§ Layer 2

Aztec's Tierra V6 upgrade for privacy layer 2 on Ethereum; AI audit harness identified critical vulnerabilities in cryptographic libraries.

Celestia publishes technical deep dive on Voyager hyperscale blockchain architecture targeting 21M TPS for agentic commerce payments.

Empirical study of 973,581 Bitcoin Lightning channel force-closes (2018–2026) measuring fee costs under old design before Bitcoin Core 31.0 and May 2026 zero-fee specification change.

Exa launches AI-agent search engine on Base, charging per query in USDC.

Seam contract on Base verifies Zcash block headers using EIP-152 BLAKE2b precompile, enabling trustless cross-chain verification of Zcash consensus rules at ~626k gas per header.

ERC-8446 extends EIP-3668 CCIP-Read to enable clients as cross-chain gateways, eliminating proof requirements when client already trusts RPC to target chain.

MegaETH raises $30M to pivot from Ethereum L2 steward to AI inference marketplace operator.

Research finds faster blocks (Base Flashblocks) reduce arbitrageur priority-fee costs but decrease liquidity depth and widen spreads; validates theoretical equilibrium model.

Elysium, Hyperliquid's first L2 rollup via Kinetiq, launches; tests sustained adoption after day-one traction.

Kinetiq's Elysium L2 for Hyperliquid launches, offering throughput that HyperEVM intentionally excludes.

Ross launches Tacit Chain, a Stage 2 ZK rollup on Ethereum for private TAC payments with post-quantum memo encryption.

Elysium launches on Arbitrum mainnet, offering 100 ms blocks and routing 25% of sequencer revenue to builders via Hyperliquid integration.

Base Denim upgrade activates on mainnet, fourth protocol upgrade for Coinbase's Layer 2.

Spiko launches yield-bearing fund product and API on Base for businesses and platforms.

Base Batches 004 cohort announced: ten teams building payments, trading, finance and AI projects.

AIDA registry documents 5,868 AI service outages (2025–2026) correlated with 5M verified MEV transactions on Ethereum and Base, linking tool failures to trading activity.

Celestia announces Voyager blockchain architecture benchmarked at 21M TPS for agentic commerce and on-demand service payments.

Shopify Payments adds USDC checkout on Base, with merchant settlement in local currency.

Proposes EVM-Cosmos bridge preserving semantic meaning of domain-typed tokens (e.g. verified carbon credits) via deterministic identity indicators and atomic settlement.

Derive, an onchain options exchange, publishes case study on why it chose to build on Celestia for scaling.

Aave enables USDC loans collateralized by Coinbase tokenized stocks on Base.