The Weekly Ethereum Bulletin! Vol. 6: February 14–20, 2026

Key highlights:

• Ethereum's tokenized RWA market surpassed $15 billion, a nearly 200% year-over-year increase.
• Protocol Priorities Update for 2026
• FOCIL Scheduled for Hegotá
• OpenAI and Paradigm introduce EVMbench
• SP1 Hypercube Live on Mainnet

Ethereum's tokenized RWA market surpassed $15 billion, a nearly 200% year-over-year increase

It signals strong institutional adoption of Ethereum for tokenized real-world assets.

And it goes beyond RWAs. The Ethereum mainnet stablecoin market cap has grown to over $160 billion. Between tokenized funds, commodities, stocks, and stablecoins, Ethereum is solidifying its position as the default settlement layer for tokenized finance.

No other chain comes close.

Protocol Priorities Update for 2026

The Ethereum Foundation's Protocol team is reorganizing into three tracks for 2026:

• Scale: Gas limit toward 100M+, ePBS, zkEVM attester client, and statelessness
• Improve UX: Native account abstraction, cross-L2 interoperability, and post-quantum readiness
• Harden the L1: Censorship resistance, post-quantum security, and expanded testing infrastructure

This follows a productive 2025 that shipped Pectra, Fusaka, and raised the gas limit from 30M to 60M. Next up: Glamsterdam in the first half of 2026, Hegotá later in the year.

FOCIL Scheduled for Hegotá

Ethereum core developers agreed to schedule FOCIL (EIP-7805) as the consensus-layer headliner for Hegotá, the upgrade following Glamsterdam.

FOCIL strengthens censorship resistance by enabling multiple validators to enforce transaction inclusion, preventing any single builder from excluding valid transactions.

Other proposals under consideration include Frame Transactions (EIP-8141) and Encrypted Mempool (EIP-8105). Decision deadline: February 26.

OpenAI and Paradigm introduce EVMbench

EVMbench is a benchmark evaluating AI agents' ability to detect, patch, and exploit smart contract vulnerabilities, built from 120 curated vulnerabilities across 40 audits.

GPT-5.3-Codex scores 72.2% on exploit tasks, up from GPT-5's 31.9% six months ago. Detection and patching remain harder — agents struggle with exhaustive auditing and fixing subtle bugs without breaking functionality.

SP1 Hypercube Live on Mainnet

Succinct launched SP1 Hypercube, 4x faster than SP1 Turbo, proving 99.7% of Ethereum blocks in under 12 seconds on just 16 RTX 5090 GPUs.

First zkVM with formal verification of all 62 RISC-V opcodes, done with Nethermind and the Ethereum Foundation.

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