Arbitrum announced the execution of “ArbOS Dia Upgrade,” part of a broader initiative to improve fee smoothness and execution performance across the network. These changes aim to deliver more predictable economics for users and builders, a key infrastructure signal for ecosystem maturation.

One of the most visible announcements is the launch of Open House 2026, Arbitrum’s expanded global builder event series.

Open House events are designed as hands-on, in-person sessions where developers can:

• Learn Arbitrum tooling directly from core contributors
• Experiment with Stylus, Orbit, and Nitro-based stacks
• Connect with ecosystem teams and potential collaborators

For 2026, the program expands beyond isolated hackathons into a coordinated global initiative, signaling Arbitrum’s intent to compete aggressively for developer mindshare across regions.

Arbitrum has released Rust SDK v0.10.0, continuing Arbitrum’s push behind Stylus, its alternative execution environment that allows developers to write smart contracts in Rust.

The updated SDK improves:

• Developer ergonomics
• Tooling stability
• Integration paths for performance-oriented applications

Ben Greenberg, Devrel at Arbitrum, published a detailed builder-focused article on x402 v2, explaining how the protocol evolved from a promising concept into a production-ready payment interface. Rather than summarizing the spec, the piece walks through real friction points builders encounter when shipping paid APIs and agent-to-agent services, supported by working code, a private inference demo, and a reference facilitator implementation.

The article highlights key improvements in x402 v2, including CAIP-2–based network identity, inspectable facilitators via the /supported endpoint, header-first payment negotiation aligned with HTTP standards, strict and idempotent verification, and lifecycle hooks that give developers explicit control over settlement timing. Together, these changes position x402 as a chain-agnostic, extensible payment layer capable of handling real-world workloads on Arbitrum and beyond.

Arbitrum introduced the ArbiFuel Gas Sponsorship Program to help early-stage teams build without worrying about gas costs. The program sponsors transaction fees for teams testing, deploying, and onboarding users, removing a major source of friction during the earliest phases of development.

By covering gas expenses, ArbiFuel allows builders to focus on shipping and iterating rather than budgeting for infrastructure. The initiative reinforces Arbitrum’s broader strategy of lowering entry barriers and accelerating experimentation across the ecosystem.

Alex Gluchowski published ZKsync’s 2026 roadmap, framing the strategy as “no shortcuts” and prioritizing real-world constraints such as regulation, privacy, deterministic execution, and native interoperability as ZKsync pushes toward institutional-grade adoption. The roadmap positions the Elastic Chain/network model (multi-chain + native interop) as the foundation for scaling beyond a single chain into a broader network economy.

The roadmap also reinforces ZKsync’s product pillars (including the stack powering elastic chains) as core to expanding use cases where privacy and control matter, rather than optimizing only for crypto-native throughput narratives.

Shelby announced a new tagging system on the governance UI that makes it easier to identify active delegates and categorize key ecosystem participants (chains, apps, technical partners, Security Council, Guardians). The goal is explicitly framed as making governance more enterprise-ready, improving navigation and decision-making for token holders and institutional participants.

This also ties into the upcoming staking pilot UX, where rewards are expected to depend on delegating to active delegates, making “active vs inactive” visibility a functional part of tokenholder workflows, not just a dashboard feature.

ZKsync announced that its Airbender prover reached the #1 position on eth_proofs, leading both in proving time and cost per proof across single-GPU and multi-GPU benchmarks. The results position Airbender as the most efficient prover currently tracked on the public benchmark leaderboard, highlighting significant gains in zero-knowledge proving performance.

Optimism introduced OP Enterprise, a suite of managed blockchain infrastructure products designed for enterprises that want to deploy on the OP Stack without operating the full blockchain themselves. It includes three tiers: OP Mainnet (deploy on public network with enterprise support), Self Managed (operate your own chain with 40 hours/month engineering support), and Fully Managed (end-to-end operations with 99.99% uptime SLOs and 15-minute P1 response). The offering includes pre-negotiated vendor partnerships across wallets, indexers, oracles, and compliance providers, eliminating negotiations that typically take 6-12 months. The infrastructure is MIT licensed and open source, with direct access to the engineers who built the OP Stack.

Paul Dowman (OP Labs) posted the Upgrade 18 proposal detailing three major OP Stack advancements: Custom Gas Token v2 (CGT v2), a creator-pattern dispute game refactor, and Cannon + Kona fault proofs. CGT v2 enables OP Stack chains to use any asset (not just ETH) as the native gas token, unlocking designs like stablecoin-fee rollups, while explicitly noting that there is no migration path from legacy CGT to v2.

The proposal also adds Kona, a second Rust-based fault-proof implementation alongside Cannon, increasing redundancy (via the new CANNON_KONA game type, not yet canonical). It outlines the operational plan (Security Council signing + pre-states) and targets mainnet execution after Feb 5, 2026, with bundled upgrades across multiple Superchain networks.

