January Blockchain Technology Update: BTC Core Adds New Maintainers, ERC-8004 Standard to Launch on Mainnet Soon, opBNB & SUI Upgrade

Feb 04, 2026

Written by | GaryMa, WuBlockchain

The WuBlockchain summarizes key developments in the blockchain technology sector for January：

Bitcoin

● On January 8, 2026, the Bitcoin Core development team promoted the anonymous developer TheCharlatan (sedited) to a Trusted Keys maintainer. This marks the first expansion of core members with main branch commit privileges since May 2023. As a result, the number of PGP key maintainers with commit access in Bitcoin Core has increased to six: Marco Falke, Gloria Zhao, Ryan Ofsky, Hennadii Stepanov, Ava Chow, and TheCharlatan. TheCharlatan graduated in Computer Science from the University of Zurich and primarily focuses on reproducible builds and verification logic. The appointment received unanimous support in discussions among core contributors.

Ethereum

● Glamsterdam upgrade preparation:The upgrade is expected between June and August, maintaining the cadence of two upgrades per year; BAL DevNet2 has already been launched.

● The Ethereum Blob Pressure Optimization proposal BPO2 upgrade has officially gone live on mainnet. The target number of Blobs has been increased to 14 per block, and the maximum capacity has been raised to 21.

● Vitalik Buterin published a post stating that in 2026 Ethereum will systematically address the regressions in self-sovereignty and trust minimization that occurred over the past decade. Key focus areas include: lowering the barrier to running full nodes through ZK-EVM and BAL; verifying the authenticity of RPC return data via Helios; enabling private RPC queries using ORAM and PIR; promoting social recovery wallets and timelocks to reduce private key compromise risks; achieving privacy-preserving payments with a user experience consistent with ordinary transfers; enhancing privacy and censorship resistance under ERC-4337, future native account abstraction, and FOCIL; and advancing IPFS-based on-chain application UIs to reduce reliance on centralized servers. Vitalik noted that node operation, wallets, and block building had become significantly centralized, but that “this will no longer be the case in 2026.” Ethereum will gradually roll back value compromises made to accommodate mainstream adoption and rebuild a “world computer” with no single points of failure and no central controllers.

● The ERC-8004 standard is set to launch on the mainnet. By enabling discovery mechanisms and portable reputation, ERC-8004 allows AI agents to interact across different organizations, ensuring that reputation flows seamlessly and unlocking a global interoperable market for AI services.

● The Hegota headline proposal submission process has opened and will run until February 5.

Ethereum L2s

● The OP Stack “Post-Quantum roadmap” explicitly proposes gradually deprecating ECDSA EOAs over the next 10 years. The migration path relies on EIP-7702 plus account abstraction, and also notes that core components such as the sequencer and batch submitter must migrate to post-quantum signature schemes. It emphasizes that OP Stack can replace signature mechanisms via hard forks.

● Ethereum L2 network Starknet released a post-mortem analysis of a brief mainnet outage, stating that the root cause was a state inconsistency between the execution layer (blockifier) and the proving layer. Under certain combinations of cross-function calls and rollbacks, the execution layer incorrectly recorded state writes that had already been rolled back, leading to abnormal transaction execution. The affected transactions did not achieve L1 finality. The incident triggered a chain reorganization, rolling back approximately 18 minutes of on-chain activity. This marked the second major outage since 2025; previously, in September, a sequencer bug caused over five hours of downtime and rolled back about one hour of on-chain activity.

● ZKsync released its 2026 roadmap, which includes three core pillars: Prividium, ZK Stack, and Airbender. Prividium aims to evolve from a privacy engine into a “Bank Stack,” providing default privacy protection for enterprise-grade crypto applications and integrating directly into enterprise workflows. ZK Stack will transition from a single-chain model to an orchestration system, enabling operation and liquidity sharing across public and private ZK chains. Airbender seeks to transform from a zkVM into a general-purpose standard, prioritizing security and developer experience, with its scope covering ZKsync, Ethereum, and use cases beyond crypto.

Solana

● According to a Jito announcement, it has launched the IBRL Explorer tool to transparently display block construction details within Solana blocks. The tool reveals widespread behaviors such as “tail packing” and “Slot Timing Games” on the Solana network, which may affect state propagation efficiency, increase latency, and weaken network stability. Through three scoring metrics — Slot Time, Vote Packing, and Non-Vote Packing — IBRL Explorer generates an IBRL score for each validator, aiming to improve block construction quality and overall network performance.

BNB Chain

● Brevis and BNB Chain will expand their collaboration into privacy infrastructure and, together with 0xbow, launch an “Intelligent Privacy Pool” on BNB Chain, scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2026. The privacy pool is based on 0xbow Privacy Pools and incorporates ZK eligibility verification: users can prove on-chain fund source compliance via the Brevis ZK Data Coprocessor, or bind off-chain KYC via zkTLS, completing compliance proofs without disclosing sensitive data.

● opBNB has completed the Fourier mainnet hard fork, reducing block time from 500 milliseconds to 250 milliseconds.

SUI

● The Sui mainnet has been upgraded to version V1.63.3, with the protocol upgraded to version 107. This upgrade includes optimizations to the path by which transactions and state directly reach finality, fixes to consensus issues where validator nodes might fail to agree on rejected transaction verification, and the prohibition of RPC interfaces that allow validator nodes to use transaction signing and submit aggregated validator-signed transactions.

Security

● SlowMist’s Yu Xian warned that VS Code–based IDEs (including Cursor, VS Code, Antigravity, TRAE, etc.) have potential security risks related to the automatic execution of tasks. Users are advised to disable the “automatic task running” feature to prevent malicious code from being triggered when opening a directory. The recommended hardening measures include setting task.allowAutomaticTasks to off in settings, and enabling Workspace Trust prompts in Cursor, so that risks are confirmed when opening new projects. Even if a workspace is trusted, this can prevent commands hidden in .vscode/tasks.json from being executed automatically.

● Security researcher 23pds warned that over the past month phishing attackers have begun adopting new social engineering and technical tactics to target cryptocurrency users, with related cases already disclosed. Users are advised to remain vigilant and avoid clicking unknown links or signing suspicious transactions. In addition, researcher Adam Chester disclosed a privilege escalation and command execution vulnerability in Anthropic’s Claude Code, allowing attackers to execute commands without user authorization. The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2025–64755, and the relevant PoC has been made public. The issue was noted to be similar to a previously disclosed vulnerability in the Cursor tool.

● Developers disclosed a software vulnerability in the BLS voting extension (block signature) mechanism of the Bitcoin staking protocol Babylon. The vulnerability allows malicious validators to intentionally omit the block hash field when submitting vote extensions, potentially causing other validators to crash at network epoch boundaries, thereby slowing block production during critical consensus checks. There is currently no evidence of exploitation in the wild, but developers warned that it could be abused if left unpatched. Babylon has not yet publicly responded with a remediation plan.

Other

● Tempo, the payment public chain jointly launched by Stripe and Paradigm, announced the introduction of its native token standard TIP-20, designed specifically for stablecoins and payment use cases. It is based on Ethereum and EVM-compatible chains’ existing ERC-20 standard and is fully backward compatible. On top of ERC-20, it adds features such as transfer memos, compliance controls, and reward distribution. The TIP-20 standard allows the issuance of stablecoins tailored to specific payment scenarios while meeting operational and compliance requirements. Any USD-denominated TIP-20 stablecoin can be used to pay transaction fees on Tempo. In the future, Tempo plans to support paying transaction fees with non-USD stablecoins.

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