July Blockchain Technology Update: BIP-110, Solana Upgrades, Zcash Ironwood

Written by | GaryMa, Wu Blockchain

The WuBlockchain summarizes key developments in the blockchain technology space for July:

Bitcoin

Bitcoin Core v31.1 was released on July 8, 2026, introducing new features, multiple bug fixes, performance improvements, and translation updates. This release fixes an issue in which the chainstate database repeatedly rewrote large amounts of its own data during normal operation, resulting in excessive disk reads and writes. It also fixes an IP address leak when using the -privatebroadcast feature, where, under certain circumstances, connections were established over the clearnet rather than through an enabled privacy network.

BIP-110 became a focal point of Bitcoin governance in July. The proposal seeks to use a one-year soft fork to restrict inscriptions, OP_RETURN, and other non-monetary data. By mid-month, miner signaling remained below 1%. On July 18, Saylor published “110 Reasons to Oppose,” arguing that the proposal would undermine network neutrality and create risks of censorship and chain splits. Foundry subsequently launched a hashrate-weighted vote. By July 27, signaling had reached approximately 2.64%, still far below the 55% threshold, shifting the controversy toward the mandatory signaling window in August.

Ethereum

Glamsterdam upgrade: extreme L1 scaling and greater MEV fairness. Progress: the upgrade has entered its final round of integration and performance testing. In early July, developers largely completed the DevNet 7 specifications, confirming core changes including ePBS, BAL, and Gas repricing, while adopting block propagation and proof timing parameters of 3/6/9 seconds. DevNet 7 launched in mid-July with approximately 3,000 validators and an initial participation rate of around 80%–90%. Operations later stabilized, but testing exposed issues including performance degradation in progressive SSZ containers, inconsistencies in BAL RPC, the Builder API, circuit-breaker mechanisms, and payload propagation. As of July 30, DevNet 7 had reached nearly 100% participation, but Gas repricing benchmarks still showed potential performance regressions. The team has therefore postponed the launch of the final public DevNet 8 / Platåberget testnet until benchmark testing and Discovery v5 preparations are complete. Officially, the upgrade is currently only scheduled for the second half of 2026, with no formal mainnet date announced.

Hegota upgrade: censorship resistance, enhanced privacy, and lighter nodes. Progress: proposals are still being collected and the scope of the upgrade is still being determined. The focus in July was not implementation, but narrowing the upgrade scope. Among the core proposals, the censorship-resistance mechanism FOCIL has been included in the upgrade, while the native account abstraction proposal Frame Transaction remains under consideration. A large number of proposals were introduced or discussed this month, including private transactions, delayed state roots, BAL sidecars, SSZ execution blocks, removal of log Blooms, Hash-Chain RANDAO, and bundled proof propagation. The submission deadline for non-core EIPs was set for August 6. Hegotá therefore remains in the “selection stage,” with neither the final feature set nor the mainnet timeline determined.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wrote that Lean Ethereum will be Ethereum’s third major iteration following The Merge and will be rolled out gradually over the next three to four years. Its core directions include incorporating recursive STARKs into native protocol verification, advancing quantum-resistant solutions, introducing new and more scalable state structures, and exploring low-level virtual machines such as RISC-V or leanISA to support programmable privacy and greater scalability. Vitalik also said that over the next approximately five years, Ethereum will repeatedly increase the Gas limit and Blob capacity while shortening Slot time, and that the Glasterdam upgrade is expected to deliver a substantial increase in the Gas limit.

Vitalik Buterin published a proposal outlining a path for further reducing the state requirements of Ethereum’s consensus chain and improving validator privacy in the context of the Lean upgrade. The proposal includes removing validator public keys from the Beacon Chain state through STARK-based aggregation, having validators generate daily STARK proofs to update balances, compressing each validator’s state to a one-byte effective balance and a five-byte public-key index, and reducing end-of-epoch processing overhead. Vitalik said the design could potentially support millions of validators. In an advanced version, validator privacy could be enhanced through daily validator re-anonymization, ZK-STARK proofs for balance updates, and hidden withdrawal-address commitments, breaking the public links between deposits, staking activity, and withdrawals. The mechanism could also approximately provide Single Secret Leader Election, or SSLE. For balance update intervals, one hour would be the lower bound, while one day would be a more conservative option.

A new proposal titled “Native UTXOs on Ethereum” suggests introducing native UTXOs alongside the account model. UTXO data would be stored in historical records, while only a marker indicating whether a UTXO has been spent would remain on-chain, reducing the permanent state footprint of one-time payments by approximately 99.8%. The design is based on EIP-8141 Frame Transactions, supports UTXOs paying their own Gas, trustless Gas sponsorship, and use cases including ERC-20 tokens and private payments.

Ethereum proposal EIP-8222, or Lean Staking, aims to use STARK cryptography to separate staking deposit and withdrawal information, reducing the link between validator identities and fund flows and thereby improving privacy for institutional staking. At present, institutional stakers’ deposit addresses, validators, and withdrawal credentials can all be publicly tracked, allowing external analytics firms to infer their staking scale, timing, and strategies. If implemented, institutions could gain stronger privacy, but may also face more complex deposit and withdrawal processes, transaction delays, higher operating costs, and increased compliance requirements. EIP-8222 remains under discussion, with no launch date determined.

Ethereum L2s

Starknet announced the launch of its STRK20 privacy framework, allowing users to apply privacy protections to any asset, while developers can integrate it through an SDK and wallet APIs. Users must undergo screening before entering a privacy pool, while activity inside the pool remains encrypted. Information relating to specified users, transfers, or time periods will only be disclosed after a valid legal request is received and independently reviewed. Starknet said the mechanism can be used for source-of-funds audits and investigations into stolen assets while avoiding the exposure of unrelated users’ data.

