Ethereum Turns 10: From an Experiment to ETF-Age Infrastructure
Today Ethereum is 10 years old. Wow! As headlines mark the anniversary with greatest‑hits reels of booms and busts, the network’s arc looks less like a hype cycle and more like an infrastructure build‑out: shipping core protocol overhauls, surviving governance shocks, bootstrapping whole industries (DeFi, NFTs), and—over the last year—crossing into traditional finance via U.S. spot ETFs. Cointelegraph’s retrospective set the tone; here’s a sourced rundown of the decade’s turning points and why they matter now.
Germany Launches New Regulated Euro Stablecoin EURAU
Germany now has a fully regulated euro stablecoin. AllUnity, a joint venture backed by DWS (Deutsche Bank’s asset manager), Galaxy and Flow Traders, has launched EURAU, described as the country’s first MiCA-compliant euro token issued under a BaFin e-money institution (EMI) license. The ERC-20 asset is designed for banks, fintechs and corporates that need instant, regulated euro settlement on-chain.
CoinDesk, which first reported the launch, said EURAU will debut with BTC/EURAU and USDC/EURAU trading pairs on Bullish Europe, where Flow Traders will provide liquidity as market maker. (Bullish owns CoinDesk.) The issuer positions EURAU as Germany’s first euro stablecoin licensed by BaFin and issued in full compliance with the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR).
Bitcoin’s largest holders have turned active buyers again. On-chain data tracked by analytics firm Santiment indicates that wallets holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC accumulated over 30,000 BTC across the last 48 hours, reinforcing a trend of steady whale demand since late March. Decrypt, citing Santiment’s latest breakdown, notes that these cohorts added roughly 0.9% of circulating supply over four months, with the most recent two-day burst standing out against choppy spot price action.
A controversial campaign by Qubic to concentrate Monero (XMR) mining power has devolved into a technical and narrative battle after Qubic’s mining pool was struck by a DDoS attack, disrupting its operations and visibility, even as on-chain trackers and miners debated the scale of the threat. Cointelegraph reports that Qubic’s pool stopped reporting hashrate on July 30, with the project’s own tracker intermittently claiming peaks up to 1.6 GH/s when its “intermittent mining” switches to Monero. MiningPoolStats, meanwhile, showed Qubic as the only Monero pool with no reported hashrate at press time.
Monero (XMR) is the most prominent privacy-focused cryptocurrency. Unlike transparent ledgers (e.g., Bitcoin), Monero hides the sender, recipient, and amount of every transaction by default. It does this with a stack of cryptography—ring signatures, stealth addresses, and Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT)—plus network-layer protections. Over a decade, XMR has iterated through multiple hard-fork upgrades to harden privacy, improve efficiency, and keep mining decentralized.
This guide traces where Monero came from, how its privacy works, and the milestones that shaped it—along with the trade-offs and regulatory backdrop you should know.
Indonesia is examining whether Bitcoin could play a role in its national reserves, according to a local industry group that says it presented the idea at the Vice President’s office. The group, Bitcoin Indonesia, described the discussion as part of a broader pitch that included state-linked Bitcoin mining and national education programs. While the talks signal rising policy interest, no official policy or allocation has been announced by Bank Indonesia (BI), the Ministry of Finance, or the Financial Services Authority (OJK).
USDC Surges Past USDT in the Stablecoin Payroll Race
Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) has displaced Tether’s USDT as the preferred stablecoin for crypto payroll solutions, according to Pantera Capital’s newly released 2024 Blockchain Compensation Survey. The report—based on 1,600 professionals in 77 countries—shows that 63 % of all salaries paid in digital assets were settled in USDC, while USDT captured just 28.6 %. Together, the two dollar-pegged tokens account for more than 90 % of crypto-denominated pay packets.
Pump.fun unveils a liquidity backstop
Solana’s most prominent memecoin launchpad, Pump.fun, has set up a new liquidity division dubbed the Glass Full Foundation to “inject significant liquidity into ecosystem tokens,” according to an announcement highlighted by CoinDesk. The move comes amid a steep drop in platform revenues from early-year highs. Pump.fun didn’t disclose GFF’s funding source or how projects will be selected, but said initial deployments have already begun, referencing posts on X.
Polkadot is a multichain network designed for interoperability—a way for many specialized blockchains to plug into a shared security layer and talk to each other. The idea was laid out by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood in a 2016 white paper that proposed a heterogeneous multi-chain with a minimal “relay” core and many flexible “parachains.”
In practice, Polkadot’s relay chain handles consensus and security, while parachains provide the features users actually touch: DeFi, gaming, identity, data availability, and more. The result is a network that aims to scale by running different blockchains in parallel—and letting them exchange messages natively.
NEM—short for New Economy Movement—is one of the earlier public blockchains to take a payments-and-assets approach with built-in features rather than external smart contracts. The original public chain, often called NIS1, has been running since 2015, and in March 2021 the project’s next-generation chain, Symbol (XYM), launched as a separate network after years of development (codename “Catapult”).
This article gives you a concise, educational tour: where NEM came from, how its technology works (especially Proof-of-Importance and harvesting), the system’s early “smart-asset” ideas—mosaics, namespaces, multisig, Apostille—and how they set the stage for Symbol.