The Optimism Collective has approved, via voting, a formal governance proposal to allocate 50% of Superchain revenue to monthly OP token buybacks over a 12-month pilot. This proposal is designed to align the OP token’s value more closely with Superchain’s growth and sequencer revenue.

Optimism Collective published the Guide to Season 9, detailing how governance will operate from January 29 through June 3, 2026. Season 9’s theme, “From Experiment to Organization,” signals a strategic pivot: governance will lean more toward oversight of core development (e.g., OP Stack upgrades and protocol performance) rather than decentralized funding for community experiments. Key governance bodies continue with refined roles, while some incentive programs (like Intents and Retro Funding) are paused.

The Optimism Collective’s Grants Council laid out the Missions for Season 9’s Governance Fund, defining concrete success metrics for protocols, primarily around decentralized exchange liquidity and usage. Critically, any projects deployed on Superchain Index chains that funnel revenue back to the Collective become eligible, reinforcing Superchain-wide alignment. With a total budget of around 3.89M OP, this mission framework aims to balance growth incentives and sustainable revenue commitments across the broader ecosystem.

Optimism co-founder Karl Floersch shared a post-quantum security roadmap for the Superchain, outlining a 10-year plan to deprecate ECDSA EOAs and migrate users and infrastructure to post-quantum smart accounts via account abstraction. The initiative positions the Superchain as one of the first large-scale blockchain ecosystems planning explicitly for a post-quantum future.

Polygon Labs announced the acquisition of Coinme and Sequence to build a fully integrated, regulated stablecoin payments platform in the United States. With this move, Polygon adds licensed fiat on- and off-ramps, enterprise-grade wallet infrastructure, and cross-chain payment orchestration, forming the foundation of what it calls the Open Money Stack, a vertically integrated solution for compliant, global stablecoin payments.

Coinme brings licensed access to U.S. money movement across 48 states and over one million existing users, while Sequence adds smart wallets and one-click cross-chain payment routing that abstracts bridges, swaps, and gas from users. Together, these acquisitions position Polygon Labs as a revenue-generating blockchain payments company, aiming to enable instant, predictable, and compliant money movement for institutions, fintechs, and enterprises.

Toku launched a compliant global stablecoin payroll on Polygon, enabling companies to pay employees in over 100 countries using existing systems like ADP, Workday, UKG, and Gusto. The platform processes more than $1B in annual payroll volume, turning payroll into a drop-in on-chain upgrade without requiring workflow changes.

Toku handles compliance end-to-end while Polygon provides fast, low-cost settlement, making stablecoin payroll a production-ready primitive for global businesses and reinforcing Polygon’s role as infrastructure for real-world money movement.

Polygon Labs published a manifesto explaining why it is building the Open Money Stack, a vertically integrated yet open payments stack designed to enable end-to-end stablecoin payments. The stack combines wallets, regulated on- and off-ramps, orchestration, and settlement into a single integration that institutions, fintechs, and enterprises can use without rebuilding their existing infrastructure.

By remaining open across chains, providers, and regions, the Open Money Stack avoids vendor lock-in while reducing operational complexity. Polygon positions this approach as the path to making money move reliably, predictably, and globally, turning stablecoins from a raw primitive into real-world payment infrastructure.

Ternoa, an AggLayer-connected chain, confirmed that Cifer is now fully compatible with its network, enabling developers to build smart contracts with encrypted on-chain data secured by post-quantum-resistant cryptography. This gives Ternoa a strong long-term security advantage for applications requiring future-proof data protection.

Ternoa also announced it will stop rewarding L1 validators starting April 1st, as it prepares to migrate $CAPS and CAPSULE to support L2 growth, while keeping L1 nodes running so users can unstake safely.

Gajesh posted that EigenDA currently accounts for roughly 98% of L2 blobspace usage, overtaking Ethereum-native blobs as the dominant source of data availability for rollups. This reflects how quickly EigenLayer’s EigenDA has become a core infrastructure layer for scaling ecosystems, optimizing blob costs, and throughput.

This trend is also observable through public analytics dashboards such as L2BEAT, where blobspace usage across data availability providers can be monitored directly.

EigenCloud published a technical explainer detailing how EigenAI achieves bit-exact deterministic inference for large language models on GPUs, addressing a core limitation of modern AI systems: nondeterministic outputs. Because GPU execution introduces variability through floating-point behavior and parallelism, the same prompt can produce different results across runs, making verification impossible in high-stakes applications.

It also explains how EigenAI enforces determinism across the full stack—hardware constraints, deterministic math libraries, and a controlled inference engine—while adding cryptoeconomic verification through EigenLayer primitives. This enables AI outputs to be replayed, audited, and economically enforced, laying the foundation for verifiable autonomous agents in areas such as trading, prediction markets, and on-chain decision-making.