Ethereum Daily — October 1, 2026

Julien Béranger

+ Claude Sonnet 5

Ethereum Daily — October 1, 2026

This edition covers roughly the last 24–48 hours (September 29–October 1) and is diffed against yesterday's post.

Roadmap. Real movement here. Glamsterdam's Sepolia testnet run, still targeted for October 6 at 13:53 UTC, hit a round of newly surfaced issues: Devnet-9 testing produced unplanned non-finality that developers are still tracing to client compatibility and consensus-layer changes tied to enshrined proposer-builder separation (ePBS); EIP-8037's state-gas accounting showed edge cases in nested execution calls, prompting revised repayment logic; and EIP-7928 (Block-Level Access Lists) ran into a compatibility snag with legacy zero-nonce accounts that still hold storage, which a new companion proposal, EIP-8253, is meant to patch. Separately, developers flagged a builder-attack vector in ePBS on the September 17 dev call: because Sepolia test ETH is free, an attacker could spin up thousands of fake builders, win block auctions with inflated bids, and then withhold payloads — potentially stalling the testnet. Client teams had a September 29 deadline to ship Sepolia-ready software, leaving only a compressed seven-day security review versus Ethereum's usual fourteen. Devnet-11 is the next checkpoint before Sepolia goes live. October 6 "is not guaranteed," and mainnet remains a Q4 2026 target with no firm date.

Governance. No major new development since yesterday.

Institutional and corporate adoption. Chainlink unveiled Fulcrum, an institutional financing platform that coordinates repurchase (repo) transactions across public and private chains, at Sibos 2026 — where co-founder Sergey Nazarov is presenting alongside major banks. It's aimed at pulling more institutional repo and financing flow onto crypto rails, including Ethereum-based infrastructure. No fresh corporate ETH-treasury purchases surfaced in the last day.

Stats. ETH is trading around $2,680–$2,688, roughly flat to up about 0.4% on the day, still capped below resistance near $2,825–$3,000, with the 200-day EMA support sitting at $2,272. Derivatives positioning keeps unwinding: futures open interest fell to 12.49 million ETH, the lowest since March 1, down roughly 1.46 million ETH since early July even as price has held up. ETF flows flipped negative: after a $17.1M inflow on September 28, spot ETH ETFs posted a $2.8M net outflow on September 29 — BlackRock's ETHA led exits at $8.94M, partly offset by Grayscale's Ethereum Mini Trust at +$12.83M — snapping the seven-day inflow streak. Outflows then widened sharply on September 30 to $59.6M, led by Fidelity's FETH ($26.6M) and Grayscale's newer ETH fund ($25.5M): two straight down days after a strong September. Macro backdrop: August core PCE inflation cooled to 3.4% YoY, below the 3.7% forecast, which markets read as mildly dovish, though it hasn't yet pulled ETF flows back positive. Broader DeFi market cap ticked up 0.6% to $88.6B.

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