November blockchain roundup highlights Bitcoin Core audit, Ethereum upgrades and cross-chain innovation

Developers, investors and regulators faced another dense month of protocol upgrades, security milestones and infrastructure launches in this November blockchain roundup.

Bitcoin Core completes historic third-party security review

Bitcoin development reached a major governance milestone as security firm Quarkslab, funded by Brink and coordinated by OSTIF, completed the first public third-party security audit in Bitcoin Core‘s history. The team invested 100 person-days, reviewing core modules including the P2P network, mempool, chain management and consensus.

The audit reported no high-risk or medium-risk vulnerabilities, flagging only 2 low-risk issues and 13 improvement suggestions. Moreover, the exercise is being framed by contributors as a turning point that signals Bitcoin Core‘s transition into a more mature and formally governed development era.

Ethereum protocol enters a new scaling and privacy phase

The Ethereum roadmap advanced on several fronts. The long-awaited Fusaka upgrade completed its testnet phase successfully, with mainnet activation scheduled for 2025-12-03 21:49 UTC. In parallel, work continued on the Glamsterdam upgrade, which is expected to further reshape Ethereum’s consensus and execution layers.

For Glamsterdam, EIP-7732 / ePBS has been confirmed as the core consensus-layer proposal, while EIP-7928 / Block-Level Access Lists will anchor the execution layer. However, the FOCIL anti-censorship transaction list will likely be postponed to the following Heka/Bogotá upgrade, pending a credible governance commitment.

At Devcon, co-founder Vitalik Buterin unveiled the Kohaku privacy framework. This open-source project, driven by the Ethereum Foundation, aims to deliver modular on-chain privacy and security components. It already supports foundational modules compatible with Railgun and Privacy Pools, enabling wallets to offer opt-in default privacy modes and exploring future tools such as mixnets and ZK-enabled browsers.

Ethereum’s account abstraction and chain abstraction teams also proposed an Ethereum Interoperability Layer (EIL). Built on ERC-4337, EIL is designed so that multiple L2 rollups feel like a single Ethereum chain. Moreover, it would let users initiate and settle cross-L2 actions directly inside their wallets without bridges, relayers or other intermediaries.

The team behind EIL argues that this layer will boost compatibility for multi-chain wallets and dApps, accelerate the rollout of new rollups and preserve Ethereum’s trust-minimized security model. That said, practical deployment will depend on coordination across client teams and infrastructure providers.

Looking ahead, Vitalik Buterin suggested Ethereum could move from “broad scaling” to “targeted optimization” next year. One proposed path is to raise the gas limit by 5× while simultaneously increasing gas costs by 5× for computationally expensive operations, seeking to lift overall throughput without overburdening nodes.

On November 25, Ethereum’s gas limit was adjusted from 45M to 60M. Since gas limit changes require approval from more than half of validators, the adjustment triggered automatically once support exceeded 50%, avoiding the need for a hard fork.

Researcher @nake13 argued that developers can now pursue aggressive L1 scaling thanks to three innovations: EIP-7623, which constrains block size to preserve safety margins; client optimizations that support higher gas demand; and testnet verification, which has shown no propagation issues so far. However, future scaling will still depend on optimizing heavy cryptographic operations, controlling state growth and improving network propagation.

Ethereum L2s push real-time settlement and cheaper proofs

On the L2 front, ZKsync announced the Atlas upgrade, pitched as transforming Ethereum into a real-time capital hub. Atlas targets more than 15,000 TPS, 1-second ZK finality and near-zero fees, while enabling real-time liquidity interoperability between L1 and L2.

Atlas will allow chains built on ZKsync to access Ethereum liquidity directly without creating separate liquidity pools. As a result, the upgrade could reshape the L1/L2 capital structure and position Ethereum as an institutional-grade, real-time settlement center. Vitalik Buterin called ZKsync’s work “underrated but extremely valuable” for the wider ecosystem.

The zkSync Airbender prover reached another technical threshold by enabling full L1 block proofs using only two RTX 5090 GPUs. This suggests that L1 gas limits could be raised significantly while L2 fees trend close to zero, as proving costs fall.

Vitalik welcomed the milestone but noted that systems of this kind often experience roughly a 60× gap between average and worst-case performance. He advocated for Gas Repricing that sharply increases costs for operations such as RSA, instead of relying on hardware arms races. That said, the goal is to ensure that even under higher gas limits, ordinary blocks remain cheap to prove, making scaling safer and fairer.

Separately, StarkWare introduced its new proving system S-two, now used to verify every Starknet block. S-two supports decentralized proving, client-side proving and large-scale privacy use cases, so proving is no longer a bottleneck for the network.

Solana, BNB Chain and Avalanche refine economic and technical parameters

The Solana ecosystem turned its attention to monetary policy. The community proposed SIMD-0411, which would double the inflation decrement rate from −15% to −30%. This simple parameter change aims to accelerate the decline in inflation from the current 4.18% toward the long-term 1.5% target.

If adopted, the proposal would move the projected date for reaching that target from early 2032 to early 2029. Moreover, the reduction would take around 3.1 years instead of 6.2 years, cutting approximately 22.3 million SOL of issuance, or about $2.9B, over six years. Supporters argue this would relieve staking-yield pressure and increase SOL holding efficiency, and the change has already entered governance discussion.

