GM, frens! ☕️

Innovation is why we’re really here, the reason why this space keeps moving, why nothing ever stays still long enough to get boring, isn’t it?

But every now and then, it’s worth asking whether we’re sprinting so fast that we forget to look at the ground we’re running on. Progress is great. Free fall, less so.

Anyways, here’s what we’re watching this week:

• 🧨Ethereum’s Fusaka lands clean - new lanes for value to flow back to ETH

• 🔥 Ambire’s November DELIVERS

• 🤖 Why “code is law” won’t save you from AI

• 🏰 Citadel wants DeFi gone and crypto isn’t thrilled

And on the bag side - $WALLET is holding well, as expected 🤝 

If you want to chill with us, you know where our Discord is 🤠 

Ethereum’s Fusaka lands clean - new lanes for value to flow back to ETH

Ethereum ticked off another upgrade with no drama.

Fusaka went live and the clients behaved, blocks kept coming, everything was safe and in order.

This is the kind of week that feels extremely good 😎 

What Fusaka actually changed 💣️ 

Fusaka is an execution layer tuneup. It:

• tightens opcode edge case handling

• trims block validation paths

• delivers small client performance gains

• lines up groundwork for the 2026 EIP bundle

Post activation, participation stayed high, inclusion and confirmation times looked normal, explorers didn’t melt, and there was no odd blip in proposer duties. Total success 🫡 

PeerDAS and value capture

Running alongside this cadence is PeerDAS (EIP-7594). That is, in essence, larger data lanes for blobs so rollups get meaningfully cheaper space. More throughput without cost blowing out 💰️ 

Why this matters for ETH itself:

• Today most rollup economics live at L2 - sequencing, ordering, MEVs, etc 🤷‍♂️ - (that’s just what we got after years of Ethereum gas being insanely expensive, basically).

• With PeerDAS, the “based rollup” model becomes practical - L2s can let Ethereum’s validator set handle sequencing.

• If teams adopt it, more fees and MEV share are routed to ETH stakers at L1. Value ties back to the base layer instead of leaking outward.

Nothing is automatic. Projects have to choose it. But the core protocol is putting systems in place for ETH to capture more of the activity it already secures.

That addresses some of the biggest criticism Ethereum had to deal with 🧠 

Market behavior - exactly what you want

ETH climbed back over 3k and pushed above 3,150 around activation, extending the late November bounce.

Validator set health stayed strong. Lido remained the biggest pool, but Rocket Pool and exchange pools along with permissionless participation was alive and well. Client diversity stayed intact 🤓 

Why institutions care about a “non story”

Capital markets like predictability. They need a base layer that won’t ambush them during issuance, settlement, or reconciliation. Weeks like this tell risk committees the stack is pretty mature 💵 

Knock-on effects people are modeling:

• cheaper blob data - better economics for rollups and their users

• the option for validator run sequencing - simpler risk models and fewer bespoke boxes to audit

• cleaner settlement behavior - better fit for tokenized assets 🪙 

This is the scaffolding that lets large players pick public infrastructure over copycats 🤔 

A public company voted with cash

While some crypto treasuries trimmed exposure, BitMine Immersion Technologies added almost 100,000 ETH in a week.

The firm already had a large ETH position and cash on hand. With this move it sits among the biggest ETH treasuries in public markets.

Their reasoning is straightforward:

• fundamentals tilt positive into PeerDAS

• macro liquidity is set to improve

• the weak prices at the moment look like a good entry 🤷‍♂️ 

You can disagree on timing, but directionally it’s clear as it can be: there is still patient money building exposure to ETH when sentiment is uneven 💰️ 

What to watch next

The experts in the space are pointing to:

• Watching PeerDAS milestones and test results from client teams 💻️ 

• Any L2 publicly committing to validator run sequencing trials ⛓️ 

• Blob pricing trends as data capacity increases 🫧 

• Real RWA pilots that lean on rollup throughput but settle at L1 👀 

Fusaka wasn’t overhyped, but it was effective. And that’s how ecosystems really bloom - devs continuously pumping out upgrades, less value leakage, real usage skyrocketing - nothing more to ask for.

Ambire’s November DELIVERS

Ambire spent November sanding down the rough edges of daily wallet use 🫡 

Here are some of the highlights:

The big one: auto-login.

• Thanks to ERC-8019, you can stay signed in for a set window (24h, 7d, 30d, etc.) without clicking the same “welcome” prompt all day. Fewer popups == more useful stuff🧠 

Gas pain got lighter too.

