abstract

Regarding the announcement "Polygon is not dead" released by Polygon's official Twitter, which is suspected to mock the shutdown of Abstract, Polygon founder Sandeep responded that the dissemination effect of the related content "did not meet expectations," and some people attributed a completely different meaning to it. The Polygon marketing team was self-deprecating, as Polygon's fundamentals are still growing, and there was no intention to imply anything about Abstract's shutdown.Sandeep added that he was also confused when he first saw the content and emphasized that he has great respect for Abstract founder Luca Netz and his team. Since Polygon itself had also terminated the zkEVM project, he empathizes with the pain and would not mock the other party, wishing Luca and the Pudgy Penguins team all the best.

According to on-chain information, shortly after the shutdown announcement of Abstract, a newly created address withdrew 1 million USD from Kraken and then quickly bought 25 Pudgy Penguins NFTs on the market. As of the time of writing, the wallet still holds ETH worth 766,000 USD.As of the time of writing, the floor price for Pudgy Penguins NFTs is reported at 3.3 ETH, with a 24-hour increase of 6.8%.Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz stated that Abstract is gradually shutting down, and its parent company Igloo Inc. will now focus all its efforts on the development of Pudgy Penguins, Pudgy NFTs, and PENGU.

NFT and IP company Igloo, Inc. announced the shutdown of its consumer-grade blockchain Abstract, reallocating personnel and resources to Pudgy Penguins, Pudgy NFT, and the token PENGU.Igloo stated that the goal of Abstract was to create a public chain for consumer scenarios, and the company invested engineering and ecological talent and infrastructure for this purpose. Its growth was constrained by the high operational costs of independent blockchain, limited liquidity, a weak DeFi ecosystem, and declining market interest. Over the past two years, Igloo has lost tens of millions of dollars to maintain Abstract's operations, expand, and seek product-market fit and profitability.The company stated that after even well-funded enterprises struggled to find product-market fit for their own blockchain, shutting down Abstract became the right decision. Moving forward, they will refine the brand path from products and content to PENGU, and then to Pudgy Penguins NFT, refocusing on this role as an IP.

The consumer-grade Ethereum Layer 2 network Abstract, supported by Pudgy Penguins' parent company Igloo Inc., announced that it will gradually cease operations and officially shut down its mainnet on December 15, 2026. The official reasons given are stagnation in growth, thin liquidity, limitations in the DeFi ecosystem, and insufficient institutional adoption. Abstract warns users that they must transfer their assets across chains before the shutdown date, or they may lose access to their funds.Abstract stated that the network has deployed over 144 applications and has attracted more than 400,000 users through consumer-grade collaborations with brands such as Red Bull Racing and Disney. However, significant changes have occurred in the industry since the project's conception, and the independent chain model focused on consumer-grade crypto has ultimately proven difficult to sustain. Igloo has continuously funded Abstract for the past 18 months, with CEO Luca Netz revealing that cumulative losses have reached tens of millions of dollars. Igloo is now redirecting resources towards Pudgy Penguins and PENGU.In July 2024, Igloo completed a financing round of over $11 million led by Founders Fund, aimed at developing Abstract and leveraging Pudgy Penguins' distribution capabilities to bring consumers on-chain. The network launched its mainnet in January 2025. Netz stated that Igloo ultimately decided not to issue Abstract tokens and would not continue funding the network at the expense of Pudgy Penguins' business.

Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang stated that the collaboration between Base and Ethereum regarding account abstraction around EIP-8130 and EIP-8141 (Frames) has broken down last week, with both parties advancing their respective AA standards.He pointed out that for a long time, the EVM has been a unifying force between L1 and L2, and sharing an AA standard could have ensured a consistent multi-chain experience for smart accounts, including future post-quantum accounts. However, as the industry evolves, L1 and L2 are beginning to differentiate in terms of value and use cases: L1 pursues censorship resistance and capture, open source, privacy, and security, while L2 focuses on scalability, customization, and compliance.Both sides agree on core use cases such as gasless transactions and passkey wallets, but there are significant differences in compliance requirements. Chiang believes that a lack of unified standards may not be a bad outcome, as both parties can maximize innovation according to their visions.He proposed two paths: establishing a governance mechanism for shared resources like the EVM that covers more stakeholders, or accepting that a lack of unified standards is inevitable and focusing on building wallets and applications that can mask differences, expressing greater optimism about the second path.

