August was packed with breakthroughs across infrastructure, regulation, and stablecoins. Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade and stress tests showed performance surging past 100,000 TPS. Meanwhile, Circle, Stripe, and Google unveiled stablecoin-focused chains, signaling a new wave of institutional adoption. Within the ecosystem, Hyperliquid opened governance on its native USDH stablecoin, a move that could reshape settlement and trading flows across its rapidly growing network.
Solana’s Alpenglow upgrade, consisting of two new main components called Votor and Rotor, which allows 20% of adversarial stake and additional 20% of non-responsive stake without breaking safety or liveness, has entered its governance process. Currently, only Votor has been voted in through the governance process which aims to reduce finality time from 12 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Rotor, which will replace Solana’s existing systems Proof-of-History and TowerBFT, focuses on a new mechanism for faster block propagation and is scheduled for a later governance vote. In parallel, a network stress test pushed Solana past 100.000 TPS in an experimental run, further cementing its strong performance in these types of performance benchmarks. On the other side of the aisle, TVL on Ethereum crossed $95 billion, its highest since January 2022.
Most noteworthy is Hyperliquid continuing its rise in dominance, capturing 35% of all blockchain revenue in July. Alongside this, proposals for a Hyperliquid native stablecoin called USDH are being submitted. USDH is a proposed stablecoin native to the Hyperliquid ecosystem, suggested to replace USDC with the current supply on Hyperliquid pushing upwards from $5.5 billion. New Hyperliquid-native stablecoin would facilitate trading and settlement across its perp and spot markets. Participants putting forth proposals are namely Ethena, Native Markets, Paxos, Agora, Frax, Curve, Sky and Bastion. The three proposals that stood out came from Ethena, Native Markets, and Paxos. All three of them aimed to be at least GENIUS ACT compliant, while some would (in)directly also be MiCAR compliant as a result. Ethena represented the most aggressive proposal in terms of growth and ecosystem incentives. Ethena pledged 95% of its profits to HYPE buybacks which would also be contributed to the Assistance Fund and distributed amongst staked HYPE while offering $75 million in initial incentives to kickstart this campaign. Paxos leaned into its strong and long-established stablecoin reputation when it comes to regulatory compliance. In Paxos’s proposal, a tiered yield allocation was based on the growth of USDH, directing up to 70% to buying back HYPE which would be distributed to the Assistance fund and 25% to the ecosystem support. Native Markets was the first team to file a proposal for USDH within 90 minutes of the vote going live. Although a new team, Native Markets was formed specifically for USDH purposes and consists of some of Hyperliquid’s earliest and most dedicated users. Their proposal offered a 50% yield split focused primarily for HYPE buybacks which would be directed into the Assistance Fund, and 50% designated for USDH and ecosystem growth. The biggest moat that Native Markets seemingly possesses is the perceived alignment with the broader Hyperliquid ecosystem growth.
Major U.S. crypto regulatory momentum came this month as the Anti-CBDC Surveillance Act was folded into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signaling deeper Congressional resistance to state-backed surveillance money. The DOJ clarified that decentralized developers cannot be held criminally liable for writing non-custodial code, although following the Tornado Cash trial this clarification may turn out more confusing than perhaps intended. However, despite the fact that Tornado Cash was built as a decentralized code base with no central authority guiding it, Roman Storm was unfortunately still charged with two serious charges regarding conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit sanctions violations. Meanwhile, the Treasury opened a public consultation on illicit finance risks, building on the GENIUS Act’s momentum. The CFTC granted permission for U.S. citizens to access Binance and other foreign exchanges via foreign board registration and expanded crypto oversight via Nasdaq surveillance tech. On the global scale, South Korea is preparing a stablecoin regulation bill while pausing exchange-based lending; and Japan approved its first yen-denominated stablecoin (JPYC) for fall, with Japan Post Bank planning tokenized deposits in 2026.
Circle made headlines by acquiring Malachite from a portfolio company Informal Systems, to power its own stablecoin-everything L1 called Arc, and is partnering with Finastra aiming to bring USDC into $5 trillion daily cross-border flows. Jumping onto this bandwagon, there are two more prominent players that stepped into the arena of stablecoin chains. Stripe and Paradigm have launched a payments-focused blockchain called Tempo, currently live on a private testnet. Tempo will be tailored to high-scale real world financial service applications, and it’s already in partnerships with firms such as Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, DoorDash, Nubank, OpenAI, Revolut, Shopify, and more. The second large entrant is Google themselves. Google is launching their own permissioned chain called Google Cloud Universal Ledger or GCUL. Google is focusing on building a new platform for payments services and financial market products. It simplifies management of commercial bank money accounts and facilitates transfers via a distributed ledger. Coinbase launched its Bootstrap Fund to deepen stablecoin liquidity on Aave, Morpho, Kamino, and Jupiter, and rolled out perpetual futures in the U.S. On the TradFi side, JPMorgan partnered with Coinbase to pilot its JPMD deposit token on Base, and is now actively exploring crypto-collateralized lending. In parallel, Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon both launched tokenized money market funds. Regulatory progress continued as Anchorage had its OCC consent order dropped, Gemini filed for an IPO on Nasdaq, and the Federal Reserve ended its crypto bank supervision pilot. Meanwhile, Tether is ramping up its U.S. expansion by hiring former Trump crypto advisor Bo Hines to lead strategy.
Chainlink and Pyth began publishing U.S. macroeconomic data on-chain across 10 blockchains, marking a major step in oracle relevance for RWAs. Prediction market Polymarket acquired QCEX to secure a regulated U.S. entry, and added Donald Trump Jr. to its advisory board. Aave hit $50 billion in net deposits and expanded in every direction, for example launching “Horizon,” a stablecoin borrowing platform against tokenized RWAs, and also deploying onto Aptos, which marks deployment on its first non-EVM chain. MetaMask, in partnership with Stripe’s Bridge and the M0 Protocol, unveiled its own stablecoin mUSD for in-wallet native yield. Stripe is also building Tempo, a new blockchain in stealth with backing from Paradigm.
Ethena had multiple major announcements, firstly, introducing MegaUSD (USDm), a new stablecoin built with MegaETH Labs and backed by USDtb, which holds reserves primarily in BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and set to serve as the native stablecoin for the MegaETH ecosystem. Additionally, StablecoinX raised an additional $530 million, bringing its total to $895 million, to further accumulate ENA, with $310 million earmarked for open market buybacks over the next 6–8 weeks. Combined with prior purchases, this initiative represents over 20% of ENA’s circulating supply. Also, Ethena greenlighted BNB as collateral for USDe and signaling plans to onboard XRP and HYPE next. Finally, the long-awaited Camp Network token generation event took place, launching a new IP-rights layer for creators building on-chain.
