Wu Shuo team summarizes important developments in the blockchain technology field in May.
Bitcoin<ul><li>The Bitcoin community proposed BIP-177, suggesting redefining the base unit as 1 Bitcoin, deprecating "satoshi", with 1 BTC = 100,000,000 Bitcoin. Jack Dorsey supports this.</li></ul>
Ethereum<ul><li>Mainnet Pectra upgrade completed, Fusaka upgrade launched on Devnet-0.</li><li>Vitalik proposed simplifying the Ethereum protocol to reduce complexity, enhance resilience, and increase participation.</li><li>Explained the evolution of the Rollup security model, recommending L2 deployments directly from Stage 1, prioritizing strengthening the proof system security.</li></ul>
Ethereum L2s<ul><li>Optimism activated the Isthmus hard fork to support the Pectra upgrade.</li><li>ZKsync achieved full EVM equivalence; the upgrade was approved by ZIP-9.</li><li>Polygon Labs CDK supports multiple tech stacks, with the first integration of the OP Stack.</li></ul>
Solana<ul><li>Anza launched the "Scheduler Binding" feature to improve MEV revenue transparency and security.</li><li>Released the Alpenglow proposal to replace TowerBFT and Turbine, enhancing consensus efficiency.</li><li>Launched Solana Attestation Service to support off-chain data verification.</li><li>The Accelerate NYC event announced new progress including Alpenglow, Mithril nodes, and ZK compression upgrades.</li></ul>
SUI<ul><li>Cetus DEX was attacked, losing approximately 230 million USD; the SUI Foundation froze 162 million USD of stolen funds.</li><li>The community passed a proposal to return the stolen assets through special transactions.</li></ul>
BNB Chain<ul><li>Testnet activated the Maxwell hard fork, improving block generation speed and network scalability.</li></ul>
Near<ul><li>NEAR achieved 600 milliseconds block time and 1.2 seconds finality, outperforming Solana and Ethereum in speed.</li></ul>
Hyperliquid<ul><li>Launched a feature supporting developers to autonomously deploy perpetual contracts (HIP-3), now live on testnet.</li></ul>
Others<ul><li>Filecoin activated the Fast Finality consensus mechanism, enhancing transaction final confirmation speed.</li><li>World Chain launched the portable iris scanning device Orb Mini, simplifying identity verification.</li><li>ZKM and GOAT Network released zkMIPS 1.0, improving performance by 19 times, supporting the BTC ecosystem.</li><li>Coinbase released the open-source payment protocol x402, supporting registration-free payment processes.</li><li>BitsLab discovered a TON virtual machine vulnerability and has assisted in fixing it.</li><li>Sei Labs released the Sei Giga whitepaper, planning to build a high-performance EVM L1 chain.</li><li>Google Wallet introduced zero-knowledge proof technology for privacy-preserving age verification.</li></ul>

<div>Compiled by | GaryMa Wu Talks BlockchainWu Talks Team Summary of Important Developments in the Blockchain Technology Field in May:Bitcoin· The Bitcoin community recently drew attention with the proposal of BIP-177, which suggests redefining the base unit as 1 Bitcoin, discarding the use of "satoshi" or "sat". The currency code BTC remains unchanged, meaning 1 BTC = 100,000,000 base units = 100,000,000 Bitcoin. The proposal argues that the long-term benefits include reducing confusion and achieving a more accurate understanding of Bitcoin’s fundamental design. Jack Dorsey expressed support for "BIP-177" in a tweet.Ethereum· The Ethereum mainnet Pectra upgrade has been successfully completed.· The next mainnet upgrade Fusaka has launched on Devnet-0.· Vitalik's blog post: How to make Ethereum in 5 years as simple as Bitcoin. The article focuses on the importance of protocol simplicity, proposing to significantly reduce complexity by simplifying the consensus layer (3-slot finality, STARK aggregation) and the execution layer (replacing EVM with RISC-V or a similar virtual machine), thereby lowering development costs, error risks, and attack surfaces. It suggests a smooth transition through backward compatibility strategies (such as an on-chain EVM interpreter) and unifying erasure coding, serialization format (SSZ), and tree structures for further simplification. The goal is to bring Ethereum’s consensus-critical code close to Bitcoin’s simplicity, enhancing resilience and participation, requiring a cultural emphasis on simplicity and setting maximum code line targets.· Vitalik also elaborated on the evolutionary strategy of Ethereum Rollup’s security model. The three stages of Ethereum Rollup security (Stage 0, 1, 2) are defined based on whether the security council can cover the trustless proof system: Stage 0 where the security council has full control; Stage 1 requiring 75% agreement (at least 6 out of 8) with at least 3 members external; Stage 2 intervenes only when a verifiable error is detected in the proof system. Vitalik’s mathematical model analysis indicates that considering each security council member has a 10% “fault” probability, L2 should start deployment directly from Stage 1 rather than remain at Stage 0. He also points out that jumping prematurely to Stage 2 is inadvisable and recommends prioritizing strengthening the underlying proof system’s security. He suggests data providers (e.g., L2beat) should display audit and maturity metrics of proof systems to assist evaluations.Ethereum L2s· Optimism announced the successful activation of the Isthmus hard fork, introducing key features from the Ethereum Pectra upgrade into the OP Stack and Superchain. This upgrade occurred only two days after Pectra went live on the Ethereum mainnet. Superchain is the first L2 ecosystem to support the Pectra upgrade. The upgrade covers Base, Ink, OP Mainnet, Soneium, Unichain, and several other OP Stack chains.