Arbitrum opened registrations for its three-week Open House Singapore Buildathon, an online program where teams can build with Solidity or Stylus and deploy on Arbitrum One, Robinhood Chain, Arbitrum Sepolia, or other Arbitrum chains.

The program includes $115,000 USDC in total funding, split between $70,000 in main prizes, $15,000 for promising products, and up to $30,000 in milestone-based grants. The top three teams can also earn a spot at the in-person Founder House in Singapore, where they will work with Arbitrum’s technical team, mentors, and ecosystem founders.

Variational reached a new all-time high of more than $2.1 billion in 24-hour trading volume, alongside $1.5 billion in open interest.

The platform offers access to more than 500 crypto and traditional finance markets with on-chain settlement. Built on Arbitrum, Variational has grown into one of the network’s largest perpetuals trading platforms.

Eligible Venmo users can now buy, sell, send, and use PYUSD on Arbitrum, expanding stablecoin access through one of the largest consumer payment platforms in the U.S.

Venmo serves more than 67 million monthly active accounts, giving Arbitrum and PYUSD another distribution channel for consumer stablecoin payments and transfers.

Following governance approval, ArbOS Elara is now live across the Arbitrum Platform. The upgrade introduces protocol-level compliance filtering, customizable priority fees, and an alternative data API for dedicated Arbitrum chains.

On Arbitrum One, Elara also introduces improved base fee tuning and increases capacity for Stylus contracts by 4x.

Business banking platform Slash added support for USDC and USDT payments on Arbitrum, allowing eligible businesses to receive stablecoins with the option to automatically convert incoming payments to USD.

The service is available to eligible businesses across more than 130 countries, expanding access to stablecoin-based payment rails through Arbitrum.

Robinhood Chain committed $1 million in funding for early-stage teams participating in Arbitrum’s Open House Buildathon.

The three-week online program is aimed at founders building on-chain financial products, providing participating teams with an opportunity to develop projects and access funding from Robinhood Chain.

T3tris reached $12 million in TVL across Arbitrum One and Robinhood Chain after launching in July. The asset management platform was previously one of ten teams selected for Arbitrum’s first Mentorship Program.

During the program, T3tris developed its product and go-to-market strategy, placed third at Demo Day, and progressed from stealth to an on-chain launch.

ZeroDev is offering Arbitrum teams three free months of its Grow Plan, providing access to programmable accounts infrastructure.

The package includes 100,000 credits, smart accounts, gas sponsorship, and embedded wallets, giving developers additional tools to simplify onboarding and transaction experiences in Arbitrum applications.

Robinhood Chain surpassed $1 billion in TVS, reaching the milestone roughly a month after its launch.

Built using Arbitrum technology, the network has seen rapid early growth, alongside the $5 million in cumulative fee revenue reported earlier in August.

ZKsync’s B2 Token Transparency Filing from Blockworks is now accessible across more than 350,000 Bloomberg Terminals, expanding the availability of information about ZK governance, token structure, market arrangements, and other disclosures to institutional market participants.

The filing is part of Blockworks’ Token Transparency Framework, which aims to standardize disclosures for crypto assets and make token information more accessible to traditional capital markets.

ADI Chain, powered by ZKsync, partnered with Shipfinex to bring tokenized commercial vessels on-chain as a new regulated category of real-world assets.

The initiative aims to broaden access to maritime finance by enabling investment in an asset class that has traditionally been accessible to a relatively limited group of market participants.

Ether.fi Cash is moving the credit backend supporting more than 70,000 cardholders to a dedicated Aave V4 instance on OP Mainnet. The integration will allow users to borrow against a broader range of assets, including tokenized stocks and metals.

The move builds on ether.fi Cash’s growing activity on OP Mainnet, where around 29% of crypto card spending settles, with ether.fi accounting for most of that volume. Optimism reports median fees of around $0.00001, sub-250ms finality, and 99.99% uptime supporting the product’s payment activity.

DB Securities partnered with Optimism to bring the underlying assets of tokenized securities on-chain, marking a notable move in South Korea, where the sector has largely relied on permissioned distributed ledgers.

The collaboration explores how public blockchain infrastructure can support regulated tokenized assets and connect traditional financial markets with on-chain infrastructure.

