Author | GaryMa Wu Blockchain Blockchain
Wu Blockchain team summarizes the important developments in the blockchain technology field in January:
Bitcoin
On January 8, 2026 , the Bitcoin Core development team promoted anonymous developer TheCharlatan (sedited) to a Trusted Keys maintainer. This marks the first time since May 2023 that core members with commit permissions to the main branch have been added. This brings the total number of PGP key maintainers with commit permissions to Bitcoin Core to six: Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, Ava Chow, and TheCharlatan. TheCharlatan, a graduate of the University of Zurich with a degree in Computer Science, focuses on reproducible build and verification logic. His appointment received unanimous support in discussions among core contributors. (Protos)
Ethereum
• Glamsterdam upgrade preparation: The upgrade is expected to take place from June to August, maintaining the pace of two upgrades per year; BAL DevNet2 has been launched.
The Ethereum Blob stress optimization solution, BPO2, has officially taken effect on the mainnet. The target value for blobs has been increased to 14 per block, and the maximum capacity has been increased to 21.
The ERC -8004 standard is about to go live on the mainnet. By enabling discovery mechanisms and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact between different organizations, ensuring that reputation flows everywhere, thereby unlocking a global market for AI service interoperability.
In an article , Vitalik Buterin stated that in 2026, Ethereum will systematically rectify the regression in self-sovereignty and trustlessness over the past decade. Key areas include: lowering the barrier to entry for full nodes using ZK-EVM and BAL; verifying the authenticity of RPC return data through Helios; enabling privacy queries on RPCs using ORAM and PIR; promoting social recovery wallets and time locks to reduce the risk of private key leaks; achieving privacy payments consistent with ordinary transfers; enhancing privacy and censorship resistance under ERC-4337, future native account abstractions, and FOCIL; and promoting on-chain application UIs based on IPFS to reduce reliance on centralized servers. Vitalik pointed out that node operation, wallets, and block building have been significantly centralized, but "this will no longer be the case in 2026." Ethereum will gradually withdraw the value compromises made to cater to mainstream adoption and rebuild a "world computer" without single points of failure and without a central controller.
The Hegota Headline proposal submission process is now open and will close on February 5th.
Ethereum L2s
The OP Stack's "Post-Quantum Roadmap" explicitly states that ECDSA EOA will be phased out within 10 years, and the migration path will depend on EIP-7702 + account abstraction. It also mentions that basic components such as sequencer/batch submitter should also migrate to the PQ signature scheme. It emphasizes that the OP Stack can replace the signature mechanism through hard forks.
Ethereum 's L2 network, Starknet, released a post-incident analysis report regarding the brief mainnet outage, stating that the cause was a state inconsistency between the blockifier and proof layers: under a specific combination of cross-function calls and rollbacks, the blockifier incorrectly recorded a rolled-back state, leading to abnormal transaction execution. The relevant transactions did not receive L1 finality confirmation. This event triggered a block reorganization, rolling back approximately 18 minutes of on-chain activity. This is the second major outage since 2025; the previous major outage in September was due to a sequencer vulnerability that caused an outage of over 5 hours and rolled back approximately 1 hour of on-chain activity.
ZKsync released its 2026 roadmap, which mainly consists of three core components: Prividium, ZK Stack, and Airbender. Prividium aims to evolve from a privacy engine into a "Bank Stack," providing default privacy protection for enterprise-grade crypto applications and integrating directly into enterprise workflows. ZK Stack will shift from a single chain to an orchestration system, enabling operation and liquidity sharing across public and private ZK chains. Airbender focuses on transforming zkVM into a universal standard, prioritizing security and developer experience, and its services will cover ZKsync, Ethereum, and use cases beyond crypto.
Solana
According to Jito's announcement, it has launched the IBRL Explorer tool to transparently display the build details within Solana blocks. This tool reveals common issues in the Solana network such as "tail packing" and "Slot Timing Games," which can affect state propagation efficiency, increase latency, and weaken network stability. IBRL Explorer generates an IBRL score for each validator using three scoring mechanisms: Slot Time, Vote Packing, and Non-Vote Packing, aiming to improve block build quality and overall network performance.
BNB Chain
Brevis and BNB Chain are expanding their collaboration to privacy infrastructure, partnering with 0xbow to launch the "Intelligent Privacy Pool" on BNB Chain, scheduled for release in Q1 2026. This privacy pool is based on 0xbow Privacy Pools and incorporates ZK eligibility verification: users can prove the compliance of their on-chain fund sources through the Brevis ZK Data Coprocessor, or complete compliance verification without disclosing sensitive data by binding off-chain KYC via zkTLS.
opBNB completed the Fourier mainnet hard fork, reducing block time from 500 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds.
SUI
The Sui mainnet has been upgraded to version V1.63.3, and the protocol has been upgraded to version 107. This upgrade includes optimizing the path for transactions/states to directly reach final confirmation, fixing a consensus issue that might prevent validator nodes from reaching an agreement on rejected transactions, and disabling the RPC interface used by validator nodes for transaction signing and submitting transactions signed by aggregated validator nodes.
Safety related
SlowMist Cosine warns that VS Code-based IDEs (including Cursor, VS Code, Antigravity, TRAE, etc.) pose a potential security risk due to automated task execution. It recommends that users disable the "Automatic Task Execution" feature to prevent malicious code from being triggered when opening directories. The suggested security measures include setting `task.allowAutomaticTasks` to "off" in settings and enabling Workspace Trust in Cursor. This allows for risk assessment when opening new projects, preventing the automatic execution of commands hidden in `.vscode/tasks.json` even if the workspace is trusted.
Security researcher 23pds warns that phishing attackers have begun using new social engineering and technical methods to target cryptocurrency users in the past month, with some cases already disclosed. Users should be vigilant and avoid clicking on unknown links or signing suspicious transactions. Furthermore, researcher Adam Chester disclosed a privilege escalation and command execution vulnerability in Anthropic's Claude Code. Attackers can execute commands without user authorization. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2025–64755, has a publicly available proof-of-concept (PoC). This issue is considered similar to a vulnerability previously disclosed in the Cursor tool.
Developers have disclosed a software vulnerability in the BLS (Block Signature) voting extension mechanism of the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon. This vulnerability allows malicious validators to intentionally omit the block hash field when submitting the voting extension, potentially triggering other validators to crash at network epoch boundaries, thereby slowing down block production during critical consensus checks. There is currently no evidence of actual exploitation of the vulnerability, but the developers warn that it could be abused if left unpatched. Babylon has not yet publicly responded regarding a fix.
other
Stripe and Paradigm's jointly launched payment public chain, Tempo, announced the release of its native token standard, TIP-20, designed specifically for stablecoins and payment use cases. It is based on the existing ERC-20 standard on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains and is fully backward compatible. It adds transfer memos, compliance controls, and reward distribution functionality to ERC-20. The TIP-20 standard allows the issuance of stablecoins tailored to specific payment use cases while meeting operational and compliance requirements. Any USD-denominated TIP-20 stablecoin can be used to pay transaction fees on Tempo. In the future, Tempo plans to support the use of non-USD stablecoins for transaction fee payments.