· ZKsync announced the achievement of full EVM equivalence as part of the protocol's 27th version upgrade, now live on the Era network, with plans to extend to all ZK chains in the Elastic Network. Developers no longer need to use zkSolc, Foundry ZKsync, or hardhat-foundry and can deploy directly with standard solc, foundry, and hardhat tools. This upgrade was approved through the governance proposal ZIP-9 and accompanied by related developer documentation.· Polygon Labs announced that its chain development kit CDK (now renamed Agglayer CDK) officially supports multiple tech stacks, the first integration being with the OP Stack configuration. The new version allows developers to launch high-performance, low-cost chains using OP Stack with native connections to Agglayer without additional fees. In the future, Arbitrum Orbit, ABC Stack, and others may also join the Agglayer ecosystem.Solana· The Anza team announced the release of the "Scheduler Bindings" feature for Solana’s Agave validator client, allowing validators to customize block packaging logic via a modular architecture without modifying core code. Currently, over 90% of Solana validators utilize custom schedulers (such as Jito, Paladin) to enhance MEV revenue but face issues of insufficient transparency, security risks, and operational complexity.New features significantly enhance transparency, security, and operational efficiency by separating packaging logic and providing standard rules such as "fail discard" and "all-or-nothing," optimizing MEV revenue and supporting non-default schedulers.· The Anza team, spun off from Solana Labs, released the Alpenglow proposal, intending to replace Solana's TowerBFT consensus mechanism and Turbine data propagation system with Votor and Rotor. Votor optimizes the consensus process through parallel voting paths, reducing block processing time to 100–150 milliseconds; Rotor improves the block propagation protocol based on Turbine by optimizing bandwidth with single-layer relay nodes and employing erasure coding to ensure data integrity.· Solana officially launched the Solana Attestation Service (SAS) new verification service, which can be used to verify any content and aims to provide a trust layer for the internet capital market. SAS allows off-chain data to be linked with any Solana wallet. Applications can now verify information such as KYC/identity proof, investor certification, and on-chain reputation while maintaining privacy through signature verification.· Solana announced multiple new developments at the Accelerate NYC event, including the launch of the new consensus protocol Alpenglow, the lightweight node Mithril, and ZK compression upgrades. Alpenglow introduces new mechanisms to improve network efficiency, Mithril supports users running nodes on ordinary devices, and ZK Compression V2 optimizes storage efficiency for accounts and tokens.SUI· The SUI ecosystem DEX Cetus was hacked. The attacker exploited an overflow detection flaw in the checked_shlw function by borrowing haSUI through a flash loan, manipulating prices, and swapping a huge amount of liquidity at the cost of only one token, profiting approximately 230.00 million USD, including multiple assets such as SUI, vSUI, and USDC. The attacker transferred some funds (USDC, SOL, etc.) to EVM addresses via cross-chain bridges such as Sui Bridge and deposited 10 million USD assets into Suilend. Currently, 162 million USD of stolen funds have been frozen by the SUI Foundation. Subsequently, Mysten Labs staff urgently deployed a whitelist (transaction_allow_list_skip_all_checks) request but later closed the PR, indicating exploration of new rescue approaches.· The Sui community proposal on "whether to return the stolen Cetus protocol assets through special transactions" has been approved. The next Sui protocol upgrade will include a one-time authentication mechanism for two special transactions. These transactions will hardcode the attacker’s address, stolen asset objects, and their target address (a multi-signature wallet jointly managed by Cetus, the Sui Foundation, and OtterSec) to transfer approximately 162 million USD of frozen funds from the attacker’s address to the multi-signature wallet.BNB Chain· BNB Chain has successfully activated the Maxwell hard fork on the testnet. Key upgrades include a block generation time of 0.75 seconds, the generation of 16 consecutive blocks, and enhanced network scalability.Near· NEAR announced