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Ethereum core developers have decided to replace Holesky and launch a new testnet called Hoodi to test the Pectra hard fork. The decision prioritized long-term client stability and attempts to avoid engineering distractions that could delay Fusaka, Ethereum's next major upgrade after Pectra. But it comes at a cost — pushing Pectra's mainnet fork to mid-May. |
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Grass is scraping: |
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Grass is a decentralized data scraping application built on Solana. Users contribute their unused internet bandwidth to Grass' network, which is sold to verified companies that use it to perform activities like price comparisons and academic research. In exchange, users are rewarded with GRASS tokens for participation. |
In recent weeks, Grass' daily data scraped has soared above the 1000TB mark, made possible by Phase 1 of its recent Sion network upgrade. Phase 2 of the Sion upgrade is scheduled for some time in March and plans to boost daily network scraping capacity by 10x with parallel processing, higher scraping speeds and improved multimodal data retrieval. |
— Donovan Choy |
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A fork in the road |
The move to replace Holesky with Hoodi as Pectra's main testing grounds was one of four options debated on Thursday's All-Core Developers call. Some protocol teams specifically related to staking infrastructure lobbied for a quicker, but riskier option, and were effectively overruled by core devs. |
With Holesky hobbled by a validator exit queue of over a million — which could take more than a year to clear — developers had to find an alternative test environment for Pectra, particularly for exit-related features. Four options were considered: |
Option A: Launch a new testnet (Hoodi), replacing Holesky. Option B: Use DevNet 6 as a temporary testnet. Option C: Spin up a short-term shadow fork of Holesky. Option D: Implement a hard fork that clears Holesky's exit queue.
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For protocols like Lido and EigenLayer, Option D — despite its hacky flavor — was the clear preference. Since staking infrastructure and integrations were already built around Holesky, this option would have allowed Lido to skip redeployment of tooling, oracles and other dependencies, and focus only on Pectra-specific testing. |
Lido's Ivan Metrikin estimated that Option A, migrating to a new testnet, will require two months — several weeks for contract deployment and tooling, followed by additional time for testing. |
Matt Nelson at Eigen Labs echoed this concern, noting that every week spent redeploying infrastructure delays their ability to ensure compatibility with Ethereum's next hard fork. Given that Lido and EigenLayer collectively manage billions in staked ETH, their green light for Pectra's mainnet rollout is critical. |
The topic of ether staking is one likely to come up at Blockworks' DAS session, Ethereum's Appeal for Institutional Builders on March 20. |
Core devs prioritize stability (and Fusaka) |
Despite these concerns, Ethereum client teams opposed Option D. Their reasoning was twofold: |
Hard-forking Holesky would require "hacks" that introduce risk. Making one-off modifications to the execution queue could inadvertently create code paths that affect mainnet stability. |
Any delays from debugging a Holesky fix would eat into Fusaka development time. Core teams argued that an extra two weeks spent on a Holesky patch could spiral into months of cumulative delays. |
Geth's Marius Van Der Wijden even suggested that client teams could "chill for a bit" while waiting for LST teams to complete their testing on Hoodi — a comment that drew pushback from those in favor of a faster Fusaka path to mainnet. |
As a consequence, the Pectra mainnet fork is now officially delayed to mid-May. Hoodi is set to go live Monday, March 17, with Pectra activating there on March 26. Ethereum's rule of thumb is to wait at least 30 days before choosing a mainnet block, but liquid staking teams like Lido and EigenLayer now face an extended migration timeline. |
Meanwhile, client teams will use the extra time to refine their code, laying the groundwork for Fusaka. |
The deadline for submitting EIPs for Fusaka is now March 24, giving teams a short window to finalize proposals. By March 31, core teams are expected to share their feedback, leading to a final scope decision on either April 3 or April 10. |
To streamline future ACD calls, Ethereum Foundation coordinator Tim Beiko suggested moving more EIP proposal presentations to an asynchronous process, with only those requiring deeper technical discussions being reviewed live. Plus there's a new EIP status: declined for inclusion (DFI), reserved for EIPs that teams feel should be deferred to a future fork, but not rejected outright. |
— Macauley Peterson |
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SIMD-228 failed: |
SIMD-228, the highly debated governance proposal to alter Solana's issuance curve, has failed to pass. Of a total 910 validator votes, 44% of votes voted YES, short of the 66% threshold required for the vote to pass. 27% voted NO, 4% abstained, and 25% did not vote. |
