#rollups

#rollups

TezQuest is designed as an interactive layer to TezDev, turning the event into a hands-on experience rather than a series of talks. Attendees are encouraged to explore projects across the ecosystem, complete challenges, and directly interact with teams building on Tezos.

Blockspace Media has acquired Bitcoin Layers, an independent data platform tracking metrics across Bitcoin's layer-2 and scaling ecosystem, as the company expands beyond journalism into data and intelligence products. The acquisition brings Bitcoin Layers' research and on-chain analytics directly into Blockspace's content and product suite, including a forthcoming data dashboard designed to track adoption, total value locked (TVL), and activity across Bitcoin L2s and other scaling platforms, the company wrote to Bitcoin Magazine.

On most modern blockchains, transaction data is publicly viewable in the mempool before it is sequenced, executed and confirmed in a block. This transparency creates avenues for sophisticated parties to engage in extractive practices known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). MEV exploits the block proposer's ability to reorder, include or omit transactions for financial gain.

MEV is especially notorious on Ethereum, where it continues to be extracted at a rate equivalent to 11% of block rewards. Data shows that nearly $300,000 was lost in sandwich attacks in September. This reveals that MEV is a recurring hidden fee, not a minor inefficiency, hitting large trades hardest in volatile markets.

Ryan, who had worked for seven years at the Ethereum Foundation (EF), Ethereum's de facto governing body, suggested that Ethereum could be on the cusp of an era-defining shift. Since its founding in 2014, the foundation had prioritized technical upgrades and had avoided centralizing power while its user base was growing, but Ethereum had now grown up, and the cryptocurrency world around it had grown up, too.

Asset prices are in freefall, key legislation hangs by a thread, and members of Crypto Twitter fret it's their turn to learn what it's like to "have fun staying poor." One company, though, is sitting pretty amid all this. That would be Tether, which last week reported $10 billion in profits for 2025, and has amassed so much gold it's now storing bars of the stuff in Swiss bunkers from World War II.

Sentiment among DeFi users remains positive heading into 2026, with 72% of respondents globally expressing optimism about the sector's future. U.S. users reported one of the highest confidence levels at 83%, while sentiment across Asian markets was comparatively more muted, with respondents in Singapore (64%), Taiwan (63%) and in Hong Kong (56%).