals, after which Hegota’s scope starts to freeze. One new candidate is EIP-8268, which would add storage roots to Block Access Lists.
Native Account Abstraction Comes to Base
Base confirmed that native account abstraction will go live this September as part of its Cobalt upgrade. Rather than relying on third-party infrastructure, gas sponsorship and transaction batching will be built into the protocol itself.
In practice, that means every account on Base effectively becomes a smart account. The capabilities that today require external bundlers and paymasters, like sponsored gas and bundled transactions, would come standard at the base layer.
This builds on Base Account and Sign in with Base, which already give users a self-custodial smart wallet with one-tap USDC payments, sponsored gas, and transaction batching. Cobalt pushes those features down into the protocol so they work everywhere by default.
Base frames all of this as agent-native infrastructure. Smart accounts with programmable logic, batching, and gas sponsorship suit autonomous AI agents far better than traditional key-controlled accounts, a theme we have seen across the ecosystem in recent weeks.
It also makes for a striking contrast. Native account abstraction is arriving on a major L2 this September, while on Ethereum L1 it is still just a candidate for a future fork, which shows how quickly the L2 layer is moving on user experience.
EthSystems Spins Out for Institutional Privacy
A new company called EthSystems has launched to build what it calls confidential systems for institutional Ethereum. It is founded by Mo Jalil, Oskar Thorén, and Aaryamann Challani, who spent the past year at the Ethereum Foundation as its Institutional Privacy Task Force.
The thesis is that public chains like Ethereum are becoming the default ledger for institutions, but they still lack good, modular privacy tools. EthSystems wants to fill that gap for financial use cases such as stablecoins, tokenization, and settlement, where firms need clear security and privacy properties before moving real money onchain.
It is a for-profit company doing bespoke consulting: workshops, proofs of concept, architecture reviews, and protocol specifications. The technical work stays open source, including an Ethereum Privacy Map and a series of proofs of concept covering private bonds, shielded stablecoin transfers, and private cross-chain swaps.
The launch continues a pattern we have tracked in recent weeks. As the Ethereum Foundation narrows its focus, senior teams are spinning out into independent organizations, and EthSystems is the privacy and institutional counterpart to research-focused efforts like Ethlabs.
Reth v2.4.0 Ships a Faster Client
Paradigm shipped Reth v2.4.0, a new release of its Rust Ethereum execution client. The headline is performance, with mean newPayload latency dropping about 6.2% compared with v2.3.0.
The release adds experimental JIT support for EVM execution through a revmc integration, which node operators can opt into. It also brings a large set of networking and transaction-propagation improvements aimed at higher throughput.
On the protocol side, the team continues work toward the upcoming Amsterdam fork and EIP-7928 Block Access Lists, which let blocks declare in advance the state they will touch so clients can execute more efficiently. Some internal state-root APIs were also deprecated, so SDK users depending on trie internals will need to update.
Client releases like this rarely make headlines, but they matter for the whole stack. Faster, leaner execution clients set the ceiling for how much throughput chains like Base and BNB Chain, which build on Reth, can safely offer.
🛠️ Builder note: Etherspot
AA infra should make development easier, not harder.
- One RPC endpoint across chains
- Pay-as-you-go pricing on mainnet
- No markup on gas fees
- API key controls with built-in security
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