Robinhood has launched tokenized stocks on Arbitrum One, enabling EU customers to access over 200 U.S. stocks and ETFs directly within the Robinhood app. The rollout leverages Arbitrum’s infrastructure to provide a blockchain-based solution for issuing and managing tokenized assets. In addition to this launch, Robinhood plans to develop a dedicated Layer 2 blockchain using Arbitrum’s Orbit stack. This initiative aims to integrate crypto-native infrastructure into Robinhood’s platform, facilitating more efficient settlement and expanding access to digital financial services.

PayPal has expanded its stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), to Arbitrum, marking its first deployment on a Layer 2 blockchain. This integration offers developers and businesses access to low-cost, high-throughput transactions while maintaining Ethereum compatibility.

The Arbitrum DAO has voted not to extend the Arbitrum Research & Development Collective (ARDC) V2 beyond its initial six-month term. The current term ended on July 12, 2025, and all unspent funds will be returned to the Treasury. The proposal had outlined a potential six-month extension, which would have activated the release of the remaining 50% of the funds approved in the original ARDC V2 framework.

The Arbitrum DAO is now voting on a proposal to extend the Entropy Advisors’ agreement for an additional two years, covering the period from September 1, 2025, through August 31, 2027. This second mandate followed the completion of their initial one-year term and aimed to continue supporting the DAO’s evolution into a disciplined capital allocator. Before obtaining official approval from the DAO, this renewal must pass the on-chain stage, which is currently underway.

The ZKsync community has approved a proposal that requests 10.87 million ZK tokens to provide bridge funding for the ZKsync Security Council (ZKSC). This funding would cover operational costs for June and July 2025, ensuring the Security Council’s ability to continue managing protocol security and governance actions during this interim period.

After months of incremental upgrades, ZKsync Era has officially connected to the ZKsync Gateway, marking a pivotal step toward native interoperability within the Elastic Network.

The Optimism team has announced Upgrade 16, a critical protocol update set to roll out across the Superchain in July 2025. The upgrade went live on the Sepolia Superchain on July 9, followed by the activation of the Mainnet Superchain on July 24. This upgrade brings foundational interoperability changes, preparing the Superchain for seamless cross-chain messaging in future updates.

BOB has gone live with the first Hybrid ZK Rollup, introducing a new fraud-proof architecture built on OP Kailua, an advanced extension of the OP Stack developed in collaboration with RISC Zero, Boundless, and Conduit. This milestone brings Ethereum-grade security, faster withdrawal times, and greater decentralization to BOB, combining the benefits of optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups.

Celo launched the Eclair Testnet, a key step in its transition to an Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) for global payments. This testnet integrates OP Succinct Lite and EigenDA v2, with co-founder Marek Olszewski set to present at the Pragma Cannes summit, aligning with Celo’s June 2025 roadmap.

Optimism has announced the results of its Retro funding program. In total, 154 onchain apps and 89 dev tools were rewarded with 2.6M OP in June.

The SuperStacks Finale marks the end of one of the largest DeFi campaigns ever seen on the Superchain. Over the past weeks, more than 50,000 users joined forces to supply liquidity, drive on-chain activity, and showcase the power of interoperable Superchain assets. The results speak for themselves: $5.95 billion in cumulative DEX volume and over $250 million in TVL across participating pools and vaults. The campaign may have ended, but the rewards continue. Starting July 15, SuperStacks participants can redeem their earned XP for OP tokens at app.optimism.io/superstacks

The Optimism Governance Seasons 8 and 9 elections finished recently, bringing key opportunities for community members to shape the future of the Collective. This election cycle found the seats to:

• Grants Council: mattgov.eth, Michael, GFX Labs, and MasterMojo
• Developer Advisory Board: devtooligan, blockdev, Odysseas.eth, m4rio, wbnns, Vectorized, and shazow
• Milestone and Metrics Council: SEEDGov, Brichis, and v3naru

Polygon’s Heimdall v2 upgrade has reduced transaction finality from 1–2 minutes to around 5 seconds, significantly improving payment and real-world asset (RWA) applications. By replacing Tendermint with CometBFT and updating the cosmos-sdk, the upgrade enhances network stability and scalability, allowing exchanges to confirm transactions 12 times faster and enabling developers to build high-throughput, low-latency solutions with reduced reorg risk.

Polygon Labs has released Agglayer v0.3.1, a smart contract upgrade that introduces support for migrating zkEVM rollups to pessimistic consensus systems. This update to the PolygonRollupManager contract lays the groundwork for improving rollup flexibility within the Agglayer ecosystem, enabling broader interoperability and modularity.

EigenLayer has activated its Redistribution feature on the mainnet, marking the next evolution of its slashing functionality. With Redistribution, slashed funds are no longer permanently burned but can now be repurposed and redirected based on predefined use cases. This unlocks new opportunities for Actively Validated Services (AVSs) in areas like lending, insurance, and cross-chain interoperability.

ELIP-009, titled MOOCOW (Massively Optimized Operations Consolidation and Withdrawals), proposes a major upgrade to the EigenPod system following Ethereum’s Pectra upgrade. It significantly enhances usability and efficiency for native ETH restakers. With MOOCOW, restakers operating multiple validators can consolidate them, achieving up to 64x reduction in proof size and gas costs. The upgrade also introduces support for 0x02 compounding credentials, allowing consensus-layer rewards to auto-compound without additional transactions or fees.

Nethermind has released Halva, a Lean-based infrastructure for formally verifying Halo2 zk circuits, developed with support from the Ethereum Foundation. Applying Halva to Scroll’s Keccak-256 circuit uncovered a critical bug that could allow arbitrary outputs. While the affected circuit is now deprecated and Scroll’s centralized prover prevented exploitation, the discovery highlights the urgent need for formal verification as zk proving moves toward decentralization.