Ethereum's next big upgrade has hit a speed bump. The final test run for the Glamsterdam hard fork was cancelled this week after researchers found risky bugs in two gas-related proposals. Here is the crypto news today, plus a quick look at how the wider crypto market moved.
Security firm ChainSecurity flagged flaws linked to EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, two proposals that change how gas is scaled. Some smart contracts rely on the way gas behaves when a call runs out. After the change, at least 13 DeFi contracts could have broken, and an attacker might have used the gap.
The dress rehearsal on the Hoodi testnet will not return until the knock-on effects of the fork are fully worked through. Derek Chiang of Eth Labs said the problem surfaced just before the deadline, leaving teams scrambling. He urged protocol designers to study possible breakages much earlier in the process.
Two researchers, one from Eth Labs and one from the Ethereum Foundation, each set up groups of software agents to comb through contracts for weak spots. Once they noticed they were using the same method, they built a shared message board as a GitHub repository so the agents could split the work.
The idea worked well enough that a second board now covers EIP-8198, known as Quick Slots, which is proposed for the later Hegota hard fork. For anyone following the Ethereum upgrade timeline, it shows how testing is becoming more organised.
Alpenglow, Solana's first major consensus upgrade, went live on mainnet around 1:54 pm UTC on Wednesday. Anza, the team behind the Agave client, says transaction finality dropped from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds.
The first phase, called Votor, swaps the old voting setup for direct validator voting with certificates. The headline transaction count is expected to fall by about 60%. A later phase named Rotor will replace Turbine for block data distribution. DeFi activity has stayed flat or slipped a little, though it is early days. Traders watching the Solana price will want to follow how usage trends from here.
Starknet's community backed research into becoming an independent, post-quantum layer-1 chain. About 3,200 votes were cast over seven days, and 93.52% of voting power said yes. A separate binding vote would still be needed, and for now Starknet stays an Ethereum layer-2 network.
StarkWare CEO Eli Ben-Sasson said a whitepaper draft is planned for public review in November. The STRK token fell 24.9% this week, the sharpest drop among the top 100 coins.
Bitcoin slipped 1.2% to about $80,549, while the Ethereum price fell 1.9% to $2,343. XRP gained 0.9% to $1.20, and the total market cap sits at $2.68 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap.
MemeCore led the top 100 with a 24.4% gain, followed by Venice Token at 14.8% and Ethena at 14.1%. Aerodrome Finance and Sei each lost 12.5%.
On the long view, JPMorgan Asset Management projects a 10% yearly return for Bitcoin over the next decade, compared with 7.5% for large US stocks and 5.5% for gold. The firm still calls Bitcoin speculative and not yet a portfolio diversifier, a useful reminder for anyone hunting a Bitcoin price prediction.
Keep an eye out for a new date for the Glamsterdam test run, the first public draft from Starknet, and how Solana's activity settles after Alpenglow. Crypto moves fast, so check updates before acting, and treat this report as information, not investment advice.