OP Labs activated subblocks on OP Sepolia on August 17 and on OP Mainnet on August 31, 2026, reducing pre-confirmation times from 250ms to 200ms.

The update zeroes out several fields in the subblock payload (state_root, block_hash, withdrawals_root, and withdrawals). Teams consuming the subblock stream directly should review their integrations to ensure these values do not impact downstream state, balances, or proofs.

Whitechain announced its transition from a standalone Proof of Authority L1 to an Ethereum L2 powered by the OP Stack. As part of the migration, the Whitechain Sepolia Testnet went live on August 18.

The move brings Whitechain into the broader OP Stack ecosystem while shifting its settlement architecture to Ethereum.

Paxos added OP to its Crypto Brokerage platform, making the token available to financial institutions that use Paxos to offer digital asset trading to their clients.

OP was added alongside APT and TRX, expanding the platform’s supported assets to 32 tokens.

Revolut launched EURR, its first euro-backed stablecoin, with support on Polygon. The stablecoin is being rolled out directly through the Revolut app.

The launch brings a euro-denominated stablecoin from one of Europe’s largest fintech platforms to Polygon, expanding the network’s growing stablecoin and payments ecosystem.

Polygon was selected to participate in the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab alongside NOBO and Dun & Bradstreet, exploring potential infrastructure for a digital pound and cross-border settlement.

As part of the initiative, Polygon will use its Open Money Stack to test cross-border trade finance and simulate settlement using stablecoin infrastructure, exploring how on-chain systems could support international money movement.

OKX launched a promotional campaign for POL holders in Europe, offering an 8% deposit bonus for users who transfer POL to the platform, alongside the opportunity to earn up to 12% APY for one month.

The campaign runs through August 31 and expands the incentives available to POL holders through centralized exchanges in Europe. It also provides another distribution channel for Polygon’s native token as the ecosystem continues to expand access to POL across trading and financial platforms.

Japanese convenience store Lawson completed a demonstration of stablecoin payments at a point-of-sale register using JPYC, with transactions settled on Polygon. Customers were able to display a barcode through HashPort Wallet and complete the payment directly at the store’s existing checkout system.

The demonstration was conducted with HashPort and marks Japan’s first stablecoin payment at a convenience store. Polygon provided the settlement infrastructure, enabling JPYC transactions to clear in real time with transaction fees at a fraction of a cent.

Charm highlighted the performance of its stablecoin liquidity vault on Polygon, which generates returns from decentralized exchange trading fees rather than token incentives. The vault reported a 30-day net yield of 17% and a 283-day yield of 24.2%, after impermanent loss and management fees.

The vault provides liquidity for stablecoin trading on Polygon, supporting on-chain foreign exchange activity while allowing liquidity providers to capture fees generated by swaps.

Eigen Labs introduced Yukon Research, a platform designed to open complex research problems to a distributed network of human researchers and AI systems, allowing multiple approaches to be explored in parallel and the strongest results to be iterated on.

During its first two months, Yukon reported improvements across several research areas, including outperforming a Google frontier result in quantum circuits by more than 50% and making Poolside’s open-weight model run 2.6x faster. The initiative explores how coordinated human and AI research can accelerate progress on measurable technical problems.

Darkbloom became a paid inference provider on OpenRouter, marking a new milestone for Eigen Labs’ distributed AI network. The platform has served around 4.5 billion tokens, up 113% month over month, while operating entirely on consumer Apple Silicon.

Around 250 Macs were actively providing compute at the time of the announcement, with operators earning between $120 and $200 per month on average. Darkbloom also reported approximately $102,000 in annual recurring revenue as it moves from free inference toward a paid distributed compute model.

Eigen Labs expanded the SNARK.fast research challenge to x86 Linux after Yukon participants achieved a 3x performance improvement for post-quantum Ethereum cryptography on Mac hardware. The initiative is being developed alongside the Ethereum Foundation, Succinct Labs, and Espresso Systems.

The new phase focuses on the hardware commonly used across Ethereum infrastructure, allowing researchers and AI agents to explore improvements including vectorization, threading, memory layout, cache behavior, and proof scheduling. Valid performance improvements submitted through the challenge become the new public baseline for subsequent research.