Ethlabs stated that it has reviewed over 60 EIPs proposed for the Ethereum Hegotá upgrade and updated its priority recommendations, focusing on four areas: censorship resistance, transaction confirmation speed, native account abstraction, and performance optimization.Specifically, Ethlabs supports FOCIL to enhance Ethereum's censorship resistance and neutrality; it recommends shortening time slots for the first time in the Hegotá upgrade through Quick Slots and creating conditions for further reductions in the future; it supports achieving native account abstraction through Frame Transactions, introducing passkey wallets, transaction delegation, using tokens to pay Gas, batch transactions, as well as better privacy and quantum security support. Additionally, Ethlabs emphasizes that client and protocol design should continuously prioritize performance, using optimization results to increase L1 capacity, shorten time slots, and reduce node operation requirements.

Ethereum developer nixo.eth revealed on the X platform that Ethereum core developers have decided to change the status of the account abstraction proposal EIP-8141 from "under consideration" to "scheduled," confirming that account abstraction will be promoted as a key feature of the Hegotá upgrade.This EIP was proposed in March as a flagship upgrade, and community consensus suggests that even though there are still controversies regarding the specific implementation, account abstraction should be launched in Hegotá. In recent weeks, another proposal, EIP-8130, has emerged as a competitor, planning to be deployed on Base in September, sparking discussions about avoiding a split in account abstraction standards between L1 and L2. The authors of both EIPs and core developers are working hard to reach a unified solution without delaying the upgrade. The status change means that this feature has officially entered the planning for the Hegotá upgrade, but the specific specifications may undergo significant changes, and it is common for implementation plans to change before the official launch.

Consumer-grade blockchain Abstract announces the launch of Builder XP, an extension of its XP system, aimed at rewarding builders who contribute to the Abstract ecosystem. This mechanism allocates Builder XP weekly based on the project's overall impact on the chain.Builder XP will further incentivize developers and project parties to continue building, promoting the development of the Abstract ecosystem. Abstract is created by the Pudgy Penguins team, focusing on consumer-grade crypto applications and on-chain experiences.

The non-profit Ethereum development lab Ethlabs published an article outlining its priority recommendations for Ethereum's next network upgrade, Hegotá. Ethlabs listed the following directions as top priorities: strengthening censorship resistance (EIP-7805 FOCIL has been confirmed as the top proposal); making Ethereum faster (suggesting the addition of EIP-8198 Quick Slots to reduce slot time and improve confirmation speed and finality); native account abstraction (recommending EIP-8141 Frame Transactions to support Passkey wallets, ERC20 Gas payments, batch transactions, and privacy, etc.); continuous L1 scaling (recommending EIP-8131 and EIP-8279 to enhance capacity and predictability).

Ledger announced the expansion of support for Celo, having integrated Celo's CIP-64 fee abstraction feature into Ledger Live. After the upgrade, users can pay on-chain transaction gas fees using 18 types of Celo native assets, without needing to use the native token CELO exclusively.The assets that can be used to pay gas include USDT, USDC, USDm, EURm, GBPm, JPYm, CADm, AUDm, CHFm, BRLm, NGNm, PHPm, COPm, KESm, ZARm, XOFm, GHSm, and WETH. CIP-64 is a core mechanism introduced by Celo in the July 2023 Gingerbread hard fork, allowing transaction fees to be paid directly with approved ERC-20 tokens.According to official disclosures, nearly half of the transactions on the Celo chain are currently settled with US dollar stablecoins instead of CELO for transaction fees. Ledger had previously supported the sending, receiving, and exchanging of CELO and Celo native stablecoins in Ledger Live as of December 2025.

Particle Network today announced the next phase product roadmap for Universal Accounts, which will launch two new products in the coming months: 1. Universal Deposit SDK: Developers only need about 10 lines of code to allow users to deposit assets from any chain into the application, significantly lowering the threshold for multi-chain asset access. 2. Universal Agent Accounts: An API and Dashboard for AI Agents, enabling AI Agents to own and manage their own Universal Accounts.Previously, Particle released EIP-7702 Universal Accounts in March, supporting any EOA account to upgrade frictionlessly to a Universal Account. This roadmap further strengthens the infrastructure positioning of Universal Accounts in scenarios such as developer integration, AI Agent asset management, and multi-chain asset circulation. Overall, Particle is advancing Universal Accounts from "account abstraction capability" to a broader chain abstraction application layer infrastructure, which is expected to enhance its developer adoption and distribution capabilities within the on-chain ecosystem.

