The ArbitrumDAO is voting on a bundled constitutional proposal that includes three governance actions, each of which has previously passed Snapshot. The current on-chain vote will determine whether these changes are officially enacted:

• Remove Cost Cap on Arbitrum Nova: eliminate Nova’s cost cap to reflect reduced strategic importance.
• Upgrade Executor Contracts: deploy enhanced executors on Arbitrum One, Nova, and Ethereum.
• Disable Legacy USDT Bridge: fully retire old bridge now that USDT0 is live.

The Arbitrum Foundation has launched Builder’s Block, a new biweekly newsletter dedicated to developers building within the Arbitrum ecosystem. The publication offers fresh insights, technical updates, and ecosystem highlights—everything from advancements in the OP Stack to new tools and use cases surfacing across Arbitrum One and Nova.

Castle Labs has published an in-depth analysis of Arbitrum’s fast-growing Real-World Asset (RWA) ecosystem, tracing its journey from concept to over $350 million in RWA TVL in just over a year. The report details how initiatives like STEP, STEP 2, and RWA Innovation Grants have played a pivotal role in onboarding institutional issuers.

Arbitrum published a detailed blog post introducing its proposal for Dynamic Pricing, a multi-dimensional gas fee model based on five distinct dimensions (Computation, State Access, State Growth, History Growth, Calldata). The mechanism adjusts fees dynamically in real-time, ensuring fairer costs and reducing system stress. Still a proposal, it would mark a major step toward scalability if adopted.

Open House Build is a 3-week online buildathon starting August 22, offering mentorship, workshops, and $33,000 in prizes. It’s designed to help solo builders and teams take their ideas from sketch to smart contract in a supportive environment.

Matter Labs released ZIP-12, outlining ZKsync Era v29 plans. It introduces native L2↔L2 interoperability via the ZK Gateway and Fast Finality for early, L1-anchored execution certainty.

The ZKSync DAO approved funding for Security Council v2 with a capped mint of 27.7M ZK (~$1.1M), targeting 12 months of operations with over 50% cost savings.

Currently under voting on TPP-7: two years of funding for ZKsync Guardians, covering compensation for 6 Guardians and 1M ZK for operational/legal costs.

ZKsync has joined the Tokenized Asset Coalition, aligning with industry leaders to drive institutional DeFi adoption and bring trillions on-chain.

Optimism announced a partnership with Flashbots to bring fast, configurable, verifiable sequencing (e.g., Flashblocks with ~200ms confirmations) to OP Stack chains. Rollout to OP Mainnet and other chains is expected to begin soon.

Kona Node, a new high-performance rollup node built entirely in Rust, has officially launched - bringing modularity, composability, and efficiency to the OP Stack ecosystem. Developed under the Kona suite, this release offers an alternative to the traditional op-node by leveraging Rust’s memory safety and lightweight footprint. Unlike the original Go-based implementation, kona-node introduces an actor-based architecture, built on the RollupNodeService trait. This enables clearer developer interfaces and enhanced extensibility, especially for those integrating custom fault-proof systems. It supports multiple ZK backends (including FPVM, SP1, and Risc0) and is already live against OP Sepolia.

The SuperStacks incentive program successfully attracted $58M in net TVL across DeFi protocols on the Superchain, with $53.7M still retained after 30 days—yielding a cost efficiency of $21.5/OP after incentives. The program’s dual-sided strategy—stimulating both supply and demand—showed early signs of success in establishing sustainable DeFi liquidity loops.

BOB, the hybrid Layer 2 that brings Bitcoin to DeFi, has secured $21 million across multiple strategic funding rounds since December 2024. The latest $9.5M round saw continued support from key backers, including Castle Island Ventures, Ledger, Cathay Capital, RockawayX, and Sats Ventures, alongside new participation from Amber Group and Anchorage Digital’s CEO, Nathan McCauley.

Celo is preparing to activate its next major upgrade, Ice Cream Hardfork, which will bring EigenDA v2 (Blazar) to its testnets and mainnet. This marks a key milestone in the evolution of Celo’s data availability layer, delivering faster confirmation times, improved scalability, and enhanced stability.

Polygon Labs has introduced Agglayer CDK Enterprise, merging financial-grade privacy, enterprise tooling, and composability for institutions building private EVM chains.

Polygon Labs has unveiled the Agglayer Developer Portal, a sandbox for building multichain apps with unified bridges, fungible assets, and near-instant finality.

Moonveil, founded by ex-Riot Games and Tencent devs, is building a Web3 gaming ecosystem with a dedicated Agglayer CDK chain, backed by $2M in funding from Polygon Labs.

The Eigen Foundation introduced Programmatic Incentives v2, doubling reward emissions from 4% to 8% annual inflation (≈2.67M EIGEN/week). Allocation: 3% to ETH stakers, 4% to EIGEN stakers, 1% to ecosystem growth.

The Protocol Council approved ELIP-005 (simplified contracts), ELIP-006 (Redistributable Slashing), and ELIP-009 (MOOCOW performance optimizations). All passed unanimously, with emphasis on risk disclosure for slashing mechanics.