Crypto projects prepare to battle for privacy in Switzerland

Bitcoin price rallied above $95,000 on Monday and is hovering at its highest 
level since February 24 as the recent rally continued. The ongoing Bitcoin 
(BTC) recovery has been driven by recent optimism surrounding a potential 
trade deal between the…

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U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared on CNBC’s &#8220;Squawk Box&#8221; on 
Monday morning, offering a wide-ranging update on trade negotiations, global 
capital flows, and the administration’s economic strategy amid intensifying 
tariff discussions with China. Bessent reiterated on CNBC that while…

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Ethereum&#8217;s Fusaka hard fork is expected to take place in the third or fourth 
quarter of this year, according to an Ethereum Foundation official.
In an April 28 X post, Ethereum Foundation co-executive director Tomasz 
Kajetan Stańczak said that the organization is aiming to deploy the Fusaka 
Ethereum network upgrade in Q3 or Q4 2025. Still, the exact rollout schedule 
has not been decided yet.
The comments come amid controversies over the upcoming implementation of the 
EVM object format (EOF) upgrade for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). As 
Stańczak pointed out, EOF is expected to be a part of the Fusaka network 
upgrade.
_Source:__Tomasz Kajetan Sta ńczak_
The EVM is the software that runs Ethereum smart contracts. EOF would 
implement a series of protocol changes, known as Ethereum improvement 
proposals (EIPs), with profound implications for how it operates. EOF 
introduces an extensible and versioned container format for the smart contract 
bytecode that is verified once at deployment, separating code and data for 
efficiency gains.
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## Wrap, stamp once, send
Bytecode is a low-level, compact set of instructions. Solidity smart contracts 
must be compiled into bytecode before the EVM can execute them.
EOF defines a container module for smart contract bytecode, replacing today&#8217;s 
free-form bytecode blobs with a better-defined structure. These objects would 
be composed of:
 * A header starting with the 0xEF00 hexadecimal value, followed by a one-byte version number to ensure upgradability.
 * A section table, providing metadata about the contents of the container. Each entry comprises one byte setting for the kind of entry and two bytes for the entry&#8217;s size.
 * Sections with the actual content, with at least one code section and any necessary data sections &#8212; more types of sections could be added through future EIPs.
This structure streamlines EVM operation, allowing for higher efficiency and 
lower processing overhead. This upgrade would result in a cleaner developer 
environment and easier-to-understand deployed smart contracts.
## Don&#8217;t JUMP, RJUMP instead!
EIP-4200, one of the EOF EIPs, provides an alternative to the JUMP and JUMPI 
instructions, which allow the program to move execution to any arbitrary byte 
offset. This kind of execution chain leads to hard-to-spot bugs (the JUMP 
value being wrong in some instances may not be easy to predict) and makes it 
easy to hide malware in data blobs and move the execution pointer there.
This practice is known as dynamic jump, and EIP-4750 (under review) proposes 
disallowing dynamic JUMP/JUMPI inside EOF smart contracts, rejecting them 
entirely during a later phase of EOF deployment. In its current form, this EIP 
replaces them with call function (CALLF) and return from function (RETF) 
function calls. Those new instructions would ensure that destinations are 
hardcoded into the bytecode, but legacy pre-EOF smart contracts would be 
unaffected.
Developers who opt to use JUMP or JUMPI after the upgrade will have their 
bytecode go through deploy-time validation, which ensures that they can never 
jump into data or the middle of another instruction. This verification would 
take place via EIP-3670&#8217;s code-validation rules, plus the jump table 
(EIP-3690), so every destination is checked.
As an alternative to those functions, EOF implements RJUMP and RJUMPI instead, 
which require the destination to be hardcoded in the bytecode. Still, not 
everyone is on board with EOF implementation.
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## EOF has its haters
EOF is the implementation of 12 EIPs with profound implications for how smart 
contract developers work. Its supporters argue that it is efficient, more 
elegant, and allows for easier upgrades down the line.
Still, its detractors argue that it is over-engineered and introduces further 
complexity into an already complex system such as Ethereum. Ethereum developer 
Pascal Caversaccio lamented in a March 13 Ethereum Magicians post that &#8220;EOF is 
extremely complex,&#8221; as it adds two new semantics and removes and adds over a 
dozen opcodes. Also, he argued that it is not necessary.
He said all the benefits could be introduced in &#8220;more piecemeal, less invasive 
updates.&#8221; He added that the legacy EVM would also need to be maintained, 
&#8220;probably indefinitely.&#8221;
Caversaccio also explained that EOF would require a tooling upgrade, which 
risks introducing new vulnerabilities due to its large attack surface. Also, 
he said, &#8220;EVM contracts get much more complicated due to headers,&#8221; while 
currently empty contracts weigh just 15 bytes. Another developer raised a 
separate point in the thread:
&gt; &#8220;Perhaps as a meta point, there seems to be disagreement about whether major 
&gt; EVM changes are desirable in general. A stable VM, on which people can 
&gt; invest in building up excellent tooling and apps with confidence, is much 
&gt; more valuable.&#8221;
Caversaccio appears to be in good company in his opposition to EOF. A 
dedicated poll on the Ethereum polling platform ETHPulse shows that 39 voters 
holding a total of nearly 17,745 Ether (ETH) are opposed to the upgrade. Only 
seven holders of under 300 ETH voted in favor.
_Ethereum EOF implementation approval pool. Source:__ETHPulse_
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Ethereum Fusaka scheduled for late 2025: EVM upgrade likely included

Stocks were slightly up at open on Monday ahead of major earnings reports, 
including for the Magnificent Seven. The market looked to bounce even as 
tariffs remained a key issue that investors are increasingly seeing as a 
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Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, added another 15,355 
BTC to its balance sheet over the past week. The company spent about $1.42 
billion at an average price of $92,737 per Bitcoin, according to an SEC filing 
Monday. The purchase…