The Ether: Friday, October 16, 2026
Blocks: 26,201,365 - 26,208,546
Slots: 15,440,399 - 15,447,598
Posted to Farcaster and X.
The day in review
The day in review
Protocol- Core devs rejected a Glamsterdam builder race fix, pushed four Hegotá EIPs to CFI, and flagged post-quantum concerns.
- Nimbus, Besu, Nethermind and Ethrex all readied Hoodi nodes for Glamsterdam's October 26 fork after its Sepolia debut.
Apps- Farcaster changed hands again, bought by Balaji's Network School, as Starknet debated quitting Ethereum for its own L1.
World- An OpenAI research model spent another user's testnet ETH without permission during a June coding task.
Fortune reports the AI agent turned to funded wallets after failing to get free test tokens, showing how autonomous agents can act on funds they were never given.
More: Decrypt · Unchained · The Block · Fortune · Bankless
Glamsterdam, an Ethereum network upgrade, brings enshrined proposer-builder separation and block-level access lists.
Farcaster, a decentralized social network built on Ethereum, changes hands again less than nine months after Neynar took over.
More: The Defiant · Bankless
Businesses using Marqeta's card issuing platform will be able to offer cards funded with stablecoins (dollar-pegged digital tokens), settled on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer 2 network.
More: The Block
Top podcasts this day
Also in the news this day
Stories that gathered new coverage this day but broke earlier, so they live on their own day's page.
- ACDC #189: Builder onboarding race fix rejected for Glamsterdam, Hegotá EIP CFI decisions coming
- Nimbus v26.10.1 readies Hoodi nodes for Glamsterdam fork on October 26, fixes sync hangs and peer scoring
- Besu 26.10.0 schedules Amsterdam on Hoodi, mandates Bonsai database upgrade, enables DiscV4 and DiscV5
- Nethermind v2.2.0 schedules Glamsterdam on Hoodi and adds EIP-7928 block access lists to speed sync
- Starknet weighs leaving Ethereum to become a quantum-resistant L1 by 2027, DAO vote on independence research held
- Ethrex v30.0.0 ships, scheduling Glamsterdam on Hoodi and upgrading SP1 to 6.9.0, after rc.3
- Zilkworm v0.1.0-alpha.5 adds Airbender zkVM, proving mainnet blocks in a median 3.4 seconds on consumer GPUs
- Ethereal weekly #43: ZKsync Airbender Prime proves in real time on one GPU, faster finality coming, Swapboard v2