On BNB Chain, the development team officially released the Fermi Hardfork. The upgrade shortens block intervals from 750 ms to 450 ms, significantly raising transaction throughput, network performance and perceived user responsiveness.

Testnet upgrades for Fermi are scheduled to start on 2025-11-10 02:25 UTC. The mainnet activation time will be announced after stress testing concludes. In parallel, the BNB Chain developer team disclosed that its current multisig wallet service will be discontinued, advising users to migrate assets to Safe Global as soon as possible to maintain security.

Avalanche rolled out its Granite upgrade, targeting 2-second settlement across the network. Granite delivers three core updates: dynamic adjustment of transaction processing speeds to handle on-chain traffic fluctuations, a reduction in cross-chain transaction costs and the introduction of biometric signatures such as fingerprint and facial verification.

Security incidents and protocol resilience

Security remained a central theme. Cybersecurity firm Socket warned about a malicious Chrome extension called Crypto Copilot. Marketed as a tool to trade Solana tokens directly on X, it secretly adds instructions to siphon at least 0.0013 SOL or 0.05% of each swap to an attacker-controlled wallet.

The extension routes swaps through Raydium while attaching hidden transfer commands that are not shown in the wallet interface. Live since June 2024, Crypto Copilot had around 15 users before it was flagged, and a removal request has now been submitted to the Chrome Web Store. However, users who installed the extension remain at risk until they revoke permissions and move funds.

Cardano also experienced a temporary chain split on Friday caused by a malformed ADA delegation transaction. While valid at the protocol level, the transaction triggered a known bug in an underlying software library, leading to network partitioning.

Industry association Intersect said stake pool operators were instructed to upgrade nodes so the chain history could be re-merged. Founder Charles Hoskinson added that the FBI is now involved in the investigation. That said, some community members reacted with dark humor, claiming few people noticed the issue “because no one uses it.”

Zero-knowledge proving, stablecoin rails and rollup infrastructure

Beyond major L1s, infrastructure teams shipped new tools for verification and settlement. Succinct announced its next-generation zkVM SP1 Hypercube has achieved household-grade real-time proving. Using only 16× RTX 5090 GPUs and capital expenditure under $100k, SP1 Hypercube can prove about 99.7% of Ethereum blocks in real time.

The system optimizes the arithmetization layer and removes reliance on “proximity gap” assumptions. Funded by the Ethereum Foundation, it also completed the first formal verification of instruction constraints in collaboration with NethermindSec. Moreover, the work is positioned as a foundation for broader zk-proof applications beyond Ethereum.

Circle introduced its xReserve infrastructure, which lets blockchain projects issue stablecoins backed by USDC and interoperable with USDC at a 1:1 ratio. Smart contracts hold USDC reserves, while xReserve certification governs cross-chain deposits, burns and mints, reducing dependence on third-party bridges.

Canton and Stacks will be the first ecosystems to integrate xReserve and launch USDC-backed stablecoins. That said, adoption will hinge on how quickly exchanges, wallets and DeFi protocols support the new instruments.

Brevis released the ProverNet whitepaper, outlining a decentralized ZK-proof generation marketplace built on the TODA (True On-chain Double Auction) mechanism. ProverNet matches diverse computation tasks with specialized proving hardware to improve performance and efficiency.

The marketplace design draws on Brevis’s experience integrating with PancakeSwap, Uniswap, Euler, Linea and MetaMask. It will run on Brevis Chain and is expected to launch soon, adding another competitive layer to the zk-proof infrastructure stack.

ENS, Zcash, Berachain and Injective advance their roadmaps

Ethereum Name Service (ENS) confirmed that Namechain will migrate to Nethermind‘s Surge, a based-rollup framework built on the Taiko tech stack. According to the team, Ethereum-native settlement and sequencing will provide better guarantees for Namechain’s requirements around fast finality, censorship resistance and decentralization.

Zcash (ZEC) creator Electric Coin Co. (ECC) published its Q4 2025 roadmap. The plan prioritizes reducing technical debt, strengthening privacy and usability for the Zashi wallet and ensuring stable management of the project’s development fund.

The Berachain Foundation issued an update on its network recovery. The new hardfork version has been distributed, and most validators have already upgraded. However, the chain is waiting for RPC updates from key infrastructure providers, including liquidation oracles, before block production resumes.

The foundation said the MEV bot operator holding BEX funds claims to be a white hat and has agreed to return assets after the chain recovers, sending them to the Berachain deployer address 0xD276…32A2. After the network is back online, Berachain plans to publish strengthened security measures for BEX and core applications, along with its future roadmap.

Injective announced the launch of its native EVM mainnet on its Cosmos-based Layer 1 blockchain. This marks a major milestone in its MultiVM roadmap aimed at creating a unified, multi-virtual-machine smart contract environment.

Over time, Injective plans to support WebAssembly, EVM and Solana VM within the same ecosystem. Moreover, the objective is to enable shared liquidity, assets, state and modules across these environments, tightening the links between previously siloed execution layers.

What this means for the November blockchain roundup

Across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain and emerging ecosystems, November delivered concrete progress on security audits, scaling upgrades and zero-knowledge infrastructure. Collectively, these developments underscore a maturing digital asset market that is gradually aligning high throughput and privacy with stronger governance and risk controls.