official support for a 600-millisecond block time and 1.2-second finality. The significant reduction in new block generation time is attributed to NEAR’s Doomslug consensus, which provides substantial finality guarantees by building a block at the top layer and only allows malicious attacks subject to penalties to revoke the previous block. The finality time (the time required for a transaction to become irreversible) is now 1.2 seconds, which is 10 times faster than Solana and over 600 times faster than Ethereum and Layer 2 solutions.Hyperliquid· Hyperliquid announced the launch of a feature supporting developers’ autonomous deployment of perpetual contracts (HIP-3), currently live on the testnet. This mechanism enables fully decentralized contract market launches, requiring a stake of 1 million HYPE and gas payment via Dutch auction. Deployers can set fee sharing and market parameters, and malicious operations will be penalized by validators through stake slashing votes.Others· Filecoin officially announced that the new consensus mechanism Fast Finality (F3) was officially activated on the mainnet on April 29, 2025 (epoch 4920480). F3 accelerates transaction finality by optimizing parameters and architecture, enhancing network performance and user experience. Filecoin plans to launch related APIs to promote integration of F3 into wallets, bridges, and exchanges.· World Chain launched the portable biometric device Orb Mini. Orb Mini aims to simplify the iris scanning process, making identity verification more convenient. It was launched in the United States on May 1, 2025, and may be used in the future as a point-of-sale terminal, allowing users to pay via iris recognition. World Chain is the blockchain platform of Worldcoin, focusing on digital identity verification. Orb Mini is a hardware device within its ecosystem, primarily used to confirm human identity through iris scanning.· ZKM, in partnership with GOAT Network, released zkMIPS 1.0, the first scalable deployment version of the zero-knowledge virtual machine (zkVM) based on the MIPS architecture, with a 19-fold performance improvement over zkMIPS 0.3.0. This version successfully verified Ethereum mainnet blocks on the ETHProofs platform supported by the Ethereum Foundation and ranked first in performance benchmarks. zkMIPS 1.0 has been deployed as the core execution foundation of GOAT Network, helping to build a secure, decentralized, and sustainable BTC yield network. It has become an important application scenario for zkVM in the Bitcoin ecosystem, addressing the long-standing challenge of finding practical use cases for zkVM.· Coinbase Developer Platform released the open-source protocol x402. This protocol is based on the HTTP 402 payment status code and aims to build a native payment layer for the web. The x402 protocol supports a registration-free and email verification-free payment process, allowing developers to integrate it with just one line of code. The protocol is adaptable to various blockchain networks and provides payment capabilities for AI agents.· TonBit, a subsidiary of BitsLab, discovered a non-atomic state transition vulnerability in the RUNVM instruction deep within the TON Virtual Machine (TVM) code. Attackers can exploit the moment when a sub-virtual machine exhausts gas to corrupt the parent virtual machine's libraries and cause subsequent calls to fail, ultimately leading to abnormal behavior in contracts that rely on the integrity of these libraries. TonBit promptly submitted the technical details and mitigation solutions to the TON Foundation and assisted in completing the fix.· Sei Labs released the Sei Giga whitepaper, proposing to become an EVM Layer 1 blockchain supporting multiple proposers. The solution adopts a parallel block proposal architecture, with key technical features including: 5 Ggas throughput, 200 thousand TPS processing capability, 400 milliseconds transaction finality, and a newly developed EVM execution client. In terms of technical architecture, Sei Giga achieves performance breakthroughs through asynchronous state submission and the Autobahn consensus protocol, claiming a 50-fold throughput increase compared to traditional solutions while maintaining compatibility with Ethereum smart contracts.· Google announced the introduction of zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technology in Google Wallet for age verification. Users can prove they meet age requirements without sharing their date of birth or identity documents. This system is based on blockchain technology and generates proofs through public keys, ensuring data privacy while validating authenticity. The first platform to integrate this technology is the dating app Bumble, where users can verify their age via Google Wallet's digital ID. This development not only enhances the privacy of digital identity verification but also promotes the adoption of ZK technology in mainstream applications (Google Wallet ZKP).</div>

Wu's May Tech Monthly Report: Community Proposes Redefining BTC's Smallest Unit, SOL's New Consensus Protocol Alpenglow, and More