Ethereum News. Jan 20, 2026
Vitalik Buterin is calling for purpose-built, next-generation DAOs, warning that today’s governance models have failed to deliver on Ethereum’s original promise.
Vitalik Buterin warns that Ethereum’s trustlessness requires strict protocol simplicity. He’s calling for formalized “garbage collection,” a process to strip out growing complexity that threatens the network’s security and resilience.
Ethereum’s transactions is approaching 2.5 million, a new all-time high and nearly double levels seen a year ago. At the same time, average gas fees have fallen to about $0.15, the lowest in the network’s recent history.
MegaETH, announced it will open its mainnet to a global stress test on Thursday ahead of its public rollout. The week-long test targets processing 11 billion transactions, with sustained throughput between 15,000 and 35,000 tps
Ethereum ENS has released a public, community maintained dataset on Google Cloud BigQuery, allowing anyone to analyze ENS activity using SQL without running their own indexing infrastructure.
ETH privacy L2 Shade has officially launched its testnet, offering up to 33.3% rewards for early participants
Ethscriptions, a Stage 2 based rollup, debuts on L2BEAT bringing cryptographic state proofs to ethscriptions using Facet tech. Its derivation pipeline converts L1 activity into canonical L2 blocks, delivering EVM compatibility, speed, and scalability while preserving Ethereum security.
zkSYNC Airbender has secured #1 ranking on ETHproofs, leading in both proving time and cost per proof across single GPU and multi GPU categories
The next Ethereum Community Hub is set to open in Hong Kong, the official launch meetup will take place on January 24
Vitalik shared evolving views in favor of native rollups, citing improvements in zk-EVM maturity. Previously, concerns arose because native rollup precompiles had to operate in either zk mode or optimistic mode.
Institutions building on Ethereum