Former OpenAI Codex team engineer Daniel Edrisian announced his departure and founded an AI hardware company, Blackstar Computers. The company has completed a $12 million seed round of financing, led by Abstract, with participation from SV Angel, Naval Ravikant, Chapter One, and Timeless.Blackstar positions itself as a new type of computing device, planning to reconstruct the computing experience from hardware, software, and interaction perspectives. Edrisian stated that current software development has matured, and further enhancement of human-AI interaction needs to be innovated at the operating system level. The company team currently consists of about 8 people, distributed between San Francisco and Shenzhen, and has not yet launched a public product.

The chain abstract stablecoin system River announced its expansion to the Base network, having previously deployed on Ethereum and BNB Chain.River stated that Base is the platform with the strongest liquidity on Ethereum L2 and the highest on-chain activity. Its total value locked (TVL) in DeFi exceeds $4 billion, with a stablecoin market capitalization of $4.7 billion and nearly 500,000 daily active addresses. Currently, on-chain liquidity is mainly concentrated on Base. River's joining Base means that all Base users can natively hold, use River, and build on it.

According to the official announcement, the globally leading digital asset trading platform Gate has announced a partnership with the Ethereum Layer2 network Abstract and the DeFi protocol Aborean Finance deployed on that chain, launching a liquidity incentive campaign called "Gate Abstract Incentive Carnival" aimed at the Abstract ecosystem. This program revolves around the GTBTC/GUSD liquidity pool, integrating transaction fee sharing, $ABX governance token rewards, and ecological XP incentive mechanisms, constructing a multi-layered revenue structure of "transaction fees + tokens + ecological points" to strengthen the platform's capabilities in on-chain liquidity and multi-chain collaboration.According to the rules, users can obtain LP certificates and share transaction fees after adding liquidity on Gate. If they choose to stake in Aborean, they can receive governance token rewards; during the event, they can also earn double XP and exclusive badges from the Abstract ecosystem. This collaboration precisely matches wallet binding and on-chain incentives, enhancing reward transparency and verifiability, and under the backdrop of the maturation of account abstraction and Layer2 infrastructure, it forms a new exploration direction in multi-chain collaboration and on-chain incentive mechanism design.

Vitalik posted on the X platform stating that Ethereum has been discussing account abstraction (AA) since early 2016. Now, EIP-8141 serves as a comprehensive proposal aimed at addressing all remaining issues related to AA. The core concept of this proposal is "frame transactions," where a transaction contains N calls that can read each other's call data and can authorize the sender and gas payer.This mechanism supports various use cases: ordinary account transactions (such as multi-signature, variable keys, quantum-resistant signature schemes) are completed through validating frames and executing frames; when paying gas fees with non-ETH tokens, it can be achieved through the main contract without any intermediaries.In terms of privacy protocols, ZK-SNARK verification or the addition of two-dimensional randomness can be implemented through payment contracts. Regarding security, on-chain transactions are only valid when the validating frame returns an ACCEPT with a gas payment flag, while the memory pool layer will initially adopt conservative rules, gradually expanding later.EIP-8141 is highly complementary to FOCIL, with FOCIL ensuring quick transaction inclusion and AA ensuring that complex operations can be executed as first-class transactions directly. The proposal is also discussing EOA compatibility, which is theoretically feasible. After more than a decade of research, these technologies are expected to be implemented within a year through the Hegota fork.

According to BlockSec monitoring, the account abstraction wallet Holdstation was hacked, with multi-chain assets stolen amounting to $100,000. The hacker has transferred the stolen funds to the Bitcoin network.The Holdstation team has released an on-chain message and is attempting to negotiate with the attacker.

World (formerly Worldcoin) announced the release of World ID v4, introducing account abstraction architecture into the protocol system. This upgrade transforms World ID from a single key mechanism to an abstract record in the public registry "WorldIDRegistry," supporting multiple authorization keys, allowing users to generate authentication proofs across different devices or platforms.World stated that the core improvements of the new version include: support for multi-key and multi-validator management, enhancing usage flexibility while maintaining the same identity; increased protocol resilience by introducing key rotation, revocation, and optional recovery agent mechanisms; launching a web-based reference validator to simplify the browser experience; generating one-time nullifiers through OPRF nodes to strengthen privacy protection; and introducing a trust anchor registry to help validators identify request sources, prevent phishing attacks, and lay the groundwork for future protocol fee mechanisms.

The chain abstract stablecoin protocol River has officially launched on the OKX wallet. To celebrate the launch, the official X Launch incentive event has been initiated, with a total prize pool of 33,333 $RIVER. The deadline for participation in the event is January 8th at 8 AM UTC.