SIMD-228 sought to alter SOL issuance from its fixed and overtime declining curve (currently 4.68% annually) to a market-based curve that would increase issuance when stake rates were low, and vice versa. One of the critiques of SIMD-228 pointed to how a lowering of issuance may potentially cause smaller and less profitable validators to leave, which in turn would further centralize Solana's validator set. |
The chart below breaks down votes in terms of validators' staking size. Smaller validators were voting NO, while larger validators were generally in favor of YES. |
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For a full analysis, see Blockworks' Lightspeed newsletter edition on Monday. |
— Donovan Choy |
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0xResearch Analyst Roundtable: SIMD-228 |
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Does SIMD-228 discourage institutional distribution of SOL? |
Carlos Gonzalez: I don't necessarily agree but one of the stronger counter-arguments made by Lily Liu of the Solana Foundation against SIMD-228 is that reducing SOL inflation may undermine custodians' incentives to offer SOL products to their clients. That's because SOL inflation indirectly subsidizes institutional distribution of SOL today. European custodians and ETPs benefit from SOL's higher normal staking yield because they take a commission on that rate. |
Marc Arjoon: I don't necessarily agree either. They're still going to offer these products because it's a revenue-generating product. I think the demand side of SOL is more important than what issuers do for marketing. A token with a possibly lower inflation makes for a better story for SOL. |
What is the impact of TradFi enabling 24-hour trading? |
Danny Knettel: There's a continued push in TradFi markets to enable 24-hour trading, as we've seen from Nasdaq in the last week — something that crypto markets pioneered. We've also seen Robinhood and Coinbase pushing on that front. I'm curious to see if this will lead to a closer convergence of risk and liquidity patterns between crypto and equity markets. |
Marc Arjoon: Crypto trades 24/7 but equities trade about 250 days a year. I'm tired of crypto being the only instrument to express your viewpoint after trading hours or on a weekend. If 24-hour trading in TradFi happens, there will likely be more liquidity in the market on weekends. Stocks also won't be as thinly traded than they are during eight-hour windows on weekdays. That may make Sharpe ratios less appealing for stocks and make crypto look less risky in relative comparison. It's just like private equity markets having better risk-adjusted ratios than public equities because they're valued less than once a quarter. |
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 | Yu Hu 🌊 @Punk9277 |  |
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one liquid fund investor asked me why do we strategically acquire KAITO if we're at such high growth phase any regular buyback scheme in the equity world would mean you run out of other means of growth to me, the reason is plain simple - the biggest problem with most tokens… x.com/i/web/status/1… | | | 1:11 PM • Mar 14, 2025 | | | | | | 374 Likes 43 Retweets | 160 Replies |
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|  | Caitlin Long 🔑⚡️🟠 @CaitlinLong_ | |
| | Replying to@intangiblecoins | 1/ IMPORTANT: Senate Banking Committee's #stablecoin bill amendment created a distinction btwn offshore dollars (#eurodollars) & onshore dollars here, breaking one of the 4 prices of money: par. h/t @PMehrling & Zoltan Pozsar Quite a precedent--will it stay in the final bill? | | | 2:33 PM • Mar 14, 2025 | | | | | | 13 Likes 3 Retweets | 4 Replies |
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|  | Dankrad Feist @dankrad | |
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I think this is what everyone is feeling and I disagree to an extend but nevertheless the situation is tricky. Currently Ethereum is making almost zero fees from both L1 and L2 transactions *because it chooses to*: If we were a company, we would put a reasonable price tag on… x.com/i/web/status/1… |  Camila Russo @CamiRusso
There's a path to fix Ethereum L2 fragmentation and horrible UX. superchain interop, intents etc. It's gonna happen, eth community is galvanized around unifying Ethereum and they'll fix it. But I still don't see how all this L2 activity gets reflected on Ethereum mainnet. Layer… x.com/i/web/status/1… |
| | | 8:09 PM • Mar 13, 2025 | | | | | | 758 Likes 97 Retweets | 108 Replies |
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|  | Jason Choi @mrjasonchoi | |
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Virtually all the growth in crypto happened because of someone's optimistic assumptions about the future value of some asset. Optimism enabled bitcoin to bootstrap its network of miners from a white paper, L1s to kickstart ecosystems with token war chests that Web 2 startups at… x.com/i/web/status/1… | | | 2:04 PM • Mar 14, 2025 | | | | | | 34 Likes 2 Retweets | 11 Replies |
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