The Polygon Foundation announced that the Ithaca hard fork had been successfully deployed to the Amoy testnet and was scheduled to launch on the Polygon mainnet at approximately 14:00 UTC on July 29, at block height 50,185,000. The upgrade will improve network reliability through measures including automatic failover mechanisms, restrictions on transactions that could affect network stability, and enhanced monitoring capabilities for node operators.

Solana

Anza has published the release plan for Agave v4.2, with the first phase of the upgrade targeted for August 17. The upgrade will lay the groundwork for 200-millisecond block times, greater transaction capacity, and a reduced-rent mechanism, while also advancing the implementation of Solana’s Alpenglow consensus upgrade.

The Solana Foundation announced the official launch of the on-chain governance mechanism Solana Governance Proposals, or SGP. Validators can now use SGP to submit, support, and decide on core protocol matters. All proposals are conducted on-chain, use stake-weighted voting, and are verified through Merkle proofs. Any validator with at least 100,000 SOL delegated to it may initiate an SGP. Unlike Solana Improvement Documents, or SIMDs, which focus on technical and protocol changes, SGP is primarily intended to express ecosystem governance opinions. A proposal must receive support from at least 15% of total network stake before it can proceed to the formal voting stage.

Brennan Watt, CEO of Solana core engineering company Anza, wrote that the Solana mainnet is expected to activate SIMD-0286 at the beginning of Epoch 1009, increasing the per-block compute limit from 60 million compute units, or CUs, to 100 million, an increase of approximately 66.7%. Solana uses CUs to measure the computational workload required to execute transactions. SIMD-0286 is intended to expand network block capacity, allowing validators to process more computational tasks within a single block. The actual increase in transaction throughput will still depend on transaction types, network demand, and validator operating conditions.

BNB Chain

The BNB Chain Pasteur upgrade has entered the testnet phase. It fixes an issue in which duplicate validators could potentially bypass cross-chain signature thresholds and strengthens the security of staking, governance, and legacy consensus keys. It also introduces block-builder proposals and a validator blind-signing mechanism. The mainnet upgrade is scheduled for August 25.

BNB Chain released its technical roadmap for the second half of the year. BSC’s current block interval has been reduced to 450 milliseconds, with test throughput reaching approximately 5,200 TPS. The goals for the second half include doubling throughput again, advancing resource isolation, parallel execution, dedicated transaction channels, lowering Gas costs, and developing a next-generation L1 architecture.

Others

Zcash core developer Sean Bowe wrote on X that activation of Zcash Ironwood had entered the rollout phase. All consensus-rule changes had been implemented and moved into the audit stage, while the related specifications and ZIPs had been published and were nearing finalization. He said Ironwood was expected to activate around July 21, with the official testnet activation scheduled for the following day and a supporting version of Zebra expected to be released that same day. Sean Bowe said there was already sufficient hashrate signaling technical readiness for the mainnet upgrade. The main unresolved issue was that some wallets might not complete upgrade preparations in time, but because alternatives were already available and the testnet schedule provided sufficient time, this did not justify delaying Ironwood.

NEAR has released mainnet version 2.13.0. The release supports the NIST-standard ML-DSA-65 quantum-resistant signature scheme, making it the third protocol key type after ed25519 and secp256k1. It also supports dynamic resharding, allowing the network to automatically split heavily loaded shards at epoch boundaries based on shard-state size. The update also introduces Gas Keys under NEP-611, allowing access keys to maintain independent prepaid Gas balances and 1,024 parallel nonce channels, and to be combined with DelegateV2 meta-transactions for Gas sponsorship. In addition, contracts can assign deterministic yield IDs, and node state synchronization has shifted to a peer-to-peer model.

The activation block height for the Zcash Ironwood mainnet has been finalized and marked. Major organizations have committed to activating NU6.3 at block height 3,428,143, which is expected at approximately 20:00 Beijing time on July 28.

The Zcash ecosystem released Zakura 1.0.0, a new full-node client supporting data pruning, fast synchronization, and compatibility with the original zcashd interface. The team said that an approximately 11 GB node snapshot can reduce startup time to less than two minutes, representing a speed increase of around 680 times. Zakura is the first implemented component of Zcash’s scaling plan, whose long-term goal is to increase processing capacity to more than 50,000 transactions per second while preserving privacy and full verification capabilities.

Cardano Protocol Version 11, also known as the van Rossem hard fork, has been activated at an epoch boundary. This is Cardano’s first hard fork to be approved entirely through on-chain governance, following votes by DReps, SPOs, and the Constitutional Committee. The upgrade will reduce smart-contract costs, introduce new Plutus built-ins and cryptographic built-in functions, and lay the foundation for the subsequent Dijkstra phase.

Uniswap Labs announced the launch of Permissioned Pools, a new Hook standard based on v4, designed to provide automated market makers, or AMMs, with infrastructure for trading permissioned assets with on-chain compliance enforcement. The initial partners include Superstate, Securitize, and Dowgo, which integrates the ERC-3643 standard. The standard allows asset issuers to manage whitelists directly at the protocol layer rather than through front ends or off-chain systems, and to verify wallet permissions during every trade or liquidity addition. It also uses Uniswap v4’s flash-accounting mechanism to ensure that underlying permissioned assets remain securely held, expanding the path for compliant assets such as tokenized funds, securities, and equities to access DeFi.

Sui announced the launch of the Hashi testnet, allowing developers and institutions to test lending and credit applications backed by native Bitcoin collateral without moving BTC off the Bitcoin network. Hashi also introduced a Guardian Layer that uses a 2-of-2 multisignature scheme to protect collateral.

Follow us
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WuBlockchain
Telegram: https://t.me/wublockchainenglish