• Gas Tank now tops up with 100+ tokens across chains, and you can pay network fees straight from the tank - no tiny leftovers to babysit. Even ¥-pegged JPYC works as a gas token inside Ambire ⛽️ 

Discovery also got an upgrade. The Apps catalog added verification checks, TVL and X links, plus filters by chain and category, so it’s easier to sort em before you connect 👛 

For regulars, Season 1 of $WALLET rewards wraps mid December and the projected rewards now sit at the top of your portfolio - clear, visible, no hunting 😎 

Fewer interrupts, smoother payments, cleaner discovery. The devs just keep cooking🔥 

Why “code is law” won’t save you from AI

Anthropic ran a big, messy experiment: point automated money hungry clankers AI agents at recent mainnet contracts across Ethereum, BNB Chain and Base, then see what breaks. And a lot broke.

What they did

• They put Claude based agents into a realistic blockchain testbed and let them hunt for money 🤖 

• The agents successfully exploited a large chunk of targets in a controlled setup - including dozens of contracts with no prior recorded bugs 🤯 

• In a focused run against a handpicked set of fresh contracts, the agents exploited roughly half and “stole” millions in simulated funds 💀 

• In broader sweeps across hundreds of real deployments, they modeled hundreds of millions in hypothetical haul.

• When they widened the scan to a few thousand newer contracts, the agents surfaced brand new vulnerability patterns - the kind you won’t find in typical crappy crypto space pay 4 audit result PDFs 😐️ 

The point was to answer a simple question: if you give an autonomous system decent tools and the patience of a machine, can it find real money routes that humans missed? The answer is yes, and it’s getting easier.

What actually failed

Anthropic lists the greatest hits, so according to them:

• Auth bugs that let an attacker withdraw user funds with the right nudge.

• “Read only” functions wired to state in goofy ways, so clever call paths changed token balances.

• Missing validations around fee withdrawals and other money moving code.

• General supply/logic manipulation where contracts assumed “this input can’t possibly happen” the agent made it happen.

None of this needs a zero day in Solidity itself. It’s just patient pattern matching across on chain codebases and the public bread crumbs devs leave behind.

Why this escalates

Two curves matter:

1. Cost curve - running these agents is getting cheaper 💵 

2. Payoff curve - the profits are getting bigger 💰️ 

When cost falls and upside rises, more attackers try, and they try faster.

Anthropic notes the cadence of exploit revenue in the wild has been accelerating, and they expect AI to push that harder. They expect bots to grind harder with every upgrade 🤖 

• Also: they highlighted the long tail. As AI gets better at spelunking old code, attackers won’t necessarily just camp the shiny new DeFi project. Instead they’ll actively attack old contracts that have sat for months, and depending on what the devs do it can cause huge chaos 🧱 

• Not every project can easily migrate, not every coin can just easily move pools to a v2 or stuff like that, some projects out there still run even though they don’t have a dev anymore - that’s the beauty of crypto 🤔 

So what now?

Anthropic isn’t doom posting. They’re basically yelling the obvious: use AI for defense too.

And yeah, audits still matter - but not if they’re done just for show. A lot of projects could potentially affected, and honestly, who isn’t tired of crypto’s “traditional pastime”: getting hacked every other week? 🤦‍♂️ 

Citadel wants DeFi gone and crypto isn’t thrilled

Citadel Securities just told the SEC that DeFi platforms touching tokenized stocks should be regulated like exchanges or broker dealers.

According to them, “we’re just software” doesn’t cut it 🤪 

They also lumped in smart contract devs and self custody wallet providers, arguing they shouldn’t get broad exemptive relief either 👇️ 

That letter landed like a bomb 😲 

• The core claim: if a protocol lets people trade tokenized equities, it fits the Exchange Act box and should live under the same securities rules as Nasdaq or a brokerage 🤡 

Crypto folks immediately pushed back.

Lawyer Jake Chervinsky said the stance would rope in “literally every single person in crypto” 👇️ 

Uniswap’s Hayden Adams said it’s because “the king of shady tradfi market makers doesn't like open source, peer-to-peer tech that can lower the barrier to liquidity creation” 🤔 

The Blockchain Association called the idea unworkable: treating software devs like financial middlemen would kill competitiveness, push activity offshore, and do nothing for investor protection 🤌 

It’s not just Citadel, though. SIFMA - the big TradFi trade group - echoed this: tokenized securities should sit under the same old investor protection framework 👴 

Back in November, the World Federation of Exchanges told the SEC to ditch any “innovation exemption” for tokenized stock markets.

The vibe from boomer finance is consistent: if it looks like a stock and trades like a stock, it should answer to the same rules - whether it’s on a website or a smart contract 🤦‍♂️ 

And just to say it plainly - none of this debate is about letting scams run free or anything related to this topic whatsoever, despite some actors trying to point to that. It’s about not treating a bunch of opensource github commits like a top tier brokerage and by extent, treating crypto devs like garbage.

If the SEC wants to protect investors, great. Would be amazing for them to start aiming at the entities that actually take people’s money and execute their trades. But leave builders and self custody out of this.

Other worthy reads

Latest DeFi developments, by The DeFi Investor:

“Pouring Cold Water on the Prediction Market” by IOSG Ventures:

Thoughts on AI progress, by Dwarkesh Patel:

Memes

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need